trauma

The Root of Happiness

  • Reading time:5 mins read

The first thing that ever made me happy was me. It was recognizing myself, realizing that I was an actual person—that I had always been me, I’d always been in there. That my own ideas about myself were clearly the truth. All that other happiness that I’ve felt since has built on that basic core. Which isn’t to say all the happiness I feel is about me, exactly. It’s that I didn’t have access to that emotion at all until I felt that way about myself—and now that I can, I can extend that love to other things.

Tonight I stumbled on a dumb thread from an artist who didn’t seem to have met a real girl in his life and had no idea how bodies work. In particular he focused on “W-sitting,” which is that whole thing that kids often do where they turn their hips sideways about 90 degrees and sit with their legs splayed out sideways in front of them. He described it as this innately feminine posture that the male body was unable to reproduce due to the differences in the female skeleton. Which is uh, of course complete nonsense on so many levels. But also, this has for 40 years basically been my go-to whenever I sit on the floor. I had to check many times to make sure I understood correctly, and yeah W- and even T-sitting (where the calves are straight out to the sides) have always been natural to me.

And… yes I am of course a girl, but I have a feeling he wasn’t thinking of a girl quite like me here.

What strikes me though, out of this ignorance is, how angry my ex used to be with me when they saw me sit like that—or squat. Or… really do much of anything with my body. This whole time I’ve been like, well, it’s comfortable? And what’s it to you? I didn’t understand what their problem was. Now, though—in mind of so many other complaints, I wonder if their brain was in the same place as this guy, and they were uncomfortable with the implications of this body language.

I often think about how when I finally worked out I was trans, everyone who knew me pretty much shrugged. “Oh, yeah,” they replied, “That makes sense.” Of the people I talk to regularly, I don’t think one of them expressed anything approaching surprise. It was more like, “Ah, that would be it. Okay.”

So what strikes me here is, all these leg motions and positions that come naturally to me, that have historically made other people uncomfortable or angry—a lot of that is probably kinda gender-coded, right? Just like everything else in my body language that kept getting me into trouble, sheesh.

Basically my whole life the people around me encouraged me to stop moving or holding my body in ways that were easy or natural or comfortable to me—without explaining to me why exactly—in order to prevent others feeling uncomfortable.

I have so much to unlearn. Like, the emotional state that I get in, the way I move and behave when I am chilled out and comfortable and yes on some level happy? With what I now understand, it seems that most of that default is uh super-duper feminine-coded.

To be happy, to be myself, to me is feminine-coded.

Which says a hell of a lot about my first 40 years—the persistent message that for me to be calm and comfortable and happy was wrong and disgusting and disruptive, and that I had to contain it at any cost lest I bother someone or invite some kind of punishment.

This all brings a certain light to our now-common term for same-sex attraction. To be allowed to simply be one’s self, to do what comes naturally, to be comfortable in one’s skin, is to feel gay. This isn’t quite about that, but, well, all queerness is related, right.

It is another level of galaxy-brain to understand at last that the people I relied on, who controlled my life for four decades, literally wanted nothing more from me than for me to be unhappy. To be uncomfortable, stressed. To understand how worse-than-worthless my humanity was. I’m just following the logic here, right? If to know happiness is to feel comfortable with who I am, and if every behavior that comes naturally to me is considered wrong and off-limits, then the last thing that anyone central to my life has ever wanted was for me to be happy.

And so, I wasn’t.

To be happy was wrong. It bothered others. It was dangerous. So, fine, I wasn’t happy.

Ever.

For 41 years. And about two weeks.

Anyway, it’s astonishing how things can shift for me now. When I calm down, I feel so, well, girly. I feel so myself. Just being able to chill can bring on this kind of a euphoria, as I lock into who I actually am as a person. Then when I freak out and tense up, I feel like I am regressing into that other person; I feel so much less charitable toward myself, I like myself so much less, down to what I look like. How I hold myself, navigate space.

Then I look at Azure in a good moment, and I think, this is what those dummies were afraid of? Seriously, her? And it just underlines even further how pathetic all those people were. How deranged their sense of good must have been.

Just look at this chick. Who wouldn’t want her?

The Neverending Suck

  • Reading time:12 mins read

I find it increasingly unavoidable that much of the trauma that I have such trouble detaching from sex as an act of communication is based in my relationship to gender—specifically in the expectations that it sets me up for when engaging with a person in this way.

So I’m a girl, right. Non-binary, but still. Obvious as my gender may be to me now—and to anyone else, it would seem—I didn’t always know it. I had no sense for what I was, beyond what people told me. The things they told me… didn’t seem quite right, and made me deeply uncomfortable, but as with so many things I didn’t want to argue so I shrugged and tried to play along.

Like the act of sex—like most of the things we do with our lives—gender is a conversation. The way that you frame it defines a role, and the role suggests a kind of a relationship. Much like art, when we define ourselves by our actions, we unavoidably embody a certain philosophy or ideology within our identity.

At the risk of getting reductive, every role that we embody serves to signal a set of expectations for how we mean to behave toward others and how we expect them to behave toward us. The coding can get complicated and conditional. But it’s there. A big part of understanding one’s relationship to gender, at least to my mind, is in coming to grips with how one wants to relate to one’s self and others; how one feels about the world; what behavior one considers constructive and important, and makes one feel good to perform. The identities we build through our actions represent a set of apprehensions about how the world works, or how we want it to.

To that end, when one is compelled to behave as someone other than who one genuinely is, that is on some level a breach of principle. You know that you’re doing something wrong, that you’re betraying something important, even if you can’t quite articulate how or why. For me, constitutionally the expectations put on me most of my life made me feel ill, and wrong, and like a horrible human being. Which isn’t to say those roles are awful in and of themselves—there are people who can rock them and make good out of them—but they did not fit my view or ideals, and just made me more and more upset and disgusted with myself. To project them onto me in particular, and expect me to follow them, was harmful.

This definition could be a discussion in its own right, but where I’m going with it here is that, to maybe even a greater extent than my sexuality, these sorts of gender issues may be the source of my biggest problems with sex.

I say, with good reason, that my asexuality is key to understanding everything else about me. This is absolutely true. It also is complicated to understand, and a little misleading until you get there. After, all aces can and will and do fuck—some of them—without it necessarily being this big traumatic ordeal for them. So my asexuality isn’t in and of itself the answer here, though it is of course relevant.

Where trauma comes in with a thing like this, it’s not really to do with attraction or orientation. It’s from how you’re treated, what happens, and how it makes you feel. It’s a matter of the individual relationships that you form, and the patterns and associations and expectations that you take from your experiences. And those specific dynamics—about what feels right and wrong and good and bad and healthy and harmful and how it affects you and changes your ideas about yourself and others and the world that you live in—those are based in that ideological coding that you carry around with you, that gender in part serves to express.

With that ideology of self in mind, when you’re expected to act in ways that feel wrong to you, and due to whatever power dynamics you feel no real option to refuse or negotiate, that constitutes a violation. Whether by direct threat or unspecific fear, consent can’t be compelled. And for me—from the gender dynamics at play, the expectations put on me, the threat of punishment either expressed or implied or readily tacitly understood—sex was a horror show. Because I was not who I was told. And the person who I wasn’t, carried certain narrow expectations, for how they should act, what they should want, none of which were negotiable. If I didn’t want those things, I was lying or I had some other agenda, and it didn’t matter because that was my responsibility.

More and more I understand how my evidently hard-coded sexual roles and interests are interwoven with my gender—with my femininity, my sense of myself as a girl; with my relationship with myself; with what kind of a person I want to be, with how I want to relate to other people. As far as roles go, how much of my being 100% bottom can be triangulated with my asexuality and how much to my ideas about power and fairness and truth and sincerity and trust and openness, I don’t know. I just know I hate to impose myself onto others, and that I spend all of my time taking in others’ worlds. In essence I am made not to assert but to receive.

For me there is a natural and kind of obvious line between the way I feel comfortable communicating sexually to the way I feel comfortable communicating in any other way. All of this is an expression of my sense of self—which by that definition above is an active process, tied to my ideals.

Which is not to say that for another person femininity or being some kind of female is this deferential mode of being. I’m just talking about Azure here. My gender is my own. My ideals are a part of me in particular. This is how all of this ties together for me, as this coherent whole.

Likewise my whole overwhelming, if you will pardon me, thirst for cock—it’s always been there, basically since I became aware of sex at all. It’s a part of me, whether I’ve acknowledged it or not. And—well, it’s both complicated and not at all really. Sometimes one just has a special craving. But a big part of that craving is again just my whole concept of myself, in relation to myself and in relation to others and in relation to the world. It’s rooted in my mode of interacting with things, in how I am inclined to interface. To be receptive is, like, the basic thing about me. If we’re talking sex, then I’m gonna want to take things in, accept them. So to me a fascination with this particular structure… well, it just naturally feels like it follows everything else that makes Azure Azure.

So to the extent that sex interests me at all, I have… favorites. And it’s all part of this same system, the best I can tell—this “correct” way of relating to others. A monkey wrench in all this is my equally ideological tendency toward panness, for most of the exact same reasons, and all the tricky business with gender and anatomy and so on. (I mean, genitals aren’t gendered. As a girl with a dick of her own, it’s difficult not to be sensitive to the complications here.)

Of course in practical terms I’m aroace and I’m never gonna actually pursue a sexual relationship with anyone in real life. All this is a thought experiment more than anything; it’ll never affect anyone outside of my head. And yet it all does lean into some of the historical trauma that I associate with sex—with the dynamics that have felt so wrong, and how they relate to my concept of who I am as a person. And so, abstract as it may be, this business can’t help getting a little messy as a result.

I’ve only had two actual sexual partners. Depending on how we define things, I might have had… I don’t know, a few more romantic partners beyond them. Things were often weird, what with that ace/allo misalignment. Their ideas and mine never quite lined up. However you count, one common factor is that they were all cis women—which, you know, sure. Fine. Cool. Though that homogeneity feels a bit… off, considering all the things about me.

The other common factor is that I never went looking for any of this. Generally they all pursed me, and normalized themselves as a part of my life until I started to think of them as friends, then intensely close friends. From there, any romantic or sexual development was always a change of terms. Suddenly I’d have this choice: either to lose this friend I was getting to rely on so much emotionally, or to make this compromise, step outside of my comfort zone, and accommodate these new expectations. And then, to keep accommodating. Keep playing along, to make them happy.

An ultimatum is not a good start for any stable relationship, but that’s the only experience I’ve known. Sometimes it was more pointed than others. Sometimes more was at stake. It’s always been coercion, though. And built into that coercion was this demand that I perform this alien role.

And, I was awful at it. I didn’t want to do it. I felt miserable. I felt like I was betraying myself. I felt like I was doing something ethically wrong somehow.

This is a little hard to find the right words to express the way that I mean to. My experience has been narrow, and it’s been entirely focused on my sorest pressure point, and it has really really sucked. As a girl, 100% of my association with sex and romance has been of other girls pressuring me to pretend I was a boy and punishing me when I failed to do it correctly. And that’s just. Uh. There is nothing good about any of that. Beyond girls generally being awesome of course. And it creates these unfortunate associations for me.

It’s like. In a scenario where in fact I were not aroace down to my teeth, I would say, yeah, great, let’s have a balance of everybody. Keeping in mind who I am and the dynamics that I need to be healthy, let’s get in some men, some women, some enbies, cis, trans, whatever. Anyone who’s cool and kind. I’m polyam, even. Party on. Then with that kind of a broad net established, one can narrow down special interests and favorite parts and dynamics, and it doesn’t really matter because everyone is different and people are just people and one will appreciate something new with every individual.

But like. I never got a cock in there, y’know.

Not only did I never actually get the kind of dynamic that I’m most specifically—though not exclusively!—wired to favor. Every relationship was also another riff on the same sucky dynamic that served to deny my humanity, to work against my sense of self, in service of someone else’s whim.

It’s frustrating on a certain level, as I’m never going back to that well again. I know myself well enough now that I’m not going to be in another sexual or romantic situation. I know this isn’t for me. So what I’m left with is that the entirety of my experience is defined by this trauma—and by never once getting what means the most to me. Like, the energy balance I need to feel well, I never got it and I never will. That’s not an experience I’m going to ever have.

And, you know. That’s fine, in the sense that I know this isn’t a part of my life. The future is more important than the past, and I have a good handle on that. It’s just that on some level it seems like a shame, and to be real it’s kind of annoying, that in that whole… er, brief novella that is now closed, I never got a chance to relate to anyone on my own terms, as a girl, in a way that felt healthy and enriching to me.

No one has ever treated me like me. And what they wanted from me, I couldn’t give them. Because I wasn’t that person. And it hurt. And made me frankly want to die.

Most of that is just, yeah, the people who’ve macked on me against my wishes have, surprise surprise, been awful people. But gender, it’s not an insignificant part of that.

I’m a girl, dammit. Of some kind, anyway.

And you know. Hypothetically I like girls too, it’s fine. But, just—even then it would be different if they’d allowed me to be myself. But they didn’t. They made up their own minds.

I was only ever a toy. And a broken one, because I never worked the way they assumed I was meant to. And it was always my fault, for failing to fit that mold.

And it sucked.

It just sucked.

And it’s over now. And I won’t have to worry about it again.

But the suck stays with me.

The Voice Inside My Head

  • Reading time:11 mins read

Though all of NIN kind of exists on a different level from other pop music, one could make a life’s work of studying The Downward Spiral and never come to a point where it feels like one has run dry of revelations.

To my concern, I often comment on the distinct transiness of Reznor’s music. There are really obvious moments like “The Becoming,” but there’s just this tone and perspective to so much of the emotional journey. This is extremely 2019 for Azure, for instance:

I guess there’s a certain universality in the infamous vagueness of his lyrics. You can project anything into Trent’s little trauma boxes. But through all his work there’s this regular sense of transition, of fear of one’s identity, of numbness and desperation, of one’s false persona eating one alive.

“Help me understand myself,” his music pleads. “Nothing that anyone has told me seems to fit, or make sense to me. I don’t have the tools. But—don’t look too closely, because whatever’s in there, I just know it’s horrible, it’s irredeemable. It scares me. And if you see it, then I’ll have nothing. I’ll be helpless again, and then even hope will be tarnished.”

All that’s interspersed with these moments of just, fuck it: I have nothing left to lose. I’m going to go down this rabbit hole, guide or no guide. Lifeline or not. I don’t care anymore. God help me. Whatever I truly am, I might as well find it and face up to it, even if it kills me.

There’s just this constant sense of grief and loss and despair, and disgust and horror with one’s self—of searching for any kind of a frame that makes the pieces add up in a positive way, and finding nothing but pain in the models pushed onto you by every controlling force in your life.

Again it’s all so vague, which is why he’s a successful artist. All this sounds a heck of a lot like adolescence. You get this with a general sort of heartbreak. With disability or neurodivergence-related traumas. With any sort of existential anxiety that we all experience at one time or another; any time when our ideas of ourselves don’t match up with the story that we’re fed by the world that we live in.

But like. In practice and in totality, this is such a deep, distilled, rich kind of a trauma that Reznor depicts. And it’s so thoroughly infused with these questions of identity—of reaching the end of the usefulness of the self you were handed, and of embracing the part of you that has caused you too much distress to acknowledge. It’s all about metamorphosis, of casting off the last vestiges of a humanity that does not fit and just going with whatever horrors you’ve failed to keep inside all this time. Time after time he hammers on this inability to keep masking any longer, and the death of one’s connection to an abusive world.

Nothing can stop me now
I don’t care anymore

There’s a fatalist spin here, and there’s a determined one. It’s kind of the same agency you get with body modification; that in a less healthy outlet may lead to, say, cutting behaviors (and, well, potential hesitation marks).

The Alice Glass song “Mine” angles at a similar kind of space:

Here I go again, it’s all I can do
(Let go)
So tonight I’ll take my own body
I’ll take my own, take my own mind
Abuse myself till I’m finally mine again
Finally mine again
I will go and use a ninety nine cent
Razor drawn, razor drawn line
Leave a trace till I’m finally mine again
Finally mine again

It’s not a healthy trauma response, but it’s just—claiming some kind of autonomy. Over one’s body, one’s emotions, over one’s sense of self. Even if it’s a destructive one. If you’re going to survive after everything, you need to be your own person, set your own terms.

Azure ain’t the same person who looked after her body those forty-some years before she woke up. A lot of things happened last August, all at once—but the breasts are not an insignificant one. They quickly became an anchor for my identity: this permanent, physical, obvious affirmation of who and what I am, that no one can ever take away. They became this cornerstone of body autonomy, of this general sense of self-possession that I’ve never enjoyed before.

To that end, I’m going to get my ears pierced. Sooner than later. This summer, probably. I never understood the appeal before my tits came in. Tattoos, piercings, any kind of body modification, it just—my head, it was locked in this deferential mode. “My body doesn’t belong to me,” I felt. “I don’t belong to myself. I’m not a real person.” Like, it wasn’t my right to do anything with the body, the name, the identity, the character sheet I was given. I would get in trouble. I would ruin this thing that I was handed responsibility to maintain, for someone else’s benefit. For me to tamper with it would be this inexcusable critical failure.

But it turns out that I am a real person, with all the same rights, worthy of exactly the same consideration, as anyone else. No one gets to control my body but me, and I get to make choices on what to do with it. I get to assert that control as I see fit—including decoration. Including things that serve no function beyond making me feel good. Which is an important end on its own, as it turns out.

I’m fortunate to have (rather late in life) found the tools to understand myself and to work out what I need in a reasonably healthy way. I’ve still got all this business to do, to strip out all the wrong wires and set myself right. But I’m on the path now. I think I’m going to be okay. But to have this support, to be able to interpret what’s going on inside me independent of the judgment and expectation of the world that I’m living in—that’s not a given. And it took me four decades. And not everyone has the fortune to stumble on those resources.

Heck, that neglect is mostly by design. We’re not meant to find the tools that will help us, because then we’ll no longer be prey to the system that feeds off of us and depends on our unquestioning obedience to generate all of the wealth that we’ll never ourselves see in our lifetimes. We’re not meant to have that agency, none of us—which again speaks to the universality of the sentiment in Reznor’s music. But there are degrees and nuances, right? There are colors and shades. And existential horror is one of the biggest drivers here.

Nine Inch Nails is substantially about horror, specifically through the lens of what we are presented as pure and correct and acceptable, and that is impossible to ever actually live up to. Combine that with all the sexuality and the imagery around changing bodies, and, well. It’s fucking queer, right. It’s unavoidable. Not exclusively, and I expect not deliberately, but distinctly and clearly. The queer-coding is just about blinding, and once you’re in a place to notice, you’ll never ever unsee it. You’ll only ever find further confirmation.

And among all its other strengths, The Downward Spiral is such a centerpiece for this energy. It’s all throughout Reznor’s work. From track one there’s this association between the perceived wrongness of self with monstrosity, with evil, with internalized fear on the basis of what one is told. It’s like, my very essence is an offense to all that is pure. I am an abomination by virtue of these facts of me that I have no control over but I am assured are objectively, unavoidably dangerous. This is the kind of logic that fuels anti-trans bills, that fuels hate crimes and lets them off with “gay panic” or “trans panic” defenses. It’s all about fear and hatred and disgust for the intrinsic evil that lurks inside.

Then underlying that notion of casting off ties to other people’s notions of humanity and embracing the horrors within one’s self, after the catharsis there’s this constant theme of being ruined. It’s angled against a vague religious context, but more broadly against “reality”—like, the surface of the social framework one is handed. It’s this all-or-nothing thinking where taking one step away from some hypothetical light will tarnish a person forever on some fundamental level, and there is no getting that purity back. From that moment, one will never not be tainted.

That’s a damaging sort of narrative to buy into, in regard to anything. It informs stuff like the AA model to addiction therapy, to our criminal justice system, to sex, to any kind of exposure to “dangerous” ideas. It’s a social control device, that serves to tell people they are essentially bad and owe their lives to the system. It serves to demonize and scapegoat the vulnerable as symbols to other members of society rather to than actively provide the support they need to live healthy lives. And it’s what we do all the time, to basically everyone who steps over an ever-shifting imaginary line.

Again though for all its ubiquity, when you combine this dynamic with all the body horror and identity and sexual stuff, well—the overall impression is profoundly relatable to someone whose body and identity and ideas about sex are considered essentially “other,” and threatening and diseased, and horrifying and wrong.

I was never not afraid of public toilets—they’re gross and psychologically strange, and leave one feeling vulnerable in all these different ways at once—but as a transfeminine person, I’m sure as hell going to avoid them forever, to the extent I am able. I will plan around them.

Because of unavoidable elements of who and what I am, to some people I will never not be considered an existential threat. And they will use that as an excuse to hurt me, to take out all of their other unresolved traumas and resentments on a person whom they can tell themselves deserves it.

I’ve gone through most of my life knowing I was broken and disgusting and wrong, and I’m used to having that affirmed by anyone who has gotten close enough to see beyond the flimsy mask I had propped up to keep me safe from those who would call out a mob if they recognized me. I know now that this garbage doesn’t apply to me, and I know it’s all somebody else’s problem, but it still leaves me vulnerable in a lot of situations. The street harassment is bad enough, but what if I don’t brush them off before they clock that I’m transgender?

There is something about queerness that presents as a fundamental threat. Fundamentally devious. Conniving, perverse, manipulative. Decayed, revolting, evil. This narrative is so central to our experience, in relation to the world and the stories we’re told about ourselves. So for Reznor’s music explore this precise conflict, much to most of the time, it’s—it just really feels familiar, you know? Hauntingly so. This trauma isn’t a passing thing for me, just as it’s no incidental topic for Reznor. It’s not a bad year, or a bad event, or a stray misunderstanding. This is life. This is what it means to exist in the world I was handed.

I am so fortunate to now be in a place where I can love myself the way that I do. This is so miraculous to feel, and I appreciate it every single day. It was so hard to find my way here, and I’m never going to let go again. And that catharsis from Reznor’s music, over so many years, is part of how I made it here alive. Intentionally or (more likely) not, that deep and overwhelming queer coding, it helped to underline that this struggle could be in some way articulated. That it wasn’t just me who felt this way, even if I didn’t know where it was coming from. It helped to validate the pain I felt, even without any answers.

I really owe this music a lot for keeping me going, keeping me on some level sane enough, until I could find the resources I needed. And even as I heal and build a healthy relationship with and toward myself, I can’t imagine a time when the sentiments here will fail to be relevant to the basic conflicts of this identity, in this world that blames us for its own sin.

The Space In Between

  • Reading time:5 mins read

My experience and emotional association with sex is of the most profound violation of my sense of self. It has been too big, too strong for me to bear without melting down. And until now I didn’t have the tools to start to understand. It was just screaming.

The thing about sex is, it’s a powerful kind of communication. It serves to connect the mind and body of each participant more viscerally than nearly anything, then to align those wholes to a united sense of being amongst the parties. There’s this intense oneness and recognition.

That is, if it goes well. The problem is, in being so very intimate it tends to entail putting people at their most vulnerable. The level of trust and acceptance has to be close to absolute, or some of that circuitry is going to fire off all wrong. Possibly to horrific result.

When people aren’t on the same page, have different apprehensions of what’s happening and expectations for how things will play out, that can quickly create massive problems. When the terms are non-negotiable and compulsory, then the violence to one’s personhood is indescribable.

Consent is a difficult topic, as it gives the impression that it is so simple. The basic outline feels self-evident, right. It’s easy to explain, makes for good slogans and mantras. But practice is way weirder, because it involves human beings and each of us houses our own world.

It’s difficult to have informed consent unless everyone understands what they’re agreeing to the same way, fully accepts the other, and is willing to reassess at every step of the process. If you’re working cross-purposes, you can inflict some life-changing damage on someone.

In my case there have been a couple of severe bottlenecks. The obvious one is the point between me and the other, where there has always been this presumption and a total lack of willingness to clarify or explain or listen or negotiate. If they have to tell me anything, I fail.

The less obvious bottleneck is within me, between my mind and my body. There has been this basic dissociation my whole life. The wires just haven’t been connected, and the practical elements of my presentation and my physiology and assumed behavior horrified my basic inner self. Like, I wasn’t on the same page as myself, never mind on the same page as them. And even if I were a whole functioning person, I’d still be faced with a near total refusal from my partner to communicate or compromise on the most basic of wants. I still had to know everything.

I’m a girl of course. Never haven’t been. I’m very much a bottom, to the core of my understanding of life. I am autistic, and need assumptions spelled out to me. I am aroace, so though I am able to fuck and to feel enough affection for another as to open that possibility, I don’t myself experience those attractions in the way an allo would (I presume). So if you go in expecting a very different situation from me, refuse to tell me your terms and assumptions, refuse to adapt in any way, and punish me if I fail to adequately perform your gauntlet? It’s not going to go well. And every step of trying to coerce me into your anticipated roles, every moment of refusing to work with or listen to or respect me for who I am, it only forces that wedge in my sense of being all the deeper, increases my basic horror toward everything.

Being told and shown how disgusting and awful and broken and wrong I am, at my most absolutely vulnerable? Making out that brokenness and wrongness as being so foul as to be the offending party, like I’ve done something wicked to you through the failure of my very existence?

I have had anxiety attacks. Full-blown panic attacks where I’ve felt like I was actually dying. I’ve run and cried and cowered and hid. And I was never not in the wrong for showing any of that. How dare I. When I’ve held together, I’ve mostly faked orgasm and gotten out quickly. Not because of any lack of affection for them, or lack of arousal, or lack of sensitivity to whatever needs I was failing to meet. But because I was in that much pain. And I had no terms to begin to address it. And they didn’t care. My pain was itself disgusting to them.

I don’t know what to call this situation. I don’t have a model for it. I’ve never heard anyone talk about this dynamic. But, there’s something about all of this, and the basic premise of the surrounding relationships, that creates for me deep questions of consent. It feels wrong.

The amount of disgust and inhumanity I’ve absorbed to the core of my being from all this, the amount of terror I have learned to associate with sex, I don’t know if I’ll ever fully come to terms with it. I carry it around every day. I just start crying and shaking for no reason.

Part of that is their disregard. Part of that has been my lack of a working relationship with myself and understanding of myself as a whole person. And part is just the sheer power of the kind of connection that sex represents. Which can be remarkable, nurturing. Affirming.

Or, it can be that.

It’s something like seven years since the final time I had sex, and the nightmare has never gotten better. But I may have a few tools now to start to understand it a little. Slowly. Some of those tools are less than weeks old. So this is super shaky. But, I think I may have a beginning.

Bad Air

  • Reading time:3 mins read

My voice lesson the other evening, one of the professors popped into my breakout room with my grad student to comment on a thing he’d seen and heard with my breathing, how I seem to unconsciously seize up and hold it, and how that cascaded to affect various things in my voice. I thanked him, and it made sense at the time because I know my history of wind problems. Like, I’ll just forget to breathe all the time. Then there was that mysterious respiratory ailment that took hold a year after meeting my ex-spouse and let up right after the divorce. With some more thought it was clear that the breath thing, it was a stress response. I’m all up in the freeze and the fawn, right. And I think that’s just automatically the first thing I do; my throat seizes up, almost like it’s afraid to give me away lest someone notice me.

So this is basically this core trauma response that I didn’t fully realize was happening, beyond all these individual data points that I hadn’t really strung together. And the thing about breath is, it’s this load-bearing process that affects just about everything about a person. It’s kind of astounding how much gets lumped onto breath. It has all of these knock-on effects, for my emotional state and my physical well-being, the way I move my body, the way I use my voice, the energy I have to work with moment to moment. And I feel like every time that my breath is taken away from me like this, like that’s a little bit of myself that’s taken away. Like I’ve ceded a bit of my being, as a human.

It’s like my breath is this anchor to my physicality, to my humanity, that radiates out, and underlies and supports all of these other structures, all these other concepts. And by removing my breath, you’re removing all of my power. You’re removing my voice. You’re taking my energy, you’re taking my connection to my humanity, and on a present, visceral level, to my sense of self. I mean, we’re all verbs. We all exist in the doing, not in the being, right.

Just like shame is some share of your soul that somebody else has claimed, I feel like some piece of me is being taken away by the damage that’s been done to me by other people. Like, this response isn’t actually me. It’s nothing directly to do with me as a person. It has nothing to do with me as a person, it’s nothing to do with my core principles, or the way that I’m wired intrinsically. I’ve been miswired over the years in response to my experiences and the abuse that I’ve been through, and this stress response is part of that whole mess.

I think that reasserting—not control, but that conscious relationship with my breath as a core element of my being—a key link between my body and my self—without allowing it to be taken away from me, would be a really substantial step forward in my recovery process.

A Critical Eye

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I came into this world unwanted. I navigated it at the sufferance of others who wished I were someone else, if indeed I were there at all. And for forty years I agreed with them.

But the tools they gave me, those were absurd. There wasn’t any kind of a reality to them. When I really look at what’s in me, and I think about all that I value in the world, I realize, it’s in there too. All that love, all those dreams were there the whole time.

The things I want and wish that life could be, they’re right here. They’re what make me a person.

Finally I feel wanted, by the one person who knows best and will never leave me alone.

My predecessor wasn’t equipped. They were one 30-year-long dissociative stress response. A literal embodiment of all my worst feelings. A walking nightmare.

Now when I feel anxious, at times I feel like I’m slipping back into them. Then I chill out, and check in with myself, and I call myself back to reality. I don’t have to be that person anymore. They were never real. They were never even my idea.

I am so proud to be me, now that I can see me. And there are so many dimensions here I have yet to fully apprehend.

All these things that I find cool in other people, I also embody them, at least to some extent, in my own individual balance. And now, I get to explore that.

Start of the Breakdown

  • Reading time:6 mins read

To proceed, we may need to distinguish a few things. The trauma I have around sex per se is different from the trauma that I have around my sexuality—though both are really difficult for me to engage with to the degree I need to unpick everything. (Well, half of my sexuality, I guess I should say. The part that isn’t just nope.)

It’s way easier for me to engage with my gender, though even that has kind of two levels to it. My enbyness was obvious and no problem at all; it took a lot more work to connect with my femininity. Either way, ultimately that’s just an obvious visceral fact of me. Clearly I’m a girl, and clearly that’s on my own terms rather than some external binary road map. And, okay. Sure. It’s all inward-focused, about my relationship to myself. I can work that out, with time.

Before we even get there, though, we need some body autonomy, which is provided by recognizing my aroaceness. That’s kind of the key to everything about me, the thing that allows me ownership over myself in a way I never previously understood.

It’s all the other parts, when it stops focusing entirely inward, that are hard for me. Whenever just the concept of other people enters the picture, the terror comes along with them, right—and that scrambles and complicates any effort to understand what’s really happening, how I function.

Breaking the problem down, though—I think that may help. I think it’s easier to engage with one part at a time, carefully strip out the bits that are just other people’s damage and tend to what’s left, puzzle it into a working order and see what it’s really like under there. I think the question of the trauma around sex itself is just too big for me, as I am now—and it’s not really pressing or important, in that I’m never going to have sex again. (Well, not with another person anyway.) That’s too hard, too painful, and just… not a priority to sift.

Sexuality, though, is a totally different thing, if obviously related. That’s way more hypothetical, more about ideas than actions. Yes it’s hard to engage with some of these ideas, but it’s just a playground of the mind in the end really. There is still mirrored glass. It’s way easier for me to deal with the notion of being pan, and what goes into that (or… hypothetically, uh, into me, one says with intense bottom energy), what it means for my ideas about myself and the way I relate to the world and the people around me and in my imagination—than it will ever be to deal with my past experiences, and how I feel about the actual practical elements of sex and just—

I can’t even finish that thought, Christ. Even approaching it makes the dam threaten to burst. I don’t feel like crying right now. It’s 12:30 am. So, I’m just—I’m not going to go there, for now. And that’s fine. Doesn’t mean I’ll never reconcile, never work at it. But, you know. One thing at a time. I don’t have to deal with what’s happened to me to play with the nuances of the way I’m wired to think and feel about people. That’s got enough baggage, that’s confusing enough. But, I think it’s workable if I just take it as its own thing. If deeply peculiar for me to engage with.

I’ve got so much to get over here. All this internal mess, that’s just a reflection of other people’s problems. And so much of that weight, it doesn’t even reflect the reality of who I am. It’s based on all these wild misconceptions of me as a person. So the question is, why am I listening to it? Why is it affecting me at all? But that’s how they get you with the programming, right.

So. Okay. I guess that’s kinda where my hyperfocus is gonna be for a while. Call this stage four of Azure unpacking (ignoring the neurology, which is related but kind of its own separate set of concerns from the whole queer parade I’ve got running through my head here). I’m a non-binary girl. I’m so very aroace, holy shit. But, it is also clear that I am intrinsically pan. And that’s weird to engage and hard for me to understand, and I guess I’m ready to try now.

To be precise, I need to understand it in relation to me, to Azure, not to the gender that other people misdiagnosed for me so long ago, or the persona they projected onto me. That’s never going to lead anywhere useful.

I got, like, feelings here. And I guess this is a long time coming, huh. I’ve never really been in a place in my life, in my relationship to myself, to even begin to figure them out. They’ve always been here in hindsight, same as I’ve always been a girl even when I didn’t have the tools to see it clearly. I just, what feelings I housed, they weren’t ready to rise to the surface.

In this dive, I don’t want to be crass about it. I don’t want to be performative or weird. I definitely don’t want to make other people uncomfortable. But this isn’t about anyone else; this is me, this is is my space, my self, my recovery. And I guess this needs to be my interest for the next while.

So. Okay. Shit, fine. Yeah. I’m, uh, gonna have to think on this, and where to go from here. Now that we’re dropping this next brick of shame off the highest possible bridge.

God, this is what we’re actively engaging with now.

All right. Let’s see where this leads.

I’m hella pan here. And, uh. Right now the fixation is on certain dimensions of that which have a novelty of not previously being allowed recognition.

It’s normal for a girl to be into dudes. Well, if it were anyone else I’d say of course it is, dummy. It’s normal for anyone to be into anyone. It’s always different rules for me than for others. I’m gonna have to really start checking myself on that line of thinking.

Whee, so.

…

Here we go, I guess.

Hook and Eye

  • Reading time:9 mins read

Since I was… However old I figured it out (Early teen? Maybe?), I have had an ambivalent relationship to masturbation. Nearly every time, I come out of it thinking, “… Why did I just do that?” I feel gross and unpleasant and ashamed—and then to nail it home there’s this mess. That last stage, when I had no energy or will to handle it, was like this punishment for something I should have known better than to do, that didn’t get me anything, that made me feel physically unwell, and that just reinforced all these negative ideas I had about myself. Yet as will happen, particularly to one with a masculine-coded penis, there was this compulsion, right. A thing one feels the need to deal with, if for no other reason than to get it out of the way so one can think about other things. And it was so friggin annoying, god.

The thing about all this is, between this and my real severe problems with sex, and my transness, and how that plays into my sexual identity, there’s a lot of really confusing messaging going around, every piece of which has to be examined on its own terms to determine the shape of the puzzle and where it may actually fit.

The problem isn’t with my dick, right. I like dicks, and I’m very fond of my own—especially since it’s gotten feminized and has begun to behave itself, but even before I fixed my hormone situation. That’s not a problem. That’s not what weirds me out here.

As I’ve talked about, the fact that I feel very little compulsion these days is such a relief—as is the fact there’s so little cleanup in that regard anymore. But even with no punishment it’s not really—like, I don’t get much out of it. Not enough to bother almost ever, right. Like, I just feel empty, lesser. Annoyed with myself. Physically there’s this fleeting glowing rush, which is more intense than it was in the old days. But it’s like, who cares? Any therapeutic value from the physiology is usually more than offset by everything else still. At best I wind up with this sort of neutral situation, like, well, that just happened. Oh well. So, it’s pretty great that what barely-there libido I ever had is pretty much vanished entirely. It’s like my body and mind are finally operating on close to the same level.

So, to put a pin in this, now I’m thinking about my problems with sex—which are many and complicated, and will possibly never be fully unwound—in part because there’s no practical element. I will never have sex again under any circumstances, and I wish I could erase what I’ve had.

One especial trauma point for me, when I look back, is the expectations lumped onto me. I’ve only had two partners, right; both were cis women, with their own… issues, that are none of my business. But they really expected me to play a role, that they expected me to understand. And for their part they just… did not want to be involved. They wanted to be 100% passive, and they projected all this stuff on me on the basis of my genitalia (and I guess their misreading of my gender). And they got so vicious when I failed to play that role in the way they imagined it.

I’ve often dwelled on how inhuman I was made to feel. Like I was just some kind of a wind-up toy for the other’s benefit. There was no communication, no fondness, no joy. I was a tool, and I was there for a purpose, and if I failed to do so automatically, I was useless to them. So it was my responsibility to be the horny one, to regularly initiate sexual situations, to arrange everything appropriately, to actively engage them in everything, while they just kinda… sat there. Because I had a penis, that made me a top. Because they saw me as male, to them I was mega-top.

Except, whee, that has nothing to do with me. I couldn’t, can’t handle that garbage. I don’t have a libido. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t really like sex. I just wanted to be close buds, right. Share my life, spend my time studying the other. I didn’t want to dominate. It made me so sad and it freaked me out and made me feel awful about myself, and in hindsight it shot my dysphoria through the roof. I was so ashamed of the way I looked, of the way my body worked, back then. I felt disgusting. I nearly had a panic attack every time. It was bad. On a couple of occasions I did actually have a full-blown attack, and wound up pulling away in terror and just curled up in a ball in a dark corner, shivering and sobbing. Which they then seemed to decide that was a thing never to bring up again, to imagine never happened.

And for all of that, sex was my exclusive responsibility. I was tolerated as a person on sufferance with the understanding that I provide them a service, right. Which was not my understanding, entering into these agreements.

Which is kinda where I have consent issues. I don’t know how to parse the situations I was in. None of it really feels fully consensual to me, and it’s just… I’m holding back tears just writing this now, as long ago as it all was. Hell, the last time I had sex at all was… I think, 2014? Not nearly long enough, but still.

So, there’s a lot going on there, right. But if we strip away the interpersonal weirdness and narrow it down to my own physical and emotional mechanics, there may be some things we can pick apart in here.

A big issue here of course is the dysphoria: deep and crushing and all-encompassing but undiagnosed at the time and not understood in the least. I felt like some horrible creature, and did not want to be seen the way that I was. More than that, I did not want to play that role. In that itself there’s a lot to unpack, about communication and genuine care and affection and love and concern and so on. But it’s worth focusing on the gendered expectation, and the assumption that well of course I would be a top. They thought I was male. I had a dick, right. Sexual roles have nothing to do with gender or anatomy, obviously, but like everything else, people tend to make these assumptions. And not to play too much to stereotype, but contrary to what people kept telling me, I am a girl. And I think this is relevant to some of my wiring.

To bring that back to the masturbation thing, if we posit that to the extent that I would have any sexual role at all, I would very unambiguously be a bottom in fact, that may inform some of the historical issues here, including the focus on my dick (which is otherwise great). Like, psychologically, emotionally, it does nothing for me, even upsets me a little, to emphasize stimulation through penetration. I don’t want it. And what physiological payoff may result doesn’t really offset the personal damage that it does every time.

What’s confused me with most of the literature that I’ve read around this topic is the hyper-focus that it tends to take with genital dysphoria, right, which again I don’t have going on. My dick is gorgeous and one thing about me I’ve always been happy about. In my case, it’s not the penis itself that’s the problem, but I think probably the role lumped onto it and the consequences of leaning on it as a primary instrument. Which just messes with my head and makes me feel awful.

So now, there are a hundred problems with butt stuff as well, right. In my case it’s almost entirely down to cleanliness, which is just… you know. Not a thing I want to dwell on here. And as fine as I am with the mechanics, it feels so weird to talk about in so many words. The thing is, though, for all the aversions and complications about cleanliness both going into and coming out of that scenario, ultimately it’s less of an imbalance than the what-feels-like punishment when one focuses up front—which again almost never feels worth it on balance.

Again I don’t really have an active libido, and it’s never going to be more than a rare occasional thing, but I feel like butt play is both more affirmative and more rewarding than genital play. Like, I find myself glowing for a whole day afterward as opposed to feeling miserable. The near total lack of shame (as hesitant as I may feel to verbalize it), the full-body rush of calm and giddiness. The feeling like I am a real person. Something in my brain clicking, and my feeling my gender more strongly than ever. Feeling in love with myself and who I am.

Even if it’s super gross.

Between that grossness and the general lack of an impulse, there’s more than enough to prevent me from getting around to it almost ever. But it actually does make me feel good. It has a therapeutic value that masturbation is supposed to have, right, that I don’t associate with the act.

All of which feeds back into sex. I think I better understand a piece of why it has always upset me so very much. Again there will never be a circumstance where it comes into practice, because this is just not a thing I will be doing with myself, but I’m so very much a bottom. And that’s fine, and that’s good, and that’s neither here nor there. And it’s kind of obvious if one knows anything about me. But it’s interesting just how deeply wired that is, and how much it wounds me to go against it. How much it makes me frankly hate myself.

Which is absurd, because I’m wonderful.

So. Okay. That’s me, thinking this through. As these discussions will tend to be. I think this makes more sense to me now.

Anyway. Another brick in place, in the puzzle that is Azure. One that really shouldn’t have taken this long to cement, but here we are.

Diagnostic Culture

  • Reading time:3 mins read

In some ways it feels like transness is a thing for Other People, to explain to them why I’m not behaving the way they expect me to. For my part it’s more like I’m finally getting care for a condition that was negligently misdiagnosed and so has gone untreated all my life.

It kinda feels like… making a transition from, say, an assumed free-breather who keeps coughing all the time, goddamn, to an asthmatic. Like, this was probably always the case, right? Or more close-to-home, a transition from a neurotypical to an autistic with ADHD issues. I was obviously never neurotypical; that doesn’t even make sense. Pinpointing my neurological situation is about correcting for a previous set of false assumptions and lack of care and support.

By the same reasoning, at no point did I ever agree to my gender assessment. I just… didn’t want to argue. It’s neither here nor there that as a result of that misdiagnosis it took me 40 years to work out what was wrong with my situation. It happens all the time medically. I’m not changing anything. This is a diagnostic process. All I’m doing is correcting for other people’s mistakes.

The sense where I am obviously gloriously correctly trans is the cultural, ideological aspect. There’s a way of thinking, of relating to one’s self and the world—a sort of shared understanding of how things work—that is very different from those who don’t have to deal with this. And that is very much a part of who I am and who I want to be.

In an ideal society we wouldn’t dump these gendered assumptions on people the moment they’re born, and even before. Before roughly the 20th century, kids in western culture were treated as more or less androgynous until they hit puberty, at which point they adopted gendered roles. The past sucks and shouldn’t be taken as a model for the future, obviously. But point is, this is arbitrary that we project this garbage on our frickin’ caterpillars, way before it’s relevant to their lives or their self-concepts.

If our culture actually made sense, then… well, gender as we know it probably wouldn’t so much be a thing even—but more to the point, it would be pretty meaningless to be trans, as people would make up their own minds who they were and wanted to be at the right time—except in the occasional case someone realized whoops, they got it wrong before, or something in their life really changed the way they felt, which, of course, valid. But then, like, it still wouldn’t necessarily have anything to do with assigned gender, right.

Assigned gender has nothing to do with me. It’s never played into my self-concept except for the fucking trauma that it’s caused me and the way it’s forced me to react and sublimate myself to keep safe all these years.

To make a very cautious parallel that one shouldn’t look at too deeply, just as race doesn’t really have a biological basis yet it’s still meaningful due to cultural identity and history, I absolutely am socially trans. 100%. There’s too much wrapped up in that concept. As for me, though, the way that I see myself? I’m just… me.

People got things wrong, and I listened to them. And it hurt me. Then I worked out the truth, and I’m getting better. That’s… really nothing to do with me. Who I really am has no relation to what others expect.

I’m just Azure. I’m some weird kind of a girl. I always have been. People are just dumb.

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.

Small Talk

  • Reading time:2 mins read

On reflection—sex is a conversation, right. It’s a kind of communication one works out with one’s partner(s), pooling the mutual appreciation you hold for each other into something bigger. At least in theory. Ideally.

I don’t think I have had proper sex. It’s more that in each case I have been used as an elaborate masturbation aid for the other’s benefit. No connection. No communication. No foreplay, no exploration, no fondness. Just, be expected to read their mind and satisfy their unstated urge while they zone out. Then go away. Fail any of these steps, and be punished.

Which is not to say that sex is a thing I need or desire in my life. It sure as heck isn’t, and I sure as heck don’t. At all. Ever. But, I guess those are some of the words for some of the distress that I associate with it. None of which, really, has anything to do with sex itself, or with me. Rather, it follows the personalities and values of the other parties.

As I’ve been saying, I want to be saying no for the right reasons, from a position of calm and understanding. I don’t want to just be reacting with fear to everything; I want to make good decisions, that reflect who I am and not just the damage I’ve been dealt.

So. Here’s a piece of that, I guess.

Having and Giving

  • Reading time:9 mins read

I didn’t have a good childhood, right. I guess some people did? Weirds me out. I can’t wrap my head around that. Up until I managed to leave, I was continually told how much worse everyone else had it, so therefore I had no right to complain. If I failed to be sufficiently grateful that my parents weren’t even worse, I was a horrible child and I deserved whatever was coming.

It’s true that that most of my problems were a matter of neglect, rather than active violence or abuse. So that’s something, I guess. It’s just that it was a matter of record that no one wanted me. No one cared that I existed. They vocally, regularly, in so many words, resented the fact that I was there, and tried their hardest to wish me away.

I was hungry most of the time. I was left mostly on my own, to figure out my meals in a house full of things nobody sane would eat except each of them specifically and independently of each other. There were no meals and there was no compromise, middle ground of communally edible food because everyone hated each other. I’m pretty okay at baking because I learned in grade school if I wanted a birthday cake i had to work it out myself.

I has nothing to wear except old, too-small, torn and thin, usually dirty clothes that I had no say over and that often gave me a rash. I knew better than to ask either of them for help or a favor. If they didn’t turn on me, they’d find a way to fuck it up. I learned never to express emotion or betray a hint of what I wanted or needed or intended, lest someone scream or hit me or lock me in my room for a couple days. Best case, all I’d get is mockery.

They were both horrible, but of the two I think my father sometimes took a kind of pity. Like, he wouldn’t actually address anything or many any steps to make it better but he’d make these gestures toward… not an apology, but filling the void in some small way. That’ll do; assuage his conscience.

One of the reasons I’ve all this background in videogames is that around 1986 he found that if he kept up a slow but steady supply of the things, I would spend all my time with them and not bother anyone. He wouldn’t have to think about me again for days. Weeks. That was his parenting done. I don’t want to knock that entirely because, yo, I got a fair number of videogames to occupy me, and to use to escape from… all of that, everything around me. And I know we didn’t have a lot of money. But this wasn’t really about me, right. It was pure fucking guilt on his part.

Anyway, these gifts really made my mother livid. (Which also may inform part of why he continued to do it.) She got so angry at the idea of my… well, having things. So I never got any clothes that i needed. Nothing would ever get washed. She’d ensure I didn’t get any food that I wanted in the house, and again no one prepared anything. Were I to actually ask for something—some toy or book or whatever—well, who did I think I was? Royalty?

The exception being the odd, rare thing she got it into her head to bestow upon me regardless of whether I wanted it or not. Regardless of anything I said, any boundary I put up. I had no right of refusal. I’d unambiguously tell her straight out no, then she’d pretend it was news.

When she saw me receiving things that she didn’t pick out, that I actually wanted and enjoyed, she went fucking apoplectic. It was like, what the fuck was this; I didn’t deserve anything! If she saw me leaving the house with my father, she would scream at him, “DON’T BUY [them] ANYTHING!!“

So, okay. Let’s take a step back now. At this point there are a few possible ways to read this, right?

I know my mother used to be all hippie-dippy. I’d heard stories of how when my sister was a teen the former would dig through the latter’s drawers for any bras, so she could trash them. The patriarchy and all, you know. So, a lack of barriers, lack of compassion and theory of mind, Just plain fucking crazy, but second-wave feminism forever! There seemed to be some guiding principle here, even if a stupid one, applied maliciously.

All this time, these forty-some years, I figured, okay, what a flaming asshole—but anti-consumerism, anti-materialism? Sure, okay, I get it. Again we didn’t have much money, and I can see how especially in the 1980s, putting all this value on owning stuff would be perceived as, like, not so superb. Even now, I’m not totally ascetic—I have my books and games and movies, my small collections of things I’ve hung onto all my life—and I am so fucking broke that buying things isn’t really an option. But even if I weren’t, I’d think twice before any purchase. Do I really need this, I think. Do I really want it?

Here’s the thing, though. Just now while eating my garlic bread, I remembered a pretty key clarifying detail. My mother, who was so adamant against my having appropriate clothes to wear, food to eat, anything of my own that gave me a little joy in the void of humanity that was my childhood? She has a fucking consumer addiction.

She will never not spend money on any random thing you put in front of her, no matter whether she wants or needs it or likes it or has the money or not. She lives like a fucking trust fund kid. She will sit and watch QVC for 16 hours a day and buy at least two of everything they show. It gets so she’s afraid of the mailman because she doesn’t even know what she’s ordered. After the divorce, she got the house, completely paid off. Within a few years she’d taken out two mortgages, to pay off credit card bills from all the stuff she orders every day.

All this woman does all day is buy things for herself. Non-stop.

So. It’s taken me all these years to connect these dots, right.

She was so against my ever having anything at all. It was obscene for me to ask for so much as a sandwich. But it wasn’t about a lack of money. It wasn’t about anti-capitalism or anti-materialism. That wasn’t a problem at all. All of the neglect, the active denial of care or support, the rage at the idea of my being on the receiving end of anything but the scraps she hand-selected—it was all about me.

All of which to say: holy shit. Fuck her.

Just. Goddamn.

I cannot emphasize this enough: Fuck. Her.

What the absolute shit.

What.

I knew that my parents always hated me, but. Like.

I just.

So.

Yeah.

There we go.

I have no guilt, no qualms whatsoever, about wiping her from my mind. Any lingering crap about cutting her—anyone related to me—out of my life, I just.

No. Fuck her, absolutely and forever. This is not a person worthy of my pity, my guilt, or anything else. She can just fall down a well and die.

I’m not especially angry, even. I just—no.

I mean, I’m a little angry. but it’s not this overwhelming rage. It’s too tired for that. It’s more that I’m done. I solved the puzzle. I don’t have to ever think about this again.

Time to shut down that runtime. Clear that space.

Still at 42 years old, I feel such intense guilt for wanting anything at all for myself. It’s a thing I’ve had to actively work against since coming to grips with who I am, and recognizing my need to recognize and affirm and support this person whom I’ve discovered I like and want to be. And, that’s why all that garbage is there, inside of me. That’s who put it there, and that’s why she did it.

All this shit, it’s from some jerkass who called me an “interloper” for happening to be alive through no action or desire or consent of my own. Who actively wanted to deprive me of any agency, means, joy, or respect even as she ran up the bill on her own interests.

To her i was an “interloper.” To my father I served only as an excuse for her not to get a job. He was open about my older sister being the only good thing that ever came out of the marriage. Nobody wanted me, so for me to assert my existence, to remind them that I was there, was fucking evil to them.

And I just—no.

Despite everything, somehow—despite the pieces that I’m made out of, despite all my experiences and neglect and a fucking lifetime of trauma—I’m actually kind of awesome.

I never deserved to be treated like that, by anyone. Nobody does. Nobody would.

And, I love me. Finally. Despite everyone’s efforts.

I deserve to want things, materially and otherwise, within whatever ethical structure strikes me best. My basic needs deserve to be tended. I deserve joy and reward and support. I deserve to be a fucking human being.

Which is a thing that nobody in my life has ever told me.

Despite everything, here I am: still alive. and everything that I’ve been accused of.

What they did to me was wrong.

What my ex-spouse did to me was wrong.

And the list can keep going on, filling those gaps in between.

And I absolutely cannot carry that around with me any longer.

Writing the Unspeakable

  • Reading time:23 mins read

So sex, right. I don’t like this topic. It makes me cry, and not happy tears. There’s so much built up in and around this, that hurts and scares me to examine. It’s fortunate, sort of, that being aroace means I don’t have to actively contend with it much, except in my own head.

As I’ve unraveled elsewhere, there are a couple ways to frame the relationship and the distinction between my aceness and what has become clear as my pansexuality. One approach is more granular and is about modes of attraction—I don’t experience sexual or romantic, and my neurology and trauma complicate sensual attraction, but there’s an element of aesthetic and platonic is definitely on the table. The other is an innie/outie thing, sorta like gender—you know, like identity versus presentation. That’s an inexact parallel, but it gets at the idea of this outer practical awareness and expression (aceness), versus the theory and fantasy and inner life (panness) that never thinks or wants to cross into real behavior—which doesn’t make it any less a part of me.

The aroace angle is easy enough for me to manage. That was just a matter of identifying, oh that’s why my interactions have always gone this way; that would explain these other things that never added up. Okay, cool, so it turns out that’s just how I’m wired and there’s nothing wrong with me. Phew, good to understand that at last.

The inner modes of attraction are harder, for so many reasons. There are so many layers of shame, and fear, and bad memories and past violence and trauma and blame and accusation. and it is weird and difficult to realign my feelings with my current understanding of my gender.

I grew up ostensibly male in the 1980s and ’90s, in a rural area. It’s not just that “gay” was the ultimate insult; it’s that it was a pathology for those with power over one’s life to be concerned with: You’re not one of them, are you? Do we need to send you somewhere? I had all this other stuff going on as well, of course. I was neurodiverse and I was badly, reluctantly playing out the wrong gender. For reasons beyond my understanding, everything about me was wrong, and I could never betray a word of my full, true thoughts or feelings on any subject, without putting myself at risk.

The most terrifying shame out of all the things I shouldn’t be thinking and feeling, and here we get to the point of this discussion, was my fixation with dicks—a topic I always tried to dance around and not to dwell on, but it would always surface. So here I demystify it: I have always liked dicks, okay. It is what it is.

In the year 2020, with our current nuanced understanding of gender and sexuality, and with all the discourse and controversy about genital preferences, this is sort of a different world to be breaking this down in. but in the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, masculinity was super not appealing to me—which made it more confusing. How was I to resolve this attraction?

Back in the present, I know now that I am pan. My block against attraction to dudes on principle has to a large degree melted with time and hormones and understanding of my own gender in particular, though still it feels so fucking strange and triggering to wrangle with. And with that dam down, it’s now clear that my attraction to people—in theory if not in real life, where again it simply doesn’t happen—has everything to do with who they are as people; that gender doesn’t really enter into it meaningfully. (Trauma-based hang-ups aside, of course.) But it is also clear to me that on a personal level, though I can appreciate any equipment based on its attachment to the person who’s sporting it—the person being the only thing that really matters—all things being equal, given a choice, I have an obvious preference and fascination for the penis. And it’s clear that this fascination ties into a lot of other things about me.

I am of course passive as hell in most things, even the topics that engage me, and the aroaceness sure as heck indicates a lack of active engagement with sexuality or attraction. It’s more that sometimes, ideas come to me. and then, there they are for me to manage somehow. And in all this ideation… well. A thing I have observed a few times, with increasing clarity, is the possibly strange way i have always engaged with porn. As I’ve explained before, I tend to see the central figure as the protagonist like any story, and to identify with (usually) her on her journey. And, as it turns out—oh. That’s not just an abstraction, huh. Like, it’s more than empathy and narrative analysis.

Not to cross lines between porn and reality, but, well, again reality doesn’t much enter into my sexuality. it’s all in my head, all the time. But all things considered, I am so clearly a bottom, right. Almost exclusively. It’s all about navigating things done to me, rather than seeking to do them. Which, whee, sheds so much light on my history, such as it is. Which has exclusively been with cis women who insisted on perceived gender roles, and so expected me to take on the behavior of a certain cultural narrative, growing more and more frustrated with my timidness, reluctance, confusion. It had nothing to do with attraction to them or otherwise. In each case they were at that time the center of my life and my attraction was proportionate to my all-encompassing love. That’s the only motivation that matters, right. It’s the performance that freaked me out. Had they initiated rather than always expected me to and grown furious when they felt forced to lower themselves to ask me, and had they taken the lead, I would have let them carry me anywhere. Instead there was this tangle based on assumed roles, that they would not deign to discuss.

To equate the penis with action is of course reductive—I have a dick, and I like my dick, and we’re having this discussion here—but there are connections going on with all of this, right. It’s not the realm of binary black-and-white objective labels, as we’re talking about people. And likewise not everyone with a penis is male, not everyone with a vagina is female, and it’s all complicated and that’s great and weird and as it should be. Again, case in point: me. But my preference for dick, it makes a kind of sense that wends through every part of my being, touches so many things.

It is perhaps messy to be pan, yet to have a clear and unambiguous preference for one mode of genitalia—but we’re messy, right. Of course attraction isn’t based on what’s in a person’s pants, and even if it were, a preference isn’t exclusive. Once you get that far, who cares? It’s messy in the same way that I can be pan but far more importantly aroace, and that it all makes a sort of sense because people aren’t math problems. There is only so much external logic you can apply to a person. It’s not about the outside, about all these boxes and labels. All of that is just death.

But yeah, this is all me coming to terms that i’m a girl who dreams about getting railed by hypothetical dicks even as she recoils from any actual touch. And, like. I shouldn’t feel shame about who I am, right. That’s what I am trying to get past, so I can just fucking live here, goddamn.

I like dicks. That’s a part of who I am, and it’s normal and it’s fine. Because people are fucking weird, man. I have talked about this all a little, in bits and and pieces and behind ciphers and in private conversation that has unintentionally gotten weird, for which I feel I hope appropriate chagrin. But here’s me thinking it straight through, finally; coming to terms with it all.

Of course in real life also, sex is gross and unsanitary and awkward and emotionally overwhelming—and with my sensory issues, it is viscerally unpleasant. Perfectly normal behavior just hurts to the point of weeping, in the manner of whacking one’s shin or funny bone. So yeah. no. Fun thing about keeping it in my head is, one can overlook the practicalities like that and work on the basis of aesthetics and fascinations without having to deal with, like, suffering and disgust and a big mess to clean up.

On which note, HRT has also been amazing to me. I swear, nine months in, I have not experienced one adverse effect. Nothing at all. Everything is the way I want it to be, and that I have always felt awful that things weren’t since I was about twelve. It’s a little bizarre how it even affirms my basic attitudes toward sex—which my body did struggle against a bit, when on the wrong hormone path for so many years.

Sex is gross and undesirable and overwhelming and unpleasant, but a feminine penis is so much better-behaved, it’s superb. All the literature they hand out is framed to make this sound like a scary, undesirable side effect to put one off of treatment. But, uh. no? It’s very good. It is such a relief to no longer experience random arousal, and that in the rare event I feel compelled to engage nonetheless, hardly any mess now!

See, the thing about the feminine penis is that it wants to behave like vulva and vagina. It’s all the same hardware basically, right, and the hardware gets its instructions from the hormones it’s sent. so the priority shifts toward lubrication instead of ejaculation. So in all this there is way less of a sense of urgency. It becomes more about the journey than the destination, as it were. (Though yes, multiple destinations are entirely feasible, if one’s brain can handle it.) Which is also in part why it doesn’t demand attention the same way.

Even in the event of arousal, which again is way less frequent, it comes more of a decision point. It’s not a case of, Christ, guess I need to take care of this huh. It’s more like, oh. Well. There’s an option. Do I feel like making time for this right now? 90% of the time if you’re like me, the answer is probably no—because there are other things to do, it’s a hassle, it’s time-consuming, and it’s not very important. For that one time out of ten you do make the time, it’s way less annoying and gross and… depressing, than before.

I feel like I have control over my body for the first time, or rather that I am on a level with it and we are able to communicate clearly and agree on principles and priorities. It’s so wild that everything now works how I want and expect. I guess some people who put a lot of stock in sex might be frustrated, but it’s so cool to me that all my aspects can be friends now rather than constantly argue. I am a greater whole than I used to be, as a result of dynamics like this—of which this is just one dynamic example.

So for like three decades my physiology was one of a million ways I felt like I was fighting myself. This sense of calm that I feel now that all my parts are alight may contribute to my ability to finally step back and take tally of my sexuality and attractions; figure out what I really feel and want for myself.

This shift in function, it plays into a broader shift in my self-image. There are of course a few angles to this: general self-worth, confidence, fear about asserting boundaries, shame about my general weirdness—but my body plays into it big-time.

Historically I have had big old issues about being seen. There was a sense of danger and vulnerability, and also of this disgust and shame I felt for my form. I didn’t want to see or acknowledge myself. I definitely didn’t want to be touched or commented on. I was horrible.

It brought me to tears to be stripped down without my protective layers. Shorn of jackets and waistcoats and sweaters and shirts and trousers and everything else, there was no hiding my horribleness: my long, bony limbs, my weird chest, my birth marks—and of course my terrible skin. It was bad. It took such trust to get me that far—and if trust faded?

It’s funny how late, even into my transition, I processed what all that was. Somehow I’d never connected my body issues with my transness, even after accepting that I was trans. There was just so much rewiring to do, I guess, and it took a while to get to that particular wound—one I had no interest in touching. Appropriately enough.

About six months into my regimen, I decided that I actually really like my body and where it’s going. Suddenly now I am not ashamed to have arms and legs and a torso and a face. (Well, the facial hair is a problem still, but.) It’s all on a knife’s edge every day, and my mood is up and down and all over the place, but I have never felt this before, and like so many things lately it makes me drunk with novelty and glee: Hey wow! I’m not completely disgusting! I can apprehend myself as a person worth seeing and touching. With my hips and my breasts and the changes to my face and posture, I enjoy the way I am now shaped. I can dance naked in the mirror, and think, wow, I love her.

So that would seem to be another hangup in the can—if one were to desire sex, which, still: no. For all the reasons. But, like. Since we’re clearing house here, sanity dictates that I work through the issues that aren’t really about me or my wiring and wants and needs. And my body issues, they aren’t innate. I’m dealing with them. They don’t need to affect the choices that I make.

The goal is to get it down to the necessary hang-ups only; the things about me that I can’t, and don’t want, to change. I want to be making decisions based on truth, not trauma, even if the answers turn out the same. When faced with something as big and confusing and momentous as sex, I want to be able to confidently say, nah, not for me—not to melt into fear and uncertainty.

Wound up of course in all of this drama is the age-old question of what it means to be trans and to have gendered attraction. The paradox being, by lifting my mental block on a gender in order to nullify gender as a factor in attraction, my brain goes into these gendered conniptions.

It can be hard enough to wrap one’s head around the meaning of gay or straight attraction if one is just flipping polarities, right, from one binary gender to the other. There’s the label logic, but none of this is rational. One’s perception is all based on a lifetime of emotional appeals and enforcement. If you’ve got decades of people incorrectly calling you a boy, then attraction to girls doesn’t feel gay even if mathematically is sort of works out that way. And vice-versa, one presumes.

To be non-binary, though, the labels all become sort of a mockery. I guess, Logically to be non-binary and gay would be to feel attraction to other enbies, right, but, like. It’s more complicated, right, in part because these terms and categories are inadequate. Again, people are weird. So of course the sensible thing to say is, fuck the labels. You’re queer; just do you. Feel what you feel. Who cares. And… right! Sure. if we’re going to be sensible, absolutely that. But, what’s sensible about any of this? To assert that, we’re just dismissing our natural emotional response, which is a sucky kind of a solution. Due to the way this fucking society works, there can be (and in my case is) a lot of trauma and headfuckery to untangle and work through to be able to get to the point of just shaking it out and saying, yeah, lol, whatever, love is love—as true and perfect as that ideal may be.

All of which is to say, to accept myself as in some capacity pan means wrangling with the very visible and visceral hangups over this one angle of attraction, that have been so long wrapped up in fear and threat and accusation, and the labels that I’ve absorbed that go with it.

It’s funny in a way. Because I was (ineffectively and erroneously) raised to be male, I can’t help but read attraction to men as gay. What’s funny about this is that, this should in itself be a good thing, right? Let’s all be gay! Hurrah! And in any other context, it transparently would be. But there’s so much wrapped up in this. For me this isn’t fun-gay. This isn’t happy-gay, iconoclast, freedom, anarchic empathetic human acceptance rainbow self-direction gay. My brain wants to process this to at least some extent as weaponized, accusation, terror gay: the thing to be denied at all cost.

The other funny part is that, like. It… kind of really isn’t? Again if we’re just going mathematically—which doesn’t work when we’re talking about people, but here the architecture serves a support purpose so let’s go with it—how can attraction to males be gay if I’ve never been male?

So it is that there’s all this internalized garbage, that elicits a certain protective panic to surface the moment I start to relax and think, you know, it’s fine; this is true; this is just how i’m put together; I can appreciate all people the same way—yes, even dudes, okay; it’s fine! I try to bring down the wall and make things equal, and just admit what’s in front of me, and something in the back of my head begins to sputter and go, oh no, oh shit, oh God, I can’t be thinking this, no one can know about this, I’m going to get in so much trouble, help. So that’s a reflex I’m going to have to keep working on. It’s nothing inherent to me. it’s just an injury. with a really strong immune response.

To go back to the labels, everything is a big old shrug here. Nothing feels straight; every kind of attraction is some kind of queer. I’m in this weird old gender space where, like, I’ve taken myself outside of normal kinds of polarity, even as I continue to recover from the above garbage. so just the act of feeling any kind of attraction at all becomes—like, no attraction will ever be straight again.

In a sense being non-binary makes it easier to just go, yeah, whatever. Gender is a fuck; people are people; find attraction where you will, or don’t. It’s all the same; don’t worry about it. But to embrace this also adds extra pressure when I recognize my hang-ups. I don’t want any of that mess guiding my thoughts and my feelings, since it really has nothing to do with me and just ideologically it’s gross, right. With all this rumination on dudes and dicks, I feel like I’m putting way more emphasis on this one angle of attraction than it probably warrants, to the point where it comes off as a little weird and fixated—but that is, I think, because it bothers me. I’m trying to wrangle this deep terror, in the face of reality. It’s so hard to admit. I feel like I have to keep looking over my shoulder, like I’m going to get in trouble. But this is one of the last pieces in the puzzle of me, I think; one of the last facets to embrace until it can stop hyperventilating and accept that everything will be okay.

It was so much easier to accept my asexuality, followed a little later by my clearly non-binary gender. Accepting my femininity was more of a drawn-out, mildly terrifying struggle, but I think i’m pretty well committed to that concept now. (Like, seriously. This is amazing.) In broad terms, recognizing myself as pan feels like it should be simple—but then, this. It’s so hard to talk about, especially as I have such a strong aversion to sex and romance, right. On top of the more present and visceral issues, I have all this trauma wrapped up that I don’t know when if ever I’ll begin to unwind. Then admitting this in particular? Oof.

Which is of course why I have to do it. God, I have absorbed so much crap—but I need to fucking accept myself for who I am. I don’t want Azure to have to deal with any of this. She is a new person. We’re dealing with our shit, so Azure can just live her fucking life.

So in terms of my innate qualities we’ve done my lack of attraction and interest in anyone ever, which are 100% valid and important to recognize and assert. We’ve also addressed the neurological issues—the physical discomfort to sex and sense of ickiness about the whole business. In terms of things have been done to me, we’ve gone through body issues, shame, confusion over my orientation and what it means. What I think is left is a sense of physical fear.

To be sure, this isn’t entirely unwarranted. It can be dangerous out there, for men as well as women, but especially anyone femme-coded—and especially if they happen to be transgender. And likewise it is not unwarranted to place much of that fear in the lap of men. I do not, for instance, to get get enbies and women honking at me trying to pick me up outside the grocery store, and that’s far from the scariest this could get.

But it is also true that despite a certain share of bad actors, the world is not a field of bogeymen and most people are not in fact monsters. Despite what some first and second-wave feminists may assert, this includes men—because people are just people, right. No one has to be a certain way; largely people behave as they think they’re expected to.

Now that I crunch the obvious, I think that historically this whole patriarchy thing has also helped to unnecessarily gender my attraction. It’s so easy to equate men with toxic masculinity and physical danger, right? In which case, zoop, there goes any interest for me. I’m not going to consciously put myself in a dangerous or violent situation, if I can avoid it—and threat is anything but attractive to me.

But that’s a gross and unfair attitude, and yes it feeds right into patriarchal notions with the presumption that boys just gotta be that way. And to be sure, our culture does create an element of yikes that i don’t want to think about navigating. But since were talking about intrinsic and extrinsic qualities, that’s not the former, right. Dudes don’t gotta be like that any more than I need to be shamed and traumatized over being the person who I am, feeling the things that I do.

I think that engaging with queerness and the variety of ways that everyone can ultimately just kinda be as one—coming to grips with my own gender, having interactions with trans men, and all of this stuff that goes into interrogating the systems that we’re living in—it’s helping to loosen up that deep associative fear, which has helped me come to grips with my reality. If I’m not terrified, it’s a lot easier to let other feelings in.

All things equal, people being equally cool and non-threatening—yeah, in that circumstance it really comes down to the individual. Gender’s not a significant factor. Of course we don’t live in an ideal world, so complications and fuss and worry do abound. A big problem in my marriage was, I did not feel safe. Like, ever. But especially not at my most vulnerable and under the closest scrutiny imaginable. That’s not going to help any sort of attraction or desire. But as that also demonstrates, that fear and danger are not exclusive to a gender. It’s all about the people, as individuals. The fear is individual, just as appreciation can be. Anyone can be a monster, but that’s up to them, and it’s not determined by any objective factor. There’s nothing rational or empirical or necessary about being a cruel person. It’s a choice that people make. That anyone can make, or not.

As I say, 90% of my reason for putting this stuff all out here in public is to help me push through the thoughts in a linear form and lock them into place so I can understand them all better. The other 10% is thinking, maybe there are some other people like me whom it could help—other neurodiverse queers out there, just trying to make their own sense of all this garbage they’ve been handed. Everyone’s different and will have a different experience, but gosh I’d be a lot better off now if I’d had something, anything to work off of when i was younger. So, as I help myself, maybe this is my addition to the global data bank.

Drizzled over all this of course is this glaze of defiance. Just, seriously. fuck all y’all, trying to shame me and force me to be something I’m not just for your comfort. I’m awesome. and I’d never have known that if I hadn’t dumped all that baggage. I deserve to be myself.

In the end it’s hard to see how anything will change. There’s no real visceral end to this introspection. I’m not gonna bang anyone, I’m not likely ever to enter into an intimate relationship. That’s just not what’s happening with me, and it’s such a fucking weight off to understand that part of my wiring. There’s no compulsion, there’s no desire.

What’s important to me is that I make the decisions I do for the right set of reasons. That my actions are guided by what I want and need and I think is best, rather than by fear and trauma and denial. And likewise, I want to be free to appreciate myself and others and the world in general, in the manner that I choose. I’m a grown woman, even if I don’t feel particularly grown, and I have a certain well of compassion and I know I’m not gonna be objectifying others. I’m not gonna be shamed for the things I think and feel. I am who I am, and I am beautiful.

And sometimes, not altogether infrequently, I dream of cocks and all the places they might go. As a healthy living person well might. Such is the folly of our lot.

Just, nobody touch me, please.

Off the Board

  • Reading time:5 mins read

God, even on a relatively good day it’s all up and down with me, sometimes from minute to minute. When the tears start coming, I just curl up and start muttering over and over, “You’re not my best friend, you’re not my best friend.” I don’t even hear it until it’s been happening.

I don’t need that garbage. I’ve got myself now. I’m finally building the relationship that matters the most. But the pain, it never really goes away. I just sometimes manage to forget. For a while.

Anyway, I’m actually feeling emotions these days, so that’s something. They are what they are. They’re neutral. It makes sense that I would feel them. Better than I not. They don’t apply to my current reality. There is no danger attached to them. They’re just normal grief.

One has to grieve, and grief isn’t linear. Change doesn’t work like that, when you’re human. I broke my wrist when I was fourteen. Dumb bike accident. There’s no visible scar, but it still aches sometimes. Even when it doesn’t, it feels odd. Some alien sensation I still can’t name.

I don’t want an unkind person to make me bitter, make me lose trust and hope. They’re just them. They act this way to everyone. I had no reason to think I was exempt. It has nothing to do with me, or with anyone else. I was never responsible for a cruel person’s behavior.

You’re never responsible for another person’s behavior, no matter the relationship, no matter what they say to you.

I want to think most people are earnest. Dumb, self-centered, and oblivious to anything outside their experience, maybe. Misguided. But well-intentioned at least. There are predators, and I guess I am getting better at spotting them, but it can’t be that many.

I don’t subscribe to the reality they insist we live in. I can’t accept such a broken, wrong view of the world. The only monsters are the people who think everyone is a monster but them.

…

The thing is, both romance and sex-based attraction are fundamentally about reducing the other—and often one’s self—to a function. It’s this act of objectification, encouraged by the structure of the culture that we live in. It all confuses me, and strikes me as so upsetting. I don’t want someone to treat me like that, and I don’t want to objectify anyone else. I just want to appreciate and be appreciated by virtue of who one is as a person. Like. I don’t want to be a thing to anyone, and I can’t view others as things to me. It doesn’t really register.

There’s a distinction here. I can understand the role of sex as communication in an existing relationship. It’s not for me, but I get it. A physical language, based in consent and affection and mutual appreciation? Why not. (If one can tolerate it personally.) But sexual attraction as such? The viewing of another in terms of personal arousal? Basing one’s interest in another person on that premise? It’s a big yikes here. It heebs my jeebies right out of my bones.

It does well to stress that I don’t intend this as judgment; more as an attempt to clarify a cultural disjunct that causes me personal distress. There’s a boundary issue in all of this that I have real trouble navigating, and it has resulted in… problems, at times.

In the abstract I see sex as this hilarious folly. Like, what are you even doing, you silly dummies. Its appeal lies in its absurd bathos. There’s a sincere place for that kind of whimsy. I am unsure if the place I’d choose is where most people would expect.

For other people, there’s this transactional nature to certain things that I just… can’t resolve. It doesn’t work with my brain, and it scares me a little because I don’t easily see it except in hindsight.

That understanding of a transaction causes so many people feel Owed, and it, like—this is my body. This is my person. I’m not here for you. I can be with you, if you’re cool. We can do neat stuff together. No one owes anyone anything except recognition of their mutual humanity.

I just don’t get power dynamics. Other people can play these roles and navigate these rules and have fun doing it like it’s all a game, and fine. So long as they’re all consenting and respecting each other, so what. Go nuts. But, like. I can’t.

Yet there is this underlying unspoken presumption: of course I can. I must, and I will, and if I say I don’t, I’m lying or there’s something wrong with me that needs to be fixed. Everyone’s playing the same game, people seem to think, and there’s no way to opt out. And, that can be fucking dangerous.

There are levels to this. There’s the… like, the reaction I’m starting to get from randos when I walk to the grocery store, right. The overt angle. More insidiously… I am getting better at spotting and understanding coercion, at a pace. Not so much when it’s in my face. Like. I don’t know how to clearly signal that I am not playing. You’re not getting anything from me. I don’t want anything from you. I’m just a person here. Can’t we be cool?

I’m just saying, living in a system where this is the norm causes me distress, and I can’t get with it. Don’t want to subscribe. It’s not a moral issue; more a philosophical one based on how my brain fucking works and how I navigate the world. And, like. There are consequences to that disconnect.

The dynamics of consent are complicated, and I expect I will be picking through my history for the rest of my life.

Grasping On

  • Reading time:6 mins read

In hindsight it says a lot I think that the thing to first draw me in to Steven Universe was “Cry for Help.” There were lots of feelings I had no clue how to process. The scenario, it spoke to me—in a way I had trouble identifying.

Steven Universe s02e10: “Cry for Help” (2015)

It’s not direct, 1:1. But, like. I needed to see that.

It’s so hard to validate sometimes when a thing feels wrong and everyone you turn to is saying to you, what, you signed up for this; what are you complaining about; actually you owe this to the person making you feel this way, for putting up with you all this time.

The whole nature of my arrangement, it was like a big switcheroo, and I was trapped.

My body no longer belonged to me. I was no longer a person. I was just… an acquisition. For someone else’s use, at someone else’s whim. I was a prop for their benefit, and I had no more say.

Again, “Cry for Help,” it’s not exactly the same scenario. (Pearl is the one doing the coercion, for a start.) But, like. The point of the story is, our problems, the dangers we face, they aren’t really about bogeymen most of the time. People are people, and everyone is capable of great or terrible things, sometimes in the same breath. For practical reasons if nothing else, nearly all meaningful violence comes from people close to you. It’s hard to abuse a person without a foundation of trust.

Steven Universe Future s01e04: “Volleyball” (2019)

On some level, I knew things were wrong. I knew I was in a bad situation, and I didn’t know how to get away. But I just couldn’t address it. Not directly. Any problems I faced, I told myself they were my own fault; I just wasn’t strong enough. I needed to bear with it, try harder to prove my use to someone who didn’t even see me as human. I didn’t have the words or the resources to admit what I was facing, how wrong it was. And there was always some new emergency that was somehow mine to clear up.

I had ignored the show before that episode. Then I saw the response online. I looked up some reviews and saw what it was about. I dug up a copy and I watched it, repeatedly.

And just, seeing that coercion.

And, knowing, in some raw piece of what was left of me: oh.

There are so many abusive relationship dynamics in this show. It’s really something else—for any TV series, let alone a show aimed at twelve-year-olds. So many moments, it feels like the show is checking in on the viewer, saying, you see this? This isn’t okay. If it looks in any way familiar, go and chew that over for a minute. Maybe talk to someone.

Steven Universe s03e15: “Alone at Sea” (2016)

…

One of the reasons I like Lapis so much is, not only is her story just one big mound of whoomph identification over here; she’s also… not very likable. Lapis is a major fuckup. She’s prickly, and nasty, and inconsiderate. Not on purpose; just because, that’s what trauma often does to a person.

She knows how awful she can be. She knows how much she can hurt others without meaning to. It’s just, she just doesn’t know how to manage her pain and fear and depression well enough not to. The worse she responds, the worse she feels, because she doesn’t want to be like that. Every time she lashes out, all it does is affirm her own self-image that little bit more.

It’s not cute. It’s not cozy and sad and pathetic. Lapis is bitter and broken, and she has zero faith in herself. But, she also is so full of love and care and gratitude, that she wishes she knew how, had the basic fucking energy, to express.

It would be so easy to paint a character like Lapis as, oh, that poor little waif. Pity the mirror girl.

But no, Lapis is an asshole.

And it’s amazing.

And just, so… real.

Steven Universe Future s01e08: “Why So Blue” (2019)

90% of the time, Lapis is Extremely Not Helping. Because in the event she does anything, she doesn’t trust herself not to fuck it up or hurt someone or just lose control. But when she can keep it together? There’s no stopping her.

…

All that trauma, leading to all that bad behavior, all that conflict, all that grief and self-loathing, that’s the bulk of the show, just seeing how this plays out. Seeing people bounce off each other, bite each other’s heads off, weather each other’s abuse in the wake of things way bigger than them, that we never get to see clearly. Because they’re just the world Steven was thrown into. Much like us.

With Steven Universe, the real story happens long before the show begins. The show is about the fallout and the consequences of decisions ages in the past. What do we do now? What does this mean for us? How do we fix this? Can it even be fixed? Why is this on us? How is this fair?

Steven Universe: The Movie (2019)

This is in part why “Change Your Mind” has to happen as it does, why the trans allegory plays out in its slightly occluded way. Rose isn’t there anymore. She can’t end her story. She can’t fix things. She will never know closure. But we can still find a way to address her problems and move on.

We can give her a proper elegy, make sure the reasons behind her decisions are as clear as we can make them, and try our best to accept the present for what it is, and make the best of it that we can. Like Lapis, like Pearl—like Steven, like Amethyst—Rose was a fuckup, and she was in pain. That pain set all of this in motion. We can try to address the causes. Then for our part we can do better, we can be better. We can make a better life than we were handed.

That’s what it’s all about. That’s what everything is always about.

The throughline of Steven Universe is about working through the crap that has been left for you by forces outside your control and finding a way to live your life again.

And yet people remain baffled that Future plays out the way it does. As if it’s not the only possible resolution. As if the whole reason for this reckoning was for any other purpose than to come out the other side and find a way to be human.