Content warning for discussion of childhood abuse and the lingering effects of that trauma.
Continue readingIdentity
Carrying My Doubt Filled Present Into Pride Month
It is incredibly easy for me to pass as a white, cisgender, heterosexual man. Other than being white, I’m none of those other things, but the only way to get anyone to see me as anything other than that is to actively force them to acknowledge my self-described identity. One of the reasons I’m not out at work, beyond the things that some of my coworkers have done or said that make me believe they might not be the most accepting people, is that I’m just not sure I’ve got the energy to constantly correct people. When I came out to my friends, the ones I’m still friends with didn’t take much work to correct. Most of them were in the practice of using pronouns other than he/she in their daily lives and while some of them slipped up (and some still do), they catch and correct themselves most of the time. As far as I can tell, none of my coworkers practice using a wider-range of pronouns and none of them self-correct themselves. One of my ex-coworkers (for whatever reason, probably my years of isolation within the company, default to thinking of the people on my team as my coworkers and everyone else as fellow employees) who transferred off my team back in early 2021 uses they/them pronouns like I do and I constantly have to correct my coworkers when they come up in conversation. I do not expect that my coworkers would be any better when it comes to me and my pronouns, especially because I look exactly like your average Midwestern Cis-Hetero White Guy.
Continue readingReturning To Nimona With Some Company Along For The Ride
Over the weekend, I visited a friend for her birthday and the two of us caught up on some streaming stuff that she was behind on. I was also behind on some of it, on account of having promised to watch it with her and waiting until we had the chance to even think of watching it, but I’d already seen Nimona. I saw it the week following its release, resubscribing to Netflix for the first time in years to do so. I figured my second time through the movie would be less impactful, mostly because the moment-to-moment tension of the movie would be gone after the first viewing, but I figured I’d be familiar with it enough the second time around that I’d start to look for things I missed the first time. More background details. What the other characters in the movie are doing when the movie is directing my attention to a specific place. Subtle nuance I missed in the course of the raw emotions I experienced the first time through. That sort of stuff. Instead, the only difference was that I knew things were coming and was able to eagerly await them rather then be surprised when they showed up. Sure, it was a bit less tense and a bit less moving, but I still felt the same way as when I watched it the first time. I still experienced the same swells of emotion at the same parts, even if they never quite reached the peak of my first time watching the movie. The only thing that was different was that I was watching it with someone else.
Continue readingTrying To Break Free From Identity Defined In Opposition To The World I Live In
While I was mulling over my identity and coming to reflect on the decision I’d made years ago (largely out of self-defense, given how absolutely locked-in I was to my parents’ vision of who they wanted me to be), I was listening to a lot of Friends at the Table. A lot of stuff they said there informed the way I think about my place in contemporary society and the way my identity fits into the world I inhabt. Not because I was entirely unfamiliar with those ideas, but because the thinking they explored as a part of their science-fiction themed seasons (especially Twilight Mirage, their fourth season) helped build on what I’d learned in some of the classes I took in college, in the research I’d done on my own, and the helpful things I’d coincidentally read along the way. One the things that stuck with me the most was the GM, Austin Walker, talking about how he wanted to push the boundaries with their fourth season. I don’t remember the exact quote, but he said something along the lines of “we need to imagine the most radical thing we can and then take it one step further.” The idea being, he explained, that all of us are limited by the world we live in, by the society we’re used to, and that a civilization that had progressed to the very edges of what we could conceptualize would be able to imagine modes of being/ways of life/etc that we couldn’t even conceive of because we are so anchored by the world we know, and that the society he wanted the group to attempt to represent in this season should have progressed beyond even that.
Continue readingI Feel So Relieved Already
Just one week later, not even seven full days getting my mole removed, and I’m already wondering what I was worried about. Sure, I’m still in the active wound-care stage of things, but I’m notably less self-conscious of the bandage stuck to my face than I ever was of my mole, and that’s even with the bandage feeling way more noticeable than the mole ever was. It just bothers me so much less. Honestly, the only gripe I’ve got about this whole process is how I have to shave every single day. I learned the hard way that more than a day’s worth of facial hair growth makes the bandages fall off much more quickly. Most of the other gripes I’ve had (such as how bad the wound looked) either faded away in the first few days or I’ve learned how to counter them. For instance, I might still be unable to bite into large things (like an apple), but I’ve gone back to drinking as usual and gotten the hang of eating various more easily bitten foods without making a mess or accidentally putting pressure on my wound. It has all become fairly routine at this point and while I’m definitely eager to get to the point where I don’t have something stuck to my face twenty-four hours a day, I’m honestly just happy to not have the mole anymore.
Continue readingExploring Identity As I Search For Community
For most of my life, I was content to accept that I’d never really find an answer to the question that is my identity. I mean, I’ve had thoughts and feelings about my identity (gender, sexual, and otherwise) for as long as I’ve been capable of the abstract thought required to understand that the self is separate from the physical being that other people see and interact with. I just didn’t realize that those thoughts and feelings were not the way that other people felt about themselves until I was in high school. I hadn’t really had much of an opportunity to have conversations about the self with other people, after all, given that I was home schooled and didn’t have many close friends. Plus, I was too busy surviving and protecting my younger siblings to really indulge in that kind of reflection and introspection, especially when a core element of that survival was fulfilling the expectations of my parents. They had assigned me an identity based on what they wanted and expected me to be, so I did my best to play my part. I couldn’t afford to openly ask questions that might show that I was not the person my parents demanded I be, nor did I have the language or energy to have a conversation with myself about it. It wasn’t until years later, when I was almost thirty, that I actually started this conversation with myself and then it was another six months before I even mentioned it to anyone else.
Continue readingRelief From A Weight I’ve Never Mentioned
I went to get a mole checked out today. I wasn’t super concerned that it might be a sign of some kind of skin cancer since I’ve had it for as long as I can remember, but it has long been an inconvenience at best since it sits right between my nose and my lip. It gets in the way of shaving, of blowing my nose, of wiping my nose, and it can interfere with sneezes if I don’t have them absolutely locked down. It tends to bleed easily, if I scrape or pinch it hard enough and it frequently itches in a way that encourages me to scrape or pinch it. If I shave too thoroughly and indelicately around it, it will bleed the next time I brush against it with anything rougher than my hands. That said, I’ve been living with it for as long as I can remember, so it hasn’t been an issue for much of my life. Only occasionally, less than once a year, will I accidentally cause it to bleed or otherwise hurt myself by absentmindedly interacting with it. It has been easy to ignore as I’ve dealt with more pressing issues because I had the tools and skills required to cope with it in an effective and safe manner.
Continue readingPicking Up the Pieces One Week Later
Content Warning for Harry Potter and JK Rowling again, though this piece is more of a reflection on my experiences talking about that with people over the last two weeks than about those topics themselves.
Continue readingEmbracing Willful Ignorance Makes You Part of the Problem
Content Warning: Discussion of Harry Potter and the harmful tropes in the franchise, along with discussion of JK Rowling and the harm she has caused via her financial support and platform as one of the most active and mainstream Trans-Eclusive Rradical Feminists in the world.
Continue readingBusiness Casual and Me
I haven’t had a reason to dress up in over three years. The last time I dressed up for an event, it was when I was Best Man in a wedding, back in 2019, before coming out to anyone, back when I was still living under the gender identity I was assigned at birth, in a time that seems almost unreal at this point. Not because I’ve come out in a big way (I’m masculine-presenting for one thing, so not much has changed so far as it feels from day-to-day especially given that I’m also not out at work yet), but because it happened before the pandemic. I almost went to a Roaring Twenties themed New Year’s Even party back in 2019/2020, which would have meant wearing a suit, but I wound up skipping that to stay at home and hang out with my roommates. We played D&D as I pushed them to see how far they could get through one of the starter kit adventures in a single evening. It was a lot of fun, but I kind of regret missing what felt, for a long time, like my last chance to get fancy before becoming the isolated, comfort-focused individual I am today.
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