Everything it's Cracked Up to Be

[has been *finally* binging @azulcrescent 's I Want To Be A Cute Anime Girl intermittently over the last 24 hours]

[comes back to the page I left off on, realizes it's the most recent one]

"Nooooooooooo! I can't be caught up yet!"

A coworker sent an email today where she cited some of her notes from a year ago (before I was out, at all, anywhere) where I had helped her with something. And she took the time to update my name in them.

...was the day I watched Identity (I talked about this a short time ago.)

It is on my milestones calendar as "The Second Cracking of the Egg." The time between "The First Cracking of the Egg" and that moment where all the threads of my self-exploration finally came together was almost 11 years.

Now I'm sitting here, having just finished my morning dose of E, making preparations to come out at work (probably in the next month) to 200+ people globally who know me by (dead)name or reputation.

I don't think the me watching Identity that day would have believed that in only five years, she'd be on the threshold of her own mini Abigail moment - possibly about to become one of the most known trans people in her company without even meaning to.

I pulled out a real nice icy blue nail color from my collection to do my nails tonight. Turned it upside down to see what funny name it had - "It's a Boy" - and immediately felt uncomfortable with it.

Then I realized I was getting dysphoria from a NAIL COLOR because of what the company decided to call it. And that has a pretty easy solution.

[scrolls through my entire history, not that it takes long]

[Oh shit, have I seriously not posted that yet...?]

So this is the coming out video of Abigail Thorn (of Philosophy Tube and @theabigailthorn here). While this was not part of my own "egg cracking" I remember watching it (it was the FIRST PT video I'd ever seen) and being rocked to my core about how much this resonated with my own experiences.

It's probably fair to say that it may not have cracked the egg but it most certainly fried it up with hash browns and some toast. This inspired a lot of the framing I usually use to describe my dysphoria and at the time brought together a lot of disconnected threads that formed my experience into one coherent picture, probably for the first time.

I re-watch this every once in a while and it has been on my "things to send my parents when I finally come out to them" list. That is, until a short time ago when I finally did.

Each time I re-watch it, I'm still in awe of the pacing, the clever use of theatrical allegory, the artistry and thought behind the production.

And then I laugh as I remember this was the first video of hers I ever watched.

I was a very imaginative kid. My play was very centered on having an alternate reality that I lived in. Of course, there's lots of trauma responses buried in there, but one thing in particular stands out in my memory:

By the time I was 13/14 I had reached a point where I needed to be "in" my world all the time, so I began committing to this idea that I was in the imagined world and I was "projecting" myself into a robotic body in order to conduct my day-to-day life on Earth.

It's hard not to see a little bit of a trans allegory in this. Other things too, definitely, but the idea of the 'true self' wearing a suit is a recurrent theme in the trans experience.

The fallout of letting my grip on reality slip a bit too far one day when I was being bullied in math class is one of those super-cringy memories that sometimes sneaks into my mind when I'm trying to get (back) to sleep.

I've been struggling lately with my inner critic (who is very obviously cis.) Saw this imageset and it sort of spoke to me.

He's fought so hard for so long to protect the cis charade. It really sucks he's never gotten on-board to protect the real me, even after 15 fucking years of knowing.