i want to write poetry again but my brain hasn’t done that since june and im worried. i know what used to make me good at writing and the reason i want to write is because i’m close to it again, but what used to make me good at writing also made me sad. maybe i like knitting because it suggests that my ability to imagine and then make things is not entirely contingent on the opportunities life gives me to hit myself with an emotional meat tenderizer on purpose

medical stuff, menstruation cw

i have spent a week trying to chase down any of my 3 doctors to give me the kind of birth control pill that i can actually ingest, so i can hopefully stop having continuous bleeding and abdominal cramps, as i have for the past two months

the conclusion so far is “your insurance won’t cover the brand. here, after several days, is a prescription for the generic. your insurance won’t cover that either, and it costs $637/month. also, we lied to you when we said your insurance covered the original iud insertion that has caused these other problems, so that will be an additional thousand dollars. there is no way for you to actually speak directly to anyone with the power to prescribe you something, so any new step in any direction on this problem will take an entire day to resolve and require you to contact several people and miss at least an hour of work per day.”

i am literally not worth any of this money, my problems are not several thousand dollars of serious, it would be most appropriate for me to decide to just keep functioning as-is because acting like i have solvable problems is 1. an inaccurate picture that will make me more unhappy than i would be if i just assimilated “bleeds, hurts” into my self-image 2. just the kind of thing that got me into this mess in the first place

i’m not really doing the performative egotism thing anymore, in that that’s something you do when you talk to anyone other than the three people who are already totally in love with you

like, i’ll get to revisit it soon, because graduating/grad school necessarily means a new group of people to confuse impress acquire be used by and then winnow down to the 1-3 actually interesting & kind people who i will incorporate into myself and love forever, which is the inherent life cycle of entering a new space, but it’s just funny to notice that i’m no longer routinely making jokes that hinge entirely on explaining, with deep sincerity, that i’m a fascinating genius

honestly i spend so few nights getting a reprieve from [THE WANT] that i’m going to enjoy this one as much as i can. however i don’t want to pattern-match from this all the way into living at home again as a [THE WANT]-remover. [THE WANT] is better than living at home. [THE WANT] never yelled at me even onct, nor anyone else neither.

somehow what this gets at maybe most for me is that question about paths of least resistance, you know? like, the thing where part of why i’m not [pursuing x path as a career] is because i found it so difficult to make myself do [almost-100% required prerequisite activity], due to what felt subjectively like sheer mental reluctance about the concept of effort, that i just …. didn’t. so now i can’t do that. and i probably correctly took that as a sign that i shouldn’t try to pursue x, since part of why [activity] is a prereq is that it is at least a decent angle on what various aspects of x would actually be like.

nonetheless: when does one decide that something being hard to make oneself do is a reason not to do it? when does one decide that not experiencing dread & procrastination about a thing is a good reason to do it? when do you push past one or the other of those feelings?

this is a question both on the level “if a relationship needs effort to maintain should it be maintained” and “if i can’t make myself do a kind of art consistently or frequently or well, should i stop trying”. the version of me that tries harder to achieve its goals, but whose life is almost certainly the worse for it, at some point combined those problems by trying and failing to do collaborative art with someone.

fortunately, collaborative art is impossible, and i made the morally upright choice of ghosting all but one of my pre-2015 irl friends; but the matter remains–– of the future

star trek discussion i guess?????

got super weirdly emotional about ds9 s1e15 (”if wishes were horses” in which figments of various people’s imaginations come to life wreak havoc etc, star trek star trek) mostly i think because of my weird painful empathy for bashir??? in it? well both bashir and jadzia. i at once think jadzia is absolutely right to be upset about bashir’s apparent interest in a bashir-obsessed, sex-obsessed, subservient version of her, but also i am so like…….. idk i think on some level i just discovered that having some imaginary, one-dimensional version of a person i was interested in from some one-off fantasy show up, and for the actual version of that person to be confronted by it, is maybe my Literal Worst Nightmare Made Flesh. and bashir was just put off/taken aback/apologetic enough about the whole thing for me to fully project onto that scenario the degree to which i think that my interest in other people is inherently harmful & violent, i’m fundamentally predatory, it denies other people’s personhood for me to be interested in them, etc. this isn’t even strictly how i feel anymore, not least bc i’m not actually still dwelling in tortured silence wrt my most recent serious iteration of having a nightmarish secret crush, but it’s still recent enough that watching some version of it happen was a lot in a very uh unanticipated way. so. that’s my star trek thoughts! ds9 review so far: i like it; i am embarrassed that i like julian bashir so much.

had a great therapy session today, by which i mean it was very productive because my therapist managed to shock me by pointing out that if something happens that makes me feel uncomfortable/worried/nervous, it might be because the thing is weird, concerning, or bad. i had jumped straight to “it’s because i’m needy, difficult, and inherently flawed, and need to learn to stop having this kind of reaction” [+ infinite echo chamber of self-hate for inability to stop having emotions], apparently without considering the fact that, with some consistency, if i feel like something is unexpected and leaving me wrong-footed and anxious, it turns out to be because the event in question is something that it would be reasonable for a person to be confused or perturbed about, because it’s reflective of something bad happening or something trying to hurt me. this is even including the times when literally no one else in my life was noticing anything acutely concerning about the thing, but it made me feel bad and afraid. i’m not only not manufacturing every emotion due to my hypersensitive, overreactive neediness and inability to function as a useful human being–– i actually react, on a visceral/emotional level, more perceptively than other people i know to at least one [nontrivial] known instance of a problem.

of course i obviously am not, you know, willing to extend this to the idea that it would be, in the future, okay for me to feel and express things that might make other people’s lives difficult, cause them inconvenience, or require them to accommodate me. just because i was, in the past, correct and probably not having a wildly outside initial reaction to things does not mean i have now earned the right to have a feeling or tell someone about that feeling. just because that “maybe means something is actually wrong” and “it’s good to address and solve problems that are hurting me, so i am no longer in pain”…. etc.

that is not real, i am not convinced that the unreasonable:justifiable ratio of causes of my emotions is low enough for me to apply a blanket belief instead of a blanket discounting and i still would prefer to never feel anything that caused anyone any problems ever, or indeed to have any negative or difficult impact on anyone’s life. when i was too depressed to believe i could possibly be net-not-harming anyone, i wanted to die so that i could stop impacting people; now, i would prefer to be replaced with an indistinguishable robot copy of myself that only expresses feelings that make other people feel good and affirmed, since apparently some people net benefit from having me around. but that’s not enough–– i could be better–– i could be frictionless–– i could be perfect

remembering dreams over and over, remembering dreams and having the same dream again

the dream with the tunnel under the buildings; in this one every time the entrances must be dug out of where they are hidden, in planters and under steps, opened only with the help of others because i don’t have the strength. in this one i eventually connect with two others enough for us to pull ourselves from the maze and save each other, but other people are left behind, and i wake before we reach a point of any real safety.

the dream with the terraces in layers of concrete, making a cliff down to the ocean; in which the only other figure was someone with whom i feel totally open and without fear, and the two of us were open to each other in ways we don’t need or want in real life but which in the dream reflected the ways we actually are at ease together.

the dream with the low open house full of sun with the door that opens to a beach: once, in this dream, i lay on the floor between two beds and the house was full of my friends, and one of them stood over me protectively and then fell on top of me full of bullets. the second time, in this dream, i lay on the floor between two beds and the house was full of my friends, and one of them came and sat beside me and stripped the packaging off my headphones with their teeth for me.

the dream with the clean all-white upholstery and the hotel bed where i hold someone and they tell me, slowly, stumblingly, how much they– and if i could, just for a moment, let them– and if i’d forgive them, if i’d allow them this desire even if i could never– and then i touch their face slowly and carefully, and then woke up in a hotel bed glowing for nearly ten minutes of selective amnesia in which i forget which things i am allowed to want

got all gender again today for a while, partly bc i’m struggling with–– public presentation questions, i guess, things about how i actually curate my Self. like: i’m not actually haunted by the knowledge that some people will not pick up on/correctly read/“correctly gender” me based on my presentation, that’s like fine, i didn’t expect near-universal comprehension of my visual/presentational Project at any point regardless of whether it involved gender identity. it’s more that there are things that are clearly curational and that would move toward achieving more of the goals of the project/being more “successful” at coming across in [ways] to people generally. and the thing is that while a lot of the presentational project is about me/my goals/satisfying myself, it’s not like the whole concept of having presentational goals is not in many ways predicated upon having an audience to present to; i do care and care to influence how i am viewed by others, what kinds of intentional choices i appear to be making and how those would seem to coalesce.

the big things are my name and my voice. it’s hard for me to imagine an american-culture-legible person’s name that i would identify with more strongly than gray, which…. i don’t identify with. [birthname] i at once feel more and less strongly about––more simply because of like, built up associative stuff, less because it’s not on its own particularly aesthetically interesting imo and has some amount of cultural/religious gendered baggage or w/e, tho idk that that’s strictly the first association for people who are not like, deep in to bible study or w/e lmao. [if that’s the first association for jews then like whatever, that’s a little better actually, bc i do like that it’s like. pretty jewish. but still ultimately not really me.]

what i like more is, well, as i’ve said–– [static], an unpronounceable symbol, a color, if absolutely necessary maybe a non-name object noun, the word “glass”. but that feels like it foregrounds the gender thing in some pretty ostentatious and visible ways that seem to connote some things that i don’t strictly want to be always connoting. especially in a college context it feels like i’m going to put people into kind of a place of expecting me to be About gender/transness where i don’t really…. want to be. it’s fun to talk about and think about but with like, people who are actually interesting about it, which is …. not most people, and definitely does not include like, my coworkers or heterosexual friends-of-friends. and i feel like i’m therefore caught between using a name i feel neutral at best about but that incurs Difficulty bc name change problems/i still would have to talk about gender, vs using a name that i don’t really like except for ease reasons, and that would also seem to not align with everything else i’m like, doing, in ways that feel jarring/like i’m not being deliberate enough with or succeeding at my concepts, yk? like the problem with birthname is at least partly that it’s just not gendered correctly or occupying an aesthetic space that lines up with my Thing, and i don’t want to seem like a person who doesn’t understand their own Thing enough to line things up with it well, but everything that truly does align with my Thing is, you know, #898989.

so there’s that.

hopefully a faster meditation is that: i know at least sometimes my voice is the thing between me and ~~passing as male~~ since people who just see and don’t hear me will pretty unambiguously address me as sir/bro/etc if i’m wearing even remotely plausible clothing. and i think the Ideal Me would have a slightly lower androgynous-range voice. but like. i do like my voice fine, in a vacuum, and the obvious thing which is T is not uh strictly appealing to me given the range of possible effects both globally and in terms of the fact that in my very limited interpersonal experience, some people end up with voices that are “pitch shifted into male range” but also become … buzzy? or something? i think? in a way i don’t mind at all in other people but would h a t e in myself. and i can’t tell if vocal training is like…. a relevant concept here, especially since most trans ppl going my vocal direction….are on T, and also given that i get vocal strain from like Literally Any Singing and am just maybe not a good candidate for trying to do that. also i am not really feeling irreversibility rn wrt my body, just like generally.