with my voice

The world screams, with my own voice.

Categories The world screams, with my voice

Introducing the new, same old me

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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

Categories The world screams, with my voice

Enter stage left, Natalie

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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.

Categories The world screams, with my voice

My transgender self-discovery

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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…