13 years and a day

 I've had this blog since 2008. 13 years almost. I've neglected it in the last few though as it became easier to escape and avoid the things that were getting to me. Easier to not deal with the negativity and the creeping dread. The pandemic, the politics, the relationships, the lack of any real sort of fulfillment, the impending sense of foreboding, and the complete sense of helplessness. Why would you want to look into that. Why tap into your own unending fountain of suffering. 

Honestly, I was content to not write anymore. Only on the suggestion of my therapist am I here again. Masks off I guess. 

So where do we begin? I'm trying to ignore the voices, the whispers that ask if anyone cares, if anyone will notice or bother. Because whether anyone does or not isn't the point. The point is not the response, the point is the asking of the question. 

Where do we begin? How do I feel? I feel numb. I have suicidal thoughts, and I fantasize about shooting myself. I have no plans to do such, but the desire is there. I find myself watching anime and feeling like I'm wasting my life. I talk to my therapist and we rehash the same conversations and nothing ever changes. I wake up, I go to work, I go to bed. We repeat. One day I'll die and my last words will probably be "fucking finally". 

I think about what all of this is for, what I'm supposed to be doing, what I want to do, and it's just empty. My brother has things he's passionate about, his music, his kids (I assume), and I look around and there's just..circuses and distractions. Things to occupy my mind so that it doesn't think about what's going on, or how I feel, or how empty everything is, just, waiting to consume the next thing. 

I'm on the wrong side of 30. And, reading back to 2014, I can say that my anger at being trans has diminished a lot. It's not something that I actively grieve as much. I've largely made peace with it I think. The surgery helped a lot in that regard. I don't feel attractive, and I don't think I'll ever be so. But, I've accepted that. It makes dating hard, but as we've seen, I'm used to being alone. It isn't desirable, but it is at least routine.

I feel suicidal because my life is needless suffering. It's needless because my life has no purpose. I've tried to ascribe some point to it, to try and create something, to try and say something, to scream into the void of anyone who would listen, but I can't form sentences. I get so paralyzed at the idea that someone might be listening that I freeze and go non-verbal anytime I'm emotional. So raw and sensitive am I to the idea that I might actually be seen that I shut down out of fear that I might reveal something. A lifetime of hiding will do that. Hiding who was I was, what I wanted, how I felt. Hiding everything under the guise of performative masculinity and fear. Convincing myself that I would never be perfect and so there was no point in trying. Since there was no point in trying, the only other option was suicide. Thinking, back in 2008. Holding that razer to my wrist, have the last 13 years been worth it, or do I regret not killing myself then. Or hell, back in 2000. If you asked me, given the chance, if I had the option to go back and make those attempts successful, would I? Probably. 

It isn't that things haven't gotten better since then. They have, objectively, I'm in a better place all around than I was then. Its more that, it still all feels so meaningless, and I still don't place much value on my life. I don't hope for better things, because better things don't happen. Will I have good days, sure, I'm sure I'll a few really good days before the end of my life, but I know by far those will be outnumbered by awful days. And dwarfed by the sheer endless numbers of pointless, meaningless, meandering nothing days. Pointless weeks on end of doing pointless capitalist busy work peaking from weekend to weekend in the hopes that one of three people in my life might be free to do something interesting. 

I feel like I've become a non-player Character in my own life. A passenger without agency to say where and how it goes. And even when someone does ask me what I would do with my own story, I have no answers. The things I would do, are closed off from me, by me. 

I say I want a voice, I want to say things, to express things, and every time I try I find my nothing comes. I try to create a song but I can't hear it. I try to create a world but I can't see it. I'd long ago given up any attempts at finding success with a voice, the goal was simply to speak for the first time. But I can't even do that. 

Maybe that's the true irony of being cursed. I can transition to be a woman, but I'll still never be able to create anything in exchange. Be it life or art. But I can suffer for it all the same. Someone remind why I don't kill myself again.

Beach House

It's hard to describe the emotions that come into this. I feel forced, and yet writing is seemingly the only way I can process things. I've been extremely low and suicidal lately. Mostly due to the ongoing feelings of being trapped and hopeless. The cyclical nature of my life becoming more evident, and feeling like nothing ever changes. Since I've moved here, I've bounced around jobs but never really landed a "career" or anything resembling job security. I've pushed my wage up, but the most I've ever made is still well below the area's median average. While it's a small point of pride that I can live on 17/hr, it's not comfortable living. It's certainly betraying what my skills and qualifications should be garnering. Of course, people who are hiring folks with my skills, don't want to hire people who look like me. They want cis folk, they want people who will fall in line and do all that 110% company life bullshit. That isn't me, but then I'm not asking for 100K a year.

The most depressing part is watching people in my same position, who are less qualified, get better opportunities because they "interview well" despite admitting to me lieing in their interviews, and other bullshit and questionable behavior that would get someone like me even more disqualified.

Being trans inherently means I have to work four times as hard as anyone else to get the same thing, and I just don't have the energy or mental capacity to do that. So I bounce around from temp job to temp job, struggling to get by, and watch as the money I've saved gets eroded away by months of unemployment.

Which, wouldn't be so bad if I felt like I was making some sort of progress towards anything. My relationship also has parallels of running the same course as my last one. The same anxiety/depression pairing where I get pushed into a nurture role that I'm not enjoying, but get stuck being in because, as with jobs, being trans means it's 2x as long to find an interested romantic partner.

Suffice to summarize, everything is incredible difficult, and I see no way to change any of that, or create or produce anything of meaning. So I wake up and I sit on the couch and I just ...waste. Time, money, energy, it all just gets wasted as I sit in this room, and just exist waiting for something dire to happen.

my heart aches for some sort of raison d'être, and everything feels pointless until I find it. I thought it was writing, I thought it was music, but so far the only thing I excel at is self delusion, suicidal tendencies, escapism and compartmentalization of my emotions. 

Everything in my experience of this world is so atrociously mediocre or short that I can't wait to pass onto some new existence. 

I often dream up a character who routinely kills themselves only to end up trapped in the same room over and over again in a sort of purgatory hellscape. It isn't intentionally auto-biographical, but that feels very humbly stupid and imperceptive of me. If I knew I would end up right back here, why would I even bother killing myself. The whole point is to get out of this bullshit.

I've no hope or options, but to just numb the pain away and continue on until I hopefully get hit by a truck. 

Criminal Negligence

I wrote twice in all of 2019.

It isn't due to lack of trauma, it's a sheer matter of negligence and aversion. I don't have to deal with my bullshit if I don't acknowledge it. As long as I stick my head in the sand my complete failure at my own imposed goals will go unnoticed and I can continue on this path of make believe.

Plainly, I've failed at everything I've set out to do in the last two years or so. I called myself a writer, yet I didn't write anything. I didn't draft, and I didn't even brain storm. I spent half a day on it, and then installed a writing program that I then spent more time configuring than actually using. I can't even get myself to write here, where there is literally no audience and no performance to create. How can I call myself a writer when I don't even do the basic things a writer does? What, oh, because three years ago I wrote a bullshit narrative based off actual events that happened to me that some friends liked?

I feel creatively bankrupt. Like I've spent so long escaping into other worlds that I can't exist in this one, let alone create new ones to exist in. Like I've warped my brain into a consume only mode that does nothing else but shut itself off while doing something else, anything else, rather than be left alone with my own thoughts.

I sit here, wallowing in my depression, as it drains my mood into ever deeper pits, lamenting my own failures because i don't have the discipline, or willpower, or strength or whatever have you to commit to the work needed to actually get the results I want. Be it any sort of creative outlet, or my body, or diet. And then I beat myself up for not having said results that I could have had by now if I only had the virtues to do so. I've been practicing yoga off and on for the better part of four years, and yet because I don't have the virtue to continue it regularly, I make no real progress. I could be in much better shape if I bothered to continue working out regularly, but because I don't see results in my hyper short attention span, I get discouraged, and then stop doing it, and then don't get results, and the whole cycle repeats. Look at creativity, had I consistently practiced guitar I likely could have done something with it, yet because I can't play the songs I want to play, I can't ever get the results I want, and since the results I want I can't get, I get demotivated and stop practicing.

There's no sense of just doing it for the fun of it.

And then back to writing, which all along I said the whole fucking point was not even to get results, but just to fucking finish the thing. I invested time and money, I took a class, and yet I can't get more than three chapters in before getting lost in bullshit. Feeling like I don't know where to go or what to write, or what the characters would say or do. I have a half an idea of some cool world building and then I can't get anything else. How could I ever finish a completed story when I don't practice writing stories?

So practice writing you say? Yes great idea, BUT I CAN'T GET MYSELF TO DO SO. Maybe because if I actually allowed myself to practice I'd have to put in the effort, and then, like I do with everything else, I'd realize I'm a failure at that too. After pretending to think this was what I wanted to do, not writing, feelings like I'm back to square one, and at my age I'm not sure I know what to do with the idea of being back to floating in the cosmic void.

Like all the rest of my emotional baggage, it's easier to put it in a closet and pretend than it is to take it out and unpack.

So now I sit here, once again unemployed, with endless time on my hands to do anything, the perfect time in my life to practice writing, and I sit here, depressed, crying on the couch, watching YouTube and playing crappy old video games lamenting why my life feels so empty and directionless, and why I'm so unhappy. While I at least have the awareness to realize my own bullshit, I don't have the capacity to change any of it apparently.

I wish I could just start this life over. Just hit the ol reset switch and call this go a mulligan. I've clearly fucked myself up to the point of being unsalvagable and it would be far easier just to start fresh without all the fucked up processes I've instilled in myself.

A question was posed on reddit earlier, something along the lines of: 13 year old you is teleported to the current time for 24 hours, what do you show them. And the thing that came to my mind was that 13 year old me would be so sad and depressed that after all this time, and everything that I've done, that I'm still a depressed little nothing, who doesn't even have the strength to do the things she wants to do, to get better at what she wants get better at, for the sole purpose of having fun and to do something she set out to do.

Like, those are small fucking goals, and I can't even do that shit right, and if 13 year old me, saw how fucking pathetic I still am, I think she would have put a lot more effort into those suicide attempts.

Insurance

I've recently been trying to figure out how to unlock my emotions. I don't know if it's just normal depression that has muted my feelings, or if it's a subconscious choice to dive into escapism or aversion. Either way the end result has me tuning out of most emotions because I find them overwhelming. I've been using the metaphor of a slipgate, and while I can try to turn the flow on or off, it comes as one large surge.

Which would be fine, if I could tolerate the water, but seeing as how almost everything I feel is related to how awful literally everything is in the world right now, it feels very difficult to try and stomach that taste. Maybe if I could isolate myself away from all the awful shit going politically, environmentally, socially, economically, literally almost anything about my outside world and focus on just the fine minutia of my daily life I might be able to tolerate my emotions. But as is, it's a few strands of happiness amidst an entire ocean's worth of negativity, anxiety, hopelessness, anger..seething apoplectic anger, sadness, and just more hopelessness. There's just soooo much of that awful brew that it outweighs any positive emotions I may be feeling at the same time.

Now I will add some caveats. I'm not married to the idea that it's all or nothing, or that its a binary of on or off emotions. I'm also not super set on being turned off to everything, because It has also locked up a lot of my desires to be intimate or sexual with anyone as well. Although, that may be an aversion to something else.

But the main gripe, is that to avoid all those awful emotions, I've locked away most everything that I feel. Most of my daily life I feel sorta empty. A numb contemptuous passive witness to my life. My instinctive Id-like mind doing all of the work, while any higher level emotions are just ..gone. The emotions are still there, but it's just the name tags. All of the substance and mass of them are locked away.

I don't want to risk dealing with those emotions, they are incredibly intense, and overwhelming, and avoiding them is easier and allows me to function on a realistic level. In that same vein, I need to come to grips with some very heavy sexual emotions that I've also been avoiding. One being the potential ongoing truama that is my sex life, that is coming to terms with what sex is now, and accepting it for where it is, and how it isn't what I thought it would as a little girl. All my life I've wanted to have sex as a woman, and while I now have as close an approximation as I can get, it isn't what I dreamed it would be. How could it have been? Nothing in the world would have lived up to those expectations. Still the disappointment in that is very, very real and very painful to experience. That isn't to say it can't or won't be enjoyable, or that I've even begun to learn how to have sex as a woman, or what the best and most enjoyable sex is for me. But the aversion comes from now wanting to risk that disappointment again.

After all, I can't be disappointed in the sex if I don't have the sex to begin with. That's the kind of sick, high brown mental gymnastics I've twisted myself into to avoid that emotional pain. In order to avoid that risk, I've locked away my sexuality as well, much to the detriment of my relationship, and any other potential relationship. Oh but we can go deeper. Buried in that fear of disappointment is also the fear that as I have more sex, that it will never be fulfilling or engaging or enjoyable, and that I'll come to regret my surgery, because you know, I don't have enough fucking weight put on my ability to enjoy sex from myself, I need to add the weight of becoming one of those people that neo-nazi's use to argue against my own fucking rights.

So, you can see how it just becomes so much easier to let all that shit go and just be asexual. Just don't think about anything, just leave all my cares and emotions behind to where nothing matters and I can just exist on some functional level. Everything else is just too much to risk.

Anyway, happy fucking birthday to me, guess I need to visit a claims adjuster.

Hit that Like Button

Here we are yet again. Pushing myself to write in order to try and get some sort of feeling again. Not, coincidentally enough, long after another letter from my dad. I'm not sold on what to do just yet about it, and if it is worth bothering to respond or deflect once again. The fact that the letters come off as emotionally manipulative has led me to liken them to an ex boyfriend who refuses to give up the ghost. He's not willing to meet me on my terms, but insisting that what we had was some amazing relationship.

I've babbled on enough before about that though, and how unwarranted that position is, and how hypocritical it is and I'm so very tired of it all. I'm tired of just about everything these days. I've seen my tolerance for being compelled to work to pay money into someone else's rent seeking bullshit decrease. Maybe it's just watching capitalism's slow cannibalization of our planet and conveyor belt sushi line style march of humanity towards it's own destruction that has soured me on the idea.

I see the rise of leftist politics on YouTube, and it's a nice change of pace, but I can't help but feel it's far too little to late to make a difference. I fight everyday against that notion and the urge, the idea that this is all pointless, despite knowing deep down that it is. That is my background radiation, and it makes it hard to justify putting up with even the slightest injury or inconvenience.

I'm not sure if that is why I haven't been writing. If it's just easier to compartmentalize emotions and go about my normal day of escapism and entertainment. I know it is, obviously, as who can live with the slow death of watching the world eat itself to death. I guess I sit here and second guess what I'm doing. Maybe I'm losing touch with reality in exchange, as I just.can't handle what the world is or what my life is.. So it's escapism or delusion.

Forgive the rambling. I've always struggled with my purpose and feeling like anything I did was of use or meaningful in anyway. I've spent so long in school and in life just preparing myself to get by in capitalism, just trying to be self sufficient. I am, more or less, at that point now. But it all just feels like treading water with no real aim at a direction or goal, and I see thousands of other people, all treating water, and they all seem to be going somewhere, or content I guess, and no one tells me where they are going or how to get there.

Sometimes I wonder just how much time I've spent staring at a screen, writing out thoughts, just...waiting, waiting for things to get better, for the world to make sense, and it just...never does.

I'll try to write more.

On family debt

I find myself at a bit of a judicial conundrum. For years my family has operated on a transactional basis. One of family duty and obligation. One of where we overlooked abuse and damage because of all the good things people did. We simply didn't talk about the awful things people did. My grandmother was a terrible abusive person but we all just grit our teeth and went along with it. The inauthenticity of that was outrageous and I couldn't stand dealing with it. I long ago cast off my ability to be inauthentic with myself, and even now can't stand doing it for long, if at all.

I've had arguments with them before over their attempt to leverage family to get favors, as if my labor or time wasn't valuable. "Yes I can fix your website for you, if you pay me to. I'll teach you how to do it for free, but I'm not going to be at your leisure anytime you want".

Which brings me here, where I've asked my father how he plans to vote, knowing everything that's going on. He sent me back a list of all the good he's done to support and help me, along with a paragraph of insane right wing ramblings that are both verifiably untrue, and paranoid terrified rantings justifying voting GOP. I say GOP because they aren't republicans anymore, If you want a republican policy vote democrat. If you want a liberal policy you're screwed, sorry, I digress.

What unnerves me about this though, is the transactional basis of the letter. It's balanced out in a way to make it seem like I'm asking a lot of him. A relationship is not a ledger, where you put in good times to enable your abusive behavior later on. It's 2/3 a list of all the support and emotional ties that we have together, and 1/2 a justification of why he feels it's okay to enable people who want me to not exist. People who will put into place policies to enable that, policies to pursue that goal.

That cognitive dissonance doesn't sit with me. You don't get to say you love me, and then vote for people/enable people who actively want to harm me. Your choices, have consequences. 

So there's that. My position, on one side, is thus: I hold fast, and maintain my policy of choices matter, of being authentic to myself and not tolerating a two faced relationship, of not compartmentalizing someone's enabling of a threat to me, of believing that a family is not duty bound by anything, and nothing is owed anyone.

The alternative side, is the huge guilt factor in that my position as it is now, and much of where I am in my life, is owed to my family supporting me. The privilege I've had in growing up wealthy, of having financial support in college, in having financial support in moving to a different city, of going to Thailand to have a surgery. The emotional and time commitments of him coming with my to Thailand, the guilt of him not being able to be at his mother's (my grandmother's) funeral when she passed, because he was helping me recover in Thailand. I owe much to him, and his money, and also his willingness to accept me when I came out, and to continue to support me in getting to where I am in my life, and to help me when I need it.

When I was fired from my last job he sent me money, and he continues to do so on my birthday and during the holidays. That isn't lost on me.

There's also the "he's your family, and he's the only dad you'll ever have" argument, but that falls a bit more hollow on me given how terrible my upbringing was. Still, Nostalgia is a bitch at times. I owe him a lot. So is my overlooking this, that big of an ask? Why not compartmentalize like my brother does and reopen that line of communication and relationship?

That's the other side. And I'm here debating between the two.

I don't know. I think in some ways, it's easier for him this way. It's not like he doesn't know why I don't talk to him, he knows what my sticking issue is, what is causing this divide between us, but he's continuing to stick to his absurd beliefs. If nothing else, he's gone even further to find new means to justify them, rather than self-reflect or admit he may have been wrong.

Maybe, if I was a cisgirl, I'd have the strength of will or emotion to attempt rescuing him from the cult that he's joined, but, that's just not in me anymore. I'm exhausted from this all, and I simply can't put in that much energy in what feels like a lost cause. In that since, it's easier for me as well to simply drop out of this relationship. If that means having to tolerate the guilt of it, well, maybe I'm too exhausted to give a shit about guilt.

Nine Months

It's been 9 months since I've written here. It's been over a year really since I wrote any fiction. I just, haven't found any real point in doing so. Which, maybe isn't entirely the case, so much as how it feels today at least. Let me back up.

I've been working part time for the last year or so. As I've written before it was causing my anxiety over my finances as I was unsure how long I'd be able to maintain my apartment and style of living long term. That ended in June as the company moved my department to Phoenix Arizona for some bullshit reason or another. Some of the team went with, most did not. I was again unemployed. This was third time in seven years, and I wasn't looking forward to the idea of another year long job search (as they tend to be). I applied for an entry level gig, interviewed and got the position, and then lost it about six weeks later for discussing my team's low wages in an email (we all started at minimum wage). They said they "didn't trust my judgement". Okay, whatever excuse you want to use, fine. I don't have the money or resources to fight anything so off I went. I picked up a temp gig a few days after that, and thought things were going well, only to be fired again randomly on a Tuesday afternoon about a month later. I'm still unsure why. No one said anything to me, there was no feedback, only they called the temp agency and said I wasn't engaged in the work. Which, is just flatly untrue, but even if it was, why not talk to me about it? Surely its easier to just tell me to engage in the work, than it is to hire a new temp right?

And so here we are, Early October, and unemployed again. I did build up my finances a little bit more when I was working full time, but that was only for two months more or less.

So, that's a thing. It wasn't being out of work that's traumatizing, I'm used to that. It was the insulting nature and surprise that really did it. I was expecting the contract to end in a month or so, not a big deal on the outside, but the fact that they randomly decided to call me after a full day of work was what was so shocking.

Now I start the whole process over again and it just feels so utterly overwhelming and pointless at the same time. I'll maybe send out 200 applications (I keep count), and of those, get back one interview request, in a three month span. Which I'll fail at generally because they all boil down to a random charisma test, which being a mentally ill trans person, I'm almost guaranteed to fail at.

MEANWHILE, we have all this *points to socio-political-economic-environment* going on. Which, makes even life in general feel like a tedious exercise in running out the clock. We as a species have already doomed ourselves within 150 years, so why bother trying to create anything? Why try and get a job to stave off homelessness and death, when life is going to get exponentially worse as time goes on. I can barely keep my head above water (global warming pun intended) as it is, let alone when the economy turns down (which it is guaranteed to crash magnificently within 10 years or so). I'd give it an honest, serious 50-50 odds that this administration starts rounding up trans folk and removing their citizenship rights. Not that I'd mind running away from this backwards ass country, but do it with what money?

That isn't even looking for things like, passion. I have no passion. There is no enjoyment in things anymore. There's only escapism and binging on the next new thing until I've exhausted it and need something else to occupy my mind to prevent it from looking at the shame that is my life.

A few days ago my landlord died. He lived across the hall from me. The first thing after the shock of the news to hit me was jealousy. I'm just so incredibly exhausted of this life. Of the seemingly endless cruelty and harshness of it all.

So, in like, trying to be an optimist, what's the base case scenario? Say I get another fulltime job, and then what? I go back to slave labor and spending the vast majority of my life working for generate profit for some corporation that exploits me and its consumers to benefit some unimaginably rich asshole who will set himself up in a bunker to outlive the rest of us. Until the climate genocide or economic depression forces that to end, and then what?

What difference does it make in the end anyway, it's not like I enjoy my life as it is, I might as well sign it away to some shitbag for pennies on the dollar.

Amidst all that weight on me, all that I just wrote, why bother trying to play guitar, or trying to write fiction. Who can have passion for anything?