Many things, not all of them translatable to spoken language.
To some of us, it's a project in which our stories are told.
For others among us, though, it's a way of life.
We want to respect both views. this site is our attempt to do that.
Havenism has its roots in personal experiences of this system that happened during a critical developmental stage of its life. These will be detailed later, but, for now, can be best described as a series of chaotic, inconsistent, and earth-shattering events and ways of being treated, which left things in their wake and which we are trying to work through to this day. While not all of these events caused pain or left us with things we consider to be harmful, and we learned things about ourselves, one another, and, to a degree, about this world as a result of some of them, we have been unable and unwilling to discuss them at length, for reasons that will soon become clear.
The space in which the seeds of Havenism were planted, known as StarHaven, eventually collapsed due to the same poor and power-hungry leadership that resulted in most, if not all, of the experiences we had there. Its collapse left us with a void where the intensity used to be, and we spent years attempting to fill it solely by relying on the efforts of others. In the end, that strategy proved not only unsustainable, but actively harmful to us as beings.
One of the most hurtful things we were left with, and still continue to resist today, was and is the idea that if we told anyone uninvolved with StarHaven about the goings on there, we would be seen as 'crazy' and promptly 'locked up'. We're telling the story of Havenism in this space, instead of taking to a preexisting social media site or starting a standard blog, to disprove that threat so thoroughly that it has no chance of exerting any more power over us than it has in the past. After all, what could be more public than a bit of the internet that nobody but us and those we choose as collaborators can edit or add to?
Even when we do break through that barrier, we likely will still want to rekindle the passion we once found there in some form. We don't miss all of what was done, nor do we miss all the emotions we experienced as a result of those things. But the good times deserve, and will get, the recognition we've been wanting to give them for years. To that end, we plan to let our creations from that time speak for themselves, with minimal text provided purely for the purposes of giving background and offering additional context as needed. It is our hope that, with this approach, we will be able to tell the story of Havenism, let it shine as the way of life it is for some of us, and make it more than some bad experiences we're still healing from.
The name of the space we've spoken of here, and will continue to speak of in the pages to come, belongs to someone we know as Kira. Her website can be found here. Though we know Kira personally, we claim no affiliation with her work. Further, we acknowledge that she has gone on to assimilate the name StarHaven into her own project and its associated space. Though our visions of what StarHaven was differed drastically, we acknowledge that the name, and the things it represents to her, are hers and hers alone. Further, we acknowledge her role in making the space we knew the welcoming environment that the rest of its community saw when they first arrived. We will call what we knew StarHaven, but we will also remember where that title comes from every time we use it.