#transtemporal

TransChrono: an identity whereby one desires to be from, or identifies as being from, a different time period.

What am I thankful for? Grateful for? Consciously blessed with? The list is endless. For all that I struggle with, I really could not ask for a lot in life I’d prefer. I am fortunate to be healthy and surrounded by those I love and am loved by. It feels good to be home for the holidays, in a stable environment…even back with my childhood toys, in case you did not catch onto that in my last post. There’s something to be said for familiarity. It’s comforting.

I’ve been reading and writing mostly today. Curled up in introspection. I know that Thanksgiving is a time for family, but it’s only the people I spent the first eighteen years of my life with, and it’s hard to remember why I’m happy with my life when football commentators are yelling in the living room.

I’m lucky, to be transtemporal in a time period as accepting as this one. With all of history laid out behind us, it’s easy to see where it would have been hellish to endure this sort of dissociative disconnect from the time period one is physically confined to. It is a blessing that information is so readily available and easily distributed in this time as well…I cannot imagine how alone I would feel without ready access to the literature and art produced by a time I feel more of a connection with.

I’m grateful for Tumblr, too, connecting me with others who feel alienated for their unique identities, and giving me a place to speak about what troubles me, unconstrained by the worries of what a primarily cistemporal society would say. So thank you, Tumblr. Know that I care deeply for you.

  Victoriously,

I've been pondering the beauty standard lately. I don’t particularly care for it, but I try not to be mad with it for fear of growing mad with those who abide by it. We are all our own entities, making the choices we want about our bodies and how to present them, but I for one don’t care for aspects of this code that seems so universally celebrated by our society. I for one never understood your modern fuss about shaving. What should it matter if I have a bit of hair beneath my arms or on my legs or anywhere else, tucked away on my body. How can anyone structure an argument against the natural state all human beings are born into? This modern world and its expectations leave me flustered sometimes.

More so, I’ve been thinking about weight in our culture. Perusing paintings from centuries past, it is obvious that once plumpness was the ideal, and that we have volley between images of slenderness and fatness as our representation of beauty. Why is it that once we were so eager to celebrate weight, and now so quick to condemn it?

Although it would be easy to make the argument that this proves how arbitrary and cockamamie the idea of a beauty “standard” is, I think there is a reason behind it.

In the past, it was seen as a sign of opulence if you had enough food to grow fat. It was hard, and that challenge differentiated some people from others. Now, in this modern age that reeks of fast food and over abundant sweets, it is startlingly easy to put weight on. The challenge has reversed itself; it is now harder to keep weight off than put it on. Shaving, too, represents a challenge. It is easier to neglect to trim your bodily hair, and so when it is shaved it represents effort. Makeup, hair curling, nail painting and so many other aspects of “beautiful” as we culturally know it visually broadcast how much effort we are willing to put into our appearances.

I think that, for better or worse, when we preen ourselves to fit the beauty standard we are not announcing to the world “I am beautiful,” but rather, “I am willing to put absurd amounts of effort into my appearance,” and that is what other people regard as attractive. Our bias against natural beauty seems to come from an unconscious desire to equate it with laziness.

Painting ourselves with makeup or choking ourselves with neckties, men and women are in this together, just corsets or stiletto heels, moderns and transtemporals have to deal with the consequences of attempting to standardize beauty.

Victoriously,

I’ve been thinking about my last post, and a thought occurred to me that I would like to amend to it. There are few moments where I do feel to be “living in the moment,” but the one unifying commonality between all of the moments when I am most “present” is that I am with cistemporals.

Moderns do a great deal to draw me into “the” moment. I suppose I could accuse them of coercing me into assimilating, using their power as the majority to coerce me into their standards and ideas of normalcy…but I don’t want to sound disrespectful, and after a fashion, I do need a little bit of that. Being transtemporal isn’t like transgendered…what we are no longer exists. There is no outfit, no surgery, nothing at all that we can pursue in order to be regarded as what we are. People have to have a little trust, compassion, and patience to understand our identity, and there are plenty of moderns out there that simply do not exhibit these virtues to this extent. So, while I will never forfeit this fight for recognition and basic human respect, I acknowledge that a certain responsibility falls on me to make the best of my transtemporality and function within this time period.

So I appreciate it when others can help me to forget that I am an outsider among them. You hand me a Rock Band guitar controller and laugh alongside me as I gracelessly fail to understand its mechanics during a song. You sing along howling punk-rock vocalists, and suddenly I’m swept up in the desire to do the same. It doesn’t matter that I’ve never heard the song, don’t care for it in the least, and don’t relate to the lyrics at all. You hand me a game microphone and tell me to sing, and three years of formal voice training finds itself attempting to emulate a rockstar. I just let go of everything that defines me and I embrace all that you are.

And for a moment, I’m free. I’m no one. I’m just…joy, totally out of context.

Victoriously,