Recordings From Our Sojourns in the Intersectional Universe
I didn’t expect to write anything today.
Honestly, I didn’t expect to do much of anything at all.
Trans Day of Remembrance is a hard one for me, every single year. It’s a sobering reminder of how close I’ve come to having a candle lit for myself.
But it’s also a reminder of why I live the way I do – loudly, fiercely, insistently. So I wrote some things.
On April 28th, 2019, I wrote what I have come to think of as the most important love letter of my life. It was, by volume, mostly exposition – storytelling context, establishing the circumstances and setting the scene – and concluded with a short but poignant declaration of love for myself.
This, here, is also a love letter. It will begin, as is my way, with some exposition; and it will conclude with the heart of what I want to say.
I couldn’t resist the title of this post. I’ll take a moment to explain it properly, because it is a silly computer programming joke, but the thing I’m trying to say here really has very little to do with programming or even computers in general – I promise. If it helps, just think of this as having the alternate title: “True or False is a bad way to think about things.” You can even skip to the section with that heading if you like!
I spend a lot of time thinking. About everything.
Sometimes, that includes thinking about myself – who I am, how I wound up where I am in life, and where I want to go next. This is a story about myself, and how much things have changed because of how I’ve chosen to think about me.
Editorial note: I originally wrote this years ago, and later posted it as part of a public blog, on a predecessor to this site. I’ve manually transcribed it here, unchanged, on 2022-12-09.
I stopped smoking on April 6, 2018. Over a year ago now. Even during some intense stress the past few months I’ve barely had any cravings, but I’m sure as fuck having some now.
Editorial note: I wrote this as a journal entry in the spring of 2019, and it started a series of writings that eventually became a blog project. I’ve long enjoyed the practice of sharing my journaling openly and publicly – of “learning out loud”; I first started sharing this particular series later in the fall of 2019. Some three years later, I’m migrating it over to a new platform, but the content remains intact and largely unedited from my original, raw notes.
My journey has been long, and it continues; much has changed along the way. This is the recounting of my path. I hope that it may become a part of your survival guide.