while the light lives yet

Okay, some stuff!

- I've started to become interested in a victorian queer writer called Robert Murray Gilchrist. I found two of his stories on archive.org, and I read them this morning. They read like if you smashed Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Aubrey Beardsley together and then wrote it in prose. The Basilisk is actually a lot like Under The Hill in its first sections, except The Basilisk is horror and Under The Hill is a romantic confection.

- I've decided that my daily little day-summary journals that I write are gonna be about me and what I did and things like that which sounds silly (surely they would be already, one thinks) but I've been doing a lot of work with my emotions lately and I wanna try and do a bit more, and yesterday i was proud of myself for two whole things: 1. I had an immediate emotional reaction to something but I slowly levered myself out of making assumptions from that space, and listened and ended up with a hopefully more constructive conversation and 2. I asserted another very soft tiny boundary (I use boundary loosely but they're so hard for me that I gotta start tiny)

- I've been slowly plodding along with my Yuletide fic. I have 2k and I'm not far off the end of the first rough section, so it might hit around 6k.

- I opened an etsy shop to sell some paper-pieced pincushions I've made!

- Teaching is going okay, but only okay. I'm surviving it.

- I watched Julie and the Phantoms! I enjoyed it, but mostly because "90s himbo music boy" was my gender when I was fifteen and I can be a teenage boy vicariously through them.

- It was mine and Keats' 5th anniversary of official queerplatonicness about a week ago, and they bought me some shirts and my gender has been VERY soft farm boy ever since.

Uh....I wanna post but I don't wanna keep being heavy so I'm gonna make an update post!

- Quilting is going okay, but has been a bit slow at the moment. I've done a third of the countryside-ish quilt, and the space quilt needs its borders on and to be sewn up from strips to a full thing. I've sewn all the middle parts of the strips up so it's not TOO long off done. I mean. It is but it isn't. Borders will be a mare until everything is squared up.

- First I finished Mystic Pop Up Bar, as I said I think last time, and then I watched all of Hotel Del Luna which is...very similar, in a lot of ways, but a little more serious and more heartbreaking. Then I looked up if Why Women Kill is available here and it is, so I watched a bit of that. I like it, but it's playing with some homophobic and biphobic tropes. I've not decided to stop watching it, because I have a very vague sense that they might trouble some of those tropes a bit, but I don't know yet. The new series of Ghosts is out, so I binged all of that yesterday and then watched s2e1 on the tv, after finishing the whole season, because my mum put it on. Then I watched s1e1 after that went off. Because this is a hyperfixation and I'm in emotional difficulty.

- I bought a kindle copy of Piranesi last night. Mainly because Keats' pre-order came and i couldn't let them read it alone so I had to get over my adhd nonsense (mixed 'ugh BOOKS', weird rsd, and avoidance because of crap that went down in the jsmn fandom) and bought it. I'm only a couple pages in, but. Screams.

I don't have anywhere to go with this but like every time I come on here to answer comments I wanna talk about Something. They're usually sad I know but I'll try to sandwich a quilt update in here too.

> I'm sick of having to run around in the closet. I can't come out (yet) because as much as my parents are fine with trans stuff, they're not wholly....they're learning but it's not always easy. My mum literally asked if Keats had become less caring and nurturing on T which doesn't make me excited to come out. I think it would be safest to come out while I'm at Keats' because then they (parents) can process it on their own time.

> Had a discussion with Keats earlier this week. Doing a lot of thinking about my parents and the emotional abuse and how traumatic homeschool was for me in that context. Made me realise I definitely wanna get my doctorate in Keats' name. They (parents) tend to focus on how my academic performance reflects on them, despite the fact that I barely scraped into university because of how much strain I was under. I came to the realisation that I actually feel supported and safety-netted academically at university which I never felt in homeschool. Anyway the point is, they're always going on about how smart I am and how I'm a credit to them and I know it's supposed to make me feel good but it feels like they're trying to possess the things I work at. So I don't really want to be Dr [their name]. It feels more mine if it's Keats'.

> On that theme like, Keats said, don't name yourself what they were going to name you. I was going to cave and have my new first name be one they'd picked when they thought I was going to be AMAB (my mum was Convinced I was going to be a boy - well look how that turned out!) and my middle name be Bowman but now I'm going to be Bowman something else, maybe a version of my actual middle name or something else. I feel like I need to set up one of those "guess the name of this bear" charity games for this.
 
( Nsfw )> Quilt update! The Lancashire quilt (the one with the crosses that's actually made of fabrics inspired by a place in Yorkshire but my book is set in the Forest of Bowland so we ignore that) is in progress of being sewn together. I'm going to make and sew on blocks as I go. The star quilt is going to actually get laid out to decide lay out, so I have a few more blocks to make up for that. A few, he says, knowing he's only made up six of twelve. And then I'll sew the other stars on and attach the blocks together. Keats also bought me some fabrics, and I've decided I'm going to make a hexagons quilt with that because all the fabrics go despite not being the same range (Keats is amazing...)

So I met with my two supervisors yesterday morning, and they seem happy with my ability to successfully talk about my research, which is good because my Review is tomorrow afternoon, aka the bit where I have to sit in front (virtually) of Professor Medievalism, Professor Regency, and Professors Supervisor, and convince them that I'm doing a good enough job. (Professor Modernism, my internal examiner last year, appears busy. Professor Regency and I Get Along but we have totally different styles so I'm a bit. aaaa. But Professor Medievalism likes me.

I also submitted two conference abstracts today and I'm also supposed to be submitting a CV to the school admin to put my name down to possibly be a research assistant on a project to do with the libraries of [redacted] estates, which, given that my ideal job is the character in a Christie novel who is doing something Academicy about the estate, is. Hm. It wouldn't be in person, it would be online, but....experience. pay. money. aesthetic. When can I get my work uniform that's a crisp 30s suit rather than a tshirt and sweats. Arthur Hastings, give me your clothes.

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.