u/BatteredOnionRings

Last night Daddy went to a very fancy dinner with some of our friends and left me at home. (I had been too slow to claim a spot on the reservation on a group chat.)

While he was out I was playing in the yard with the dog, and stepped in poop that he had missed picking up when he’d been out with the dog earlier.

And then when I told him what happened and what I’d been doing while he was out for three hours eating delicious food—cleaning dog poop off my shoe—he had the gall to express amusement!

So, obviously I was not using the potty for anything today, and he got to deal with the consequences.

Balance has been restored.

I’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks and I can’t seem to settle it fully in my head, so I’m curious to hear this community’s thoughts or framing. TL/DR: I’m moving into a close knit neighborhood community and I’m suddenly afraid of being visibly little in a way I haven’t been in years.

I generally fall in the “dresses little in public without being inappropriate” zone as most people in this sub seem to define. Not all the time by any means, but I’ll pretty regularly wear overalls or sometimes shortalls over a plain onesie, shirts with dinosaurs on them, occasionally Velcro sneakers—really fairly tame, but also clearly a choice. Also, especially with overalls/shortalls, sometimes a regular ABDL diaper will make a pretty obvious shape around the butt area if you know what you’re looking for—I’ve heard of ABDLs getting noticed by parents of small kids for diaper butts that we would not consider obvious.

Anyway, as far as ethics goes I’m totally comfortable with my own behavior.

This is less about ethics and more about what is wise for me and my long-term happiness.

Because while I dress in the way I’ve described around vanilla friends, they’re people I know and trust, and also whom I could cut out of my life if I really needed to.

And for a long time I lived in a dense, urban neighborhood where, while I knew some of my neighbors by face and a few by name, there was no real community. I also didn’t expect to live there forever.

My husband/Daddy and I just moved into a house we bought in a much quieter area, and have quickly learned that absolutely everyone knows each other by name, socializes, walks each other’s dogs and babysits each other’s kids. They also gossip—openly. I mean people have joked with us about the fact that we were being talked about before we moved in because a few people had met us while we were getting the house ready. (In a funny, understandable, welcoming way.)

This is what we wanted! We’re planning to have kids of our own and raise them in this house. And we want to know our neighbors and be liked and trusted.

It’s also an extremely diverse and liberal community. It’s somewhere being an interracial gay couple feels like the most normal thing imaginable.

But being little and ABDL is not. And I realized as we were about to move that suddenly I would be worrying what kind of impression I was going to make if I was seen walking the dog in shortalls all summer.

I don’t have any shame about ABDL, and I’m so used to my own comfort being the only signal I had to listen to. But now my own comfort is not just about whether I’m turning heads more than I’d like, but about whether people are peaking out of their windows and talking about me and… jumping to the bad conclusions some people jump to about age-players.

I don’t think the risk itself is high. I think this is a good community where people are chill. And they’ve met me and my husband and can tell we are friendly and “normal“, and I think and hope that would be enough to also be allowed to be a bit weird.

But now the stakes are high, and I don’t know how to think about that. I don’t know how to weigh the immediate joy and comfort of being myself the way I want against the long term risk of my reputation in this community. But then, deciding to let that fear dictate my wardrobe forever would also be a long term cost.

There’s a lot of kinds of middle ground—from dialing some clothing choices back but keeping others, to just waiting until people know me better and it’s less of a first or second impression.

But I am curious how other people would think about and approach this, and especially anyone who has been in a similar situation or transition. I really liked this post this post from the other day and I’d be kind of curious if u/LittleBoyDavy has any advice—I respect the hell out of his choice to bring his kidcore self to work, which I think has similar kinds of risks.

They went into a Rearz.