Just some emo guy talking about stuff

My older brother had everything he could have wanted. He barely had to try in school to have friends, to be liked by his teachers, to get good grades, to be seen like someone of quality. Everybody loved him: even the science teachers that had things to say on evolution that my brother didn't agree with because he was The Good Christian Boy my parents raised him to be.

As for me, I never liked those things. I loved to lose myself in reading fiction and writing fiction and drawing fiction and those things were never anything my parents were interested in. My father never liked fantasy. My mother never liked reading. My brother never liked me. And so I lost myself in these things.

I suppose I was the lesser son in that I was never man enough. My brother was never man enough but he had to try to not be man enough: to take too long trimming his beard, to wash his hands too often, to pick at his face too much, to worry about his clothes too much (only for them to never match). And there I was trying to be with the guys and like what the guys liked and hold the door for the girls and everything my brother never did well and yet. I was never man enough for my father because of that stupid condition we like to call what I've got between my legs.

I've always been the lesser son. I didn't have friends growing up, and I was never in any clubs, and I bent over backwards to maintain the same grades my brother could just look the other way and obtain without much thought. He was the teacher's pet and I was the raccoon rooting in the trash bin hoping I didn't get caught.

And here I am, exactly the same. I hope it's not my fault that my friends don't text me back, but part of me thinks that it is. My brother's phone is always blowing up every time he turns around, much to the chagrin of my parents. And mine is silent. Always silent. Never once buzzing with a "hey, let's hang out sometime! I really enjoyed being around you."

He gets away with so much. With mouthing off to my father. With yelling at my mother. With saying such awful things about people. I have to fact-check every offhanded thing I say about even the dumbest of movies in the box office right now for fear that it isn't God-Glorifying, and there he goes, spouting about how good and educated of a man Charlie Kirk used to be.

I learned over and over again that sharing the things I enjoyed wasn't safe because it was going to be used against me not only by the other students at school, but my own parents. The things I liked weren't valuable or meaningful unless they could be used to make me miserable, and so I started treating everything I enjoyed as if it were another skeleton in my closet. Now, I'm 22 and experiencing fight-or-flight because Deezer just asked me my top ten music artists so it can figure out what music to recommend to me.

What I've seen so often is people seemingly focusing on the end result of the illustration or what it can offer in terms of value, how much you can get out of it without putting too much into it, and that destroys the first half of art-- being the creation of it.

Art isn't just the end result or the final product. It isn't the finished piece, whatever that piece might be. Rather, I believe it only to be half, while the other half is the process itself. It's like a cake, in a way; a cake might be what you want, but you can't get that without the eggs, the flour, the baking powder, the vanilla, etc. For some recipes you have to combine things in certain ways (keeping the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients separate, for instance). And even so, someone might have their own cake recipe that doesn't follow what's in a cookbook or something online and it still works even though it might seem absolutely absurd.

That's what half of the art is-- it's the process of its creation just as much as it is the final product.

Because what goes into the process of its creation isn't just the components, such as paints, pencils, pens, tape, glue, stickers, glitter, digital layers and filters and what have you. It's the person or people making the creation and their experiences.

I believe the human soul to be like a lump of clay. Everybody has a soul and life shapes and alters that soul by adding to it or chipping away at it and that soul will then reflect the human experience unique to the individual. They're all strange and unique shapes, and for artistic expression, those souls can shape what the art itself can be.

Which is why AI cannot make art. It's an algorithm designed to take images that closely suit whatever words you've given to it and mishmash them together in such a way that might resemble what you're asking for, without the human imprint of experience. (Which is plagiarism).

All art must go through the human soul-filter of experience, something AI will never have. AI has never personally experienced anything human and that's why nothing it makes will never be art. Grok will never have a birthday. ChatGPT will never have a best friend. Claude will never admire a sunset. Gemini will never try something new and fun and discover that it likes that. They will never experience euphoria, heartbreak, rage, anxiety, melancholy, distress, joy, contentment, trauma, or injustice.

AI is only able to take from the final products of somebody else's artwork and stitch it together into something that even the AI doesn't quite understand. It doesn't get the other half of the art, which is the creation of it that goes through the human-clay-soul-filter-thing.

I have such a difficult time being able to articulate this to my parents because so many of the things that have guided me on my journey to being who I am today are firmly off the table? Can't talk about the TV shows I watched without their permission, can't talk about the books I read in secret while I was at school, can't talk about Gerard Way.

Never gonna make it, I guess.

Something I heard today on my mother's preferred news outlet struck me, and it was barely 9 in the morning: "It's so hard to get away with crimes nowadays, it's amazing! Serial killers from the 70's and 80's wouldn't be able to do today what they did back then!"

I don't think that should be the brag some people think it is.

I think the average amount of times people should think about murdering is zero (but we aren't perfect, of course). It shouldn't be so much that we can't get away with "bad things" but that we don't want to do them at all.

If all humans were evil from the moment they're born, then wouldn't that make a baby as bad as, say, a serial killer? A baby that can barely see past its own face, who only knows how to cry to get fed or held, as bad as someone who takes lives simply for their own personal gain? The baby hasn't proven itself to be good or bad-- it can barely lift its own head!

So why do so many people believe that humans are just evil all the time? Why is that the default?

Does it prevent us from grouping together and taking care of one another? From forming community with others? If we're raised to believe that humans are all selfish, then we will only look out for ourselves, and then others see our actions and think we're selfish. It's a self-perpetuating cycle of selfishness based on assumption alone-- the assumption that nobody is going to help us with anything. That our existence is inconvenient for somebody else.

Does it keep us afraid? Does telling people from the moment they're able to understand words that people are scary and bad and out to get you so you have to stay away from cities or that other country or even not go to public school do it? Keeping us afraid keeps us reliant, acting on instinctive self-preservation, and in search of something to "save us." Is this how we get cults or authoritarianism?

My mother was, again, trying to convince me that I couldn't possibly be a transgender man in love with another man, because "God didn't design the animals on the Ark that way! It was two of each kind of animal, and none of the male animals wanted to be females and none of the females wanted to be males, and the males and females would mate with each other!"

Except gay penguins? Bisexual giraffes? Transgender clownfish and birds? Intersex lobsters? The sheer amount of animals that are homosexual, bisexual, intersex, and just otherwise ignorant of anything more than a 12-year-old's understanding of the natural biological world is astounding. If God can make sea turtles transgender, then surely, I, someone allegedly made in his image, can be as well?

I've been trying to articulate to my parents what it was like to be autistic and not be diagnosed, and this was only after they recently realized that my behaviors fit autism. They were in such strong denial for so many years about anybody in the family potentially being autistic or ADHD, partially because of some extended family's reactions to said diagnosis. They feared labeling something that didn't exist, and therefore, if they didn't label it, it didn't exist.

But it kept existing, regardless.

Growing up a boy who was too girly for the boys and too boyish for the girls and too weird for anybody else hurt me in a way I can barely comprehend. The little pieces of everything that built up the belief in me at the age of ten years old that nobody likes you because there's something weird and wrong with you are too numerous to count. I was bullied and didn't even know it until I was older. I was the butt of the jokes, the subjects of the harsh rumors, and the classroom troublemaker, and I was never autistic. I just caused problems. I was the problem.

And so I fixed myself by pretending I wasn't weird. I didn't fidget, I made eye contact, and I didn't talk about the things I liked, because having things that you like is bad, especially when you were, well, me. Or autistic.

And it killed me every day. I sat in silence with a wall around me, convinced that I had to walk on a tightrope made from barbed wire to make people barely tolerate me. Every conversation and social interaction felt like an interrogation-- where's the crack in this guy's armor so I can wedge my blade into it? What does this guy hold dear, so I can rip it apart in front of him? Who does he care about, so I can tell them how terrible and disgusting of a weirdo he is?

Would you give up your humanity for just a touch of sanity? Because God knows it's not like it's cancer.

I did every day for over ten years.

How damaging is it, to be a child whose only redeeming qualities are smart and low-maintenance? To sacrifice your personality for a chance at being seen as just another kid, and not a freak whose friend groups change with the school years because nobody can tolerate you for longer than ten months? To realize that the things that you enjoy only hold importance to others when they can use it to bully you into crying?

But none of that existed to mom and dad. Because if it wasn't labeled, it wasn't real, and nothing was a problem.

And, good news to the purists: they've discovered a cure for the symptoms of being alive!

Despite everything happening, both on a federal level and in my own house, I'm fixing up old furniture.

My parents, shockingly, are the ones that suggested it-- before a bible study, before family counseling, before anything else, they said I should be trying my hand at fixing old furniture. It's really specific, but I'm actually glad I'm working on furniture rather than anything else. I'm unemployed right now (I quit my job under the assumption of moving), and if I can grab some stuff for really cheap, fix it up, and sell it for a bit of profit, that's some extra cash in my wallet, and some rando out there with a nice table they didn't have to put any work into.

I'm also trying to draw more often, but that's coming up short since I don't feel that creative. And it's easier to grab the heat gun and a scraper and remove old latex paint from a console table than it is to come up with a design for a DnD character that's probably going to die in the second session.

There's something therapeutic about it-- going to estate sales and thrift stores and just random people's houses on Facebook Marketplace and finding dirt-cheap tables and desks and snagging them. Pieces that have absolutely seen better days, with chipping paint, gross wax from the 80's, and more nails than wood to keep the drawers together (and not even that well in the first place). These pieces seen for what they could be, not what they used to be or are right now. Things that need a little bit of love.

They're testaments to the quality of craftsmanship from forty, fifty, sixty years ago. Branding inside of the drawers proving that there's solid oak, the name "Sears" faintly stamped underneath, dented but elegant lines on the legs and the tops.

It's nice to work on things that were designed to last and to be looked at. I can't stand most modern furniture or their aesthetics. I hate the grays and the whites and the barely-tinted colors of beige and beige-r and desaturated browns, as if they're afraid of making a statement. They're afraid of having a personality. Why would you pacify a wood grain or sand down an intricate table leg to just stilts? Why did we ever decide that embellishments on the things as simple as our furnishings was evil, disgusting, immature, and offensive? Why isn't anything allowed to have any opinion on anything louder than a whisper?

I hate minimalism. I hate beige. I hate the washing of everything to be just white and bright and looking like a dentist's office.

God forbid our furniture has evidence of having life.

I came out of the closet two weeks ago to my parents.

Actually, I wrote a letter and tried to move to California while my parents were celebrating their anniversary.

Do I regret the letter? No, of course not. It was a concise statement on how I felt: I'm trans, I don't feel safe living at home as a trans person, I'm sorry to disappoint you, I'm leaving. Goodbye.

Except, I didn't leave, and part of me feels like I made it all worse.

I drove for about 3 hours to grab my boyfriend from the airport, and then, drove 3 hours back home, with him in the passenger's seat, to meet my brother, and later my parents, and watch them have an emotional breakdown over how they didn't know who I was for the better part of the past 6-7 years. And then, they bought him a plane ticket and had him fly home.

We didn't even get a proper date.

That all happened about two and a half weeks ago now. In that time, my parents found a counselor for me, and are looking for a family counselor for everybody. They've been listening to me when I express my needs more often, I'm spending more time with my dad, and I'm learning new things by finding old furniture and fixing it up.

Except, my whole family is adamant that I'm not transgender, and I'm simply confused.

Their argument is 30 years old and hasn't gotten an education past 6th-grade biology class, but they believe that God made me a woman, and I'll always be a woman, regardless of what I do to my body. They think I was coerced into being transgender, and that even my cells are female (vagina is the powerhouse of the cell), and argue that who I was born as is who I have to be. It doesn't matter how I feel about my body and my gender, because all that matters is what God has for me. And, what he has for me, nobody knows, but apparently it's clearly... girl?

It makes me want to scream, to put a hole in the wall, to set something on fire, to pack up my shit and just leave again.

They'd gone right back to square one with how they think trans people operate. They went from calling me by my name to calling me the one they gave me within a day. They went from calling my boyfriend a boy to calling him a confused girl within a week. And I can hear the whispers when they think I'm sitting in my room playing Hollow Knight-- I can't possibly be a boy if I like another boy.

I can't explain to them anything about my experiences. I've tried everything-- explaining gender like being given a gift you don't really jive with, talking about how I've always felt different, and weird, and alienated by my peers, but it goes back to the same exact thing: You're a tomboy, you're just yourself, you're just a masculine girl, you'll get over this.

There's no getting over 6 years of knowing very much that you're not a girl.

Despite the amount of questions I've posed, they refuse to even allow their faith to be challenged in the slightest. Surely, if God made day and night, he also made dawn and dusk, so if he made male and female, he made trans people too? No, of course not-- God doesn't make mistakes. He made you in his image.

And what if his image is more complex than us?

I'm not a Christian. If you came here to see about guidance on your faith, please look elsewhere. I don't have a degree in theology, I'm not a pastor of any kind, and I read the Bible from an analytical and literary point of view. I'm closer to a pagan, at this point.

But surely, if God made fish that can literally transition between physical sexes, if He made bisexual giraffes and gay penguins, if he made the human brain so insanely complicated it can come up with moving pictures and nuclear power and whatever in God's name is happening in Long Live The Black Parade, then surely he makes people transgender. People that look at the arbitrary standards of what makes "men's" and "women's" clothes and decide that it isn't for them, or look at the name they were given at birth and how they are referred to and say "I want to change that because I don't think it suits me." Surely, if nature itself and people left to their own devices are complicated, then surely, God made transgender people too.

But here I am, sitting on my bed and typing out my gripes while my mom sits in the other room thinking she's So Right for thinking my cells are gendered and that physical sex and gender are the same thing. It's raining out. Dinner will be ready in less than five minutes.

I really, really hope I can make this a consistent thing. Something to consistently post on, or something.

A friend of mine awhile ago told me that I should get into writing essays on art and politics and religion and other stuff "and posting them online you'd do NUMBERS," and it took me forever to actually commit to it, mostly because I didn't think I'd be good enough to do it. That being said, some things that have really changed the trajectory of my life have happened, and now, I have more time on my hands. So, Poppy, this first ever post goes out to you.

This first piece is not going to be perfect. Since when is the first ever pass of something perfect? The first airplane was the worst airplane. The first page of somebody's sketchbook doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be filled (this is a callout at both me and fellow artists that have hoards of empty sketchbooks). Therefore, I don't think this first bit of writing will be perfect in any way. I just need it to exist, written the way I write, talking the way I talk, to an audience that's willing to listen.

I used to write a lot more. I loved fanfiction so much my old Chromebook laptop spacebar was worn smooth because of how often I used it to write (that, and it was my go-to workspace for school when the pandemic happened. I still use it for my college work, although my education is on hold right now).

Now, I struggle to write. I have ideas, I struggle to articulate them, and then they fade into oblivion. My time is spent doomscrolling more often than it should be, or drawing, or watching competitive Pokemon videos, but with all that I have to say, and nobody in real life to say it to, I figured I could just shout it into the void of the modern-day internet. Nobody knows who runs this blog, anyways (except for Poppy and maybe a select few other people), so who's gonna stop me?

I hope this blog can exist as a diary, a soapbox on Manic Street, a confession booth (though not that intimate), and just somewhere online that I can exist, free from the expectations of purchasing a subscription to a newspaper that used to be free when I was 12, free from in-post sponsorships from Squarespace or Honey-- just someone's ramblings and writings that maybe make sense as I throw them into the universe with a lousy arm.