#i know i'm a small blog in a big tumblr ocean

[citruscrumples]

please. virgin hair means hair that's never been dyed or chemically damaged. you can google it, it isn't an uncommon term at all

thank you for educating my ignorant ass on proper wig terminology

you have curbed a more disturbing crisis that i had stuffed in a box in the back of my brain and forgotten about until i saw this ask

genuinely though, i do think it is very funny that out of all the terms that could have been chosen to describe untampered hair, "virgin" is the one that was picked and i appreciate the clarification. (hey maybe i'll even check the etymology!)

now i can tell all my friends i have virgin hair and watch the fallout

[pillowbo]

THIS BLOG IS FOR ADULTS ONLY

Hello and welcome to my Tumblr blog!

Points about me:

My name is Bo.

I am an aroace trans man with an extremely high libido.

I love to indulge in my kinks and write erotic stories.

I am an author and narrator.

I use he/him pronouns.

I am autistic.

30 and flirty but probably not with you sorry

5'4/130 lbs

White

Short blond hair

Blue/Green central heterochromia

Small breasts (A cups)

No plan to medically transition

No piercings or tattoos

No smoking or drinking

For exercise, I like to go on walks and light weightlifting.

I can speak broken French and I'm learning to be fluent.

I like black coffee.

I like to cook and I do it well.

I like the ocean and its aquatic creatures real or legendary.

No denomination (I am open to spirituality.)

Gemini sun/Gemini moon/Sagittarius rising

(Star charts are fun and interesting to me. I don't take it too seriously. If you don't like astrology, there is no need to announce it.)

If you are an adult feel free to interact with my blog.

If you are under 21 I will not message you or respond to messages sent from you. 18-20 are legally adults and are free to like and reblog my posts, but I feel are much too young for me as a man in my 30s to message personally.

Don't interact if you're a minor or if you're an adult who can't take two goddamn seconds to put your age in your bio or pinned post. You will be immediately blocked.

At the very least put adult or 18+ on your blog. It's not fucking hard.

If your account says men dni you will be blocked not out of malice but because I am a man and I want to avoid accidentally interacting with you.

I'm open to a LDR and I'm willing to relocate.

What do I prefer my parts to be called? I have a big meaty cock that you can suck for a dollar.

I will not engage with you in my kinks unless you explicitly say in your bio, your pinned post, or through messages that you are comfortable with it.

KINKS

Objectification

Tickle Torture

Sploshing

Coulrophillia (ties somewhat into the previous two bullets and dressing like a clown or a jester is fun)

Hypnokink

Overstimulation

Edging

Orgasm Denial

Genderplay

Humiliation

Praise

CNC

Exhibitionism

Voyeurism

Dry humping

Monsterfucking (especially slimy wet tentacles)

Spanking

Flogging

Wrestling for dominance

WARNING: The above bullets combined will make my brain melt

Not all of my kinks are necessarily sexual if that makes sense. Some of the things listed make me feel good and spacy, or high and mighty.

I am a virgin. I have also never kissed anyone, or been in a relationship before. I know it's unusual for someone my age. You'd think with all of these kinks, I'd have been fucking someone by now, but we could be. If we're a match we can talk about it and maybe we can be partners.

LINKS

My YouTube channel:

I'm a narrator and VA who enjoys reading creepypastas and making roleplays. Please consider clicking the link and subscribing to my YouTube channel for frequent uploads.

AO3:

https://archiveofourown.org/users/bosandaros

Literotica:

https://www.literotica.com/stories/memberpage.php?uid=7627422&page=submissions

Thank you for being here!

[snickerdoodlles]

Re AO3- Politely inquiring as to why you aren't worried, oh Cinnamon One? Thanks! Xoxo

1 part "that's not how it works" and 2 parts "LLM-generated writing has nothing to do with fanfic writers"

some quick context for anyone who's confused-- generative-AI is trained on large datasets, and a lot of training datasets for these LLMs* include data scraped from AO3. i know that the generative-AI Sudowrites has been specifically referenced in socmed posts encouraging AO3 authors to lock their fics, but i believe the AO3 announcement on AI & data-scraping was prompted by current events and debates on the presence of generative-AI in day-to-day society vs any specific situation/event/etc

*LLM stands for 'large language model' which is the type of AI we're talking about here

my first note here is that if locking fics makes you feel more comfortable posting fanfic, do it. it's a fantastic security feature and no one needs a reason to lock their fics beyond "i want to." if you're doing it specifically to stop data scraping for AI, beware it doesn't actually stop that from occurring, it just acts as a deterent (AO3 has said they've done some backend work to prevent data scraping from occurring again in the future, but there's no way they'll ever be able to stop it completely)

but there's also been a lot of...well. i'm not sure misinformation is quite the right phrase here, but a lot of misunderstanding on how LLMs work that's resulted in a lot of outraged or indignant posts on LLM-generated writing in conjunction with AO3, and that's resulted in some fearmongering in regards to the issue that doesn't help anyone :( so, why i'm personally not worried about this issue;

1 part "that's not how it works"

first things first: i don't think people appreciate the sheer scale of LLMs. to refer back to a name that's been mentioned several times in these posts, Sudowrites is a generative AI based on GPT-3, which is a LLM based on 175+ billion parameters. GPT-3 requires 800GB just to store it. GPT-4 is based on 500 billion parameters. these are two of the big LLMs, but even the small LLMs are working off of 3-7 billion parameters. LLMs are fucking huge.

i think it might surprise some people to realize just how long AI has been around. the first recognized AI was made in 1943. neural networks (the "brains" of AI) were first developed in the 1980s. people have been working on generative-AI specifically for almost 20 years now. but it took 3 big factors before generative-AI was even possible:

1- neural networks that could do unsupervised learning,

2- hardware that could handle the computing requirements and neural networks needs,

and 3- the development of the internet into what it's been for the past 10 years, and the sheer scale of information now stored within it

so here's my point: LLMs weren't "trained on data from AO3"--AO3 is a database who's stored material was pulled alongside data from online journals, literary magazines, library databases, newspapers, video transcripts, blogs, Wikipedia and so much more than i can ever list to make these training datasets. individual AO3 writers are drops in a pool and AO3 is a bucket in an ocean of information. AO3 as an own individual entity has negligible impact on how LLMs were trained or what they do, nevermind individual stories.

honestly, this alone should be a huge relief for some people--i saw posts going around where people were appalled at the idea of their fanfic being used to train a generative-AI that could hurt professional writers. so great news! your fics have no meaningful impact on any of this in any way that conceivably matters! you can post your fics for anyone to see and read and even download with absolutely zero guilt for how generative-AI is affecting jobs.

2 parts "LLM-generated writing has nothing to do with fanfic writers"

if you want to learn how LLMs work, do it outside of tumblr, it's too complex to explain here (this dive into how ChatGPT works is a good starting point for anyone interested, personally i learned a lot looking up lectures on 'deep learning'). but for a simplified overview of it for anyone who doesn't care, LLMs are just figuring out what word comes next in a sequence. basically, you give a LLM a prompt. from that prompt, it determines what your topic is, then it spits out the first token (tokens are the 'language' of LLMs, in this case it's spitting out a word or short phrase). then the LLM spits out the second token based on the first token. then spits out the third token based on the first token, second token, and combination of the tokens. and so forth, until it's reached the end of the prompt.

LLMs are just writing sentences word-by-word. i remember doing something very similar when i first started analyzing what i loved about my favorite writers--i had a notebook where i wrote out sentences that i especially loved, usually looking at description or a funny piece of dialogue, with the goal of figuring out how to write like them. this lasted for maybe a month before i moved on to analyzing story structure, narrative pacing, etc because sentences are just lines of words. anyone can put words into a nice sounding sentence. they can even put several words into nice sounding sentences that sound nice when read together. but writing, and everything about it that makes it special, is so more than writing nice sounding sentences. giving an a concept a narrative, or creating distinctive characters with their own voices, or building a setting/world, or connecting ideas to themes--generative-AI can't do any of that. it's just determining which token comes next after the previously generated ones. it can do that with a lot of variety--baby writer me was working off a bookshelf, LLMs are working off things like the entire internet--but that's still all it can do: write nice sounding sentences.

there's another aspect to generative-AI at play here too--in every example you've seen of LLM-generated writing, did you notice that they're all limited to less than 500 words? prompts shown in newscast articles/segments are usually 300-500 words, Sudowrites only offers written passages of up to 300 words, and even ChatGPT recommends keeping responses limited to under ~800 tokens (even tho it offers responses of up to...4000 tokens i think?)

this is because each generated token comes with an error value. i don't want to bog down this already long response with how that exactly works, but let's say the first token comes with an error value of 0.0002 (*im picking random numbers for this). that error value carries over to the second token (which can have its own error value of let's say 0.0007). then that combined error value carries over to the third generated token, which also has its own separate error value, and so forth. and while each individual error value is negligible, they add up with each additional token and eventually the overall gained error is too high and the LLM cannot properly/accurately produce the next token (this is called error propagation, and it's non-linear in the case of LLMs)

i will stop torturing people with math nd statistics concepts, but the long and short of this means that after a certain number of words are generated, the LLM's response starts breaking down. maybe at first it starts sounding a little stale or the wording gets awkward, but if it keeps going, the LLM starts spitting out gibberish, and you have to end the prompt and start a new one. this is why those generative-AI writing examples have a word limit to them, the LLMs can't write more than that small section of writing on their own.

so, add up all of that, LLMs already aren't going to replace story writers any time soon. they just can't do it. furthermore, the response you get from an LLM is only as good as the prompt you give it and it's working off such a huge dataset, that responses are going to be really broad. if you want a more tailored response, you have to feed it extra context alongside the prompt. and in the case of fanfic specifically, fic is entirely based on previously known context. it's written with a very specific context in mind, it expects readers to enter with at least some level of knowledge on that specific context, and works within that level of context even in the cases of AUs. fic writers play in someone else's sandbox, which is not something that LLMs are naturally capable of doing

but frankly, even if they did, they still have zero relevance to fic writers

the people currently affected by LLM-generated writing are journalists, who jobs have been under fire for years. the editors in published magazines getting slammed with LLM-generated writing because it was sold as a shortcut. writers rooms for shows, which act as an important stepping stone but execs have been trying to reduce and cut out for years. and even more that i'm not listing.

these are people's livelihoods that are being impacted by generative-AI. situations where managers and executives don't care about the fact that LLMs can't write like people do because they only see a money-saver instead of art.

like, 100%--if locking your fics feels more reassuring to you personally, absolutely lock them. that's the point of the feature. but the attitude of acting like AO3 has any relevance how LLMs are trained or that generative-AI has any meaningful impact on fic writers is just such a self-centered view of the actual issue at hand. and, if you will excuse me getting a little snarky here, anyone up in arms over AO3 being one of the many databases getting scraped is about 20 years too late to worrying about internet privacy.

[powdermelonkeg]

Wondering why you didn't post any sources for the wild claims you make about the ocean and skybox sizes in the new Pokemon games.

It doesn't make any sense that they would do that, and this is exactly the type of misinformation tumblr and pokemon fans who love to hate on gamefreak would lap up instantly without applying any critical thought.

In this age where people make up wild elaborate lies for clout I just can't believe you without proof.

I'm going to assume you didn't mean to be and point out that this is very accusatory. You can decide not to believe me without sources, that's fine, but going "Hmm, strange you didn't post sources, this is EXACTLY what the masses would go wild over" is, frankly, incredibly rude.

However, you're not the only person that's asked about sources in the *checks notes* less than 24 hours since I made what I thought was another niche theory to go on my blog. I do these for Zelda all the time, and take a good chunk of the screenshots for those myself.

However, you're in luck! I do NOT have the tools in my Switch to yeet myself out of the stratosphere. Here's someone who DOES, though!

There's a small correction this video makes that I just added on to the big post—the Sky Sphere is NOT the Skydome. They are separate entities. Somehow. Information update here.

In any case, I agree that it doesn't make sense. That doesn't dispute that it's there, though. And I'm incredibly curious to know how you think I faked those pics in my world-size-theory-thing.

Be nicer. Ask for sources before you point fingers.

[jdenvs3000w24]

Final Post, finally

For the last time, Hello fellow bloggers!

I know for most of us this has been a very long semester, so I hope you all get to finally relax soon and take a minute for yourself to just breathe. Maybe you can reconnect with nature again without the need to talk about it for class and just enjoy yourself.

Anyways, the prompt for this week asks us to merge the skills and insights we have accumulated throughout this course with our own personal beliefs and ethics. For me, my personal ethics in terms of nature interpretation lean heavily toward equality and equity in opportunity. I came from a less fortunate place financially, so growing up I may not have had as many opportunities to connect with nature as most, but living by the ocean was a privilege for me that I never took for granted. The point is, I want to ensure that every person I encounter on my nature interpretation journey has an opportunity to connect with nature. That will likely look different for most people. But that's my job as a nature interpreter: to identify how people perceive the world and provide a meaningful nature experience tailored to them. In an ideal world, I would work for a not-for-profit providing different experiences in a forested space, maybe by the coast. I don't want there to be an option to pay more money to get a better experience because that perpetuates the notion that connecting with nature is a privilege. 

I bring the belief that everyone deserves to connect with nature and that I am there to help build the bridge to get there. I bring the belief that natural interpretation takes many different forms through many different media. I bring the belief that we need more natural space in urban areas. Not only to break up the concrete jungles but to provide enrichment to the people living there. I bring the belief that anyone can be a nature interpreter, all you have to do is look. 

As a nature interpreter, I have certain responsibilities. First and foremost I have to find nature for myself. I personally find nature every time I walk out of my front door and am greeted by the squirrels and birds a plenty gathering around the various bird feeders in my front yard. I feel nature every time I take a walk down the edge of a river, lake, or ocean. I understand nature when I walk through a forest and see outcroppings of rocks telling me the stories of eons past. My responsibility to humanity is to ensure future and current generations are able to see, hear understand, and feel nature. It is my responsibility to do so in a safe manner, so as to not push anyone past their limits. It is my responsibility to give back to nature as nature gives to us. Not only must I respect trails, parks, and other natural settings as if it were my own home. I also feel the responsibility to transform my own space into a natural setting. I intend to plant wildflower gardens for native pollinators. I intend to have solar panels to limit my carbon footprint. I intend to live in a very small square footage house on a decent-sized property so as to limit my own personal impact on the land that provides for me. Aside from my own personal intentions and self-imposed responsibilities, I also feel responsible to empower and enlighten others to do the same. Not through the means of telling them this kind of life is for them but by providing the knowledge that allows them to make informed decisions themselves. 

As an individual my means of impact are limited. The approaches I find most suitable for me include a face-to-face component. I would prefer to work in a park or conservation area which allows me to really individualize the experience for each guest. I'm not a big fan of posts on social media so this whole Tumblr nature blog will not be a thing I continue in the future, that's for sure. I also understand the appeal of a podcast or YouTube video style of nature interpretation, and while that's more accessible to people who find themselves far removed from nature, it just isn't my style at all. Even if I had to get a job in some other field where I'm not in nature for my day-to-day, I hope I will be able to at the very least become a scout leader and inspire youth as I was (briefly). 

Thank you all for listening to my Tumblr rants this past semester, I can't say I'll miss doing this. However, it was nice to have the routine. Considering I only made this account for this course, and I've used my school email to create it, you all are part of the lucky few who got to read my thoughts on a public forum, congrats! I will never be doing this again. I continue to use what I've learned in this course, in person, to provide a sense of nature interpretation for my friends and family who I keep dragging on hikes. Good luck to all of you in finishing up your podcasts this week! I hope you all get amazing marks in this course! Good luck and goodbye!

[project-sour-grapes]

State of the Union

I have hit the same roadblocks repeatedly in my life for 29 years. Or 26, if we consider that the first 3 years of life are basically boilerplate.

After a childhood of being told I was special, or after my temperament demanded that I be treated as special, or some feedback loop of the two, I am accepting that I am not. I am not inherently special. At the very least, acting like I am has gotten me nowhere. I half-ass everything I do. I rest on my laurels. I wait for things to turn into emergencies before I take action. I sit and observe things, and--while there is a role for the philosopher-sitter-observer in life--this has prevented me from taking action and making things happen. Whenever I hit an obstacle, I give up. Or I think of changing course entirely. I could be sailing in the middle of the ocean and come across a log and say, "Shoot, I better turn around."

I started this blog as a goodbye to that sort of thinking. I started it as a way to catalog my journey away from that life. But I'm turning around and realizing I'm merely a foot further from shore than I was a year ago.

There's that Confucius saying about "going slow" vs "stopping" along your journey that any Tumblr veteran knows. But this trajectory is just not satisfactory. I am going so slow towards my goals that it's almost as bad as being stopped. Hell, it might be worse, because I can comfort myself with my millimeters of progress, and say, "Well, I'm moving," and then blame the microscopic magnitude of it on anything that feels comforting at the time. "That's just how the system works." Or, "I'm just being patient." Or, "Maybe this just isn't the right path for me."

And maybe this isn't the right path for me. But I'm not going to find that out by being mediocre. Or by working only one hour a day toward my goal.

I was talking to my mother a few weeks ago about why I can't finish anything I start, big or small. I told her that I wanted to leave healthcare already and that my patients were starting infuriate me. Then after the hour-long practical conversation about work-life balance and "pros and cons," which is all of the typical career advice that anybody ever gets, she just said frankly, "Whatever you're running from, once you realize it and are ready to stop running, you'll find your goal."

The things that came to mind when she said that include:

running from body dysphoria (since I'm a man born with female body parts)

running from my desire for but difficulty with building friendship and relationships

running from my gigantic ego, since I don't know what to do with it

As I'm writing this, I want to stop and change course real quick. What if what I'm running from is my huge ego? And my fear of it means it just comes out in unhealthy ways? My repeated career and relationship failures would show as much.

Old school psychology is kind of goofy, but I'm thinking of Freud's concept of sublimation, where anything that we bury just comes out in new, weird ways. And in Jungian psychology, the things we don't like about ourselves or that are the more animalistic parts of ourselves (our "shadow") will make themselves known one way or another. The most vital, carnal parts of the human psyche fester like a pressure cooker unless we let off steam in a healthy way. "What we resist persists" is a true statement even for the ego.

I can't resist my ego. I can only channel it. The human ego is a powerful force, and with that, there are only two things I can do with that energy:

use it to compress diamonds in my own life

use it to make coal to burn others

Looking at the track record of my life, I have gotten most off track after I have accidentally acquired a pile of coal and then decided to weaponize it. Perhaps this was because I felt entitled to diamonds instead, and lighting the coal was a "fuck you" to those I had held my hand out to.

I think my mother was right. I am running from something. (Maybe several things, but) The something is my ego.

I'm not going to bury it or accept being average (at least the kind where no progress is being made year-over-year) or Buddhism my way out of it. I am going to run with it.

"What is the best way to ride a horse? The direction in which it is running." -Somebody

There are a few analogies for embracing the ego that I want to mull over the next few weeks. The ego is:

like fire in that it can keep you warm and aid in survival or it can burn your house down

like nuclear power in that it is the most efficient form of energy known to man or it can poison entire cities if handled poorly

like a German Shepherd or Belgian Malinois; it can either sniff out the bombs and incapacitate the bad guys or it can rip up your entire living room and shit the bed

It's not the ego that is the problem. It's what you do with it. It's where you point it and why.

Anything powerful can be both protective and harmful. Who are you serving with your ego: yourself or your community? Ideally, it would be a mix of both. My problem has been lopsidedness and then victimhood and self-righteous indignation when nobody even asked for my lopsideness to start.

With all of that being said, a few things are true:

I am not special and the world owes me nothing.

I have a huge ego, and if I work for what I want, I will fucking get it or something even better

It's the tension between these statement that gives rise to human motivation (past the lizard brain motivations like food, water, etc.). It's like in Ernest Becker's "Denial of Death," where he says mankind's greatest achievements are pitiful attempts to live forever. Or F. Scott Fitzgerald's belief that we should be able to "hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise." We are both statistically not special in a world of 8 billion people and such an expansive universe, and yet having an ego is the most human thing ever.

And that's the universe: just paradoxes and the tension between them, and mankind's convenient spot at the center. Everything in the universe is in flux. Nothing in the body or in nature is static. It's all trajectories and voltages and potentials in the Physics sense.

Thus I will both accept that I'm not special and that my ego is gigantic, and that's aight.

How do I channel the powerful force of the ego in a healthy way then, like those superhero movies montage where the hero starts using their powers and sucks at first and breaks everything in their kitchen but then masters them? Honestly, fuck if I know. I have shit to do the rest of tonight, and I'm going to have to think on this one.

Will come back with more ideas, but the goal is not to squash the ego, but to channel it for good. Don't put out the fire, just learn how to use it like any other tool.

That's it for now.

Other quotes that are on my mind today:

Life is a numbers game.

The grass is green where you water it.

Have a good one.

[wowitsrohan]

Ok you know what I'm always talking about missing big things from my memories like my family and my home but I never talk about the small stuff so I'm gonna do that rn bc I feel like it 🤷 why not

Yeah I may use this blog to ramble about memories I have nowhere else to and they're always on my mind ok so if you have a problem with that send your complaints to (a beep starts playing and you cannot hear me over it) 😒

I miss my old artstyle! I don't exactly know how to describe it but I could draw pretty realistically really quickly.. I'm stuck with a pretty cartoonish artstyle currently but as soon as I learn how to re-learn my old skills I'm getting my old style back ASAP

Also they sold this strawberry cheesecake flavored ice cream at Owson (local convenience store in town) and it was SO GOOD. I miss morioh food 😔!! Stuff isn't as good here tbh!! Dunno what it is about the morioh air that just makes food absolutely amazing

The scenery too wow. Morioh was a really beautiful town! Sure the sky was yellow but you get used to it. There was an ocean pretty close to my house n I liked just kinda going over there every now and then when I was bored or needed to clear my head. There were a lot of flowers literally all over town , the land was very taken care of and I think it was very easy to tell. We (morioh citizens) poured our hearts and souls into taking care of the environment!!! And it payed off! Was breathtaking

Also. Sounds silly but I miss my eyes. My eyes were so cool you guys don't understand. Grips your shoulders. One was purple and the other was green. THAT'S SO COOL. Why can't I have purple eyes here 😞 !?! I mean I guess technically I do in the innerworld but it's not the same man.. not the same..

Ok that's all byebye Tumblr people

[evesaintyves]

from the new ask list! #5, #9, and #18!

thank you for these asks!

5. what made you start your blog?

i had just started posting fanfic and, though i was overjoyed to have a few lovely reviewers right away, it felt a little lonely - ao3 is such a huge place and i didn't have any sense of belonging to a fandom community there, so when i saw a few other authors linking their tumblrs i decided to give it a shot. glad i did, i've internet-met some really cool people here.

9. tell a story about your childhood

i'm about six. we've been living semi-off-the-grid on various beaches and campgrounds on the west coast in a creaky old 80s camper because my dad has warrants. currently we're on a beach in northern california. my mom wakes me and my two little brothers up in the middle of the night, bundles us up in blankets and hustles us all into the station wagon. my dad drives us all up a pitch-dark road, lit only by the headlights, to the top of a cliff. we park on the cliff's edge. it's freezing, my oldest brother is really upset and wants to know what's going on, and my parents are making it worse by being all quiet and mysterious about it and keep telling us to try to go to sleep. my mom and dad get out of the car and stand on the edge of the cliff, looking down at the ocean. after what seems like forever they get back in the car and drive us to a doughnut shop in Eureka and get us doughnuts and hot chocolate.

my mom explained years later that the cape mendocino earthquake had woken my parents up and when they turned on the radio there was a warning to evacuate the coast because of the possibility of a tsunami. there actually was a tsunami, but it was pretty small. my parents parked on the cliff and stood watching to see if the waves were going to reach our campsite, and kept us quiet in the car without explanation because they didn't want us to witness or be thinking about our rv being washed away.

i know this might sound like a bit of a rough story, but i remember this time really fondly. we lived all kinds of gorgeous remote places and made exciting middle-of-the-night moves now and then. we had a red hummingbird feeder that hung from the camper loft, a big green plastic sandbox shaped like a turtle, string lights that swooped over the little astro-turf yard my mom would set up everyplace we landed, and my dad would take us hiking out into the absolute dark to teach us about astronomy. i feel sad sometimes for my younger siblings, because they were too young during those camper times to remember much. once, when i was around four and living in an rv park in mexico, we found an abandoned bird's nest with blue eggs under a plastic lawn chair and my mom moved it into a kitchen cabinet to try to protect it, but she knocked it over getting a jar of spices out and broke the eggs. for years after that i looked for eggs under every lawn chair i saw. that time was full of beautiful adventures.

18. do you believe in ghosts and/or aliens?

definitely not ghosts. i'm open to the idea that there's other life in the universe.

[weltenwellen]

There's nothing to ask but here's something that's weighing my heart-

I've gone through bullying, childhood trauma, and many other abuses and that always made me feel it somehow might affect my adulthood. And it did, I have severe anxiety and been diagnosed with depression, and have finally began taking therapy. Reading your posts made me feel seen idk it's just that they always speak to me on a personal spiritual level. I'm really scared, I feel like there's something incommunicable happening inside me which eats me raw but somewhat your posts relieve me. I hope I'll get better. I hope. I'm scared and lonely and there's no one to console me, to tell me that it's gonna be alright. You know, in India, mental health is really stigmatized, which indeed triggers many of us more than our illness does. But I just wanna say, thank you for existing. Whatever you do here in Tumblr, makes me believe in hope, life itself, it's faulty goodness. I really admire your posts.

Sending hugs! ❤🌻

that is such a heartbreaking and simultaneously beautiful message, thank you for taking the time to write it. i am glad that you’ve realised and admitted to yourself that you needed to begin therapy and have gotten yourself to start. i felt for a long long time there were such unspeakable things inside me, like something was and always would be irreparably broken or damaged inside of me & that would always set me apart and make me unable to connect to other people and to the outside world. it’s super embarrassing, but when i was younger i believed for awhile that was like an alien because i was so cut off from everybody else (because i was so cut off from myself). i lived inside a small corner of my heart where no light got in and it made me so hopeless and scared and lonely.

i am so so happy that this blog makes you understood. that’s so important when you’re experiencing anxiety and are dealing with depression because both suck you into isolation. therapy has been such a light for me because it goes beyond feeling understood. it’s about being seen. a big chunk is about putting your emotions into words and getting the feedback that you’re not only not alone but someone has felt and thought exactly what you have felt. you’re not abnormal in what you’re feeling or in your numbness. the experiences of a person may be unique, but there is such an understanding and overlap in emotions as we feel and how we react to trauma, to loneliness, when we felt trapped or hopeless. you’re unique in your own beautiful way, but the experience of being human? we all wade through oceans in our heart. we all run through labyrinths in our minds. as you find words to express what you experience, feel and think, you will feel less disconnected not only to others but more important the less disconnected you will feel from your own emotions and from yourself. as you find ways to speak about your childhood and your trauma, they will feel less like giant road blocks and you’re able to leave certain emotions in the past where they belong.💛🌻

[transtryingtheirbest]

So here I am. On Tumblr again. I guess I should introduce myself. I've never been good at introducing myself but I can start with the relevant basics.

Hello, I'm A. I'm 28, I was assigned male at birth, and I grew up a boy and at some point became a man. Anyone who knows me knows this But something less people know is that I have spent a lot of those 28 years wishing I'd been born a girl.

For a while, in uni, I thought about starting a blog, much like this one, which would let me rant about secretly being a woman or trans or something like that. I don't know what I would have said, I don't know what I would want to say even. I still don't. I didn't ever make the blog because I felt like it was stupid and I wasn't really trans. I put it aside. Even if I was trans (and how could I be) I was a fat man. If I were to transition, I'd be a fat ugly woman, and that would be worse. I could live my life of privilege as a cis male (who is basically white even if that isnt strictly true) and I could be happy, or happy enough. I tried to put it out of my mind and kept this up through uni and into full time work after graduating.

As everyone knows, the novel coronavirus arrived in 2020 and messed everyone's life up. Fortunately, as an office working yuppie, the main effect of this was that I started working from home. I made a few non-committal statements to my girlfriend that I might try doing make up or wearing more femme clothing, and lockdowns made me grow out my hair but I didn't really do anything until about three months ago when bored and procrastinating from work, I pilfered a lipstick from her make up bag and put it on.

I looked good, I thought. Better than good. Such a small thing, a tiny insignificant change and I was examining myself in the mirror like a preening bird. I wasn't noticing my double chin or the bags under my eyes. I flopped my hair around until it sat more girlish and admired myself again. An ocean had been crossed. The step of colouring my lips a deep violet showed that I could be more than the limits I'd always assumed were there. Within a week I'd bought a set of supermarket make up brushes and a fun "mini power palette" of eyeshadows and a lipstick shade called "thirsty bae". Bright red. Subtlety is for suckers.

The great thing about being stuck in your home is that you can order things off the internet and sit around waiting for them to arrive. I scrolled through Shein, a fast fashion site which mass produces clothes in China and ships them worldwide with great haste. This probably means that Shein fills landfills in the developing world and fills the sky with aircraft exhaust fumes, but on the other hand it means that a nervous maybe-not-a-boy in Australia can get their girlfriend to measure them and then fill a cart with dresses and skirts and shirts of all kinds of shapes and styles, so who is to say if they're good or bad.

If putting on the lipstick opened the door, wearing the cutesy overall dress and white blouse pushed me through it. While I'd always wanted to be born a girl, I never felt like I had dysphoria about my body. I hated it, sure, but I hated the way fat clung to my face and my belly (and in an example of my vanity, despised the fat that built up there far more than the fat that chose to choke my liver), but I never despised my broad shoulders or my big feet or even my penis. But looking at myself in this cute outfit, I felt euphoric. Immediately I lost all interest in my entire male wardrobe. I shaved my entire body in the shower. Another Shein order was made within the week.

I found myself putting on makeup and skirts/dresses on every day. I turned off my webcam for work calls, patiently waited through morning scrums to apply mascara and eyeshadows and lipsticks safe from prying eyes. I started to get bold, I would take out the bins girlmode. Walk to the post box. Take the dog on walks. Eventually I was comfortable enough, or rather brave enough, to do the shopping in my dress. I scanned every face for disapproval or disgust but aside from a child who seemed more intrigued than anything, nobody paid me any notice. This was revolutionary. I definitely did not pass, and it didn't matter. People didn't tell at me or throw rocks or any of the many unrealistic scenarios I had dreamed up. So I did it again. And again.

This week, I told my brother and cousins that I was trans/non-binary. I'd asked internet friends to use they/them pronouns for me previously, and even gone over to a close friends house in femme mode, and the more people I told the more that I felt like my little attempts to transition actually amounted to something real. I tried to be nonchalant with my coming out but was showered with slightly bewildering support and joy from my brother and cousins. I had to sort of stop and think to myself why they were making such a big deal of it, before letting myself accept that this is a big deal. So here we are. I don't know where this gender journey will take me. I'm not certain if I'm an enby or genderfluid or a trans woman. But I know this.

I'm 28, I was assigned male at birth, and I've spent 28 years hiding that I'm not male. I'm not a boy and I'm not a man. I am trans. I am a transfemme person.

I am 28 years old and three months ago I put on lipstick and finally saw what I could be. What I should be and what I will be.

And I'm so fucking excited.