Introducing the new, same old me

This is a topic that means a lot to me so I’ll be keeping it pinned to the top of my blog, and it would mean even more if you’d be willing to read what I have to say.

The past few months have really torn me up in more ways than I can count, but I’d like to think that there’s some good coming out of it at least. When I started to rebuild myself after being sick for so many months, I realized that there is something that I can’t ignore anymore and that I hope will start to change me for the better. While I’ve known about it my whole life, I’ve always ignored it for one reason or another, or just being a suborn moron to be honest. So now that I’m having to rework my life style basically from the ground up, it’s time I start being who I know that I am.

While this may not match up with the image some of you have of me, I am Transgender.
I’ve known this for literally my entire life, and that’s not me being hyperbolic. As far back as I can remember that’s been who I am, so I won’t change just because I’m presenting differently. I am still mov, and have always been mov, just like I am trans, and have always been trans. So if me saying this changes how any of you think about me, please consider that I haven’t changed between now and then.

After today, I’ll be using She/Her pronouns but I’ll still be going by mov. And don’t worry, I’ll never drop that name, it is my name <3 though you may see me use nat now and then. I hope that this is a good move for myself and the community on a whole, and hopefully I can start to be more comfortable as an individual soon.

I have a few blog posts sorted that I’ll be linking below, but if you have any sincere questions please ask. Though I’m not likely to ask any questions about transition plans right now, or in the future, due to how personal and complicated they can be.

Thank you to those of you that read this, and a double thank you to everyone who has helped me over the past couple of months as I’ve prepared for this.
You all know who you are, and I could never, ever thank you enough for being some of the most supportive friends I’ve ever had.

My coming out post, this explains how being trans feels like to me in the style of my old blog posts. Kinda explains who Naspen is too, lol
https://mov51.net/naspen

This is a “short” explanation as to why I took so long to come out, even though I’ve known that I’m trans my whole life.
https://mov51.net/my-discovery


My transgender self-discovery

This is a simplified explanation of how I got to where I am today in regards to being transgender. As with most things in life, there’s more to it, but this hits the important points. It’s important to stress that this is not how everyone experiences it, and quite a few people get a lot more doubt about it than I did. I have my amazing Mom to thank for me being able to accept myself and my best friend MiniPixie for being there when I needed her. Suffice to say, I wrote this to emphasize the importance of accepting your friends and family, even if they’re not sure about what’s going on yet.

-Natalie, written with love and hope to everyone who needs it

Regarding my initial self-discovery story, it’s always very obvious to me. I’ve always known that I’m transgender in some capacity for as long as I can remember. Even though my father is, well, not open-minded, my mom is an amazing person who has always been there for just about anyone who needs her. So after my parents got divorced when I was 5 my mom became an extremely active LGBTQ+ advocate all the way until I was 14. I was always surrounded by people from all over the LGBTQ+ space that I never felt like anything about me was out of place. Even though I knew what transgender was, I never tried to apply that term to myself back then. But I know that if I had, then I would have agreed in a heartbeat. I guess that’s what happens when you’re a kid. You don’t really realize why labels are important, and why telling others how you feel is even more important.

That’s where the hard part of my story starts, all the way back when I was a stupid kid who couldn’t figure out what fights were worth fighting and for how long.

As I “eased” into puberty around 12, I realized I needed to talk to my mom. But I was so wrapped up in my newfound dysphoria that the idea of having to actually talk about it was killing me, and I kept putting it off. I knew for certain that I was actually trans at that point, I just needed to talk about it. I even had the name I’m using now picked out already. So I’d already put a lot of thought into it, but I just wasn’t ready to talk. I didn’t know how to handle it yet, and with all the added stress of puberty and dysphoria, I was just broken.
Then one night around when I turned 13, I was forced into it, but it wasn’t really in a good way. I’m going to skip the details as to how it happened because it’s somewhat personal, but it was something that could have happened by accident but that meant a lot to me at the time. If there are any transfems reading this, you might have an idea as to what I’m talking about, lol. My mom and her girlfriend (who she’d been with for the past 7 years and had been with us as long as I can remember) ended up trying to make a joke out of the situation and I got really upset and shut down, then I refused to talk about any of it for the next 9 years.

At that point I ended up just sabotaging myself through my teenage years, even knowing for an absolute certainty that I was trans and that my mom would absolutely support me to no end. I didn’t want to confront what happened to the point that I actively refused to think about it and only remembered it when I was alone. When I wasn’t alone, I was just angry all the time. Any little thing would set me off. Anyone not doing what I expected of them or what I had assumed was correct would send me into an unparalleled rage. Almost everyone assumed I was angry at the world, and to some extent, I am now, but the only excuse I have for how I acted back then was that I was angry at myself. Every day I felt like I was digging myself into a deeper hole, and then at night I’d look up at the hole I’d dug and see no way out. I made the mistake that put me there, and I continued to make it worse because I didn’t believe that I could do anything else.

When my mom finally broke and had to sign me over to the state for long-term mental care, I just gave up on fighting. Just because I couldn’t get out of the hole didn’t mean I had to make it worse. I wouldn’t fight anymore. I was tired of being ruled by my anger. But without my anger, I was consumed by my dysphoria. So during the 6 months that I was at in-patient care, I redefined myself around making sure that I was distracted and still a good person. I knew who I wanted to be, I knew who I was, and I knew who I could be without having to fight very hard. On the day I turned 16 I was released from in-patient care and have only been back into mental care once in the 6 years that have passed since then. So I’d say even considering that I was still trying to run away, I did a fairly decent job at not getting worse, I guess…

By age 17 I got my first job and then I started zoning out my dysphoria as best as I could. I was just jumping between anything and everything that could distract me. Playing games, reading, listening to music, learning, and joining random communities. Eventually one stuck, and it would kind of end up being both my downfall and savior. CapeCraft was such a large and time-consuming project that it pushed me past my limits, and when I got a high-stress, fast-paced job on top of that, I finally broke in August of 2020.

I could have probably kept that up for years, if not a decade or two. But in August last year, I hit a biochemical roadblock with how far I’d been pushing myself that resulted from me hitting my 3rd wave of Chronic Migraines and a new condition called Cortical Spreading Depolarization. The effects of the two lasted for over 7 months, and even as I’m writing this I’m still trying to get back to normal. But the important part for this story is that I was cycling between being depolarized and having a chronic migraine between August 2020 and midway through January 2021. Being depolarized, at least from how I understand it, is my brain being overworked to the point that it just physically can’t function properly anymore. So going from pain and hallucinating, to basically brain dead for 5 months.

When I finally started getting treatment in January, I was hit with a massive wave of dysphoria, but I couldn’t keep running anymore. Since the main thing that triggers the depolarization is overworking my brain, they had instructed me to take things slow for at least two months until my next appointment. So I had to reassess my situation, and I suddenly realized I am an idiot and came out as trans to my best friend, MiniPixie, and then my mom a couple of weeks later.

The End. Kinda


Enter stage left, Natalie

I want you to imagine an alarm that constantly going off around you. It’s been there as long as you can remember and you’re the only one who can hear it. Every time you ask anyone else if they hear it, they look at you like you’re insane, dismiss your question, and move on.

Oh, you’re just overthinking it! Just do what everyone else does and you’ll be fine.
There’s nothing to worry about, I’m sure you’ll get used to it eventually just like the rest of us.
Why would you want to do that?? Just be normal and it’ll pass.
It’s a phase we all go through. I remember a time when…

Despite everything they say, it stays with you through your childhood and worsens as you get older.

You can ignore it most of the time, like the sound of the fan by a desk. You start to think that maybe it really is just like that for everyone. Maybe life is just intrinsically annoying and you’re overthinking it. Who knows maybe if you stop thinking about it so much then everything they say will be true and you might actually get to enjoy yourself.
You go about your life trying to forget about the alarm sounding in your head, trying to forget what it’s telling you. But there are things that make it louder, make it harder to ignore. You see the echoes of it everywhere. Things that you could see making it better, maybe even things you’d like to do anyway. But every time you do something to help, people gawk and stare.

You look too different...
You’re trying too hard…
You don’t know what that’ll do to you in the long term.
Stop looking for attention and just act normal like the rest of us.

So despite everything you’ve done telling you differently, you just accept that it’ll always be there and that there’s nothing you can do about it. That you should just listen to what the masses say,

There is no alarm.
I’m just like everyone else.
there’s no need to “change”, I can be happy with the alarm.

Even with all of that though, it still feels harder than it should, it feels like you’ll always be haunted by it. Even when you can distract yourself from the sound, it’s there in your mind. Everything you see reminds you of what you’re ignoring, and the alarm is right behind that thought to make itself clear. Day after day you search for more distractions. Something that keeps the quiet, alone time away.
It’s easy enough to ignore when others are around, there’s so much noise that it just gets drowned out. So you fill your time with noise, just hoping that you’ll find something loud enough that you could enjoy. You run faster and faster, always chasing those moments of balance between being overwhelmed by the sound on the outside, or falling victim to the alarm within. It’s a never-ending race, one in which you can’t reset or relax, and where losing is still an unknown.

You can’t keep doing this, it’s tearing you apart. You have dreams that are being destroyed by your drive for silence, but you’re stuck. You’re running so fast but the thing you’re running from Is inside you. So despite all of your effort, you’re just standing still. There’s no getting away from it. The only thing you can do to survive is to sacrifice your life to the noise. To just give up on anything you want to do or be and let yourself rot under the torrent of sound. Unless they were wrong. Maybe the alarm can’t be ignored?

But what would that even mean? Every time you’ve tried it’s been a fight against those you love. Everyone you’ve ever known has told you that it’s not okay, that you shouldn’t be trying so hard to fight something that doesn’t exist! But if you’re having to fight so hard to even stand still, are you even sure it doesn’t exist?

But what if they are wrong? What if there is something different about me, not unique, just different?
Well, even they weren’t wrong, that alarm is part of me now. It’s been there forever, and I’ve built my life around ignoring it. Would I even be the same person without it?
What would I even do if you didn’t have to fight it anymore?
Even if I gave in, how far would the alarm take me?

There are so many questions that you’ve ignored for so long that the alarm is now louder than it’s ever been.

What does it want?
Why did I wait so long??
How can this be normal???
Have I been lying to myself all this time

There’s nothing dampening the alarm anymore, it’s the loudest thing you’ve ever heard.

I’m done ignoring my alarm. It doesn’t control me, but I’m not fighting it.
My alarm’s name is Natalie, and I am my alarm.


Why Minecraft means so much to me

It’s been a while since I’ve made a blog post, but today Mojang released a video that really hit me and I wanted to get the words out while I had them. I would strongly recommend watching that video, it’s extremely short but it does a great job of capturing a person’s experience with Minecraft and their disability.

The video tells a story about a person by the name of Join Chris who was born with underdeveloped corneas which are what focuses the light into your eyes so you can see. His story about how Minecraft assisted in his adaptation to his disability is incredible and amazes me to no end, so I don’t want to downplay the differences between what he did and is doing by telling y own story. However, I feel it’s important to bring multiple angles up in this conversation because Minecraft, and games in general, have so much to offer.

The idea that games can be more than just something fun to do is something I strive to live by, and I feel Minecraft is such a perfect example of that. It’s so open to interpretation and the player that it can be a great stand-in for things the player may be in danger doing otherwise. I think that’s why I love it so much, I’ve mentioned before that Minecraft is what taught me how to control a character when I was younger and I always get laughed at about it (not in a bad way lol), but it couldn’t be more true. Like most people with autism I have/had a very poor spatial sense and would manage to hurt myself by trying to make it better. Minecraft gave me a place with known limits and a way to try something again with my surroundings exactly the same as they were, meaning that I could make mistakes and learn from them without injuring myself or others.

I don’t think I’ve ever been in as bad of a situation as Join Chris was, at least not one that can be attributed to what Minecraft taught me, but with how basic of a skill that perception is I can’t say for sure. What I can say is that what I learn in-game is what gave me my IRL reflexes Well… what little I have. When I was younger (<10) I was attending Physical Therapy 3 times a week so that I could learn how to write, run, catch things, throw things, or even walk without hurting myself. There are so many situations IRL that can result in extreme injury if you can’t remember how to move properly, and that was me.

When I turned 14 or so my best friend at the time got me into Minecraft. Up until then, I had been playing basic flash games that didn’t require me to move a character. Every time I would try a game that had a character to control I wasn’t able to move the way the game wanted me to and it just resulted in my frustration. But I took on to moving in Minecraft quicker than anything I ever had. Every limit was visible and static, I knew what I was looking for and I could track it as I moved.
If you’ve never had to re-learn how to walk or had issues with moving in general you may not know how essential of a thing that is. When you move you have to keep a visual in your head, however unconsciously, of your body and the area directly around you. Everyone has a different amount of skill with that, being good at it results in a good sense of direction, and being poor at it results in clumsiness. I was on the very low end of that spectrum in that I couldn’t keep track of myself at all, I basically had no balance and would always slam myself into things because I forgot something about where I was. Always covered in bruises and marks from missing my target.

With how simple Minecraft is, even in 3D, I was able to learn how to think relative to what I saw better than what my Physical Therapist could explain. That’s not to say they didn’t help me at all, not in the least! But Minecraft is what made it click for me, and I feel like it was a similar situation for Join Chris. You can tell someone that the sun rises in the East and that you can use that to orientate, but you never know how to use that information effectively until you get the chance to put it into practice. Minecraft was the perfect place for me to do that and I still do to this day.

Even watching my content, you wouldn’t notice how much Minecraft has changed my life. Most of the struggles I had when I started I’ve learned to work around and if you didn’t know me then you wouldn’t be able to see the difference. If you are interested in seeing how Join Chris plays Minecraft through his disability with other blind Minecrafters he does have a YouTube channel where he does just that and more. I’ve only watched a small amount of his content but he seems like an amazing person who is taking a challenge I could never imagine in stride.
Also, check out the video Mojang posted, they do an amazing job at making Minecraft accessible to people who need it.


A word to define a lifetime

When I was growing up I was ravenous for knowledge, and random pieces of information that I came across would be next obsession. Every week I was on a whole new topic, a completely different field of study. While I still retain a large portion of that hunger, to the extent that “Information Sponge” has come to be my de facto self-description, there has been a rather large change in a significant portion of my world view.

When I was about 9, I got stuck into reading the dictionary, I loved learning new ways to describe things that I had previously had to work out with multiple words. Each page turned unlocked summarized knowledge I didn’t know I was missing. Well, one day I found a word that would change my life and mental stability for years to come. I remember looking at that word, realizing I had never fully understood its scope, never realized what it could mean. Now I feel like I’m good at inferring words I’ve never heard when used in a sentence. But of course, with a word like this, one that holds so much between the lines, I had a very limited view of what it entailed.

This word has defined my reaction to the world ever since then, and I’ve done my best to explain what it means to me over the years. But for whatever reason the word doesn’t mean as much to everyone else, it doesn’t seem to capture the same intent outside of my mind. To me, it defines and references an individual’s world view, brings forth the idea of an imperfect mind, shows that the world we see is altered by our ideas and motivations. The world is defined by our perception.

Perception is a simple word that is thrown around in everyday conversation without thought, but it has shaped everything I see about the world. In that word I see the differences that state of mind enforce on your vision, I see the effect of memories and knowledge on normal reactions. Through it I follow every change I make, I watch myself grow daily, watching my “self” get lost in time. The word perception holds so much value to me, it will always remind me of the vast differences between every mind.


Senseless Time

As time goes by it becomes harder and harder to trust my senses, to know exactly how and why my body reacts to the world. My interpretation changes by the second and some days it’s impossible to keep up. Each sense working on a scale that changes with every new piece of information I gleam from it, a drastically fast kaleidoscope of broken images and feelings. Brighter lights, clearer sounds, sharper temperatures, and a swaying scope of scale attack me constantly, wearing at my view of the world. Each shift defines a whole new set of actions and reactions to reinvent, a constant game of mix and match, find the value, adjust and prefix.

Check my vision, watch for space, rescope distance and speed. Always a broken game, a losing battle against a shattered brain. Skills that wain faster than their use, moments of clarity that set me free. Moments by which my motivation flys, a vision of broken skies and solid ground. The heavens lost, confounded in their great scope, with solid burning ground screaming it’s putrid truth.

Adjust and prefix

Watch the scale
A distance around you
Measure the falling hail
Shattered parts in view
Leaving burning trails
Make your perspective true
Your center motion rail
Feel each push pass through
Moving you by sail
Shaking you broken and skewed
Counter actions or fail
Reaction and survival impromptu
A new sound prevails
The world coloured in blue
Cracking foundations hollow and frail
Prefix the action in due
Lest you end with an action designed to fail
A motion written in the best of truth

Watch for Space

Hear your dreams
Become a master of seams
Find the open lost scenes
Hidden behind noise that screams

Hear the space
Watch it race
Rushing into place
Ending with a blasting face

Hear it’s words
Know what they hold
Waiting for time to scold
Teaching a lesson of life gone cold

Hear the shatter
A pattern of broken plaster
Each its own single splatter
Tearing through space and matter

A shattered brain

Men define their world
With a mind short of pure design

A preemptive idea of hot and cold
Flying truth a feature undefined

Vision is but an image to hold
Ideas forming the world they find

A broken game for time to mold
Perception built to define the sane

Brightest light

Reflect the world my light
Show the feature rich world in sight
Shape it’s contours just right
Bleeding edges of colors fight
A diming future for all of life
Brighten to fight the waxing night
A future doomed with unbending might
My vision all but burning bright
Fighting the deadend fright
Colours burn the world alike
A feature rich landscape a colours flight


The world will scream as long as I live

My senses have been at war with me for as long as I can remember, always tricking me, forever showing me more than I need to know. My earliest memory that I have a date for is 9/11 on a military base, and in it I remember nothing but mechanical screams. I remember standing on my porch as the base rallied itself, sirens and flashing lights on every car, tearing at my body with monotonous pulses. I remember the jets overhead, the bone wrenching blast of movement that they left behind. I remember the cracks in the concrete, wavering in front of my tiny face as I trembled in the wake of the neverending onslaught. Just waiting, watching the world shatter in my mind.

Even now, 19 years later, I still fight with the world my body shows me. Always having to predict where my senses will fail, where and when they will alter reality. I’ve built my whole frame of mind around constantly predicting and verifying my own thoughts against the world as it should be. Always having to watch for context and verify what should be there before trusting what I see, forever watching my step in preparation for the world to run away. A knife edge between life and agony.

The world is a changing mass laid out before me, too large to grasp and overwhelming without context. Sound and motion holding stories too subtle to put to words. Stories of interactions between man and nature, of a never ending cyclic energy. The world is on fire while color and heat make shapes in the wind, marking scenes out in oily swirls. Each ray of light showing beauty in my pain and forging a vision of non reality that burns its way into my dreams.

I will never have a quiet moment, as long as I live. There will never be any form of stillness in my mind. The very vision I wish to define is broken and mismatched. A jigsaw puzzle smashed together in reaction to so many constraints. A machine running on false information, never able to produce the desired output. But as it is, this is who I am. The man who struggles to see, who values moments of clarity and vision beyond its worth. A faulty process by all standards, but one that nature has wrought out of it’s own jagged methods.


Audio processing with mov

You know that person that always tries to finish your sentences for you, trying to prove that they have a sense of the world around them by making an assumption and rolling with it? Well everyone does that, or at least their brain does. When you hear something your brain tries to predict what it is as soon as the sound begins, the more information it receives the more defined of an idea it has. As it hears a word in the sound it switches to recognizing speech, and tries to make it easier to understand malformed sound by predicting hat word will come next. This can make it hard to understand people who have a different accent than you, or if the topic suddenly veers off course from what you were expecting. If you pay attention there is always a part of your mind running those predictions when your talking with someone, a part of you trying to make the audio processing job easier by ruling out words based on context. A sort of echo in the background of your thoughts that jumps in reaction to every new word.

Now because of that, we do have instances where our brains make mistakes. Where we expect a different sound than what was said and it’s enough to cause confusion. This is normal to happen in day to day life and our brains are really good at sorting out the context to make up for the missing word. But there are times where people can have a very hard time processing audio in general and the context isn’t enough to make up for it. For me it’s an issue with how my brain compares sound and words. I don’t always know how a word sounds, and will get very confused when I come up with a different mental sound for a word than what I hear. That leads to a cascade of misinterpreted sounds that just mix up the context and ruin any chance I had of accurately getting the word right.

There are thousands of reasons why someone might have issues with processing sound though, and it varies in intensity. For me, it generally just means I’ll ask for the word again or ask you to spell it while for others they may not be able to recognize certain sounds on demand or even understand speech. Most of us who have this diagnosis learn to deal with it when we are young, whether by therapy or necessity. So it is often a forgotten part of myself, coping with it becomes something I do in reaction to everyday life. Just another thing that gets between the communication of two people, and a reason to listen more intently than the average mind. Just like any condition it’s a spectrum of symptoms, effects, and causes. So we all have to find our own weaknesses and how we can turn them around, so that we can each learn the most from each other while making the world a better place.

Sources,
Very new to citing sources on things I talk about. These are things that explain what I’ve experienced over the years of dealing with this disorder and I don’t actually quote any of them directly. Use them as a diving in point if you feel more interested in the topic.

https://kidshealth.org/en/parents/central-auditory.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_processing_in_the_brain


Traverse

Traverse the lands brink
Across every world link
Each defined and distinct
Making broad skies blink

A world by which minds are made
Through it lines can fade
Boundaries defined melt away
And lay to waste mans decay

A global force for uniting
For connecting those dividing
And to thwart those in hiding
A web of that needs defining

Make of it what you will
This miasma of man’s own skill
A putrid sensational boil
Of man’s own turmoil