Blog

"Hope is like the sun; if you only believe it when you see it, then you will never make it through the night."

Friends, aka: the most important thing (seriously)

I don't know who needs to hear this or if this even connects with you, but I hope it makes someone's day/night a little bit better.
There's always going to be new people. There are billions of us out there, so there might as well be infinite people to meet. There's always going to be folks for you on some forum, some server, at some show that's happening next weekend. Maybe I'm just projecting but I feel like a lot of us are upset because we feel like our true selves are hidden behind a mask we create to blend in with whatever delusional construct of normality we've come up with in our own heads. Nobody else cares when you start to act like yourself because people are always caught up in their own thoughts anyway. Connect with other people. I feel like most of us are brought up to feel like there's always a camera on us, or like everything we do is in front of an audience. Most of the time, only a couple dozen people even know about you.
Anyway, I don't know who the reader might be, this page is really just the ramblings of a somewhat lonely college girl.

Stress (CW: light sexual topics and self harm)

Stress can kill you. That's why people get heart attacks from working too hard at an office job; going through a certain level of stress is absolutely horrible for your heart, physically. It gives people cardiac arrest. It makes me sad to think about because I didn't know this in high school, the stress I put myself through was never enough for me. I wasn't just pushing myself in school with AP classes, I was also foregoing sleep, all-nighters were too common. 4 days a week I worked at a thrift store until night (~8pm) and on days I didn't work I had to lead the woodwinds section of the high school band until 8:30, which I hated. (Don't take band in high school. Nobody likes it.)

It wasn't just physical labor that was hurting, the worst part was the social aspect. When I was 14 I dated a guy for the first time who was using me to live out his yaoi fantasy of having a high school boyfriend. After about a month of dating, he started ghosting me. He pulled me into a bathroom to have sex, but stopped after pulling my pants down and just kind of stared at the wall while looking downward and told me to leave. Then, he refused to talk to me for weeks. I was completely in love with him, so I was fucked up about it, sobbing most nights. Then, he pulled me outside of class to tell me that he just wasn't attracted to me. I started hurting myself for a while after this. Before Thanksgiving that year, he started blowing up my phone. At that point I had already put all of my self worth into him, so in my mind, everything he said was the god's honest truth; that being that I'm a worthless dumbass, that I'm nothing, etc. Paragraphs of the most awful shit you could say to a person. For all of those Snapchat messages, I just kept saying I'm sorry and that I "don't know why I'm like this." Turns out he was angry about some petty shit, apparently I mentioned to a couple people in passing that he dated person x and he didn't want anybody knowing about that. At the time, I felt completely gutted. Like an irredeemably evil person, because that's what he was telling me. I couldn't eat for a few days because I was sick to my stomach with grief, that I had hurt someone I loved, even if it was one-sided. On Thanksgiving, I just cried in front of my family at the table and I had to go back to my room where my mom consoled me. I'm an adult now and writing about this by hand in my journal still made me throw up for some reason. I hated all trans men for a while after that, which was completely stupid. I was a bad person for a while.
After that, I came out to my parents. My mom is very Catholic, so she talked about "where she went wrong" when raising me, etc. At the pediatrician, she started crying saying that she thinks I'm just chasing a feeling because I was hurt before. I should have just done DIY, I regret not doing it, but instead I went the route of fighting my parents until I could get androgen blockers at 15 and then estradiol at 16 the clinical way.
I was very unpopular. I was so awkward that it was genuinely uncomfortable to talk to me, so I (understandably) didn't really have friends. People were nicer to me when I was younger, but once the cute factor wore off, they couldn't deal with me anymore. Transitioning made me slightly more accepted by the Tumblr type of people, but even they grew to dislike me. I didn't like them either, not really. Everybody's fake in high school. It didn't take long for one of them to start accusing me and saying to people that I sexually assaulted him in some way. (By the way, if you're curious, he was talking about the time that I asked to kiss him, and he said yes, and I asked if he was really sure that he wanted to kiss, and he said yes. He was also obsessed with me and I made it clear that I didn't want a relationship which is why he made things up about me.) He also mocked my clothes and said that I'm a fetishist. He was believed by some people, but other people called him out on his bullshit.

I think that all of the stress of the loneliness, insomnia, and being the only out trans girl in school caught up to me, and I stopped going to school entirely. I was an all-A's student because I wanted to get into an ivy league, but I withdrew from high school and nuked all of my social media so I never had to think about those people again. Before dropping out I started to hear things, I used to listen to classical music and jazz all the time, and whenever I was doing something stressful sometimes I would hear music. One time I was taking an exam and I could hear an entire concert hall playing a piano concerto I had never heard before, with a strings section and brass. My school didn't have a strings section. If I was in a loud restaurant, sometimes it would sound like there was a saxophone playing in the booth next to me. The CIA was after me. I started meeting random girls off Grindr and after a couple months of being mostly indoors, I started getting frequent panic attacks every day. It felt like ideas could hurt me. I didn't sleep for a week or so because I could feel myself dying every time I tried to put myself to bed. So, I went to the mental hospital at the behest of my parents.
The hospital staff absolutely hated my guts. Every time I tried to talk to them they just started crying for some reason. After a week and a half I realized that the only way they would let me out was if I either let them diagnose me with something or lied, so I lied until I got out. I could write a whole blog entry about the mental hospital, maybe I will in future.

A lot of people will try to push you to kill yourself with stress, to stay "locked in" or whatever. For the sake of yourself, don't listen to them. The only thing that matters is happiness. That's what life is for (in my opinion, anyway.)