I talk a lot about this dividing line, and how I am not the same person as the previous caretaker for this body, but seriously, all my memories prior to maybe a year ago feel so unreal. It’s getting harder and harder to remember specifics, like grasping at a dream.

Just as well.

It sure doesn’t help the continuity of self that all my tastes and preferences and some deeply-held understandings seem to now be up in the air and need to be caught and relaid from scratch. What foods do i like? What do emotions feel like? What do i think of body modification?

I may have mentioned that my taste for food has been shifting since my transition. This is pretty normal, of course. Change your body chemistry, your body is gonna start bothering your brain for different complementary materials. In practice it still feels so odd.

It’s hard to navigate. I’m autistic, right, and I’m very particular about what kinds of sensory input I can deal with. It’s taken decades for me to explore and branch out and work through what’s acceptable to me. Since my tastes calcified somewhere in adolescence, they haven’t really changed; they’ve just expanded. I’ve managed to tack things on, break through barriers, develop things further. But it’s all hooked into the same architecture, same basic assumptions that have never shifted. Now I can’t safely fall back on any of that.

I used to be all about sugar and carbohydrates. Whether it’s my metabolism or my neurology, I dunno, but I couldn’t function without a constant input of quick, easy energy. (Even then, functioning was a philosophical matter.)

Now the things I naturally assume I’ll want, I kind of shrug at. They’ll sit there, and I can’t really imagine eating them. In their place, I don’t always know how to read the new signals. It took so long to figure out the old ones. But definitely acids and oils and fats. It’s all about savory things now, which… really weren’t a major concern before. I’m super into stinky cheese and fermented things. I find myself drawn to just, raw vegetables in a way I wasn’t overly. Stereotypical as it may be, I seem to crave as I never have. I was always into, like, gummy and hard candy, right? All sugar, no fat. This is almost the flip of that.

All of this is comprehensible, right. I know what my body is doing and why. It’s just, there’s a lot of identity in this.

As I say, Azure is not the same person as that shell she stomped around inside, or that stomped around on autopilot as she largely slept. If you could even call them a person.

I hadn’t factored how much of my prior sense of self, such as it was, had been scrubbed by that last decade. by this total breakdown of my humanity. Which… in hindsight was weirdly helpful for finding the person buried beneath all that and clearing the room for her to finally grow properly.

But she still inherits all these memories and notions and understandings, and many of them no longer apply, or are fading in ways that are hard to predict. And it’s… really confusing. I’m starting from zero on so many things. This life is just so completely new.

I still like liquorice, though.

That’s how you know I’m trans.

The signs were always there.

…

Ew, I swear to god if this winds up with me liking cheesecake at the end of it all, I’m gonna kill a bitch.