This wouldn't exist if I could just delete things

Had a video call with my brother Chuck the other day.  Things got heavy:

KATE: Was Kurt Cobain a trans woman?

CHUCK: What?

Kurt Cobain.  Rock musician.  He was in a band called Nirvana.

I’m familiar with him, yes.

Was he a trans woman?

Um.  No?

OK.  Why not?

I mean, he wasn’t.  It’s like asking why he wasn’t an astronaut.

He wasn’t an astronaut because he never went to space.  Why wasn’t he a trans woman?

Because he didn’t transition.  I mean, he didn’t ever say he was a woman, didn’t ever say he was trans.  So no.  Kurt Cobain wasn’t a trans woman.

So someone is trans if they say they’re trans.  Self-determination.

That’s what you’ve told me.  Is that wrong?

No, that’s right.  We know ourselves better than anybody else can know us.  If we say we’re trans, nobody can say we aren’t.

And Kurt Cobain never said he was trans.

So was I trans in 1994?

I don’t know, were you?

Yes, but if you’d asked me in 1994, I would have told you “no”.

So if I tell you I’m trans, I’m trans…

Right.

But if I tell you I’m cis, I might still be trans?

If you tell me you’re cis, I believe you.

That’s not the same thing as “I’m cis”.

That’s a really good point.  This is sort of what some queer people are getting at when they say “gender is a construct”.

Come again?

Well, you’re cisgender, right?

As far as I know, yes.

Aha.

Hmmm?

You hedged.  “As far as I know” isn’t the same thing as “yes”.  “As far as I know” opens up the possibility that you could be trans and not know it.

It doesn’t seem terribly likely.

That’s an interesting statement.  Early on in transition one of the biggest problems I had was dealing with the sheer unlikelihood of my being trans.  I mean, I knew trans people existed.  I knew somebody had to be trans.  I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that it would be me.

Do you think this is why you’re on this whole “Kurt Cobain was a trans woman” kick?

Hey now, I’m just asking questions.  You know.  Like J.K. Rowling is “just asking questions”.

Kate, you are literally wearing a T-shirt that says “KURT COBAIN WAS A TRANS WOMAN” on it right now.

Am I?  Oh, shit.  I thought I was wearing my “Skip school, take hormones, kill God” T-shirt.  To your question, though - yeah, I do think that’s part of it.  Honestly, the hardest thing about growing up trans was believing that nobody in the world had ever experienced what I was experiencing.  I didn’t have any role models.  I didn’t wonder if I was the only one.  I was convinced of it.

So being able to say that this incredibly gifted songwriter, the voice of a generation, was a trans woman like you…

I need someone like that.  I need to not be the first of my kind.

Of course you’re not the first trans woman.

No, but before a couple of years ago almost every trans woman would tell you they always knew, unquestionably and innately, that they were women.

So it’s not just about him being trans, but specifically his being a trans woman who didn’t know he was a trans woman.

An egg.  Right.

Why Kurt Cobain, anyway?  What’s so special about him that you’re trying to induct him into the Egg Hall of Fame?

He knew things.  Things cis guys don’t know.  Things I didn’t know until after I started transition.  He understood women, what we’re like, what we experience.  “Pennyroyal Tea”.  “Rape Me”.  I just have a hard time thinking of a cis man who could write songs like that.

It wouldn’t be the only way in which he was exceptional.

True.  Ahhh.  I don’t know.  I mean, I know, I can give you all the reasons, but there’s something in his eyes.

Something in his eyes.

All the pictures of him.  No matter what he’s doing.  If he’s grinning, or sad, whatever he’s doing, you can see something trapped there.  Trapped and in pain, wanting to get out but not quite knowing how.

Huh.  You, uh, know that what you’re doing is pretty much the textbook definition of projection, right?

Maybe.  Chuck, do you think I’m happier?

Since you transitioned?

Yeah.

Of course.  Absolutely.  Night and day.

Everyone says that, and honestly, I see it.  Even in pictures, you know?  I see it.  You’ve seen some of my transition timelines, right?

You do look really different.

It’s not just me.  Every single person who transitions looks like that.  We look so much happier, so much more alive, so much more us.  I don’t understand how anybody can hate us.

I don’t get it either, Kate.

And when I look at any timelines, I look at the before photos… and I see something in their eyes.  Transmasc, transfem, doesn’t matter.  There’s something trapped wanting to get out.  Every picture I’ve ever seen of Kurt Cobain looks like the “before” picture on a transition timeline.  It’s just that with him, there aren’t any after pictures.

And it’s not just the eyes, either.  The way he dressed, the whole “grunge look”.  It’s just literally egg fashion.  We dress with total disregard for our appearance or how we look because no matter what we do it’s wrong.

“Egg fashion”, egg this, egg that… isn’t it a little bit anachronistic, judging him by 2022 standards, 2022 values?

Is it?  Chuck, I was alive in 1994.  I was an 18 year old egg.  I know what that feels like.  I know what that looks like.  I lived that.  Why didn’t I come out as trans in 1994?  Because I didn’t have the opportunity.  Because self-determination needs to be informed, and none of us were.  None of us.  Look.  You know what he said to Melody Maker in 1991?  “I knew I was different. I thought that I might be gay or something because I couldn't identify with any of the guys at all.”  That’s what he said.

Holy shit.  Really?

Really.  September 14, 1991.

Hold on, let me look that up.  Oh, yeah, I see it.  Look, if you look at the full quote he’s just saying he’s not a jock.  Like he didn’t fit in with the jocks. 

Well, what about the dresses?

What dresses?

Kurt Cobain wore a lot of dresses.  Like, a lot, both onstage and off.  On MTV in 1991, he said “It’s ‘Headbanger’s Ball’ so I thought I’d wear a gown.”  He said in a 1993 interview, “I personally like to wear dresses.  I wear them around the house sometimes.”  This is not some shameful secret he kept hidden from the world.  He was open about this.  He was proud about this.

Yeah, but… it’s just clothes.

Except it’s not just clothes.  Listen to his songs.  Listen to his lyrics.  “Should have been a son”.  “I’m a lady, can you save me?”  “Everyone is gay.”  The original lyrics to “All Apologies” from his journals – “Boys write songs for girls.  Let me grow some breasts.”

I mean they’re song lyrics.  There are all kinds of ways to interpret song lyrics.

Sure.  All kinds of ways.  You ever read Michael Azerrad’s biography of Cobain, Come As You Are?

Nope.

Azerrad spent weeks talking to Cobain.  He was Cobain’s biographer, but also his friend.  And he has his own interpretation of the lyrics.  For instance, Azerrad talks about all the lyrics about guns, and to me, now, I look at that, and I think of how he died, but Azerrad, when Kurt was alive, he looked at it another way.  He thought it’s about dicks.  “To paraphrase Dr. Freud,” he says, “sometimes a gun is just a gun.  But not this time.”  He talks about “Come As You Are”, where Kurt keeps singing “I swear I don’t have a gun.”  That’s not my interpretation.  That’s never been my interpretation.  That’s what this cis man says.  More than one cis man.  Kurt says Dave Grohl’s dad, he said the same thing.  Yeah.  There are all kinds of ways to interpret lyrics.

“By this time,” Azerrad wrote, “one begins to wonder how Kurt rationalizes being a man at all.  His first response is revealing.  ‘I don’t know,’ he says.  ‘Castration.’”  I don’t wonder how Kurt rationalizes being a man.  I rationalized “being a man” in all kinds of ways.  What strikes me is that he needed to rationalize being a man.  Had to come up with some kind of excuse.  It just strikes me kind of funny.

Kurt’s songs have meanings.   The lyrics to “In Bloom”, Kurt was pretty explicit about that.  The lyrics he wrote have meanings.  “Heart-Shaped Box”.  You know what that refers to?  When Courtney Love was flirting with Kurt, Michael Azerrad says in Come As You Are, “She gave Dave (Grohl) a package to give to Kurt – little sea shells and miniature teacups and a tiny doll, all packed into a small heart-shaped box.”  A tiny doll locked away inside a box shaped like a heart.  That was what I felt like before I came out.  A tiny phantom doll.  Kurt and Courtney first kissed after a show at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago.  Rumor was that they fucked against the bar, but they denied it.  What actually happened, Azerrad says, is that “Courtney had a bag of lingerie with her for some reason and Kurt ended up modeling the contents.”  And then they went to Kurt’s hotel room and they fucked.

You’re making it sound…

Maybe it was.  Because you look at that and you think that if it was like that, it was perverted and wrong, because that’s what you were told, that it’s a sick fetish thing, and I look at it and it isn’t.  To me, that’s normal.  That Kurt Cobain was sexually aroused while wearing Courtney Love’s lingerie, that’s normal.

Kate, he was a punk!  He hated jocks, and wearing a dress pissed off jocks, so he wore dresses.  He talked about wanting to wear a dress and piss on a redneck A&R man’s desk!  You think that was some kind of sex thing?

Sexuality is part of being a woman.  Part.  Rage – and Kurt Cobain had a lot of rage inside him – that’s another part.  Am I interpreting, am I looking at things from my perspective as a trans woman?  Yes, certainly, just like you’re interpreting, looking at it from your perspective as a cis man.  When cis people interpret things, their conclusion is never “they were trans”.  Never.

Ed Wood wasn’t a trans woman.  He was just a transvestite.  He was a man.

Pete Burns from Dead or Alive wasn’t a trans woman.  Sure, he got all sorts of feminizing surgeries, but he never said he was a woman.  Man.

Prince Nelson adopted a female persona, feminized his voice, and recorded a song about wanting to be a woman's girlfriend, but he was also a Christian and believed that being queer was wicked and sinful, and that's the identity of his we need to respect.  Man.

Richard Wright, who wrote the Phish song “Halley’s Comet”, spent most of the 1980s telling everyone he knew he was a transsexual lesbian named Nancy, but after being consistently treated like shit changed his mind about that, so none of that counts for anything.  Man.

Dave Carter was on HRT when he died, but he was just questioning.  He didn’t tell anybody for sure that he was a woman.  Man.

Quentin Crisp said just before he died that if he was younger, he absolutely would have transitioned, but wanting to transition isn’t the same as actually transitioning.  Man.

All men.  Always, always men, whatever they do, whatever they say.  I know how that works.  I was told all these same things about myself for decades, all these same reasons, and now, I don’t know, I guess people will make a personal exception for me, but for everybody else, the same old assumptions, the same old arguments, they still apply.  They’re still legitimate.

I thought we were talking about Kurt Cobain.

And the only way to do that is to talk about him in isolation.  There’s no larger context to consider, no bigger picture.  I can’t really know.  I can’t really judge.

I mean, everybody else does.  I guess I can’t tell you not to.  But all of this circumstantial evidence, all of the dresses and the lyrics that you I guess know the real meaning of – none of that makes him a girl.

Sure.  And nothing can make him a girl.  Because he’s dead.  Because he killed himself.

Oh, here we go.  After thirty years and countless speculation, you have at last uncovered the real reason Kurt Cobain killed himself – gender dysphoria.  Do you have a book deal yet?

Working on it.  And yes, people say a lot of stupid things about Cobain’s death, like it’s this big shock that this guy who hated himself and wanted to die killed himself.

Right.  He was pretty well-known for being a heroin addict, which isn’t exactly something that improves one’s quality of life.

Sure, but why did he start heroin?

I don’t know.  Why does anybody start heroin?

To help him cope with his eating disorder.

Wait, what?  Eating disorder?

You don’t know about that?  He had stomach problems, for a long, long time.  He could only eat certain kinds of food, certain kinds of food that wouldn’t make his stomach hurt.  Doctors looked but they could never find any organic cause for it.  Nobody took it seriously.  So he self-medicated with heroin.  “It was my choice,” he told Azerrad.  “I don’t regret it at all because it was such a relief from not having stomach pain every day.”  I know, though.  Lots of cis guys have eating disorders.  Doesn’t mean anything.

Kate there’s a lot of interpreting going on here.

Yeah, I guess there is.  Is that necessarily a bad thing, though?  Is that necessarily wrong?  Like.  You’ve seen The Matrix, right?

Only the first one.

Yeah, that’s fine.  So you know how important The Matrix is to a lot of trans women, right?

Yes, but I’m not really sure why.  Just seems like a retelling of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” with extra fight scenes.

It’s pretty trans, though, right?

Clearly.  It was directed by two trans women.

And trans women who watch it – eggs or otherwise – find their own lives and experiences reflected in it in ways that cis people, like you, don’t.

I guess, but the fact that it was actually made by two trans women carries a little more weight with me.

OK, but what if the Wachowskis had died in 2000?  In, like… a car crash or something?  Does that mean The Matrix isn’t a trans film?

Well, no, because it’s still a film made by two trans women.

A film made by two trans women that speaks to the trans experience, and that is recognized by living trans women as speaking specifically to the trans experience.  The only difference is that, in this scenario, nobody knows the Wachowski Sisters are trans women.  And we can’t prove it.  We can’t possibly prove it, and nobody is going to just believe us when we say it’s a trans movie, that the Wachowskis were trans women, because they didn’t say it, they didn’t say the special magic words.  Self-determination.  You know what self-determination meant to Kurt Cobain?  I remember seeing Courtney Love on television reading his note, I remember her interrupting to say that he was an asshole, that what he was saying was bullshit.  She didn’t respect his self-determination.

Um…

“Pennyroyal Tea”.  Cobain told Azerrad “It's a cleansing theme where I’m trying to get all my bad evil spirits out of me and drinking Pennyroyal tea would cleanse that away.”  Pennyroyal is an abortifacient – but, Azerrad notes, only in lethal doses. 

Hell, not just that song.  The whole album.  In Utero.  The collage on the back cover, the one Cobain described to Azerrad as “Sex and woman and In Utero and vaginas and birth and death".  The occult symbols surrounding it, taken from Barbara G. Walker’s The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects1.  There was something inside Kurt Cobain, something inside him waiting to be born, but he was told, over and over, that it was a monster, so he killed it, the only way he could.  By killing himself.

That could have been me.  That could so easily have been me.  I was told all the same things he was.  We all were.  When I was 27?  When I was 27, I was addicted to benzos, benzos they prescribed me because I was trying to bury, trying to kill this thing, this thing I had inside of me.  I was a zombie.  Walking dead.  When I quit, I quit cold turkey.  Nobody told me about the withdrawal syndrome.  Nobody told me it could have killed me.  And if it had, everybody would remember me, everybody would think of me, as a cis man.  Forever.  They would perpetuate the Lie.  That’s why I transitioned, why I chose to go through all the shit I went through.  The writer and musician Margaret Killjoy, in 2017 she talked about what she went through the day before she came out:

“All I could think was: ‘Oh god, I don’t want to die a boy.’”2

I felt the same way, came out for the same reason.  I figured no matter what I did, I was dead.  I didn’t do it live, but to at least have an honest death.  I genuinely believed transition would kill me.

It didn’t, though!  You’re alive and you’re beautiful and I’m so, so glad for that.  It didn’t kill you.

It could have.  Still could.  Transition has helped, has made it easier­ for me, but it’s not that way with everyone.  People have been kind to me, in ways that they aren’t kind to other trans women.  Others of us… aren’t so lucky.

Who are we respecting, exactly, by remaining silent about our shared experiences, our shared perspectives, things we see that you fucking don’t, that you can’t see?  Of course I can’t prove it.  I can’t prove that I’m trans.  You can’t prove that you’re cis.  Cis people, though, cis people never have to prove anything.  Their prejudices are the null hypothesis3.  If I was to go out there and say that Kurt Cobain was a cisgender man, would anybody say I was wrong?  Would anybody object or complain?  Even though my saying that is an anachronism, is meaningless.  The word, the concept, it literally didn’t exist when Cobain died.  Have you ever heard the word “agnotology”?

No?

It means making a false claim to ignorance.  Claiming that we don’t know something that we do.  That we can’t know something that we can.  We know things now, Chuck.  We know what the symptoms of gender dysphoria are.  We know what it does to people.  How eggs think.  How eggs act.  How eggs die.  But we pretend we don’t.  We still pretend.  We pretend suicide is an individual act, even when we know it’s not, that the reasons for it are wholly personal.  We pretend that when someone dies by suicide, their reasons for doing so die with them.  And they don’t, Chuck.  We’re still dying, still dying for the same reasons Kurt Cobain did.  It’s not just that we aren’t allowed to recognize ourselves.  We aren’t allowed to recognize each other.  Individual choice or social contagion.  Those are the options we’re given.  And neither of them are right.  Neither of them are who we are.

Kurt Cobain wrote, thought, talked, died like eggs do.  I don’t care if he never said the magic fucking words.  We know our own.  We recognize each other.  And if someone is alive?  If someone is alive I will go my whole life without ever breathing a word.  Because as long as we’re alive, we do choose, and that means we can choose ignorance.  What I think, what I want, for someone else, for us, it doesn’t matter.  I do that, I follow that code, for the benefit of one person – the egg themselves.  Once they die, all bets are off.  Omerta no longer applies.  Kayfabe no longer applies.

To be queer is to be erased, to experience erasure.  I still hear straight men arguing, as if they have any right to argue, as if they know, that Emily Dickinson was not a lesbian.  Emily Dickinson!  I’m supposed to listen to people who say this shit?  I’m supposed to take them seriously when they say well, actually, calling Dickinson a “lesbian” is historically anachronistic, we can’t apply the standards of the present to the past, and Jesus fuck have you read her letters?  She liked girls.  She really liked girls.  Kurt Cobain was a trans woman.  Kurt Cobain was every bit as much a trans woman as Emily Dickinson was a lesbian.  Refusing to say it isn’t “respect”.  It’s perpetuating the crime perpetrated against Cobain, against every other trans woman who ever killed herself because of the lies we were told about ourselves.  No more.  Kurt Cobain was a trans woman.  I can’t, as an individual, say that.  I don’t have the right.  No trans woman can say that, individually.  But collectively?  All of us together?  The things we see in each other, we see those things in him too.  Not all of them, and not all of us.  Absolutely not all of us.  But enough of us.  Enough that we have the right.  We have the right, and I will fucking say it, and if you don’t like that, you can go fuck yourself.

Kate, are you ok?

I’m fine.

Do you want a hug?

Fuck you, Chuck.

OK, well.  I’m, uh.  Gonna go to the other room.  You should, uh.  Drink some water.  Stay hydrated.  Love you, Kate.

Love you too, Chuck.  Sorry.

Shhh.  It’s OK, Kate.  It’s OK.

1 Diane Purkiss criticizes the occult nature of Walker’s encyclopedia in "Women's Rewriting of Myth", in Carolyne Larrington (ed), The Feminist Companion to Mythology, London, 1992, p. 444: “In Donna Haraway's influential terms, these women may wish to be goddesses, but they are cyborgs all the same”. The work she’s referencing is Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto”.  Haraway was, it happens, an academic advisor to the trans woman Sandy Stone, and her “Cyborg Manifesto” was a pivotal influence on Stone’s “The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto”, one of the foundational works of transgender theory.

2 Margaret Killjoy, https://birdsbeforethestorm.net/2017/06/im-not-even-going-to-try-to-pass/

i didn’t realize it for the first few years - something shifting, something so subtle. the winter makes us all cold, the summer makes us all a little out of our minds. i just loved her, because she was incredible, and i was the luckiest person alive.

it’s just that i realized that spring came with sudden bursts of cold. it’s just that summer frequently raged in with fire sprouting from her lips. it’s just that winter was the worst of all, her eyes dead. it’s just that autumn loves me different; throws herself into it without the clingy sweat of summer. i used to love that summer girl, you know? i loved how wild she was, the way in summer she took every risk she could. but i carried her home drunk one too many times, cleaned up one too many of the messes she made for no reason than to enjoy the sensation of burning. and winter was worse; the shutdown, the isolation. how she became distant, a blizzard, caught up in her own head, unable to tell me what was wrong and unable to think i actually wanted to listen.

she comes home, her hair bleached white. a dark smile on her lips. the shadowy parts of her are back. they loom like icicles overhead. she kisses me with her body held at a distance, a peck on my cheek that feels like an iceberg. she makes polite conversation and we go to bed early, our bodies untouching. 

it is a lonely season, i think on the ninth day of this. winter is cold. winter is known for the death of things. when i look at her, i see the girl i fell for, inhabited by an alien. she was the first women i loved so much i felt it would kill me. i can’t leave. when i wake her up with my crying, she tells me to shush and go back to sleep. she’s different like this, quiet, doesn’t eat. 

three days later i stare at myself in the mirror. i wonder if it’s me. if the fat on my body or something in my face or the wrinkles and she doesn’t love me. i try prettier lingerie, lean cuisine, i try different hair, more makeup, try harder. it doesn’t work. she looks at me the same; that empty gaze that neither loves nor condemns my actions. 

somewhere in februrary i lose it. we’re fighting again, from car to restaurant to car to home again. we fight about stupid things, small things; i tell her i feel she doesn’t love me, she says i’m not listening. the circle goes around and around, old pain peeling back, new pain unhealing. i sleep on the couch.

i wake up when i hear her crying, white hair around her all messed up. the kind of sobbing that only comes at two in the morning, heavy and thick and hurting. my winter girl. my heart is breaking. she looks up at me like i’m her anchor. “i’m sorry i’m like this,” she says. and i start saying, it’s okay i’m here we’re married, but she just shakes her head and says, “I know this isn’t the real me.”

i hold her cold hand. she stares at the blankets. “i am different in winter,” she whispers, “i know i am and i’m sorry.” she looks at me. “why do you think i dye my hair? cut it off? get rid of the old me?”

i tell her it’s okay. we’re together and it’s okay, and then she whispers, “i’m sorry you married four of me.”

we lay there like that, her head on my chest. she falls asleep. i stare at the ceiling, thinking of the way she sounded when she was crying. how i helped put her in that pain. how i promised in sickness and in health and everything in between.

the next day i spend at the library. there aren’t enough books on how to love someone with seasonal affective disorder so i make my own, notes and pages and little ideas on post-its. and i take a deep breath and make myself a promise.

she comes home to her favorite dinner and we kiss and she’s uneasy but that’s okay. the next day i bring home flowers and the next day she finds little love notes in her pockets. i love her quiet, the way winter demands, understand her sex drive is faltering; spend more time just cuddling. we drink wine and we kiss and some part of her starts relaxing. 

the truth is there is no loving someone out of their mental illness. the truth is that you can love someone in despite of it; love them loud enough to give them an excuse to believe they can make their way out of it.

and i learn. i remember the rebirth of spring, when she starts thawing. we kiss and have picnics in pretty dresses. i remember her joy at little birds and her rain dancing. i fall in love with the flowers in her cheeks and the little bursts of cleaning. i fall in love with summer’s slow walks and milkshakes and shouting to music playing too loud on the speakers. i fall in love with her dancing, with the sunfire energy. and when winter comes; i am ready. i remember that snow used to look pretty. i fall in love with the hearth of her, with the holiday, with the slow smile that spreads across her face so shyly. i fall in love with how she looks in boots and mittens and every day i find another reason to love her the way she deserves - they way i always should have.

she comes home with her white hair and dark smile and a package in her hands. i ask to see what it is and that small shy grin comes creeping out. it’s a sunlamp packed in with medication. she looks at me with those wide eyes and that beautiful winter blush. “i’m trying to get better,” she whispers, “i promise.”

recovery doesn’t look immediate. sometimes it isn’t neat. i can’t say we never fight or that we’re suddenly complete. but each day, that tiny girl’s strength gives me another reason. i love her. i love her while she tames the roller coaster of spring; i love her for reigning in the summer storms; i love her for taking her winter and trying to be warm. it is hard, because everything worth it is hard. she spreads out her autumn leaves; mixes the best parts of her into everything. learns to take winter’s silence for a moment before yelling in summer. learns to take autumn’s spice and give it to spring. we are both learning.

one day she comes home and her hair is different, but it’s a style i don’t know. i kiss it and tell her that she’s beautiful and the inside of me swells like a flood. i’m so glad that she’s mine. every part of her. the whole. i am the luckiest person on earth. and i always have been. but she’s hugging me and saying, “thank you for helping me,” and i can’t explain why i’m crying.

this is what love is; not always an emotion but rather your actions. the choices we make when we realize our lives would be empty if the other was absent. this is what love is: letting them grow, helping them find their way in out of the cold. this is what love is: sometimes it takes work to see how the thing you planted together actually grows.

Had a video call with my brother Chuck the other day.  Things got heavy:

KATE: Was Kurt Cobain a trans woman?

CHUCK: What?

Kurt Cobain.  Rock musician.  He was in a band called Nirvana.

I’m familiar with him, yes.

Was he a trans woman?

Um.  No?

OK.  Why not?

I mean, he wasn’t.  It’s like asking why he wasn’t an astronaut.

He wasn’t an astronaut because he never went to space.  Why wasn’t he a trans woman?

Because he didn’t transition.  I mean, he didn’t ever say he was a woman, didn’t ever say he was trans.  So no.  Kurt Cobain wasn’t a trans woman.

So someone is trans if they say they’re trans.  Self-determination.

That’s what you’ve told me.  Is that wrong?

No, that’s right.  We know ourselves better than anybody else can know us.  If we say we’re trans, nobody can say we aren’t.

And Kurt Cobain never said he was trans.

So was I trans in 1994?

I don’t know, were you?

Yes, but if you’d asked me in 1994, I would have told you “no”.

So if I tell you I’m trans, I’m trans…

Right.

But if I tell you I’m cis, I might still be trans?

If you tell me you’re cis, I believe you.

That’s not the same thing as “I’m cis”.

That’s a really good point.  This is sort of what some queer people are getting at when they say “gender is a construct”.

Come again?

Well, you’re cisgender, right?

As far as I know, yes.

Aha.

Hmmm?

You hedged.  “As far as I know” isn’t the same thing as “yes”.  “As far as I know” opens up the possibility that you could be trans and not know it.

It doesn’t seem terribly likely.

That’s an interesting statement.  Early on in transition one of the biggest problems I had was dealing with the sheer unlikelihood of my being trans.  I mean, I knew trans people existed.  I knew somebody had to be trans.  I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that it would be me.

Do you think this is why you’re on this whole “Kurt Cobain was a trans woman” kick?

Hey now, I’m just asking questions.  You know.  Like J.K. Rowling is “just asking questions”.

Kate, you are literally wearing a T-shirt that says “KURT COBAIN WAS A TRANS WOMAN” on it right now.

Am I?  Oh, shit.  I thought I was wearing my “Skip school, take hormones, kill God” T-shirt.  To your question, though - yeah, I do think that’s part of it.  Honestly, the hardest thing about growing up trans was believing that nobody in the world had ever experienced what I was experiencing.  I didn’t have any role models.  I didn’t wonder if I was the only one.  I was convinced of it.

So being able to say that this incredibly gifted songwriter, the voice of a generation, was a trans woman like you…

I need someone like that.  I need to not be the first of my kind.

Of course you’re not the first trans woman.

No, but before a couple of years ago almost every trans woman would tell you they always knew, unquestionably and innately, that they were women.

So it’s not just about him being trans, but specifically his being a trans woman who didn’t know he was a trans woman.

An egg.  Right.

Why Kurt Cobain, anyway?  What’s so special about him that you’re trying to induct him into the Egg Hall of Fame?

He knew things.  Things cis guys don’t know.  Things I didn’t know until after I started transition.  He understood women, what we’re like, what we experience.  “Pennyroyal Tea”.  “Rape Me”.  I just have a hard time thinking of a cis man who could write songs like that.

It wouldn’t be the only way in which he was exceptional.

True.  Ahhh.  I don’t know.  I mean, I know, I can give you all the reasons, but there’s something in his eyes.

Something in his eyes.

All the pictures of him.  No matter what he’s doing.  If he’s grinning, or sad, whatever he’s doing, you can see something trapped there.  Trapped and in pain, wanting to get out but not quite knowing how.

Huh.  You, uh, know that what you’re doing is pretty much the textbook definition of projection, right?

Maybe.  Chuck, do you think I’m happier?

Since you transitioned?

Yeah.

Of course.  Absolutely.  Night and day.

Everyone says that, and honestly, I see it.  Even in pictures, you know?  I see it.  You’ve seen some of my transition timelines, right?

You do look really different.

It’s not just me.  Every single person who transitions looks like that.  We look so much happier, so much more alive, so much more us.  I don’t understand how anybody can hate us.

I don’t get it either, Kate.

And when I look at any timelines, I look at the before photos… and I see something in their eyes.  Transmasc, transfem, doesn’t matter.  There’s something trapped wanting to get out.  Every picture I’ve ever seen of Kurt Cobain looks like the “before” picture on a transition timeline.  It’s just that with him, there aren’t any after pictures.

And it’s not just the eyes, either.  The way he dressed, the whole “grunge look”.  It’s just literally egg fashion.  We dress with total disregard for our appearance or how we look because no matter what we do it’s wrong.

“Egg fashion”, egg this, egg that… isn’t it a little bit anachronistic, judging him by 2022 standards, 2022 values?

Is it?  Chuck, I was alive in 1994.  I was an 18 year old egg.  I know what that feels like.  I know what that looks like.  I lived that.  Why didn’t I come out as trans in 1994?  Because I didn’t have the opportunity.  Because self-determination needs to be informed, and none of us were.  None of us.  Look.  You know what he said to Melody Maker in 1991?  “I knew I was different. I thought that I might be gay or something because I couldn't identify with any of the guys at all.”  That’s what he said.

Holy shit.  Really?

Really.  September 14, 1991.

Hold on, let me look that up.  Oh, yeah, I see it.  Look, if you look at the full quote he’s just saying he’s not a jock.  Like he didn’t fit in with the jocks. 

Well, what about the dresses?

What dresses?

Kurt Cobain wore a lot of dresses.  Like, a lot, both onstage and off.  On MTV in 1991, he said “It’s ‘Headbanger’s Ball’ so I thought I’d wear a gown.”  He said in a 1993 interview, “I personally like to wear dresses.  I wear them around the house sometimes.”  This is not some shameful secret he kept hidden from the world.  He was open about this.  He was proud about this.

Yeah, but… it’s just clothes.

Except it’s not just clothes.  Listen to his songs.  Listen to his lyrics.  “Should have been a son”.  “I’m a lady, can you save me?”  “Everyone is gay.”  The original lyrics to “All Apologies” from his journals – “Boys write songs for girls.  Let me grow some breasts.”

I mean they’re song lyrics.  There are all kinds of ways to interpret song lyrics.

Sure.  All kinds of ways.  You ever read Michael Azerrad’s biography of Cobain, Come As You Are?

Nope.

Azerrad spent weeks talking to Cobain.  He was Cobain’s biographer, but also his friend.  And he has his own interpretation of the lyrics.  For instance, Azerrad talks about all the lyrics about guns, and to me, now, I look at that, and I think of how he died, but Azerrad, when Kurt was alive, he looked at it another way.  He thought it’s about dicks.  “To paraphrase Dr. Freud,” he says, “sometimes a gun is just a gun.  But not this time.”  He talks about “Come As You Are”, where Kurt keeps singing “I swear I don’t have a gun.”  That’s not my interpretation.  That’s never been my interpretation.  That’s what this cis man says.  More than one cis man.  Kurt says Dave Grohl’s dad, he said the same thing.  Yeah.  There are all kinds of ways to interpret lyrics.

“By this time,” Azerrad wrote, “one begins to wonder how Kurt rationalizes being a man at all.  His first response is revealing.  ‘I don’t know,’ he says.  ‘Castration.’”  I don’t wonder how Kurt rationalizes being a man.  I rationalized “being a man” in all kinds of ways.  What strikes me is that he needed to rationalize being a man.  Had to come up with some kind of excuse.  It just strikes me kind of funny.

Kurt’s songs have meanings.   The lyrics to “In Bloom”, Kurt was pretty explicit about that.  The lyrics he wrote have meanings.  “Heart-Shaped Box”.  You know what that refers to?  When Courtney Love was flirting with Kurt, Michael Azerrad says in Come As You Are, “She gave Dave (Grohl) a package to give to Kurt – little sea shells and miniature teacups and a tiny doll, all packed into a small heart-shaped box.”  A tiny doll locked away inside a box shaped like a heart.  That was what I felt like before I came out.  A tiny phantom doll.  Kurt and Courtney first kissed after a show at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago.  Rumor was that they fucked against the bar, but they denied it.  What actually happened, Azerrad says, is that “Courtney had a bag of lingerie with her for some reason and Kurt ended up modeling the contents.”  And then they went to Kurt’s hotel room and they fucked.

You’re making it sound…

Maybe it was.  Because you look at that and you think that if it was like that, it was perverted and wrong, because that’s what you were told, that it’s a sick fetish thing, and I look at it and it isn’t.  To me, that’s normal.  That Kurt Cobain was sexually aroused while wearing Courtney Love’s lingerie, that’s normal.

Kate, he was a punk!  He hated jocks, and wearing a dress pissed off jocks, so he wore dresses.  He talked about wanting to wear a dress and piss on a redneck A&R man’s desk!  You think that was some kind of sex thing?

Sexuality is part of being a woman.  Part.  Rage – and Kurt Cobain had a lot of rage inside him – that’s another part.  Am I interpreting, am I looking at things from my perspective as a trans woman?  Yes, certainly, just like you’re interpreting, looking at it from your perspective as a cis man.  When cis people interpret things, their conclusion is never “they were trans”.  Never.

Ed Wood wasn’t a trans woman.  He was just a transvestite.  He was a man.

Pete Burns from Dead or Alive wasn’t a trans woman.  Sure, he got all sorts of feminizing surgeries, but he never said he was a woman.  Man.

Prince Nelson adopted a female persona, feminized his voice, and recorded a song about wanting to be a woman's girlfriend, but he was also a Christian and believed that being queer was wicked and sinful, and that's the identity of his we need to respect.  Man.

Richard Wright, who wrote the Phish song “Halley’s Comet”, spent most of the 1980s telling everyone he knew he was a transsexual lesbian named Nancy, but after being consistently treated like shit changed his mind about that, so none of that counts for anything.  Man.

Dave Carter was on HRT when he died, but he was just questioning.  He didn’t tell anybody for sure that he was a woman.  Man.

Quentin Crisp said just before he died that if he was younger, he absolutely would have transitioned, but wanting to transition isn’t the same as actually transitioning.  Man.

All men.  Always, always men, whatever they do, whatever they say.  I know how that works.  I was told all these same things about myself for decades, all these same reasons, and now, I don’t know, I guess people will make a personal exception for me, but for everybody else, the same old assumptions, the same old arguments, they still apply.  They’re still legitimate.

I thought we were talking about Kurt Cobain.

And the only way to do that is to talk about him in isolation.  There’s no larger context to consider, no bigger picture.  I can’t really know.  I can’t really judge.

I mean, everybody else does.  I guess I can’t tell you not to.  But all of this circumstantial evidence, all of the dresses and the lyrics that you I guess know the real meaning of – none of that makes him a girl.

Sure.  And nothing can make him a girl.  Because he’s dead.  Because he killed himself.

Oh, here we go.  After thirty years and countless speculation, you have at last uncovered the real reason Kurt Cobain killed himself – gender dysphoria.  Do you have a book deal yet?

Working on it.  And yes, people say a lot of stupid things about Cobain’s death, like it’s this big shock that this guy who hated himself and wanted to die killed himself.

Right.  He was pretty well-known for being a heroin addict, which isn’t exactly something that improves one’s quality of life.

Sure, but why did he start heroin?

I don’t know.  Why does anybody start heroin?

To help him cope with his eating disorder.

Wait, what?  Eating disorder?

You don’t know about that?  He had stomach problems, for a long, long time.  He could only eat certain kinds of food, certain kinds of food that wouldn’t make his stomach hurt.  Doctors looked but they could never find any organic cause for it.  Nobody took it seriously.  So he self-medicated with heroin.  “It was my choice,” he told Azerrad.  “I don’t regret it at all because it was such a relief from not having stomach pain every day.”  I know, though.  Lots of cis guys have eating disorders.  Doesn’t mean anything.

Kate there’s a lot of interpreting going on here.

Yeah, I guess there is.  Is that necessarily a bad thing, though?  Is that necessarily wrong?  Like.  You’ve seen The Matrix, right?

Only the first one.

Yeah, that’s fine.  So you know how important The Matrix is to a lot of trans women, right?

Yes, but I’m not really sure why.  Just seems like a retelling of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” with extra fight scenes.

It’s pretty trans, though, right?

Clearly.  It was directed by two trans women.

And trans women who watch it – eggs or otherwise – find their own lives and experiences reflected in it in ways that cis people, like you, don’t.

I guess, but the fact that it was actually made by two trans women carries a little more weight with me.

OK, but what if the Wachowskis had died in 2000?  In, like… a car crash or something?  Does that mean The Matrix isn’t a trans film?

Well, no, because it’s still a film made by two trans women.

A film made by two trans women that speaks to the trans experience, and that is recognized by living trans women as speaking specifically to the trans experience.  The only difference is that, in this scenario, nobody knows the Wachowski Sisters are trans women.  And we can’t prove it.  We can’t possibly prove it, and nobody is going to just believe us when we say it’s a trans movie, that the Wachowskis were trans women, because they didn’t say it, they didn’t say the special magic words.  Self-determination.  You know what self-determination meant to Kurt Cobain?  I remember seeing Courtney Love on television reading his note, I remember her interrupting to say that he was an asshole, that what he was saying was bullshit.  She didn’t respect his self-determination.

Um…

“Pennyroyal Tea”.  Cobain told Azerrad “It's a cleansing theme where I’m trying to get all my bad evil spirits out of me and drinking Pennyroyal tea would cleanse that away.”  Pennyroyal is an abortifacient – but, Azerrad notes, only in lethal doses. 

Hell, not just that song.  The whole album.  In Utero.  The collage on the back cover, the one Cobain described to Azerrad as “Sex and woman and In Utero and vaginas and birth and death".  The occult symbols surrounding it, taken from Barbara G. Walker’s The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects1.  There was something inside Kurt Cobain, something inside him waiting to be born, but he was told, over and over, that it was a monster, so he killed it, the only way he could.  By killing himself.

That could have been me.  That could so easily have been me.  I was told all the same things he was.  We all were.  When I was 27?  When I was 27, I was addicted to benzos, benzos they prescribed me because I was trying to bury, trying to kill this thing, this thing I had inside of me.  I was a zombie.  Walking dead.  When I quit, I quit cold turkey.  Nobody told me about the withdrawal syndrome.  Nobody told me it could have killed me.  And if it had, everybody would remember me, everybody would think of me, as a cis man.  Forever.  They would perpetuate the Lie.  That’s why I transitioned, why I chose to go through all the shit I went through.  The writer and musician Margaret Killjoy, in 2017 she talked about what she went through the day before she came out:

“All I could think was: ‘Oh god, I don’t want to die a boy.’”2

I felt the same way, came out for the same reason.  I figured no matter what I did, I was dead.  I didn’t do it live, but to at least have an honest death.  I genuinely believed transition would kill me.

It didn’t, though!  You’re alive and you’re beautiful and I’m so, so glad for that.  It didn’t kill you.

It could have.  Still could.  Transition has helped, has made it easier­ for me, but it’s not that way with everyone.  People have been kind to me, in ways that they aren’t kind to other trans women.  Others of us… aren’t so lucky.

Who are we respecting, exactly, by remaining silent about our shared experiences, our shared perspectives, things we see that you fucking don’t, that you can’t see?  Of course I can’t prove it.  I can’t prove that I’m trans.  You can’t prove that you’re cis.  Cis people, though, cis people never have to prove anything.  Their prejudices are the null hypothesis3.  If I was to go out there and say that Kurt Cobain was a cisgender man, would anybody say I was wrong?  Would anybody object or complain?  Even though my saying that is an anachronism, is meaningless.  The word, the concept, it literally didn’t exist when Cobain died.  Have you ever heard the word “agnotology”?

No?

It means making a false claim to ignorance.  Claiming that we don’t know something that we do.  That we can’t know something that we can.  We know things now, Chuck.  We know what the symptoms of gender dysphoria are.  We know what it does to people.  How eggs think.  How eggs act.  How eggs die.  But we pretend we don’t.  We still pretend.  We pretend suicide is an individual act, even when we know it’s not, that the reasons for it are wholly personal.  We pretend that when someone dies by suicide, their reasons for doing so die with them.  And they don’t, Chuck.  We’re still dying, still dying for the same reasons Kurt Cobain did.  It’s not just that we aren’t allowed to recognize ourselves.  We aren’t allowed to recognize each other.  Individual choice or social contagion.  Those are the options we’re given.  And neither of them are right.  Neither of them are who we are.

Kurt Cobain wrote, thought, talked, died like eggs do.  I don’t care if he never said the magic fucking words.  We know our own.  We recognize each other.  And if someone is alive?  If someone is alive I will go my whole life without ever breathing a word.  Because as long as we’re alive, we do choose, and that means we can choose ignorance.  What I think, what I want, for someone else, for us, it doesn’t matter.  I do that, I follow that code, for the benefit of one person – the egg themselves.  Once they die, all bets are off.  Omerta no longer applies.  Kayfabe no longer applies.

To be queer is to be erased, to experience erasure.  I still hear straight men arguing, as if they have any right to argue, as if they know, that Emily Dickinson was not a lesbian.  Emily Dickinson!  I’m supposed to listen to people who say this shit?  I’m supposed to take them seriously when they say well, actually, calling Dickinson a “lesbian” is historically anachronistic, we can’t apply the standards of the present to the past, and Jesus fuck have you read her letters?  She liked girls.  She really liked girls.  Kurt Cobain was a trans woman.  Kurt Cobain was every bit as much a trans woman as Emily Dickinson was a lesbian.  Refusing to say it isn’t “respect”.  It’s perpetuating the crime perpetrated against Cobain, against every other trans woman who ever killed herself because of the lies we were told about ourselves.  No more.  Kurt Cobain was a trans woman.  I can’t, as an individual, say that.  I don’t have the right.  No trans woman can say that, individually.  But collectively?  All of us together?  The things we see in each other, we see those things in him too.  Not all of them, and not all of us.  Absolutely not all of us.  But enough of us.  Enough that we have the right.  We have the right, and I will fucking say it, and if you don’t like that, you can go fuck yourself.

Kate, are you ok?

I’m fine.

Do you want a hug?

Fuck you, Chuck.

OK, well.  I’m, uh.  Gonna go to the other room.  You should, uh.  Drink some water.  Stay hydrated.  Love you, Kate.

Love you too, Chuck.  Sorry.

Shhh.  It’s OK, Kate.  It’s OK.

1 Diane Purkiss criticizes the occult nature of Walker’s encyclopedia in "Women's Rewriting of Myth", in Carolyne Larrington (ed), The Feminist Companion to Mythology, London, 1992, p. 444: “In Donna Haraway's influential terms, these women may wish to be goddesses, but they are cyborgs all the same”. The work she’s referencing is Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto”.  Haraway was, it happens, an academic advisor to the trans woman Sandy Stone, and her “Cyborg Manifesto” was a pivotal influence on Stone’s “The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto”, one of the foundational works of transgender theory.

2 Margaret Killjoy, https://birdsbeforethestorm.net/2017/06/im-not-even-going-to-try-to-pass/

Not to distribute or anything, I'd feel weird about that given I didn't write it, I just love it so much I wanted a physical copy (and so did some friends, hence the extras)

Can't put pdfs on tumblr so here it is as images if anyone wants to make one for themself (and assembly instructions bc it's a little messy):

as with octopodes, cuttlefish have donut shaped brains. the esophagus passes through the center, which is why they straight up die if they try to swallow anything too big! stretched out the brain :(

cuttlefish are filled with love, as demonstrated by their 3 hearts

but they are also filled with venom. good for them!

oh and also blue-green blood. yes they have teal blood, i love that for them

smaller male cuttlefish will disguise themselves as female in order to mate with females who are guarded by large males. sometimes they even use fake egg sacs as props. let's hear it for transfem lesbian cuttlefish!

btw their eggs look like boba, which is why mermaids add them to beverages

their pupils look like this:

they have an internal shell called the "cuttlebone." (it is not an actual bone, as cuttlefish don't have bones.) they use it to control buoyancy, and it's freaky:

multiple people replied with "cuttlefish are fish." they're not. they! are! mollusks!

and of course by far the most important cuttlefish fact, they change color for hunting, camouflage, and disguise purposes.

I will also add:

- They have 8 shorter arms (the ones you see) and two long tentacles that are normally kept hidden except for when they burst out to grab their prey like this:

- after they catch their prey successfully they will occasionally do a little flash of a different colour. It's currently uncertain why they do this, but one theory is that it's an involuntary response to being happy at having food!

- many sources, including the BBC, have claimed that they rapidly flash different colours before catching prey to "hypnotise" them. The current scientific consensus is that that's probably not really true. Instead, it's likely that they do it to break up their silhouette and so the prey isn't really sure what they're seeing - think like zebra stripes but strobing!

- they can change texture as well as colour. Since their skin is almost entirely muscle, they can make elaborate shapes and patterns out of their skin by retracting some muscles. That's why they sometimes look very spiky and sometimes very smooth

- Some of the smallest species of cuttlefish, particularly the flamboyant cuttlefish, Ascarosepion pfefferi, are so small that their cuttlebone doesn't even work as a flotation device, so they have to waddle around on the seafloor instead and it's so so cute

No computers were used for these - partly because I like using my hands and partly because I have genuinely no idea how to do digital animation anyway. It seems like witchcraft.

These are life-sized because I have very little experience with figure drawing/sculpting so I just used my husband and I for proportion measurements. (Which meant I was chasing him around going “come back! Let me measure your femur!”)

@shot-thru-the-art can I ask: the wire they're hung from, does it just go anywhere the wind blows? vs being on some sort of tumbrel (I think it's called?) that spins them, I mean.

This is the most amazing thing, IDK how anyone could think it's digtal. It's too perfectly imperfect.

Schedule date of coronation

Organise a trip to the Royal Soothsayer with the new Queen

Search forest for the crown

Purchase a new throne, or locate the stolen one

We hired a mage.

Settle down. I understand this is a controversial decision, but the benefits have already begun to reveal themselves. While the mage is unable to detect ailments on a corpse, several of the princesses have all shared an ailment referred to as a “shellfish allergy”. While it is unclear what allergy means, it sounds detrimental, and the mage clarified that it is deadly if not handled. As lobster was served at that banquet, that is likely the culprit, and as such shall be removed from the palace’s future supply orders, preventing future queens from following her path. Staff members will be allowed access to the current stock until we run out, so I hope a nice lobster dinner will quell your fears.

Are you the type of person who describes a setting by using an intimidatingly huge paragraph that just rambles on and on and on because you're told to be specific but don't quite know how to do it correctly? If you've been struggling to detail settings, you've come to the right place! I'll reveal how to effectively describe a setting without having to use one big chunk of text and shoving it at your reader!

~ LINK IDEAS TOGETHER

As writers, we hear "show, don't tell" quite often, and the same applies when writing settings. But for some people this tip does little to help because, well, it's a bit of a vague concept.

With that being said, "linking ideas together" is a great way to describe the setting without having to explain the location! What do I mean?

Let's say there's a green field and I'm trying to depict it. This method is to find another subject that could connect with the setting to further describe it. What else is green? What reminds the character of the field? What's something similar?

Ex: The field in front of him reminded him of a photo he once saw long ago as a boy. His parents were standing in a lush, grassy area void of people, hugging each other tightly and smiling brightly at the camera under the bright blue sky.

In that example, I linked the field to a picture the character found, and by using his memories, I was able to paint a rough image of the location while setting the tone!

Ex: She'd been there before. She was there when the building still stood tall. When the streets were filled with people bustling about and the air smelled like cigarettes. Now, there is no tall building, but instead a pile of debris. She hasn't seen anyone in thirty minutes, and any smell of cigarettes would've surely been washed away by the rain.

This time, I connected the present location with the past one. But instead of showing the similarities, I contrasted them to emphasize the changes and abandoned state of the area!

~ LITERARY DEVICES

The most common literary devices I see regarding setting are similes, metaphors, and personifications!

It's similar my previous tip, where you connect two ideas together, but more general. The similes and metaphors don't have to be based on a specific experience of the character, but instead something more universal so everyone can connect with it!

Personification, on the other hand, can be used to substitute verbs.

Examples:

The stars shone like glittering jewels.

The road carved into the mountain.

The flowers waltzed along the music of the wind.

These devices allow you to describe something quickly and elegantly!

~ USE ACTIONS

Arguably, the most common tip provided when describing a setting is to use the five senses: sight, smell, touch, hearing, and taste. If you're like me, though, and have NO clue on how that's supposed to help, let me break it down!

Instead of thinking about the senses directly, use ACTIONS that correlate with the senses.

Instead of saying "the wood felt tough", say "he touched the wood, marveling at the toughness of the material".

Instead of saying "the air smelled like candies", say "she sniffed the air, inhaling the aroma of candies".

Instead of saying "the city was bright", say "they stare at the city, admiring how the lights illuminate the buildings and roads.

Do you see how your description suddenly blends in with the text now that there's an action and separate subject involved? You're still effectively describing the scene, but you're not pushing it at your reader. This also makes it far easier to build onto the depiction of the moment because you're not limited to adjectives!

By utilizing these three concepts, you can build an evocative description of the setting that won't overwhelm nor bore the readers!

Happy writing~

Much like the days when I didn’t think of you

And as I pray for sleep at night

There’s always an image of us in my mind

Side by side

My head to your shoulder

As if we still offered each other peace

In this desert garden

I wonder what you tell yourself now

She’s too sassy

She talked too much

We didn’t make sense

But all I really asked for was your consideration

To be thought of

To he cared for

To be something other than a convenience

And somehow, that was too much

I wonder if you’ll regret it

I hope you regret it

use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.

use firefox instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).

use mega or proton drive instead of google drive.

get rid of bloatware

use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

use vetted sites on r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH for free movies, books, games, etc.

use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb.

use storygraph instead of goodreads.

use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions

use ground news to read unbiased news and find blind spots in news stories.

use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp

make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google

use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)

use flashpoint to play archived online flash games

find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books

burn your music onto cds

use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe

use unroll.me to clean your email inboxes

use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail instead of gmail

remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X

remove bloatware on samsung X

use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta

use NCH suite for free software like a file converter, image editor, video editors, pdf editor, etc.

feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3

Nightmares:

- one party member’s nightmare seems like a perfectly normal and even pleasant scenario until the rest of the party realizes that what’s normal and pleasant for them is terrifying for the other member.

-the happy-go-lucky character who told everyone their fear is something benign like “ducks” actually has a massive and crushing trauma nightmare scenario they never told anyone about because they didn’t want to be a burden/still can’t trust.

- villain tries to make a nightmare scenario for someone and it backfires because they didn’t realize that guy is a grade-A Freak and they love it.

“ideal life” illusions

- villain attempts to make what they think will be an ideal dream life only for the protagonist to immediately point out a glaring flaw or get mad because they know damn well life isn’t like this

-a party member struggles to break free from the illusion because it’s just like regular life for them

- party discovers someone in the group has been not entirely honest about who they are when their ideal life doesn’t match thier projected persona at all.