bugscrew-diary

[bugscrew-diary]

Blogpost on Girlhood rewritten 4 sydney eheheehe

I started making this post a while ago and then didn't because I had no real reason to finish it but now I do so here u go hehe.

I've noticed that many of the women I know (myself included) had phases where they believed they were not women. When I try to explain this to cisgender people who haven't experienced that, it goes over their heads a little bit. I think they believe that very few people genuinely struggle with realizing a queer identity, and that most people just "know."

When I think of my early teen perspective, I think it actually makes sense that I jumped to the conclusion that I may not be a woman once I realized that my thoughts on gender do not align with most people. When you're in middle school, coming into an understanding that the arbitrary traits our society assigns gender to are actually pretty illogical is hard to do without it making you think you must be transgender to think that way. When you're in middle school, the only other people you know of that think that way are probably transgender.

But recently, I've been thinking about it a little differently. Not to say "Younger me should have known!" because I think it's good to contemplate and experiment with your own gender, even if the conclusion is that there's nothing to be changed. I've seen this discourse online before so it's not like it hasn't been said before, but that few years in online queer communities where it was pretty much exclusively about what label you wore and what pride flag you used was really harmful to queer ideology as a whole. Instead of breaking down the walls that queer people feel trapped by, it just added slightly bigger walls around the initial walls. "You're either this or that" became "You're either this, that, or maybe one of these 55 other very specific labels. Also you have to pick one or you're not really like us."

Some people were kind of beyond the idea of forcing one specific gender label, but not quite beyond the hyper-specificity of it all, so they would pick a few different labels. But then, those people would get piled on, it would cause a bunch of fighting and discourse and accusations of bigotry, and all of this was probably really frustrating for older queer people to see. They were watching a bunch of young people pass the "One size fits all" approach to identity, but get stuck at "These few sizes should fit all, but if they don't, we'll just make more until we get everyone!" I wish my younger self could have seen a community of queer people who understood that identity can be, and pretty much always is, an extremely individual experience.

I think this wave of identity-forcing and then identity-policing I grew up seeing made it really hard for me to accept that I didn't really need a one-word answer to my identity if I didn't find or even want one. Before I struggled with my identity, I felt the same way about myself as I do now. I don't think my "gender" has changed with my ideology shift.

I remember liking my brother's toys more than mine. We had action figures, mini Halo figurines, and Legos. I was introduced to gaming through watching my brother play. I can't recall a single toy of my own because they simply weren't as impactful for me. I'm really trying to think right now but I can't remember any of my own toys at all. Before writing this, I think I would have described my childhood gender experience as disliking "girly" things. But now that I really run it through my brain, I realize that I just didn't care about them and I liked my brother's experience better. Any perceived "dislike" of girl things was probably just because I felt like I had to pick a side. I remember calling myself a tomboy despite always dressing like a girl. It was just the way I felt about things.

Even now, most of my favorite things about myself and favorite pastimes are what people consider masculine. I've picked up more feminine traits over the years because I'm more comfortable with femininity, but they're nowhere near the most important things about me or what comes to mind when people think of me. Being a little girl unimpacted by femininity made it hard to think I could just be that, someone who absorbs femininity passively without rejecting it. I love feminine and girly things when I see other people engage with them, but applying them to myself doesn't really work for me. I used to think if I wanted to be "feminine," it would be absurdly more effort and useless to achieve that, but it turns out I just don't like it that much.

I hope this suffices sydney sowwy it took so long

[bugscrew-diary]

I have been away.

A lot has happened since I last wrote a post here. It has been 3 weeks now. I actually wrote a chunk of a post about the kinds of crazy dreams I have, but I didn't finish it so it's just in my drafts now. There definitely is a reason for my initial neglect towards writing posts, but the extended absence is just a product of me breaking the habit of writing every day before it even had a chance to form. I don't really need to expand on that though, because I've talked about the problem of my habits in an earlier post.

The initial absence was caused by the unfortunate fact that I gave myself a little bit of weed induced psychosis. The actual weed psychosis part sucked but really, the bad part was the week long battle with debilitating anxiety and mild psychotic delusions that followed. It got a little better every day, but the first few days were excruciating. I couldn't do anything without it causing a panic attack. However, I think it was worse the first few days because the main source of the anxiety was that I thought I just fucked my brain forever and I was just going to have horrible anxiety and moderate psychosis for the rest of my life. It went away though, so I'm back.

I wanted to write about all of it the first day after it happened, but I couldn't even text my friends a brief, just one-sentence explanation for what happened without triggering a new panic attack. Writing a whole post about it was definitely out of the question, especially because I still believed some of the delusions caused by the psychosis and I felt anxious about the fact that I would be writing about things that I knew weren't true but still somewhat believed. But the anxiety is gone now and I feel inclined to write about the experience and what it felt like to have MIP, a random acute anxiety disorder, and delusions that genuinely scared me.

It started after getting way too high and seeing a tweet about Lily Rose Depp. I didn't know what she looked like, but I know people think she's pretty so I was curious to look at her instagram. I scrolled through a few pictures and quickly became infatuated with the fact that you couldn't see her neck in most of the pictures, and if you could, some other part of her body that I can't remember anymore was covered. It's a weird thing to become fixated on, but I did and the more I scrolled, the more my suspicion was confirmed. I believed she wasn't real. I thought she was some kind of doll or mannequin, being placed in different outfits and poses for pictures. This then sent me down a spiral, believing that no celebrity was real and they were all these mannequins that just get toted around for pictures. I still don't know why, but this thought scared me and led to the craziest panic attack since my shrooms trip went bad, and it actually might have been worse than that.

I finally calmed myself down after about 2 or 3 hours of trying, walking around in my house, seemingly in the clear only to go back to my bed and have another panic attack. I thought I was gonna be like that forever, but after a few hours of spiraling, I realized that I was not in the headspace to be deciding whether I thought that was true. I finally somehow calmed myself down enough to sleep and decided to deal with it in the morning. When I woke up, the first few hours were okay, but then I quickly realized it was just as bad as the night before and I was having constant panic attacks all day. This made the thought that I was stuck like this forever even worse because it was seemingly being proven by the fact that this was now a 2 day ordeal. Plus, I still believed the delusions that I also simultaneously knew weren't true. It's a weird thing to experience, wholeheartedly believing that something could be true when you also wholeheartedly understand it to be factually untrue. It's especially strange when that thought is unsettling or even anxiety-inducing for absolutely no reason.

I think this was all so scary for me because my brain doesn't typically operate emotionally and especially not anxiously anymore. I used to have pretty severe anxiety about everything, but now I think of myself as an extremely rational person. This doesn't mean smarter, I just mean I tend to lead with logic (or attempted logic if my conclusion is wrong, I suppose), rather than emotion. It is very rare that I make a decision, big or small, by way of emotion. It is even rarer that I don't take something I perceived and mentally expand upon it until I've drained all the intellectual life out of it, or I get distracted by something else. Both of these processes were smashed to pieces for almost a week straight because 1) the conclusions I would come to when I would try to expand upon something were completely illogical and deluded and I knew it, and 2) I was completely unable to mentally expand upon anything without it triggering some amount of anxiety because of that, but I was still trying because this is just how I operate. It's not even really "trying," it just happens.

To be fair, the reason the psychotic delusions stayed bad was because they were triggered by the Coffeezilla video about the IShowSpeed crypto scam situation. The part that brought the anxiety back was the fact that he brought a fake Cristiano Ronaldo on stream to promote the scam he was a part of. This was literally my fake celebrity delusion from being put into real life practice, right in front of me, literally 12 hours after it spawned in my mind. This situation genuinely made me anxious almost every day for over a week after the initial break, but honestly I think that was warranted considering what an insane fucking coincidence that was. I ended up watching a bunch more Coffeezilla videos after that though, which is really cool because he's genuinely a great YouTube journalist and it's nice to have that now.

The true saviors of that week were TMG, though. Their podcast has been my go-to safe media for over 3 years now. It might even be 4 at this point. Even on the initial panic attack night, where nothing seemed to be able to make it stop, I used their podcast to help calm down and it actually worked for a little bit. It completely worked every single day I had anxiety after the first night until it finally went away. If I need something to fall asleep to, it's always them. I don't know what it is about them that is so comforting to me, but they encapsulate and deliver true calmness for me. I listen to both podcasts every week and it's still not enough. I've never stuck with a content creator like I've stuck with them and it's not even through any effort. They're just part of my routines now. I appreciate them so much and I hope I have the money to go to one of Noel's comedy shows soon.

Anyway, I think I've said enough considering I'm going on tangents now but I'll have more to say tomorrow or the next day because I have a job interview and my friend who lives far away now is coming home tomorrow. Plus, I didn't even write about how I bumped my car into someone else's 2 days ago and I'm being unjustly held liable for damages I didn't cause <333.

Also, it'll be a slightly more difficult post, and it'll probably take me a few days to write, but I want to write about stan culture and its relationship with mental health and now corporations. I'll be writing a fully fleshed out essay about it, but I don't have my thoughts organized at all, so I think a post on here will be a good place to start that. I also want to write a post about Charles Leclerc soon as cringe as it sounds but I have much to say about my own thoughts, my mindset surrounding him being an actually pretty good thing to frame it around so we'll see if my cringe detectors will let this one slide and let me post that to the internet when I finally write it.

Ok byeeeee.

[bugscrew-diary]

Late night ramblings about some work and some trauma and some nightmares... all the same really.

I said in my last post that I would be going out to do deliveries after I wrote the post, and I actually did try. I scheduled my delivery time and was about to walk out the door, but there was snow on the ground. I didn't expect to see it at all considering I hadn't looked outside all day and it was the first snow of the year. I think this wouldn't be a problem for most people but driving on snow scares me, especially with the context that it was 33 degrees and my weather app predicted rain. The only thing that sprung out in my head at that point was There's just gonna be ice everywhere and you're gonna crash your car. To be fair to myself, this is a valid fear because I crashed my car in these exact conditions last year. So moral of the story, I didn't go do deliveries.

I think I decided as soon as I saw the snow that I wasn't going, but I stood for a few minutes lying to myself that I might gather the courage and just go work. My dad was sitting on the couch and I have a weird fear of disappointing him, especially in small contexts like that. It's just a few hours of work, but in my head, rejecting that in front of my dad is just a display of weakness and laziness. This is a bigger thing for me than I usually realize. Every time I am put in the position I was put in last night, I feel like I am 14 again, suicidal, being taken to the psych ward because my last straw was being called weak for quitting my first job.

In reality, I made the right choice then. There's literally no good reason for a 14 year old to be working 10-12 hour work days in the blazing sun, even if it did pay a lot. And that's not even the reason I quit. The real reason was that one of my coworkers was taking advantage of the fact that he knew I liked him and would do a lot to gain his approval. His job was difficult so he would always ask me to help him, and of course I would do it because I thought he was asking me to come with him because we were friends. But as the days went on, he asked me to do more and more, and eventually, I was basically just doing his job for him while neglecting my own. It actually got to a point where I didn't want to do so much of his work anymore, but I also didn't really know how to just say no yet. I was just an anxious kid. Saying no felt like telling someone you smashed their phone by accident or something.

It culminated one evening, when he asked me to help him with some of his work at the end of the shift. It really wasn't even a big deal this time because I typically finished my work early, and the coworkers who did the same job as me usually just left when they were finished. I had to wait there though, because I went to work with my cousins, who did jobs that required them to stay longer. My coworker needed to carry some trash bags to the dumpster out back, so we each took a bag and started walking. I started to notice that I was getting some looks from other coworkers, but didn't really understand why. I turned around and my stomach felt like it could have actually dropped out of my body. I was hauling this heavy ass, filled to the brim trash bag that I could barely carry. When I turned around, I saw that he was carrying just one, barely used trash bag in one hand, and a milkshake in the other. Everyone knew this was happening right behind me, except for me. It was such an obvious thing for someone to have noticed, it looked like I was doing it on purpose. Doing the bulk of his work while he simply watched me. There was no effort for him. He was getting paid to watch me do his job instead, for everyone to watch me do his job instead. He humiliated me.

He humiliated me there and it wasn't even the worst part yet. Well, logically, that was the worst part. However, the worst part for little 14 year old me was that after all of that, when we were all going home, we saw each other again, and he didn't even say bye to me. I waved and he looked directly at me and acted like I didn't even exist. Like the eye contact we made was nothing but the coincidence of his eyes passing me before landing on something else. Sometimes I still think he must have just not seen me, but I know that's not the case. I felt humiliated, and weak, and taken advantage of after that. I was nervous to go back to work the next week. I didn't want to ever see him again, so I made sure I didn't. I just never went back. Anyway, when my dad found out I quit, I was too embarrassed to tell him the real reason. I don't even think I fully understood that what happened to me was wrong. I don't think I could have coherently explained why I quit because I didn't fully realize why my fear of him was actually valid until much later.

But I actually think made the right choice yesterday too, anyway. It's not always about courage. I would have been driving around in the dark in conditions I didn't feel comfortable in, going on streets I had never gone to before, and probably encountering situations that could end in a crash, one way or another. It might have been perfectly safe to go out, but I don't think I made the wrong choice by deciding it wasn't. What's a few hours of work in the grand scheme of things? I don't think there was a "wrong" choice.

I think if there was a fear of losing something, it was the motivation I had at the time of writing yesterday's post. I struggle with losing momentum, but it's usually because there's no momentum to begin with. I trick myself into thinking that any effort at something is "momentum," so I stop trying to make myself do the thing almost immediately because I trick myself into thinking I'll just be in the swing of things forever now. I thought because I got this sudden burst of motivation, I'd be killing that "momentum" by refusing to go out and do deliveries and putting it off until today. That's actually not what happened at all because I went out and did deliveries twice today.

The morning was pretty slow. I woke up around 9am from a really unsettling and quite gory dream. I don't remember every little detail like I do for some of my dreams, but what I do remember is that the dream was basically about a little boy. He couldn't have been older than 10. The dream was framed almost like a verbal story about him even though I was seeing images of what was being told to me. It was about how much of a good kid he was and how he was good at sports and I think he had superpowers or something but basically the moral of the story is that he seemed like a really good kid, but he got bullied by another kid. And then the dream took a sudden turn because it moved to a classroom and I was basically told that he was murdered by his bully and I saw his gory body just dead in the classroom. It wasn't even a body at that point, it was just gory sludge that I only knew was the remains of the boy through the context of what I was told in the dream. I actually just remembered the boy had a name, Joey. Anyway, I was suddenly in the classroom and I ran out into the hallway crying and trying to hide in a room. I cried harder in this dream than I ever have in real life. I remember I was crying so hard that it caused some kind of physical effect but I don't remember what it was, just that it was bad.

I guess I had formed some kind of connection with this imaginary boy over the course of the dream, because even after I woke up I felt really bad. I knew if I wanted to catch lunchtime for deliveries, I would have to get up soon, but I spent a really long time just consoling myself from the nightmare with sweeter daydreams. It's a sordid excuse considering, valid or not, I blew off deliveries last night, and at that point I was just either being a baby about it, or really just enjoying the milder and kinder morning daydreams. However, that is the real reason I was late on starting lunchtime deliveries even if it is a stupid reason. I don't actually think it's stupid, though, so I don't know why I wrote that as if it should be negative. I still did my deliveries and even went out again for dinner and killed it for a Wednesday.

I don't know, this has just devolved into rambling and it's taken me way too long to write so I'd better just send it off. I want to talk more about feminism and how I feel about my friends soon, so hopefully I'll actually give them each separate posts dedicated to their topics and not just keep doing this daily log of all my thoughts for the day. I do also kind of like this format though, I just have to get all these thoughts out so I can make them shorter and have them not take me over an hour to write.

Hopefully I'll have a dream to log tomorrow or something. Goodbye.

-parker