The Numbers Game

  • Reading time:2 mins read

The rich see success as a matter of effort because they don’t actually have any obstacles beyond bothering to do a thing. “Feeling hungry? Then why don’t you just order something, you lazy shit!”

This leads to the natural conclusion, if you didn’t succeed that means you didn’t try. If you really tried, then how could you not have gotten what you want? It doesn’t make sense. You just need to try harder. Want it more. Force of will. Make the world bend to you.

This also ties into, I think. a reason that rich people are so bad with numbers and statistics and probability and so prone to magical thinking:

  • They’re unused to the concept of wanting a thing and not getting it; it’s this binary thing. Either things are, or they aren’t.
  • If things aren’t the way you want them, and if you’ve clearly wanted them enough to say you put in the effort, it’s because they’re being kept from you specifically, maliciously and for a reason.

So when you start talking about, like, 1 in 12 million odds, they’re like, GREAT! So it’s not impossible! And I’m a person who wants it, so it might as well be me, and it probably will be. Numbers mean nothing, because there’s nothing they can’t make happen through force of will.

Me, I’m not even used to having my basic needs met. I’m unused to knowing any sort of agency over my life, and have only ever felt ashamed to want anything for myself. The notion of anything turning out for me, with the odds as they are, has seemed too ludicrous to entertain. So put me in a room with a rich person, and just see the panic and disgust creep into their face. Am I serious? How can I exist? Oh no, I’m raising the wrong questions! I’m citing references! I’m one of those people! The unclean! I’m thinking poor! I’m going to infect them! Fuck fuck fuck! Stomp it! Get rid of it! Before it brings us all down with it!

I’m not speaking rhetorically, either. I’ve got… maybe a decade of intense experience here.

Stonewall

  • Reading time:3 mins read

For allistics, every interaction is on some level a power struggle. It’s not about understanding; it’s about asserting. You can see this in politics as well; the more explanation a candidate gives for a position, the less people seem to respect that candidate. If they just assert, â€œthis is how it is,” no matter how irrational or unreasonable it is, then people back away and go, okay, clearly they know what they’re talking about. 

I don’t like to fight, I have no interest in controlling anyone, and I want to know the reasons for things so that I understand how stuff works. But the more that I try to earnestly engage with allistics on my level, giving them all the tools I need to deal with a situation, the more aggressive they become. Because they see it as a fight they can win.

So the more quickly and bluntly you can shut them down, give them no leverage to even question your decisions, the smoother things will tend to go—as unintuitive as that feels.

“No.”

“I’d rather not.”

“I can’t do that.”

“I just can’t.”

I can’t stress this enough: allistics don’t want to know things. They don’t want to understand reasons or methods or meaning. They think they have it all under control, and that you’re undermining them, insulting them, if you give them anything to work with that interferes with the conclusions that they will form on their own. 

You’re controlling the story, they think, with all these facts and details, and not letting them write it themselves. How dare you. Well, they will show you who’s in control of the story. 

The only solution is not to engage. Don’t give them anything. Then they can’t throw it back at you. 

“This isn’t a negotiation. This is me telling you no.”

I think this is why consent is such a big issue for me. I don’t do power struggles. I don’t do negotiation. For me to say something, I’ve already worked out all of the angles I can and proposed the most generous possible solution, reserving as little as I can manage for myself. For someone to question that and say, no, you’re being a dick; I need more than the 95% you’re giving me, it’s just…

No.

I said no.

Fuck you, I said no. I won’t let you kill me.

I am so vulnerable to manipulation and guilt, to give up what autonomy I have over my own mind and body and emotions and needs and desires. I’m so prone to giving more than I can spare, even after I’ve drawn the final line, just to keep the peace.

No more explanations.

Just, no.

Setting boundaries is hard as hell. But if you don’t, it’s an invitation for abuse.

Here we are in the future and it’s dumb.

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Guy in distance: [incomprehensible shouting]

I: [tune it out]

Guy, closer: [more shouting]

I: [ignore it]

Guy, scampering toward me: “Miss! Miss!”

I, turning reluctantly: “Pardon me?”

Guy: “You’re just my size! I said, you’re just my size!”

I: [dumb stare]

Guy: [peers closely] “Whoop!” [turns robotically and walks away]

Later, on my way back, two different cars began to honk energetically, accompanied by more shouting, as I passed.

I guess it’s starting.

It was broad daylight. The first guy at least seemed amiable enough, if… a poor judge of how to communicate with people. I was too baffled to feel threatened or anything. But yeah, I guess I knew this was likely to become a thing eventually.

So. Here’s a new annoyance, then.

Today, this was just stupid. But if this is going to be how things go now, I guess I should start to be more careful.

All hail the monkey’s paw.

(Incidentally, this is not what I was feeling a few days ago. This is not the charming part. This is not what I find attractive.)

Gone Some Tomorrow

  • Reading time:4 mins read

I need to get rid of this facial hair at the earliest moment I can. This is driving me nuts. Right now, it’s this and my voice that are the two big things that give me problems. I mean, I can manage both, but I’d rather not have to. And this is such an easy thing to deal with… if one has the money. And there doesn’t happen to be a pandemic outside.

My priority for erasing this mess:

  1. upper lip
  2. chin
  3. throat
  4. jaw
  5. cheeks

The upper lip is most noticeable and darkest and hardest to hide and most psychologically… troublesome. The chin is viscerally annoying and prickly and hard to deal with. Other areas, decreasingly so.

With this neurology I’ve got here, it’s hard to express how much energy it takes for me to shave, and how dizzy and ill I feel afterward, what with all that standing around and waving my arm around and close scrutiny. Physically it wipes me out, never mind the emotional exhaustion from acknowledging it, focusing on it, engaging with it. So, often I don’t. Which on its own makes me feel worse and worse until I do.

When I do—it’s not perfect, but it feels like my whole face shape changes a little, and it’s soft, and I can stand to look at myself, or rest my chin on… anything, really. Part of the mask is scraped away, and I feel like me. It’s this big achievement. All this effort, and now there I am again, Christ. Then repeat the same cycle tomorrow, forever.

What, another day? I only just finished the last one.

It would be such a difference not to have to outlay all that energy, making myself feel awful, so as to not feel a little more awful, every single day. And for it to be completely effective, which this isn’t. For it no longer to be a concern, so I can move on.

I remember when I first heard about laser treatment, maybe 15 years ago—I think it was offered in Japan at that time but not here, so it was this novel thing—and I thought, wow, that would be really desirable, but how could I excuse it? I didn’t have the right yet to want anything. I didn’t see the point of making myself better. I just wanted to not exist, really. So I filed it away to chew over at some indeterminate point that was unlikely ever to come.

It says, I think, a lot that this has been such a growing point of insecurity for me since maybe 1992, and for a decade there it was used as a major point of control over me. I wasn’t allowed to touch it. I was told in so many words that my body didn’t belong to me anymore. (When had it ever?) The odd time I couldn’t stand it anymore and I shaved it off, they were so aghast and disgusted. I looked like an alien, a child, a girl. I wasn’t to just do that to them without telling them. What would people say?

Anyway, without going back down that well again, this is the next thing I need to wrangle. And in practical terms it’s… like, theoretically it should be simple and straightforward. All it takes is money, which I don’t have but I can maybe figure out. But again also: pandemic.

One of the places around here, they had some kind of a deal where you paid a flat fee for forever treatment—however long it took to get rid of everything, which I know can take several visits —and could pay that in small installments. Something like $40 a month. Which, y’know. That’s… not terrible. It’s a thing I could maybe figure out how to manage. Except, it’s plague outside. Even worse, it’s plague inside, particularly with self-care facilities where people will linger. And technically this is not vital, time-sensitive treatment. So that’s a barrier.

I’ve held out for 30 years, so I guess I can wait a few more months and see if we can fix the problem every other fucking corner of the world has figured out. (Ha ha, have I even met America?) But I don’t want to. And for once, that matters. I never let it. But this time it does.

I matter.

So. This is a priority. We’ll figure it out. Somehow.

  • Reading time:1 mins read

god, my marriage was fucked-up

i was too lost to see it, but everyone was right

i feel like i’m lucky to be alive now

and for the first time maybe ever, i want to be

Random Access Mammary

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Now over six months into HRT, there have been some clear effects. My body has taken well to the regimen, reacting strongly even to low starter doses. It seems obvious this was something my body was starving for. The first thing I noted, within moments of the first pill hitting my bloodstream, was how much clearer my head got. This thick fug that’s always been a part of my mind, it lifted a little. Soon I became able to feel emotions. Like, viscerally, physically. I had always thought of the term “feelings” as poetic, but now there was this burning sensation in my chest. Looking online, it seems like the shittiness I had felt every day since I was maybe eleven, it’s… similar to menopause. It seems like for decades my body was physically waiting and looking for chemicals that it wasn’t getting, and so just made my life hell demanding them. Just mentally, emotionally, this has been a revelation. Is this the way normal people feel, because suddenly I feel like a real person.

The physical side also kicked off quickly. Skin, scent, eyes. What small hair loss was happening in the corners of my scalp turned right around. I am still waiting for some more pronounced fat redistribution, around my face and hips and thighs. As impatient as I am for that, my body has other priorities at the moment, it would seem.

So.

Despite frequent pressing questions from medical staff, I wasn’t really asking for boobs. The notion didn’t factor into my ideas for myself. I’m not a sexual person, right, and that was the frame I used. Now, though, I am struck daily with how cool and validating this is. It’s just this obvious marker that I am who and what I am. That I exist. That my body belongs to me. That this is all really happening. And, it’s just neat.

People are people. Humans are not particularly sexually dimorphic. Any differences between what we arbitrarily define as the two sexes are subtle and inconsistent. As a result, then, any small change makes a big apparent difference. Psychologically, more than physically.

I just wasn’t prepared. It felt weird or pervy to dwell on. But, it matters. So many people have laid claim to me over the years, telling me what I could or couldn’t or must do with my body, most of which just caused me to hate myself more, dissociate further from this tangible thing I was attached to. This body, it belongs to me now. It is an aspect of me. This part of me, this physical form, it’s becoming a thing that I want to inhabit. That I am starting to feel attached to, that has begun to reflect me. I am turning into an actual person, who exists in the world.

With boobs.

Look, boobs are hilarious. And cool. And I get to have them now. Because I am kinda-sorta a girl. So I get the Cracker Jack prize.

I feel like I just went back to complete some certification I was forced to drop several ages ago. Picking up life wherever it was I left off.

I am real, and I am awake. And maybe someday soon I will be able to push through my trauma and take care of myself. Make a home. Build a world that I want to live in, filled with kind and sincere weirdos who just appreciate each other for who they are. I deserve to be a person. And I think I am figuring out how to make that work, bit by bit.

Freedom from Identity

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Of the three main Gems, Garnet’s story has always seemed the most muted and hazily defined. If you go back with the understanding that she is trans (as one of many dimensions to the metaphor she embodies), her whole character arc of learning to be honest and open about who she is, embracing her inner complexity and allowing herself to be vulnerable, it takes on a lot more color. It all starts to open up and make sense in a similar way to Amethyst’s and Pearl’s inner journeys.

From the start it’s just taken as read that Garnet is who she says she is. But she asserts this so strongly as to be rigid in her attitudes toward herself and her potential, and as to not let anyone in. She has to learn how to be a verb, and not just a noun. A person, not just an identity.

There’s this sort of fear that letting people know her too closely, or performing outside of this narrow definition she’s made for herself, will negate her identity, cause them to respect her less on her own terms. Which is not an entirely unwarranted fear, as we see in the show.

So her journey is about learning that essential trust in the truth of who she is, so that she doesn’t have to be defensive about it, protect it all the time. So that she can feel free to just live.

An Existential Upgrade

  • Reading time:2 mins read

So these hormones have been doing a lot to my head, all of it I think good, as well as what more incidentally is going on with my body. What’s curious to me is the things the process continues to reveal to me. It’s hard to say how much of this is the change in hormonal balance, how much is the shift in perspective on myself and the parts of me I never liked, and how much is just overcoming internalized garbage that I didn’t have opportunity to address before.

It feels like my queerness keeps increasing, in my typically equivocal way. I don’t adhere to the gender binary—but I am in fact medically transitioning. I don’t actually experience sexual or romantic attraction—but what appreciation there may be, it turns out it is regardless of gender.

That was… difficult for me to sort out. But it really doesn’t matter. People are people, and the toxicity that put me off one side of the spectrum is neither innate nor exclusive to that end. Anyone can be lovely or awful, based on what they individually bring.

Which is to say, I now seem to be pan-aroace. Which I, uh, decisively wasn’t before this rejiggering. But now pretty clearly am. It’s… a little weird. I haven’t yet figured out what that means in real terms, given, you know, the aroace part. It’s taken a couple of months to grapple and come to terms with. Like, what is that, and why is it here now? And, there it is.

I feel like I’ve unlocked a massive shrug here. It’s as abstract a notion as possible, since I can’t imagine a situation it could pertain to. But hey. How else could it possibly be with me?

“None of this really applies. But also, I am diving in completely.”

Clearing the Buffer

  • Reading time:2 mins read

My therapist told me today, it’s night and day, comparing me now to when I first came in to see her. It’s like I’m transformed, she says. There’s a lot of mess still to deal with, but, like. 

I’ve said how the real me is taking over recently. That other person is being depreciated and packed away, and Azure is in control of their own body for once. It seems like this is a visible change.

Your new captain on this expedition

I mentioned the nurse and some other interactions I’ve been having, and how it just seems like the last few weeks people are being nice to me to a degree that I’m not accustomed. What she said, it was… interesting. She described how the attitude one expresses toward one’s self serves to prompt others’ responses. It becomes this feedback loop, where if you treat yourself as someone deserving of respect, people tend to respect you. And, the reverse—well. I’ve been living the reverse for most of my life. 

It’s always been very clear to me how wrong I am, you see. Ergo the mask. It was only ever good for surface-level contact if that, maybe a few memorized scripts, because I can’t fake a damned thing. And when it faltered, yow did people make this clear.

Knowing how this works, it doesn’t help in itself, right. But it does help to clarify some of the dynamics I have experienced (particularly over that last decade, but really for the last 40 years). And why the more distraught I feel, the more toxic the situation seems to become. 

This whole concept sucks and is unfair and is gross, and it feels like the opposite of the way people should behave to a person in distress. But that seems to be the situation. And now, it seems I may be entering the early stages of the reverse kind of a loop—what with this new self-possession and what scant interactions I have experienced with others.

It’s so frickin’ weird, I said to her. It puts me off my guard every time. Why are people being kind? Why now? 

Well, it seems that may be part of it. It’s because I have found who I am. And, people seem to like them.

All the Tears that She Cried

  • Reading time:2 mins read

So how many times has Greg seen Pearl poofed? He seems to know exactly how it works—using language that suggests first-hand sensory experience that he struggles to articulate—and to know that Pearl’s reboot is unusual for her. 

If we take Pearl’s memory as accurate, both when Steven enters her gemstone and in the later context of musical theater, then she seems to have remained intact from the night she met Greg up until she learned about Rose’s plans for the future.

Then she seems to have regenerated at least once sometime between her initial meltdown over Rose’s pregnancy and what seems to be quite late in the process. 

From there, Pearl keeps the same form through Steven’s childhood (God, her body language in “Three Gems and a Baby”), into season 1a. 

If Greg saw her regenerate—likely more than once, given his familiarity with the process—that would have been somewhere in the few months before Steven was born. That must have been a, uh, rough period for her, huh. 

Dare I say, her regenerated form—after she realized Rose was going to be leaving her—to my eyes it’s coded as markedly less independent than her prior, somewhat with-the-times style. She becomes more, well, Pearlish. More delicate, reverting more to type. So her mental state…

For millennia, Pearl just sort of expected she and Rose would be together forever. Then in just a few blinks of her lifetime, she’s pushed to the periphery and Rose is about to die. And with that, suddenly Pearl takes on more of the appearance of a traditional Pearl: devoted, subservient. 

A Gem’s physical form is a manifestation of how they see themself—so it’s as if Pearl is asking, what did she do wrong? She must have strayed too far from her purpose. She dropped her guard, let a threat in, due to her lack of devotion. 

It’s like her very body is pleading by way of her subconscious, please, don’t go; I’ll be who I was supposed to be, see. I’ll always be here for you.

But it wasn’t enough, because it was never really about Pearl. 

Estrogen High

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I am not my abuse. I am what my abuse was trying to prevent. I am the person everyone was afraid I would be. And that person is starting to wake up.

There is much that I only technically consented to. Because it seemed best. Avoided some perceived bigger problem. A problem which often was manufactured, for the purpose of gaining consent. A concentrated decade of this. After a diluted lifetime.

I just accepted the fact I couldn’t do anything. The last time life seemed to carry some possibility was some 24 years ago. Today I feel I can just, make it mine. This is my life, my world, my body, my self. Even the aches and pains, they’re mine.

I can feel my mask slipping. There’s a sort of a hand-off. The person I’ve been forced to pretend to be, who has shouldered all this garbage, has begun to rest, and allow me to take over and just exist.

That other person is another life, with its own anxieties and concerns. They carried me, found me, helped me figure out who I am and what I need to do. They’re tired, harried. They need to go back where I’ve been hiding all this time. I’m grateful. They did their best. They protected me as well as they could. They’re done now.

Now it’s my time. The real me.

The Bafflement of Care

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I got some stuff done at the doctor, and it was all constructive; better than a worst-case scenario. Then a nurse who wishes to remain nameless offered me a lift. I guess they’re technically not supposed to do this, but her partner was waiting around to pick her up at the end of her shift, so she went down and asked him to use that time to drive me home—all the while gendering me semi-correctly.

She did keep asking to make sure I wasn’t a serial killer, which I tried to assure her I wasn’t. I was a little unclear on how to respond to that, especially after the first time. I also approached the endeavor with a certain amount of caution until I saw everyone involved. And, when I saw the scenario it was clearly fine.

I’m so unused to people just… doing nice things that the moment I was dropped off I started to feel so guilty. What am I not doing? I thanked them both profusely. Should I have… done something else? Made some gesture of my own? I don’t know how these things work. Was I rude? Did I act like a jerk? I just. I’m trying to figure, sometimes people are just nice, and leave it at that.

On top of this, all the gendering (which I’ve been getting regularly of late, often in the strangest scenarios). I mean, I know it’s part of her job to be sensitive to that sort of thing, but, like. Again, it’s a lot.

Just. Oh my God, I don’t know what to do with someone just going out of their way to do something like this for me, for no reason, and against policy. I’m kind of overwhelmed.

Normally the worst part of check-up appointments is the hour-long trudge home after the blood draw. Today I got to just decompress, and drink the complementary ginger ale; spike my sugar back up a little. Normally I am completely wiped out by the time I get home, but this time I had enough energy to actually get groceries (where I continued to get ma’amed, somehow, despite looking like a melted slug).

Agh, interacting with people is so strange. I don’t know what I am doing at all. Just, accept it.

Conservation of Trauma

  • Reading time:3 mins read

I appreciate that in Steven Universe violence is always a tragedy. Sometimes it’s necessary, even justified, but that doesn’t make it good. And there will always be consequences. Those who glorify it do so out of damage or ignorance, and it will eat them. The discussion is about cycles of abuse—in families, relationships, the broader social structure—but the show uses its ostensible format as an action-adventure series to subvert all the things we’re told are glorious and righteous, to assert that, no, actually, violence is just violence.

Take the “Stronger Than You” battle between Garnet and Jasper. On the surface it’s triumphant, an early high note for the show. And indeed Garnet was left without many other options. It was an act of self-defense. Jasper was never going to be reasoned with. Something like it had to happen, to prevent other violence. But that doesn’t make it innately virtuous. It still passed along trauma in unpredictable ways. It was necessary, and that’s the tragedy—because violence doesn’t cancel violence; it only mutates its form, maybe puts it out of sight and mind for a while. And boy, that keeps happening in this show—from thousands of years before its start, all the way to the end.

To an extent the Gem War was necessary. It redistributed trauma away from some of the most vulnerable, even as it ravaged all that survived. And the show only ever plays that with ambivalence, except through the eyes of characters who were clearly warped from the violence beyond the ability to cope. It’s a tragedy that it was necessary, and the consequences are endless.

Then all those themes that have been building up since 2013, they culminate in Future. Where would all the violence land, but in the lap of our central character? Including the fallout of Jasper’s history of war and insecurity, heightened to the point of mania by her battle with Garnet. All those millennia of hard-won victory and juggled, mutated trauma come home again, to be absorbed by a single target.

In other shows, the Perfect Steven reveal would be a cathartic triumph, a symbol of growth and success. Here it’s tragedy. It’s clearly wrong even before what happens. This is what violence has done to our boy; this is how it’s warped him. It’s the show’s message from the start, but now it’s personified so you can’t ignore it, much as the trans issues were brought to the forefront at the end of season five.

Abuse and neglect, they don’t just go away. They don’t evaporate when you stop looking at them. It’s like conservation of energy; all they do is transfer and change forms. They linger and fester until they manifest in some new unexpected form. The only way to stop the cycle is to acknowledge it, take a step, back, and show unconditional love.

Which is easy to say, of course. But all we can do is forge ahead, day by day, step by step, and try to show care where we can. And maybe one day it will be enough to make a change.

Ding

  • Reading time:6 mins read

Food, when I was growing up, amounted to, “I don’t know; don’t bother me. Make yourself a bagel if you’re hungry.” My school lunch was perhaps a Fruit Roll-Up and a Kudos bar, in a brown paper bag. If there was nothing readily available, I just didn’t eat.

I think I never really got in the habit of food. Even four decades in, I remain vague on the idea of Eating Things. Even when food is available, it’s this abstraction. Yes, ideally I would consume it on occasion. Mostly, I forget—and mostly, I don’t.

When I was a little older, the same friend who helped me to escape from my most recent abuse scenario and set me up where I’m living now—his parents sent me a sort of care package; just, all this food, to eat. Since they knew there was never anything at home.

I stored that in my room for a few months, until I worked through it. Saved me having to enter the same air as my parents.

The two of them, they had their own specific things they ate, which were always, uh. One of them was just liver and onions, all the time! The other, I hope you like boiled rhubarb. If not, tough. And if so… well, it was theirs, right. So they did them, and then went their way. And I had to figure things out on my own.

When I was a little older my paternal grandmother, who was a horrible person in every respect (I won’t approach the racism), regaled me with a story of when I was perhaps two, and she saw me trying to make a bologna sandwich with green luncheon meat. Which… tracks, yes.

Come to it, when I was really young they did that thing of, if you’re bad you don’t get to eat, right. And I was “bad” all the time because I was a weeper. It seemed like everything made me cry. So I just got used to self-punishing and keeping out of the way.

I’m 6’5″ now. I wonder how tall I’d be if I weren’t malnourished most of my life. I wonder if this has anything to do with how late puberty hit me.

Every so often my father would scream at me that I was anorexic. And, then, well, that was the end of it. He just needed to scream that at me, so that I knew it. It wasn’t technically true; I was just scrawny, as I remain. But let’s just say that I was. Do a little math. Why does one imagine I might be that way?

Both my parents were… shall we say, deficient, as people. It’s not my job to sort through or apologize for what damage may have brought them to the point that I entered the story; they were who they were, and they were the kind of people Roald Dahl served to illustrate. Of the two I think my father took a little pity on me, inasmuch as when he happened to be stuck with me and we were out of the house he would always take me for fast food. Often my choice. So there was that. When he had to be there and see that I existed in front of him, occasionally I received the bare minimum of care.

Too much contact, though, made him uncomfortable. If he could get rid of me he would. I’ve already talked about the mall thing, where he’d dump me all afternoon, evening, and night until closing, because he didn’t want me to burn down the house, as he put it every time, but if I chanced to burn down the mall then that was out of his hands. If he remembered he’d give me five dollars for pizza. But with my training, I could easily not-eat—especially if there was a new game in the arcade. Something that introduced new ideas, like Rolling Thunder or OutRun or Double Dragon or Rastan. Or one of a few favorites that happened to cycle back in somehow, like Vs. The Goonies.

As I unpack the tangle of disasters that has brought me to my current situation, I gain more and more perspective on the complicated intersection of ways in which I was set up to fail in life.

My whole response to any scenario, I was taught: go away; don’t remind anyone that you exist; keep quiet, don’t show any emotion; don’t give them reason to punish you. I was taught to be a non-entity, to want nothing, not to attend to my own needs if I even knew them. I’m a bad student, but eventually I learned.

If I make myself invisible enough, I an rewarded with neglect instead of active abuse. So, I can stay quiet. I can make myself sit still. I can just not ask for anything. Ignore my bodily functions. Remove myself from the equation, remove myself from myself. 

Maybe I should eat something.

Between all this and my lack of romantic or sexual attraction, such that every relationship I’ve been in has been a matter of other people inveigling themselves into my life, telling me they’re my best friend until I rely on them, then handing me this ultimatum where for the friendship to continue it must do so on their terms, to which I have replied, “no, don’t go; I’ll do what you say; I’ll be good,” I can recognize a few central mechanics to the manner in which my life has, historically, sucked.

Of course now, as I approach my 42nd birthday, I have begun to learn my own systems—as opposed to the whims of narcissism that have shaped my my every fear and expectation for the first two score of my knowledge. So we’re not great, but we are at a turning point. Had I the capacity to cope with everyday life, and could I support myself financially, I would be well on the path to hunky-dory, and could begin to address some bigger structural issues. For now… I have a quesadilla in the oven.

Got to eat, Azure.

The Longest Yarn

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Every so often I feel like a girl. And my whole body gets warm. The world starts to feel real. Everything begins to make a little sense; I feel connected to some kind of a story. It just comes to me, a realization. A toggle. And there it is, and somehow I’m human. Complete.

I’m not used to feeling like anything. Just this fuzzy ball of consciousness, resenting my humanity. This goes back forever. As far back as memories make sense. I’ve been an abstraction, unable to recognize or tolerate the entity holding my place in this game I cannot understand.

Now there’s this anchor. I’m still a space cadet, and I’ve got a whole host of distractions. But, I have a tether to this body and the world it inhabits, and now I know the truth, and sometimes when I don’t think about it, I find myself back on the ground. And I finally get it.

This is that sense of self it seems that everyone else has by default. They’re worn and damaged and a big old mess that I need to keep toiling away to repair, but they exist, and I like the model and the controls make a kind of sense to me. Sometimes I wake up, and they’re me.

And it’s just… kind of astonishing. There I am. There I’ve always been. What did I wake up from? It’s like that morning haze where you clear away the dream logic and sort out where you are and what day it is and what you need to do this afternoon. Except so much more vivid.

It comes when it comes; brains do what they do. When it does, it may follow my evening meds. It’s not hard to connect those dots. What strikes me, though, is how not just right but transparent it feels: this wave of Self and Reality and Truth. The pills are only a catalyst.

This gender business, I don’t mean to play by anyone else’s rules. I’ve been messed up for far too long, and this is my own scenario to sort. I’m going with whatever seems true and correct. And where I get that wrong, I will adjust. I’m a girl, in the lower-case. I’m just me.