self-reflection

The Brittle Veil

  • Reading time:3 mins read

I try to wall it away; tell myself it doesn’t matter, that I’m not affected; I just walk away and create this distance from others—but the thing is, I’m really fucking manically hyper-sensitive to rejection. It’s to the point that I can’t stand it. And over the smallest shit.

My inability to deal with even minor conflict plays into this. I freak out and immediately feel like my life is over over a slight change in tone. I can’t handle it. So for my basic day-to-day sanity, I have to just… not engage, ever, with anyone, emotionally. Because I know it will never go well.

And I tell myself that’s fine. That it’s just the way that things are. I’m so used to it by now, being alone, always—because I know it’s for the best. It’s the only coping technique that has ever worked.

But God, does it suck. I’m not used to feeling actual loneliness. That’s new, as of maybe… December or so? But now that that’s in my repertoire, it’s really opened me up to some deeper problems in my life.

I’m just, I’m sick of living like this. Of being scared of myself, being scared of everyone else, assuming that I exist on sufferance in every scenario—just waiting for the other shoe to drop, and for the people in my life to realize what I’m really like and to snap and leave me alone again.

Fuck, I want an honest emotional connection with people. I don’t even know how to do this. I never learned how. I know there are a few people who actually like me for who I am, who don’t treat relationships like some kind of business contract they expect others to maintain—the same way that I approach people, right? There must be other people who look at me the same way as I look at them. I just don’t know how any of this works.

This whole thing here, I don’t mean it to be fatalistic. This is me, recognizing a problem here, right? This sensitivity is a basic structural thing that I’ve been terrified to admit to myself for basically my whole life, that I think I need to understand for me to be able to move forward.

All this stuff lately is tied together, right. It’s about recognizing all these things that I’ve never really understood in so many words or been able to admit to myself—because what’s the point, right?

I deserve better than I’ve been habituated to treat myself. It’s just, how?

Again, I’m fine. This is all just… unpacking shit that’s better unpacked than left crammed where it’s been for 40 years. Which is to say, I’m not fine. I really need to stop pretending that I’m okay, that things don’t affect me, when everything hurts all the time on levels I’m not really able to articulate. That’s the only way that I’m going to wire up a system that actually works here.

Anyway. Figuring it out.

An Existential Upgrade

  • Reading time:2 mins read

So these hormones have been doing a lot to my head, all of it I think good, as well as what more incidentally is going on with my body. What’s curious to me is the things the process continues to reveal to me. It’s hard to say how much of this is the change in hormonal balance, how much is the shift in perspective on myself and the parts of me I never liked, and how much is just overcoming internalized garbage that I didn’t have opportunity to address before.

It feels like my queerness keeps increasing, in my typically equivocal way. I don’t adhere to the gender binary—but I am in fact medically transitioning. I don’t actually experience sexual or romantic attraction—but what appreciation there may be, it turns out it is regardless of gender.

That was… difficult for me to sort out. But it really doesn’t matter. People are people, and the toxicity that put me off one side of the spectrum is neither innate nor exclusive to that end. Anyone can be lovely or awful, based on what they individually bring.

Which is to say, I now seem to be pan-aroace. Which I, uh, decisively wasn’t before this rejiggering. But now pretty clearly am. It’s… a little weird. I haven’t yet figured out what that means in real terms, given, you know, the aroace part. It’s taken a couple of months to grapple and come to terms with. Like, what is that, and why is it here now? And, there it is.

I feel like I’ve unlocked a massive shrug here. It’s as abstract a notion as possible, since I can’t imagine a situation it could pertain to. But hey. How else could it possibly be with me?

“None of this really applies. But also, I am diving in completely.”

A Comb and a Brush and a Head Full of Mush

  • Reading time:4 mins read

The final class of the summer session, my voice group began to get into nonverbal language, which we’ll explore in more depth this fall. What struck me was, eight out of ten of the signifiers they went over that day were things people have spent a lifetime drilling out of me. One thing after the other, they were all, “Here’s what you might want to try doing,” and it was precisely what I have always been told not to do: “Cut that out. It’s inappropriate. It’s gross. Do this other thing that makes you uncomfortable instead.”

But I’m no good at lies, and I can’t really perform. So I just bottle up, and do nothing. I suppress what I’m told is wrong, and I can’t make myself do what I’m told is right, and I glitch out and get weird.

In Dial M for Murder, you know how the husband dictates everything the wife should say to the police, explaining, “It’s much simpler if that’s how you say it happened; that’s what they expect you to say; it will raise fewer questions”—all of which makes her seem more suspicious? In hindsight, every relationship I’ve been in, they just lied to everyone about me—about who I was, what I did, where they met me, what my background was—and kept updating and feeding me these scripts that I was meant to play along to, to support their lies. If I failed to convincingly play the part or foresee lies they hadn’t provided but expected me to figure out, they grew furious with me for undermining them and raising questions they didn’t want to answer. I was going to ruin everything, by… existing.

I am so used to people being ashamed of me, and terrified that those things will reflect back on them. Of them being so ready to punish me for disgusting them, while telling me they’re helping me, and that I should be grateful. It’s such a thankless job, abusing me day and night. The least I could do was recognize their effort.

There’s all this overlap between ABA and conversion therapy, right. So many of the behaviors that they try to crush in autistic young men to make them seem presentable are traits that are described as overly effeminate. And for others’ comfort and my own safety, I sure have had to learn to mask my neurology. And now, we become aware of this. Now we come to actual, overt gender issues—and for me at least, it’s the exact same breakthrough. This is just like learning what stimming is, and why it is, and why it’s good and neutral and necessary. It’s the same process of seeing all these things I have been trained out of doing, and realizing that, no, this is who I always was. I was supposed to be that way.

It’s the revelation that everyone in my life, they were wrong. It’s that, holy shit, they all knew—and my obvious queerness bothered them so much that they tried to make it go away. And I ate it, because I didn’t know any better. I knew I was wrong, because I was always wrong, and they told me what I needed to do instead.

So much of my transition, it seems, is less a matter of learning some new performance than to learn to stop papering over my own natural behaviors to make other people comfortable. To figure out where things went wrong and how to be myself again.

There’s a reason I am such an awkward, nervous bundle of confusion. And it’s not my fault. It’s the abuse. Everything I get into, everything I unpick, it’s not about making this new thing. It’s archeology, digging down and piecing myself back together. Undoing damage. Rebuilding myself from first principles, with mostly all the same pieces but without someone else striding in every few steps to tell me what shit it all is and what I need to do differently, according to a completely unrelated set of plans that requires pieces I don’t even have.

It’s just. The epiphany of being told step by step the way I might want to try behaving to support my identity are exactly my natural behaviors that I have been abused out of performing because they were wrong and disgusting. I was always right. I was always me.

Fuck y’all.