#god I'm still feeling these in my chest

[mokutone]

your art makes me wanna start testosterone

i can't read tone well, so this is either an incredibly touching ask, or an extremely funny one, and in the absence of confirmation: both!

i'm in a chatty mood, so i'll share some thoughts about testosterone and my art.

i liked being on testosterone a lot. i had an IM injection every two weeks (on tuesdays!) and because that's a sizeable dose every 14 days that slowly disperses, it can cause some mood fluctuations (every other friday i would have a crisis about not feeling like the world had a place for me in it) but even those were far more manageable than the ones that would come with my previous and current monthly hormone cycle (every month i spend a solid week thinking the world will never have a place for me in it)

It gave me a patchy little bit of scruff on my chin and a whispy mustache under my nose that still struggles on, despite adversity!

It redistributed my fat a little bit, but that's long since gone back to pre-T shape.

it lowered my voice! that hasn't changed :^)! even if i never go back on t, that won't change. it was the thing i most wanted, and its the one i'm most grateful for. Pre-T, I didn't speak much. I'm getting better and better at talking and getting more and more comfortable communicating with people because of it.

having been off t now for 3 years, i don't pass anymore—not as a cis man, or a cis woman, certainly not as anything approximating straight. if people look at me and see anything, i'd hazard a guess that they see me as A Queer (the noun—for all it's complicated connotations).

i'm not surprised that my art might make somebody want to start testosterone! a lot of my art was made out of the aching grief that came with being kicked off of testosterone, and how neatly that loss of autonomy over my own body knits in with yamato's loss of autonomy over his own.

how my body started doing things i disliked, how i didn't have the support necessary to access the healthcare i needed—how my inability to give myself what i needed made me feel as though i were trapped inside of myself and abandoned (by both myself and the world at large)

when i write comics about yamato as a trans man, i don't take away his testosterone, because that hits a little too close to home for me. for Ninja War Town Reasons, he has plenty of access to all the HRT he could ever need and nobody questions his need for it—instead, i project my own horrors onto the way Danzō defined his identity for him as a child, the way that Kabuto and Obito dehumanize him as an adult in their war efforts, and reduce him to the thing his body holds (the Mokuton). I give him a kneejerk compulsion to dehumanize himself (out of a feeling that he has a duty to his community to do so) and I give him a slow-growing resistance to that impulse (which comes out of a feeling that the people he loves would frown upon seeing him reduce himself like that)

it's dysphoria! it's not gender dysphoria, but it's a loss of self, and a need to reclaim it. it's a war between the hollow shell of a thing he thinks he has to be, and the vibrant and messy person beneath it that he is. it's a desperate need to say "this is who i am—only i can say it"

I enjoyed HRT a lot. it was a really useful tool in helping me feel like my body was my own, that i didn't have to fight it, that we were the same entity. It's not the only tool, but it was a really good one, and one day I hope to use it again.

(as for the being off of it—it's unpleasant, but i'm enduring! being somebody who now doesn't really pass as anything has put me in a weird and interesting position, where I'm constantly having to declare myself to people, because nobody knows what to make of me on any front. they don't know if i'm a man, a woman, nonbinary, nor even what age i am (Augh!!!!) it forces me to be brave and vulnerable more than I'm comfortable with—if I tell somebody I'm a man, there's no way that they will believe I'm cis, but I'm not about to recloset myself—and I don't think I could at this point anyway.)

(there's something fascinating about the position i find myself in, and while i'd leap back on t the moment that an opportunity presented itself to do so, i do feel like i'm experiencing something interesting and important in this weird zone i find myself in)

[somethingmissingthiswaycomes]

I don't know what to add, but I wanted to share this.

This needs to end.

This needs. to end.

Edit:

2nd edit in case this blows up: Do not be vile in the notes justifying or trying to recruit for antisemitism by using this genocide to justify another.

[izloveshorses]

i stayed up late last night to finish playing rdr2 and i have been walking around Crying all morning and i imagine i will be crying for the rest of the day..... idk if they could've made an ending more upsetting and devastating than That

[miodiodavinci]

well 😔 after literally 3+ years of masking and double masking with N95s and KN95s and social distancing and not going anywhere where i can't be assured i won't be in close proximity to someone with COVID ya boy got COVID , , , ,

[talentforlying]

one of these days i'm going to write up all that i've changed from azzarello's bullshit era and the one (1) piece i've kept from milligan (and also changed) and the only thing currently stopping me is that it is going to be so, so inside-baseball incomprehensible. and i almost never want to go reading/screencapping azzarello and milligan to add references but i Want to add references.

canon is goop, just know that we continue to ride the bus down "hellblazer ended at #250 and looks like swiss cheese before that" street.

[vidovy]

.

I'm feeling extremely anxious right now. I can feel my heart beating against the pillow. The only thing comforting to think right now is that it could be his chest. This pillow could be his chest. And maybe he could softly pet my head to ease me down. Or maybe we get up and go outside and sit on the porch. We have tea and breathe the cold air of the night. Soon enough we get cold and head back in, he asks if I wanna go back to bed, and as much as I wanna go and lay with him on a warm, cozy bed, I stay in the leather sofa that's uncomfortable and cold. I stay there and wonder. Why am I so anxious about? I started to think about it.. it made me rage, it made me sad, but after feeling these intense emotions I forgot what even had caused them. I sigh, get up and head to bed. He's still wide awake staring at the ceiling as I awkwardly get in the bed, laying beside him close enough to feel the heat of his body. His slow, calm breathing is enough to ease me. It would be enough to ease me.

[ghostoffuturespast]

Being a writer is weird.

[hamburgirlbulge]

A girl wants to go back to bed so badly

[lunetual]

DEAR YOUTH [ALBUM FILM] YOUTH ✧ 2022.10.24

[taegularities]

hope you're all liking the epilogue and that you enjoyed the whole series in general. thank you for giving it so much love and support. can't wait to share more 🤍

[egglygreg]

hugging you hugging you hugging you

Thankyou, it's been a pretty rough day, after a difficult couple of weeks 🧡🧡🧡

[elitehoe]

I had an absolutely cursed dream that Hangman went to wwe... when I woke up I almost had a fucking meltdown. So yeah that's how my day started illness right out the gate!

[rj-anderson]

😢

[the-busy-ghost]

Is laundrycore a thing? It should be

[karomiiz]

i’m so sad 

[youremyonlyhope]

There is a nonzero chance that I have COVID.

Yayyyyyyyy.

Let's hope it's just a cold...