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.
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Monday, February 24, 2014
Die and Not Live Forever
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.
Monday, February 17, 2014
The Tip of the Tongue
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.
Sunday, February 09, 2014
Dear Santa Muerte
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.
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.
Monday, February 03, 2014
Indulgence
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
Thursday, January 02, 2014
The Reaction
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.
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.
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