Neue

Getting Out

2025-09-11T13:06:00.000-06:00

I always return here. How could I not? You, my dear journal, the record of me.

A crossroads is coming up. Du mußt dein leben ändern - you must change your life. The walls appear to be closing in on my life here in the USA. We talk about fascism and blah blah blah but it's really the same as it's always been but more. Racism but saying the quiet part loud. Reaganomics squared. The Moral Majority but more. I go back and forth. Is it better to ensure my own survival by leaving, making a new life elsewhere? Is that just an exercise of privilege? When I was 19, I wanted to move to Canada because it would be easier to transition there. Maybe I should've, maybe I should now.

But I have kids here now - not my genetic offspring, or even adoptees, but people who rely on me to varying extents. Part of the allure of leaving is to go somewhere where I don't have a web of responsibilities, where no one looks to me for guidance. A new life, but a regression. As much as I feel it's part of my identity, sometimes I resent having to be the rock for others when I don't feel like I have a fixed point to anchor myself to. It kinda sucks being the final authority in your own life, as much as it is a freedom.

So, my dilemma. I don't want to leave my home - fuck the USA, I love Chicago. There's black people here, it's lit! Still, it could be good for me to put down roots somewhere else. Learn a new place, see some new sights. Understand new racisms, meet new parts of the diaspora.

I will find a way to survive. Maybe even thrive, goddess willing.

2025-09-11T12:03:00.000-06:00

My soul is troubled at the moment. I'm worried I'm making the wrong decisions. I took a job that I worry might be too much for me. The COVID walls are closing in. I worry that one of the relationships I feel the most dear has way past gone to shit.

Maybe I've reached the limit to what I can achieve. I worry about that a lot, maybe always have.

Usually, I would say I to myself: I need to get stronger. Smarter, better, something-er. I don't know if that's the case here. I need more clarity, maybe.

What do I know is true?

Sunny's Song

2017-08-24T22:28:00.001-05:00

I keep think about my father, his black liberationist roots. I wonder if I'm fulfilling that mission correctly, the one he silently charged me with. Why am I still carrying it? Despite everything he was, the hands made for fighting children, his disdain for the queer, his ancient roiling rage ... I guess he taught me how to see critically the ways people and systems perpetuate racism, thrive on it.

But I spend all this time around these white trans people and queer organizers and I feel lost. I look back on my life and see how much of it has been transactions of social and economic survival with white people. It leaves me feeling so estranged, so painfully in-between. I recognize that colorism is what gives me the privilege to hand-wring about the subject.

Sometimes I tell a story I half-stole from Kate Bornstein: I imagine two teams playing football, only to realize that I'm the football. White/black, gay/straight, man/woman; every border that my body lies upon is another set of teams looking to spike me into the astroturf. I didn't identify with my blackness as a sapling because my femme-ness made me smell foreign to my black caretakers and peers. Failing to uphold the code of black masculinity is often seen as traitorous, an affront to our fathers and their fathers. I carry that weight still, try to help others dismantle it while I'm doing the work.

I feel a need to balance the perspective, to offer up the sins of white culture so I don't come off coonish. I want to be a help to my people, not an anchor or another light-skinned person who accrues socioeconomic capital off the struggle. But I'm not woke and I know it. There's layers to unlearning, more than there ever appear to be at first. I see people with white privilege who feel as though they're done unlearning their prejudice but, baby, that shit's bone-deep. Sharing a community with a gaggle of faux-woke white communists has made my rose-tinted glasses turn a deeper shade of gray. They see me in fractions, reflections, 2D cutouts. They ignore their black trans sisters fighting tooth and nail, then justify their paranoia and xenophobia by citing the murders of black trans women. They move to Bridgeport and Pilsen and only make space with other white people. It's exhausting. I hoped I could galvanize them to change, to create a bridge between south and north. I now see that goal as far-fetched.

I grow increasingly underwhelmed by the social scenes that appear to be available to me. As I consider how to grow my life there don't seem to be people around me who care about the same things, who share my drive to build. I retain the ability to fit in most social circles, but it requires me to expend social energy disproportionate to how little I seem to care any more.

This is a prayer for the estranged. This is a song for isolation and healing. I don't know what the way forward is, but may it look different from what's behind me.

Flowers Blooming in the Church

2017-04-22T21:23:00.000-05:00

Religion just seems like the wrong word, but it's the only one that comes to mind. My higher power, a la Alcoholics Anonymous. There's been many years since I regularly prayed to it. Tonight, I find myself in need of guidance.

The prophecy of the Nerevarine: you are not the one, but you may yet become the one. Being the hero doesn't matter. It's walking the path that counts.

I pray to Luna. I pray to Althena. I pray to Alys and Shizel and Terra and you, the player. They give me the strength to strive, the security of knowing I'm protected by heroes bigger than me, the knowledge that battles against outrageous odds can be won.

Every now and then, I light a candle to Santa Muerte, my queen. Her sainthood gives her domain over the queers and the night and all manners of risky business. I'm not sure if it's some form of appropriation, given that I'm a non-Latinx PoC of vaguely Catholic descent. Still. She gets it. I'm gonna go buy a candle.

Pyre Rhino

2017-01-14T19:42:00.000-06:00

I'm rediscovering bits of myself. I put together a mix made of music from my archives and some more recent stuff. Letting myself slow down my emotional dash lets the me of now catch up to the me of then. So many different versions of me. I don't miss being regarded as a boy, but I do miss how much less complicated that Jessica's life was.

I broke up with the girl I'd been dating for six months. I think I regret it now, but at the time it was a relief. No more being obligated to talk, no more managing her abandonment feels when I couldn't be present, no more of someone touching my body. I still love her. She still loves me too, I think. But I kept breaking up and getting back together with her, and that is a sucky thing to experience and I couldn't keep doing it to her.

Right now there's a wall between me and other people. I'm having a hard time maintaining friendships. I get messages on OKCupid and ignore them. Why start what I can't keep up? Maybe it's my BPD/CPTSD flaring up, sending my into an avoidance spiral. Or the fact that, for me, doing social work makes being social feels like work.

My job is an exhaustion without end. Spending three hours a day in a loud room full of triggers and potential violent energy is making my mental illness into an even thicker stew. I'm jumpy and irritable and my memory's worse than usual. I feel so inadequate. Shouldn't I be able to do this? If I can't sustain the work, does that mean I've failed? I want to be kinder to myself than all that, but the stakes are always so high.

It's hard to maintain my center in so many survival situations. I feel sad, angry, and hurt most of the times I'm not numb. Trying to smoke less weed. It's been helping

This Slender Slice of Silence

2016-12-13T23:05:00.000-06:00

The spoken word must be killed. My brother hated noise of any kind. What a terrible thing, that I've come to resemble my torturer.

I can't find peace, inside of my body or out. I retreat to my room to play video games. Not exactly an adaptive coping mechanism. Existing only as rumor, emerging to eat then scurrying back to my nest. I don't know how to fix it. I honestly have a hard time describing the problem I want to fix. Is it that I'm so socially drained that I never see fit to leave my home? That my anxiety has reached a peak which leaves me to see no gain in interacting with the physical world? Or that I've become desensitized to the feelings in my body, watching them from outside myself?

I'm mad at my sister for leaving me, for doing it in a crappy way, for making out with the younglings while loudly complaining about how the sexual politics of power. I'm mad at my job for not supporting me, for being a place of pain that preaches self-care without providing structure or resources for it. I'm mad at myself. I'm mad at myself because I can't continue doing what I'm doing. I feel like I've failed at being the person I want to be. Intellectually, I know that I'm another wounded bird who deserves care. But my gut says that I should be more, that any burden too big for my shoulders is a sign I should improve.

I want to love that broken little girl inside of me. It's hard to know what she wants because she's spent so long avoiding pain instead of pursuing life. I want love and companionship and a bank account that grows and a body that can do anything. I want to feel freedom. I want a car that runs and a love that endures. To find a midpoint between stability and chaos. I want to see tomorrow as possibility instead of hardship. I want to feel sexy without always needing to prove it.

I want to feel safe. I don't right now. I want to forge a path away from addiction and fear. I want to live a manageable life where I rarely have to worry about a fight breaking out. I want enough space away from the pain of others that I can unpack my old hurts without breaking down.

I want space. Enough that I have room to contemplate, not so much that I'm lost in emptiness.

The Process

2016-08-19T07:39:00.000-05:00

I'm addicted to feeling powerful.

I'm addicted to being the right person for the moment.

I'm addicted to learning.

I'm addicted to love.

I'm addicted to feeling helpful.

The Tao of Surviving

2016-03-23T20:41:00.000-06:00

There are days where all I can focus on is subsistence. My life is unbearably survivable. I get home from work, I drop into low-energy mode. I'm trapped in a gravity well, sustained indefinitely in some fraction of a life.

Experience made me excellent at enduring the untenable. It's a powerful skillset, and not one I seek to lose. Violence and torture can't stop me. Being without friends won't end me. Fear becomes courage. The price of this limited immortality is living half a life, separate from the ability to enjoy purposeless moments. I avoid the bad without being able to steer towards the good.

I ache for a romantic relationship. Everything comes back to that, circles around it. Now that my apparatus for avoiding bad relationships has been refined, I can't bring myself to go on a date. I want a new kind of love, the kind that doesn't rely on caretaking, but I have no idea what that looks like. How can I seek something when I don't know what it'd look like?

The Mommy Effect

2016-03-13T00:43:00.001-06:00

I want to make a family that will take care of me. But, in the process of putting that family together, I put myself at the head of it so no one can victimize me. I place myself in a position where I give more help than I take. There's safety in that; I don't have to admit my needs and face the possibility that they won't be met. I'm still not taken care of. I'm still satisfying unreasonable demands. But now I can blame it on others and their needs rather than the ones who made me this way.

The Woman

2015-12-10T11:35:00.001-06:00

She wants more of me than there is. When I'm around, she seems to feel better; I soothe the broken parts of her, doting and cooing. I play the companion, nurse, and daughter. Many hats.

I feel trapped. I don't want to admit that I like feeling trapped. She needs me. Maybe she won't say it outright, but she lets me know in her ways. It keeps me coming back.

I worry she'll leave. I try to anticipate needs, think of reasons we need to be with each other, find any reason she wouldn't leave someone as shitty as me.

It gets worse in the winter.

On Enduring Constant Thoughts of Being Raped

2015-11-28T13:17:00.000-06:00

I feel the guilt and shame. It's a flat board on my chest that keeps getting heavier. If I intentionally put myself in dangerous situations where I end up getting raped - is that my fault? Will my family and friends blame me? Will they leave?

There's this rush of nihilistic freedom when I'm thinking about being raped. It completes me, makes everything smell like danger. When there's a hand on my neck, time progresses differently. Everything is always Now. The world consists of only me and the person who's in control of me. Simple.

I know I can survive nearly anything. That fact honestly kind of scares me. If it happens - if I get raped again - I know I'll probably still be alive to deal with whatever comes after. The fear that comes along with that thought runs into my bones.

Ataraxia

2015-03-06T01:37:00.001-06:00

I hit a new bottom. I saw who I was, who I am, the anger and pain and dysfunction that came from being raised by people who abused me. I saw how it worked. I let myself say out loud the things my mom had done to me. I began to reckon with how dependent I am on the other people in my life and the shame that came with it.

I don't feel triumphant about any of it. It just sucks and makes feel feel uneasy, like I've perpetually committed some misdeed in need of punishment.

I don't know what I'm doing right now. Teetering on the edge of adulthood again. Small. Empty. I can't take care of myself. I don't know if it's the depression or the BPD/C-PTSD, but I feel powerless to change the course of my life.

Now that I understand the extent of my mental illness, I can't trust myself. Every blind spot I find is another reason to question my judgment. Every move seems like another twirl in the spiral down.

Death has reappeared in my fantasies, the maiden I daydream about when desolation overwhelms. I want to embrace her with all my heart, consummate my marriage to Santa Muerte. I went goth a bit more. It's who I am in the deep-down places.

The people I live with scare me. All the drinking and denying and aggression make this house feel a bit too much like home, the familiar drama of dysfunctional people bouncing off one another. It's hard to watch this new band of players say all the same lines straight off the script. Unhappy families may each be unhappy in their own way, but they tend to express it in the same frustrating storm of slammed doors and drunken challenges.

I'm done. I've got nothing left.

The Love Poem

2015-02-06T23:48:00.001-06:00

I want to fall in love with someone who's a monster to everyone but me

Killing Moon

2014-06-24T15:37:00.000-05:00

I started smoking cigarettes again. It was a while ago. Right after my big breakup with my evil ex, I lost that quantum of control, that sheer little bit of luck, discipline, and habit that kept me from backsliding.

I failed two classes.

I had my surgery.

I've needed to write, I should've been writing, but ... I couldn't get my thoughts organized, corral my mind long enough to get them on a page. I sat in that bed after the surgery, my thoughts buzzing, groggy and not too mobile, but I couldn't write. I'm smoking as I write this. Keeps me from having that low-dopamine feeling, the intense boredom and disaffection that comes with using a substance to temporarily climb out of the hole I'm in.

Things are good. I have a girlfriend who is genuinely great. She understands. All of it. It's incredible. I've been graduated, though there are some more bureaucratic hurdles to jump. The only thing left to do is get a job and become the adult I need to be, that I'm scared of being. I take on so much anxiety when I'm sitting on a threshold, as I am right now. Liminal spaces, where I'm not who I was nor who I will be - they make me feel lost.

I took this month-long sabbatical, which I'm now nearing the end of. I stay with my friends and my girlfriend, away from the grim silence of the lonely apartment I'm still paying rent on. It gives me an immense comfort, to have the community I'd never dreamed was possible to have. At the same time ... am I hiding? Am I dissolute? Am I now again the slacker I worked so hard not to be anymore? I don't think any of those fears hold factual truth, but they point to my fear of becoming who I was. Y'know, a smoker, a liar, an addict, a burnout. I don't want to be him.

Die and Not Live Forever

2014-02-25T00:27:00.001-06:00

I've had the superlative romantic turmoil packed into the last week. Hm, maybe turmoil fails to summarize . . . desolation? A hailstorm of heartbreak? The concupiscent catastrophe, a gentle hand that methodically scattered everything inside of me.

Death and rebirth . . . and death, and rebirth, and death, and the whole cycle of samsara embodied in a series of bad choices and great kisses. If I'm vague, it's only because I'm sick of telling the story. Even if my girl-on-girl (-on-girl) drama is a bit out of the ordinary, there's no profit in the account of it.

There's no profit to be made in any of this, really. I don't know if I'm writing to give an accounting of my feelings, or just to vent. The empty bed stings more when it's king-sized. I want to go read Anne Sexton poems and do deliriants and cease to be a person. I want to be freed from myself, from this apartment I share with her, from this life I'm quickly becoming far too tired to lead.

I'm tired of women, scared of their eyes, no matter how wonderful a soft arm cradles my head. I can't easily find a world where I feel safe trying to date other women without having my belief in myself ground down. I find something curious in the touch of a man. But how frightening a man is; how many precautions a woman must take. I worry of becoming some political lesbian, fear and politics informing her desires.

I need to detox from love. Sweat out all the oxytocin, drink bad coffee in a church while I admit how very powerless I am in the face of an emotion so vast and devastating.

I'm going to go to sleep so I can get up in time for my girlfriend to break up with me.

The Tip of the Tongue

2014-02-17T15:17:00.000-06:00

I understand being the one who desires. Years of fruitless crushes and longing that tore gaps into me. But I have no context for feeling desired. All my life I longed to be beautiful, to be worthy of want. Now that I'm at least not quite as ugly I don't know what to do with this.

I've started to have these moments where people tell me they think I'm pretty. I don't see it, and I don't get it. This isn't me trying to brag. I completely fucking don't get it.

It first became apparent upon taking my first fledgling steps into the local trans community. Which is partially a social more thing - I think we're more likely to tell each other that we're pretty than our cis counterparts, because we know firsthand how much perceptions of trans women as unattractive have been weaponized against us. But also we have the ability to see beyond the jumbled secondary sexual characteristics, the will to see the person that is the person. And maybe we see that each other are sexy when no one else seems to except men of vile intent.

Reasons aside, on that night I got hit on more than I have in the rest of my life. I hesitate to even talk about this anywhere outside of you, my lovely blog, because how can you discuss this and have it not sound boastful? But it isn't, it's just this thing I need to discuss because I can't contextualize it. It's a feeling of sensory saturation, like when you stub your toe so bad you stop hearing anything for a moment. I hear a compliment and I shut off.

Probably it is better this way. When I was a teen, I lapped up those fleeting moments of attention from men, what I saw as a wonderful approval of my self even when I knew I was being hit on by a creep. It's so fucked up, but validation for a young trans girl is rare enough to turn many frogs into princes.

I want, have always wanted to be invisible. No voice, face a mask, interacting with the world briefly only to be forgotten again. Transformation fantasies always seemed to hopeful to me, the sort of thing kids who believed in Santa might dream up. Cipher-hood could come true, at least. My vision of the future, depersonalized and nameless.

Dear Santa Muerte

2014-02-09T17:25:00.003-06:00

Love is like this terrible thing, right? Like in the sense that Yahweh is terrible and the greatest One Above All. Being in love is like living next to the ocean: it gives life and its constant motion soothes, but one really bad day and it'll wash your house away.

That is my way of prefacing that I broke up with my girlfriend, who made me feel so rotten. I met this lady and, well, she kinda asked me out. I didn't have a reason to say "no," soooo ...

No. Let's start this again. This girl asked me out as I was about to break up with my girlfriend. I said no, because I can't be a person who cheats ever again, even if the love is gone and I feel justified in it. Refuse to hurt someone like that again, lose that much respect for myself again. But I asked her out again once the deed was done. And we went on a date and ... well, it was a little magical.

No. Stop. It was really magical. There's the narcotic feeling of touching a person for the first time, right? I won't discount that. But meeting someone whose understanding you have, without having to explain, it's so nice. It's nice not to feel like I'm taking up too much space. Her lips are nice and I want to kiss them. She's tall and funny and beautiful. And I'm supremely scared of how much I like her.

I lit two candles to Santa Muerte. It seemed appropriate, really. I helplessly fall in love with death, and then I ask death for help with love. Her intervention was much appreciated.

I'm used to dating as a butch guy. Try to pursue with clear intent but without so much energy as to appear crazy and desperate. Make strong gestures while leaving enough ambiguity to make the other person fill in the gaps with their imagination. I'm off script and in a completely different country right now, something which leaves me eternally grateful and awfully tense.

I can't tease apart my desire to replace the phantom limb of my recently-dissolved relationship and my feelings for this new lady. I miss what I had, that field of flowers which bloomed in my heart for Leigh Holmes, the future I wanted to build with her, the love I still have for her that seems to be unable to get over that hump. I worry that the feeling my new flame ignites is not a desire to be with, but one to consume; to have, never able to be divested of. To erase the hurt. To fill up the empty spaces.

Also I would like to taste her neck.

Seriously, thank god no one reads this.

Indulgence

2014-02-04T00:46:00.000-06:00

Death. Death. Death.

I've fallen in love.

Death.

The void is always calling if you're in the right spot to listen.

Death.

Why did Odysseus lash himself to the mast? You could say he was adventurous, but that's not it. The sirens that call you to the underworld really don't have such pretty voices.

Like a drug dealer. Some things just sell themselves.

Death.

I wish it was just a morbid quirk, my goth desires reaching their apex. But that was never it. I'm fascinated. The closer I get to desiring my cessation, the more beautiful it seems.

Death.

I worry if that people would remember me for anything but this, my testament. No one should read this while I'm alive. It would make so much more sense in retrospect.

Death.

I'm so close, maybe. Death. I feel better than I ever have. Death. But it's creeping up on me. Death.

How do you end something like this?

Ex Animus

2014-02-04T00:02:00.001-06:00

The great thing about this being my secret blog is that I owe responsibility to no one for the content. Even if I feel like a nerd for talking about video games and a stereotype for talking about trans stuff.

With that in mind, here's like ten paragraphs about trans stuff and Knights of the Old Republic II.

There are certain themes that resonate with me, vibrating deep parts of me that I can't quite reach. Stories about loneliness, about losing parts of yourself, about learning the wrong lesson. In the community, we call it "detransition" when you give up living your life as yourself and go back into hiding. If that sounds judgmental, it's just the echo of my own bitterness. Sorry.

Your character - the Exile - did something so terrible that she was cut off from the Force completely. She has to re-learn how to be a person from the ground up, severed from the heartbeat of life. I identified with that sense of having your inside torn out, with discovering that there's a hole in the world. I still do. When I detransitioned, my confidence left me. I felt guilt for trying to convince people I was a woman, then more for not having the guts to go through with it. More than that, though, was the feeling of going off of estrogen. It was like I'd had a star open up inside of me and then through my carelessness snuffed it out. My connection to the Force was stripped from me.

"I suffered ... indignities. And fell into darkness." -Kreia

RPGs, like the Joseph Campell fueled mythos of Star Wars, reiterate protean patricides, always finding a new Dark Father to kill. The theme of the RPG is growth - you overcome adversity and become stronger for it. The genre is about adolescence, so of course you fight your parents. I say "parents," but it's always the father, echoing the Oedipal. He tries to steal the pure maiden whom the mildly pubescent hero is in chaste love with, and for that he deserves to die. The father hoards mother-as-saint and must defeated in order for the son to become the father.

But Kreia. Oh, Kreia. Mother, teacher, protector, ideologue, adversary. Kreia's narrative weaves in themes of control, the pain of wanting something greater for your charge. She wants you to see her point of view, and is willing to help or hurt to achieve that goal. She genuinely loves you, and she can't help but hate it that you love people other than her. She hates being tied to the cyclical nature of a story - the curse of being bound by a narrative Force - and wants you to break free from it, live the life she could've had. And does evil for it.

I can't write about her without it being obvious that I love this character in a way I can't explain. I fear my mother, sometimes. Back before I detransitioned, she was pretty much opposed to me following my own path. In that soft way, where you find ways to undermine, but are no less obvious in intent. I don't trust her anymore, not in the way I did beforehand. Even beyond my own transubstantiation, I know of terrible things she's done, moral lapses that coexist in dissonance with the nice little lady that gives me soup in Tupperware.

The problem with KotOR II is that it is unplayable. It is mess that was never finished and all attempts to polish it have still left it with this empty spaces fan enthusiasm fails to fill. No amount of effort will cause it to be truly finished. So, I fear, with my body, the eternal battlefield. I can get asymptotically close to forgetting about the scars that mark my condition, but maybe it'll never be fixed. I write about it, and I feel guilty. Guilty! For talking about my life. As though it should go unspoken.

There is no conclusion. In the original, Kreia tells your future in a fit of prognosticating pique and then expires. They added some cruft back in with the restoration mods, but it's all still a bit of a mess. It's not clever enough to be a message. Sometimes you just run out of time.

2014-01-02T18:51:00.000-06:00

agh I'm shopping for sex toys but it's just a metonym for what I really what

The Reaction

2014-01-02T14:34:00.001-06:00

The new year is a strange goalpost to recognize. Does the annual memorial for recently-consumed Christmas leftovers really merit a deep moral inventory of one's self? I feel like the fiscal year would be a better way to go, or something lunar. I'm a financial wiccan, apparently. I rub crystals to summon my familiar, which is just a floating wad of cash. After all, what magic is more mysterious than a good credit rating?

The girlfriend pulled back from kissing me at the designated it's-a-new-year-and-let's-shame-the-singles portion of the holiday. Like, a totally lame New Year's peck. Here's to the year of her not kissing me past, and possibly the one ahead. What I wouldn't give to not be madly in love with her. Here's to another year enmeshed in the complication of having a relationship so fulfilling in some respects yet disheartening in others. Here's to the middle passage, through which I and we now travel.

If I said I was in a bit melancholic right now, would you be surprised, based on prior experience? I soldier closer to my goals. My wicked plan may just let me gather all of the pieces of the Triforce and finally make my wish for facial feminization surgery. I will actually have a degree come May. But my anxieties mount, and victories only glimpsed upon the horizon seem hollow.

Unfulfilled Desires

2013-12-22T01:32:00.000-06:00

Catalog every cause for which you'd mortgage your soul. Number your dreams, then make them boring and real by putting them on a list.

Reach Heaven by Violence. Recognize that they all have this club which doesn't seem to have room for you. You will mourn and most of you will move on, but some of you will be stuck there, worrying the sore.

You love her, but you love anyone that gets in your way. Better than hating them, like you used to. Or nicer, maybe? It'll hurt you either way.

The wound doesn't heal. It just scabs over to be re-opened. Is that grim? Question your metaphors. Have you earned calling yourself a bitch?

Remember the man that taught you the word "liminal." (You should probably hate him for that.) Grim to think of all the people you knew but don't know, all the ghosts you've disappointed with your absence.

Does anyone know how long she wandered? Words are so sexy and bleak and meaningless once you get a handle on them. Try not to get too excited by this.

You want to be the sort of person who goes out and has fun, you just don't like the actual doing of it. Act like it will get better. Sit in front of a computer. As a default, as a refuge, as a peaceful act of atrophy.

Don't show this to anyone.

Milk and Honey

2013-12-20T23:24:00.000-06:00

I got hit with a gust of happiness! Not sure why. I've been taking 5-HTP and I just injected myself with life-giving estrogen, one of which I feel obligated to assume is the culprit. It's so, so nice. I listened to a song that's made me feel this intense sense of longing, this profound loss ever since I first heard it. For once I heard it and just felt ... peaceful.

It's always Secret of Mana music, isn't it? While each misery is a splinter universe with untold riches left to describe, I find I lack the words for my elation. I want to describe every moment of this to the me of two months ago that was considering the straight razor with such a calculating gaze, walk her through it like I was describing a Mucha painting to a blind person. God's in his heaven, I'm in mine, all's right with the world.

It Will Never Be Enough

2013-12-12T03:05:00.002-06:00

I switched to injections, and the first five days were a-w-e-s-o-m-e. But right now, a day before my shot, all I want is to get in a fight with my girlfriend, clean my house, and cry. I've totally lost control of my eating, and now I have the addict's existential horror of watching myself backslide into my disease while feeling powerless. Which is layered on top of my weight-gain anxiety stemming from a desire to lose weight so as to hopefully maybe some day pass and not look like terrible shit forever?

All I write is dissatisfaction and regret. It's too much, too much. I love cheesy words - like the titles to these posts, which I will hand-wringingly admit to spending more time revising than the body itself. The totem made real excites me, which is why my own personal mythology centers around 90's JRPGs with a dash of anime thrown in. (My name, my real name, comes from a character in the Lunar series. I feel guilt for that.) The link between signifier and signified is always so deliciously short and strong. I'm sure Joseph Campbell began to salivate in his grave the first time Goku went Super Saiyan.

I want to write more, but I just can't. I feel too vulnerable to go off on the long, nerdy tangent I want to. Maybe later.

A Life for a Life

2013-12-03T22:30:00.000-06:00

My sisters die, and I can't do anything.

That's what gets me about the recently-past Transgender Day of Remembrance. If I get attacked, that sucks, but fuck me, right? If I saw another trans woman get attacked, I think I would lose my mind and catch a case trying to protect her. I don't know where it falls on the spectrum - is it self-sacrifice, mama bear-ness, maybe a disregard for my own health and welfare?

Back in the mists of history, I met this 16-year-old girl at a therapy thing whose parents had thrown her out for being trans. She had a semi-successful career in the blowjob industry, and not the kind of Tumblr-safe "I do this because it empowers me asshole" sex work. It sucked. It sucked because she really wanted to hang out with me because she seemed so alone, it sucked for my sense of self-importance because I was comfy and middle-class and still bemoaning my problems where she was mostly homeless.

Survivor's guilt?

A couple months ago I was in a total "don't fuck with me" mood when this mixed-up little queer kid with bad nail polish tried to strike up a conversation with me. I shut 'em down, and looked back later and felt awful. Maybe they were a sister or brother reaching out, just like I unsuccessfully tried to back when I was a lil' question mark. E-mailed a local charity that serves queer people, never heard back. I want to claw my way into self-esteem. Practice my love for trans women so that maybe I can get to a point where loving myself doesn't feel like such a distant star.