aposematic-jessica

[aposematic-jessica]

Idk why I wish I could transition into a woman. Like why I wish I was assigned male at birth and then got to reject (? That doesn’t feel quite right) it and become a woman. Perhaps because that’s an easy way to reconcile my desire (to be at peace with my gender) with my reality (not being fully at peace as a cis woman). But the obvious truth of this situation is that, by wishing I could “become a woman”, I clearly don’t feel like a woman now. And I feel some sense of uneasiness.

The explanation I’ve been going with for the last however-many-years (probably between 15 and 5) is that it’s institutionalized sexism and patriarchy that makes it impossible to be a woman “perfectly”. That the disconnect I feel between who I am and womanhood is something all women, especially all cis woman, feel. But more and more I find that not only is that explanation insufficient, it’s wrong. The disconnect and discomfort I feel with the womanhood I’ve been practicing is not that which real woman feel. God, I call it “practicing”, like it’s a religion or a performance. So often it feel like a performance. It’s just one I enjoy and do well. But it doesn’t feel real.

And then we come to the problem. Obviously, the conclusion we must come to is transgenderness. But I don’t know where to go. I don’t know who to become. I haven’t really heard of this. It seems that all the stories I’ve heard and people I’ve met have know where they wanted to go, even if it changed along the way. I don’t even know where to start. I’ve been stumbling into the minute changes—not even changes!! Additions, and microscopic ones.

I do not know how to leave behind the gender I’ve been presenting and embrace something new. I do not know what changes I want to make. I do not know how to figure out what changes I want to make. I do not know who I am. I do not know who I am. I do not know who I am.

[aposematic-jessica]

love my girlfriend

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i just had my first gyno appt and i got to say. you have to advocate for yourself so hard ahead of time. they didn’t do anything wrong, they were actually pretty fine, the exam was fine, but they didn’t give me enough autonomy, they didn’t get enough of my consent, they did not inform me enough.

she was a good doctor but she didn’t tell me what the process would be, she did not ask if i had any questions or concerns before the procedure, she did not ask me if someone else could come into the room (or even warn me!). it was a routine check up, she probably wanted to get it done fast, and she didn’t violate any basic social norms. But she made it a bad experience. The procedure itself was fine, relatively painless, and not traumatic.

The people in the process made me sit in the exam room shell shocked. They made me feel unsteady on my own feet. They made me sit just outside the waiting room, disassociating, unable to leave because I couldn’t process what just happened, dissociating, go to the bathroom so I could look at my face and remember I am a person, tear up while driving home, and feel objectified and viscerally uncomfortable that I’m still thinking about it hours later.

I don’t want to fear monger or accuse. There is so much medical mistreatment and abuse in women’s health, and honestly this wasn’t a case of that. I wasn’t taken advantage of or ignored to my physical detriment. It is very important to get examined bc this is the kind of routine thing that saves you from an early death or excruciating suffering. But this was an experience that could have been routine, and became traumatic. That might be an overstatement, but it was a genuinely upsetting, distressing, disorienting experience that did not have to be that way.

All she needed to do was tell me what she was doing, ask me if someone coming in was okay, and ask me if I had any questions or concerns after. That would not have taken any significant amount of time. But it would have stopped me from crying.

You need to tell your healthcare providers the kind of experience you need before it happens. You need to define the parameters, outline what you expect to happen. You need to tell them to explain it to you ahead of time, you need to object if something happens you don’t want, you need to take what you know and make them cooperate with you. That’s how you make this a survivable, repeatable experience.

[aposematic-jessica]

Consent was[1] a form of institutionalized[2][3] sexual violence[4] based on the pseudoscience of social contract ethics[5]. It gradually replaced marriage as a dominant legal fiction[6] under liberalism during the rise of girlboss capitalism, from the late 20th century until the middle of the 21st century[citation needed]. Consent remained in practice in some parts of the world[where? discuss] until the Second Global Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Today, the taboo nature of consent makes it a popular[citation needed] theme in fetish pornography, along with related[7] concepts such as employment and citizenship.

[aposematic-jessica]

....do you think bitch or cunt are misogynistic?

where do you live that they aren't? lol

[aposematic-jessica]

Amy Winehouse passing popsicles to neighborhood kids through her window, 2008

Emily Dickinson prepared baskets of treats (including her famous gingerbread) to lower from a window to the neighborhood children

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@bunni-bonez : “they should let lesbians cruise in the hardware store”

They do babe it’s called Lowe’s

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[aposematic-jessica]

i love my therapist but i hate being in therapy. 10 minutes before my appointment, i'm in a meeting with my boss - we discuss my artistic choices; my boss recommends i artistically choose less. 10 minutes after therapy, i wash my hair and think about everything that was said, and then i have to switch it off, like a lamp, and go back to work again.

i was on a walk the other day and someone had the perfect combination of his cologne and whatever-else. it was almost exactly his scent. i fucking hate that. after all these years, i remember that? i tell my therapist - i feel like a fucking wolf. try telling a middle-aged blonde lady. oh i scented him on the air. i'm 30, and i'm having a panic attack over something that would be a plotline in the omegaverse.

what they don't tell you about mental illness is that if you are lucky enough to survive it into adulthood; it becomes a weird slice of your life. because you do, eventually, have to build a life. i realized in a panic somewhere around 22 - oh. i don't know what i'm fucking doing, because i always assumed i'd just go ahead and die. i didn't die, and i'm grateful for that, and i'm very happy about that choice. but it does mean that i am an adult in an apartment, living with my conditions side-by-side like. oh, that's my roommate, adhd. ignore the glass, bytheway, that's ocd.

so you pick your stupid life up by the scruff of the neck and you're, like glad for it (so much laughter and light and friends you would have never thought possible, when you were in the worst of it). but it feels so strange to be dancing around these odd little microcosms, these patchwork moments of your symptoms. if you have a panic attack at night, you still need to wake up and walk the dog in the morning. if your depression is making everything boring, well, you don't have any sick days left, and a job's not really supposed to be that exciting anyway. your ocd tears out each individual leg hair, and then, an hour later, you sigh, patch up the bloody bits, and go get dinner with friends. and the life is kitten-quiet, mewling and pathetic, but it's also like - it's yours, so you're fond of it.

and it's like - you're real. so you still enjoy pushing the shopping cart really fast and then riding on the back of it down an empty aisle. and you're not, like, so sick anymore that when you accidentally drop a mug you burst into tears (except for the days you do that. which are bad). and no, you're not allowed around certain items anymore. oops! but you've learned to be good about brushing your teeth most days of the week. and you sometimes in the middle of the day you have a little freak-out about how fucking unfair it all is, how fucking hard, how other people can just do this without having to fucking hurt the whole time. and then you sigh and force yourself to sit down and fucking journal about it so you can tell the nice middle-aged blonde woman yeah i had a hard day but i practiced grounding. you still sometimes want to burst out of your own skin, but you force yourself to eat kind-of healthy and to take your vitamins. you let yourself chop off all your hair in the sink in a dramatic poetry of control and relief - and you also have developed good hobbies that help you move your body more frequently. you feel helplessly behind, lost in the shuffle - but you also practice gratitude, taking stock of what you have garnered. because you're trying. even if you're never gonna be normal, you have something... close enough.

and the little kitten of your life, this mangy, starlit tigercub, this thing you expected to rot so young: in your arms, it turns itself over, belly-up. exposing this new soft part, all the organs and guts. like it's saying i trust you now. you won't give me up.

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trying to use ~online sleep aids~ but they’re all like “oh im your girlfriend come back to bed” and i keep hearing the first few lines and going “NO YOU ARE NOT MY GIRLFRIEND HOW DARE YOU IMPERSONATE HER” !!! and it doesn’t help that no one has as warm and beautiful a voice as hers. My girlfriend sounds like an angel, these trollops can peddle their sultry speeches elsewhere!

[aposematic-jessica]

There was an interesting situation at work recently. I'm gonna keep it vague for privacy, but basically the husband of a patient threatened to shoot hospital employees after he perceived they were ignoring his wife's situation. Which, looking at the case, people were like, yeah, this patient was in prolonged discomfort and had delayed care over multiple shifts due to factors that weren't malicious but were careless. Basically, the task that would have helped this patient was classic "third thing on your to do list." It had to be done, but it didn't need to be done urgently. The impact of not doing this task likely wouldn't be felt on your shift. The work of doing this task would require the coordination of a couple different people. Very easy to just keep pushing it back, and because it wasn't an emergency (until it was), it just kept being pushed back.

You could do a root-cause analysis of the whole thing (and we have) to really break down what happened, but ultimately the effect was the same as if the neglect had been malicious. I'm sympathetic to the husband, as were a lot of people in this situation, because, yes, hospital staff dropped the ball in a way that meant the patient was in unnecessary pain and discomfort with delay of care for over a day, despite multiple requests from patient and family to address the situation. The husband reacted emotionally to a situation where he'd felt helpless and ignored. Institutional neglect ground away at him until he verbally snapped.

And the way he snapped was to tell staff, "I'm going to come back with a gun and shoot you all for what you've done." Which is about as explicit a threat as you can get. Does he get to keep visiting the hospital after that? How do we be fair to him, to the patient, and to the staff? He probably didn't mean it. Right? But how do you ignore a statement like that? If he does come back and commit a shooting, how will you justify ignoring his threat? But does one sentence said at an emotional breaking point define him? How much more traumatic are we going to make this hospital stay?

A couple years back, I worked on a floor a few hours after a patient had been escorted away for inappropriate behavior--by the way, you can't imagine how inappropriate the behavior has to be for us to do that. I have never seen another case like this. That patient said he was going to come back with a gun and shoot nurses that he identified by name. This didn't come to pass. Whether that was because the patient didn't mean it or changed his mind or was prevented or simply was not mentally coordinated enough to follow through on the plan, I don't know. I do know that shift fucking sucked. I remember the charge nurse telling me that it wasn't our jobs to die for our patients. If there was shooting, she told me to run.

There was another situation recently involving a patient in restraints. I despise restraints. I think the closest legitimate use for them is in ICUs for stopping delirious patients from ripping out their ventilators, and that should still be a last resort. I discontinue restraints whenever I inherit them, and I am very good at fixing problems before restraint seem like the only solution. Having said that, I work in a hospital that uses restraints, and so I am complicit in their use. Recently I walked into a situation involving restraints with zero context for what was happening, just that there was a security situation involving a patient who had been deemed for some reason to lack capacity to make medical decisions. They were on a court hold and a surrogate med override, which means they cannot refuse certain medications. The whole situation was horrible, and I've spent the days since it happened thinking about every way I personally failed that patient and what to do different next time.

At one point, the patient called one of the nurses a bitch, and the nurse said, "hey cmon, that's not nice," and the patient replied, "if you were in hell, would you call the devil a nice name?" And yeah! Fair! It is insane to expect people who are actively being denied their autonomy to be polite to us as we do it.

Then there was another patient on the behavioral health floor who got put in seclusion. It's so frustrating, by the way, that staff put them in seclusion because it would have been extremely easy to avoid escalating the situation to the point that it got to. But the situation did escalate, and by the time the patient was locked in a seclusion room, they were shouting slurs and kicking the walls. Other patients were scared of the patient even when they were calm because the patient talked endlessly about guns, poisons, bombs, etc. When I checked in with the patient in the seclusion room, they called me a cog in a fascist machine just following orders. And I was like, yeah. Fair.

Another patient: one night when I was charge nurse, I replied to a security situation where a patient trapped a staff member in the room and tried to choke her. The staff member escaped unharmed. She told me later that the patient had been verbally aggressive to her all day, but she hadn't told anyone because she knew he was having a bad day, she didn't want to get him in trouble, and she didn't think anything was actually going to happen. She said, "Patients are mean all the time."

And another case: I had a different patient with the ultimate combination of factors for violent agitation--confused, needed a translator, was hard of hearing so the translator was of little use, in pain, feverish, scared, withdrawing from alcohol, hadn't slept in two days, separated from his caregiver who had also just been hospitalized--the whole shebang. He shouted at us that we were human trafficking him and could not be reoriented to where he actually was or that he was sick. I tried all my usual methods of deescalation, which I am typically very good at. I could not get him to calm down. He had a hospital bed where the headboard pulls out so you can use it as a brace during compressions. He ripped that out and threw it at the window, trying to shatter the glass. At that point, with the permission of his medical surrogate and with help from security, I forcibly gave him IV medication for agitation and withdrawal. He slept all night with a sitter at his bedside to monitor him. I pondered when medication passed over the line into chemical restraint, but I stand by the decisions I made that shift.

Last one: I had a different patient who was dying who had a child with a warrant out for arrest. We didn't know for what, and no one investigated further because no one wanted to find out anything that might prevent this person from visiting his dying parent. Obviously, "warrant for arrest" could mean literally anything, although it was significant enough that security was aware of the situation and wanted us aware as well, but I was struck by how proactively the staff protected his visitation rights and extended him grace. Everyone was very aware of how easily the wrong word could start a process that would result in a parent and child losing the chance to say goodbye to each other.

In the case of the husband who threatened a mass shooting, you'd be surprised how many of the staff advocated for him to keep all visitation rights. After all, the patient wanted him there.

Violence--verbal, physical, active, passive, institutional, direct, inadvertent, malicious--pervades the hospital. It begets itself. You provoke people into violence, and then use that violence to justify why you must do actions that further provoke them. And also people are not helpless victims of circumstance, mindlessly reacting to whatever is the most noxious stimuli. But also we aren't not that. You have to interrupt the cycle somewhere. I think grace is one of the most powerful things we can give each other. I also think people own guns. Institutions have enormous overt and covert power that can feel impossible to resist, and they are made up of people with necks you can wring, and those people are the agents of that unstoppable power, and those people don't have unlimited agency and make choices every day about how and when to exercise it. We'll never solve this. You literally have to think about it forever, each and every time, and honor each success and failure by learning something new for the next inevitable moral dilemma that'll be along any minute now and is probably already here.

[aposematic-jessica]

guys level with me

how bad would it be if i ended up sexually attracted to the evolution of dramatic plumage in birds. i was just watching a nature documentary and i felt feelings. feelings ive only felt before when watching a man do mediocre sex with a woman. the feeling of "if only i had what he has, i could do amazing things". is this cisgender? if im attracted to the plumage dimorphism in some bird species, but it's the male plumage, that's straight, right?

[aposematic-jessica]

The biggest misconception in public schools is that literary analysis is about proving you can be right or wrong about a book you read

Literary analysis isn’t about the book

It’s not even about being right

It’s about performing an investigation and presenting your case to the jury

It doesn’t matter if your defendant killed that guy or not. If you can convince the jury he didn’t, you’ve won

And the incredible life skill of spinning bulletproof bullshit out your ass with a handful of facts and a prayer is soooooooo much more valuable than anyone’s ever gonna tell you

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[aposematic-jessica]

Excerpt from texting my gf:

“…Today i went through the friends likes reels [on insta] and sent out a couple to folks I haven’t talked to in a while. Every few weeks i get this urge to catch up with people but it’s kind of hard to manage, so i took a note from my therapist and now i try to send people reels more often. I like trying to find the right ones for my friends.” (iMessage, 5-4-25)

I like doing this, it makes me feel like a more engaged friend. It’s so hard to keep up with the people who used to be my whole life now that I don’t see them almost every day. I hate how much of their lives I miss. I used to know things before they even hit texts. I miss feeling like our hearts and lives were intertwined. And I feel guilty and frustrated and sad that I’m part of the reason we don’t have that anymore. It’s so hard. I don’t remember, or I don’t want to answer texts, or I don’t know how to send engaging messages. I’m bad at remembering to make plans. But I love them still, so much. I want to be part of their lives for forever. I think of them often and I brag about them and I have such joyful memories with them.

[aposematic-jessica]

I came up with this three-way table to help me (and now you, if you want) to rate things out of 5 stars. I was thinking of books and films when I made it, but you can probably use it for other stuff.

The idea is that you rate the thing on how much stuff you loved and how much stuff you hated, and those things weight against each other. There's only one way to get 5 stars or 1 star, so those should end up as the rarest ratings, wtih 3 stars being the most common.

'Spicy' means that the thing inspires emotion, whether positive or negative, while 'bland' means it doesn't affect you much either way.

An example of a 3-star (spicy) - for me personally - would be the Twilight series, because there's plenty of garbage in there but also some things that are like crack to me. I can't think of an example of a 3 star (bland) because by nature they don't stick in the mind.

(This also assumes giving 0 stars isn't allowed. That'd throw it out of whack...)

[aposematic-jessica]

𝐂𝐨𝐬𝐦𝐨𝐠𝐲𝐫𝐚𝐥

Whirling round the universe.