#i did prepare myself for the worst

[ensiriustea]

another terrible HDD nightmare pull :')

lil doodles below

[jadelemonadee]

if you call farmer refuted the worst hamilton song just know you’re wrong! ❤️

[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.

[willowfey]

starting to think maybe waking up with an anxiety stomachache every single morning and then needing to spend the entire day trying to get rid of said anxiety just to maybe have a few minutes in the evening of feeling relaxed before going to bed is perhaps not normal

[orkidays]

the expensive ass burger ended up being really good :)

[orcelito]

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention it here hfkshfks

So when I was tuning the violins today. Well it was the first time I'd done anything with them in a while. And tbh I should've loosened the strings before leaving them for so long, but I hadn't thought of it.

So I tuned up my main violin. It's always been easy to tune & keeps in tune near perfectly when it's played regularly. So it went by quickly, except... when I'm tuning, I like to check the harmonic notes when cross-checking strings, and for whatever reason, the G string's harmonic was like half a note flat. The string itself was in tune tho, which was weird. So I went to adjust the bridge a little bit, just in case that might help, and then the G string fucking SNAPPED!!!

RIP lmao

Good for me tho I've always kept spares in my case. I had 2 of each string, so I just went and put in the new one. First time stringing a violin in years and years, but it went perfectly fine!!

Back and better than ever!

Then I went to tune my electric violin, and it took me literally 10 minutes bc the pegs DID NOT want to turn. I had to literally grab a blanket to pad my fingers as I put my whole self into that shit. It hurt !!!!! But I got it eventually lol. My main violin is definitely the best one for playing out of the bunch.

[sydmarch]

spent months like I need prescription for my mental health give me prescription please please & now that I have it I'm like hm. do I want to have to take meds, actually

[thetriangletattoo]

.

[kikker-oma]

GUESS WHO'S GETTING RABIES TREATMENT?!

me

Lol. My cat has caught 2 bats in less than 2 weeks, in the dead of night while I was sleeping and I don't know if I was bit or not, so my health department suggested treatment, cus even if I send the bat I have in my fridge to testing, I didn't save the first bat and have to way to tell if that one had rabies or not.

So, it's going to be a lengthy and expensive next 2 weeks of treatment lol. The last of my 5 prompts may be delayed🥴

[rpfisfine]

(1/2) hi, i’m just a random person who reads your fics, but if it makes you feel better, it didn’t actually say that them reacting to fanfics is the very next video, right? just that they’re working on it, so maybe you have some more time? also, is it really that bad? i mean i know it is lol, but like alex and aleksa are both basically immune to embarrassment (as shown by the hot tub song and many other vids lmao), so at the very least I don’t think they would be shocked or cringe or anything

Hiiiiiiiiiii thank you so much for this message yeah im gonna be honest i guess the problem for me personally is that the possibility of it not being the very next video is actually MORE stressful to me than if we still had a few months worth of time left bc its like. i know that pretty much all of their videos take a long time to film plus ostonox is confirmed to be very slow w editing bc he puts so much effort into it but its still like what the hell wjy do you need so much time... i have also recently learned that ostonox actually announced the softcore gay porn video on november 1st on his twitter so . it has been in the works for some time i guess so its like.. just film the video innit... like i need to see it NOW to be able to have peace in my life again. also its not rly even abt them reacting to it its the fact that aleksa literally used the word "reenact" that makes me wake up in the middle of the night in cold sweat LOL. but overall yeah i guess youre right thats kinda what ive been telling myself as well and i truly wish i had your optimistic outlook i guess its due to the fact that i have genuinely legitimately never once in my life anticipated this ever happening to me it kinda makes me feel like im gonna have like idk. dozens of nude photos of my bare spread open genitals potentially leaked to thousands of ppl any day now . also the fact that he emphasized that they need to have not yet read the fics in order to film their genuine reactions on camera is what probably haunts me the most bc like if they ARE shocked. we WILL see it. plus ultimately im still just kinda shaken by the fact that i had like my little private corner where i could be insane without them ever knowing abt it taken away from me LOL but i realize that makes me kinda sound like a moron bc thats sort of the risk that just automatically happens to come with writing rpf and posting it online like i guess thats. yeah

[carmenlire]

this has been a difficult, awful week only for it to end friday at 3pm with an invitation to interview for a management position next week.

[megandzane]

My bone density scan actually tuned out kinda decent.

[argentoheart]

I think I completely butchered this bar exam I wanna die like actually

[sunlightfeeling]

man…….

i didnt take baby reindeer’s warning seriously enough lol

[thisisadecisionimayregret]

I feel really bad, I went to go see a movie with friends and they both loved it and I really really didn't 😭 artistically it was beautifully crafted and an honest to god masterpiece, and i'm so glad to be living in a time where movies like that can be made and shown in theaters. however. It was also viscerally upsetting to watch and used a lot of suicide related imagery and references and like yes that's the point yes that's integral to the film's meaning and storytelling, and if it's not horror it's definitely horror-adjacent. All of which to say even while I can recognize that it's a meaningful piece of art and I can see why people really love it, I really didn't enjoy watching it and there were multiple times that I wanted to get up and leave the theater and remained mainly bc I would regret not staying until the end.

[usodeshou]

Guess who's sick! 😬