Transitioning into liminal space

Seeking companionship:

I feel like a shitty person today.

Today (technically yesterday, before midnight) is the antiversary (that's so much better than mirrorversary!) of my relationship that ended a few months ago. I've been broken up with for the same number of days I was with her. I've made a lot of progress there: I'm pretty sure there are days I don't think of her. It feels like something that's firmly in the past. So that, in fact, is mostly good.

But it was also the day that I told the woman I'm kind of smitten with that I need to maintain some distance because I and Miriam both are too unstable, and our situation is too fragile, to be able to manage me being in a relationship with someone who may become homeless, which is terrifying and dangerous as a blind and otherwise disabled person.

I'm still going to visit and spend time with her, and I am going to make myself available to help with her finding a home in any way I can - phone calls, driving her to see places, searches, anything.
She was understanding. She and I both know this isn't fair, and I hate that the inadequate public safety net puts her in this position, and that I am not in a position to do more.

I was a mess yesterday, for some reason. In FB I wrote:

"Anxiety is worse today and tonight than it's been for quite a while. I felt anxious and almost panicky driving around for errands this morning.I have my first appointment regarding voice therapy tomorrow morning at 9:15 and am anxious about everything and am having trouble relaxing enough to try to sleep.

I don't know why I'm a mess right now, but I want to be at the bottom of a cuddle pile with people petting my hair and telling me I'm a good girl and I'm doing my best and it'll be ok.

Gonna snuggle Miriam and my shark friends and breath."

That was some particularly bad mental weather, but the storm has passed, leaving just the usual clouds at the horizon.

I had my first voice therapy appointment today. It was primarily getting a baseline for the therapist on where I am in my transition and with my voice. It was interesting to look at the quantitative analysis of my voice after doing a recording and ask questions about it. I understood about 75% of the answers. 

She said would have been very surprised if I hadn't already done some voice training or practice. Which I have, through those Youtube voice training videos I've mentioned. I have a second appointment in the new year and I'm really excited to get started on the work.

My homework in the meantime is to think about things about my voice that I like. Which is hard. But she talked about doing so a lot more broadly and about more than technicalities or the actual sound. Things like how I like reading to people. Maybe once I've thought about that for while, I'll write about it here.

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I just watched anime in which a high school girl made a bunch of zombies literally explode by reciting Lady Chatterly's Lover to them from memory. Train to the End of the World keeps getting weirder and I love it.

I'm still watching anime while walking on the treadmill. But I did, in fact, give up on Hidamari Sketch. At least for now. It was just...really dull. Some people really love it, and that's valid. I do not.

Instead I watched a couple episodes of something called Stardust Telepath. There's a girl who is terribly shy and socially anxious and finds it really hard to talk to other people. Becuse she has so much trouble with other humans, she has always daydreamed of meeting an alien and making friends with them. Then a new girl starts in her class who says she is an alien, and it seems quite possible she is. The Earth girl still has a lot of trouble talking to her, but the alien girl can use "foreheadpathy" to understand the Earth girl's thoughts while touching their foreheads together. It's really sweet! I'm not sure if there's going to be any romance, but it definitely counts as yuri to me.

Then, for a couple days, Miriam wanted to watch something with me, so it's been 5 episodes of Train to the End of the World. A technology company was ready to unveil the new generation of cell phone technology: 7G! But when it was activated, it entirely reshaped the world, turning people into animals, or making them tiny, or infesting them with mushrooms, or making them zombies. It's also possible that the entire rest of the world outside of the train line between Agano and Ikebukuro no longer exists, but we're not really sure? Four girls from Agano get onboard a train and make their way toward Ikebukuro, where the 7G thing started, and to find one of their friends who left Agano after a fight. As I noted, it keeps getting weirder, and I kind of love it.

On the manga front, I started reading the first volume of Goodbye, My Rose Garden. In Victorian England, a Japanese woman, Hanako, goes to England to meet a novelist whose work she loves passionately. She spends a month visiting the publisher every day, and is always turned away. Then, an aristocrat named Alice who also loves the same novelist meets her there and hires her to work on her estate. In time, during a discussion of the novelist's work, Alice says that she coul arrange for Hanako to meet him. But in return, Hanako must do one thing for Alice: she must kill her. 

I think Alice is the ostensibly male novelist, personally. I'm enjoying this so far and the art is beautiful.

I thrifted this set of plastic shelves on the left for $35 while out with Miriam yesterday. This our little kitchen space down here now, with fridge, freezer, microwave, and toaster oven. The added shelves make everything rather tidier and more accessible.

I wish that I didn't think it was best to potentially settle in like we're going to be here for a long time. But it won't hurt if we're not, other than having more stuff to move, and if we are, I would like to be as comfortable as possible, and as independent from having to use all the kitchen stuff upstairs as possible because it makes me feel anxious and in the way.

Image below is the corner of a basement. The floor and the wall on the left are concrete. The wall on the right is covered in plastic-covered insulation material. In the lower right are a mini fridge, a mini freezer, a toaster oven, and a microwave. Beyond them, against the wall, is a black folding table with a few dishes and things on it. At the left, against the left wall, is a set of black plastic shelves. They are about five feet tall and have cereal boxes, condiments, boxes, and other things on them.

I am so close to being able to play through Prelude in C without making one or two little mistakes along the way. So close!

I'm also starting to work on The Sunlit Garden from Revolutionary Girl Utena a little bit. That's the song that Miki plays on the piano. But...I might switch over to the intro to Watermark instead? Dunno.

The job hunt is proceeding. I haven't heard back from anything I've applied to yet, but I'm still trying.

I'm going to be driving to Wisconsin on the 23rd to visit my mom and folks there. I'll be back in Hamilton on the 30 and Miriam and I will spend NYE with a couple we met through queer community events here who are also Covid cautious. That will be really nice! It's been a long time since I've been with friends on a NYE.

And lastly...

It's true. As Miriam said today, I'm very bad at hookups. 😂

I've been talking more with Mississauga girl and I have a crush...

Which doesn't mean it will go anywhere in particular. But yeah. I'm seeing her again on Friday.

So, that was a really lovely evening with Mississauga girl! There will likely be more of them. 

She showed me a conversation she was having with her friends about me. She called me a MILF 🤣  If the shoe fits...  She also thinks it's quaint that I call everything an IM instead of saying text. To me, text is when you send someone an SMS message? I am older than 95% of the people on Lex and T4T, and while maybe in a perfect world that wouldn't come up at all, I'm glad she thinks my occasional anachronisms are cute 😂

I very much enjoyed my time with her and am looking forward to more visits.

However, I am also realizing that I am very inclined to do things that give people joy *just* to give them joy. If those things include expressions of affection that I am performing that are not actually true representations of myself and my feelings, that's a problem for everyone involved. It's hard to disentangle the positive feelings from giving someone I care about joy vs positive feelings from knowing that I just gave someone joy regardless of my emotions toward them. Those reactions are both really strong, and the latter may even make me *think* I have more affection and feelings than I do. I feel like I'm pretty good, in general, at emotional self-awareness these days, but this may well be a blind spot for me. I'm wondering if this is a trauma response on my part, in some way. I have things to think about.

From yesterday evening:

I'm on the train home from Toronto after laser. I walked about 16k steps today, and I was *thrilled* to be walking around in a real city. After the appointment, I walked the 1.6 miles back to Union Station instead of taking transit just so I could be there, walking in the city.

I am a city girl.

Though the best part of walking around the city was doing a lot of it with that cute puppy girl I mentioned. She is even more adorable in person than I remembered!

I'd read about a dog themed fountain downtown, and she didn't know about it, so that was a mandatory stop! She also showed me a shop with the largest selection of manga I've seen in a long time. It's also a mask required space, and I haven't seen one of those in years! At a different store, she had talked a bit at length about Warhammer. At that shop, I realized I was taking about yuri so much that I told her I was gushing about a special interest and she could stop me if she'd like to. Instead she bought two volumes of yuri 😂

So it was a very, very nice day. On the walk to Union after laser, my lips started feeling numb in a way that's new and I was a little concerned, but it didn't last long.

I'd spent a while thinking about what I wanted to wear today before going to bed last night and I thought I had it sorted. Then I got up and it wasn't working and Miriam's advice and help saved the day. I appreciate her for so many things in so many ways.

Car insurance has become kind of a disaster. I spent quite a while on the phone with CAA and got through the whole process of getting a quote. For some reason the agent's audio kept dropping out and we had to call each other back a couple times and that dragged things out even further. We got all the way to the end with a quoted rate of X. Then, after putting in my driver's license info, the quote turned into 4X because I have a G2 learner's license instead of a full G license.

When I moved from Amsterdam to Hamilton, I got an Ontario driver's license. At first they thought I was only eligible for a learner's license, which at the time was fine. The only restrictions are no more passengers than seat belts and zero alcohol, neither of which were things I would be doing anyway. Just as we were moving out of the province to SK, I got a letter saying that they had made an error, and I was actually eligible for a full G license. It said I should return as soon as possible so they could correct the error.

Well, I didn't make it back, and I swapped my license for a Saskatchewan one. There were no issues, and insurance (which is provincial in SK) was fine. Insurance here, though, because I have a learner's license, quadrupled.

But! I have a copy of the letter DriveTest sent me saying to come back as soon as possible, and explicitly noting that I should have gotten a G license in exchange. It's been a little over 3 years now, but this is as soon as I could get back. I've had some shit going on, you know?

I'm going to push really hard to get them to swap my license on the strength of this letter. My license number is even the same as it was for that month here, so...they should upgrade me? Right?

This has all been terribly stressful for Miriam and I both because it's causing difficult in getting the car registered too. Miriam may end up just getting insurance in her name only, at least for now, if this continues to be a roadblock.

And last but not least, a friend of Miriam's (and mine) helped me (well really, she did the whole process) dye my hair yesterday. It's only the second time I've done it: my hair has always been deeply important to me, and doing things to it like that has been scary.

The first time, I asked the stylist to match my natural color. This time, I decided I wanted try going a bit red. I think I really like it. But just as, or possibly more, important than the color was getting rid of that gray.

Image below is a woman with light skin from the lower chest up. She is looking at the camera and smiling. She has small stud earrings on her ear lobe and upper ear. She is wearing a pink knit turtleneck top and pink and gold cat eye glasses. Her hair is a reddish brown shade and is swept down over her near shoulder.

And I wrote an update for my seeking companionship filter!

I haven't said too much here, in part because I was kind of a mess since the election and wasn't doing a lot of seeking. But my head's been a bit more together and I am not going to let anxiety take any more of my life away than I have to. I've done enough of that!

So I'm still kind of chatting with the person who was giving me egg vibes, but I'm not convinced that she/they will actually want to ever meet up in person. Which is fine. If they do, it would be fun!
I've played Satisfactory a few times with the girl in Peterborough, and am talking about more factory building this weekend. I think we might be factory friends if nothing else, and that's great! It's wonderful having people into the same weird games I love.

I kind of dropped the ball with the woman here in town who's post about looking for hookups I responded to a while back. Having thought about it, part of it has been anxiety about, like, not really having a script to follow in a few ways. I've never done hookups, so that's one new thing. She also hasn't expressed strong preferences about she's into, which puts me in a position of expressing things I want to someone without knowing what kind of reception to expect, and...that's kind of new for me 😅 But I messaged her again after something over a week.

Here's the most exciting part though. I made a post on Fet in a T4T group I joined recently, kind of expecting that, like my other intro posts on other groups, it wouldn't get much response.
This girl in London (ON) responded and she is *so cool*. She's a grad student who is researching local adaptations of Marxist thought and iconography. That sounds really fascinating, since so many political thinkers are anchored in a particular Western social/political/cultural world view (as all humans are). How do people with very different underlying assumptions integrate that kind of thing? She's coming at it from a history perspective, and I could easily have chosen to be a historian at one point in my academic career, and she thinks human geography is fascinating and, as a historian, really appreciates librarians and archivists too, and I think we have so much we could connect over. We also have pretty similar politics, which is a big thing.

She likes long communications in text. She's early in her transition and not very experienced with a lot of things, and to some extent and in some ways, that's true of me too? We're both looking for experiences we haven't been able to have before, and I think maybe we can find some of them together. She is young and searching and I feel a lot of responsibility to not fuck anything up for her if I connect with her, but I am very intrigued by her for several reasons. Looking at her activity on FL, I see she's quite new there, but she's also busy trying to make other connections, finding munches to go to, making friends, maybe finding other play partners, and that's awesome! I am just so damn proud of and happy for trans folks who figure out who they are and start living the way they want to. You go get it girl!!

We're talking about meeting up in person in London this weekend to see how things flow in person. I'm pretty damn excited. And I am now sort of micro-analyzing the way I communicate with her. She said she likes long messages, but are mine *too* long? Does the fact that her most recent response was short mean I'm being too much? I have fears of being too much for people, and while I'm not actively looking for a girlfriend instead of a friend and play partner...I also think she's really nifty. I have some tummy butterflies.

I find it a little hard to keep up here because writing everything up for Facebook, and then copying it here and to Livejournal manually, takes time, and I don't always do it at the same time even though I keep wanting to. At one point, I was thinking about learning enough Javascript to write something that will automate this for me, but I didn't follow through. (Though I did end up sort of pivoting to learning enough C++ to write LED control code for my computer case lights!)

Anyway, some stuff has been happening!

Someone posted a meme that I related very strongly too and I wrote about it. The meme text said:

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In text attributed to blueberrygoth, it reads "ive known so many "cis" people who've told me they thought they might be trans or nonbinary but they don't really experience dysphoria so they felt like werent allowed to call themselves trans. how many people have had to live their lives in the closet because they were told they werent in enough pain"

Then, follow up text attributed to thatse-corvid-core-babey reads "i've said it once and i'll say it again. EUPHORIA is the greatest identifier of a trans person. not dysphoria. dysphoria is hard to define and thus it's hard to regulate what is and isn't dysphoria. but euphoria? that feeling u get when someone uses the right pronouns? that "i can't contain my smile" sort of joy? THATS what the trans experience is all about. that's what unites us"

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I wish someone had told me this 25 years ago. I was too disassociated to feel much dysphoria, but the euphoria was *always* there. I just didn't understand.

I do have dysphoria now that I understand who I am and I feel the ways my body doesn't match. But the absolute delirious happiness I've found since consciously living as the correct sex is worth it a thousand times over.

While I was out at Costco yesterday getting my prescriptions, I talked to the pharmacist about getting the two accounts I had there (from two different doctors prescribing with two different names) combined. He confirmed which name I want to use and said "I'll get that taken care of for you Meg." Literally, the whole rest of the day, I was having flashes of joy about him calling me Meg and seeing me as a woman. As I drifted off to sleep that night, I spent a little while saying to myself, out loud, "I'm Meghan. Meghan. Meghan. I'm Meghan," and I simply don't have words for the joy I feel just knowing that and seeing that other people know that.