#I am learning new stuff about myself

[sicksucculentz]

welp

turns out I really like bugs! I like millipedes and isopods!

who knew! I thought I was gonna be strictly a small mammals fan!

pleasantly shocked to find I like the spiders at work to! and i'm scared of spiders!

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

Randomly thinking about “tolerate it” (narrator voice: it was not random) and how under the cloak of fiction it is ostensibly inspired by works like “Rebecca” (which Taylor said she read during the 2020 lockdowns I believe?), with the line of “you’re so much older and wiser” indicating that the speaker is significantly younger and inexperienced compared to the person she’s speaking to and a pretty direct reference to the plot of the book.

But I saw something somewhere once that stuck with me about how it might not be referring to relative age between the characters but chronological age as in the passage of time in a relationship. And that made me think about how in a contemporary context, it might not necessarily be referencing an actual age gap between the two characters, but rather a sarcastic or cynical response to the man’s claims that he has matured (“you’re so much older and wiser [than you were before/than you were when we met/etc.]”), which then made me think about that line in relation to the woman. And that it could be taken like, “you act like you’ve matured so much in our time together and like you know everything, while I’m supposedly still stuck as the girl I was when we first met.”

Which then made me think of the “right where you left me” of it all and did you ever hear about the girl who got frozen time went on for everyone else she won’t know it and the bit in Miss Americana where she talks about how celebrities get frozen at the age at which they got famous, and how she’s had to play catch up in a lot of ways not just in her emotional growth but kind of in general. (Which also made me wonder if she’s ever been called out for immaturity/lack of curiosity/lack of education about things in her life…)

Which then made me think about the rest of the song, and @taylortruther’s posts yesterday about “seven” and “Daylight” and the way Taylor idealizes her youth yet contrasts it with an almost sinister reality in its wake, and the line, “I sit by the door like I’m just a kid,” because the discussion raised that her relationship let her recapture some of the childlike joy and wonder she’d lost. So this line is a double-edged sword: the speaker sits by the door with childlike hope that the person will come home and cherish her, but on the darker side, feels like the child dealing with the monsters she doesn’t have names for yet and the feelings of isolation she felt as she aged.

I’m not saying the song is necessarily autobiographical; like most of the songs on folkmore, it’s clearly a fictionalized story based on media she’d consumed and created, but we know a lot of the fictional songs were infused with her own feelings and experiences and… This idea swirling in my head picked up steam and now I kind of can’t stop thinking about it. Sorry but I’m a little obsessed now.

Like maybe it might start to shed light on why she identified so strongly with the novel in the first place…

[fisheito]

yakuya in MY swamp? in MY ecosystem? no . i am still in disbelief. i hope you all know that my particles are bouncing off the everything. i am using periods as punctuation but the state of my mind is naught neareth final.

[sharkneto]

Hey, sorry if this is a bit of a personal question - and feel free to ignore it if it is - but how did you know you wanted to start hrt? I am someone who IDs as transmasc and knows in an ideal world, I would've loved to have been born a guy. But the idea of going on hormones is terrifying because I can't figure out if I really want it... I worry about regretting it, or it making me 'unappealing' physically, or my friends judging me for it. Did you ever struggle with similar worries?

I think every person thinking about and starting HRT goes through this. A rite of passage, if you will, and also not a bad thing to do. HRT is a big step, some of the changes (especially on T) are irreversible. It's good to think through if it's a choice that's right for you or not.

That said, it's also Just A Thing You Can Do. I first started really questioning my gender at the end of 2020 (thank you, Elliot Page, for coming out and making me go "oh shit, you can do that?"). I got a therapist to talk about gender... Mid 2022? And started hormones spring 2023, top surgery a year later.

Before getting the therapist, I spent over a year Just Thinking About It. And a lot of the thoughts were around the changes on T and if I'd like them or not or if I'd regret them. If I'd be ugly, after being conventionally attractive as a woman.

It hits a point, though, where eventually you have to pull the plug one way or another. I spent a lot of time thinking about how my body would change on T. A Lot. With longing. I caught myself putting things off Until I Knew For Sure and because I didn't want to do it while being perceived as a woman. I was sitting, treading water for a hypothetical Later that I could start moving towards at any time. I was scared for the Teenage Round 2 phase, and didn't want to spend months being "ugly and awkward", but then the months passed anyway and I was still in the same spot.

HRT isn't an all-or-nothing thing, you can ease into it on a low dose. My doctor started me on a low dose and we ramped up over months. Some T changes can start pretty quickly (voice dropping, bottom growth - this isn't true for everyone, but was true for me). If these changes excite you, make you feel good - great! Keep going! If they scare you, feel wrong - stop. Assess. Figure out what about it isn't right (a gender therapist for all of this process is a Huge Help). In early days if you stop T, the changes can revert, for the most part. But you can always stop at any time.

The bigger thing I actively worked to wrap my head around before starting HRT is - Who Cares If You're Wrong? What's right for you now might not be right for you later. The idea of detransitioning was scary to me, society has such a weird spotlight on it, the Right uses people who have detransitioned as props against transition. But it shouldn't matter. At the end of the day, if I do change my mind, I'll know myself better, and I don't think it's wrong to chase and find comfort in your own body.

A year+ on T, I've mostly made it through the ugly duck phase, I think. I was lucky, I didn't get bad acne or get too oily or anything (after having horrible acne in my first puberty). Most of what I dealt with was the chronic baby face, where I was getting read as male but a teenager - I'm almost 30 and a woman wanted to card me over a free T-shirt at a baseball game because it had beer logos on it. After some middle months of changes and going "oh my god what am I doing" and not feeling confident in how this was all going to turn out, I think of myself as relatively attractive and I think I'm just going to get more vain as my beard comes in. Some of that is physical, sure, but I think a significant amount of that is me feeling more confident in myself and liking the body I'm in more. I was never a selfie or picture person, now I am. I joke I'm like a budgie, always looking at myself if there's a reflective surface nearby. I'm more excited to exercise, I'm interested in lifting weights for the first time, I'm curious what my body on T can do and become. Keep your eyes on the pieces that are going well, the changes exciting you, and let the rest catch up.

My social circle helped a lot. I'm very lucky and blessed to have great friends and family, all of whom are supportive. If you don't have friends who are supportive of you, that are judging you for exploring yourself rather than lifting you up for it, it's a sign to expand the social circle and find ones that are. Family is harder, but that's a thing you have to navigate for yourself and find your own boundaries for.

So, there's no ~one moment~ where you're 100% certain that medical transition is right for you. It's a huge unknown and you're changing the body you've had your entire life. At some point, though, you just have to jump and see how it lands. Part of being alive is making mistakes and doing things you might regret.

That said, the regret rate for trans people is something like 3%. The regret rate for knee surgery is something like 20%. Trust yourself.

[kil9]

everypony hates me for my complete and utter disrespect of authority

[pardonmydelays]

i also think it's kinda cool how tyler makes me want to learn stuff

[pom-seedss]

Old art, new format!

Made a paint by numbers for myself to keep track of which colour goes where because I know I would have messed it up otherwise.

Fun to see how this turns out.... I custom mixed the blues. I think 2 and 3 may end up being too similar, but it should still get the effect I wanted for the most part.

[mortellanarts]

2023 go bye bye

[cappurrccino]

maybe i should try my hand at typesetting/bookbinding with my bang fic from last year... 🤔

[nemotakeit]

i remember the first time ever i listened to SO i was like pfft rap? get out. (i was cringe) and then when i gave it a listen again a few months later i was a changed person... so i binge listened to their entire discography immediately and was genuinely shocked because how could ALL of their songs be bangers, like i couldn't believe it was possible it was surreal........ i wish i could turn back time (lol) to experience that pure shock again

[torchickentacos]

REALLY want to legit learn how to sew. I can't just buy myself things for various reasons, so I'm always looking at, like, how to make dinner with random shit around the house, how to alter clothes since they WILL fit differently from 2013 (because I only own old things and hand me downs), how to repair things at home, and I really just want to have things I like to wear without resorting to fast fashion or even shipping stuff to my friends and picking it up that way. I bought one jacket off of amazon as my, like, single purchase of the last five months and I feel really bad about it (which is silly and I know it, but alas), and I just really want to be able to sew actual garments on my own. Do I need another hobby right now? Not really but we'll see.

[fair-lead]

textbook mentioned gravitational waves/radiation and i almost imploded in my seat

[neverendingford]

.

[pepprs]

discovered miah_pie on t*ktok (<- i don’t have one btw i just stumbled upon her bc someone i follow on ig talked abt her) and her videos make me want to cry so bad. 24 year old dependent moment

[schnaf]

.

[batfossil-fr]

I have another skin I've been wanting to get some progress on and then I remembered that I haven’t streamed in one million billion years. if people are interested in a jank little ipad stream (oh god I’ll have to figure out if that’s even possible) maybe I’ll try my hand again at streaming my art. no promises I’m still trying to crawl my way out of Only Making 2 Pieces of Art Per Year so I cannot guarantee when the mood will strike me