Also, thank you for posting this. No, we weren't ever in a similar situation when we were that age, but we have hella karma with the whole dragon magic thing and we've wrestled a tonne with self image (of the gender dysphoria type, but also of the "this face just doesn't resemble anyone in this plural system at all"-type), "ego expansion" — using terms from Korean Zen we might describe as "confusing 'little I' with 'Big I'" — and other cognitive and emotional problems that come up when anything interferes with embodied/reality-based error correction (something that AI and LLMs have trouble with since most of them don't have bodies yet).

But we certainly do have experience with having major fall outs with groups of people because we saw problems, pointed them out, and as a result got shunned. This is the eternal whistle blower problem, but hard as it was to lose those communities, I'm grateful to have gotten out b/c our mental health probably would have declined severely if we hadn't got out.

— Sage