beyond here be dragons
After all, things may come and things may go away,
After a year and a half, one more journal post.
I make illegibility a point of valor: seeing is not understanding; knowing is a little death, understanding the final blow. (It is forbidden to forbid: not Death the terminus, rather the cumulation. "Ooh yeah, life goes on...")
The goal, the line one rides, is to be visible without being legible.
I'm 23. As of this past month, I've been on HRT for four years.
I grew up rural poor. More of my transfeminine friends than not are bourgeois or PMC, and a good half of them didn't figure out their own transness 'til they were my age, or close to it.
I worked it out when I was 16, and I bought into it with my full throat. I only acted on it a couple years later—out of my hands—but I was socially transitioned, at least partway, a good few months before starting HRT.
The rich-kid tgirls I know often describe a feeling of waiting for permission to be trans, to the point
of putting transition off for years before they finally seek counsel. Not for fear of reprisal—more
for doubt of their ability to know themselves. This is an easy enough pattern to fall into (that was
the next 5 years and I for a long while after I dropped out), but regarding my transness (and I was,
and am, far from gender-conforming), I knew, full well. It's ineffable. I saw what I wanted, and I
took it, grabbed with both hands.
I have no consistent theory for this. Could be individual variation (built different), or my having been poor, or homeschooled (left to my own devices nigh-unsocialized), or saddled with the germ of Calvinist ethics (something the Lastname boys, myself included, have kept alive for a couple hundred years at least). I wonder about it.
In the couple years surrounding my starting HRT—back when I was more sociable—I cracked a lot of eggs, without trying. Among them are a then-fifteen-year-old, and a few of my aforementioned several-years-senior PMC tech tran friends. Whatever "real" and "authentic" mean, this is what comes of living[1] that way. The ones that don't get it come away with some measure of respect for you and for it, or else quietly seethe or fail to give a shit. The ones that get it, get it. They see what they want. They take it.
My authentic tranny was a girl with a hand drill and a robot in a convention center in Orlando. I don't stand alone.
Back in 2020 I briefly used this blog as a public journal. Many of the later posts are missing; maybe God knows, but I don't remember where they went.
The Brynn that writes today, in 2023, is catastrophically altered.
My becoming-illegible entailed, in part, becoming-edgy, living in non-normative ways. In the year-and-a-half after my last posts I kicked the drinking habit, picked up an horrific amphetamine addiction, got heavily into (and out of) psychedelics, started smoking; lived like a NEET until I didn't, failed Calc II but at least I showed up a third of the time; broke friendships, broke a girl's heart, broke myself, was broken, got beat to shit, for lack of an understanding of my own psychology (bipolar I god damn) that I was actively deterred from pursuing 'til a couple weeks ago.
Unsustainable. Ineffective. But there it is again.
I don't like to leave things behind deliberately. Things come and things go away. Choosing my actions or behaviors is safe enough, but making or breaking bits of my self, my own internality, is one road towards understanding myself.
The goal, the line I have to ride, is to see myself without knowing myself. Living without understanding.
ʟᴀsᴛ ᴊᴏᴜʀɴᴀʟ ᴘᴏsᴛ ᴛʜɪs ʙʟᴏɢ ɪs sʀs ʙsɴs ɴᴏᴡ ʟᴇᴛs GO
[1] presentation is homeomorphic to living if you're doing it right
Tags: personal