On semi-fresh starts.

Not quite a clean slate, but I'll take what I can get.

I've emailed all of my professors officially coming out as trans so that they'll get my name and pronouns right. Of the five I've emailed, I've heard back from three, and they are all totally cool with this and seem nothing but helpful.  Problems may arise if I find I'm in class with lots of people I know, which given I'm a senior and am pretty much locked into my major/minor field classes, I probably will be.

My Bunnie was here for two weeks and headed back to N.C. about a week ago; she was supposed to only stay ten days, but ended up having to reschedule her flight because of a snafu with her boarding pass.  I wasn't complaining.  Neither was she.  We spent our surprise time after the airport trip fell through sharing lunch at Red Lobster and going to Barnes and Noble.  It was excellent.  As much as I love the idea of her being my girlfriend, I like her being my girlfriend in real life even more--I love the fact that we can hold hands, that we can kiss, that I can have her in my arms and everything feels so right with the world.  I've wanted this for way too long.  Of course I'm taking advantage of it.  I miss her, but I'm okay with her being gone this time, because she has her cell phone, which means I can call her without it being long-distance, we can text each other, and she has internet access, so it's like she's not really that far away.  Besides.  I'll see her again in a month when the Vampire group goes to New Orleans.

Speaking of vampires, I'm getting my fangs.  The binder is working out excellently, and now another piece of my identity should be falling into place soon.  I love the fact that my mom understands roleplay and what it means to me; she actually told me tonight that she doesn't get moms who don't get roleplay and that it's harmless and fun and we're just enjoying ourselves.  I love my mother.

Classes start tomorrow, and I'm all kinds of nervous about it.  This is the first time I'll have gone out in public actually presenting male with people knowing I'm presenting and people who know to call me Connor, and who know that I'm a guy, more or less.  I'm terrified.  It's kind of been triggering my dysphoria tonight, because I'm in a panic about looking perfect tomorrow, even though looking the part is only half the battle.  I did cut my hair again, though.  Hopefully it'll dry straight and fall right tomorrow and I'll just get lucky.  I've been PMSing for nearly a week now, so you just watch me hit my Lunar Cycle tomorrow and fuck everything up.  It'll be great.  And typical.

And on the subject of people calling me Connor.  I love my friends.  The girl's learning to call me Connor, my best friend Pookie was the first to make the switch and has been doing so consistently. (She also, after a fact, came up with the term 'chickadude'.  This is the same person who says that since I'm still fairly genderqueer, I'm a Transformer, as in the robots, and that if I'm dressed like a girl, I'm a drag racer instead of a queen.  She is the best at ridiculous gender-neutral terms.)  And my Foxy Lady has also been pretty consistent and awesome.  My Lil Sis has started calling me her Big Bro.  And I'll get my Badger to play along eventually.  No worries.  All in all?  Pretty damn good bunch of people, these guys are.

It's two in the morning and I am really damn sleep deprived.  I think I'm going to attempt to write for a bit and probably end up crashing the hell out.  Here's to tomorrow morning.

On deepening dysphoria.

I just started a new job--working fast food, preferring cashier duty right now.  I'm good at it.  It's not been a bad job so far.  It's a place I like to eat at, my coworkers are great, and my boss is nice.  (The owner, I'm not sure about--I think he needs to get out of the kitchen, most of the time.)  The problem?  The first day I went in for training and got my uniform, I noticed one small nitpicky detail--the uniforms are stupidly gendered.  Barely, but still gendered.  The guys get baseball caps, the girls get visors.  From what I can tell, this is just so the girls can pull their ponytails through the tops of their visors and keep them off their necks.

I'd rather have a baseball cap, personally, but I'm not going to ask for one just now.  It's not that big a deal.

I left work early tonight because I was having dizzy spells and feeling faint.  I blamed this on the fact that it was hot in the store and we'd just had a huge post-church rush of people.  In reality, it was because I was about to have a panic attack.  But explaining that I was about to panic required explaining why, and the why is the part I can't really explain to anyone who doesn't know me.  I was about to have a panic attack because I was having an incredibly bad dysphoria attack.

I'm learning as I go along in all of this the things that will trigger my dysphoria.  Sometimes, I'll get little easy-to-deal-with bouts of it for no reason at all.  Lately, though, two things have been triggering major attacks of it.

One: roleplay is becoming a problem, since I'm playing a girly-girl.  It's no big around the roleplay group.  I'm out as genderqueer to all of them, so they know the clothes are just a costume, and they all comment on how weird it is to see me looking like a girl, which makes me feel more comfortable.  They understand.  But I get into costume in my dorm before heading across campus to the student center where we play, or over to the community center when we can get it, and what triggers my dysphoria is having to be seen in my costume by total strangers.  My friends have suggested that I pretend I'm in drag, as it might help.  Which it kind of does.  But the problem is that I know these other people are looking at me and thinking 'girl'.  No one would give a second thought to calling me "miss" or "ma'am" or "young lady" or "woman" when I'm in that costume.  I look like a girl.  Even when I'm dressed as a guy, I don't pass.  I'm not trying exceptionally hard to, but only once has anyone ever second-guessed my gender and called me "sir" instead, and that was because I was in a football jersey and being generally boyish.  That was an accident.  And then they tripped all over themselves apologising and correcting themselves, because I said something and my voice sounds like a deep girl's voice.  Point is, my costume triggers my dysphoria because I know I look like a girl, no questions asked, to any stranger I see.

The second thing that's been doing it lately is a little harder to get rid of.  My "lunar cycles".  I have pretty bad PMS as it is, which just compounds it, because I have terrible moodswings, painful cramps, fatigue, upset stomach, faint spells, the whole nine yards.  (I wouldn't be a bit surprised if I ended up diagnosed with PMDD.)  Problem is, I just started my cycle tonight, so I was sore and sick and feeling like I was going to pass out, and all of the people calling me "ma'am" while I was running the register was making it worse.  This has happened every month since the beginning of the year, and it gets worse every time.  Every month, the dysphoria gets a little worse and a little worse, because this is the ultimate marker of being female.  I can even handle not binding my chest all the time, and most of the time, I feel no need to.  But at least the option is there, and that's what makes it easier to deal with.  But this?  There's nothing I can do about it.  I can't afford birth control.  And my friends who are on BC tell me that insurance won't cover it, at least not most of it, even in medically necessary cases, such as preventing ovarian cancer.  If I could afford it, believe me, I'd be getting on one of the seasonal pills in a heartbeat.  It just seems like I'm stuck, because there's nothing I can do.

What's insane about this is that I don't feel like I'll ever choose to have SRS, and I'll probably never even go so far as a hysterectomy.  So I almost feel like I have no right complaining.  I almost feel like it would be easier if I were fully FtM, instead of this genderqueer-masculine mess that I am, because at least then I would have something to come out as, instead of feeling so lost and torn and unable to explain what I am inside.  But I know that's not true.  The truth is, I know exactly what I look like when I close my eyes.  I could explain the body I want to people, and I could explain who I want to be inside, but that doesn't explain what I am; it's like I have an idea, but no terms to convey it.  It's hard to come out when you're not even sure what you are.

Emotional Involvement in Fictional Headspaces

The longer I go on playing Taylor in this Vampire: the Requiem game, the stranger it gets, because the deeper in character I get.  Slipping into the accent and the swagger.  Developing the laugh and the grin.  Finding the right subtleties of expression.  All the actions and reactions, all the phrasings and witticisms, the quirks and neuroses, the delusions and derangements.  Loving and hating all the right people.  Bringing it all together and being unafraid to let it out.  It's an art I'm still learning, and one I'm not sure I'd be good at in a professional capacity.

But I think there comes a point when one goes beyond acting.

Maybe I'm just discovering what method acting is indirectly, which I suspect is the case, and it's how I explain what I'm doing to people who don't get the concept of roleplay, anyway.  It's improv.  It's me getting into character and not getting out.  (I'm finding I'm having a harder and harder time getting out of character lately, but that's probably because I'm in so deep in the first place.)  It really is a lot of fun, and I always love the opportunity to stop being me for a little while.

But it kind of worries me sometimes when I react in unexpected ways when I'm in character.  It means I'm in the headspace of someone I don't fully understand, and that never fails to catch me off-guard.  The character is in my head, fully formed, and we're suddenly switching places and I don't know my way around in theirs as well as they do in mine.  It normally doesn't bother me that much, because it just means I'll be writing and go "oh, hey, I didn't know that about this character," and I'll keep writing.  But in roleplay...it means that someone can say a passing word that falls like a rock in my stomach, or I'll start shaking, or I'll start laughing, and it feels like I'm not entirely the one in control, because I don't know why this is happening.  It's the character fully taking over.

Tonight at roleplay, the final act of the game was that my character was handed an envelope, presumably from the woman who is basically out to kill him.  In the envelope was a picture of this woman torturing the girl I had just slept with the night before--someone who reminded me far too much of the woman who had been the mother of my child, my baby girl.  (You see me slipping into first person here.)  Now, what startled me about this is the fact that when our storyteller described to me what was in the envelope, in very simple straightforward terms--no description of the torture, no real description at all, in fact, I'm only assuming that she was being tortured, because I have no idea--I felt as though someone had poisoned me.  Lightheaded, stomach knotting, knees weak.  I felt the colour drain from my skin.  My hands started shaking.  I had to sit down.  I did not know Taylor would react that way.  This girl...the one I'd slept with, and the one I'd been with way back when (before I was a vampire), I thought they didn't mean anything to him.  Not much.  I didn't realise he was so tied up around this girl.  And now I'm wondering if she really left him, or if maybe she died.  Or was killed.  Taylor won't tell me.  Or he doesn't remember, one, but it still is a little disturbing to me that I'm having this powerful physical reaction in character when he obviously would expect to react this way in this situation and I don't.  And I couldn't shake the feeling after I got out of character, which is kind of strange.

The point of all this is that I was entirely too in-character tonight for it to be healthy, probably.

Mind, this is all vampire!Taylor.  The Taylor I speak about in the canon (the one where he's not a vampire) is a different person than vampire!Taylor is becoming.  Which in itself is odd to me.  Even Dameon didn't change this much when I played him as a werewolf.  Then again, I did give this version of Taylor a much more traumatic backstory.  That's probably all it is.

I don't know.  I have a headache from roleplay tonight.  And I love the storyteller for doing this to me, it's great, I like tormenting my characters, don't get me wrong.  It just throws me off when they're so deeply affected by things that I did not know would screw with my head this much.  The sacrifices we make for our art, really.  Or the bizarre twists of a game.

Time to introduce my friends.

I have, over the past week or two, had a couple of different things I wanted to write about--the counter to my last entry, for instance, on why writing workshops are not entertaining, on gender issues and why it's hard to come out when you don't know what you are, and on writing in general--but I don't think any of those are quite as important as this one.  I think that five entries is far too many to go by without properly introducing my friends and why I love them.  I'm going to stick to the ones that are really, deeply important to me; understand, if you get left out, it's not because I love you less.  It's because I don't have space or time to write a novel about why I have the most amazing friends in the world.

My friends, I'm afraid, will be going by nicknames, because I feel I need to protect the not-so-innocent.  They are probably the only ones who will understand these nicknames.

The first person I have to talk about is my Bunnie.  (I am her Doggie.  This is all you need to know.)  She's been my best friend since 8th grade, though one might argue that we didn't hit best-friend-status until at least 9th grade.  Truth is, this is one of those friendships that I feel like was fated to happen, because she and I fit like puzzle pieces.  We're different, but we work.  And I love her dearly.  I would not be a writer if it weren't for my Bunnie.  She's the one who got me started writing original stuff--I'd been writing fanfic before, and I'd been writing all my life (well, 'writing', I use the term loosely), but if it hadn't been for her and the fantasy novel she's been working on since 6th grade (she'll correct me if I'm wrong), I never would have found my calling.  And I wouldn't be where I am now.  Bunnie is responsible for a lot of things I am now.  And I love her for that.  She's not in Arkansas right now, and that makes me kind of sad, because I haven't seen her in since October, but we've talked on the phone, and that's okay.  No amount of space can really separate us.  We manage to be joined at the hip even when we're in different time zones.  I actually foresee myself growing old with Bunnie, just because I really doubt any significant others will ever come between us.  (We've discussed it.  Even if either of us get married, we're going to live together anyway.)  Bunnie is the reason I believe in soul mates, and also why I believe that 'soul mate' doesn't have to mean 'lover' or anything of the sort.  She's just my Bunnie.  And I'm happy with that.  This is the Trapper to my Hawkeye, the Aziraphale to my Crowley, and, more importantly, the Dylan to my Taylor, the Cedric to my Dameon, but those last two don't make sense unless you know us.

Next is my Pookie.  Pookie and I met in a high school math class when I was in the 11th grade.  We bonded over anime, she got me into Quiz Bowl, and she probably turned me into a furry.  She has been the one who was there for me when Bunnie was driving me crazy, when I was down and really needed someone to lean on, and when I needed a break from reality for most of the Spring '09 semester.  She has been the Dollar Bill to my Mothman, which no matter how many fandoms I go through, she always will be.  She is my Radar.  She is my favourite penguin, and the Wilson to my House that I need when I'm busy being everyone else's Wilson.  Most importantly, she's my taco buddy, and I probably never would have discovered Taco John's without her.  Nor would I have discovered what it means to be a Nerdfighter.  Pookie and I have had a rather strange friendship, in that I kind of realise that I should have considered her one of my best friends all along, but it took Watchmen to really hit me over the head with that, and that's why Watchmen will always have a special place in my heart.

The next one, if she'll forgive me, I had a really hard time coming up with a nickname for, but I think I'm going to call her my Foxy Lady.  She'll know why.  I met her around the same time I met Pookie, and if I recall--though she's had to remind me--it was in an 11th grade French class.  I spent a lot of time not really getting to know her, because to be frank, her girlfriend at the time terrified me.  Foxy and I really became better friends somewhere during 12th grade or after I graduated, though I can't for the life of me tell you how or why.  I think what really did it was the fact that we started RPing together back when we were playing that epically insane VtM game.  She's the Adele to my Gabe, which in more generic terms means the Toreador to my Gangrel, which you'll have to forgive if it makes no sense.  She's the Hot Lips to my Hawkeye.  She's Sally to a lot of people, the feminine allure to my masculine tendencies.  She's been my go-to when I start having crazy gender issues lately, and I think it's a lot because she was in the right place at the right time and she was exactly the right person to talk to.  I owe her a lot right now.

I have to give a token mention to my Little Sis, who is not actually blood related to me, but who is probably at fault for half the people I was friends with in high school.  I've known her since...sometime in middle school.  She gave my story the push it needed to go in the right direction, and Dr. Adon would literally not exist without her.  She's kind of the Goten to my Gohan, if you'll pardon my using a ridiculously old reference.  She and I kind of drift in and out of being really tight, but I can't ever abandon her, because I love her too much for that, even during the times she was driving me batty.  She's also the entire reason I became friends with Bunnie, so I have to thank her for that, and she's the reason I got into roleplaying, which changed my life considerably.

Lastly, I have my Badger, who if Bunnie is the Trapper to my Hawkeye, Badger is my BJ.  I've only known her for a couple of years, and this is another one of those friendships that I kind of feel like was fated, because it spiralled into something incredibly close incredibly fast.  What you have to understand about me is that I do not make friends easily.  All of the people above I only began to really consider myself close friends with after I'd known them for two years or so, which is mostly because I have problems trusting people and truly committing to people.  Badger is special.  Badger and I met through writing classes and realised that we were quite a lot alike and somehow ended up being really good friends, and over the past couple of semesters, she has become one of my sisters.  She's someone I feel I can really talk to, and someone I really enjoy talking crazy character things with until all hours.  She introduced me to the awesome that is the Magical Doughnut Adventure.  More importantly, she introduced me to Pickman Studios, which has more or less been a weekly salvation for me since Bunnie left back in October.  She's been my inspiration to be more outgoing and to take more risks with getting close to people, because if I'd gone with my usual instinct--which is to shut people out until I know they're safe--I wouldn't be where I am now, and I'd probably be in pretty sorry shape.  But because of Badger, I have someone I can go to when I just need someone to have lunch with at random, or when I need to write, or when I just need a hug, especially with all of my other friends far away.  If I were the type to believe in miracles, I'd be convinced Badger was mine, because she showed up in my life just when I needed her and welcomed me into her fold of friends.

These people are all my sisters, and I love them all more than I can put into words.  I'm going to sign out before I start waxing too incredibly sappy here, but I'm afraid I already have.

Strange to be in between.

I had a moment of acute gender!fail this week.

I'm taking a fiction workshop night class this semester.  There are only seven people, myself included, in the class, with a male professor.  All of the other students are guys.  I absolutely did not realise that I was the only female body in the room until the professor commented on it.  I looked around, and I was honestly surprised to confirm this fact--not that everyone else was male, but that I had missed this fact because I no longer think of myself as female.

I occupy a female body.  I'm decently comfortable with that, most of the time, unless the Gender Demons strike and I really start hating the fact that I'm a 38-DD.  I found a vest I totally forgot I had about a week ago.  It's water resistant and fleece-lined, which makes it ideal for this weather, especially considering I usually have my hoodie sleeves shoved up around my forearms anyway.  More importantly, it's just barely too tight, and has a zip-front, which means it does a pretty good job of constricting my ample cleavage.

This vest is the best thing that's happened to me lately.

I'm actually at a very strange time in my life.  I've gone through phases with my identity, and I think I'm about to enter another.  When I was in high school, maybe 2004, I started to realise that I was attracted to women, and so began to label myself as bisexual.  Sometime during college, I began to realise that the bisexual label didn't suit me at all--it affirmed an idea I was beginning to reject, that being the concept of a gender binary.  I can't call myself bisexual and recognise that there are more than two sexes, more than two genders.

Shortly after that, probably circa 2007, I started to notice something strange.  I noticed that whatever magical 'femaleness' I was supposed to feel wasn't really there.  Maybe it wasn't there anymore, or maybe it had never been, I don't know.  I can't remember if I ever really felt like a girl.  I know when I was a kid, I was a tomboy.  I was the antithesis of all things feminine.  I hated dresses.  I loved playing outside.  I wanted to play football in middle school.  (I decided as I got older that dresses weren't so bad, but I'll still buck and snort if forced into a dress or a skirt.  I have to really be in the mood.)  I just did not get 'girly things'.  That said, I also loved playing dress-up with my dolls and my costume box, and I loved playing House and Tea Party.  I've always been a little bit genderqueer.  I liked my Barbies and Easy-Bake as much as I liked my Legos and Hot Wheels.

The truth is, though, that I'm not sure how much the 'genderqueer' label fits me anymore, but that's what I get for lurking over at the What Is Gender forums.  There's a lot more out there than I ever expected to find.

What I find fun about these phases I've gone through is that my writing is clearly affected by it, and my characters usually know before I do.  Dameon was bi before I ever started identifying that way.  Now I have Taylor, who is very strictly a Whatever, and I identify more with Tay than I ever have with any other character, even Dameon.  I wanted to be Dameon's best friend.  I just want to be Taylor.  Which I get the chance to do once a week, and that's enough for me.  It's one day out of the week where I'm not expected to present myself as a girl.  For now, it's all the escape from the Gender Demons I need.