Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

I could barely do the morning chores I usually feel neutral-to-positive about this morning -- I open the curtains, unload the dishwasher, make a pot of tea, get breakfast for myself... Things that are always the same and always different. It can be very grounding.

Today I wasn't especially tired and I wasn't in pain or anything, I just didn't want to. I couldn't imagine doing the first tiniest step.

This is a sign of burnout. I need a break. I was telling my counselor this evening that a break for me has to be somewhere away from my house, because my house is full of reminders of chores I need to do, things that get on my nerves, etc. I am not good at relaxing, but when I can do it it doesn't tend to happen at home.

I did an okay amount of work today but near the end of the day I was in this focus group about "inclusion" in our workplace. These things can be kinda therapeutic but by the end I was thinking that we keep having surveys and stuff like this, where we tell some nice external person all our woes and we're assured that the feedback is anonymized into themes that cannot identify us, but all that means is our specific nuanced articulations all get flattened in to "we all have good colleagues who care about their work but the executive team keep letting us down," and we're going to get the same kind of response from said executive team about how impressed they are at everyone's honesty and how committed they are to addressing these themes, and then we'll do this all over again in a year or two.

I felt really tired by the end of it, which wasn't great because it was almost time for my first counseling session in almost a month. A real "let me explain, no there is too much let me sum up" kind of situation.

My counseling happens on the phone and usually in my bedroom; I normally come right back downstairs in search of dinner, but this time I just lay on my bed for something ridiculous like an hour. I kept trying to get up and go back downstairs but again: so many steps. And it was relatively peaceful just lying there.

Since I had to come downstairs and try to eat dinner I'm feeling more depersonalization, so maybe all of this has been more stressful or triggery than I realized. I hate feeling like this; is probably the most uncomfortable symptom of my anxiety/depression.

I didn't get as far as Sparkle on its first day today but I did go to the Village for a meal with a local disabled group (moat of whom are also queer/trans) which I'm adjacent to, with a friend who needed a PA.

(I was glad to learn that I can still queer this friend/PA binary; it used to make up my whole employment for like five years.)

I got to my friend's house before we went out. They had glitter on their face and offered me some. I love glitter but it was the kind of hot day where I started sweating as soon as I got out of the shower. After having to hustle over to their house, my face was so sweaty I told them not to bother putting it on my face because I'd just sweat it off. Of course I had a sleeveless t-shirt on (the one D bought me at last year's Sparkle!) so they offered to put it on my shoulders. Pretty soon both my upper arms were covered in pink, purple and blue glitter, it was great.

When I got home, D saw me and pointed this out of course (as well as my "painted for the first time in five years" fingernails (chrome with rainbow sparkles over them).

I said it'd be the perfect time to flex my biceps, now that they're extra gay.

"Guy-ceps!" he said. "Guy for guy-ceps."

I refuse to talk about work again, and nothing else happens to me lately, but luckily here is a giant meme from used_songs:

( 80 questions! )

I read about this NatGeo documentary about Sally Ride last week and D and I watched the first half or so tonight (before I got too sleepy).

I remember being floored by a photo of Sally Ride in space, in the shuttle, that I saw in my social studies textbook in I wanna say third or fourth grade. American women could go to space. I think I was probably just about grown out of my desire to be an astronaut by this point (I'd seriously considered it until I decided my mom would worry too much about me so it wasn't a good idea...seeing how much she still worries about me, this seems very astute (the fact that I can't see did not occur to me as a dealbreaker until I was much older, by the way)) but I was fantastically interested in astronauts and the space shuttle (I had a toy version, complete with the truck to slot it on to for the drive across the country), the Voyagers still encountering planets at the time, and all that.

Reading about and especially watching the documentary now, I'm struck by how familiar parts of her story are. Never showed her emotions? Had parents who never modeled how to? (In a way that's referred to as "Norwegian"?!) This shit could literally be taken from my counseling sessions, heh.

This person as remote as the space she traveled to still feels as close as I was to that social studies textbook in elementary school.

I knew it'd be awful but the PIP assessment was really awful.

I've mostly had nice assessors in the past, which helps as much as anything can. But this one wasn't doing a good job of hiding her glee at her petty power over me. Mean-girl vibes.

When we told V we were having coffee and cake afterward, they expressed their approval and said they'd hoped I would be. I said I learned this from them the first time I had one of these fucking assessments and they went along with me: they had to buy me the cake after that because I was too poor to do it myself, so I remember it.

V replied: "They will not be allowed to take away our joy." Damn right.

The way my voice now resonates in my body feels better to me than I ever thought it could.

I was thinking of this this morning because I talked with a fellow trans dude about singing over the weekend; him dealing with changes to his range made me ponder how I've been kinda avoiding trying to find what my singing might be like?

I know voice training and documenting changes, in speaking and singing, is a Thing for a lot of trans people but the notion gave me big anxiety so I've stayed away from it.

Today I am carefully singing along with the radio (in the sense that I am doing it with care, rather than just finding myself doing so while I am working or whatever) and I don't really care how I sound but I love how it feels.

I said this on fedi and was charmed to have one of my dadliest friends (who we call Other Erik because he's another Erik) say

I hope you never lose that joy! For my part, I still love the feeling and I’ve had a mature low “adult” voice for over 30 years. I find myself humming low-range tunes to myself rather frequently just for the feeling of it in my chest.

It's nice to know it can stay fun for that long!

Ever since D's girlfriend broke her leg while roller skating last weekend, my ankle has been sore, something it hardly ever does any more and I've done nothing physical (like walk a lot) to cause it.

So I have tried yelling "Shut up, this is clearly psychosomatic! You're fine!" at it. Repeatedly.

Disappointingly, this doesn't seem to be working. (I didn't really expect it to. I'm just saying it woulda been nice if it did, is all!)

My ex-husband knows and thinks and cares so much about Brian Wilson that I feel like I shared a polycule with the man.

Wandering around the house tonight, doing the last chores of the evening while the Doof is finishing up, I hear "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" and I still know all the words, still remember the pained 20somethings Andrew and I were when we met and he introduced me to this weird lonely musician and all his feelings which were also our weird lonely feelings.

There was always something terribly melancholy for me in Brian Wilson's music -- there's a demo of "Still I Dream of It" that used to make me so sad that just thinking about the song made me cry uncontrollably -- and all the more once I left my marriage and never really listened to the Beach Boys any more. And the odd time I hear them, on the radio or like now, I'm always a little thrown by how weird the commercially-released songs sound, without all the unreleased versions layered over them in my mind because those were more common in my marital home (like I said: Not a parasocial relationship for me, but a parasocial metamour).

D made sure I heard the news, and I texted Andrew once I did. I just couldn't let such a thing go by without saying I was thinking of him.

I think both Brian Wilson and Andrew eventually "found the thing they can put their heart and soul in to," as the song goes, and I'm really glad for that.

The other day I overhead D telling someone that I now naturally have the voice that I put on for my character in our D&D game a couple of years ago.

I was an orc barbarian, heh.

I was delighted to hear this because I hadn't consciously been doing a voice for Bulrik (I went through dozens of orc names I hated in one of the online name generators before finding one I could live with at all, only much later realizing it's most of the name I chose for my self!) and I didn't know that's what I sound like all the time now! How delightful.

I haven't done any conscious voice training at all, just let the testosterone do its work. And I didn't record my voice at any point with the intent of tracking the change, which I guess is a norm in some online cultures. Both of these choices have been conscious decisions made to protect my mental health and I feel really good about that, but it does mean my boundless self-absorption has nothing to work with here! So it's nice to have some external observation.

The other stuff I've been meaning to write about is gonna have to wait; I'm too tired now apparently.

Last month I met someone whose visa has just been approved and who started T today.

What a good day.

I was excited to meet another trans immigrant... so much that I immediately behaved as if there was a kind of intimacy between us that does not in fact exist: I teased him about how he only had a few hours left until he started being stinky...and then as we were leaving he asked me "wait, so about that smell thing, was that serious, because I've been wondering...."

oh no!

But! It worked out okay: I saw him again a fortnight later, and he made a point of telling me I was right about the stinkiness. Which made me smile but also gave me a chance to apologize for saying something that could be so easily misconstrued. I tried to explain about the false sense of intimacy I immediately felt when

He said it was fine, it was funny. To be understood as I'd intended was a relief!

He told me that the person standing next to him, an acquaintance of mine, someone he had been draped over all evening, has been counting his facial hairs.

As of that day there were eight of them.

It was so heartwarming and delightful to see early transition so intimately documented like that. Especially for a masc person; the loving detail is something I'm so much more used to seeing from trans fems.