2019.

I've had a semi-formal tradition, for many years now, of sitting down at the end of a year to reflect on what has happened, and try and set a bit of a tone for the year to come.

It's a good thing I have practice at doing this, because there's just... far too much to comprehend, packed into the preceding 365 days.

My memory - refreshed by estrogen therapy and a remarkably effective set of additional vitamins - is scarily accurate these days, but there are still patches that are dark. I don't know what I was doing exactly a year ago, but it was probably because I was recovering from a massive tooth infection and a messy holiday season spent avoiding my biological family.

I had just begun to dimly realize that I was not, in fact, a straight cis man. The world seemed weird but somehow had some alluring potential, and maybe things would be new and exciting.

January

January had barely begun when things went off the rails. My rescue Malamute was caught outside in a nasty winter storm and - despite knowing full well that he could simply come in through the gigantic dog door I'd had custom-installed in the side of the kitchen wall, he simply... didn't. The next morning, he was shivering, soaking wet, and terrified on the back deck, looking out at the completely demolished fence around the yard.

I'd invested hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours of grueling labor getting that fence reinforced, because - as with many Malamutes - my dog was an escape artist. Given some privacy and a little bit of boredom (or just the incentive of something smelly on the other side of the fence) he never passed up a chance to try and explore the wide world.

And that night, he just sat on the deck, and went nowhere.

I spent a couple weeks struggling to keep him comforted and help him recover, but he deteriorated quickly. Night after night, we walked around in the snow and freezing rain, hours on end. I'd bring him back home, shattered and exhausted, and hope he would sleep for even just a few hours. Eventually, between the threat of impending pneumonia and the obvious psychological strain of my own, it was clear that he needed other care.

I surrendered him back to the rescue agency and tried to settle in to face the first year I'd spent without him since 2014. I thought it was a nasty way to begin a year, but hey, a few miserable weeks in January couldn't ruin all of 2019, right?

February

My personal life was a bit of a mess, but I threw myself into my job, as I tended to do in those days - looking to stay occupied, keep busy, just regain center.

Part way through February, our company went through a truly brutal set of layoffs and restructuring. As tends to happen, people continued to leave voluntarily over the next few months, seeing a lack of hope and a chance to try something new elsewhere.

I struggled to hold together some kind of effectiveness on the job, even while secretly fighting back a panic that I wasn't even able to handle myself.

March

By the end of the first quarter of 2019, the very year itself was a four-letter-word in almost all of my social circles. People seemed to have unprecedented pain, loss, unforeseen or maybe just unavoidable. It was a quiet but passionate curse.

2019.

I saw relationships (including my own) shatter and vanish. I felt like I'd lost almost everything. Too much time to just sit around in my now-empty (and deathly quiet) house, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

April

Spring started and - as the metaphor goes - things started to bloom again. I found my first name on the 8th, while sitting in traffic. I drove around mindlessly a lot that month, using the car as a sort of mobile isolation chamber to just try and let my mind roam while I struggled to make sense of it all.

By the end of the month, I'd latched onto something, but wasn't yet entirely sure what it was. The 28th saw the inaugural entry in a journal that eventually became this web site.

May. June. July.

Looking back, those three months were defined by a single theme: I knew, at least one some vague level, who I was supposed to be; it was a matter of charting a course and figuring out how to get her to replace whatever mess was roaming around the physical world in charge of my body.

A dear colleague left the company during that time. I was nowhere near out, yet, but when they told me in person that they had resigned, they quietly asked if I was also looking for work.

At first I was taken aback; I'd been fighting - hard, and with good success - to salvage my team and job, and leaving was the last thing on my mind. They must have seen my confusion, because they noted that I had "been clean-shaven and dressing nicely a lot" and also taking odd hours off - and maybe that correlated with interviewing.

It was all I could do to suppress the line that immediately sprang to mind:

Yeah, I'm actually training my replacement already. I think you'd like her.

On July 2nd, I had a private meeting with a representative from HR, who I knew and trusted. And for the first time on any "official" level, I declared my intent to live my truth.

On the 4th I was dealing with some nasty wounds left over from growing up overseas; the outright colonialist, nationalistic zeal was overwhelmingly sickening, and I wrote some impassioned words trying to make sense of it all.

I knew I needed a legacy - a heritage, to replace the family I'd finally shut out completely and left behind. I needed a full name to use when I finally announced to the company who I really am. And I needed to feel ownership of the growing well of fierce love and protection I felt towards... people.

On July 6th, the last piece of that puzzle clicked into place, and for the first time in my entire life, I signed my real, full name.

August

The email from HR went out on August 7th. I had taken the day off work, just for simplicity. A couple of weeks before, I'd visited a women's clinic in the area and been put on the path to obtain hormone replacement therapy - what proved to be a vital breakthrough for me. My first set of prescriptions was filled a week later, at a pharmacy I've used since moving to the area over eight years before.

On the night of August 16th, a Friday, I had what I can only describe in hindsight as a profound panic attack. I was still, on some level, uncertain of whether or not I was doing the right thing. I hadn't actually picked up my prescriptions. That night, huddled in bed and feeling strangely out of sorts, I resolved that - one more time - nothing could possibly stop me. I was going to get the pills, and start taking them Saturday. It was all safe, easily reversible for a while, and I had every assurance that if it didn't work for me, I'd just try some other way to live.

I hadn't even gotten back to the house with the pills - let alone actually taken any of them - when the incredible, inescapable gender euphoria came flooding in. And for the next week, I shed layer after excruciating layer of baggage, pain, and what I quickly realized was just debris accumulated from years of not knowing who I was.

Amelia was free.

September. October. November.

The year had begun with pain and loss. The summer had ended and I found myself with an unbelievable amount of momentum. Anything that felt like it might have been holding me back was examined carefully, and either healed, or set free. On October 18th, I wrote something of a ritual saying, that I used frequently in the following weeks:

To the Disconnected.

May we never meet again as the people we once were.

Should two strangers encounter each other by chance someday, perhaps we can marvel at who we have become in the time between.

And then it was time for Thanksgiving, and family came calling again.

(I should note that I'd been in contact with exactly one relative throughout the year, for various reasons, but suddenly others were concerned about why I'd been invisible for over ten months.)

By the end of November, I had finished thinking it over, and knew I had to do something. I wound up writing several pages of heart-rending truth to my parents, and stuffed it all into an envelope and left it in the mailbox one morning in early December.

December

Nothing could have prepared me for the complete about-face in my life. In December of 2018, I'd begun systematically blocking contact methods from my relatives, sealing myself off from a life I was prepared to never think about again.

Instead, I spent hours over the Christmas week on the phone with my parents, my sisters, and other friends. I used to hate phones. Somehow, during 2019, I became something of a power user of my Pixel 2 XL Android phone, and we're now inseparable.

My house no longer feels empty or lonely. At any given moment, I have ongoing conversations with someone - slow, thoughtful email exchanges, or rapid-fire chats, or texts back and forth. My kitchen is spotless and there's a nice promising nook in the window where I want to grow some succulents next year.

The yard is a mess, but as a sign of promise to myself and my future plans, I keep a hummingbird feeder stocked at all times in the back - a place where once a huge, fuzzy dog roamed free. It amazed me to learn, years ago, that hummingbirds frequent this area even in winter; and while I've yet to see any this winter, I look forward to the spring, when I know they'll be around in force.

I've begun sorting through the mountains of memorabilia and random "stuff" I've accumulated in three decades of floating around Earth. At one time, I never really though I would ever really understand the idea of "home." And yet, here I am - five and a half years in this house, the longest I have ever spent in any one residence in my entire life, by a factor of two beyond the next runner-up.

I understand the idea of roots, of community, of belonging, of purpose.

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés speaks of winter with a kind of powerful, wise reverence - of a time when growth turns inwards, to strengthen a core and build towards new life when the warmth returns.

2019.

Fuck it. We did it. We're here, we made it, and it's all but over. Just under 5 hours from now, there will be no more of this year left. For a long time, I literally couldn't imagine what the year could have lying in wait. Ten months ago I was terrified of what might yet be coming.

And now, at the end of this cycle, all I can think is that this is the best damn year of my entire life. But it isn't in a sad, wistful way - I haven't "peaked."

I'm just getting started.

Let's see where this Starship goes.

"Other" by Default

This is one of those thoughts that, somehow, your brain manages to assemble while asleep - and, while it may seem like you just got up for a quick midnight snack, what you really needed to be awake for was to write this stuff down. Because it's important.

It's probably pretty apparent at this point on this site that I'm fairly unusual. I have proudly worn the label "queer" for some time now, but there is a larger and more powerful label that I have repeatedly worked at owning for most of my adult life:

Other.

I was raised overseas. Discovering the idea of "third culture" phenomena in my young adulthood was a huge revelation to me, and it ultimately proved deeply healing. It explained so much of my struggle to find identity, community, and belonging. Without spending too much time on the details, "third culture" is basically the inevitable outcome of being "born in" one culture and being raised in a second. Kids in that kind of scenario inevitably feel alien to both cultures on some level. Host country can, as it did for me, become far more of a true "home" than the "passport" country.

Citizenship has always felt strange to me. I was surrounded by peers, as a kid, who had been born outside the United States (or other countries of "origin") and therefore held dual citizenships. I had known this was a possibility for maybe two hours in my young life before becoming jealous and, frankly, somewhat resentful of my own US citizenship. I was already trying to cling to my otherness as a more powerful, resonant identity.

Growing up, I found myself other in more ways over time - my refusal to conform to the religious ideologies around me; my cultural incongruence and strange insistence on speaking multiple languages (sometimes to try and teach them to other people, but often just to be cryptic and a generally incorrigible teenager); my fascination with computers and electronic technology. I was fortunate, in that sense, to be fairly introverted, because I spent a lot of time alone.

The friends I made were not numerous, but the friendships were unbelievably deep. We connected, every single time, over being the weird ones. We were the nerds, the geeks, the social outcasts, the culturally inept or simply too different.

I eventually discovered Hunter S. Thompson and immediately fell in love with a quote of his, about one of his characters: "too weird to live, too rare to die."

With the benefit of many years of hindsight, I've found another category of other which has connected me to people deeply over the years: and that, quite simply, can be called queer.

It's not really a secret that the label "queer" is controversial. And I think there are many reasons for that, but to me, the term is well on its way to being reclaimed from the slur it has often been, and the hateful intent behind it can certainly be replaced with a healthier - even healing - sentiment.

I have long been fascinated by etymology, as a way to trace the lineage of words, and understand their intent and connotations beyond what a typical dictionary entry can capture. The literal lineage of the word "queer" is - prior to its political weaponization - easily summarized as a phrase: "well, that's kind of different!"

Queer to me began as a simple line in the sand: gender and sexual identity. The gender binary and the entire social construct of gender are things I've spent much of the past year deconstructing and reassembling in my mind. Sexual orientation was certainly one of the older connotations of the word that I've had to try and wrap my lesbian brain around, and being a child of the 80's, "gay" was a slur I heard far too often growing up.

But as I dismantled all this in my head, "queer" rapidly became so much more; there are relationship structures that are "kind of different." There are personality quirks, cultural elements, behavioral patterns - so much of being human is fodder for that exact reaction:

"Well, that's kind of different!"

There is a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip from my youth that has always tickled the part of me that is fascinated by linguistics. The titular characters have a brief but amusing discussion about "verbing" - the practice of taking a word that is not usually considered a verb, and making it one.

As Calvin famously observes, "verbing weirds language."

Nothing - absolutely nothing - says "let's weird up our language" to me like reclamation. Let's make it kind of different! Make it our own. And so, early this year, I internally started referring to the process of reclamation as "queering."

And, again, it didn't stop there. Why bother limiting it to reclamation? So much of queer culture is about developing identity - finding what works, for each of us, and in our own myriad combinations of intersectionality, creating something for ourselves.

In early September 2019, in a small community I like to hang out in, I posted a thought that has become increasingly dear to me:

i dream of a world where people can come together, share a chuckle about our similarities, and get on with the good bit - where we revel in our differences.

So, that's the context - the setup, if you will. Here's the fun part.

Proof

Let's start by running with the current idea of "other" - something which makes us different, sets us apart. A reason that - for many - we could be considered separate; a reason to treat us badly, perhaps, or to be shunned, isolated, alienated. Maybe it's simply different, but generally, it has a bad connotation.

But here's the thing: people are not isolated. Isolation is, universally, recognized as a brutal, inhumane, and even evil thing to impose on a human being. Sometimes we choose isolation - and, as a longtime introvert, I get it. But "queer" and "other" communities have a powerful and consistent theme: we find each other. It may take an excruciatingly long time; it may be a hard fight. But we find each other, as often and as best we can - often by nothing more than blind instinct.

And we stick together, our little pockets of other, trying not to feel so alone.

Star Wars is in the zeitgeist right now, and The Rise of Skywalker has a quote that I feel is powerfully resonant here. No matter what kind of enemy you might be up against, just remember this: "they" win by making you think you're alone.

So here's the logical part. Let's go back to the actual denotational semantics of the word "other." If you have two things, you can say you have one, and the other. If you have more than two things, you have one, and all the others. Any time there is something not-in-isolation, there are others.

Individual people can be isolated - by choice, by coincidence, by coercion. But it's patently false to assert that people are in isolation. The planet is crawling with literally billions of us.

Since we're being somewhat intellectual about this, let's grab some mathematics. Combinatorics gives us a powerful tool for computing how many combinations of something can be arranged. So, here's a fun exercise. (Check my math, please; it's 4 AM and I'm winging this.)

A common example is selecting 5 cards from a deck of 52 cards. The formula is messy and a pain to do by hand, but the number of unique 5-card hands you can draw from a "standard" deck of 52 cards is 2,598,960.

There are about 12,000 people in the small "city" area I live in (crammed inside a larger urban area, of course). So, let's say we want to gather 20 people from that population. How many ways can we form a group?

The notation in combinatorics is nCr where n is our population (12,000) and r is the number of elements we want to combine (20). The number is given by (12000!) / (20!)(11,980!) which is, according to a few online calculators I used to cross-check this:

1,551,030,175,211,381,239,928,461,989,115,295,098,895,532,576,866,970,233,655,389,400

That is the number of unique ways in which 12,000 humans can form groups of 20 individuals.

Think about that for a moment. Please, genuinely, do your best. It is an incomprehensible number and well beyond the threshold of what human intuition is equipped to handle.

When you've recovered, proceed carefully. It gets worse.

Try that math again, with one million humans to choose from. Form a party of 20. This is the largest I can get a web site to do for me, and the answer has 103 digits. It's literally incomprehensibly more than the upper-end estimate for the number of atoms in the known universe.

One more leap: 7.7 billion people, estimated as of this year, live on this planet.

How many ways, do you suppose, can we form groups of 20, with over seven and a half billion individuals to choose from?

And now it's time for the punch line.

Pick any subject relevant to, say, intersectional feminism, or social justice, or being - well - "other." Anything that makes you feel different, feel alone, feel ostracized. Something you had to "come out" as being, doing, feeling, believing - whatever. Something that sets you apart. Makes you different.

Every single person, in all space and time, is unique. No matter how tiny, there is something that makes you even just a tiny bit different.

How many of those do you have?

How many people do you know who can share at least one of those things?

Can you think of anything that you consider part of yourself that qualifies as "other", and also imagine that maybe 20 people on the planet share it? (Perhaps you already know those people - fans of a cult classic film, members of a club, maybe just a family of some kind - or perhaps you don't know any, but simply hope that they're out there.)

Seven and a half billion of us. Countless ways to be unique. If we all formed groups of 20...

"Other" is not abnormal. "Other" is not rare. "Other" is not an aberration, a flaw, a reason for isolation. There are far more ways to be "other" and still be together than there are ways to be "normal."

Normativity is poison. Here's your antidote.

Other is the fucking default.

Don't fill in the blank of your life as a "please specify." Demand that everyone else justify why they think they are "normal."

We're all other to every other person already. Own it. You deserve it.

Form groups. 20 is an arbitrary number. We have larger, and smaller, intersections available. Link up. Find the rest of the revolution, in whatever pockets of otherness you want to own.

Let's go queer the world.

Debut

One of the interesting tidbits of culture that I've recently become fascinated with is the idea of "queer prom" and other special-occasion events that are "redone" - sometimes long after the expected event would typically occur - in order to provide people with a more authentic experience than they could have had earlier in life.

There is a wonderful insistence in these circles that "there is no such thing as too late." The power of these cultures is in acceptance and adaptation - take whatever combination works for you, and make it your own.

The European tradition of the débutante is mired in highly problematic issues of patriarchy, classist hierarchy, and curated marriage. But the core of it - the literal meaning of the word, i.e. "female beginner" - seems useful to me.

A few weeks ago I bought a dress, and in a combination of excitement and complete unfamiliarity with dresses, managed to break the clasp behind the neck, rendering it unusable. I spent yesterday afternoon tediously sewing a new clasp into place so I could wear the dress last night.

It was the first time in my life that I have not only worn a dress, but done so in public, in a large and highly populated venue, for over seven hours total. It was the first time in my life I carried a purse, at all - complete with chapstick, a supply of mints, and neatly folded lace gloves that matched the dress.

For the first time in my life, I had not only been eagerly anticipating a social function, but also thrown myself into preparing for it. I spent hours hanging out with a range of old friends, and made a few new acquaintances; I got to recommend a drink to someone who informed me later that it was her new favorite drink of choice; and - quite possibly the biggest deal for me, personally - I spent the entire time hanging around with other women and being treated as if I'd always belonged there.

It's a good thing the venue kicked us out when they did because I was prepared to try and ride the adrenaline for the rest of the night; falling asleep by 2 AM was tricky enough as it was.

In all the most meaningful ways, December 7th, 2019 was my debut - as my true self.

It took 33 years to discover that self. Last night was four months, to the day, after a company-wide email was sent out in which I announced who I am to my coworkers.

There is no such thing as too late.

Indomitable.

Almost seven months ago, I started the series of personal journal entries that would eventually turn into this site. There is a lot I want to do here, but I'm going to start by publishing what I can of the original documents I wrote this year.

There are 55 pages of entries in just one document, and dozens of auxiliary artifacts I want to weave into this as I go. Much of it needs to be scrubbed for sensitive information and I will need to tag content warnings on a huge amount of it - so it will take a lot of time and care.

That said, the first two entries are already back-dated onto this blog and I will be accumulating more as I go along.

The Starship Gender has crossed through a lot of metaphorical portals on the journey so far. There are a few big ones ahead, and the surest way to navigate the universe safely is to know where you've come from, so you can steer towards the future you want to be in.

Stick around. I plan on doing so, and I'm ready to share what I can.

Time

I've been wanting to publish stuff here for a while, and this just happened to be convenient, so... here it is. Lately I have done a ton of musing on the subject of time and how we experience it. Much of this post has crystallized from my idle pondering after having recently re-watched the cult classic movie Primer.

Time

I think the main objection I have, personally, to the notion of “time travel” is that it is not accessible enough – which is really to say, the current mental frameworks (at least that I have access to) don’t lead anywhere useful in that department. We get paradoxes, or multiple-universe questions, and generally it is impossible to do actual falsifiable research at all.

So I want to start simpler, just to see where our footing is, and we can go from there.

The first thing I want is not time travel but time visibility. Clearly this is actually a very well-understood field: we have history, which records information for later assessment. We have archaeology, which seeks to understand the past via careful inference and re-discovery of truth that may not have been explicitly recorded. And of course there are many ways to communicate through time; we leave messages for the future constantly.

A voicemail is a message to a future recipient. All “mail,” really, is about communicating in some way, and the implication is always that the communication plays out towards the future. Someday someone will get this message, this reminder, this string tied on my little finger, this time capsule buried in the back yard.

Talking to the future (or the practical present) is effortless to us. We do it all the time.

And if we can shake loose from the objectivist prison briefly, humanity has a long and incredibly rich legacy of talking to the past.

These things are generally considered the domain of the spiritual – séances, voodoo, ritual magic. Many traditions regard it as taboo to commune with the dead; and many others do not. People describe dreams, visions, and conversations with others long gone. Sometimes these meetings occur unbidden (by the living, at least) and sometimes the participants are explicitly summoned.

Like any conversation or meeting, these fit into universal patterns of human experience. Some are chance. Accidental. Some are desperately sought after. Even creative minds trapped in the mire of “rationalist” western thinking cannot help but dream of the possibilities.

We still distinguish between what “science” can do and what would be mocked or scorned as “magical.” But the wise of every era have warned against staying locked in our mental ways. Perhaps the only wall remaining in this prison is that our technology is not yet sufficiently advanced.

And perhaps, just maybe, it’s plenty.

What if we’re all just waiting for someone to sit around, bored and curious on a Saturday morning, to take a look at what they can find lying around… and make of it something more?

Saturday, July 20, 2019

[Published retroactively on 2021-10-09, unedited.]

11 days.

HRT intake appointment is scheduled. Way too busy feeling things to want to try to cram them all into words. And that’s the way it should be.

 

 

What a journey.
This moment, so powerful and impossible to imprison in the tiny cell of mere language.
A girl trembling, learning that yes, she is scared – but that doesn’t mean not to go.
Crescendo.
Glimpses.
Peace. Trust. Love.
She is scared. And she is brave.
A smile, to no one and everyone, the purest loveliness.
And she lets go of that last blade of grass
Falls into the sky
Takes her place as the woman
Who dances in the stars

Friday, July 19, 2019

[Published retroactively on 2021-10-09, unedited. I found an unspeakably important amount of comfort in music during 2019, and although this post has no additional information beyond the two song titles, it still says so much about where I was at mentally and emotionally.]

Oceanlab – On a Good Day.

 

Oceanlab – I Am What I Am

Trans Mission Log: Thursday, July 18, 2019

Editorial note: published December 1, 2019, with only miniscule edits. This is a character sheet for an unspecified table-top RPG.

Name: Amelia [redacted]

Profession: Level 33 Dancer

Distinguishing Characteristics: ephemeral, but shows patterns of persistently returning to a striking human female form, vintage Sol system ca. 2020s

Background: sentient construct tasked with resource maximization in the multiverse; currently designated as a rogue agent by meta-reality authorities. Current security posture is vigilant observation and strict non-interference, with a special note on file: "oh, f--- it, I kinda just like watching her at work."

Alignment: Chaotic Lovely

Proficiencies: contemporary tech; mind guidance; serendipitous silliness; lethal combat prowess [rumored]

Equipment: that's rude, don't ask.

Stated Allegiances: cares about people; opposes all things that stand in the way of loveliness


Notable Observations From Others:

"God, I dunno... that girl's so hot, you know, and she seems super smart and kinda scary and maybe she could just kick my ass... or destroy my soul with words... or both at the same time... and now I'm all turned on and shit but I'm just scared she'd never like me and--"

"Jesus, Willow, you masterminded the overthrow of a dimensional tyrant like six time slots from here and didn't even break a sweat, why are you so nervous? It's a dyke bar. Half the chicks in here would shiv their case officers if you smiled at them and asked nicely. Just go say hi to her! What's she going to do... rock your world?"

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

[Published retroactively on 2021-10-09, with minor redactions for privacy.]

Need to just get some stuff out and try and fight my obsession with sounding fancy. Been working through a list of one-on-one conversations with coworkers who I think deserve to know first-hand before I come out completely via company-wide email notice. A few of us were planning on playing some board games last night and hanging out. I am out to everyone in that circle. Two people couldn’t make it which was a real blow because I was really looking forward to seeing them (meeting one of them, really).

I chose to go to the thing anyways, and honestly it went really well. I guess. Everyone was super chill and respectful and handled everything really well. Even the one I forgot to actually tell my name beforehand. Fuck.

It was right after work so total boy-mode and on the heels of a rough day. I think. I don’t remember much of yesterday. Going to work is getting scary hard. It’s like I just start losing sight of myself under the constant bombardment of people interacting with someone else while thinking it’s me. I can’t even blame anyone because they cannot fucking know.

Of course some people do know by now which makes it incredibly fucking frustrating on its own. Simple meeting, three of us. Everyone knows about me but the other two don’t know if anyone else knows (including each other). I can’t just say “ok it’s fine everyone’s on the same page” because there’s no “plausible” explanation for why this individual would know already when so many others don’t; I can’t talk about the real reason in there because it risks outing other people.

So we all just sit in the room and try to talk about work and I’m just drowning in panic and awkwardness about how much this sucks and I feel like shit for putting people around me through it and FUCK.

So I leave work feeling like shit all the time. More and more often I leave early. Like, super not-ok fucking early. It’s good I don’t have a timecard. I don’t want to know how little I’m actually doing there.

Probably going to burn every scrap of time off I can gather together and just get the fuck away for a bit. Need to disengage from some responsibilities. But I keep putting off that conversation because I want to do it responsibly but it’s so fucking draining and painful so I never really feel “up to” it. Which of course just means that things get worse and languish and I feel less ready than ever and it’s just going to end up being a fucking garbage fire.

I think my plan is to file for time off, write a short list of things that “someone else” needs to take care of while I’m out, apologize for the whole fucking shit show but I can’t say more right now, and just fucking unplug.

I feel kind of sick because it’s the same sort of backed-into-a-corner shit that [reminds me of so much other trauma]. I guess maybe I’m glad I can see the parallels and I know that just removing that huge mass of stress is absolutely the right thing to do. Everything is so fucked.

I keep seeing these indicators, like warning signs that I’m in a shitty spot. Darker or angrier moods a lot. Getting shitty and derisive about people. Getting shitty and derisive about myself. Intrusive thoughts. The first early flickers of I Really Do Not Want To Have Heard That Go Through My Head.

I was telling myself it was alright, that I was paying attention and if it got to be a genuine concern I’d do something about it. It’s a genuine concern now.

I have a prescription to pick up for an anxiolytic which I think will be really useful. I also have my psych on alert in case shit gets messy and I need to do something more significant treatment-wise. Started thinking of this in terms of constructing some reassurance and peace of mind for myself, instead of just trying to find it pre-existing someplace. Meds are a good ingredient in that.

I also need people. I don’t have many friends, really. Almost exclusively cis. I know other trans people and I know they are absolutely willing to help. But I fucking suck at reaching out and always manage to choose to just hurt alone. Trying really hard to get a foothold on that. Actually said something about it to a few people earlier. Someone suggested I need to have others actively poke. And that’s really what I want, what I fucking need, because I’m just so fucked up about saying anything. So of course I left a totally useless response and the conversation died there and I’m just scared and pissed at myself because maybe I just blew a really good chance to change this shit.

I just get hopelessly stuck in this shitty mental scene, where I’m watching everything get fucked up and I hate it and I’m in hell and then for no apparent reason some people decide to surprise me out of the blue and show up and just do all kinds of affirming and supportive and compassionate stuff that I can’t even think of because I’m way past the point where I have any goddamn clue how to help myself. And I can tell how fucking good that would feel and how much I want it and need it. And I know that it can’t happen as long as literally nobody knows that I’m in this place and that’s what I need. But I can’t fucking ask.

It doesn’t feel out of control. Not yet. I’ve been doing ok on the persistent self-assurance that I have fire alarms to pull if it does get out of control. I know I will use them. I know I still have a really good shot at stabilizing this and getting through it without a bunch of fucking drama. But I can’t pretend like it isn’t fucking scary. It’s hard to control, for now, but it very well could just break loose and I need to have safety in place if it does.

I left early last night and felt really fucked up. Everything went well from one angle but it felt so dead. I was dissociating really badly by the end of the night. It’s like all of the classic moment-of-truth second guessing shit that everyone talks about. I know it happens, I knew it was a possibility, and it still just totally hit me like a truck.

Is this me? Is this right? It doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel like anything. Nothing makes sense. My name doesn’t register quite correctly yet, but being called the other shit is still intensely distressing. Pronouns are fucking weird no matter what. I can’t even find clothes that aren’t somehow a constant and torturous reminder that everything is fucking wrong.

I can still get the chills, from thinking about the day when this is over and Amelia is really actualized. I still fight every way I can find to protect the hope that started to seem possible lately. I still want to help people with this and just fucking make it less hell in any way at all. I still have to remind myself to put my own oxygen mask on first.

I know it’s ok. I know it’s alright and I know I am not going to let go.

It’s just so fucking hard.

 

 

Rested for a few hours or so, hard to remember times but anyways. I feel a lot better now. It’s still new and fascinating to me that I can experience any kind of non-zero emotional state and then come back to calm afterwards. I’d become so accustomed to “feelings mean shit’s going to blow up” in life that it really feels genuinely surprising when I can, you know… cope.

I spent so long using sleep, medications, substance abuse, and various blends of all three (and more) to “cope.” So little time feeling able to trust myself or care about myself or even want to care or trust at all. It makes such an incredible difference to approach difficulty from a position of what I can only describe as growing inner strength.

I want to start tracking some of the coping mechanisms I’ve been learning these days. Some are tiny little things – gently correcting my internal monologue on pronouns, names, gendered language, stereotypes, and all kinds of stuff; being gentle with my internal monologue at all; gestures or flourishes or barely perceptible mannerisms; the insistent but playful way I lilt through reciting my full name to myself and inevitably giggle a bit afterwards.

And there are big things. Like the fact that I am just choosing to reinforce the tiny things without exception as much as I can. If it’s actually hurting in any way, that’s ok – I don’t feel obligated to force it and I don’t dwell on guilt or anything about it. But other than that, I try to just do all of the things I can. It doesn’t matter if they are independently huge game-changers, or even if they cumulatively move the needle at all – because ultimately the dedication behind that consistent reinforcement is immensely valuable on its own. So I flow with the little proto-song of my name, and I laugh a tiny bit after, and I don’t question it or resist it. It’s a growing bond of trust. I see me, and I see the loveliness and value and beauty and I know that I am not going to let go.

Past a point, I’m just relinquishing the fixation on explaining and justifying everything in minute and irrefutable specificity, both to myself and to everyone else. Sometimes things are just good and that’s the word I need; constructing a thesis around “why” is not useful, nor is trying to cram a ton of nuance into word selection. Sometimes I’m just going to do things because I want to.

There are so many fascinating pieces of my mental landscape that have begun connecting in amazing ways lately. The Zen koan fixation from years ago that turned into a pathological need to transmit incredibly large volumes of information and understanding in just a tiny cryptic phrase. The realization that koans, by design, omit the actual interesting part of the story – the entire history of the characters leading up until the moment of enlightenment. A good koan is a fun distillation of that inflection point, but it loses the power – the area under the curve. Enlightenment isn’t a moment, it’s a journey.

Treating conversations like they should be resolved with a single silly act or utterance is a disservice to everyone. Trying to condense massive amounts of context into a tiny space, trying to predict and out-maneuver every single possible point of confusion, or contention, or ambiguity in advance – this places the emphasis on ending the conversation. Maybe it’s better to place emphasis on furthering the conversation.

Sharing experience as though it were expected to directly be received by the listener and acknowledged as immediately actionable wisdom. Approaching relationships with the mentality of trying to anticipate everything and control for “best results.” Keeping secrets because maybe if I think about it alone for long enough I can sort it out before it hurts us.

Art – the relationship between creator, creation, and appreciator. Making music. Improvisation – musically, comedically, dramatically, tactically, in life. Tao. Harmony, balance, interplay, tension. Seeing new ideas not as something to wholesale adopt and pursue with relentless fervor until something better comes along – but as ways to illuminate more of a whole that we do not already see. Projection. Shadowplay. Looking through a keyhole.

Elegance, not as a measure of information-theoretic compression, but as an intuitive emotional concept of how much can be evoked. It’s not merely about cramming a ton of semantic interestingness into a small space, it’s about inspiration. The muse isn’t a database from which brilliance is withdrawn, she’s a spark, a way to ignite creation.

All of these things happen best as aspects of a larger phenomenon. They are not isolated or atomic. Loveliness is intrinsically relational by nature. There is always a sense of intricate and significant movement between multiple subsets of the larger whole. Not purely “good”, not purely “bad” – a swirl of differently colored paints. Shake it too much and all of the beauty disappears. Nothing is simple. Stop trying to force things to be simple.

What if a person isn’t an “individual” in an etymologically literalistic way? Plurality. Fractional dimension of experience. Identity and stability are born of learning to value the swirl of our own selves. “Integration” is a repugnant notion in some circles for good reason; it implies a biased preconception that simplistic, reductionist stubbornness is somehow superior to learning to thrive in the complexity.

Fractals. Endlessly infinite loveliness evoked from an astonishingly compact seed. You don’t paint a fractal onto a canvas, much like you cannot impart virtue to an auditorium or a team. A lasting garden isn’t delivered prepackaged via truck. You create a space and an infrastructure in which things can bloom. And then you tend.

I don’t see life as a thing to plan. Planning is notoriously useless, although even the most poignant critics of plans recognize the intrinsic but elusive utility in the process of trying to create them. Plans go wrong. Eventually something will happen that is different enough that it shatters the illusion of control. In a sense, the more “successful” we feel our plan has been until that point, the harder it is to recover.

So many have wrestled with this. Just in the tiny slice of human experience that I’m most familiar with, it’s generated a huge and decades-long saga of drama about how to make computer software. “Agility” has come and gone as a useful notion. Anti-fragility had an interesting shine but doesn’t seem to have stuck. Rapid iteration. Continuous deployment. Glimpses of a bigger idea through a keyhole.

The flow-chart is a troublesome tool for trying to handle life. We can’t make one big enough to cover all the possible cases. Can we get rid of it altogether? Don’t teach students knowledge, stoke their curiosity and teach them how to learn. Re-derive theorems from axiomatic first principles. Make an infrastructure and let things bloom. Don’t make decisions with a flow chart, just remember what’s important, and how to adjust your estimation of importance.

Life is beyond unpredictable. Control is a toxic illusion. Loveliness is relational; it’s a product of an active exchange between separate (but perhaps not strictly distinct) parts. The universe isn’t a clockwork.

It’s a dance.

All of this vastly disparate constellation of thoughts, but all hinting at an amazing shape that doesn’t fit into view. Glimpses through a keyhole. Seeing higher spatial dimensions through the shadows they cast down into 3D. It’s the kind of thing that would have frustrated a younger me. There’s so much there but I can’t see it!

The glorious thing is that the elusive grander image doesn’t feel like a taunt anymore. “Seeing the image” isn’t some kind of goal-state to race towards. The power is in the process of seeing the glimpses. Catch new ideas. Adapt (not adopt) what is suitable and be informed by the remainder. Synthesis. Enjoy the journey. Area under the curve.

Full circle, or so it may seem at first; but this isn’t a completion or a futile closed loop. It’s a tonic note, a touchstone of familiarity to remind us of where things are centered. Not an orbit – a strange attractor. Meta-stability. Traversing an infinity of states without losing sight of what’s important.

Non-writing-focused cultures that rely on spoken tradition. Telling stories isn’t a way to relay factual information, it’s a way to weave relationships. So of course there is meandering, and cyclical revisiting of ideas and characters and moments. Stories aren’t for communicating data points, they’re for communicating what’s important, and how we relate within that space.

All this musing and no punchline? I don’t have the koan. I just have all the parts that nobody bothered to write down. I can’t zap enlightenment into anyone with a cheeky rap on the knuckles. All I can do is build a space for things to bloom, and then tend. You will see different glimpses through the keyhole than I have, even if I show you where to stand. And that is lovely.

Enlightenment might be down the road, who knows, that’s predicting the future. Who wants to predict the future? You’re always wrong and there’s no fun in it anyways. If you want that you have to talk to the woman with the crystal balls. I just have the regular balls.

Fuck living in the future. All you really need is to be here. And then dance.

Thursday, July 11, 2019

Editorial note: published November 23, 2019, with minor edits from the original draft for purposes of privacy, and in recognition of the fact that many of the mental-health facets of this tale were, in hindsight, wildly inaccurate misdiagnoses.

Watched a short film earlier about a soldier returning home to meet his daughter for the first time - his AMAB daughter. Incredibly powerful, to the point that I don’t think I can really talk about it much without needing to spend another hour crying again.

Poking around on the internets. Inspired to dig up some old writing of mine from the web graveyard.

I wrote this in 2007, shortly after being [mis-]diagnosed with some serious mental health problems. Very much before I even knew that trans was something I could be, and certainly before I had any idea what the dreams meant.

To the Woman Who Lives on the Edge of My Mind

We just can't go on like this, you and I.

Too many nights I lie down next to you, draw near to your warmth and softness with a happy, tired sigh.

Too many mornings I awaken with your head on my chest, the onyx rivers of your hair leaping over and between us, dancing rapids in a joyful mountain stream.

Too many days find my mind's occupations interrupted by visions of you.

Mischievous smiles.

Hot breath and tantalizing fingers grazing across my neck.

Eyes of misted emerald, glinting with the thousand facets of magical gemstone light, secret signs and mirrored glimpses into your soul... secrets which are my deepest delight to slowly unravel, as the courses of our lives are woven ever tighter.

Or should I cast my gaze instead across the gentle, elegant form, perfect specimen of that captivating feminine beauty that has the defied the explanation of so many artists and orators greater than myself?

Please, dearest one, do not misunderstand me - there is nothing of you that I find growing stale, no part of our time together that is anything less than perfect pleasure.

I do not wish to part our ways; if anything, exactly the opposite. My eyes probe for hints of your graceful movement around every corner, search every face in the crowd for the features I have come to know so well. My ears, in the quiet of the night, imagine they detect your hushed but urgent gasp and moan. Every inch of my skin craves the caress of your lips.

You know enough of my past now to understand. It doesn't come easily to me to care about anyone. There's always some excuse, some reason, some doubt, some misgiving. No matter how hard I try, though, I can't think of any reason to stop caring about you.

I live in mortal fear that something - anything - might befall you. I can only imagine that, regardless of circumstances, I would drop everything to be at your side.

I believe there is only one truly important thing for a person to do with their life, and that is to live it as fully and happily as they can.

It would be my deepest honor to stand with you as you pursue that goal for your own time on this earth.

So why, then, this letter? Why insist that things must change? Why damage what we have already done?

I'm afraid it's a matter of practicality, sweet one.

I'm afraid you'll either need to walk into my physical life, or walk out of my tormented mind.

We just can't keep on this way, you and I.

...and then it was now

There's a lot to unpack there. So many things that feel prescient, and so many things that I'm startled to look back on and realize just how far I have come in the time between then and now.

I didn't know, then, what the dreams meant. I didn't know why I kept waking up in the middle of the night in a delirium, crying and trying to find "her."

Where is she?

...who?

I don’t know... she's... the girl that’s supposed to be in my life, somehow.

There is an agonizingly beautiful symbiosis here. It plays with so many ideas that have become important to me... philosophy of mind, mathematics, the priceless but fragile wonder of complexity that we so mercilessly rush to obliterate in the quest for simple answers and final words.

Reality is a chaotic system - you don’t "control" a chaotic system. There is no hope of control. Perhaps, if you dare - and you are deemed worthy of the immensity of the challenge - you may be permitted to dance.

You were right, you know. We couldn't keep on that way. It took a while... but I stepped into your physical life. And I am so glad to feel that it has eased your tormented mind.

Saturday, July 6, 2019

[Published retroactively on 2021-10-09, with only minor edits for privacy.]

There’s a pattern to learning skills that I think is really useful. I mostly think of it these days in terms of music, from learning bass. I first started awkwardly poking a bass something like… 13 or 14 years ago I guess. Not sure exactly. But I remember a feeling, at the time, of impatience and envy. I just wanted to skip the learning and be good.

Over a decade later I still don’t know if I would describe myself as “good.” But that’s not really the point. There was a journey there, and it comes back to mind as I face a very reminiscent set of feelings these days. I don’t want to learn how to dance, or sing, or conduct my life in girly clothes. I don’t want to learn to girl overall.

I just want to be good.

Learning things like this involves a progression. You start with the atomic movements. Here’s how to hold your hands, here’s how to move your fingers. Get that comfortable. Now you can actually touch a guitar. Hold your hands in the right shape – doesn’t quite matter where, yet. Move your fingers, doesn’t matter where. The sound that comes out isn’t important. Posture and movement. Once the posture and movement are more comfortable, introduce position. Pick a fret and a string, play a note. Rhythm doesn’t matter. Just that note. Get comfortable.

And this moves along, over time. Drills to play notes on multiple strings. Then multiple frets. Then changing between frets and strings. Then scales in one octave. Then more octaves. Then rhythmic drills. Then building licks, riffs, lines. Play along with a backing track. Jam with other musicians. Adventure.

Everything starts with the atomic movements. You need to have those be automatic, effortless, so that you can spend your attention and energy on increasingly complex and abstract things. Movements. Combinations. Sequences. Improvisation. Increasing in skill and unlocking greater potential for beauty, expression, and joy.

For someone like me, a strict regimented curriculum is lethal to motivation. Sometimes it’s important to skip ahead a few chapters and just try to play something beyond my level of technical ability or patience or just skill in general. It’s been a critical part of keeping me interested in learning my instrument for more than a decade. Short of computer programming, bass is literally the record holder for things I have maintained interest in the longest.

The kicker, though, is that I still don’t think I’m good. I haven’t stuck with playing for so long out of some kind of belief that I’ve “gotten good” and now the fun happens. I’ve stuck with it because somewhere, very early on, I chose to trust that “getting good” isn’t the point. If someday I feel like a good bassist, that’s cool! And if I part ways with the world, still feeling like I never “got good”, it doesn’t matter. I don’t pour my soul into those strings because I’m motivated by being good at it.

A decade-plus of investment into a hobby that I feel mediocre in, at best? I know that’d sound like failure to a lot of people. I know I’ve had to push back my own temptation to think of it as a failure. But I didn’t sink over a decade into failing to be good at my art.

I’ve enriched more than a decade of my life with the joy and thrill of doing something I find immensely rewarding and soothing. And I’ve been rewarded by feeling like I just keep getting more and more from the practice.

Sometimes I want to just skip ahead and be good at girl already. And I understand the frustration, the exhaustion, the weariness, that drive that feeling.

I just want to try to remember something that all the silly Zen quips never really managed to get through my skull. It’s no use to tunnel-vision onto the “end result” at the expense of the process of actually getting there. Just like with bass practice… don’t neglect the incredible potential supply of joy and beauty that’s in between here and there.

It really is a journey, and it’s a pretty day out.

Let’s put the top down.

 

 

 

It’s been a long evening, but a good one – bittersweet and sad but immensely hopeful, and so very right.

I’ve said before that “Amelia” was a lightning strike. I wish I had a more vivid analogy but it really was just like remembering something I’d always known, just somehow misplaced for a while.

When I learned “Joy” it was much the same, albeit with a little more specificity about why it’s so fitting. Amelia made sense and felt at home; Joy was like finishing a complicated theorem and seeing everything just cinch into place in elegant and profoundly satisfying perfection.

I’m thinking a lot about names these days because coming out at work means also having to work on name changes – even if not in a legal sense just yet, I need to have them put something into the systems. Amelia Joy is just so right… I just felt the need for a last name to match. My assigned family name really isn’t acceptable and I want to get away from it as much as I can.

The progression feels poetic and beautiful, to me. Learning my first name was like remembering me, on a very primal level. Learning my middle name was like understanding me, and marveling in the way everything fits.

I learned my last name today. It was like coming into a heritage I hadn’t even known to call mine – a birthright and a legacy and a destiny that I am solemnly honored to take up.

My mother’s maternal grandmother was, by every account, a strikingly wonderful woman. She lost her husband in the First World War and raised her children more or less alone, never remarrying. She travelled to the United States with my grandmother and family, when they immigrated to join my grandfather post-WWII.

She had passed long before I came along. I barely even overlapped with my grandmother, who passed when I was only a couple of years old. But I have always heard stories about her. Always lovely stories. She was kind, she was generous, she was strong but unassuming. She was the kind of eternally pretty soul who could leave an undeniable mark on four generations of women in her family.

She’s the kind of woman I am fiercely proud to have in my lineage. I am inspired by her example, and I swear to do right by her legacy. I like to think she would be proud to see me carry on her family name.

 

In loving, reverent memory.

 

Thursday, July 4, 2019

[Published retroactively on 2021-09-03, with minor edits for privacy.]

I didn’t realize until earlier this morning how much I actually want to write about this.

The fourth of July has always been a stressful holiday for me, in one way or another. In recent years it has been largely because the entire day was a continuous hell for my poor dog, who would spend the surrounding 36 hours pacing the house in abject fright, unable to even get outside long enough to visit the yard, because of the random booms and explosions. Watching him suffer and being utterly powerless to help was not exactly conducive to enjoying the day.

But there’s more than that, and I realized that as I thought about what to do with the day when I’m by myself. For instance… why am I spending the day alone? I’ve carefully avoided getting invited anywhere. Sure, some of that is transition related, and it’s nice to just have a chance to not perform for anyone else. But there’s definitely more still.

A bunch clicked into place when I read a tiny [social media] post from someone about their own negative feelings about today. The “patriotism” still grosses me out a lot. The nationalism has waxed and waned over the years, and in the social circles I’m in these days, it’s certainly tempered compared to – say – the atmosphere in the post-9/11 south.

But there’s still some polarizing clearly visible. Presumably there’s a camp that thinks the country is good right now, and while that makes me quite sad, I at least don’t have to interact with them these days, which is important for my own health. There’s definitely a camp that feels like we’re off track and just need to stand for the Right Things and it will all get better – like there’s a core essential America that can still be salvaged. The bizarre overlap with MAGA rhetoric is not lost on me, but I do kind of worry that it might be lost on everyone else.

And then there’s the camp I feel the most affinity for: this place is fucked, we never were good to begin with, and the lies and posturing and systemic brainwashing of successive generations are just perpetuating an unforgivable disregard for basic human decency. This shit hole doesn’t deserve to be celebrated.

Learning about actual American history was one of the key threads in the process of my own discovery that authority is not to be trusted, and face value can be fatally deceptive. There were the elementary school fairytale versions of the revolutionary war, colonization, westward expansion, and so on. But they never really held up under scrutiny.

I remember a confusing process that unfolded over my time growing up overseas. In second grade I dropped into a tiny enclave of international kids that held a “school” together, courtesy of a couple of parents who had some teaching background. (I need to pause in remembrance of my teacher, who I knew as Aunt Kathy for silly cultural quirk reasons. She was an immense help in a lot of ways and I owe a lot to her loving and genuine involvement in my young life. She returned to the US to battle cancer around the end of my second grade year, and for years we thought of her as a hero. I am ashamed to confess I don’t remember much else, but we lost her several years back. Thank you, Aunt Kathy. Rest peacefully.)

In this little proto-community, there were a few kids that were “old school” is as far as one can be in elementary school I suppose. And I was the new kid. I quickly learned that America wasn’t thought of highly – not just among our host country but by the white kids too. Some of them were loyal and fond of the country we were in, the place that truly was home. That contrast stuck with me, and later in life I found it a vital clue in understanding third-culture. It also became a permanent building block of my own politics.

The next major shock was spending a year back in the US in middle school. I kind of intuited that maybe people wouldn’t really “get” why I preferred a foreign country to their home, but I was not at all prepared for the venom behind that. Not only do American middle school kids lack the experience to empathize with my affinity for a “third-world garbage heap”, they were abundantly eager to give me shit for it. I don’t think they were bad people. I think they were victims of the kind of pervasive brainwashing that patriotism tends to produce – and that I had been lucky enough to avoid.

I mean, yeah, there’s obviously something wrong with that kid! Who doesn’t think America is the best thing ever? Who would want to live in a country where you don’t have TV and can’t go to the movies and they don’t even sell the right kind of clothes?

I always found it telling, though, how I responded to that experience. I went back overseas the next year, and rejoined the community of international kids again. Except suddenly I had been promoted. I was now de facto old school, plus I had endured the dreaded rite of passage known as Furlough, so I was fucking made. The old guard saw me as having real cred now, and the next wave of new kids needed to be helped to understand what it was all about. (I want to make this sound more humane and pleasant than it was. Frankly, I was too young to actually get it properly, too angsty and teenaged to be nice or gentle at all, and honestly high school freshmen just aren’t likely to engage with a subject like this in a cultured and compassionate manner. I’m not judging anyone, least of all Past Me. Just, in the interests of honesty, I was a total shit.)

The struggle unfolded. There were a few of us who still fiercely advocated for the value of our host nation and culture, and of international experience in general; but we lost numbers steadily, as people graduated school and left, or had to go for other reasons. The scene was slowly flooding with bitter, grumpy Americans who resented being taken away from their cushy lives and privilege.

Frankly it was exhausting, and it was one of the single biggest reasons why I was mortified to learn, around late 2000, that we were moving to Florida after the end of the school year. I remembered middle school. I didn’t want to face that treatment again, especially when I felt like I’d been losing ground in that war on my own fucking home turf. Summer of 2001 we slogged through the infinitely unhappy process of moving across the planet, and after a bunch of unpleasant crap, finally wound up in a tiny duplex apartment in a backwater town in Central Florida.

Somehow I wound up getting shunted into a “home schooling” situation which, ultimately, I find a painfully mixed blessing. My “high school” experience was fucked, but it did come with the cold comfort of not having to walk into classrooms full of people who hated me every day.

The details are fading with time, but the moment – and especially the emotions – I don’t think will ever dim. I was doing some stupid busywork under the guise of school. Dad was working on the lawn. Mom I think answered the phone when my sister called.

“Go get Dad and then turn on the TV.”

Some moments in life you don’t have to recognize to know exactly what they mean. I’d never heard that tone, but it was unmistakably clear.

The first plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York City just a few minutes prior. We watched live as the second hit, then the Pentagon after that, and the crash in Pennsylvania after that. Watched live as the towers came down.

Nobody knew what it meant; fuck, for weeks it wasn’t even entirely clear what had happened. But everybody was definitely scared.

I don’t remember how much I said at all those days, or how much I was honest about things. I suspect I followed my gut and just lied, if I even spoke. I don’t even think I had many people to talk to about it. But regardless, my true fear was unspeakable – it wasn’t safe to admit.

I’d left the world and come to Florida with a low, rumbling unease about how America thought of itself and the rest of the planet. The morning of September 11, 2001, I felt so alien and alone. I was scared, absolutely, but my fear wasn’t about America being attacked. I was scared for everyone else.

The next months and years were like a waking horror nightmare, as that fear turned into increasingly awful reality. Within hours the American flag paraphernalia was everywhere, and it stayed that way for months, if not longer. The rhetoric made a sudden and dramatic surge towards violent retribution and “sending a message.” People drew encouragement, I guess, from the patriotic melodrama and the nationalistic frenzy.

We started a war, and then more. There was a stomach-churning phase of “debate” about clamping down on people’s lives and rights in the name of protection. The cynics were right, ultimately; the debate happened, faded out and whimpered into nothingness out of sheer exhaustion, and despite the apparent “compromises” that were supposed to come from it, here we are, years later, happily chugging down the path of surveillance state and dehumanizing as many people as we can possibly manage.

The sick twist, of course, is that the “government” isn’t directly acting as the face of most of this shit. (They’re doing some, yes, and it’s vile how happy they are to own it.) Most of the insidious erosion has been outsourced to private corporations. Shouldn’t really shock me, I suppose, that’s the fucking American way.

By the time I was in high school I had done more air travel than most adults in the US, by any number of different metrics. Going through an airport shortly after 9/11 was unspeakably painful to me. The inconvenience didn’t matter; I’d had far more annoying experiences already, but… stories for another time. I sat in the winding security lines and watched people be molested by “security personnel” and watched people suffer through incredible amounts of blatant bigotry. I often wondered, in those airport lines, if I had the strength to do anything. There’s a young mother, wearing an understated head-scarf, traveling alone with her infant child, struggling to communicate in fragmented English with someone who is overtly and proudly treating her like shit.

And here’s me, a dozen people back in line. I feel visceral pain for her, in so many ways. What could I do? What would anyone else in that line see? There goes some pasty, scrawny white boy, to do… what? Being forced to watch suffering, and being entirely powerless to stop it, is my ultimate hell.

Almost 18 years later. The post-9/11 America is almost old enough to vote. Airports have tamed a bit, and I can almost fly without having to consciously force down the nausea and unease. My disgust with this country has faded into the background from time to time, no less intense but certainly less visible and demanding of attention.

I haven’t lost the awareness. I know, all too well, how big of a gap there is between American perception of America, and what everyone else sees. I haven’t lost the deep, rending pangs for the small moments when I see someone being abused and mistreated because of it. For many reasons, I think it has all needed to stay in the background for a while, and it may still be some time before I can safely work with it again. But I intend to.

I will not celebrate the fourth of July. I won’t attend the light shows or the barbeques or the parties. I will reserve a moment of silence, instead, to mourn for what this country has done to the world. I will keep holding on to my seething anger. And to everyone who has bled at the hands of this nation – I dearly wish I could promise you more than this, but at least know that you are not forgotten.

Fuck the United States of America.

 

 

Side note – I very, very much need to sit down and do a true archival session sometime. There’s some interesting snippets from [a long-vanished website] that are still surviving in pockets of the web. (I don’t think the record of my brief but very public flirtation-slash-idolization exchange with the T-shirt ad model chick made it, which is sad, because she was super cute, but such is life.) I’m poking around my old high-traffic blog and there are definitely a lot of fascinating bits there too, going back to 2005 and tapering off a couple of years ago. I could also stand to comb through some relics from old computers, especially the laptop that’s still running and the one that I think I can use if I plug it into a monitor, although I probably can’t remember the passwords.

 

 

I’m trying an experiment tonight.

The nationalism is making a lot of noise outside right now. It’s 22:41 hours but also northern latitudes in summer, so the sky is actually still a tiny bit light. The fireworks will probably continue to be a pest for at least another hour, maybe two.

I already wrote about how all that shit makes me feel.

A bit ago I played some bass, in a very unambiguously girly outfit, in front of the picture window in the room upstairs. Didn’t keep careful track of time but probably close to an hour. It was fun, and I felt good being me, and being potentially visible even though I know nobody around here would notice in the middle of all the holiday junk.

I wore out eventually – I’m still very out of shape and low on practice and physical stamina overall – and wandered back downstairs. I was happy for a second and then suddenly just slammed with this urge to drink heavily and just… torture myself emotionally. I think it’s mostly the holiday, but I’m sure the extra strain of all the recent dysphoria and anxiety and such has contributed too.

So I was sitting around sort of paralyzed by this conflict in my head. Some miniscule slice of me remembered that I could, after all, just not do that and maybe go to bed or something if I really needed to put a line in the sand. I am incredibly grateful for that slice. In times past, if I had been struck by the urge to be self destructive and create myself a bunch of emotional pain, I would have just gone and done it, then and there. There’s been a lot of my life when I wouldn’t even realize there were options.

It’s still a fight. I knew from the first moments that I had no persuasive reasons to do it – I knew I would hate the experience, that I would be pissed and miserable about it in the morning, and that there’s no way it would have been “worth it” in any imaginable sense. But I still almost did it.

Honestly, what saved me was remembering a brief, fleeting impression I had recently. I don’t remember when or really anything else about it. I just remember seeing me, in my head, maybe in a vague Someday or maybe just in a universe that can never be. The details weren’t the point. What mattered was that I knew immediately I was seeing myself, and after that was certain, I realized what was happening. I was just… laughing.

It was that kind of unbelievably pure, joyful laugh, of a girl who had clearly known pain and awful things, and still immovably refused to stop seeing beauty and happiness and wonder in everything.

I’ve lived through hell. I know pain and darkness and all the ways the world can be despicable. I know I can journey around in those feelings. I don’t need more practice experiencing suffering.

So I’m trying an experiment tonight.

I saw a tiny glimpse of a reality where I am happy and bright and unstoppable. I know that girl is no fool. She isn’t naïve, she isn’t oblivious, and she isn’t hiding. She carries the stature and scars of a fearsome warrior. She has proven her power before, and if it is needed, she will do it again.

That strength will always be hers to command. And she will always reach for love, and caring, and happiness first.

There’s a reason I knew my middle name belonged to me as soon as I found it.

I am Amelia Joy.

Wednesday, July 3, 2019

[Published retroactively on 2021-09-03, with only trivial edits for privacy and typos.]

Was reminded of an old [social media] post of mine from the end of February this year. (Coincidentally, there’s probably a decent bit of other stuff in that account that would be fun to stash in here too.)

Meeting with HR yesterday went very well. My homework for the next few days is to start sketching up a plan for who I want to tell and when, culminating in a general company-wide memo. Basically the idea is that people who should get more detail and personal time to talk about things will be first, and as the audience widens outwards the level of specifics and such can taper off. So people I work with all the time can actually talk to me about what’s up, while on the other extreme, the vast majority basically get a note that says “send your emails to this address instead and don’t shit your pants when she steps out of the ladies room.”

It’s still tough to get through an entire day at work. Even with long lunches (which I suppose I’m being rather irresponsible about) and leaving a little sooner than maybe is strictly proper, I just… I can’t help but feel like the need to spend many hours a day being excruciatingly aware of my gender expression, and all the attendant dysphoria and dissonance, is really damaging me. I come home and feel like it’s so hard to hold on to me – like I’m still Amelia but somehow losing opacity and fading into some kind of indistinct blur. It’s been so disorienting that I didn’t even really connect the dots until I started writing this paragraph. I’m fighting to solidify my identity, but for “some mysterious reason” every time I burn a day lying to everyone around me (and partially to myself) I just magically start feeling like I’m losing ground. I mean, yeah, maybe I’m the dumbass, but… it’s literally hitting me so hard and so deeply that I’m having constant trouble thinking clearly at all.

I think it’s sort of like having a really strong physical need and trying to concentrate while ignoring it. Sure, you have fun playing grandmaster competitive chess, but would you like to play a match while you have to pee extremely bad the entire time?

That sounds miserable, of course. My life right now is like all of my mental capacity is reserved for just not falling apart entirely every time someone (unknowingly) calls me that deadname. I have a very cognitively demanding job and I feel like I have to be conspicuously failing at it because there’s no way I can do that job while I’m burning all my energy feeling awful and trying to hide it.

So it’s kind of like competitive chess with a full bladder. Except I can’t just go hit the restroom real quick because that actually makes me feel intensely dysphoric.

I think I fucked up the metaphor.

Which goes nicely back to the quote that prompted me down this trail in the first place!

 

Ya see, gender euphoria is like any other drug. First few hits? Amazing, maybe best times of your life.

But sooner or later… you need more. And more. Chasing the high. You start with some low grade stealthy cross dressing and the next thing you know you’re in prep for SRS. Last thing through your mind before the anesthesia takes hold is a profound and deep sense of peace – like you are exactly where you belong, and everything is alright.

Shit, I think I lost control of the metaphor somewhere. Oh well.

Monday, July 1, 2019

[Published retroactively on 2021-09-03, unedited.]

Working up the will to actually start getting ready for bed. I have a meeting scheduled with HR for 11AM tomorrow. Going to let them know I am transitioning and see what needs to happen next.

fuck

Saturday, June 29, 2019 - Part Two

[Published retroactively on 2021-09-03, with only very minor edits.]

The last entry was from like 1AM and then I went to bed and then I did today and now it’s close to 11PM. So mleh.

 

I’m going to try and stay simple here because I don’t want to get stuck trying to be fancy with words. A bit ago I was poking around reading about thought habits and wandered into an article on CPTSD. It talked about some of the awful things that can appear in survivors and victims. A lot of it was sadly familiar (which isn’t terribly surprising) – problems with emotional processing, relationships, self-image, etc. I’ve known for a while now that this model fits me very, very well.

But I re-read some of the symptoms with recent events in mind, and it was unsettling. It just kind of added up to making me feel really uncertain. I had the sudden question that maybe I’ve been thinking that I am trans but really it’s just the confluence of a bunch of fucked up trauma stuff.

I think that “usually” it would have been really easy to dismiss that out of hand and not even really notice the thought. But given the bumps I’ve had lately with doubting my identity and feeling like it’s hard to stay visible even to myself… it was scary for a moment.

I did talk myself out of it pretty quickly. In fact I very nearly just moved on without writing anything at all. But I want to poke at this a bit, because maybe the process will be helpful to reflect on later. And, if I’m really honest, I kind of hope that this can help create something that others can benefit from too.

One of the big points I found helpful was remembering that there are definitely plenty of trans people with CPTSD. It’s totally a legit thing to have both experiences in one person. So the “argument” becomes more focused; if I am “not trans because it’s just trauma” then what exactly distinguishes that from the (acknowledged) case where maybe I’m both?

Obviously the simplest refutation requires demonstrating that “me being trans” is a real thing, independently of “me being a trauma survivor.” This gets murky really fast. I can’t rely on chronology, for example; my early recollections of trans-indicative experiences are still very much in the same time period as the ongoing trauma itself, so it’s difficult to say “ha, I was trans before I was fucked up by the other stuff.”

So there’s more subtlety needed than simply “here, trans and trauma are totally separate buckets.” Instead of reasoning that I am both trans and traumatized by pointing out that the two exist independently, there is promise in doubling down on the idea of them coexisting. Specifically: trauma is assumed to be the more “stable” element (I’m not scared of being wrong that I have CPTSD…) so how, exactly, would things look if I had CPTSD but the “trans identity” was a retroactive idea that I had constructed recently to “explain” trauma effects?

I keyed most of this in my head on one central observation. I learned about CPTSD a while ago, and first really began to explore the framework as a way to help myself heal right around a year ago, almost exactly. For months I tried to use things like affective self-therapy (“inner child” type approaches) and found them disheartening and frustrating. I seemed to always resist the attempts and even recoil or lash out very negatively in response to them. I actually had pretty much given up on self-talk until very recently… when I discovered, basically by accident, that my intense negative responses to self-talk were not based on the actual content or ideas involved. I wasn’t rejecting the concept of communicating with myself; I was disgusted and defensive about it because I had always been trying to talk to a boy. I started over, looking to make contact with a girl instead, and almost literally overnight everything I felt about affective therapy changed completely. Since then I have had incredible and increasing success with interacting with facets of myself, provided I am respectful and (often most importantly) I gender them correctly.

These pages open, in fact, with a very vivid example of this. I learned, in short order, not only to operate from the “inner child” paradigm, but also to see parts of me that are in the present. I talk and joke and reassure Little Amelia almost constantly now; and I am always tickled when she quips back at her Big Sister Amelia in her distinct, adorable, elementary school girl voice. I spent time with my contemporary facets – boy mode, Sarah the enigmatic enby genius, and of course Amelia as I have settled into now. (I had a fascinating trip into the ideas of plurality/multiplicity and, although I now feel quite stable and singular, I have a lot of unanswered questions I would love to explore someday, when the spoon reserves are a bit less depleted.)

Anyways, my key reasoning was pretty simple. CPTSD is a set of responses that develop in reaction to prolonged trauma; affective therapy is aimed at engaging the portion of the self that most intensely remains trapped in that horrific experience. I started attempting inner-child work long before I had any conscious notion that I might be trans. And it didn’t work, because I was trying to operate with the notion that I was a cis male. It began to work once I involved the new understanding that I’m a girl. The inner perception I had of myself, in CPTSD’s framework, was formed and locked in long ago – and already a girl, long before I had any thoughts at all that maybe I’m trans.

(Pedantically, lest the objection be attempted that maybe I just ret-conned my past to be a girl out of wishful thinking or something, at that time I was still very much hesitant to even think about female identity; consciously I was still identifying as male and maybe enby in a fluid configuration. Discovering that my past was a girl was a surprise to me – far from any kind of overt revisionist bullshit.)

So really… far from CPTSD being the source of some kind of delusional belief that I am a trans girl, it’s actually a pretty compelling (not to mention validating) argument that I am definitely trans, and have been for a long time indeed.

Saturday, June 29, 2019

[Published retroactively on 2021-09-03, unedited.]

Dance like no one is watching… until the day when you are ready to dance like everyone is watching.

 

I’m quibbling with myself over the date on this entry, because it’s 0115 and I haven’t really slept so maybe it’s more of a Friday entry, and Friday had some good stuff to talk about, but… bleh. Whatever.

 

Earlier tonight I gathered the courage to email HR. Super preliminary; I just privately contacted someone I trust from the department and asked to talk in person next week. But it’s a huge step and I am trying to permit myself some pride and comfort in having done it.

Things continue to inch forward on the transition path. I am maintaining my resolve to see it through, and… I’m happy about that. I’m proud of that. I find a ton of reassurance and confidence in that. Somehow, though, it is still hard to own.

Dysphoria has been a real battle this week. I’ve said that I’m not unsure of who I am anymore, and that what I am feeling is a pained reaction to the discrepancy between my certainty in myself, and the world at large. And that is true, but incomplete. There are times when the pain is overwhelming enough that it really does become hard to see me anymore.

I haven’t disappeared, and that gives me hope and encouragement to a depth that I’m not sure I can really describe. It’s true that I am learning so very, very much about how to love myself. But something I said a while ago in these pages still rings true – I don’t want to have to do this alone. I know that I can, and I swear in the most sacred and binding ways I can reach that I fucking will – if that is what I must do. I just hope I don’t have to.

 

My memory is foggy, mainly because I think I was in the middle of trying to fall asleep at the time, but frankly the circumstances are irrelevant. Earlier tonight I found more name.

I am eternally worried about absolutely everything and therefore obviously not sure yet; but the same warmth and belonging is there, and the same chills when I think of hearing it from someone else. It’s so… pretty, and poetically suited to me, and just… right.

Hi! I’m Amelia Joy.

 

Saturday, June 22, 2019

[Published retroactively on 2021-09-03, unedited.]

Something I’ve been enjoying a lot in the past couple of months is the feeling of freedom in how I move. It’s incredible to me… not just that certain physical motions are intensely gendered, but how utterly invisible that is to most people. I mean – they can probably spot something “wrong” but that’s probably the extent. I don’t think it’s typical for people to be low-key conscious of every muscle contraction in their body because they feel compelled to make sure it’s gendered “correctly.”

I like moving around, when I can, in a fashion that feels more natural to me. Maybe it’s feminine? Hard to tell at this point. It’s definitely not straight-guy.

The dancing is definitely the distilled, refined, pure form of this. There is something amazing about just dancing like a girl.

I thought about this a bit ago, and realized that I have wanted to move, freely, for a very long time. I remember a moment in I think 5^th grade or so. For a while I would spend time alone in one room in the house, carefully isolated away from everyone else, and just dance. I think there was probably music involved but I honestly can’t be sure.

I remember feeling so right – moving, unfettered, just expressing myself by flowing around the room. It was like a direct tap into a spring of some kind of primal, beautiful joy.

I am much less certain about why that ended. Maybe someone saw and said something, maybe not; maybe I just thought too much and got myself scared. I think I remember a rush of the shame and fear. Whatever happened, I left the experience with a very loud and clear lesson, which is that proper boys do not do “that” and I better not do it ever again if I knew what was good for me.

It still churns in my soul… that I can’t remember much of anything, that the pervasive abuse even happened in the first place that led to all that memory loss, that it’s taken so long to re-emerge, that I still have incredibly conflicted feelings about the people who hurt and abused me in the first place. It hurts to know that an ecstatic, happy little girl once got told she wasn’t allowed to dance, and she had to carry that lashing in her heart for so many years.

But now… now it is 2019. It may have taken a while for her to heal, to find the smuggled memories from so long ago and lovingly dust them off again, but they’re intact.

I still love dancing like a girl.

And for the first time in my life, I really understand why.