ezra-autumn

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I feel like if I were a flavor, I would be sauerkraut.

No further explanation

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rebellious gifted kid -> weird disappointing adult pipeline

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i’ve reached a weirdddd stage of transition where other queer people see me and treat me like a guy but cis het people still constantly misgender me and treat me like a woman

I really need get past this stage faster bc this is jarring af

post brought to you by a queer person I know being genuinely surprised that I asked them if i could pick up their dog instead of just doing it, and then when I asked the dog if i could pick her up and put her back down when she signaled she was done being held, her person thanked me for paying attention to the dog’s signals.

And then immediately getting called “dear” and “honey” by various employees at the grocery store.

it’s like getting the worst of both worlds rn

😩😮‍💨🙃

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I think Americans need to understand how normal it is in other countries to have extremely limited hours of operation to ensure the sanity and health of workers are kept in tact. We are so accustomed and entitled to demanding people’s time that we forget that they’re… y’know… people

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there’s a wild narrative about trans people out there that it’s supposed to have been obvious to ourselves and everyone around us from and early age that we were trans based on adherence to incredibly arbitrary gender roll stereotypes.

Literally even the diagnostic questions include things like “did you hate pink and love trucks??”

That’s stupid. Gender has nothing to do with colors and stereotypical interests, also lots of us do what we get postive feedback for, so even though little kid me knew I felt like a boy, I didn’t know why or what that meant so after i got constantly told I wasn’t a boy little kid me went “ok, how do I girl then?” and observed and tried very hard to girl. I assumed it was a skillset I had to learn. For the next 20+ years of my life I obsessively studied fashion and makeup and social rituals and found the aspects of girlhood and then womenhood that I enjoyed and leaned hard into those things to fight the constant undercurrent of discomfort and disconnection.

It wasn’t until I pretty suddenly realized only very recently that most women don’t think that being and feeling like a woman is a Very Difficult Skillset and Very Exhausting Performance, that I realized that there could even be other options and ways of being for me that would feel genuinely a million times easier, more authentic, and come to me so much more naturally.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t have a love for makeup and fashion and style and all those things anymore, but it means that I get to explore those things as me and through the lens of just enjoying stuff and not trying to utilize those things as a tool to perform womanhood as convincingly as possible.

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Leaving this here to reference later.

It’s interesting that in 31 years of being alive, this is the first time I’ve ever thought to simply google “why does it feel like there’s a rotten black hole inside of me instead of a soul” and apparently that’s actually a whole thing. 🙃

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I personally wanna see less ‘you are not a burden/it’s not work to love you’ and more ‘you are worth the work it takes to love you.’ I KNOW I’m a burden sometimes. that isn’t such a terrible thing! humans are strong. we can carry burdens. and it is work for me to be there for my friends, but it’s work I’m willing to do.

we need to acknowledge this because pretending love isn’t work will never make people like me feel less guilty for accepting love. we need to talk about it so people don’t feel bad for having boundaries and not always being up to do the work. we need to accept it so we can properly appreciate what others do for us and what we’re doing for them.

yes it does take work to love you. but guess what? you still deserve love, and you deserve people who are willing to do the work to love you. it doesn’t make you bad. all love take work. and everyone is worth it.

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i thought of a perfect way to explain why I was so reluctant to come out to my family about my transition. For me, realizing I am trans was a huge relief and something to celebrate. It was like after decades of suffering and feeling deeply uncomfortable in my body and not really understanding why, I finally had an answer and a real pathway towards finally feeling better and more at home in my body. I was and am so happy and so excited to finally understand myself and become connected to my inner self identity, and I really started to love myself for the first time.

Unfortunately my family took the news that I had figured out that I’m trans like I was delivering a terrible turn of events or a deep dark secret or something. My mom literally cried about it on multiple occasions and my dad simply dismissed it in a really disrespectful way. It sucked the joy out of me for long stretches of time no matter how much I tried not to let them get to me because you want your family to want whats best for your happiness and celebrate your victories with you. I don’t understand how someone who claims to love me could look into the face of my joy and happiness and then react so negatively.

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i feel like i’m accidentally starting to look like the kind of boy that plays a portable brightly colored kid’s keyboard in an indie folkpunk band and is probably also an alcoholic. 😂💚🥲 This journey of self individuating and identity formation is a rough one, but I’ll get there eventually. I just feel like a turtle about it

🐢💨

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Testosterone and Emotions:

I went on HRT with the knowledge that a lot of people report their emotional range changing and as someone who used to cry Every Day over pretty much everything, I was kind of relieved and excited about this.

Now, let me try and explain where I’m at now and what i’m experiencing now 4+ months on T.

My emotional range has completely changed. It’s not more limited, it’s just like not really comparable. It’s not on the same graph. It’s like trying to chart the sweetness of candy vs the sweetness of fruit. It’s apples and oranges or whatever people say. They’re not the same thing.

1) Fear: I can tell where the fear used to be and I can remember it, but when i’m in mildly scary situations it just isn’t there anymore. Walking to my car in a mostly empty parking garage at night, i’m aware it’s not totally safe and I’m wary, but I have to remember to be wary. I’m not just automatically on guard with adrenaline making me jumpy and my heart racing and stuff. There’s this weird feeling of like extra thick skin? i know it’s not physically different. I didn’t get magically stronger or less vulnerable or at any less risk, but I just don’t /feel/ vulnerable in the same way. I feel a little delusional-ly invincible in a way the reminds me of being a teenager and doing dumb shit just because it felt good to be alive.

2) Sadness/stress/etc. is all internal and implosive instead of external and explosive. I don’t feel any less sad over sad things or any less stressed over stressful things, but now I feel it in a sort of internalized sinkhole and a feeling of shutting down and my brain just like slowing and molasses-ing. Crying doesn’t come easily any if it does it’s like one tear after a long long while of feeling miserable.

3) sex drive: understanding for the first time in my entire life why people call sex a basic human need. I was kind of like take it or leave it about sex/masturbation before this and now it’s like a basic maintenance item on my list of stuff I have to do for myself to feel functional like showering and brushing my teeth and eating. It’s wild.

4) internal perceptions of my own strength: still figuring this out but when i forget to over-think it, i can open jars easier and lift stuff i wouldn’t have attempted before. I’m hoping i adjust to this enough to start being more confident about my ability to build and use more upper body strength soon. The weirder part of my adjusted self perception of my own strength is that intellectually i know i’d still lose most fights, but emotionally I’ve caught myself mentally up for a potential fight in a way I haven’t been since i was a kid. Even though i’m a nonviolent person and I definitely do not actually want to fight anyone, I’m like “yeah but i could though.” and I have to be like “sit tf down me, you would still lose and it would not be a good time.”

5) anger: still haven’t noticed anything there yet. Anger isn’t really on my emotional range that often. usually it’s tied to sensory overload for me and i’ve been working pretty hard on shaping my life to accommodate my sensory needs as much as possible.

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https://youtu.be/hL2tPPFdsHM

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One of the absolute weirdest/most reality shifting effect of T on me so far is actually how much less scared of the dark I am now.

It’s so hard to explain to people the sheer paralyzing terror I used to feel confronted with a dark space or having to go out outside at night.

It was visceral, like it felt like my veins were made of cold acid and I’d literally see creatures and shapes in the darkness, not like in a vague shadowy way either, just like whole on fully embodied beings.

Now it’s like i look out at my dark yard and think “yeah me 4 months ago would be really scared of this.” but i don’t see things and noises raise concern and like mild worry but my adrenaline doesn’t peak at all and I don’t FEEL the fear the way I used to.

Maybe it’s just the effect of being way less depressed overall, and maybe it’s actually just changing my brain chemistry, but I love it. So many things just feel Right now like my body was really supposed to be running on T this whole time and it was actually made for this.

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I’ve been reading a lot of autobiographies by trans authors recently and honestly feeling really grateful for being autistic because it makes me really bad at secrets.

I imagine if I was allistic it probably would have taken me even longer to come out. All these authors came out in their 40s after a lifetime of battling down the truth they knew about themselves all along but didn’t want to admit.

That’s not how it went for me. I didn’t understand my truth until a few years ago. That’s not to say that I wasn’t experiencing it and it wasn’t there all along in retrospect, but rather that I didn’t understand my own discomfort or have the language to express it until a few years ago. And then as soon as I did, I ended up telling everyone pretty quickly all things considered.

I was scared of how my family would react, and I was anxious about how I’d fit into my community as I changed to match the person I felt like inside so I took “coming out” slowly for me, but not telling everyone was never really an option. I can’t hold multiple realities inside myself at once without becoming miserable and exhausted.

One of my major sources of stress as a teenager and young adult was having to carry around fake me + real me all the time and constantly battle between them and maintain fake me when I didn’t even really like “her”

As soon as I realized fake me was a burden that I literally Did Not Need to carry around to survive anymore, I just stopped being able to do it. I literally could not reconstruct “her” even under pressure anymore. I see old pictures of myself and I actually do not know “her.” It seems weird to say, but it makes sense. I didn’t recognize her as me then and I don’t recognize her now.

I used to take hundreds of selfies, maybe thousands, and draw obsessive self portraits, and I loved when other people drew me or took pictures of me, but I simultaneously almost always strongly disliked like 99% of pictures of me. I tried to explain that it wasn’t vanity. I wasn’t obsessed with how i looked because i thought i looked good. It was because I literally couldn’t see myself.

I had no idea how I looked, and I thought that if i just looked hard enough or tried to really understand my appearance the way i would study and draw anything else that i wanted to really know well, then I might finally figure it out and be able to actually see myself. If i could come to understand what other people saw when they looked at me, then I might be able to become connected to my sense of self and I might be able to recognize myself.

It turns out the problem wasn’t that I couldn’t see what was in front of me, it was that what was in front of me Wasn’t Me.

I’m so relieved to finally be living in a body that I actually recognize.

I no longer feel strange and unreal in front of mirrors, i’m just there. Sometimes the uncanny valley effect will still hit me and i’ll slide out of my body and accidentally hyper-focus on the stuff that isn’t quite right yet, but it’s a lot easier for me now to shift the lens back into focus and look through the dysphoria to see myself again. I can focus on my sharpening jaw and my soft golden blonde mustache and my fuzzy eyebrows and peter pan haircut and i can put on a shirt and feel it flat against my chest and I can draw on a bunch of freckles and feel like the scrappy boy I never really got to be, and I can flex my muscles and feel how T is helping them grow and become strong with an ease I never could have imagined.

The author of the book I’m reading right now echoed my own thoughts when she said “what kind of woman would I be when I never got to have a girlhood.” I used to think that too, a lot, all the time. I thought “i can’t possibly be a trans man when I never got to be a trans boy. I can’t even fathom feeling connected to manhood without getting to grow up through a boyhood.”

But.. i’m starting to feel it. I don’t know, maybe it’ll come and go like a weird tide depending on context. I still don’t feel like a “man” around other people or out in public, but sometimes.. sometimes I feel something that feels like i can envision my future and i might just feel like more of a “man” than i really thought was possible.

The other day I was on the train and i found myself standing in a group of guys between the two train cars and none of them looked at me, even when i went to reach for the same handle as another guy at the same time. He didn’t do the awkward smile or eye contact thing, i wasn’t out of place among that group of men, and it felt so comfortable and normal and good in a way that I can hardly describe. I felt concrete and grounded and real in a way I haven’t really ever experienced out in public.

This journey has had a lot of unexpected twists, and I’m starting to learn to just lean into it with an open mind and see where it goes.

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depression sucks because even when everything’s great and by all means I should be just like relaxing and enjoying an expanse of calm and happy time, part of my brain is always like “ah, it’s quiet in here, my time to attack has come.” And then comes the literal flood of every insecurity and every bit of self destructive over thinking.

And logically I get that it’s the opposite of constructive and it literally creates problems that aren’t there, but emotionally as soon as it gets too quiet and I’ve been alone just a little bit too long, I’ll be picking at the seams of my happiness like a subconscious stim, and I can see myself doing it and tell myself to cut it tf off and stop. But like any other subconscious stim, usually you don’t notice it till you’re already doing it and at that point it’s got a foothold.

Like pleaseee brain chemicals, can I please just enjoy resting and reading a book and like being cozy at home? It’s not fair to me or anyone else that I’m so dependent on not being left alone too long. It’s an unfair amount of pressure to put on other people, and it’s just plain annoying that I can’t seem to stop doing it even when I’m perfectly aware of what’s happening.

On the bright side, being on T has helped with one major being-alone-issue which is my fear of the dark. It’s definitely not gone, but recently it hasn’t felt quite so oppressive. Like me on T feels like I could maybe fight the darkness apparitions or something, so that’s really cool. There’s a certain totally irrational self confidence or inner strength that’s gotten into me since starting T that makes it easier to open jars and tell the shadow monsters to get bent apparently.

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Just a little screen cap of one of my recent Masc Faecore fashion videos that I really liked 🧡

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Listening to the podcast Transmission today and one of the guests, a trans-woman, said something that shook me, because I just keep stumbling onto more and more obvious signals of my trans-ness from childhood and like I know I shouldn’t be surprised or anything at this point, but it’s like “oh that’s a trans thing” just constantly.

she said she used to look over at the girls playing on the playground and wish she could join them instead of the boys because they always looked they they were having so much more fun.

I was exactly like this but the opposite. I was always so upset and mad that the boys wouldn’t let me join them and that I had to do girl stuff and hang out with the girls. Not because I didn’t like girls, i did! i thought they were great.

But I just didn’t belong or relate at all to groups of girls, and i always felt a lot more natural and normal and less lost around boys as a kid, except when the boys would point out that i wasn’t a boy and treat me differently or exclude me.

I ended up finding friends who felt the same way (outsiders to either the girls or the boys) and we made our own playgroup during recess (no surprise that that entire group is now out as queer) but I remember so intensely and vividly this feeling of gazing across the playground at the group you knew you were supposed to be part of, but knowing you wouldn’t be allowed because everyone saw you as the wrong gender.