Sans Seraph

Tag: mental-health

  • Just keep swimming

    Just keep swimming

    I’ve been focusing rather hard recently on finding somewhere I belong, some sense of community in this new identity and body I’m finding myself in. Considering how little I slept last night, and how puffy my face is from crying, it’s going well.

    Nothing is wrong, really. I went to play a very interesting DnD variant last night, and had fun. Everyone there was nice to me. I will go back and hopefully continue to push through my own bullshit and make friends. For right now though, I don’t feel like I belong anywhere.

    I’ve made it my goal for this year to branch out and widen my social circle. That’s not to say I don’t have a lovely group of friends and a partner that I adore, and I have already made some new friends since coming out, but I feel this very deep longing to be part of something that I honestly have never really felt before.

    It was so easy before. When I was wandering through life, pretending to be a guy, being mad at the world, hating myself, I had no problem being alone. Afterall, who would want me? Why should I have any joy when I’m trapped in this body I despise? For thirty-five years I went through the motions of what I thought it was like to be a person. Now, though, the mask is off, and I really can’t put it back on. So much of how I moved through the world was hidden behind the character of the man I played at being, that I never developed a sense of self. Now, at my early middle-age, I get to figure out all of the things that people usually have decades to work out.

    I’ve realized that not only do I have next to zero social skills when I’m not drunk off my ass (nor confidence in who I am) that I also exist in this liminal space where I don’t feel like I belong with men or women. It also seems like the other trans people around me are much younger, and are getting to learn who they are without having to unlearn as much programming as I do. It’s a very isolating feeling.

    I’ve lived half a life. I have the greatest of hopes that things will get better, but from down here, that feels so far away. I’ve felt that sense of belonging that I crave now before, at raves, at Burn, and I can’t help but be mad that he got them, and I didn’t. Even though I can still go to those things, I’m older, and that wild, young, free person is a bit more subdued now (and much, much more jaded.) I can’t help but feel resentment for all the time I didn’t get to be young, and gay, and a woman.

    I’ll be thirty-seven soon, and, statistically, my life is about half over. Subtract the years of abuse I put my body through, and the chronic anxiety, and I probably have less than that. It would have been far easier to just kill myself, but I’ve never been much for taking the easy way. The truth is, I’m a lot of things, but a coward is not one of them. I can repeat that over and over again to myself, but it doesn’t make the pain of feeling like something other go away. I know a lot of this is my own internalized fears, and a lot of it is just needing to grow more into who I am, but being essentially a teenager trapped in a grown woman’s body is the most supreme of mind fucks.

    I guess until it gets easier I just have to trust that forward is the only direction. It’s all part of the becoming. I spent so long in a state of arrested development, and I’ve gone through so much fire and ash to get to this small precipice, that to stop now would be a disservice to my past self (yes, even him.)

  • I will fear no evil

    I will fear no evil

    I recently got a new piercing and it’s made me think a lot about fear.

    Fear is not an emotion that I like to subscribe to often. I think of all of the vast range of human emotions, it is the most belittling. Fear leads people to do horrible things, inhuman things. Fear leads to panic, which often leads to death. Fear leads to war, to genocide, to living a half life in the shadow of something that is rarely so big in the light.

    Yet even though I like to say that I don’t live with a lot of fear, I do. I was afraid to get my nose pierced. I was incredibly anxious, nervous, but ultimately afraid of the pain, the change in my routine, the unknown of how it would affect my life. Even immediately after, some of that lingered. In the end though, it didn’t really hurt, and though it has been annoying adjusting my routine, I quite enjoy it. It gave me ownership over a part of my face I’m not too happy about, and that was my goal. However, in the week leading up to my appointment, I was very much on the fence. Even in the moment, I wasn’t too sure about my decision, even though I had spent a good amount of time considering it. I tried to call those emotions everything else but fear, but they were.

    My mother used to always say that there are only two emotions, love and fear. I don’t like to give that heinous witch too much credit, but she had some wisdom. If you really want to be reductionist, I think that you can boil things down to just though two emotions. I think sometimes intelligent people can get caught up in all of the myriad ways we can define and categorize things, yet it’s hard to not look back on all of the times we walk forth into the void, pushing past all of the uncertainty and doubt, and move forward into greater things, that it wasn’t those things that kept us from doing it sooner, but ultimately fear. After all, isn’t anxiety mostly just a fear of being wrong, of having too little information, and making the wrong choice?

    I spend a lot of time thinking about why I didn’t transition sooner, when it seems like the time was right a decade ago, and, though there is an argument to be made that I wasn’t ready (because dear god, I wasn’t) it was really my fear of being something that I had been told was horrible to be my whole life that stopped me from even considering it. I spent so much time trying to make anything else work, that I missed out of so much of my life, all mostly because of an emotion that in hindsight is just so small, yet casts such a big shadow in our lives.

    Some fears are instinctual. Being afraid of what can destroy you bodily is healthy. When your gut tells you that something you’re about to do is sketchy, then it’s usually a good idea to listen to it. Fear definitely has a purpose in our lives, but the real problems are the fears that we’re taught. In a vacuum, there is no reason to be afraid of all of the things that society tells us are wrong. These fears are little lions with amplified roars, echoing off of cave walls. These are fears that are meant to control us, and make us bend to the will of others. These are the tools of evil, and those that seek to work it have used the same formula to get their way since the beginning of time.

    The right likes to tout the idea of the “woke mind virus” as if the idea of being awake is somehow bad, as if it is better to live in the dark then to be shown all of the messiness and splendor of what is going on around us. They are ultimately afraid of losing what they have worked so hard to achieve, and those that follow them have co-opted that fear as their own. Now they decry that their cause is righteous, that the way people like me live is against some divine order, when really, they’re just afraid of the truth: there is no order, and not them, nor you, nor me, are indistinguishable from god, and when everything is the same, nothing is special. We’re all born, we live, we die, and the cycle repeats until the last proton decays. Our lives have no more meaning that the actions of a hydrogen atom fusing with another, and honestly I think that’s rather beautiful.

    I think when you take out the idea that life is special, it takes the pressure off. The roar isn’t so loud, and you can see the actual beauty in everything. The absurdity of it all is fascinating, because when nothing is special, everything is. There’s a duality to existence and oblivion that makes the whole idea of judgement, of caring what others do and shrinks it down into an oddity. The only law is to cause no harm. To stand in the way of other’s trying to live their life is an affront to the flow of the universe, a violation of a physical law that is far bigger than you could ever hope to encompass. I think we’re seeing a change here, and on the other side of it we will realize how childish it was to live with so much fear and hate.

  • A hole at the bottom of the sea

    I’m sick, it’s injection day, and, shockingly, I’m miserable. I’m doing that thing I do, less than I used to, but still frequently enough that it’s annoying, where I just can’t help but wonder, “What the fuck is the point?”

    Sometimes I feel like the immense weight of everything is resting on my shoulders, like I’m being crushed under the mass of existence. I feel like if I can just move, a little bit, I could rest, and gain some perspective, but the waters are pouring in, never-ending, and nothing really seems to change. It makes one feel like every change they’ve ever made, every bit of progress, has just been trading one ring of hell for another.

    I know I’m not alone in this. This is, above all else, the curse of my generation. We work ceaselessly, breaking our minds and bodies, so that we may earn less, have less, and be less satisfied with our lives. I’m sitting here now, on my way to my day job, so supremely unsatisfied, yet there isn’t really anything I can do about it. Finding a new job, even if it happened in the current market, would just been trading one devil for another. I’ve done it before. The novelty carries you along for a while, but eventually it always ends up the same. Birth, death, rebirth, in a never ending cycle; a constant search for meaning, success, something that will heal instead of hurt. The realm of the human has become the realm of hungry ghosts, always starving, never full.

    I’ve always been a huge proponent of, “if something isn’t working, change until something does,” and, yes, there were things I needed to change, that is for damn sure, and I am massively better than I was, but there just seems to be something wrong with the world, something I can’t get past, and it bothers me that I’ve reached a point where perhaps change is no longer than answer. The Buddhist thing to do, then, would be to try acceptance, but, that doesn’t seem right. These forces feel external, and acquiescing to them feels like losing.

    The deck is definitely stacked against us. If I could take a temperature reading of the world, then we would be close to boiling over. This state of constant agitation though, of being a bubble waiting to pop, is so pervasively anxiety inducing, that right now, in this moment, I’m really struggling to see the point.

    There used to be things that you could do that would matter. You could sell everything you own and move to the woods, except there are no jobs in the woods. You could get a remote job doing something creative, except those have all dried up. You could go back to school, except now the career you train for doesn’t even want you, or perhaps, doesn’t even exist when you graduate. Then you find yourself saddled with debt that can never be paid back, slaving away for some job you’ll never enjoy, doing the same thing, day in, day out, never growing as a being.

    You may say, “Well do with less. Cut back, do something that makes you happy, even if it doesn’t pay as well.” However when a studio apartment costs $2000 a month, how do you even consider that an option? There is no where to go. You’ll cling onto your shitty job, and your shitty life, until you and your shitty, burnt out, depressed, spiritually annihilated body die. You’ll be told how much better you have it than others, and how you’re free, and the whole time you’ll wonder if freedom ever existed.

    You’ll try to fight, and the hegemony will kick you back down, and serve you processed food, and flash fashion trends and ICE killings in front of your eyes on a black rectangular mirror that you paid $999.99 for the privilege for them to do so. Just make it make sense to me. My queendom to someone who can.

    I usually like to end on a bit of hope, or call to action, but sometimes I think it’s okay to just lay out what you’re feeling. Screaming into the void has become one of my favorite pastimes of late. I know there’s hope, you see little pieces of it every day, but it’s just that: fragments, specks of dust, little bits of joy you hold onto while the tempest roars around you.

    How about this: I know that this is what they want. I know that the point is to be worn down, ablated by the hate and fear, so that only the kernel of your soul remains. Well, today I think it’s winning, or, maybe it already did, but as long as I’m still here to scream, the darkness can’t consume me.

  • Jagged little pill

    Jagged little pill

    I have to take these supplements every day or else my joints hurt. Yes, I’m getting older, and yes, I’ve been doing blue collar work my whole life, but more than that, I spent at least a decade, probably more, simply not caring about my body.

    I’d assume this is somewhat typical. When you’re young you think you’ll live forever. You can watch your wounds close up in front of you whilst you search the cabinet for a bandage. For me though, I wanted to be broken. I wanted to use myself up, to sacrifice my body and to leave a husk to blow away in the wind, or some other such poetic drivel. Before I came to the realization I was trans I hated myself. I saw no reason why I shouldn’t work myself to the bone, do risky things, and not drink and smoke myself into a stupor every night. A very common phrase of mine to toss out was “I’m just waiting to die.”

    Now, to my employers, this made me an excellent worker. I’d do the hard things. I’d work late, lift too much, get paid too little. I didn’t care. In a way it was a cowardly way to approach suicide, though, after a while, it started to be clear to me that I was far more resilient than I gave myself credit for. I was going to suffer before my body wore out, and I was starting to worry that I might not be up for it. The answer then came to be that I would have to hasten myself off this mortal coil. Being a firearm enjoyer, the quickest answer seemed to be eating a nine millimeter sandwich, but that seemed to be letting myself off easy. I still wanted to suffer.

    So i figured one day, at some point in the future, I’d drive myself out into the woods, toss a rope over a limb, and hang myself. Not a far drop, I wanted to suffocate. I wanted to watch the world fade away, grasping at the rope futilely as my instincts betrayed my desires, then all of the anger would make sense. The body I’d hated so much for so long would cling to a world that I hated so much, and me, the real me, that lived inside, would finally end, and with it, all of the suffering I had to endure.

    I didn’t though (obviously.) I’ve always been a fighter, and more than my share of stubborn, so I had to try one more thing, and, lo and behold, I finally had my answer. Transition literally saved my life. Now, however, I have to deal with some very interesting consequences.

    The longer I’ve been transitioning, the more I have trouble relating to that person that wanted to hang himself. Not only because that dim world I lived in has gone, but because that is not all who I am now, or perhaps ever was. When I think about my life before, it is so hard to think of it as mine. I know, logically, that all of those events happened to me, but the extreme disassociation I had for the first part of my life has left me in a state of arrested development, such that here, while going though a second puberty, I find that I truly have to learn who I am all over. Whoever I was before, and the experiences I had, has come to have very little bearing on who I am now. The things I liked to do, the way I dressed, the people I liked to be around, all of those are in flux.

    Aside from my partner, I feel so supremely alone in this world. Not only is this a lonely time, but naturally, as we get older, we drift away from the things we liked to do in our younger years. I have no lived experience telling me where to move on to now though. It is frustrating, and anxiety inducing, but all so exciting. I’m trying new things, slowly making new friends, but where as a teenager it is so easy to be fluid, I’m a thirty-six year old woman. I have a job, responsibilities, and, yes, aches and pains that have pigeon-holed me.

    Experiencing such a great change in the middle of my life is by far the biggest mental trip I have ever been on. Perhaps on a daily basis I have to catch my breath and reassert myself into the world, lest I be swept away into the waters of disassociation by the massive “what the fuck” of it all. I’m sure, as time goes on and I get farther into my transition I will cement this personality more, but for now, it is quite the experience.

    For now though, despite everything going on, I just have to live my life. The world, the country, the species, all of it is literally burning down around me, the difference is now I don’t want to be swept away by it all. I’m all full of piss and vinegar, and that fighting spirit, the little part of him that held on so that I could raise like a putrid flower from his corpse, isn’t going to shy away from living while everyone else wants me dead.

    In the end, he got want he wanted, but I like to think that as he slowly fades into oblivion, that the anger he expected has been replaced with a certain peace watching me step out into the light.

  • Misanthropocene

    Misanthropocene

    As we find ourselves coming to the end of the year it’s usually a good idea to pause and reflect on the past and take a look toward the future. There isn’t a lot to do when you’re stuck inside, hiding from the deluge and wind, but sit around, staring at each other in the candle light, watching the shadows dance long down your lover’s face, hoping that when the calm finally returns, there will be something of the world left to salvage.

    The amount of apathy I have toward the world at the moment I feel is a decent reflection of the apathy that got us all here in the first place. Our planet is angry, and instead of responding to a changing world, and trying to either adapt, or prevent disaster, we as a species have decided it is better to fight each other, and ignore the bigger threats. How can we possible deal with our failing infrastructure and increasingly record breaking weather events when the boys are wearing dresses, the children are using litter boxes, and the elderly are intent on burning the world down around them just to stave off the cold of old age? We are gambling with the one thing there isn’t more of in this universe: time, which, as someone who doesn’t gamble at all, seems like a bad idea. What do I know though, I’m just some trans woman with an inner monologue and empathy.

    This year has been hell. Sure, there’s been a lot of good, but I’m sure that my fellow Americans will agree that the general feel in this country is that hope is fleeting. Prices are higher, jobs are disappearing, and even those that “voted for this” are beginning to see just how wrong they were. To put it simply, we done fucked up. How can anyone do anything but look to their own survival in times like this? When you can’t eat, or get your meds, and every day you’re told that society is collapsing around you, how are you supposed to put up a fight?

    This time of year there are always a lot of posts like this, and videos talking about the year, but the most pervasive ones I’ve been seeing have contained a message that circles around this: if all you did this year is survive, then that’s good enough, and, sure, that’s valid, even in good times there are some of us struggling, but these aren’t good times, and if we are already, as a civilization, knocking on the doors of survival, at the hands of our own duly elected leaders, then how do we expect to survive when the actual doom comes? We sit on the face of this planet (giggity) and proclaim ourselves masters over nature, but some bronzed pedophile and his Gatsbian court of ghouls has brought us to our knees. We are victims of a terrible intelligence, but that pales in comparison to the one thing we are all victims of, physics, and if we cannot survive a baboon, then I shudder to even begin to imagine the untold suffering that we are about to witness in the next century.

    The dams and levees are breaking, crops are failing, every summer is hotter, every winter colder. If these warning signs are ignored, then when the real shit comes, when mother nature tenses and begins to shrug us off the surface of the earth to save herself, then it won’t matter that the bible isn’t taught in schools, or that the girls are kissing each other, or that a Puerto Rican is doing the halftime show. There will be death, not noble, not bright, but total, brutal, in the way that only a cruel and uncaring universe can mete out.

    My hope is that this past year has taught some of us that it is easier to leave others alone than to try to control them. Above all, as long as whatever someone is doing isn’t hurting others, then they should be allowed to do it. We spend far too much time caring about the actions of others, and not enough working on ourselves and trying to better the collective. At this critical point in our history as a species, if we do anything that does not contribute to the greater good, it should be considered a moral crime. Take care of yourself, take care of your neighbor, and take care of your planet. One day, even if we turn our shit around, we will need to find a new home, and we cannot gain the knowledge and build the technology we need to do that if we are constantly bickering with each other.

    So stop it. Live your life, let others live theirs, stop giving so much of a shit about the things you don’t like. It’s selfish. We are selfish, and it’ll be our downfall. If you care about yourself, your children, your friends and family, then you have to also care about the rest of us. There is no more distinction. Never before has the line “the only thing required of the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” been more poignant. So if all you did this year was survive, then in the next you should riot. Tear down the enemies of mankind that have made you only able to survive. We are running out of time.

  • Where the waters do not curve

    Where the waters do not curve

    One year ago today I went on a date with an amazing girl at a Mexican restaurant on Alki Beach. We were both shy and awkward. She forgot her ID and so neither of us had a margarita, which was fine, because she doesn’t really drink. We went for a walk on the beach. It was very cold, though I was much colder than she was. We decided to sit in my car with the heater running, and talked for hours. I stayed up past my bedtime.

    This morning I woke up next to her, the same as I have for many mornings now. Of course my first lesbian relationship would be one in which I very quickly U-Hauled. I had a Halloween party the weekend after our first date. The night before was the first time she slept over, and she helped me set up for it, but didn’t attend. I was too scared of things moving too fast. That night, at the party, I kept bringing her up, and was summarily met with questions such as “well, why isn’t she here?” I was scared. I didn’t want to rush, but I hadn’t quite grasped that I was caught up in a wave of feelings that I could not control, and day visits became nights, became weeks, became months, and now, I’ve spent a year with her.

    I love her so damn much. I’ve never felt so understood by someone, or let myself be so open. I don’t know where I’d be now, I don’t know how I’d have gotten through the last year, as rotten as it has been, without her next to me. She has let me radiate all of my chaos into her life, and stood by quiet and composed and ready to help me put myself back together. Similarly, she’s harnessed my stubbornness and unyielding march toward progress to her own benefit. We work very well together.

    I have some pretty major trust issues, mostly stemming from my upbringing. Until recently, I’ve seen my life as some great cauldron, run through with cracks, and filled to the brim. The water leaks out, and I am furiously applying clay to patch the holes, failing to see that the cracks are getting smaller, and the flow of love into the vessel out weighs the flow out.

    I’m very lucky. I have an wonderful partner. I have amazing friends. I have been in amazing relationships in the past, and they are now very dear and wonderful friends. I suppose that is what healing is, at least for me. If I am a coiled spring, cold and tense, then the love that has been brought into my life by accepting myself, and welcoming the acceptance of others, is the heat of the torch that is straightening that spring. Slowly I’m starting to unwind. I’m starting to forget that I was ever coiled, holding up the weight of the world. I can’t begin to thank all of the people that have helped me along the way.

    Ram Dass says that “we’re all just walked each other home.” We all remember trauma. We all enter into this world formless, and have others beat us and shape us on the anvil of adolescence. The world looks at us with a cold eye, and says that we must do this, and say this, and think that, but love eventually returns us to that immutable shape. We are not the sum of our experiences, quenched in oil and set rigid in the sky. We are the same lump of clay we always were. Sometimes we’re a pitcher, or a plate, or some horrific sculpture born from the mind of a narcissist, but never fired, never set.

    The hands of love reach down to us and smooth our edges. They push and prod and make us into something new, something better, and then remake us all over again. It’s up to us to accept the change, and the help, and realize that nothing is wrong with us, and that the only thing you’re doing wrong is standing still.

  • All the bones of summer

    Well, that’s it. The summer of 2025 is over. The bleak gray of the long dark has come once again to Seattle, and I sit here hoping in the deluge and freeze to come, that some of the rot and decay that has stuck fast to the ribs of this country will be washed clean. I hope that in winter’s blanket the world, and myself, will heal a bit, and be ready to face what spring will bring, and what will probably be another summer stolen.

    I recently returned from a work trip. Usually I abhor going on such excursions, but this time was a bit different. I am a bit different. I’m a bit better. Despite everything I feel the progress in my own soul advancing, even when the world outside me seems determined to crumble. For a week I holed up in my hotel room, and in the hours that I was not working, I took a break. Spending time online recently has been a source of extreme frustration and suffering, and I just couldn’t do it. After washing off the dirt of the day, I’d lay in my rented bed, watching cable (an anachronistic hobby at this point) and reading. In between page turns and early evening cartoons I had a lot of time to think.

    When I’m alone and not plugged in, I’m happy. When even for a minute I can ignore the tempest blowing through the hallowed halls of Washington, I can remember how I felt in the summer of ’24, when my whole life was ahead of me, and that’s the thing, it still is. I’m really starting to love the way I look, and how I feel, and I’m starting to gain an amazing confidence and surety in myself that I can’t believe I never had before. What I am doing, what I’m going through, this whole process of becoming, and of being true to myself, it’s working, which makes me wonder why are there people out there that think that standing in the way of that, when it affects them not at all, is a good idea?

    Completely ignoring the fact that most people actually don’t care about trans people, and most people also want to be left alone to live their lives, and that trans people are just another in a long line of marginalized populations used as scapegoats to further the agenda of organizations determined to impose their will and, more importantly, capitalism, why does anyone fall for it? Why do followers exist? Why do people look at me, who has found within herself all of the tools to heal and be healthy and is doing the work to make a difference in her own life, with such disgust? Surely it can’t just be the fault of propaganda?

    Why do others feel the need to impose their will on others? Why is everyone so convinced that their way is right, and that others are wrong, and that they can’t be happy until everyone thinks like them? I think there lies within the structure of power, of governance, an inherent evil. One that is ancient and must be routinely routed out, or else great pain is felt for entire generations. The playbook for this evil is known, and that knowledge is widespread, yet there exists some sticky-sweet honey that it possesses that allows the common man to fall prey to its charms and ignore all of the history, all of the rivers of blood, that it has left in its wake.

    It is the need of the few to control the many that gives rise to this evil. True freedom, for anyone, can never be felt as long as there is the will of another imposed on the will of the self. Small groups of people can work together, and I think everyone agrees that common goals and mutual aid are a great boon to society, yet we seem to all be fighting the same battle every century.

    If Siddhartha’s great battle was to free the soul from the infinite cycle of birth and rebirth, then the modern search for Nirvana should be to break the constant cycle of the few holding sway over the many. I do not know how much longer we as a species can do this dance before have no more floor on which to do so.

    Men who live in excess now go to their satin lined graves on the backs of generations of people who wanted nothing more to be free. They have sacrificed the future of billions of their fellows in order to make their temporary respite from oblivion marginally more comfortable. What else can you call that but evil?

    I want it all to make sense. I want to understand how anyone can look around at all of this, see what’s happening, and not rage against the time stolen from them. I want to know why evil prevails. I want to know why something using such archaic weapons is still so effective.

    I’m very curious how this will all play out. We always look back at things like genocides, or wars, or terrorist attacks, and say “never again,” but it always comes back. Millions of people, myself, included, have been pointing out the descent for years, and yet it all falls on deaf ears.

    The only hope I’m holding onto right now is that the current administration seems so farcical, and so inept, that I hope all of the atrocities I’m predicting don’t come to pass. I’ve been staying away from the news as well. That has truly been helping. I don’t feel so under fire when I get away from it all. I am doing great. When I focus on my little life, I am constantly in awe with how much better my minute world is now. Perhaps that’s the secret. Maybe where individualism went wrong was it stopped being about the individual. If you look to make yourself a person you’d actually like to be, you stop caring about how others are different. If you look to better yourself, then all of their primordial weapons will turn to ash, and finally blow away and find rest on the fields of history.

  • Up to speed

    I’ve recently returned from my tenth journey to Burning Man. Since I’ve been back I’ve been trying to think of how I’d write this article, something summarizing the changes I’ve seen in the event, the denizens, etc, but I find myself not having a lot to say, or, at least, I haven’t puzzled out quite what all of those thoughts I had in the Great Desert K-Hole meant.

    It was a hard burn. With the weather and a flurry of emotions in the beginning of the event, I found myself falling back into old habits. It is a lesson I’ve learned a few times now, but it is truly hard to disassociate who you were in certain places and certain events with who you are now, especially when those prior actions were, at best, coping mechanisms for a hollow life.

    It has become very apparent that my attitude and relationship toward the event needs to change, and I’ve decided to take at least next year off. I’ve been planning to do so for a while, but I’m going to follow through this time. Think of it less as a retirement, and more of a licking of the wounds and returning with vengeance.

    All of that being said, I had a great time with my absolutely wonderful campmates, and I greatly enjoyed showing my darling, patient girlfriend around my favorite place. I promise, beautiful, burn was better next year.

    I haven’t posted in a while, and that irks me. I really hope this gets me back into the habit of writing regularly. I need it. I think I can make something of it, if I can just maintain momentum. It is the thing I was always best at, afterall.

    This summer, nay, this past year, has been hard. It constantly astounds me how polarly opposite this summer and last were. Here is the part where I’d tell you about how my job has been kicking my ass, I seem to be incredibly emotional all of the time, I live with constant anxiety that my rights are being taken away, and I’m one dark alley away from being tossed through the gates of a modern Auschwitz.

    In fact I’d usually, at this point, start lamenting how my depression has returned after being basically eliminated by HRT. I’d talk about how every day I read the news and cry out into the void as only one who truly doesn’t understand what to do in the face of such reckless hate and idiocy can.

    I won’t. I won’t do it. I spent this morning crying and I won’t do so again. Not today. Not for that reason at least. I just cry all of the time now, so it’s bound to happen later. So let’s talk about what’s going right, and we might as well start with that.

    I cry all of the time! I have emotions! How wonderful (and no, that isn’t sarcasm!) Now that I’ve used up my lifetime allotment of exclamation points, let me just say, that being able to feel this deeply is one of the highlights of the past year. Sure, it makes the bad stuff really bad, but the good, dear reader, the soaring in my soul when I play with my dog, or eat something delicious, or feel hope, the good things I feel almost make up for the pall that has fallen over the world.

    On top of emotions, I look great. Modesty be damned, and I know that I have a long way to go, but I don’t hate looking at myself in the mirror every day now. Things are starting to match. Just earlier I noticed my silhouette, something that has always bothered me, and I didn’t have an instant aversion to it. I had a lot of dysphoria at Burning Man, but it was apparently unwarranted. I loved the pictures. I’m starting to feel confident in my body, and why anyone wants to take that away, I’ll never know.

    I took Jenny to her first pride, and she took me to see her camping spot, and, just, Jenny. She is so good to me, and so patient, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so understood by someone. How I have not annoyed her to death at this point, I’m not sure.

    I went to the ren faire with my friends for my birthday, and we had a great time. In fact, I have wonderful friends. I am really hard on myself, but these people let me hang around despite the despair and self-loathing.

    I’ve been writing. I think I’m actually starting to get back into the swing of it. Currently I’ve got two stories I’m sort of hashing out, as I’d like to start diving into fiction again. I think at this point it’s safe to assume I’ll always be far too anxious to make it as a reporter, and that’s okay.

    Things aren’t always going to go well. In fact, I’ve spent increasingly more amount time assuming that nothing will be good ever again. I’m still not sure I’m incorrect on that. There are dark clouds on the horizon. The overwhelming sense of agitation I feel on a daily basis just existing in this most broken of timelines is immense. I’m not going to think about that for the rest of today. I can’t. To do so pushes me farther into the realms of burn out, and I’m already circling the rim. There may be a time where my will finally breaks, but not for the rest of today.

    Fuck it all, and stay safe.

  • Rattling the keys

    Mine is a very anxious mind, and as such, I have a very hard time sitting still. You see, I like to solve problems. More than anything I’ve ever been able to do, that is what I do best. Even this blog is a means to try to solve the problems I have with the insane ramble that is always chattering and wailing inside my head. Living like this, while constantly feeling I must shift one way or another, in a futile attempt to “fix” something about myself, or my life, is an absolutely horrible way to live.

    I wrote the above after having a shower revelation. I spend so much of my life trying to pursue some sort of arbitrary level of perfection. The impatience and anxiety I embody wholly is immense. I am eternally, and existentially, exhausted. I seem to be constantly taught and reminded to breathe and take things easier, slower. So I am hoping that this small, daily reminder, posted next to my monitor, will be something that can ease some of this tension.

    My entire life there has felt like I have this spring inside me, that I just desperately want to let go. The only time I have been able to make any progress on that goal was when I started transition. That is perhaps the only time I have ever felt peace in my life, and, for a long time, it was good. However, I’ve noticed a curious pattern of late. If I could find an answer to the biggest question I ever had, if I could actually change things in my life, than surely I could solve everything, right? If I had the ability to start this monumental journey, it should be easy to roll the momentum over and finally reach the top of the mountain. I could untwist the spring inside of me until the coil was straight and true and rang pure into the void of my soul.

    So, without even realizing, I let my guard down. I took out the earplugs, and let the sinister voice of anxiety back in. That demon then immediately used its greatest weapon against me. My old nemesis had sat for nearly a year armed and ready to bring me down, and it did so with my greatest flaw.

    I’ve never been a patient person. I rush through things. Really, it goes hand in hand with my anxiety. If I have things I want to do, problems I want to solve, I feel compelled to do them, even if care and caution are warranted. The weight of the thing pushes on the spring and undoes whatever progress I have made. Thus, the only logical way to relieve the tension, is to immediately and completely do the thing.

    Sometimes this manifests as projects completed to a lesser grade than I would like, sometimes it manifests as crippling agitation when I can’t do them. I will spend a whole weekend worrying about something I have to do on Monday. If I can’t complete something in one day’s time, than I will ceaselessly grind down on it until it and I are dust.

    I decided I’ve spent too much of my life concerned for the future and lamenting the past. I gave myself an amazing gift, of finally, after more than three decades, of being my true self. I have goals, sure. I’d like to own my own house some day. I really need to get out of my dead end job and do something creative for work again. None of these goals are achievable overnight. I am doing the work. Hell, this blog is testament to that. In the mean time though, there is a whole lot of life I’m missing.

    This is all easier said than done, of course. Not only do I seem biologically prone to this constant worry, but we live in very worrying times. Ours is a world that tells us to constantly achieve, constantly grow and earn. If we don’t do that we’re left behind, or possibly cast out. Our lives are candle flames that are being used to heat an ever larger pot, and the cook cares not for any individual candle flame, only that more are produced when one burns out. Well I’m done caring about the pot. The only thing that matters are the lights within me and around me, because in the end, all that really matters is the warmth around us while our candle still burns.

    So if there is a spring, and if there is a constant, never ending supply of loads added to it, then it follows that I should not be concerned with the rate at which I am able to unload the spring, but rather with how much weight the spring can handle. There will always be time to remove loads and solve problems, and there are far worse things to be than a spring.

  • Paddle your own spacesuit

    I have a very interesting relationship with alcohol. I’ve spent a good amount of time trying to define that relationship. It certainly isn’t a relationship I have a lot of control over, but I do think it’s one I can figure out.

    My brain never shuts up. I’ve been known to say that I am “existentially tired,” and that’s why. Even my dreams are a bundle of horrible worries inserted into the VCR of my less than wakeful consciousness. Especially recently, it seems. Enter in alcohol.

    Nothing takes away all of those worries like alcohol. The constant barrage of thoughts ends for a brief few hours. Add to it the boost in confidence, and the final escape into oblivion, and you have a perfect drug for dealing with a mind that is far from stable. It is the one thing I keep coming back to, and probably always will.

    At times in my life I definitely could have been considered an alcoholic. I’ve ruined relationships because of my drinking. I’ve ruined days, weeks, jobs, hearts, property, all in the name of escaping myself. While I seem to (mostly) have a handle on things, sometimes I go a bit too far, and once I lose control, I definitely become and act like a person that I dislike far worse than the person I’m trying to escape from.

    If there has been one hallmark of my transition, it has been that it is a supreme act of self love. This whole journey was started because I was faced with the question of “why do I hate myself so much?” Well, a big reason is that I hated this meat spacesuit I pilot around. It was, in fact, a HUGE reason, and things are better, but they aren’t perfect. Now I’ve come to realize that I still have a long way to go to feel good about the pilot.

    Shame is a powerful motivator, and where in the past I’ve always tended to wallow in my self loathing after doing something I regret, now I really want to get to the bottom of it. I know that I have the capacity in me to feel better. I feel better every day I look in the mirror, and that is because I decided to make figuring out the source of my troubles a supreme priority.

    So, why then, do I hate the pilot? Is the disconnect I have between body and mind the issue? Is there some sort of unification I can bring to the two, so that the growing love I have for the outside can flow to the inside? I always feel as if my emotions, my problems, have no weight given the emotions and problems of others. As I am reminded often by those around me, I am too hard on myself. I also have a bad case of the “people pleasies.” I will go out of my way to do anything for everyone, but if I slip up, if I need help, if I get all in my cups and cry and let the flood gates open, that somehow feels wrong.

    I love it when people open up to me. I love playing therapist, but even now, even having the logical ability to see how one sided and insane it is that others wouldn’t also enjoy doing those things for me, I can’t give myself the grace to accept it. When I think about being anything else than the confident girl who can do anything for anyone, when I think about needing help myself, then the feelings of doubt and shame creep in. Suddenly, the illusion is destroyed. When others need help they’re simply human, and deserving. When I need it, it has to explode out of me in a horrible way, and then I feel worthless and small because of it.

    So I’m trying. I’m going to stop feeling sorry for myself, accept that I’ve made a mistake, and move on. I’m going to start trying to recognize when I need a little guidance, or a hand, and not let it all fester inside of me to where only under the lubrication of some substance or another it comes out, because the truth is I am worthy of having the same things I so willingly give to others. I’m not a terrible person. What I’m doing is a brave thing (despite how much I get tired of hearing it.) Am I more unstable now? Yes and no. This phenomenon is not a new thing for me, in fact, this whole “charge and discharge” thing is right out of deadname’s playbook, but I’m not him anymore, and I can be better.

    I’m not saying it won’t be a long road, but I am saying that I’m going to walk it, instead of drunkenly stumble down it. I’m worth that much, and I’d like to remember it as much as I can. I didn’t start transition to come out on the other end the same as I went in. I aim to be better, and if I can’t make the spacesuit be indistinguishable from me, then I want to fill it so completely that the lining on the inside feels like home.