nephrite_shade

By now I have scattered my identity across a half dozen impermanent websites, what's one more?

My college buddies and the people on Facebook see a version of me from 20 years ago. Facebook is a lake of pink slime. On occasion, a bubble will rise to the surface and pop, vomiting out pictures of house cats who are now dead or unhappy selfies.

The people who stalk me, who may or may not find this, used to be my friends. Now they think I'm someone they still deserve to have access to, for some reason. I had to break my life into fragments to throw them off my trail. I will hate them for the rest of my days.

My newer friends and loved ones, almost all living across the ocean, see a curated version of me too. This is a person they have never had to get into an argument with. I've never had to beg forgiveness to them in tears. I come pre-loaded with all the mistakes I made before I met them.

The more I can exist as pure words, the more truthful I feel I can be. And the more I am tied to my body, the more I feel fake. Somehow, the fakest version of me feels like the thing typing these words, in a messy one-bedroom apartment and freighted with years of self neglect. I have to haul this thing with me, like a trash bag full of possessions, from apartment to apartment. The first place I rented was about $425 a month. Now I'm spending $1425 a month in a lonely corner of a big city, miles away from anyone who gives a single shit about me.

When nothing feels like yourself, it's so easy to not care. I have lived in big cities and towns with a population of a few hundred. They're all just as fake. Sometimes my job will change and I move to another little room full of dead shapes. Sometimes a social media platform will decay into a hostile, unrecognizable moonscape. I abandon everything I used to say and everyone I used to talk to.

Wouldn't it be funny if I returned, at last, to a livejournal-alike and tried - just once - to be the most honest version of me? Or to even figure out what that person even is?

So here it is. I'm 43 years old, short and fat and trans. I want to put "very likely" or "I think I'm" in front of "trans" but I'm trying so hard not to be a coward, I'll just bull through this paragraph before I lose my nerve.

Over the past 12 years of my life I have systematically alienated a lot of the people I met in college, either because of rejection-sensitive overreaction, unexamined shitty opinions on my part, or choices we have all made that have pushed our lives farther apart. People who used to be closer to me than skin now haunt the bottoms of my friend lists. People I gave my heart to, who would now be happy to never speak to me again.

I'm scared to lose the friends and loved ones I have now, who are all well into their transitions, because I'm not transitioning fast enough. I don't know how to dress myself and even shopping for clothes alone is overwhelming. My body is weak and inflexible. I live like someone who is 30 or 40 years older than I am. I'm stuck in a big city and I don't know how to make friends here. I am currently ducking a community support group that my therapist recommended because it's the weekend after the election and I don't want to talk about the goddamn fucking election, I want to know how to find and wear clothes that make me feel like a human being.

When I graduated from high school I was terrified I would screw up my life and live like my father had for years: cut off from everyone, driving a beater car to a lonely job I never heard him speak about with any fondness. That is now my reality, except my dad had home equity.

I spend most of my time on Discord listening to my loved ones who live about $1,000 in travel expenses away from me. My body and sanity have paid the price for years hunched in front of a computer, my only lifeline to the world, on diseased websites designed to drive me insane and kill me. Eventually Discord will sink into the pink slime that eats everything on the Internet and something new will take its place. I hope I can hold on to the people I love for as long as I can.

This is going to be my little corner of the internet where I try to be as true to myself as I can be. If I write or make nothing else, I want a little testament of who I was. It won't last, because nothing does. I don't know if I will ever have a home or a Facebook perfect life. But maybe if I keep a little touchstone of who I am, as complete as I can make it, then I could try and live with a little more grace. I want to remember that I am a person and not a dissociating hallucination tied to a body I don't know how to recognize as mine.