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 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.

Monday, April 29, 2019

I stopped smoking on April 6, 2018. Over a year ago now. Even during some intense stress the past few months I’ve barely had any cravings, but I’m sure as fuck having some now.

There are so many things I just don’t want to lose. I want to start writing down all the goofy memories and experiences that should have clued me in to the fact that I’m trans. I want to capture what I feel – not really as much for inspection after the fact, but just to feel certain that I actually felt it as it happens.

And I want, desperately, for this stupid shit I write down to someday amount to something. I want some other lovely person to pick up a book full of the inanity and prattle and pretention that I’m dumping out, and see… something. I don’t really know. But I want them to be hooked, instantly and irrevocably, and finally set the volume down hours later as they close the last page. I want them to be a little sad because it’s over now. But most of all, I want them just to feel… love.

Maybe it’s some kind of egotistical thing or an imbecilic self-obsession with the idea of making some kind of useful difference on this fucking rock. I don’t know. I don’t care. If just one, single soul can trudge through the garbage I’m writing and walk away feeling like they deserve love, then I will rest happy.

If you’re actually here, actually really truly seeing this, I love you. I’m dedicating every scrap of soul I can put onto these pages to you. My truest, deepest dream is that you might see things here that resonate, that speak to your own soul, that finally say that you are not alone, you never have been, and we love you. I want to be the voice of truly unconditional and unchangeable love for you – the one you deserve so much, and the one I never got to have.

These are the Trans Mission Logs of the Starship Gender. Fare thee well, traveler.