We All Fall Down

jeez my face has changed the last four-and-a-half years. imagine if i actually took care of myself, huh.

for the benefit of your case study, the only actual medical interventions you’re looking at are:

• 5-1/2 years of hrt
• laser-zapping my whiskers every three months for two years

everything else is just introspection, curiosity, study, and practice—finding in me what felt most true and doing what lent me joy.

on the one hand… yeah, hrt is some powerful shit. on the other, all it’s really doing is flipping your body’s firmware so your brain sends your cells the exact instructions it would if your endocrine system weren’t all defective. bodies are just bodies; any difference is just a matter of degree.

the extremely divergent cultural images we receive of male and female physiognomy are largely an invention of the last 200 years, a product of 19th-20th century “race science,” that basically served to justify old white rich dudes continuing to own and control everything by asserting they were more “evolved.”

all things equal, very few cis women look like the fantasy we’re fed of what they should look like—ergo all the body-shaming and the years of practice to exaggerate or minimize the right features and behave as society expects, no matter how shitty and arbitrary and systematically dehumanizing it is.

all things equal, few cis men automatically look or behave the way society expects from them either—and the culture also likes to emotionally isolate them from each other and from their own selves, lest they start getting ideas about the conveyor belt of despair they’re to ride stolidly to the end.

we’re taught to hate ourselves for failing at filling literally impossible imaginary roles and models, then told to blame each other for failing to follow the script, for keeping us from what we’re promised if we obey—from the absurd pyramid-scheme endgame fantasy we’re led to understand we deserve.

to see yourself, befriend yourself, to work out what’s most true about you as an individual, what kind of a person you want to be, how you want to behave, move, stand, relate to yourself and others, what terms you want to live by—then to methodically teach yourself to be that person—is a revolution.

taking agency over your own body is a first step. your body is your own; nobody gets to own it, nobody else gets a say in how you tend it, and you don’t owe any part of it—or any part of your mind, self, identity, soul—to anyone. you simply are, you’re one random instance of a weird-ass template.

by all that is right and good, this body, this person, this life is your canvas. no matter its slight variation from an imaginary average thought up by old creepy racist assholes, the parts that make you are intrinsically a 100% valid expression of a person—and it will never fit this rigged game.

your only reasonable choice is not to play, not to give over everything that you are, that no one has the right to take from you—but rather to take the cards you’re dealt and make something of you that gives you your own personal kind of joy. to find in yourself the best friend you most want to know

and what do you do with a friend if not care for them, cheer for them, help them accomplish their own ideals, tend to their needs, enjoy basking in their presence, work together to build something bigger than both of you, a world for the person you actually always were to actually want to live in.

please tend to your medical needs, address any ailments keeping your brain and body from working the way that feels most healthy to you, to your own judgment. but you are not in any sense a static objective thing—and medical intervention is only a modest slice of what it means to become yourself.

the biggest part of what the straight crowd can only seem to grasp as a “transition”—though what you do isn’t change as much as to learn to be the most genuine version of you, irrespective of who-and-whatever the fascists try to force you to be—is simply years of patient unconditional introspection; of asking yourself, “why?”

i am azurelore not because of any outside model i chose to pursue. at no point have i sought someone else’s idea of what is and is not ideal or correct, of what a body should look like, of how gender is supposed to taste.

i am azurelore because i made it my ongoing life mission to listen to myself.

any good artist is going to steal bits and pieces of other people’s art and make them their own. edm could never exist without a sampler. every word we speak is borrowed from its inventor, usually anonymous and hundreds of years ago. a nuanced eye for ideas that tickle you to play with is paramount. as the smiling man observes, we live in a society. outside ideas, prompts, inspiration—it’s all grist.

art is the way that we process it all—refine it, play with it, extrapolate, disassemble, question, find our own individual meaning and joy and then run with every realization that is so obviously true.

i have never wanted to be anyone but the most low-to-hardware person, who is so nakedly self-evidently real that i never have to pretend, never have to hide, never need feel ashamed or embarrassed of anything that i am—only of what behavior i happen to misjudge, what damage to others my poor choice of actions may cause.

i am azurelore because i refuse to be defined by arbitrary rules. because i refuse to define myself by any other measure than those i have taken pains to build, interrogate, and vet as genuinely meaningful and constructive. because like an old rusty appliance i have stripped down every piece of me.

hrt is wild. it’s awesome, it’s important, it’s transcendent. it’s an essential life-changing medical intervention to correct for a congenital disorder that you never asked for, that has probably been misdiagnosed your whole life, that simply is what it is.

but you are more than a hypothalamus.

trying to unpack why i keep ending up girlfriend to women (whether trans or cis) with an apparent mountain of unexamined internal misogyny and a case of terminal dude-brain toward relationships and personal accountability.

i mean i’ve also gotten degrees of this shitty attitude from boys—but i kind of expect that, you know? it’s somehow easier to navigate. it’s just right there on the surface, rather than this insidious ickiness that only comes to focus after months of triangulation and correction for doppler effect.

i’m getting so tired of being treated like “the girlfriend (pejorative).”

specifically it’s like they subconsciously see me as a safe outlet for “typical” misogyny they have built up, unable to freely express from years of other experience that has nothing to do with me, more so than transmisogyny as i recognize and understand it.

though i am no scholar on the topic.

shout-out to the oafish therapist who pointed this out with a right chuckle fully ten years ago (plus a couple months)—despite, you know, outward appearances.

i mean he was kind of a dick to say it the way he did, but he wasn’t wrong.

and the dynamic just keeps feeling more transparent with time.

there’s some kind of cultural commentary in the way the randos who once stopped me to ask if i was an actor (??) now want to know if i’m a fashion model.

thinking of the manner my ex-spouse chose to gossip about one of their new friends.

“it turns out she’s bisexual,” they blurted, their eyes like saucers.

“… okay?” i said. what did they expect from me here?

“but no, for real,” they continued. “like, she’s actually dated women in the past!! 😮”

it went on like this, like they were fishing for a response that i failed to provide. because yes, logically that tracked. it didn’t seem unusual that a bisexual person would have dated people of more than one gender.

after a few more volleys they got exasperated with my lack of drama or whatever.

what especially puzzles me is, dude, you’re from new york city. you have lived all over the world, in all the trendiest places. rubbed shoulders with all these high-profile artists. how is someone else’s matter-of-fact sexuality blowing your mind like this?

why is your brain the way that it is?

this reminds me of kelly’s eternal bafflement over my lack of a mask, how she couldn’t seem to get over that i simply was who i said i was and meant precisely the things that i said.

and, like… yeah? why is this so very strange to you? what am i in turn supposed to understand about you from that?

i think to a certain kind of person, to be direct and open and genuine reads as ignorant or naïve

it’s like, either you’re extraordinarily simple or you’re a chessmaster beyond their comprehension

no one who knew their ass from their elbow would mean every word they said or trust others implicitly

regarding the usual two past entanglements, and extrapolating to everything else going on in the world,

those who see human interaction and emotion and relationships as a game, where all others are opponents and the point is to win,

tend to get really fuckin weird when a person doesn’t play.

capitalism breaks people’s brains.

it smothers their hearts, and fills them with fear.

“the real problem isn’t the system,” it tells them. “the problem is all these other people clogging it up, preventing it from working for you.”

to them the world is a pyramid scheme, every word a grift.

every so often the internet reminds me that some people clinically lack an imagination

like, they can’t mentally see or hear anything; they have no internal monologue; there’s nothing going on in there

and, it kind of terrifies me that these people are just out there, allowed to make decisions

this is from the perspective of a girl who lives almost her entire life in her head, to the point that, aside whatever art she may entertain, external reality is more like a background process that sometimes she’s momentarily able to tune into, grab a flash of data to feed back into the kaleidoscope

any level of external stimulus overwhelms my system, sends my brain juddering into potential meltdown—twitching, sweating, reeling, nausea, dissociating, losing access to speech, losing motor control, losing circulation and heat regulation, blacking out

people talking to me especially shorts me out

by contrast i can sit or lie or curl up myself and undisturbed and entire days can pass while i play out scenes, images, sensations, conversations in my mind—and no, or little, time will seem to have passed

closing my eyes actually makes it harder to focus on my internal operas, causes me to drift

whenever an Internet Thing reminds me that people can just be the wordless abstract notion of tumbleweeds inside, i start to question if there’s an association between this blankness and people feeling upset by thoughts or visions, unable to distinguish between inner dialogue and demons or whatever

like. i can see (in mah brane) how a dude who normally lacks any imagination to speak of, if the right synapses connect and they happen to get the occasional brief spark of average intrasensory cognition, it might feel like a kind of mystical intrusion—or they might mistake it for extrasensory input

like these Internet People who read any discussion of imagination as strictly figurative, it follows that according to their lived experience and how they’ve learned to use language to frame what they know, such a person might not even recognize their own everyday lack of imagination for what it is

you know,

due to the lack of imagination

so when their brain does randomly happen to cross those wires and give them a rare jolt of inner awareness, they’re gonna object and say, no, what they saw or felt or heard or smelled wasn’t their “imagination”—they’re not lying, they insist; they didn’t just make it up, it was visceral, it was real

i don’t know if this comes off as patronizing, this thought process, but as with anything it’s less about personal judgment or whatever than about puzzle-solving—trying to understand why people behave or respond the way they do, often with alarm, often to perfectly normal things that i say to them

… yes, this is still about kelly

and to an extent also my ex-spouse

more generally, though, there’s just this to-me bewildering divide with some people where it seems like i simply cannot talk about my internal life without them acting like i’m nuts—and who in turn seem to have nothing inside

a thing about versus fighting games as a genre is that for all of the social progress they have seen over the last ten, fifteen years as the most influential figures have made a point of modeling the behavior they want to see and calling out the rapey bigoted shitlords whenever they set foot in a community space, their starting point was so utterly vile that they remain a golden standard of the Online Video Game Experience:

(kelly would get along just swell with our good buddy here, i’m sure)

a child psychiatrist i know, who i think is doing a clinical study on the cognitive developmental effects of llms, happened to run an experiment for the yuks, and—

structurally what makes this interaction even more wild is that they chose to challenge me—and to do this, they had to see how shitty my connection was at the time, and make a personal judgment based on that understanding, in which they conscious chose to put that information aside because they really wanted to fight me even with a shitty connection, to a greater extent than that they disliked those conditions.

so, it’s like—this is entirely a you problem, my man. i didn’t force you into anything. i have no power over how your day is going.

still they felt it very important to tell me that my potentially being poor was bringing down the whole tone of the place.

because yeah, that’s it. i am your misery. raging at me will surely fix your disheartening life.

the Internet is vast and imperfect. sometimes people’s connections can just suck, my man. sometimes they don’t. i don’t control the bandwidth of coaxial cable on a sunday night.

which on reflection, crossed with a previous aside—

a key Kelly Thing i often think about is a conversation we once had about how i could possibly have seen so few concerts or live shows when i was younger.

and, it’s like. girl—different people are different, you know? in the basis of my background i don’t understand how you possibly could see as many as you claim to, but I don’t choose to project my incredulity because i know that you are your own individual.

more fundamentally though, beyond my spending the first 25 years of my life in central maine, in the middle of nothing but forest, with no transportation or agency of my own, where i’d have to drive 30 bleary minutes to replace a gallon of milk, there also was a tacit social factor that at the time i found unreasonably frustrating and impenetrable.

i described to kelly how when i was in college, despite knowing—usually after-the-fact—that major acts did occasionally play within, like, a two-hour drive of where i was, and that a local scene probably existed in some shape, i was never able to figure out how people learned about this stuff and got on it.

this is the mid-’90s, remember, and frickin mosaic barely existed, never mind the web as it would become.

but i did technically know people, and i knew that some of them went to these shows and seemed to always know when something was happening, so i made what to me felt like an obvious decision.

i elected to ask one of these people how they learned this stuff, expecting they would point me to some resource or another as a starting place.

instead they eyed me for a second before muttering, “yeah, i guess i can see how someone might not know that sort of thing,” and turning away from me.

i made clear to her in the telling how this response had always stung in a way i didn’t quite understand but that had injured me for decades nevertheless—so of course kelly ambiguously screwed up her face and replied that that, actually, was the correct thing for that person to say to me.

see, she explained, there was this unspoken social economy to this sort of situation, where if you were supposed to know about events or whatever then you would already just know about them because of the kind of person you were, and if you weren’t aware then you probably didn’t belong—so in effect they were actually being kind to me by shutting me down.

i swear her whole attitude toward me kind of shifted after this conversation; i sure began to clock an underlying tone that didn’t particularly thrill me, inflecting the way she framed the world and regarded human relationships—though at the time i felt not so much alarm as, “okay, uh… guess i should put a pin in that thought. 😐”

so anyway, in a completely different conversation, kelly and i later went back-and-forth for twenty minutes about why my broadband service—which in my then-apartment was totally adequate if unremarkable—sucked so badly.

she especially was mystified why my upload speed was so much slower than download—wich, if you have used the internet before, you may understand is because it is the internet and that’s the way it now and forever has worked—at least, on coaxial cable. upload speeds are always like a tenth of download speeds, for all sorts of practical reasons like traffic patterns and the bounds of physics.

and that’s when it clicked for her: oh, i was on cable? how quaint; she didn’t realize that essential day-one fact of information technology was a thing, because since kelly first got on the internet she had only ever known fiber connections.

…

to be clear, this girl is only four years younger than i, right, so she’s working similar timescale. we’re talking 1990s to present.

so, just, with every cell in my body,

what?

i mean—i know that today, in 2025, fiber connections are slowly becoming less exotic and expensive and geographically restricted, but still i don’t…

how could this absolute fucking top-of-the-line elite service, that until recently was physically or financially unavailable to all but a select few privileged users, possibly be your only window on this practical and existential backbone of 21st century society?

in regard to which assertion, i think… there’s some useful fractal metonymy here in the way that both those conversations played out—a shade of metonymy broadly analogous to the way our sunday buddy at the start of this post told on himself, through the way they chided me for the audacity to exist in their space while potentially being poor, expressing deep confusion how it was even possible i could be there.

as i say, i expect that kelly would grimace at the exchange, and as with her gatekeeping on other clearly sore topics would pontificate down her nose at me about how actually i was in the wrong here because i broke an import social contract by failing to cater to an entitled schlub’s every whim, and i should consider never playing again unless i find a way to afford a top-of-the-line system that is unlikely to embarrass me and everyone else who i bump into. because really, i had no right to take up space in the lobby unless i was prepared to commit to the lifestyle expectations of the rest of the community.

(i also suspect that had i discussed the anecdote with jenique, it would have gone much the same way as with kelly—except with more open disdain at how much i was embarrassing her just by admitting to have been so uncool by what she would assert were objective societal standards i should have known.)

i had to receive a strange person today

one bearing a new pharmacological dose

to avert needless questions and shows of dismay

the azure reluctantly chose to wear clothes

it seems i can still be a person at times

for all of the effort it takes

god kelly messed me up

as to why, it’s—

okay, most relationships break down because of poor communication, right?

that was part of it, but in some rabid digivolved form.

our basic difference was ideological, dealing with our understanding of the fabric of the world and our roles in it.

i talk about how she viewed every human interaction as, rather, a transaction on some level.

more to the point, though: kelly views information as currency, to save or spend tactically to further some end.

to me that’s like treating water, air, food, shelter as a for-profit commodity. water, air, food, shelter are non-negotiable biological needs, that keep our bodies alive. information though is what gives us agency. it’s what permits us to make decisions, to act, to grow our own healthy individual perspective. it’s a fundamental prerequisite to liberty.

to me it is anathema to withhold or obstruct knowledge without desperate cause.

she never stopped acting bewildered at how much “content” i “gave away” “for free”—in reference to, well, things like the words right here. to the art and writing and music i do, but most directly and especially to how much i say to others openly, how the moment i understand a thing i explain it.

take that difference of perspective, and extrapolate it to all its fractal recursive conclusions

that was the key friction between us

i don’t see how a thing like that could be reconciled, without one of us changing who we are on an atomic level. and i’m certainly not turning landlord on knowledge

…

i mean yes, you can pay for my albums on bandcamp if you want

but also you can just listen to them endlessly if you’d rather

i’m not interested in coercing any kind of behavior; that is the start of everything i know is wrong

our decisions are our own to make, for our own reasons and  judgment

my brain is still in “uk-whuk” stun after a video on my youtube subs the other day

took a while to figure out what was going on, who this was, and why they were in my space, but

an old very-online steven universe fan who spoke about autism has wiped their socials and decided to be an open nazi now

they were embarrassed over being “cringe” in their twenties and wanted to distance themself entirely from their old persona and their old ideas about why they were the way they are—so they made a choice to pivot and rebrand and talk about how obvious “race science” is when you stop pretending and really think about it

i had a flicker of a thought to reply with something like, “just happening to be autistic is ‘cringe’ but consciously choosing to be a nazi isn’t?”

instead i unsubscribed, and deleted their posts from my viewing history.

in 2025 you still can’t really block youtube channels, so that’ll have to do.

if you’re familiar with the steven universe fan ecosystem of seven years ago, then yes—it’s exactly who it sounds like.

my head can’t help picking away at this continuously as some low-level process taking up my working ram, even though i never knew them personally and kind of gave them wide berth—wide enough a berth that i am more surprised that i’d been subscribed all this time they had gone quiet, than i am by this newest posture they have adopted.

the psychology going on here, what i can unravel from a distance and scant real information, it’s… doing something.

i see… something

the longer i have to look back and process, the more alarmed i grow at every facet of my marriage

or my predecessor’s, i suppose

these memories don’t really belong to me

hwæt!

now available on bandcamp: anti-alias, the third album in my “the sequence” sequence

thirteen bloopy tracks of electronic music, plus four bonus tracks of scratch concepts presented as-is

check it out, jeezum crow!