I thought it was a good idea at the time

But one day, I think it was August 2021, I flipped a coin. Thinking back, I think it might have been the first time in my life I'd ever flipped a coin. But we were deciding where to eat, me and my friends.

And then it happened. The coin landed on the table, heads... and also on the floor, tails. I tracked the coin with my eyes, but suddenly realized I was looking at two things at the same time. It was like crossing your eyes, and seeing things kinda overlaid on top of eachother, kinda mixing and fading in and out, but with four eyes instead of two.

It was such a weird experience. At first I just stood there kinda motionless, trying to figure out what was going on. Then my friend bent down and picked up the coin off the floor, and said "Hah! Tails! Pizza!" and also she just stood there and said "Damnit. Heads. Guess we're gonna get burgers after all."

And I looked down at her and up at her at the same time.

That's really when the desynch started. I reached for the coin on the table and held a fuzzy, half-there, transparent coin in my hand.

I began to feel kinda sick. We got in the car and things got more and more confusing. Thank goodness I wasn't driving that day. My friends were having two increasingly different conversations and I just sat there kinda dissociating. By the time we got to the two different restaurants I was nauseated and I had a bad headache. I stayed in the car in the parking lot at the pizza place for a few minutes until the other car going to the burger place parked. One of my friends was worried and stayed with me, so that was nice. But when I tried getting out of the car, everything went wrong.

One of my bodies walked right into another car and fell down on the ground, while the other stopped and froze in place. The completely different sense of proprioception completely broke me.

I was basically bedridden for a week. Slowly I relearned how to move, and walk, and talk. I had two bodies, in two timelines, connected by a single consciousness. My brain(s?) had to learn how to control two bodies at the same time.

It's like, pretty weird, but I'm used to it these days. My two sets of eyes no longer overlay on top of one another, they're kinda separate. It's hard to describe. I think my brain got better at multitasking too, I can walk in one timeline and draw in the other, for example.

Things kept getting more and more different, as much as I tried to enforce keeping things the same. Finally I started seeing my therapist again.

I had to convince her that what I was experiencing was real. So I asked her to think of her favorite food and her favorite color. Then in the "Burger" timeline I asked her to tell me her favorite food, and in the "Pizza" timelines I asked her to tell me her favorite color. And I told her her favorite color in the burger timeline and her favorite food in the pizza timeline (Spaghetti and Red, btw.)

She quizzed me on a few other things and sometimes her answers differed between the two timelines which was pretty frustrating, and I don't think she really believed me at first, but she was nice enough to play along at least. And like, not have me committed.

I ended up scheduling my therapy so that I have meetings on pizza tuesday and burger friday, so they're kinda spaced out more evenly. It also just makes the meetings a little less confusing. Ironically doing the same thing in both timelines is actually more distracting than doing different things.

In late 2022 I transitioned. I decided to come out in the burger timeline and stay in the closet in the pizza timeline, so if everything fell apart I'd still have one normal timeline. And like, my parents did not support me. Most of my friends did, but some of them drifted away. And I found that just made me resentful of my parents and those friends in the pizza timeline. And the dysphoria of being a guy in the pizza timeline while living as a woman in the burger timeline was killing me. So when I got on HRT in early 2023 I decided I couldn't take it anymore, I had to transition in both timelines. So I did. Ironically things went a little smoother in the pizza timeline, probably because I was already more confident about presenting female.

I ended up making some transfem friends in the burger timeline, and I sought them out in the pizza timeline too.

It's kind of a mixed bag, this phenomenon. You know like, pain is a lot worse. One week I had a bad tummy ache in the pizza timeline and a bad toothache in the burger timeline. Or like, if I have back pain in one timeline, not having back pain in the other timeline doesn't relieve the feeling at all.

It's such a cool thing, like. When I first started out I had all these conflicting signals in my limbs and body and stuff. But now it's just like. Yeah I have a pizza arm and a burger arm, just like I have a left arm and a right arm. They're the same, but different.

When I make a drawing in one timeline, I don't have access to it in the other timeline, which is really annoying because I keep wanting to show people art I made in the other timeline. One day I'll figure out some kind of interdimensional data transfer protocol. I mean I guess I could like, convert the file into hexadecimal text, and then manually type it out and hope I don't make any mistakes. I'd have to compress the hell out of the file though. Maybe I'll try that one of these days when I don't have anything to do in either timeline.

But I get to spend more time with my friends, because I can schedule hanging out on different days of the same week. Does get kinda confusing when I confuse things that happened in one timeline for another.

Because like, ever since that coin flip, the timelines have been steadily moving further apart. You'd be surprised how little the weather has changed. Like, sometimes there's a little rain shower in one timeline a few minutes earlier than in the other, but all the big storms and hurricanes and stuff are basically the same. I guess it's harder to influence these continent-scale systems than the butterfly effect predicts.

I get to see almost twice as much meteors during meteor showers because I can look in two directions at once. Meteors hit the atmosphere in exactly the same way at exactly the same time.

But it does affect a lot of other little things. Even when you don't realize it, you affect the lives of everyone you come into contact with in little ways, and that spreads. I know people with different jobs in each timeline, people who have different relationships. Even people I don't know that well.

I wasn't quick enough in the pizza timeline to keep my friend from. Well. To save my friend's life. But I rushed over to her house in the burger timeline and talked her down. It's so weird, grieving a person you still talk to every week. Because it ended up being this kind of abstract pain. Everyone else is missing her and you're standing there like. Yeah. I have plans to see a movie with her on burger tuesday. I went to her funeral just to make sure that I saw the dead body so I could really internalize that she was gone. And I still didn't cry. It made me feel like a terrible person.

My friends never really take me all that seriously when I talk about being split like this. They kinda play along but I can tell they think it's a joke. It's whatever. But my friend's girlfriend came into my DMs one night sobbing and cry-typing and begging me to let her talk to her gf one last time. I wasn't sure it was a good idea. But I relented, and made plans to have a sort of interdimensional seance.

I could tell my friend--we'll call her Elsie, and we'll call her girlfriend Robin. I could tell Elsie was pretty awkward about it. I think she felt guilty on behalf of her other, dead self. Robin kept saying stuff like "how could you kill yourself, how could you do this to me," and I would have to say that, and Elsie was just like "I'm sorry." And it was really hard to get Robin to understand that we weren't talking to Elsie's dead spirit, we were talking to her in another timeline. I told her she didn't have to apologize, and I told Robin that guilt tripping the dead was kind of rude.

After that things went a little more smoothly, Robin asked about how Elsie's life had gone, how their relationship had progressed you know like if they were still together, things like that. Elsie said some stuff that I wouldn't have known, and Robin was like. Wow you really are talking to Elsie aren't you?

And I was just like :| yep.

Ever since then my friends keep trying to get my help with stuff. Like they'll ask me what their other self is doing, like, ok, for instance, my friend, we'll call her Jane, she wanted to ask out her crush, and she was like ok. Can you ask the burger version of my crush if she likes me back. Which kinda throws the burger version of her under the bus doesn't it!

And another of my friends wanted to know if she'd regret quitting her job, so she told me to ask the other her to quit her job, and then if it went well she'd do the same. I did ask, and she said no, obviously.

thats it! all 8 pages! i had a lot of fun drawing this, thank you for everybodys kind words on the preview post.

This is a spot from an italian estate agency (we are governed by the right-wing party)

The woman says "Ridiculous..."

The old lady is not in her home. She is at work. She's meant to be what in Italian is called "la portinaia", aka a cross between a doorwoman and cleaner of a residential building. She's in her small "office" space, at the entrance of the building, from where she can survey the coming and goings of the inhabitants. It's a job that has mostly disappeared, but is culturally very clear to us as having the connotation of "potentially gossipy, one-million-percent judgmental woman who sees everything that goes on in the apartment complex, knows everyone and their secrets, and has Strong Opinions™️".

…

actually typing out emoticons like XD and :D and :V never should have gone out of fashion and you can pry them out of my cold dead hands okay I know emojis are fun but THEY DON’T CAPTURE THE EMOTION IN THE SAME WAY

so like

"I feel like my penis/my Manhood as a symbol is smaller than Black man's" becomes "Black men have oversized penises and are sexually insatiable beasts."

"I am sexually attracted to, fetishizing, and feel entitled to Black women's bodies" becomes "well she's asking for it, look at how she looks, Black women are always more openly sexual."

"I am afraid of approaching Black men" becomes "Black men are a threat."

"I am afraid of approaching Black women" becomes "Black women are always angry."

"I am not smart enough/not qualifed enough/can't beat my white counterparts professionally" becomes "DEI and affirmative action are letting those Blacks steal my position in school/jobs!"

The way I explain it to my patients is that our neurons don’t regenerate. They make connections with each other and that’s it. If you don’t use your brain, they make fewer connections and, if one of them dies, you’re gonna miss it, because that was the only one that knew how to do X. Now, if each one of them has many, many connections, you won’t notice the difference when one of them dies. The others pick up the slack.

As of 2024, 45% of dementia risk factors are modifiable. Relevant to this conversation, 5% for less education and 5% for social isolation.

We absolutely are going to see the reflection of this, but it’s gonna take decades and it’ll be too late. So, for the love of your brain, pretend that it’s a muscle and make it work. People complain about “when am I ever gonna use this maths formula in my life?” You’re not. You’re teaching your brain to think logically. Those sinapses will be there for when you need to figure out your week’s schedule. English classes taught me how to interpret data and how to convey it in this text so it’s clear and you understand what I’m saying, not because I needed to justify why the curtain is blue.

Make your brain know how to do different things. Logic games, puzzles, taking care of a garden even if small, planning a church’s event or birthday, learn a new instrument, learn a few words in another language, look at a calendar every day, do some manual labor if possible. Do not, I repeat, do not let your brain get rid of sinapses by letting AI do everything. Your brain uses 20% of your body’s energy — do you really think it’s going to maintain connexions that aren’t in use?

Most cases of Alzheimer’s are sporadic, meaning no family history. Family history of a first-degree relative with Alzheimer’s starting before they were 80yo increases your risk in 2-3x on average.