Author: Azurelore Korrigan

This author has written 1029 articles

Your Feelings Do Not Matter To Me Nor Should They To You And Here Is Why It Offends Me Personally That I “Do Not Get A Say” In How You Feel; Wait Why Does That Upset You, That Is So Disrespectful Toward Me When I Just Spent My Valuable Time Explaining Why I Don’t Care How You Feel

  • Reading time:8 mins read

~ or ~

Portrait Of An Empty Future

…

it strikes me, in her other relationships K— is used to always being the older, smarter, more self-assured and sophisticated party—and in absence of any real grasp on this “emotion” thing, her whole way of engaging with others involves memorized or workshopped playbooks that control the crowd in any situation, ensuring that everyone sees how impressive she is before she selectively allows them to engage with her and receive her depths of wisdom and experience.

problem is, with me basically none of that applies. the statistical factors all are flipped, and i have zero interest in social manipulation or following obvious cues or messing around with superficial displays. i just want to sit and have meaningful conversations and be open and enjoy in each other as people.

and i think that sits so outside of her carefully structured theater of social performance that she has never known what the fuck to do with me. like, her bullshit doesn’t work here and instead i’m casually asking all this unreasonable ad-hoc stuff of her, like to read the poetry i write her or acknowledge the random thoughts i share, or to spend actual time with me or discuss our feelings or maybe sometimes once in a green moon tell me something nice about myself—literally any aspect of me that she genuinely likes, just once.

and i think that scared her. or intimidated her. or irritated, or triggered some kind of envy or feeling like i was showing her up somehow—even more annoyingly, without my trying and in apparent total innocence toward any kind of game even happening around me.

she frequently expressed bewilderment at her inability to predict how i would behave or react to literally anything. which makes more sense to me now if we flip that around and extrapolate that she was continually trying to get ahead of me and predict my behavior so she would know what script to follow in order to get control of the situation.

i’m only just seeing these shapes now—but i think on some level K— always kept me at arm’s length because it freaked her out that i was largely immune to her games and that she had no clue how to just relate to me directly as a real person. i think i made her feel self-conscious, defensive, uncomfortable in my lack of a facade or any apparent understanding of or interest in the social cues she spent so many years gaming and mastering to her material advantage. as if my existence was a living criticism and counter-example to her life’s work, nullifying and invalidating without even having the decency to see or acknowledge what i was stepping over on way to have a fond unguarded conversation about whatever.

how dare i not even have the decency to compete against or criticize or argue and debate the merits of her careful manipulation. i didn’t even leave her an opening to make a case or get angry for judging her. i just skipped right to direct honest vulnerable human intimacy. which, i’m not sure that she even fully realized was a thing before she met me.

so for around ten months after her visit to see me and slowly realize i actually just was exactly what i represented myself to be, every time that i tried to interact with her she would become guarded and behave like i was doing something to her by engaging with her at all. she would go to weird, frankly hurtful lengths to avoid or discourage conversation. refuse to schedule any of her precious time to spend with me. get angry if i tried to talk to her unsolicited. refuse to include me in anything, and act weird and tense if i involved myself anyway. actively discourage me from paying my girlfriend any romantic or sexual attention, and pointedly i don’t think ever once initiating anything with me.

and she just constantly took shit out on me that felt like it came out of nowhere. but it kind of makes sense if she thought of me as some kind of continual low-key existential threat or dismissal, to her mind both showing her up and challenging her to relate to me in a way that she had no tools to understand, didn’t begin to know how to approach. all she knew was that despite and maybe in part because of all the fondness i showed her, i made her question herself—and she not like what i called to her attention. it’s like i made her feel inadequate and icky in ways she didn’t have words or framework to articulate to herself, and i think she just projected that all back at me, resenting me more and more as the hurt she was causing me grew more and more obvious. how dare i further implicitly criticize her, just by passively existing for her to compare herself to?

i made everything so complicated for her, by being so uncomplicated. so she spent the best part of a year doing her best to ignore me and projecting on me all her doubts and insecurities. treating me like that one girl in class who actually did her homework, bringing down everyone else’s grade in the process, but who was so sweet and clueless that being overtly mean to her just made you feel even worse about yourself.

everybody be like azurelore! see the quality of her work? see how far her attitude goes? class, make sure you study her example.

but i’m just over here, in love with her so that i’m bursting, wondering why she refuses to tell me that she likes me, wondering why she pivots and leaves a room the moment she sees me standing there, why she snaps at me for telling her about my day when she didn’t ask, wondering what i ever did to her. wondering why despite the odd sterile memorized self-contained statement, she so clearly doesn’t love me back—not love as i understand it. how clearly she has zero interest in me, and so much less than zero concern for my feelings that she responds with hostility when i express them, seemingly no matter what they may be.

… i should have left her months ago. i almost did, once—until she harassed me to tears, spent hours yelling at me, giving me a full-fledged panic attack over the phone, until i agreed to stay. i thought about leaving several more times, but i didn’t want to get on that side of her again if i could avoid it. and, well, i was so deeply in love. i didn’t really want to leave; i adored her unconditionally. she was amazing. i just wanted to not feel like that, all the time. i kept thinking maybe after this or that rough patch, everything would be fine and we would figure things out together, learn how to communicate clearly, and she wouldn’t make me cry every other time she spoke to me.

but, yeah.

i think she just genuinely didn’t know how to reciprocate my feelings for her. i think she felt weird about herself because of how counter i stood to her whole meticulously playtested self-published role-playing game called “grown-up love & dating for the gifted & talented.” and with her absence of real emotional development, she wound up taking out her discomfort on me day after day, month after month, instead of challenging her own systems of understanding that had successfully led to so many dozens of shallow relationships that gave her the results she wanted without her needing to learn how to actually connect with another human being, or acknowledge that maybe she has never once done this in her life and would have zero idea how to go about it—leaving her vulnerable for once, unable to shape every element of the situation to her favor. unable to guarantee that she would win.

“you win,” she kept telling me in that final conversation. even as there was nothing to win. there was no game. there was just one person trying to have an important conversation, and another shouting at her about how unfair it was to them for her to express her feelings or explain to them her perspective on her own life experiences. did she not think of how doing so might make them feel?

but no, apparently i won. just this once i was permitted my own emotion about my own life, but that meant the game was over. she couldn’t play with a person who so adamantly refused to be told what to think and feel, who refused to be managed, who so insisted on an open conversation where two people just listen to and validate and care for and trust in each other. what kind of a fucked-up game even is that? it’s nothing but a trap she was “guaranteed to fail,” as she put it.

so by fiat, azure wins. fine, be that way. insist on basic consideration. insist on your own validity. insist on me showing you the same vulnerability and patience you show me. insist all you want, but this is my game and i’m taking it home with me. so if you think about it, who really wins in the end? haha, got you there!

…

seriously though, fuck her.

what a waste.

The Definite Article

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Right-intentioned as it is, you can tell that an over-enthusiastic cis dude wrote the gender stuff in the star beast. I don’t begrudge it, he’s trying, but in particular a trans person would not have written that “binary” business the way that Davies did. It feels… a bit much.

There’s a shade of this positive othering going on. An exoticizing of the trans experience, in effort to elevate it and say, “Actually aren’t the transes ever so magical and unconstrained compared to us? Isn’t it lovely when you think about it?”

I see what he’s doing, but—😅

It reminds me of how, in escaping overtly malevolent cultural stereotypes, other marginalized peoples are often cast as these mystical seers, portals to a hidden world or another level of consciousness, for the “normal” characters to consult and regard with deference.

I mean. Davies’ heart is in the right place, and this is clearly his attempt at positive propaganda (as he has stated he fully intends to produce), to counter the toxic cultural and political forces that are making him so righteously angry. I appreciate that. It’s important work.

Normalization, this ain’t quite, though.

Trans people are just people, yo. “Transness” is something imposed on us by a society that insists on controlling everyone’s lives and bodies. I’m just a girl, one who’s a little fucked-up from decades of being forced to pretend I wasn’t.

I am of course special and mystical and wonderful in other ways, but those are individual to azurelore. They’ve nothing to do with any circumstances outside of my control that led people to project a lifetime of nonsense onto me because of what my genitals happened to look like.

I am all about the positive propaganda, Russell. I’m here for whatever raging anarchist screeds you have in store. Glad to see the show weird and progressive and passionate and curious again.

Just, maybe consider letting a trans writer handle trans characters and themes for you?

Genetic Role

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I find it so surreal when friends I thought I knew turn out to have biological family, that they talk to and get along with and willingly spend time around. It’s like, surely this is a bit, right? It’s so hard to envision living that way; to me it feels like something that surely only exists in out-of-touch hollywood scripts that serve to show us a conservative cultural mythology rather than the genuine empirical shape of life.

It’s like hearing that someone believes in the tooth fairy or went to their senior prom or is heterosexual or something: “Really, you’re not serious are you? Hahaha, how… sweet. Well, have fun with that I guess?”

They will talk about needing to go vacation with their mom, and my immediate thought is “What, why? What sort of hold does she have over you? Are you safe, are you okay?”

This commentary isn’t meant as shade; it’s in response to a cohost thread on how society is structured to prevent people escaping from a static defined biological family unit, and serves to ensure those who do are eternal outcasts from the basic benefits of society.

And my response to that is sort of the opposite of the typical shock and incredulity about having no family. To me, learning that someone—especially another queer—does have assigned family is like learning that they still maintain open contact with the cult that I thought they had successfully escaped from. Or like hearing a recovering addict is about to go hang around with that old acquaintance again. I feel like, how worried should I be? 😧

The Root of Happiness

  • Reading time:5 mins read

The first thing that ever made me happy was me. It was recognizing myself, realizing that I was an actual person—that I had always been me, I’d always been in there. That my own ideas about myself were clearly the truth. All that other happiness that I’ve felt since has built on that basic core. Which isn’t to say all the happiness I feel is about me, exactly. It’s that I didn’t have access to that emotion at all until I felt that way about myself—and now that I can, I can extend that love to other things.

Tonight I stumbled on a dumb thread from an artist who didn’t seem to have met a real girl in his life and had no idea how bodies work. In particular he focused on “W-sitting,” which is that whole thing that kids often do where they turn their hips sideways about 90 degrees and sit with their legs splayed out sideways in front of them. He described it as this innately feminine posture that the male body was unable to reproduce due to the differences in the female skeleton. Which is uh, of course complete nonsense on so many levels. But also, this has for 40 years basically been my go-to whenever I sit on the floor. I had to check many times to make sure I understood correctly, and yeah W- and even T-sitting (where the calves are straight out to the sides) have always been natural to me.

And… yes I am of course a girl, but I have a feeling he wasn’t thinking of a girl quite like me here.

What strikes me though, out of this ignorance is, how angry my ex used to be with me when they saw me sit like that—or squat. Or… really do much of anything with my body. This whole time I’ve been like, well, it’s comfortable? And what’s it to you? I didn’t understand what their problem was. Now, though—in mind of so many other complaints, I wonder if their brain was in the same place as this guy, and they were uncomfortable with the implications of this body language.

I often think about how when I finally worked out I was trans, everyone who knew me pretty much shrugged. “Oh, yeah,” they replied, “That makes sense.” Of the people I talk to regularly, I don’t think one of them expressed anything approaching surprise. It was more like, “Ah, that would be it. Okay.”

So what strikes me here is, all these leg motions and positions that come naturally to me, that have historically made other people uncomfortable or angry—a lot of that is probably kinda gender-coded, right? Just like everything else in my body language that kept getting me into trouble, sheesh.

Basically my whole life the people around me encouraged me to stop moving or holding my body in ways that were easy or natural or comfortable to me—without explaining to me why exactly—in order to prevent others feeling uncomfortable.

I have so much to unlearn. Like, the emotional state that I get in, the way I move and behave when I am chilled out and comfortable and yes on some level happy? With what I now understand, it seems that most of that default is uh super-duper feminine-coded.

To be happy, to be myself, to me is feminine-coded.

Which says a hell of a lot about my first 40 years—the persistent message that for me to be calm and comfortable and happy was wrong and disgusting and disruptive, and that I had to contain it at any cost lest I bother someone or invite some kind of punishment.

This all brings a certain light to our now-common term for same-sex attraction. To be allowed to simply be one’s self, to do what comes naturally, to be comfortable in one’s skin, is to feel gay. This isn’t quite about that, but, well, all queerness is related, right.

It is another level of galaxy-brain to understand at last that the people I relied on, who controlled my life for four decades, literally wanted nothing more from me than for me to be unhappy. To be uncomfortable, stressed. To understand how worse-than-worthless my humanity was. I’m just following the logic here, right? If to know happiness is to feel comfortable with who I am, and if every behavior that comes naturally to me is considered wrong and off-limits, then the last thing that anyone central to my life has ever wanted was for me to be happy.

And so, I wasn’t.

To be happy was wrong. It bothered others. It was dangerous. So, fine, I wasn’t happy.

Ever.

For 41 years. And about two weeks.

Anyway, it’s astonishing how things can shift for me now. When I calm down, I feel so, well, girly. I feel so myself. Just being able to chill can bring on this kind of a euphoria, as I lock into who I actually am as a person. Then when I freak out and tense up, I feel like I am regressing into that other person; I feel so much less charitable toward myself, I like myself so much less, down to what I look like. How I hold myself, navigate space.

Then I look at Azure in a good moment, and I think, this is what those dummies were afraid of? Seriously, her? And it just underlines even further how pathetic all those people were. How deranged their sense of good must have been.

Just look at this chick. Who wouldn’t want her?

The Neverending Suck

  • Reading time:12 mins read

I find it increasingly unavoidable that much of the trauma that I have such trouble detaching from sex as an act of communication is based in my relationship to gender—specifically in the expectations that it sets me up for when engaging with a person in this way.

So I’m a girl, right. Non-binary, but still. Obvious as my gender may be to me now—and to anyone else, it would seem—I didn’t always know it. I had no sense for what I was, beyond what people told me. The things they told me… didn’t seem quite right, and made me deeply uncomfortable, but as with so many things I didn’t want to argue so I shrugged and tried to play along.

Like the act of sex—like most of the things we do with our lives—gender is a conversation. The way that you frame it defines a role, and the role suggests a kind of a relationship. Much like art, when we define ourselves by our actions, we unavoidably embody a certain philosophy or ideology within our identity.

At the risk of getting reductive, every role that we embody serves to signal a set of expectations for how we mean to behave toward others and how we expect them to behave toward us. The coding can get complicated and conditional. But it’s there. A big part of understanding one’s relationship to gender, at least to my mind, is in coming to grips with how one wants to relate to one’s self and others; how one feels about the world; what behavior one considers constructive and important, and makes one feel good to perform. The identities we build through our actions represent a set of apprehensions about how the world works, or how we want it to.

To that end, when one is compelled to behave as someone other than who one genuinely is, that is on some level a breach of principle. You know that you’re doing something wrong, that you’re betraying something important, even if you can’t quite articulate how or why. For me, constitutionally the expectations put on me most of my life made me feel ill, and wrong, and like a horrible human being. Which isn’t to say those roles are awful in and of themselves—there are people who can rock them and make good out of them—but they did not fit my view or ideals, and just made me more and more upset and disgusted with myself. To project them onto me in particular, and expect me to follow them, was harmful.

This definition could be a discussion in its own right, but where I’m going with it here is that, to maybe even a greater extent than my sexuality, these sorts of gender issues may be the source of my biggest problems with sex.

I say, with good reason, that my asexuality is key to understanding everything else about me. This is absolutely true. It also is complicated to understand, and a little misleading until you get there. After, all aces can and will and do fuck—some of them—without it necessarily being this big traumatic ordeal for them. So my asexuality isn’t in and of itself the answer here, though it is of course relevant.

Where trauma comes in with a thing like this, it’s not really to do with attraction or orientation. It’s from how you’re treated, what happens, and how it makes you feel. It’s a matter of the individual relationships that you form, and the patterns and associations and expectations that you take from your experiences. And those specific dynamics—about what feels right and wrong and good and bad and healthy and harmful and how it affects you and changes your ideas about yourself and others and the world that you live in—those are based in that ideological coding that you carry around with you, that gender in part serves to express.

With that ideology of self in mind, when you’re expected to act in ways that feel wrong to you, and due to whatever power dynamics you feel no real option to refuse or negotiate, that constitutes a violation. Whether by direct threat or unspecific fear, consent can’t be compelled. And for me—from the gender dynamics at play, the expectations put on me, the threat of punishment either expressed or implied or readily tacitly understood—sex was a horror show. Because I was not who I was told. And the person who I wasn’t, carried certain narrow expectations, for how they should act, what they should want, none of which were negotiable. If I didn’t want those things, I was lying or I had some other agenda, and it didn’t matter because that was my responsibility.

More and more I understand how my evidently hard-coded sexual roles and interests are interwoven with my gender—with my femininity, my sense of myself as a girl; with my relationship with myself; with what kind of a person I want to be, with how I want to relate to other people. As far as roles go, how much of my being 100% bottom can be triangulated with my asexuality and how much to my ideas about power and fairness and truth and sincerity and trust and openness, I don’t know. I just know I hate to impose myself onto others, and that I spend all of my time taking in others’ worlds. In essence I am made not to assert but to receive.

For me there is a natural and kind of obvious line between the way I feel comfortable communicating sexually to the way I feel comfortable communicating in any other way. All of this is an expression of my sense of self—which by that definition above is an active process, tied to my ideals.

Which is not to say that for another person femininity or being some kind of female is this deferential mode of being. I’m just talking about Azure here. My gender is my own. My ideals are a part of me in particular. This is how all of this ties together for me, as this coherent whole.

Likewise my whole overwhelming, if you will pardon me, thirst for cock—it’s always been there, basically since I became aware of sex at all. It’s a part of me, whether I’ve acknowledged it or not. And—well, it’s both complicated and not at all really. Sometimes one just has a special craving. But a big part of that craving is again just my whole concept of myself, in relation to myself and in relation to others and in relation to the world. It’s rooted in my mode of interacting with things, in how I am inclined to interface. To be receptive is, like, the basic thing about me. If we’re talking sex, then I’m gonna want to take things in, accept them. So to me a fascination with this particular structure… well, it just naturally feels like it follows everything else that makes Azure Azure.

So to the extent that sex interests me at all, I have… favorites. And it’s all part of this same system, the best I can tell—this “correct” way of relating to others. A monkey wrench in all this is my equally ideological tendency toward panness, for most of the exact same reasons, and all the tricky business with gender and anatomy and so on. (I mean, genitals aren’t gendered. As a girl with a dick of her own, it’s difficult not to be sensitive to the complications here.)

Of course in practical terms I’m aroace and I’m never gonna actually pursue a sexual relationship with anyone in real life. All this is a thought experiment more than anything; it’ll never affect anyone outside of my head. And yet it all does lean into some of the historical trauma that I associate with sex—with the dynamics that have felt so wrong, and how they relate to my concept of who I am as a person. And so, abstract as it may be, this business can’t help getting a little messy as a result.

I’ve only had two actual sexual partners. Depending on how we define things, I might have had… I don’t know, a few more romantic partners beyond them. Things were often weird, what with that ace/allo misalignment. Their ideas and mine never quite lined up. However you count, one common factor is that they were all cis women—which, you know, sure. Fine. Cool. Though that homogeneity feels a bit… off, considering all the things about me.

The other common factor is that I never went looking for any of this. Generally they all pursed me, and normalized themselves as a part of my life until I started to think of them as friends, then intensely close friends. From there, any romantic or sexual development was always a change of terms. Suddenly I’d have this choice: either to lose this friend I was getting to rely on so much emotionally, or to make this compromise, step outside of my comfort zone, and accommodate these new expectations. And then, to keep accommodating. Keep playing along, to make them happy.

An ultimatum is not a good start for any stable relationship, but that’s the only experience I’ve known. Sometimes it was more pointed than others. Sometimes more was at stake. It’s always been coercion, though. And built into that coercion was this demand that I perform this alien role.

And, I was awful at it. I didn’t want to do it. I felt miserable. I felt like I was betraying myself. I felt like I was doing something ethically wrong somehow.

This is a little hard to find the right words to express the way that I mean to. My experience has been narrow, and it’s been entirely focused on my sorest pressure point, and it has really really sucked. As a girl, 100% of my association with sex and romance has been of other girls pressuring me to pretend I was a boy and punishing me when I failed to do it correctly. And that’s just. Uh. There is nothing good about any of that. Beyond girls generally being awesome of course. And it creates these unfortunate associations for me.

It’s like. In a scenario where in fact I were not aroace down to my teeth, I would say, yeah, great, let’s have a balance of everybody. Keeping in mind who I am and the dynamics that I need to be healthy, let’s get in some men, some women, some enbies, cis, trans, whatever. Anyone who’s cool and kind. I’m polyam, even. Party on. Then with that kind of a broad net established, one can narrow down special interests and favorite parts and dynamics, and it doesn’t really matter because everyone is different and people are just people and one will appreciate something new with every individual.

But like. I never got a cock in there, y’know.

Not only did I never actually get the kind of dynamic that I’m most specifically—though not exclusively!—wired to favor. Every relationship was also another riff on the same sucky dynamic that served to deny my humanity, to work against my sense of self, in service of someone else’s whim.

It’s frustrating on a certain level, as I’m never going back to that well again. I know myself well enough now that I’m not going to be in another sexual or romantic situation. I know this isn’t for me. So what I’m left with is that the entirety of my experience is defined by this trauma—and by never once getting what means the most to me. Like, the energy balance I need to feel well, I never got it and I never will. That’s not an experience I’m going to ever have.

And, you know. That’s fine, in the sense that I know this isn’t a part of my life. The future is more important than the past, and I have a good handle on that. It’s just that on some level it seems like a shame, and to be real it’s kind of annoying, that in that whole… er, brief novella that is now closed, I never got a chance to relate to anyone on my own terms, as a girl, in a way that felt healthy and enriching to me.

No one has ever treated me like me. And what they wanted from me, I couldn’t give them. Because I wasn’t that person. And it hurt. And made me frankly want to die.

Most of that is just, yeah, the people who’ve macked on me against my wishes have, surprise surprise, been awful people. But gender, it’s not an insignificant part of that.

I’m a girl, dammit. Of some kind, anyway.

And you know. Hypothetically I like girls too, it’s fine. But, just—even then it would be different if they’d allowed me to be myself. But they didn’t. They made up their own minds.

I was only ever a toy. And a broken one, because I never worked the way they assumed I was meant to. And it was always my fault, for failing to fit that mold.

And it sucked.

It just sucked.

And it’s over now. And I won’t have to worry about it again.

But the suck stays with me.

The Voice Inside My Head

  • Reading time:11 mins read

Though all of NIN kind of exists on a different level from other pop music, one could make a life’s work of studying The Downward Spiral and never come to a point where it feels like one has run dry of revelations.

To my concern, I often comment on the distinct transiness of Reznor’s music. There are really obvious moments like “The Becoming,” but there’s just this tone and perspective to so much of the emotional journey. This is extremely 2019 for Azure, for instance:

I guess there’s a certain universality in the infamous vagueness of his lyrics. You can project anything into Trent’s little trauma boxes. But through all his work there’s this regular sense of transition, of fear of one’s identity, of numbness and desperation, of one’s false persona eating one alive.

“Help me understand myself,” his music pleads. “Nothing that anyone has told me seems to fit, or make sense to me. I don’t have the tools. But—don’t look too closely, because whatever’s in there, I just know it’s horrible, it’s irredeemable. It scares me. And if you see it, then I’ll have nothing. I’ll be helpless again, and then even hope will be tarnished.”

All that’s interspersed with these moments of just, fuck it: I have nothing left to lose. I’m going to go down this rabbit hole, guide or no guide. Lifeline or not. I don’t care anymore. God help me. Whatever I truly am, I might as well find it and face up to it, even if it kills me.

There’s just this constant sense of grief and loss and despair, and disgust and horror with one’s self—of searching for any kind of a frame that makes the pieces add up in a positive way, and finding nothing but pain in the models pushed onto you by every controlling force in your life.

Again it’s all so vague, which is why he’s a successful artist. All this sounds a heck of a lot like adolescence. You get this with a general sort of heartbreak. With disability or neurodivergence-related traumas. With any sort of existential anxiety that we all experience at one time or another; any time when our ideas of ourselves don’t match up with the story that we’re fed by the world that we live in.

But like. In practice and in totality, this is such a deep, distilled, rich kind of a trauma that Reznor depicts. And it’s so thoroughly infused with these questions of identity—of reaching the end of the usefulness of the self you were handed, and of embracing the part of you that has caused you too much distress to acknowledge. It’s all about metamorphosis, of casting off the last vestiges of a humanity that does not fit and just going with whatever horrors you’ve failed to keep inside all this time. Time after time he hammers on this inability to keep masking any longer, and the death of one’s connection to an abusive world.

Nothing can stop me now
I don’t care anymore

There’s a fatalist spin here, and there’s a determined one. It’s kind of the same agency you get with body modification; that in a less healthy outlet may lead to, say, cutting behaviors (and, well, potential hesitation marks).

The Alice Glass song “Mine” angles at a similar kind of space:

Here I go again, it’s all I can do
(Let go)
So tonight I’ll take my own body
I’ll take my own, take my own mind
Abuse myself till I’m finally mine again
Finally mine again
I will go and use a ninety nine cent
Razor drawn, razor drawn line
Leave a trace till I’m finally mine again
Finally mine again

It’s not a healthy trauma response, but it’s just—claiming some kind of autonomy. Over one’s body, one’s emotions, over one’s sense of self. Even if it’s a destructive one. If you’re going to survive after everything, you need to be your own person, set your own terms.

Azure ain’t the same person who looked after her body those forty-some years before she woke up. A lot of things happened last August, all at once—but the breasts are not an insignificant one. They quickly became an anchor for my identity: this permanent, physical, obvious affirmation of who and what I am, that no one can ever take away. They became this cornerstone of body autonomy, of this general sense of self-possession that I’ve never enjoyed before.

To that end, I’m going to get my ears pierced. Sooner than later. This summer, probably. I never understood the appeal before my tits came in. Tattoos, piercings, any kind of body modification, it just—my head, it was locked in this deferential mode. “My body doesn’t belong to me,” I felt. “I don’t belong to myself. I’m not a real person.” Like, it wasn’t my right to do anything with the body, the name, the identity, the character sheet I was given. I would get in trouble. I would ruin this thing that I was handed responsibility to maintain, for someone else’s benefit. For me to tamper with it would be this inexcusable critical failure.

But it turns out that I am a real person, with all the same rights, worthy of exactly the same consideration, as anyone else. No one gets to control my body but me, and I get to make choices on what to do with it. I get to assert that control as I see fit—including decoration. Including things that serve no function beyond making me feel good. Which is an important end on its own, as it turns out.

I’m fortunate to have (rather late in life) found the tools to understand myself and to work out what I need in a reasonably healthy way. I’ve still got all this business to do, to strip out all the wrong wires and set myself right. But I’m on the path now. I think I’m going to be okay. But to have this support, to be able to interpret what’s going on inside me independent of the judgment and expectation of the world that I’m living in—that’s not a given. And it took me four decades. And not everyone has the fortune to stumble on those resources.

Heck, that neglect is mostly by design. We’re not meant to find the tools that will help us, because then we’ll no longer be prey to the system that feeds off of us and depends on our unquestioning obedience to generate all of the wealth that we’ll never ourselves see in our lifetimes. We’re not meant to have that agency, none of us—which again speaks to the universality of the sentiment in Reznor’s music. But there are degrees and nuances, right? There are colors and shades. And existential horror is one of the biggest drivers here.

Nine Inch Nails is substantially about horror, specifically through the lens of what we are presented as pure and correct and acceptable, and that is impossible to ever actually live up to. Combine that with all the sexuality and the imagery around changing bodies, and, well. It’s fucking queer, right. It’s unavoidable. Not exclusively, and I expect not deliberately, but distinctly and clearly. The queer-coding is just about blinding, and once you’re in a place to notice, you’ll never ever unsee it. You’ll only ever find further confirmation.

And among all its other strengths, The Downward Spiral is such a centerpiece for this energy. It’s all throughout Reznor’s work. From track one there’s this association between the perceived wrongness of self with monstrosity, with evil, with internalized fear on the basis of what one is told. It’s like, my very essence is an offense to all that is pure. I am an abomination by virtue of these facts of me that I have no control over but I am assured are objectively, unavoidably dangerous. This is the kind of logic that fuels anti-trans bills, that fuels hate crimes and lets them off with “gay panic” or “trans panic” defenses. It’s all about fear and hatred and disgust for the intrinsic evil that lurks inside.

Then underlying that notion of casting off ties to other people’s notions of humanity and embracing the horrors within one’s self, after the catharsis there’s this constant theme of being ruined. It’s angled against a vague religious context, but more broadly against “reality”—like, the surface of the social framework one is handed. It’s this all-or-nothing thinking where taking one step away from some hypothetical light will tarnish a person forever on some fundamental level, and there is no getting that purity back. From that moment, one will never not be tainted.

That’s a damaging sort of narrative to buy into, in regard to anything. It informs stuff like the AA model to addiction therapy, to our criminal justice system, to sex, to any kind of exposure to “dangerous” ideas. It’s a social control device, that serves to tell people they are essentially bad and owe their lives to the system. It serves to demonize and scapegoat the vulnerable as symbols to other members of society rather to than actively provide the support they need to live healthy lives. And it’s what we do all the time, to basically everyone who steps over an ever-shifting imaginary line.

Again though for all its ubiquity, when you combine this dynamic with all the body horror and identity and sexual stuff, well—the overall impression is profoundly relatable to someone whose body and identity and ideas about sex are considered essentially “other,” and threatening and diseased, and horrifying and wrong.

I was never not afraid of public toilets—they’re gross and psychologically strange, and leave one feeling vulnerable in all these different ways at once—but as a transfeminine person, I’m sure as hell going to avoid them forever, to the extent I am able. I will plan around them.

Because of unavoidable elements of who and what I am, to some people I will never not be considered an existential threat. And they will use that as an excuse to hurt me, to take out all of their other unresolved traumas and resentments on a person whom they can tell themselves deserves it.

I’ve gone through most of my life knowing I was broken and disgusting and wrong, and I’m used to having that affirmed by anyone who has gotten close enough to see beyond the flimsy mask I had propped up to keep me safe from those who would call out a mob if they recognized me. I know now that this garbage doesn’t apply to me, and I know it’s all somebody else’s problem, but it still leaves me vulnerable in a lot of situations. The street harassment is bad enough, but what if I don’t brush them off before they clock that I’m transgender?

There is something about queerness that presents as a fundamental threat. Fundamentally devious. Conniving, perverse, manipulative. Decayed, revolting, evil. This narrative is so central to our experience, in relation to the world and the stories we’re told about ourselves. So for Reznor’s music explore this precise conflict, much to most of the time, it’s—it just really feels familiar, you know? Hauntingly so. This trauma isn’t a passing thing for me, just as it’s no incidental topic for Reznor. It’s not a bad year, or a bad event, or a stray misunderstanding. This is life. This is what it means to exist in the world I was handed.

I am so fortunate to now be in a place where I can love myself the way that I do. This is so miraculous to feel, and I appreciate it every single day. It was so hard to find my way here, and I’m never going to let go again. And that catharsis from Reznor’s music, over so many years, is part of how I made it here alive. Intentionally or (more likely) not, that deep and overwhelming queer coding, it helped to underline that this struggle could be in some way articulated. That it wasn’t just me who felt this way, even if I didn’t know where it was coming from. It helped to validate the pain I felt, even without any answers.

I really owe this music a lot for keeping me going, keeping me on some level sane enough, until I could find the resources I needed. And even as I heal and build a healthy relationship with and toward myself, I can’t imagine a time when the sentiments here will fail to be relevant to the basic conflicts of this identity, in this world that blames us for its own sin.

Incubation

  • Reading time:6 mins read

Well gee whiz, I sure did have horny dreams last night. And they sure did reflect my last couple years of firmware upgrades. I have had sexual dreams before, and I have increasingly been myself in my dreams. This whole situation was a bit, uh, new though.

So much cock. Gee willickers.

When I said I was doing progesterone mostly for the brain stuff, this isn’t exactly what I meant.

Is is kind of getting ridiculous at this point. If you will pardon me in my own space here, since starting progesterone I basically just want to suck all the cocks all the time. For weeks now it’s never not on my mind. And it’s so present and palpable in the way my senses and my headspace work—every bit of it. Taste, smell, warmth, texture, pressure. It’s so real. And it’s like a gum-chewing habit. It’s always there. Always on the verge. Like I am continuously primed.

There are other places to put a penis, yes, and those are all engrossing as well—but those moments come and go. This specific buzz never seems to dim, whether awake or asleep. In my actual literal dreams now, there they all are. And there I am, as me. And just one offering after the other, almost nonchalantly, almost inevitably, it’s just what I do. Almost like a handshake.

I kind of feel like my brain is melting a little. I’ve never felt a thing like this, and it just never seems to turn off anymore. If I didn’t know myself as well as I do, if I had an ounce of impulsivity, this could be a real problem. It’s like, beyond an urge. More of a mania.

There are worse things to drive a girl insane. This is basically positive I guess. It’s a good feeling. But god is it distracting. It’s just—God, I, uh. Again I guess it’s good that I understand myself fairly well now, and that I am almost a complete shut-in. Like, if I had an impulsive synapse in my brain, and were even a little more confused than I am about what I really wanted, I might be making some bad decisions these days. There is a part of me that is a little permanently insane here, it seems.

I mean, I guess I might as well bask. No shame in being who I am. No good in denying. It’s just, this has become constant and overwhelming. Not entirely sure what to do with all this energy. But I guess it will find its outlet somewhere. There is certainly some creative work I could undertake here.

Of course the feelings behind the urge are nothing new, really. What’s new is them making sense to me, and my choosing not to push them down into the unthinkable zone. As I understand me now, shame does me no favors. I’m just me. I’m wired the way I’m wired.

I remember feeling like this as far back as maybe 13, 14. As soon as I could entertain any detailed thought of sex. I just couldn’t cope with the things my brain dealt me. People were already accusing me of stuff, in confused bits and pieces—of being some funhouse mirror of who it turns out I am. The thoughts gave me a kind of panic, a sense my brain was terrifyingly out of control. I was like, “This is not helping me here. Can we just not, please?”

But, well, Well that’s the thing. Who I am isn’t a thing to be controlled. It’s not possible to do, and trying can only cause damage. So, one leans into the curve.

Like many people I am a girl who loves cock… at least in the abstract. Which makes sense, and is fine and normal and generally positive. And I guess there’s still this novelty in being open with myself and letting my feelings just do what they need to without judgment. But also, I am hormonal as shit here, and a little bit insane from the rush. And it’s kind of—

a lot

—to figure out what to do with.

Neutral and human and healthy as it may be, this thing that my head insists on doing these days, it is not a thing that most people want to hear about. Reasonably enough! When I do bring it up, it’s most often as a punchline, with mind to how inappropriate it is to spring without warning. Because this is my level of humor, somehow.

(Penis.)

I’m not even sure what there is to say that’s constructive beyond a point. Beyond just acknowledging how I’m feeling, affirming that it’s cool, that this is just how I’m built and these things are a part of who I am. Which, yes, I feel does need a degree of ongoing reinforcement. The person I am is amazing, and I love her, but there’s gonna be some friction from the four decades of garbage I was fed.

I just want to assert the pieces of who I am, whenever they present themselves to me, whenever they hand me a challenge. Each one of these segments, it comes in all fragile and vulnerable, and there’s this implied question—I’m gonna accept this, right? I’m gonna embrace it. The more I acknowledge it, the more normal it becomes, letting that wound finally heal over. And I don’t want to hide it.

Inappropriate humor aside, I’m not in this to make people uncomfortable. But sometimes I just gotta stress a thing. When I really feel I shouldn’t be ashamed. When I want to be clear about who I am and what my own boundaries are.

Sexuality is a weird thing for Azure. I still don’t really understand what makes me tick, or why. I have been making a lot of progress, but there are these constant surprises. It’s an alien zone of my humanity, that I’m not used to giving any careful or enthusiastic thought. It’s this big weird void, that is kind of overwhelming me to acknowledge at all—to admit that as a real person I have this dimension, and that its dynamics are both natural and unique to me. And as a part of me, those dynamics are important to develop a functional relationship with, wherever they may carry me. I can’t force them. I can only listen and accept the reality.

So anyway. This is gonna be nuts for a while. It ain’t going away. It’s not going to be a primary topic, if for nothing other than my bafflement at finding words for any of this material, but I need to respect Azure here. And she is uh… well, this appears to be where she needs and happens to be right now.

If you’re here, you love me. You’ll be fine. We’re all learning to adapt.

The Tools to Tell

  • Reading time:4 mins read

So far as I know, there was never a time that I didn’t prefer to be a girl. I mean, who wouldn’t; it’s so obviously better. Yes, the world is shitty and horrible in reply. But existentially, it’s so absurdly stacked that it never seemed fair. Why couldn’t that be me? The gender I was given sucked so much. The mind reels at how life might have been for me, had I ever been given a choice—been told even in passing that gender was a thing that came from inside you, and no one had the right to say you were wrong. That other people didn’t get to tell you who you are, and anything they hand you is only a suggestion.

Like, just to have that concept of autonomy in my head, to understand I didn’t need to accept what I was told, that I was not obliged to play along. That there was no wrong answer, except what didn’t feel right to me. Just given that basic support, there wouldn’t ever have been a question. If who I am really is up to me, then oh my God. Well yeah, duh. How is this a question, then? No takeback. Forever. Get me out of this bullshit. Please.

I just—I never got that message. I never knew that I could just choose to be the person I wanted, and that by virtue of wanting that and making that choice, that person would then be who I was. That I wasn’t doomed by other people’s impossible expectations. That I could just say no. Set a boundary. That I didn’t need permission to be a human being.

Nobody ever once told me that, until right around when I turned 40. Nobody told me that if I wanted to be someone, I probably already was that person. And all I had to do was embrace it. That was the biggest, most alarming reality shift in my life. For four decades, I had never been permitted to be fully human. In consequence, I never was.

We really need to do better at giving people options when they’re young. Just letting them know what is possible, what is allowed without being bad or letting anyone down; give them choices for what they can be and do if they want, and for what no one else ever, under any circumstance, has the right to dictate to them.

Not letting people make up their own minds about themselves—it’s fucking abuse, is what it is.

You hear this canned story about trans people always knowing who they were even when people told them different, and though I’m sure it’s true for some—for those with a certain personality or a healthy home environment—it feels like inspiration porn for the cises, to me. Some kind of a bottled feel-good narrative about the human spirit that doesn’t force them to question their belief in the system. I’m shy and nervous and I want to be good. I’ll do almost anything to avoid causing problems. I never had the benefit of certainty, because I never got that message, that I even had the right to be myself. What I knew instead was unending melancholy and frustration and surprise every fucking day when I woke up and I somehow had not reached the end. I did not understand the point of it all. Why was I even alive?

If only someone had talked to me. If only they had asked. Ever, once. My entire fucking life.

I was never not trans. I just.

I didn’t know that I could be a real person.

Grace Notes

  • Reading time:6 mins read

So after a stuttering indecision as to whether we’d actually do spring this year, it seems we’ve gone straight to summer. And, well. Fuck. But okay, fine. Normally summer is a special kind of a hell for someone so wan and brittle and northerly inclined. But, we’ve now been on HRT for close to 16 months. All that dissociation I lived with for 40-years began to clear up last August. This is the first full summer in my life where I actually like my body.

If I have to take my clothes off to make it to fall, for once I think I can handle that.

Dumping a fuckin Mariana trench of shame from my checksum has all these unexpected perks. I got nothing to hide anymore. Certainly not from myself. Instead of suffering the heat, I get to just shrug off the shrouds and enjoy the minimalism in a way unavailable to me at any other time of year—not without getting me in a shiver.

I mean I absolutely cannot fucking tolerate hot weather. Even moderately warm makes my brain short circuit. Give me 65 degrees and I’m a peach. But until now, even the simplest and most obvious coping strategies were off the table. The dysphoria and the shame were that much worse than the heat stroke or whatever. Now that I’m awake, and I know who I am, and that who I am and I have this whole positive relationship here, suddenly I have these options for dealing with the most basic things.

I was unable to take care of myself when I was wired up so that acknowledging any part of me sent me into an anxiety attack. But now it’s kinda, you make your choices. It’s like how I can’t seem to leave the house without unwanted attention these days—which sucks, but you know what sucks more? Not being myself. Without me, I’ve got nothing. I’ll take the creepos if it means that life is worth living, and I’ll do what I need to cope with the heat now that perceiving myself is no longer the greater threat.

I mean, this is maybe good actually. A sort of a win-win at least within the scope of what I can control. I will never love summer, but the methods now available to handle it are—you know. I like me. So it’s just a prompt to engage myself in a different way. Which is fine.

So if it’s gotta be a tits-out summer, that’s what it is. We adapt to circumstance. Because we can do that now. And we know we’ll be gorgeous any way we approach it, haha

With all this flesh laid bare around me, I’m reminded of all these weird little issues with my body, that I guess most people have. There’s no such thing as a “normal” person, right? That ain’t how averages work. Every body is an individual, with its independent quirks, that just tend to fall along various kinds of patterns. Being the way we are, with the relationship we do to this gated culture with its extremely prescriptive sense of propriety over a sense of reality that does not fully apply to the observable world, we all have these little things we feel are wrong with us, that make us uneasy.

I think most of us cope with some kind of dysmorphia on some level, usually unprocessed. Even if we manage to ignore the wash of these broad cultural standards in regard to body and gender ideals and calls to be sexy, and appealing, and thin, and fit—whatever mythology might be in vogue right now, there’s always this little shit where we feel like we’re all alone. For me my toes are strange. I’ve got these birth marks that have always made me uneasy. There’s this odd cartilage bump on my sternum (now more than obscured by breast tissue, so hey!). You have your own stuff that feels wrong, or makes you uneasy to focus on. Everyone probably does.

Most of these features, I’m coming to accept. Enough of the broad sketch of me is starting to fill out and take a shape that no longer causes me anxiety and that I actively enjoy inhabiting—so the little quirks? They’re not so important, so long as that foundation is solid. They’re just accents.

Like, medically I guess this is anything but uncommon, but I have a mild sort of supernumerary nipple thing going on. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you probably wouldn’t think twice. At a glance it just kinda seems like, huh, got a few moles there, running down the “milk lines.” I guess this is a thing in like one out of a few hundred people. And it’s not super pronounced with me. But when you’re in a place where everything about you feels disgusting, the basic shape of you feels wrong and you can’t explain why, these eccentricities really leap out.

Now that I’ve got, let’s be honest, these pretty big tits here, and the general contour and topography of my torso are so different from that gaunt straight pasty flat plain of the past, this small stuff just won’t stick out the way that it used to. The eye will tend to be drawn elsewhere. And the overall shape of things is pleasing.

This kind of deemphasis, it’s happening all over. Wherever a strange little thing felt like this massive beacon, inviting active scrutiny, now it’s overshadowed by a much more interesting and welcome topography. With all the changes, it’s just becoming so much easier to accept the whole package, including the things that I can’t easily change.

I mean none of these features were ever really flaws, because a flaw implies a perfection that doesn’t actually exist. Bodies are just different. Every one of them. That doesn’t make them unhealthy or wrong; that’s how we work. Everyone’s got some kinda thing that sets them apart, because of course they do. The stray pieces are just accent marks of my individuality.

All this feels obvious to say, but the point is that it’s getting easier for me to accept these eccentricities. It’s easier when they’re not the only parts of my body that do any work speaking to me. It’s easier when I barely even remember they’re there most of the time, so they when I do clock them they become grace notes. Little hints of discord, adding interest to a beautiful harmony.

Everything about life is so much easier when you like yourself on a basic level. There’s always something to go back to. I’m always gonna be me. Azure ain’t going nowhere. From up here, everything else looks that much smaller.

Ginger Snap

  • Reading time:4 mins read

So I’m not sure what I’m going to do about this heat. I’m a northern girl. I got this critical melanin deficiency. On the plus side I’ve lost a big hunk of the shame and dysphoria I was carrying around until last August or so. But whee, it’s going to be a process for Azure to develop her own relationship to summer. At least we enjoy our body enough now that stripping down is an option. Where before it was trauma, now it’s just a chance to appreciate the way we are without catching a chill.

Of course it would leap up to 90 today of all days. Yesterday it was fine. But second vaccine dose? Perfect for a temperature spike that would make me feel like death all on its own.

On the return through the park, I chanced to take a selfie in the blinding sun and… uh, noticed something peculiar.

Given proper, strong lighting, it seems that my hair is red.

What.

I… do not know what to make of this. How can my hair be red? I know when I was a kid it was blonde. Most of my life I’ve just thought it was brown. That’s how it has looked inside (usually with most of the lights off). That’s how people have described it to me. But with the sun, it’s really not ambiguous at all. My hair is red. A dark auburn.

I kind of feel like my brain is melting here. What is going on? How did I not know I had red hair?? How have I gone 42 years without knowing my hair color? I mean, I knew it was a little hard to describe. I kept thinking of it in terms of brown, and from that angle nothing quite fit properly…

Granted I never go outside (or with this photosensitivity even turn the lights on), but in hindsight the red is right there isn’t it. I can go back over old photos, and I see it now. Even with the terrible inside or artificial light, it’s right there. It’s so obvious now that i know to look for it.

And, well, between the complexion and the gray eyes, I guess a relative lack of melanin checks out for the hair as well.

So, basically: what the actual hell. Granted at this point I’m a little emotional and even a bit delirious from the injection. I feel so loopy and drunk. Like, as I force my fingers through apparent jello to write this, I can barely move my limbs. I literally feel like I have been sedated, like that time I broke my arm when I was maybe thirteen. But even given that, the hair thing is really bowling me over here.

Look when I said I wanted to be Agent Scully when I was younger—

How on earth did this escape me?

Forty goddamned years.

I guess the answer is, it really only does stand out as brilliantly as all that in direct sunlight. Otherwise it’s just this lingering undertone to what comes across as a dull brown, or at times even black. If anything the incandescent light I’ve been used to most of my life gives my hair almost a sickly green cast. And again, I never go out, in the daytime, on a sunny day—let alone am photographed under those conditions, in color. Also this is the longest I’ve had chance to grow my hair, which makes it all the easier to clock under prime conditions.

Then I suppose we have that thing where I was so unused to mirrors that I barely knew what i looked up until recently…

And, well. One carries these models in one’s mind, right. People told me I was a boy, so I fucking hated it and it never made sense because it was so obviously wrong, but that became my frame for understanding myself. And I guess I just always carried that image of my hair as brown, and never thought to question it until it chanced to scream at me just today.

So with this, and the gender, and the sexuality, and the neurology, and everything else we’ve been unpacking the last few years, what other very basic things about have I overlooked??

This is starting to feel ridiculous. Anyone can overlook gender, no matter how clearly it asserts itself. Without the right questions, sexuality can be hard to narrow down. But, uh. This is hair. That would seem kind of difficult to miss.

It turns out I’ve been in a relationship with a hot redheaded chick this gosh darned whole time.

And that chick is me.

The Potential to Jazz

  • Reading time:5 mins read

It’s just astounding how much more sense everything makes when I know who I am. Just the whole world. Every thought I have ever had. Every problem I’ve faced. The way I want to talk to people. The way I understand that things work. There’s this universal sort of clarity now.

These last few months I keep getting comments on this striking confidence that people see in me. And I don’t know about that, but there is a clarity that I’ve never known. I’m not even sure I know what confidence is, but so much uncertainty seems to have abruptly fallen away.

And where I’m no longer uncertain, things just are the way they are. I’m autistic, yo. If a thing is true, I accept it as true and it doesn’t occur to me to mess around. I’m not sure I even know the social codes around playing coy with stuff that’s evident to me. Why lie?

I’m still this dysfunctional bundle of nerves and everything scares me, and I don’t know how to do the most basic things—and even if I do know, I’m not well enough to do them most of the time. But, like. For once I know who I am. And I get why the problems I have are my problems. And there’s so much that now I know I don’t have to worry about anymore—like, it turns out that dynamic doesn’t actually apply to me. It’s someone else’s garbage; why should I care? Okay, call me a “little gothic steam-punk diva,” sure. But this isn’t a front. I’m not making some kind of a statement. This is just me being comfortable for once.

And yet, well, it seems like me no longer being terrified and confused, and just existing in a way that makes me feel like I’m finally alive, is seen as this audacious act. Is it really that astonishing for me not to hate myself? I mean, I’ve done that. It sucks. I didn’t deserve it. Moving on.

I just find it so amazing to be me. I’ve never known this kind of a feeling. I’ve never known the security of a love like this. I’ve never felt like anyone has cared about me in the way I’ve begun to discover in myself.

I’ve never been this grounded in a sense of truth. It all connects.

I don’t know how, but I want to share this. I think I always have, what fragments I’ve been able to scrape together despite the undertow I’ve been thrashing against most of my life. Truth and love are kind of the same thing to my mind. Intimacy and sincerity. All these fragments; all these dumb articles over all these years. Every little fascination in every work of expression. Every dumb little thread on social media. Every meaningful conversation. It’s all a piecework. Trying to condense, organize, pass on what love I can scavenge.

I feel like I’ve always kept so little of that for myself. Like I didn’t deserve any of it. The best I could do was filter it, annotate it, and hand it off to people who would likely still be alive tomorrow and maybe could use the love for something better than I would ever know.

And that’s always important. But, there’s also truth in me. I just never got to see it. And oh God, it just about overwhelms me. I not only deserve it; I’m a part of it. Like, the truth is the substance of my very being, and it’s so amazing. And it all ties in with all I’ve seen.

And I just.

I want other people to know this. Not necessarily to know me, because whatever. But to know this dynamic in themselves. To build their own relationships to the truth. To everything that ties us together. To know this kind of a love. And for them in turn to pass it on.

How else are we ever going to survive?

I feel like, it’s worth being alive if being alive means being honest. And I don’t know how to not do that, and also to keep going. And I feel like this is the most important thing in the world; the thing I’ve always been building toward.

Is that confidence? I don’t know. That word sounds like some kind of a social game. Some power thing. I don’t really get that nonsense. Truth is truth. It is what it is. The hard thing is just finding it. Once you do, it is a force of its own. I don’t see what my feelings have to do with it.

Anyway. Tomorrow I get to download some more alien proteins. Gimme a couple weeks and I’ll be ready to jazz.

…

Or more likely, to continue to sit in my apartment, doing next to nothing as usual. But, I will possess a renewed—and possibly newly informed—potential to jazz.

So hey.

Pushing Back

  • Reading time:3 mins read

When I smile now, I can feel all this meat on my face, resisting in an unfamiliar way. It’s not obvious to look at, but I can feel the change in soft tissue when I move it, same as I feel the friction with my butt and thighs when I walk. Like, it’s visceral.

Things have seemed… different for a while, but it’s been hard to narrow down until this moment. These nasolabial folds I got—laugh lines, or whatever you call them—they were absolutely not like this even a few weeks ago. Which is to say, they had grown pretty prominent with age, and now they’re filling back in—so they’re puffy, almost. Ergo, that resistance when I smile. The skin is soft and smooth, and the flesh is thick. The creases are still there, but way shallower than they were.

There’s zero question. It’s blatant. I know because I’ve been sighing about these creases constantly the last couple years, since I began to pay attention to myself.

So yeah, finally a data point. We absolutely are moving around some soft tissue up in here. This is the first concrete thing I can point at and say, bingo, yes, it is more than a vague feeling. We’re not making stuff up. We have empiricism. (I also sense that my jaw is softening, but in this case have no specific reference to back that up.)

I mean I guess you can see all this in recent pictures.

Like. Obviously I am not 24. Or, well, weirdly that’s around Azure’s age mentally, but her body sure ain’t 24. Gently used, perhaps. One anxiety-prone prior operator. But, well, it feels like this second puberty is having a pretty major effect here. Cycling us back to a prior save, right about where time stopped for us.

It’s strange. I mean, it’s really strange for me. That undoing all this damage seems to have these other effects as well—not just on my face, but on my whole body. All the rapid developments. The way everything just works properly for the first time. How all that pain is finally gone. It’s almost like it’s giving me my time back, now that I’ve finally woken up and claimed my humanity. It’s just so fucking eager to get what it’s been screaming for all these years, and it’s just like, phew. Okay. We ready to start now? Let’s go.

Still a work in progress, obviously. Girl gotta get some meat on her cheeks. All four of ’em. But it all is in fact happening. Tangibly now. It’s real. I’m real. I can hardly believe something finally makes sense, and is working the way it should.

Well, anyway. However one looks at her, it strikes me as increasingly undeniable that Azure is hot.

Never dared to dream we’d be where we are. Never dared to dream I’d be alive.

The Newest of Normals

  • Reading time:4 mins read

So these pills aren’t nearly as flashy as… practically any I’ve seen online, but hey, micronized progesterone is micronized progesterone, am I rite?

These are the first pills I’ve been prescribed that smell like a frickin’ apothecary. Or a GNC, circa 1988—roundabouts the last time I’ve entered one of those places.

Which is to say, a, er, GNC GNC. If you will.

Sadly they do not contain a core of malted milk.

It will be nice when I get my ID changed. I meant to do it a year ago, but, well. I meant to do a lot of things a year ago. It’s only recently that it’s really begun to give me problems, what with the insurance being all weird on me and the controlled substances I’ve been taking the last few months and various other hiccups. Otherwise, these little trips I take, to and fro, doing all my little things I need to do, I basically never get misgendered anymore. Not in person anyway. It’s so curious, but obviously I’ll take it.

There is the flip side of, uh unwanted attentions, but, well. One chooses one’s battles. Better to be alive and get creeped-on than to be a phantom and ignored. The life or the unlife, they continue regardless of input.

And as far as input goes, the question seems to continue ever the harder, how girl can we go? Well, let’s just find out, shall we. We’ve come this far. Might as well see where we can push it before we decide where to land.

Bodies are so weird. One day on, I can’t possibly know what affect a thing like this has on me, but if nothing else there’s already a delightful placebo effect. I find myself inordinately chill, despite all the garbage that’s going on that I am struggling so hard to deal with right now. I’m not usually anything like this calm, you know? Every moment of every day I’m always freaking out. But at the moment, not so much.

Frazzled and matted after a well-needed drug run.

God, I feel… interesting. It’s nice, whatever it is. Again I don’t know how much to lump on this random pill I’ve only just started to take, but I feel like it can’t entirely be in my head. It’s too… different. Strange, in a good way. Sort of, agreeably hyper-present. Like that jagged, hard-edged angularity of my experience with my emotions and my external experiences has been rounded off, blurred over somewhat.

That violent kind of overwhelm that I’m used to, it feels like it’s softened, padded—allowing me to ease off and cuddle up into reality, in a way that’s not typically available to me.

Granted a few things are going right for me today, and some looming shit is nowhere nearly as terrifying as it seemed just a few days ago. But I’ve felt relief before, and this is more than that.

Also yeah, as advertised, I did sleep pretty solidly for once. We can say that for various reasons my sleep has been… fraught, lately. So that alone is pretty helpful.

I don’t fully know what I’m talking about, and don’t want to over-egg the effect of this thing after, uh, one pill. But, this has been… new, whatever it is, wherever it’s coming from. I do not recognize feeling quite like this before. I don’t have a precise word for it.

I mean, I’ve had a lot of new feelings recently. Usually I can work them out pretty quickly. This one is harder to classify, beyond it being extremely nice and welcome. And if it is in any way associated with the progesterone… well, wow, okay. If this is going to be an everyday thing, then I could live like this. This would be an acceptable kind of new normal.

It would be so interesting to be stable for once.