21st Century Victorian

Dear Distracedsatrap,

It has been a while. I've migrated away from this blog, and have been pouring my energies into other pursuits as of late. There sometimes comes a point when one finds oneself dwelling too much in the inherent nature of their identity, and loses sight of the malleable, still forming, aspects of one's character. I have been actively endeavoring to set right all other aspects of my life, and have recently entered into my first relationship, with a fellow who fully respects me and has a compassionate reverence for my needs and sexuality, following the abuse I have suffered through in past.

I started this blog with the intention of speaking out to the rest of the transtemporal community, to make sure they knew they were not alone. I feel as though I have accomplished this goal as well as I am able to. It shouldn't surprise me that more of us aren't crawling about the internet. Still, I leave this up so that it can be found by transtemporals and allies. While I don't have any intention of continuing to keep it up, I will  of course, still respond to earnest inquiries and messages. If anyone should need help as they adjust to this time period, I will always be here to support my fellow transtemporals.

Sincerely,

I went out yesterday afternoon for a stroll to clear my head, which has been full of all manner of thoughts as of late. I had a charming walk, and twilight was just beginning to set in as I showed myself home. I was, as I so often am, without an escort.

You must understand that my neighborhood is a dead end. Once you enter it, there is no place you can be going that is less than half a mile away. I took a brisk pace to keep from being chilled. I dressed like a cistemporal for convenience’s sake…I hate drawing attention to myself.

As I was heading home, I passed an unfamiliar woman, hunched over, half-frozen, and loaded down with bags. She was walking out of the neighborhood, and hoped that she didn’t have far to go like that. A moment later, a truck going in the same direction as she was drove by and honked, not at her but at me.

I couldn’t see the driver through the dim of twilight, but thinking it must have been some friend or familiar neighbor, I lifted my hand in quick greeting and continued walking.

Seconds later, I saw the truck again. The driver had turned around, and now come back. He stopped in the road beside me and waited for me to acknowledge him. He was twice my age if he was a day, and he leaned his head out the window to ask, “You want a ride?”

When I curtly told him no, he got turned around again and continued on his way. He was most certainly not one of my neighbors, and I only regret that I did not have a pen with which to take down his license plate number.

I like to assume the best in people, and generally trust the goodness of humanity, but there is no doubt in my mind that he had the most wretched motives in offering me a ride. That poor woman, much older, loaded down, and with farther to go…a good Samaritan would have offered her a ride seeing as though he was going in her direction anyways, but instead we had a skin-crawling disturbing interaction with someone who was willing to totally change course in order to get a young woman into his truck.

I shudder to think what would have befallen me if I had gotten in that truck, and I can’t help but wonder why I am such a magnet for the most unsavory characters. I would blame lookism, but I don’t want to flatter myself simply because my body conforms to some aspects of our arbitrary beauty standard.

Being a woman is certainly interesting…in any time period.

Victoriously,

I've thought about this on several occasions, and ultimately I must decline. I have chosen to share my story here because it gives me a sense of anonymity. I am a faceless pseudonym, and that suits my Victorian sensibilities just fine. Because of the intimate content I post, I really do not wish to be concretely connected to it.

If this is, in part, a desire to affirm I am "real" and my blog is not the satirical product of a "troll" as so many insist...rest assured, I know how to appropriate others' pictures and edit them to ensure they are non-searchable. Were I dishonest, that's what I would do. However, I haven't given you an untruth yet, and I never will. Thank you for your interest, but my modesty insists I decline your request.

Sincerely,

I’m waiting for marriage to become sexual active. There, I said it. You are now free to hurl names at me, call me a prude or accuse me of being anti-sex-positive. I haven’t the faintest of concerns anymore, but I am so tired of people assuming they know what my reasons are.

I am the only non-religious person I know who is making the choice to uphold this traditional value in my personal life. Everyone else who shares my view seems to hold it because their God has told them it is an issue of morality. I don’t view my personal choice as an issue of religion or morality though, and I feel as ideologically different from those individuals as the ones who have taken a more carefree approach to their sexual relationships.

I am an emotionally volatile human being. I identify with the social standards of the Victorian era. There is absolutely, positively, no good argument for why I ought to deal with sexuality in anything less than the safest and most committed of loving relationships. I have no interest whatsoever in enduring the heartbreak of a post-sexual relationship, and there is plenty more I can do with my time that is more productive and does not involve indulging the human capacity for physical pleasure.

I’ve nothing against and no bone to pick with anyone who decides it is worth the interpersonal stress, but its not for me and I only wish I knew others who could say the same simply so I wouldn’t feel so wretchedly alone in this. I feel that a sexual relationship at this point in time would put the cart before the horse. There is so much more before me, why would I give the whole of my emotional and sexual self to a relationship that was only temporary?

My musings on this issue have always fallen on deaf ears, but that is unsurprising. These particular inclinations go hand-in-hand with my time, not this one. I feel as though the noble cause of sex-positive culture has quiet accidentally drowned out the voice of those of us who would cling to tradition for our own sakes. It would not be so hard to be transtemporal if only there were a fragment of the population that openly shared some of these old values, but as it stands it seems that the only people determine to wait for marriage are religious and transtemporal minorities.

Victoriously,

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 never understood plastic dolls. I suppose they look a bit more life-like, but when you hold them, they are so stiff and rigid. They don’t retain your warmth. There’s nothing about them that reminds me of a living human being. They have very nice eyes, but there is something inherently sterile about plastic baby dolls.

And don’t even start me thinking about Barbies and other “fashion” dolls, which serve utterly no purpose but as a totem for the beauty standard, like little false idols of body image.

I can appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into pretty china dolls, but in all honesty my heart belongs to rag dolls. When I was little, I cherished my rag dolls and took them everywhere with me. They were as indestructible as I felt as a child. What was the worst that could happen? Once I was swinging my doll back and forth, and her poor arm came detached from the rest of her body. My father remarked, “Well that was disarming,” and my mother sewed it right back on that night. Rag dolls were durable and unpretentious. If they got dirty, you scrubbed them like any other piece of laundry and called it a bath.

There was no such thing as squeezing them too tight. In the middle of the night, I could wrap myself wholly around them and never worry about breaking or hurting them. After years of burying my face in yarn hair whenever I was scared, the smell of yarn still brings me the greatest comfort.

Rag dolls can take a beating and be just fine. China dolls smash and plastic dolls scratch, but rag dolls are full of fluff and cotton all the same. They can stomach any kind of abuse and keep on smiling, waiting for someone to pick them up who cares, really and deeply, about them.

And so can I.

Victriously,

Thank you kindly for inquiring. I'm afraid you've caught me neglecting my blog again. I am glad to report that I've been well. I've been staying with my family lately, attempting to put my head on straight and make sense of this mad world I've inherited. Life has seemed altogether overwhelming lately, especially with my approaching graduation. I know that the summer is a long way off still, but after sixteen years of education the idea that it will all come to an end and throw me out into the purportedly "real" world is unnerving, to say the least. After my panic attack last month, I realized that I was putting myself under far too much pressure, and so I have decided to take a lightened course-load for a while, as opposed to the absolutely maximum I'm allowed to take.

Looking beyond school and imagining what comes after has got me in a tizzy trying to preemptively find and secure a place within it. I wish I could find a walk of life that kept me close to books, but it is hard to know where to begin when your goals and dreams have never revolved around any particular career. I've been looking for a bit of work in a more desirable field than what I'm doing now, and that comes with a great deal of ups and downs. We'll see what comes of all of it, and hopefully I'll soon find the time to do justice to this blog.

Thank you so much for asking.

Victoriously,

I noticed last night that my favorite pendant was starting to discolor. It was not an expensive thing, but it bears Artemis’s portrait, etched in it’s white surface to look like some marvelous marble carving. I love it dearly, and thought it was only a bit of dirt discoloring it. When I went to scrape it off with my fingernail, I chipped the pendant itself.

  Everything in this world is a victim of time. That’s something I think we forget as we look at each other. In a vibrant world made up of transgenders, otherkin, and every other conceivable identity, we can’t talk about “man” in some abstract sense of humanity anymore than we can blindly speak of humanity. These words and preconceptions about what it is to be human or sentient deconstruct themselves when we look at them in the context of our whole society.

  We may not have words to capture what we are collectively; we may never have words for it. When each of our identities are so multi-faceted across such an impossibly wide spectrum of self-understanding, there few things that unite us, few things that are truly universal. Yet, time is one of them.

  We are all in bondage to time, bound to live quantifiable lives, measured by the metrics of time. We grow, we age, we cease to be. Within these confines we experience what we call life. Our impermanence is something we all share in common. Someday, we will bodily cease to exist in the form we are in now. Perhaps that’s terrifying, but knowing that it is a shared experience at least gives me a little bit of comfort.

  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,

Someone (our dear distractedsatrap) inquired about my panic attacks and whether or not they are frequent occurrence. Fortunately, I can report that they are not.

I’ve only had a four in my life, but they have had, in some cases disastrous results. One of the worst was the first one I had, during my final year of high school. I had been at a New Year’s Eve celebration at my friend’s home. I was only a mile a way from my parents’ house, and so I thought I would be fine to walk back. I was still living as a multiple system at the time though, and I lost touch with the others. It was terrifying to be totally alone where I couldn’t reach them. My panic set in, and I ran to the wooded park outside of my neighborhood. I started yelling, and then everything became very surreal.

I woke up half naked in a snowy field. Fireworks started right at midnight.

I recognize how lucky I am that I came to before hypothermia set in, and only had minor frostbite issues to deal with. I found my clothes and ran home in the dark, unable to pull my shirt back on with my numb fingers.

I did not do well as a multiple system, and I realized shortly after that incident that I needed to abandon that mental structure and work towards a more unified consciousness. I still have issues with other personality fragments, and that was a major contributor to my panic attack last week, actually. One of the personalities that was always very potent within my mind, Koyu, resurfaced and began speaking to me while I was in the shower. She was always a destructive force in my life, and it is hard to negotiate with personified mental forces that have a wretchedly different interpretation of morality than you do. She was one of the eight I shared my mind with, and although the others were more supportive, I realized that it was too hard to maintain all of our sanities. We merged, conglomerated, dispersed, and moved on for the most part. It is hard though, in times of anxiety and anxiousness, not to pull ourselves apart and crumble back into old people listening to tired voices.

I’m still growing, still trying to become more proficient at life and coping with reality…just like everyone else. It’s easier now that I’m out about my transtemporality. Nestled in this identity, I can confidently assert myself because I KNOW myself! A strict sense of Victorian pride helps me stay strong.

Victoriously,