GhostInTheMachine
Member
- Nov 5, 2023
- 47
Every day I wake up, and I am forced to gaze upon you. Every night I shut my eyes, and your silhouette haunts my vision. I have been blessed with great strength and conviction, but it's curse was enduring the treadmill of escaping the sight of you. I run faster, yet you never diminish. I push harder, yet you never budge. I know that ultimately, the only thing that will free me is the final plunge into oblivion. In that moment, where it feels almost like going to sleep, like I've done thousands of times before, I will only have to see your visage one last time before it dissolves into the hollow.
In retrospect, I have lived a pretty good life. Most of what I've suffered pales in comparison to the absolute atrocities I've heard amongst my years in this existence. I understand that pain and misery are not competitions (unless that's just your thing, go off then), but I would be remiss to not put into perspective just how envious a lot of what I've enjoyed would make those worse off than me. I've never been raped, drugged, or tortured, but I have been jumped, bullied, and robbed when I was younger. I grew to become stronger, but also very resentful of not only the injustices that I have received, but those of others who can't fight for themselves. Eventually, the strength that helped carry me through some of my worst moments would eventually reveal to me it's cost in due time.
As adolescence gave way to adulthood, it became increasingly obvious that I was avoiding something crucial about myself. It was something I had buried deep within my psyche due to an immensely traumatic moment in which my father beat me rather fiercely. For what crime did I earn this attack? I was a young child of about 3 or 4 years of age, and I had spotted a pom-pom just left on the ground. I begun to play with it as I already had the concept of cheerleading in my mind and it felt natural to just play as such. For this action, my father violently dragged me up 4 flights of stairs to beat and degrade me for such an affront to his ego.
That event taught me early on to never willingly express myself, lest I be attacked again for daring to be myself. That would basically render me a pretty impulsive and reactionary person as most of the things I did were just me going through the motions of what people are "supposed" to do. I needed to dress one way, have my hair another, never have writing or fake tattoos on my skin, speak in a certain cadence, or even walk "funny". Hell, at certain points just having the wrong show on TV (the episode Sailor Mouth from Spongebob) would be enough to have my dad screaming at me (he thought me and my brother were making the dolphin noises and threatened to beat us if we kept making them). It was death by a thousand paper cuts past a certain point, but death never came.
During my teenage years one of my cousins decided to inappropriately touch me when we had to share a bed together, and I just went along with it because I didn't really have any feelings one way or the other about it. I would come to learn in my adult years that he was also being molested, and that there was just a chain of sexual assault that I had ended up getting sucked into. I almost wanted to enjoy it in that moment because something within me just enjoyed that kinda of attention. Of course, I was young, naive, and inexperienced about most anything at that time. There was a lot of injustice that had happened to others before it even got to me, and I got off lucky considering how deep that pit went. This moment often replays in my head, mostly because of how I grew to look at myself. It replays in my head with much more uncertainty than when I had a 9mm pistol in my face because my friend drove us to a set-up.
I've had a few past romances, all of which went poorly because I just didn't know what it meant to be a good partner outside of "be nice to be around". That obviously didn't cut it, and for one reason or another these all fell away from me. All of my friends from childhood are now gone, and my major saving grace has been online connections that I formed going into my adult year. These years would go on to become the most defining years of my life as I finally began to explore everything I was denied growing up. This is the part where I tell you that I am trans, and have been struggling with this above all else as my 20s have now given way to my 30s. I had obvious inclinations as a child outside of the pom-pom incident that included crossdressing (wearing my mother's clothes when I was home alone), wanting long hair (denied this even though it's not even exclusively a female thing), outright telling my parents that I wish I was born a girl (which was met with "don't say things like that"), and having an affinity for baby dolls and dresses.
Being forced to undergo a full male puberty has damaged me irrecoverably, and even after nearly 5 years on HRT, I have not seen enough of a change where I don't want to saw my own face off or slit my throat so I don't have to hear my own voice. I've done a lot for myself these last few years outside of transitioning as well (getting a phone and car were huge milestones because you just can't work in the US without both), but with not only personal turmoil, but also the political landscape of the era, things have gone from rough to bleak. The cost of my strength I mentioned earlier has become more obvious to me as my inability to pass lies squarely on being a pretty strong male for my size, and outright having my father's face. HRT has helped for sure, but that fundamental core of masculinity is something it hasn't been able to erase yet, and I am increasingly losing confidence it ever will. I don't have healthcare, and can barely afford HRT as it is, so future surgeries seem like a non-starter.
Even if somehow the stars aligned and my HRT just magically erased my masculine features, and surgeries were obtainable and possibly not even necessary, I would still have a hole in my heart that would make it impossible to love myself. At the moment, I have become co-dependant on my current boyfriend who has been an absolute beacon of hope in my life, but quite often I feel like I am failing him just being being what I am. He assures me that he loves me as I am because he loves my soul, not my vessel, but functionally he has needs that I fear I can never satisfy and me being his partner would deprive him of a much better one. It is not enough for me to be a simulacrum of a female, I NEED to be a female. I want to be by his side without being an eyesore, I want to bear his children, I want our intimacy to not carry the risk and complications of anal or SRS, I want to just be a normal partner for him.
To any transfolk reading this far, please understand that I am not trying to erase your validity. Yet when it comes to my own personal validity, I have fixed it upon that precondition and the inevitable failure to meet it has placed me in a stasis of not wanting to live as a male, but wanting to live for those I love. I have grown to avoid most forms of media because of just how sexualized everything is, and I don't mean that in a pearl-clutching "God's angi" type of way, but more of a "The phenomena of male and female will be pelted over your head until the day you die because humans are sexually dimorphic, and since most people are NPCs that don't even question their own face from their ass, they normalize this bullshit and will get angry if you call them out for it". I don't want to see everybody else enjoying something they won the 50/50 genetic lottery on, and I'm sick of having about 70% of most media be almost mandated to have "Hey look at this funny boy/girl dynamic, isn't this wacky and zany?" or "Here's forced romance #594325456298" or "Ok, and now here's a sex scene" or "ZOMG GIRLS".
Then I see stuff about the struggles of just being a female on this planet, and I start to think "Why the fuck would I want this?". It's pretty disgusting how commodified half the planet is, and how most of history put them on the backend simply because they often didn't have to power to reject it. As a male, I want to be female, but as a female, would I just want to be dead anyways? Why not save a step and be dead now? Then I remember, that none of us really choose the core of our thinking, even if we can add adjustments later on. Our very essence as individuals only changes when it is either fundamentally broken, or continously molded into something new through many good moments. It is so much easier to burn a city down than it is to build it up, but when it's built up and maintained, it can thrive even if it's past is written in blood and ashes.
But then where does that leave me? What can I build with what I still have? I have begun to abuse THC, LSD, and other psychedelics as they are the only moments where I can be disconnected from myself enough to stop feeling to pain of being myself. I am still trying to work my gig job, I am still sticking on my HRT despite no longer seeing hope in it, I still smile and become overjoyed whenever my boyfriend wakes up and I can have his attention, but if I can't change one of the most major things about me (XY -> XX), what am I really doing except chasing highs from one source to another? Philosophically, it makes me look at all of humanity as just apes chasing highs that they don't often understand because they're slave to the machanisms of society.
Would I even be happy if I "got what I wanted"? Would any of us be? I've often seen it questioned if happiness is a genuine state of being as opposed to just a temporary chemical state. I personally reject that notion as it presents a false dichotomy. So what if happiness is just a chemical state of being? It's something almost universally agreed to being desirable to maintain at most costs. Why not chase the high if we just accept that? People don't like the term "high" in those contexts, but happiness really is just the socially accepted way of being high, and even evolutionarily it's a literal in-built reward of biology. I want happiness, even if it has to be fought for.
But I can't fight for it, because everything else I create, achieve, or move forward only temporarily masks the pain instead of molding my essence into a more content being. I've lived a good life compared to most. I'm still in a good position now. I'm privelged and blessed to still have many things (such as my family still caring for me) that others would understandably kill or die trying for. All of this is built atop a skewed and warped plain, that's eroding from beneath and always threatens to suck all the good things into a void. It's like a type of imposter syndrome where *you* never really do anything good because that "you" that's doing it isn't *you* at all. It's a barrier of flesh that serves to allow you to operate in mortal terms before it eventually decays and fails you. You always live in the shadow of yourself, and even your shadow disgusts you.
And so, every day, and every night, I gaze upon the wall. Knowing with almost absolute certainty that it will never move. It will never crumble, and it will stand long after I expire. I can only write the words "I was here" on it, but I wonder if I am even doing that anyways. The thing that I am is not me, but perhaps I was never truly me. What do I know outside of this tiny perception that my monkey biology allows me? For all the concepts and abstracts that we can muster, you think we'd muster a way to fix ourselves. I fucking hate this wall, and the wall is me. I fucking hate myself, and I can't fix it. I keep moving along, because there are a few ties that still bind me. Binding me to a life of pain, content enough with even the most diminishing shots of happiness that I fight for.
If I knew that one day, that fight could be won, I'd give it my all. I'd actually believe, even if it's improbable, that it would be worth fighting, pushing, and running to make this wall finally go away. Even as the tank depletes, I would continue to rev my engine to make it across that line. I know that day isnt coming, so I can only hope that the shots I have left to take, will at least make dying a little less shit.
In retrospect, I have lived a pretty good life. Most of what I've suffered pales in comparison to the absolute atrocities I've heard amongst my years in this existence. I understand that pain and misery are not competitions (unless that's just your thing, go off then), but I would be remiss to not put into perspective just how envious a lot of what I've enjoyed would make those worse off than me. I've never been raped, drugged, or tortured, but I have been jumped, bullied, and robbed when I was younger. I grew to become stronger, but also very resentful of not only the injustices that I have received, but those of others who can't fight for themselves. Eventually, the strength that helped carry me through some of my worst moments would eventually reveal to me it's cost in due time.
As adolescence gave way to adulthood, it became increasingly obvious that I was avoiding something crucial about myself. It was something I had buried deep within my psyche due to an immensely traumatic moment in which my father beat me rather fiercely. For what crime did I earn this attack? I was a young child of about 3 or 4 years of age, and I had spotted a pom-pom just left on the ground. I begun to play with it as I already had the concept of cheerleading in my mind and it felt natural to just play as such. For this action, my father violently dragged me up 4 flights of stairs to beat and degrade me for such an affront to his ego.
That event taught me early on to never willingly express myself, lest I be attacked again for daring to be myself. That would basically render me a pretty impulsive and reactionary person as most of the things I did were just me going through the motions of what people are "supposed" to do. I needed to dress one way, have my hair another, never have writing or fake tattoos on my skin, speak in a certain cadence, or even walk "funny". Hell, at certain points just having the wrong show on TV (the episode Sailor Mouth from Spongebob) would be enough to have my dad screaming at me (he thought me and my brother were making the dolphin noises and threatened to beat us if we kept making them). It was death by a thousand paper cuts past a certain point, but death never came.
During my teenage years one of my cousins decided to inappropriately touch me when we had to share a bed together, and I just went along with it because I didn't really have any feelings one way or the other about it. I would come to learn in my adult years that he was also being molested, and that there was just a chain of sexual assault that I had ended up getting sucked into. I almost wanted to enjoy it in that moment because something within me just enjoyed that kinda of attention. Of course, I was young, naive, and inexperienced about most anything at that time. There was a lot of injustice that had happened to others before it even got to me, and I got off lucky considering how deep that pit went. This moment often replays in my head, mostly because of how I grew to look at myself. It replays in my head with much more uncertainty than when I had a 9mm pistol in my face because my friend drove us to a set-up.
I've had a few past romances, all of which went poorly because I just didn't know what it meant to be a good partner outside of "be nice to be around". That obviously didn't cut it, and for one reason or another these all fell away from me. All of my friends from childhood are now gone, and my major saving grace has been online connections that I formed going into my adult year. These years would go on to become the most defining years of my life as I finally began to explore everything I was denied growing up. This is the part where I tell you that I am trans, and have been struggling with this above all else as my 20s have now given way to my 30s. I had obvious inclinations as a child outside of the pom-pom incident that included crossdressing (wearing my mother's clothes when I was home alone), wanting long hair (denied this even though it's not even exclusively a female thing), outright telling my parents that I wish I was born a girl (which was met with "don't say things like that"), and having an affinity for baby dolls and dresses.
Being forced to undergo a full male puberty has damaged me irrecoverably, and even after nearly 5 years on HRT, I have not seen enough of a change where I don't want to saw my own face off or slit my throat so I don't have to hear my own voice. I've done a lot for myself these last few years outside of transitioning as well (getting a phone and car were huge milestones because you just can't work in the US without both), but with not only personal turmoil, but also the political landscape of the era, things have gone from rough to bleak. The cost of my strength I mentioned earlier has become more obvious to me as my inability to pass lies squarely on being a pretty strong male for my size, and outright having my father's face. HRT has helped for sure, but that fundamental core of masculinity is something it hasn't been able to erase yet, and I am increasingly losing confidence it ever will. I don't have healthcare, and can barely afford HRT as it is, so future surgeries seem like a non-starter.
Even if somehow the stars aligned and my HRT just magically erased my masculine features, and surgeries were obtainable and possibly not even necessary, I would still have a hole in my heart that would make it impossible to love myself. At the moment, I have become co-dependant on my current boyfriend who has been an absolute beacon of hope in my life, but quite often I feel like I am failing him just being being what I am. He assures me that he loves me as I am because he loves my soul, not my vessel, but functionally he has needs that I fear I can never satisfy and me being his partner would deprive him of a much better one. It is not enough for me to be a simulacrum of a female, I NEED to be a female. I want to be by his side without being an eyesore, I want to bear his children, I want our intimacy to not carry the risk and complications of anal or SRS, I want to just be a normal partner for him.
To any transfolk reading this far, please understand that I am not trying to erase your validity. Yet when it comes to my own personal validity, I have fixed it upon that precondition and the inevitable failure to meet it has placed me in a stasis of not wanting to live as a male, but wanting to live for those I love. I have grown to avoid most forms of media because of just how sexualized everything is, and I don't mean that in a pearl-clutching "God's angi" type of way, but more of a "The phenomena of male and female will be pelted over your head until the day you die because humans are sexually dimorphic, and since most people are NPCs that don't even question their own face from their ass, they normalize this bullshit and will get angry if you call them out for it". I don't want to see everybody else enjoying something they won the 50/50 genetic lottery on, and I'm sick of having about 70% of most media be almost mandated to have "Hey look at this funny boy/girl dynamic, isn't this wacky and zany?" or "Here's forced romance #594325456298" or "Ok, and now here's a sex scene" or "ZOMG GIRLS".
Then I see stuff about the struggles of just being a female on this planet, and I start to think "Why the fuck would I want this?". It's pretty disgusting how commodified half the planet is, and how most of history put them on the backend simply because they often didn't have to power to reject it. As a male, I want to be female, but as a female, would I just want to be dead anyways? Why not save a step and be dead now? Then I remember, that none of us really choose the core of our thinking, even if we can add adjustments later on. Our very essence as individuals only changes when it is either fundamentally broken, or continously molded into something new through many good moments. It is so much easier to burn a city down than it is to build it up, but when it's built up and maintained, it can thrive even if it's past is written in blood and ashes.
But then where does that leave me? What can I build with what I still have? I have begun to abuse THC, LSD, and other psychedelics as they are the only moments where I can be disconnected from myself enough to stop feeling to pain of being myself. I am still trying to work my gig job, I am still sticking on my HRT despite no longer seeing hope in it, I still smile and become overjoyed whenever my boyfriend wakes up and I can have his attention, but if I can't change one of the most major things about me (XY -> XX), what am I really doing except chasing highs from one source to another? Philosophically, it makes me look at all of humanity as just apes chasing highs that they don't often understand because they're slave to the machanisms of society.
Would I even be happy if I "got what I wanted"? Would any of us be? I've often seen it questioned if happiness is a genuine state of being as opposed to just a temporary chemical state. I personally reject that notion as it presents a false dichotomy. So what if happiness is just a chemical state of being? It's something almost universally agreed to being desirable to maintain at most costs. Why not chase the high if we just accept that? People don't like the term "high" in those contexts, but happiness really is just the socially accepted way of being high, and even evolutionarily it's a literal in-built reward of biology. I want happiness, even if it has to be fought for.
But I can't fight for it, because everything else I create, achieve, or move forward only temporarily masks the pain instead of molding my essence into a more content being. I've lived a good life compared to most. I'm still in a good position now. I'm privelged and blessed to still have many things (such as my family still caring for me) that others would understandably kill or die trying for. All of this is built atop a skewed and warped plain, that's eroding from beneath and always threatens to suck all the good things into a void. It's like a type of imposter syndrome where *you* never really do anything good because that "you" that's doing it isn't *you* at all. It's a barrier of flesh that serves to allow you to operate in mortal terms before it eventually decays and fails you. You always live in the shadow of yourself, and even your shadow disgusts you.
And so, every day, and every night, I gaze upon the wall. Knowing with almost absolute certainty that it will never move. It will never crumble, and it will stand long after I expire. I can only write the words "I was here" on it, but I wonder if I am even doing that anyways. The thing that I am is not me, but perhaps I was never truly me. What do I know outside of this tiny perception that my monkey biology allows me? For all the concepts and abstracts that we can muster, you think we'd muster a way to fix ourselves. I fucking hate this wall, and the wall is me. I fucking hate myself, and I can't fix it. I keep moving along, because there are a few ties that still bind me. Binding me to a life of pain, content enough with even the most diminishing shots of happiness that I fight for.
If I knew that one day, that fight could be won, I'd give it my all. I'd actually believe, even if it's improbable, that it would be worth fighting, pushing, and running to make this wall finally go away. Even as the tank depletes, I would continue to rev my engine to make it across that line. I know that day isnt coming, so I can only hope that the shots I have left to take, will at least make dying a little less shit.
