#existing is hard

Making a sock penis and wearing it in my room. Never admitting it, but wanting a penis.

Fantasizing that I was turned into a boy and choosing to stay that way.

Taking quizzes that claim to "guess your gender" and wanting to have the results say I was a boy.

This one makes me laugh, but pretending to be a boy when I would play on Club Penguin.

Really liking how I looked in our jazz band uniform which includes a men's dress shirt, dress pants, a tie, and a vest.

Signs in adulthood and right now that probably are signs of me being trans:

Buying a packer and really enjoying wearing it in public.

Loving the bulge my packer gives me and wanting to look at it all day long/wear it everyday.

Wanting a real penis.

I want a beard so bad.

Buying a binder and being frustrated that it didn't make me completely flat because I have a large chest. Kind of liking how it looked anyway when I was able to get over that and see that it did make my chest smaller.

Still fantasizing of being turned into a man and choosing to stay that way.

Going by he/him pronouns on here.

Changing my pronouns on Facebook to see it say "changed HIS profile picture" and seeing that I was listed as "brother" and "son" on my siblings and parents pages. (Changed it back out of fear of getting caught).

Changing my gender on Facebook to Male even though it's hidden.

Picturing myself in the future presenting as male with short hair, a beard, and having gotten top surgery.

I want to be a man.

AND YET I am still struggling with believing I am actually trans or that I should move forward with transitioning. There is so much that goes into this. Internalized transphobia. Inability to let go of my religion even if I don't necessarily believe because it's what I have known my whole life and all my friends are there. Religious trauma and being told that my being a woman is eternal and divine. Fear of disappointing my family and friends or confusing them/ruining our relationships. Messing with the status quo at almost 28 years old. Not being taken seriously. I probably should see a gender therapist.

Ok so first of all I havent been posting much because...... I WENT ON A FLIGHT TO FLORIDUH :DDDDD my flight was on the exact day i was gunna make brian may birthday art unfortunately

I am working on the freddie genderbend thingy but it will take a while for mental health reasons :(

As for my mental health, i don't even know what the fuck is going on. Everytime i think i'm in my prime i immediately experience an emotional plummet. Then when i somehow make myself feel better my motivation instantly vanishes into thin air. For some reason i'm prone to hating everything and just being mopey and sad. It's hard to find the cause considering i've been taken care of my entire life, never emotionally neglected, (I think??) And yet i still can't ground myself.

For a very long time, i thought i was normal but now i'm really starting to question it. As of recent years i'm starting to notice how differently my brain functions. I have a lot of traits like taking things too seriously, being awkward, being a little too intelligent as a child, having god awful eating habits, being SO SENSITIVE that i have reactions to everything even when i feel the opposite way, and probably a lot of other things i haven't noticed since i'm only self aware to a certain degree.

Everytime i bring this up to my mom, dad, or any other family members, they either say that "everyone does that sometimes" or "that's how you spiritually are because of religion/star signs or whatever bullshit". Now, my parents are not problematic. This opinion they have comes from how they were raised. My parents are very tough and have been through many things that could've traumatized them, so i just choose not to bring up the possibility of me being neurodivergent. I also choose not to bring it up because they have had a horrible experience with most kinds of healthcare in my country, so they'll obviously shut down any mention of needing therapy.

My older sibling @blue-decimal is my closest family member to me, and recently they've explained how much they've noticed my odd behavior and how much i have in common with neurodivergent people. This is a reminder that i'm just now noticing my behavior, previously i was in denial.

Because of all these things combined, I have found myself becoming suicidal more and more often. I have been suicidal before, but it was rare. now it's more elaborate and often. I constantly question the meaning of life, the point of my conception, and if i'll ever be able to relax or find peace in life. From most of these thoughts i've concluded that the only way to find peace was through death. I constantly think about death. I think about when i may die, how i may die, how it would affect everyone, and if i should avoid it, want it, or just not care.

Now, i'm not trying to bring attention to myself or make you all pity me, I just want to give you guys an answer to my absence. If you had the patience to read this, thank you.

And then sometimes that feeling is paired up with feeling like you're not actually where you are and watching it though a TV or something.

I had the best experience of this the other day. I was with my friends and we were eating lunch when all of the sudden that feeling comes. And paired with it was the mental numbness AND more.

That more was everything got brighter and more vibrant but also dreamcore like, and everything also got louder.

It's always hard for me to get back out of those mindsets, even if it's not that heavy of an example. Sometimes I just feel like I'm teetering between awareness and sense-of-self and that numb feeling that feels numb but also really heavy and stressful.

In one of the first job interviews I ever did, I told the interviewer about how my computer ‘puked’ as an example of how I handle stress. And by ‘puked’ I mean it wouldn’t load for whatever reasons, and at the time I was working at reception. It’s very hard to do your job when you don’t have a computer and people are coming in, in real time.

It was probably not the most professional way to explain that my computer at work malfunctioned, but the interviewer seemed charmed by the imagery, and commented that they would remember that term for their future use.

I tell this story not because I’m embarrassed by it, this was well over a decade ago, but I thought about it today, and my use of language. As an actual millennial, I grew up alongside the Internet. This means that I am more likely to ‘code-switch’, using terms and language at work than I would use in my daily life.

However, work is… like any other job, hard, and sometimes you need to inject a bit of humour into your workday, lest you start crawling up the walls in frustration. My way of injecting humour into my day is to use terms or sayings that I either picked up somewhere, or I made up but clearly have Internet vibes to those sayings.

Due to listening/watching one of my favourite journaling content creators, I am often telling myself that this will be a problem for ‘future me’. 

While rebooking a schedule for an assessment team, I realized if I rebooked the appointments in such a way it would make everyone’s lives much easier, but make so much more work for me. In which, I sighed, and muttered to myself “Well, plus ultra,” like I am some character from My Hero Academia. 

And most of the time, these things stay with me, but other times when I’m tired, or just done with life, they do slip out. Such as the case of this morning.

Today is Day 6 of the third round of medication, and while the medicine hasn’t completely taken me out, the 12 am and 6 am dose times makes it hard to get up in the morning for work. In fact, I was half an hour late for work, and I would have gotten in trouble for it, if I was one, in administration, two, working from home, and three, everyone who needed to know, knew I was on heavy meds, again.

Complicating matters was that one of our families forgot about their appointment tomorrow and had no arrangements to get to said appointment. This left the team (and me) scrambling to try and salvage as much of it as possible so no time is wasted. In addition, December rounds were not done being booked because families were taking far too long to get back, and I had an empty slot that needed a very specific type of client that I did not have and I had to figure out how to fill it.

It all worked out in the end, the family that forgot ended up being a hidden blessing because we could do half of their assessment virtually and then the other half in person in the slot I didn’t know what to do with for December previously. But, it was a lot since other stuff had to be done as well.

As a result, the manager of the assessment team I booked checked in with me. She knew it was a bit chaotic earlier this morning, and also knew I was sick. When she asked me how I was doing, I admitted I was late for work because, “I had trouble existing this morning.”

I'm 99% sure I didn’t pick that saying up from anywhere, but the sentence had a lot of Tumblr vibes to it. And I was a bit done with life even before getting on for work, so I had actually said this earlier that morning to someone else. However, both people involved are not only closer to my age, but they are younger than me, so they didn’t bat an eyelash at this.

So, I was startled into remembering who I was talking to when my manager laughed and said that she would remember that phrase to use herself one day. For a moment I was blasted back in time to that interview, and I couldn’t help but think, well at least she’s charmed by it.

trauma. TRAUMA.