while the light lives yet

I don't really know what this post is gonna be? Maybe like a general update I guess? Bullet points will abound.

- So I'm still having a rough time with my PHD. I've got some reading done while I was here with Tree, but not as much as I wanted. I do feel much steadier with the kinds of things I need to cover, and ready to redraft the hell chapter I was talking about + start the next one going, which is good I guess, but I didn't hit all of the goals I wanted. I did do significantly more than I did last year while I was at Tree's house though, so I'm trying to take the whole thing as a win.

- I've made some transition progress. This isn't entirely a since-I-last-posted thing, because I've been settling in my gender for a while now, but I've made a lot of progress while I've been here I think (since Nov). I bought a foam cup-shaped packer not long after I arrived, and that's brought me a fair amount of euporia but I haven't got to wear it much because until the other week I only had one pair of underwear that worked with it. I got Guy Underwear that I really like and is much comfier than I expected cis-guy underwear to be. It's not tight! It's soft! Nice waistbands! I've been wearing clothes I like that aren't too fem or vintagey, which is weird to me but it's been nice. I've been dressing like I dressed when I was a teenager, a lot, jeans/tshirt/open-button-up, and it's been...lovely.

It's not like I hate how I dressed when I changed over from that. I wore those kinds of outfits as a grungey baby trans boy who didn't know he was a trans boy, and that came to a head when I was like 18/19, which is when I switched to the performative femininity of 30's vintage. I loved that. I like it still. But I gained weight and my wardrobe got more and more constricted. The thing is when I wore vintage clothes I wore them as a kind of....mental cosplay, where I got to be a certain kind of spy or femme fatale, something I could Make and Play, and then my clothes constricted enough that I couldn't do that. Everything became limited and limiting, but I couldn't just wholesale get New Clothes because most of the time I live with my mother and she made me....all the clothes I felt allowed to wear without good reason not to. Down to my underwear. So everything was a struggle toward the Least Uncomfortable and I couldn't get out of it, so dysphoria woke itself up and came and clonked me on the head.

And it's been nice, wearing clothes the way I used to but in a slightly better coordinated way. It's been nice feeling like I'm connected to the fifteen year old who once got gendered correctly in public.

Another thing I've done is buy temporary tattoos, which I felt daring enough to do away from my parents. It was Startlingly good gender. I think when I wear them I feel like I own my skin. It doesn't have to be pretty and clean and perfect and smooth and spot-free and cut-free and 'maybe you should use a loofah' and 'you can use my hair removal stuff if you like' and 'well I'm going to ignore that you hate it and buy you a facemask' and whatever else the fuck. whoa that got venty. anyway. Also I just realised that this is why I like it when cuts and burns scar. My skin is for Working and Using not looking sweet, fuck that. ANYWAY

I also bought a realistic (the horror) packer-and-stroker the other day, but  I haven't worn him much because he's very tacky silicone and my cornstarch hasn't been delivered. Oh that reminds me (under cut bc nsfw):

( Short Dysphoria NSFW thing )
- The last or second to last thing I wanna talk about is a mental health thing. I'm gonna cut that too because it's...hard.
( Read more... )
Was there another thing? Oh yeah. Resolutions I guess.

There's a few generalish ones first. I want to try and lean into the things that I feel enthusiastic about rather than press myself towards shoulds and shouldn'ts, and more widely i guess just try to get my enthusiasm back and follow some of my impulses rather than just being quiet and unobtrusive.

I wanna get on birth control when I get back to NHS-land. My mental health takes a nose-dive when it's tide which I just last time realised is dysphoria. Who knew?

I also, if I can, want to see about getting an ADHD diagnosis. It's difficult, because my mum thinks ADHD is 'just bad parenting', so I don't feel I could really tell her about it.

I started a job the other week and I want to try and save as much money as I can, because Tree and I want to live together after we finish our degrees and if they're coming to me I might need to sponsor them.

Also, last year's goal was 'write that novel'. Which I managed!! This year's goal is edit it. I know I made a post a while ago about that but I did Not manage to keep a head of steam. So it's going to be this year's goal instead.

So, uh, I know this is a bit of a crappy post to come back on (though remains to be seen if i stay back - rsd is one heck of a drug) but I've been kinda...struggling. A bit. There've been a few posts I've thought of making recently, about dressing fem when you're of a masc-leaning gender as a kind of camoflage, as a way of controlling what people see when they look at you, and about the strangeness of what transmeds have decided dysphoria can be, that it has to be about your chest or your genitals and if you don't feel bothered by those things you're not dysphoric, even if you have trouble with the shape of your hips, the width of your shoulders. It doesn't "count" if it's not one of the Big Two.

And I was going to approach these from a, a loudly, self-assuredly nonbinary perspective. They were going to be on tumblr and there was going to be a general sense of fight-me about it.

( invalidating my own gender under the cut, be careful maybe )