#wavesandmoon

Since they have been at different places,

One in the sky, other in depths of the ocean.

So far, yet so close.

Keep changing your faces moon,

The sea will always remain, where you left 'em.

  You know, instead of lamenting that my “new” name...

I changed my name seven years ago and it felt right within two weeks. If I tell people my birth name now they visibly recoil and go “oh no, that’s not you at ALL. You’re definitely a Quinn.” It’s okay to try on other names if you’re not entirely convinced you’re an Alex! I have three trans friends who went through multiple names before finding the right one. We all just rolled with it.

I love Quinn as a name!

Just about everyone else in my circle has been like “Oh, no, your birth name sounds wrong now, you’re totally Alex!” and I’m like “SHIT YEAH I AM!” and then I don’t answer to it, and it just feels weird, like I’m playacting or faking it, and I realize these are all very common, valid feelings for someone in my situation, and it probably doesn’t HELP that I’m not 25 or even 30, I’m 40, and starting to question things you thought you knew about yourself at this age is a unique and frustrating kind of hell.  

I’m supposed to have it figured out.  But through a combination of factors, my personal development slowed radically down around age 16 and I spent the years I should have been learning who I was just trying to survive financial insecurity, untreated mental illness, and then a relationship that was no longer good for me.  So there are great big parts of me that are maybe 25 years old.

So yeah, I guess I’m complaining after all.  It’s awkward, and I wish I knew what to do.  I just want to throw it all out and start over, and I can’t, because all the inspirational self-help shit aside, that isn’t how life works for fat mentally ill poor AFAB people.  Any one of those things comes with people projecting identities onto you that aren’t yours.  Having them all at once is . . . you know, I can cope, I’m fine, but it does mean that, like I said, there’s no blank slate for me.  People are gonna write shit on me whether I like it or not, and I literally can’t control most of it.

So I just feel like some sort of weird chimerical being that isn’t wholly any one thing.

  wavesandmoon  You know,...

Ah, yeah, I should have thought more about the complicating factors. My wife is starting over in a lot of ways (new city, entirely new name, going back to school in her 30s) and I see how hard it is for her. So you have my sympathies, and I’m sorry if my comment was frustrating for you.

wavesandmoon replied to your post:

                   ways i have been addressed that i would happily...                

   Ugh, yes. My only exception is “ma'am”, and that’s only because I work in a field where people frequently call my male coworkers “sir”…and then turn around and call me “sweetie” or “honey”. So in that context I will begrudgingly take “ma'am” but otherwise there’s just no need to call me something gendered.    

wavesandmoon replied to your post:                            

                   the person i’m seeing stayed at my place today...                

   It might! I remember thinking “it’s been seven months; this amazing woman shouldn’t still like me”, but five years later Beckett and I still have a fantastic relationship where we constantly do thoughtful little things for each other.    

wavesandmoon replied to your post:                            

                   writing-prompt-s: write the backstory of your...                

   I don’t have a lot of happy memories from high school, but most of the ones I do have involve bonfires on the beach at night. When I was trying to come up with usernames, this was the first combination of words that evoked that and worked. It stuck.    

Britt always asks where Tony is. I say Pepper is sitting on him, all “No! You can’t go” and she says “and then he can’t get up, because he’s little”.

Demisexuality is considered a category of asexuality, I think. And some people have sex with people they don't feel a sexual attraction to, because they do feel a romantic attraction. I've done that, though I'm not asexual.