I've always struggled with maintaining a daily routine, both in remembering to and in finding a reason to bother. Over the past couple of years, I've come to realize that I've needed some kind of ritual to bring meaning to not just the routine but the passage of time. Both of which are things that I haven't had much luck with.
This is a letter to my younger self. Things that I wish someone I trusted had said to me. But I never opened myself up enough for anyone to know what to say.
I am not unique. The idea of a transfem developer that plays Minecraft coming to their identity relatively late in life is such a common stereotype on the trans forums that I'm on that it's hilarious how much I've boxed myself into it. Add that to the number of ace people that seem to be autistic on similar forums and some days I feel like a walking stereotype. But even if that was my entire story, that those descriptors were all I had to share with people, I believe there'd still be a unique value to my voice and an impact I can have among the thousands of others with the same experiences.
I'm so tired of seeing discussions about how children can't know that they're transgender or whatever before X age while I know for a fact that I did. I don't expect to sway anyone who has a hard-line stance on that idea, but I want to explain how that felt for me and the situation I was in. I have another post that covers why I came out so late despite knowing so far back, but I just want to cover how it felt to have always known.
Time doesn't fly, it falls with everything else, accumulating with the mess we live through. If time were to fly, it would be a fleeting thing, something that we notice on the sidelines or admire on the rare occasions that it stands still. Instead it crashes into us like a waterfall, and builds up below us like sand, weighing us down as we age. Tearing the things we build to pieces and wearing down our bodies with each grain we are hit with.
I've had to consider the concept I discussed in September a lot over the last month as I get ready for my next Neurology appointment, and while discussing it with someone I remembered a word that I never get to use in regular conversation, gestalt. As defined on the Merriam-Webster website a gestalt is,
something that is made of many parts and yet is somehow more than or different from the combination of its parts
broadly : the general quality or character of something
The following entries have been translated and reconstructed from a signal of unknown origin or direction.
We as The Archivists have made efforts to remove any of our guesswork on what these entries mean or where they are coming from, and have focused solely on making out what they say. If we are unable to discern the meaning behind a section it will be marked or noted, and when we have the ability to correct the missing information we will do so. New entries may, and have so far, give us new information about what we've already translated and the old translations will be adjusted only to correct translations or missing information.
One of the inevitable facts of being a *** is that you will eventually *** enough *** to ascend. Despite the generous wording, most of us want to avoid leaving our life behind and fight against it for as long as we can. We don't know where it is that we Ascend too, but something pulls the *** us there and it seems like we can never come back. Many have promised to return or communicate and we have never heard from them again. Always remember that there is no coming back from Ascension!
I'm going to ask you to follow me down a seemingly absurd train of thought that I had today while listening to a podcast about a particular preacher who feels that hurricanes don't have rights to anywhere inhabited by humans. While I don't think that she's considered how that actually works, I was just tired enough at the time to ask myself why it doesn't work that way. Why don't we give rights to the forces of nature that we fight against and that we're trying to protect at the same time?
Dilute our words as generations pass,
Forget the moments those words were meant to capture,
The years they shared between us.
Dilute the meaning of our phrases and twist them as we did,
to serve the same pain.
Forget the changes the world has wrought,
and the way it changes your words.