confessionsofaplayer2

[confessionsofaplayer2]

There’s this little bone on the outside of your wrist. For some reason, I’ve always been fascinated by it. As if it helps anchor me to my body. 

I remember being so focused on it on an old friend’s wrist. It used to jut out of his skin. Bigger than mine; weirdly I equated it to masculinity.

I thought I was in love with him. I wasn’t. Not in the way everyone would assume. Now, I’m pretty sure I was just envious of him. He represented a version of me, in a sense. It offered me comfort to know he existed. 

I’ve been thinking about him a bit lately. We haven’t said anything other than a social media “happy birthday” in years. Strange, considering we used to be inseparable.

He wouldn’t know me now. Just like I’m sure I wouldn’t know him.

My name has changed. I changed the rules of my game. Player One helped, of course, but I still initiated the change. My name is dying more rapidly now, crushed in my family for the most part.

It's terrifying. But I can’t back down anymore.

For anyone else who might be struggling this holiday, I can only wish you the best. I can only say that I hope things will get better for you. I hope the road is as smooth as it can be. I hope for the impossible to become possible.

And I know that’s not enough. It never is. But it’s only a start.

[confessionsofaplayer2]

[confessionsofaplayer2]

A few nights ago, I had a bad dysphoric episode. 

The day was good. I’d worn a new binder just going out to do some laundry and I felt good in it. I felt right. Even if it was only a simple trip to do the errands I’d been putting off, it was a good opportunity to test it. This was the first binder that didn’t feel like it was a bodysuit.

The problem came from taking it off. From remembering what was under it. And it was like being submerged immediately in a feeling of dread and uncertainty.

It was a hard night. I didn’t sleep more than a few hours and it carried over into the next day. Yesterday started with a series of back and forths. A struggle to get out of bed and debating on calling in sick to just wallow. Or to move and go at full speed so I didn’t have to think about it all day.

My choice was either body stress or job stress.

I eventually did pull myself up. I’ve been pretty back and forth about what I want to do with a lot of parts of my life. The reason I haven’t moved forward is very much laced in the fear of it.

My name hasn’t been dying as fast as I wish and I realize it’s because I haven’t been “killing” it enough. 

I’m taking a trip all next week back to my hometown. A lot of people there know me by both my dead name and my real name. I’ll be staying with the person I refer to here as “Player One.”

And that’s who I’ll confide in more than anyone. He can help me kill my name. I just need him to take a few stabs at it and kill it in his own head.

I should also think about seeing a therapist. But that’s a conversation for another day.

[confessionsofaplayer2]

I don’t want to have any children that are biologically mine. I decided this pretty early on in life, when I looked at my family history and saw it littered with disease and mental illness.

I would also like to avoid adding to the overpopulation of our planet, but that’s really just a bonus reason.

The biggest reason is that I think of children who are in and out of the systems. The ones who are beaten down by a government who shows little to no care for them once they’re out of the womb. The ones who slip between the cracks because of all the people who want infants as if you can’t have a parental bond with someone above a certain age. I’ve been told I would change my mind; at some point, my body would send me into baby fever.

I’ve watched friends coo over babies. The most I can think to do is go “Oh, yeah. Cute.”

I’m getting better at pretending to like them but really that’s all it is; pretend.

I believe there’s a kid somewhere in this world that I’ll adopt. They might be alive right now and have already survived through more than I could fathom. They might still be in a womb somewhere. I don’t know for sure. 

I just hope they know there will come a day where we will meet. And, even though I’m not ready to take care of them financially just yet, I will work my ass off to make sure they have the best life when we finally meet. I will do everything in my power to be the best parent I can be.

I will make sure you feel safe with me. I will be someone you can depend on.

[confessionsofaplayer2]

[confessionsofaplayer2]

Dysphoria

I didn’t know what it was for a long time. In fact, I’m still not completely sure about it, but the more I think about it the more correct it feels.

It started when I was eight. I remember it vividly. I was standing, staring in the bathroom mirror of my father’s apartment. I don’t remember why I was staring at myself. Maybe I’d just showered. Maybe I was analyzing something on my face. All I remember was the thought:

Why am I in this body and not another?

It was a simple thought. Maybe it shouldn’t be answered with anything more than a shrug and wandering off. But, it was a gut punch of a question. A question that sent me reeling into what would be the first of many panic attacks. I don’t know how long I stood there before there was a knock on the door. But this was the first of many fights with my reflection.

As I got older, I became more and more unhappy with myself. My chest was too large, my face too smooth. There was something missing. My voice wasn’t as deep as I thought it should be.

Clothing became dependent on looser fitting items. And yet….

There were days where I’d find myself okay with what I was. Like the problems before were nothing but a dream and I accepted the body I have. I shouldn’t want another body. I shouldn’t think about how to modify this one.

Right?

It always confused me when people thought I should get offended by being compared to the opposite gender. Why should I not take it as a compliment when a boy asked if I was a man when I cut my hair short? Why should I get upset when someone says “sir” to me?

Should I be upset? It’s just as correct as “miss” or “ma’am,” isn’t it?

I’d heard of “dysphoria” a long time before. I’d gone to therapy and told her about this problem only to be told I had an “advanced mind.” Such a mind wouldn’t take so long to connect the very obvious dots placed before me.

And yet… I still doubt myself. Doubt my feelings on who I should be. Doubt the very idea so much that I can’t even write the words here.

I talked to my mother about dysphoria a few days ago and explained to her my fight with the mirror. I had to stop for moments because my emotions removed my ability to speak, something I didn’t expect to happen. I never feared her rejection; I’ve been very lucky in that aspect.

But I always fear speaking about something I myself don’t know. And I have trouble knowing what’s wrong with me.

I’ve discussed this with other people before but, with them gone, my mind brings back the doubt.

I now have what I will refer to as a “dying name.” Not yet dead because part of me fears letting it go so far. But more people are beginning to call me by my new name. I just… haven’t figured out all the steps to take to make the change clearer.

Well, I think I’ve done enough speaking for now. I hope you found this somewhat entertaining. Maybe somehow informative? Maybe even comforting? I don’t know what this is to you. I’m not you.

I can barely be me.

[confessionsofaplayer2]

I apologize if this becomes pretty lengthy; there’s just a lot to unpack here. I’ve been thinking about a lot of things lately and I’m really trying to organize the thoughts in my brain. I’ve been wondering about autism and my possibly having it. As I said, this is probably going to be long as it goes into many details of my life.

So, here we go.

I grew up in a house with a lot of brothers. the one slightly older than me had textbook ADHD and, when we were younger, would speak for me and tell my mother everything I wanted/needed. It’s not that I couldn’t speak, it was more that I just… didn’t feel the need to in most cases. But that was something he could only do for me when we were at home.

School was always very frustrating. Getting into class for the first time was exciting but I always took a backseat to watch and observe. I had a “best friend” who was much more outgoing than me and, in many cases, her friends would become my friends because I followed her like a shadow. It was chalked up to shyness when I was in elementary school. Although, if I were to get overly frustrated, my body would default to tears and it was nearly impossible to get a word out of me once I started crying. It was like my throat would close over my vocal cords.

(This still happens on occasion now, but I have a much better handle on my emotions than I did back then. When I think about it, my mind always goes into comparing it to fainting goats. When they’re little and they get excited or scared, their legs seize up and cause them to fall over. As they age, they get better control. While their legs still tighten and become immobile, they no longer fall over nearly as much. Anyway, small tangent within a tangent.)

I had a teacher in fourth grade who was very good at handling this. He would sit me down, tell me to take deep breaths and calmly wait until I calmed down to ask what was wrong. It must’ve been frustrating to him to hear me say “I don’t know” nearly every time.

As far as academics go, I was a horrible student. Sure, I showed up to nearly every lesson (I was and still am rarely sick) I would listen and take notes, but something would always be missing. It took a lot of tests (all by the school) to find out how my brain worked. Whenever it’s explained to me, it just sounds like a longer process. My mother called it “taking the scenic route.”

Basically, if the quickest way from point A to point B is a straight line, my brain will try to circle around them. This, at the start, makes it look like I’m veering off to left field rather than going straight for it. But, when I’m left alone and not rushed, I eventually get there. Math is especially hard for me, though.

It was in high school when all the testing got really bad. In middle school, I had to take speech class rather than my first year of Spanish (which meant taking more Spanish in high school) This was also during the beginning of the “no child left behind” thing. Every year, there would be a sit down with my parents and the teachers and they would talk about what might be wrong with me.

ADD came up a lot. They wanted to put me on Riddlin, which I did not take. Besides, I had no problem focusing on things that interested me.

There were three teachers that understood that. I had them all multiple times. My History teacher got me to focus by reminding me history was just stories like the ones I enjoyed writing. My English teacher saw I had a knack for writing and made a focus around that (once, he threatened to take away a writing job from me if I didn’t get it done by a certain date. I had it done by the week’s end.)

I also had a science teacher multiple times. Because I had taken his class a second time, he would give me puzzles in the cases where I finished tests from just remembering the material from the year before.

All of them had a keen understanding that I wasn’t necessarily as dumb as everyone else assumed. My history teacher actually stormed into the last meeting and told everyone I was fucking fine and to leave it alone. My step-father clapped and screamed, “thank you!”

By that time, we were all tired. My parents were tired of the meetings and the failing report cards. I was tired of feeling like a lab rat and going through test after test. So, when my mother turned to me one day and asked “do you think you might be autistic?” I didn’t want to hear it. I’d had enough.

(Also, it’s worth pointing out that this was almost 15 years ago. Autism research was nowhere near what it is today. It came with a stigma that I didn’t think I could handle.)

So, we let that sit. I got through high school by the skin of my teeth. I tried my hand at college but dropped out when I realized I was paying for the same type of grades from high school. I moved on with life for a while. My thinking patterns weren’t so horribly inconvenient in the real world. I still had a younger brother who helped me navigate most of it.

But, over the last few years, I wondered if maybe there was something to my mother’s question. There are a lot of things that line up which I hadn’t mentioned on here. High school was also full of fictional characters I swore were real, hyper fixations on things and (most of the time) said fictional characters. Subtle stimming such as folding all my fingers around my middle and making a fist when I was upset (I still do this. I also rub at my face a lot.) An oral fixation where I will stick things in my mouth to chew on absentmindedly. I am horrible at remembering to feed myself on a regular basis unless its already built into a routine. My hyper fixations are still around and I still discover new ones. I had to be trained on eye contact by the same brother who spoke for me. And I constantly have to reword things to make people who don’t know me too well understand what I’m trying to say. I become especially incoherent when I’m excited about something. (Where I live now, there’s a little island of goats near a group of bars that take care of them and I was so excited about the idea that I couldn’t get the right words out to tell my brother. It had to be translated. I like goats, if you can’t tell.)

So… there it is. Some of my thoughts in all their glory. There’s much more to talk about, but I guess this is the meat of it.

Soooo, yeah.

[confessionsofaplayer2]

Game Start

I don’t know if I’m happy or not.

Really, it’s a toss-up if any of us really know if or when we’re happy. It’s dumb that happiness is supposed to be the default emotion and if you don’t say you’re happy at least 80% of the time then there’s something wrong with you. It’s bull shit. We all know it’s bullshit.

I moved recently. From a small town outside of a very large city to an even smaller town outside of a much smaller city. I traded winter blizzards for hurricanes and I don’t know if I’m feeling a pang of regret or just homesick.

I lived there for a majority of my life. The decision to leave the town was easy; it was always apart of the plan.

The hard part was who I left behind.

If you haven’t gathered from the title of this blog, I’m not what you might consider a hero archetype. I don’t say this in a self-deprecating way; I’m very happy being off to the side as the support runner. The Player Two (roll credits.)

I left behind Player One. That’s the hard part in all of this.

He’s my brother. I mean that in a literal biological sense; not just the friend sense. He’s younger than me by a few years but he’s much more along the lines of the type of person you would see at the front of a story. The guy on the poster with his back to the camera while there’s a blue and orange explosion of a background. Maybe he’s holding a gun. Maybe he’s holding a baby.

Hell, maybe he’s holding a gun and a baby.

But he’s still in that small town outside of the large city. He has his life up there; a life he does plan to uproot for another city but now is not the time.

No. Instead, I was the one to leave. I don’t feel like the best sibling because of it. 

Tomorrow marks the day of his birth. It’ll be the first year I wasn’t there to celebrate with him. Maybe that’s why I’m feeling this way.

Maybe it’s guilt. I can’t be sure; this all hit me like a wall just today.

I feel like maybe this is just proof that me moving was the best thing for both of us. But I guess, really, only time will tell. And I’ll just be here ranting into the void.

We’ll see how it goes. We’ll see how it goes.

Thanks for listening, The Internet. Maybe next time I’ll have more for you.

[confessionsofaplayer2]

Human Peridot. I don`t believe in clods