Big Consequences

personal

  • 🅱️alentine’s Day

    What you don’t see is a gaggle of velociraptors behind the POV

    It’s impossible to ignore, but I’ve gotten really good at it most of the time. Valentine’s Day. So prevalent, that there’s alternatives (Galentine’s and Palentine’s are what come to mind).

    I don’t know how much I want to divulge about my history with romance. I hate the idea of unintentionally publicly demonizing anyone when I know there’s never a purely one-sided failure.

    … You know what, I’ll touch on a few things vaguely so there’s an understanding of where I’m coming from.

    When I was a little kid, I was a weird little girl. I had big ideas about the world, including idealized notions of romance. I had crushes all the way back to kindergarten; but mostly it was me wanting to emulate crushes and romance I would see in cartoons and TV. I didn’t necessarily have a good role model growing up for what “real healthy romance” was until I was maybe 7 or 8 years old, and by then I don’t think I trusted any real people to be good and faithful.

    But by golly, did I “love” hard. I put “love” in quotations because as we all know, anything before 18 years old doesn’t count as real love. You’re just learning before then. I sound like I’m being facetious but truly I don’t have a specific age or instance where it clicked into place. I latched onto people and idealized what could have been, and sometimes these crushes would last for years.

    My first relationship was when I was still a little girl, technically, if we go by labels. It was my best friend, and I’d loved him for years; probably since I moved to my little village in Upstate NY. We were only like 11, and that clearly didn’t get far, but I wouldn’t feel resentful about all that until many years later when we were friends again. I did a lot wrong over many years with him, but ultimately I should have let us drift apart when it naturally happened. I think I held on and tried again because somewhere I never lost sight of the one I’d fallen in love with as a kid, when both of us were much different than the two kids we’d once been, running around in the woods and our backyards pretending to be in Naruto or Pokemon. We both changed so much. In fact, I’m a guy now. Funny how that works.

    Thinking of my teen years, things were complicated and messy. I had an online “boyfriend” who I never knew exactly who he really was– I’d met him on Gaiaonline, writing Pokemon forum-based roleplays together. He was the first example of me falling for people for no other reasons but creative similarities and Nice To Me. I called that the Hakumei Effect (because that was his handle on the site) for years.

    Then from I’d say late-8th-grade through to right about when I graduated high school, I had an on-again, off-again situation with a boy I was very willing to go Romeo and Juliet with for a number of those years. I was unstable, for sure. I just wanted a fairytale romance, and I was deeply delusional and volatile about it. I don’t blame him for trying to pull away so often. I even wonder if I’d apologize to him for those 5 years if I had the chance. And again, under 18 doesn’t count tooooo much, so I can’t even be like “he shouldn’t have cheated and then insisted on an open relationship about it” because honestly I wouldn’t have been rational about it even if he approached me with a level head.

    I was perpetuating a cycle I never wanted to. My mom got into many awful publicly-undisclosable situations because she was trying to have a fulfilling romance when I was young, and I in turn subconsciously repeated the patterns I’d taken in but as an undiagnosed teenager.

    The open relationship definitely opened exactly one door for me. As a youth, part of my issue was being undesirable. I should have let that be. When you’re a teenager and focused on being wanted, you open a particular door.

    When I was about 17, I met a guy online. That guy was 26 years old.

    I remember mentally trying to justify it even to myself. Well, 17 was the age of consent in New York, so clearly it was fine. He always asked for inappropriate photos but clearly that meant he wanted me, right? I think that lasted a good 5 months; towards the end, he started saying stuff like “I have a heart condition, and if I get stressed I could die” which kept me around longer than I had felt comfortable doing so.

    Then at 18, I was dumped from my main squeeze right around when I graduated. But hey! That meant I could go to college and experience wild college life, right?

    I had several crushes, I fell hard and fast very often. None of them panned out. At all. There was clearly something wrong with me– I was going to parties and having fun otherwise, but I’d walk back to my dorm alone (or later in the 4 years, I’d walk back with my roommate, since we went to many of the same parties) and wonder what was wrong with me. Some confessions were handled well enough, while some became so uncomfortable they’d avoid me altogether after that point.

    Can I blame any of that on me being pre-transition and therefore hating myself for not meeting some expectation I had imposed on myself to be “woman” right? Maybe. I think I started questioning and experimenting with my gender when I was 21 or 22. Undertale transed my gender (kidding. Probably).

    The rejections were anywhere from “You’re a wonderful person and a great friend, and I don’t feel the same but I want the best life for you and I think you can do so much better than me” to “I like skinnier girls” to complete ghosting. The latter two I was pretty used to by that point. The first example was surprising to me and I hold that memory very dear to myself simply because it was someone I’d admired for a couple years and he managed to let me down nicely.

    From 2013 to 2022 I was completely single. I didn’t understand what was wrong with me, I went on a total of one (1) mutual date before the 2020 debacle and that guy made me feel like I was just fetish fuel.

    I met someone in 2022. They introduced me to something I’d only heard of vaguely before– queerplatonic relationships. Something defined purely by the people involved. Something clicked for me then, and I decided to loosely try it out for at least a while. I admire this person, y’know? We only know each other online, but we have a lot in common and I enjoy talking to them, so why not make it special? It wasn’t romance. It felt good being close to someone without needing the romantic label.

    Then in 2023 I met another someone. Technically I met a bunch of someones, but like, I only romanced one. I tried with a different one of that bunch of someones but we figuratively shook hands and went “probably not”.

    The one who did pursue romance with me finally taught me what I needed to understand from the 10 years of reflection up to that point– I can’t handle being romantically involved. With anyone. I’m not broken, like as a person, but if romance were a bone, it would have been broken and set and healed wrong.

    At first it was nice to have someone to call mine the way I’d always wanted. I was still loosely involved with my qpr, but I considered myself taken with this boyfriend of mine.

    That was a mistake.

    I cannot do romance.

    It started out so nicely. I loved this long distance boyfriend of mine. But suddenly he was my fiance and future co-parent for children we’d raise together and I felt my autonomy slipping away and it was my fault. I was falling back into the bad patterns I’d learned before. I needed to be his everything, and I can’t be anyone’s everything. I started tearing myself apart because I couldn’t fix all his problems, and all the while he was planning a big wedding and I never wanted children but I kept agreeing because he loved me and that’s what love was; sacrificing and codependency.

    Between catching myself in that codependent spiral and continued pushing and breaking of my boundaries, I did something I never thought I’d do–

    I left.

    I never thought I’d have it in me to willingly leave anyone. I’m the master of the Irish Goodbye in social settings, sure, but I was raised to be unerringly loyal to people I cared about.

    I was then accused of never caring at all.

    After over at least a hundred dollars sent to him over the course of 2 years, after video calls as I was recovering from top surgery, after letting him propose at 3 months when I’d tried telling him to wait a year…

    I had allowed all that to happen because I wanted it to work so bad. I wanted to finally have a romance with someone who wanted me with no ulterior motives.

    …

    So now, about a year after breaking that off, where am I at and what am I thinking?

    My queerplatonic relationship continues. In fact, I’ve loosely associated myself with a few people. There’s four of us working together to heal from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I may just be tagging along for all I know, but we all seem to love each other… just, not romantically, you know?

    I may never be able to be anyone’s everything. The others don’t want me to be, as long as none of them have to be my everything in return. And somehow, that works for me better than any romance I’ve tried to pursue.

    …

    So. Valentine’s Day. I spent years hating it. I spent years feeling resentful of being alone and being undesirable. Valentine’s Day was just a reminder of all that “but hey, at least there’s cheap chocolate”. Too many hearts, too much pink.

    Ironically, now that I’m a guy, I think valentine’s hearts and the color palette of the holiday unironically SLAP.

    We’re all skittish. We’re all hurt people. Maybe I’m the only one who is coming back around on the holiday so far! But I think we’re going to be okay. We’ll figure it out together, and I’ll be able to keep an eye on my own boundaries easier now that I’m not trying to be perfect for someone. I can only be the best me I can be, and they seem to like it well enough.

  • I just had surgery and I’d like to talk about it

    I just had surgery and I’d like to talk about it

    Hiiiii

    So I’m 30 years old at this point. I’m not new to surgeries at all– I had my tonsils out when I was like 5 for goodness sake. Tonsils then, tubal ligation in 2022, top surgery in 2023… I guess two of those were an option for me, you know? This last one was a little more out of my hands.

    Now the subject matter is a little bit TMI, especially so since I’m a transmasc person so talking about the parts of my body that politicians want to claim make me a woman is a little iffy. I will try to use the best terms I know for things.

    And never take my stuff here as medical advice.

    So if I were to take this in chronological order; this story starts in March of this year. Simply, I have the parts necessary for a Pap, and I hadn’t gotten one in 2-3 years. So I think I’ll go to this gynecologist I was referred to and just get it done with for a few years.

    I go and the nurse who attends to me is very considerate and sweet. For being in West Texas, there have been some real good medical practitioners re: my identity.

    So this nurse gets to checking around; anyone with this set of genitals probably knows what I mean. And she starts seeming a little bewildered. There’s some tissue in the way– I tell her I’ve been told of that before but they usually can get by it. So she readjusts and then through the speculum she says something like “Well now there’s something else in the way of your cervix. It looks like a cyst?”

    I’m like. Oh. Okay. That’s weird, I know about ovarian cysts but not ones directly there. So the nurse talks to the doctor and orders me just like a scan of some sort. I get those results back from the diagnostic center before the doctor talks to me about it.

    It said it’s fluid filled and looks like it may be something congenital. I’m like. Oooookay? So I talk to my mother about it, because I’m silly and talk to her about everything under the sun, and she says something about “it would have been noticed by now if it was congenital, just wait til your doctor gets to you about it.”

    That took about 2 weeks, maybe 3.

    So I got a phone call saying it’s definitely a cyst and they say if it’s causing me issues then they’ll refer me to someone who can do this particular kind of removal. The gyn I was seeing, as wonderful as that office is, mostly does deliveries and bladder slings, and I’d need a specialist.

    The first specialist they referred me to was in the DFW area, which is a metropolitan region that’s probably a little more accepting of queer identities, you’d think.

    This guy. My god. He completely brushed aside the talk about the cyst and said he was more worried about my uterine lining. I wanted to be like, uhh, I think I was told that stops building when you’re on T long enough. But he’s the medical dude so at the time I just let him order me an ultrasound of my uterus.

    The kicker? He did a manual exam, said he felt the cyst with his hand, and still thought ehhhh I don’t care.

    I felt like I had become someone’s medical curiosity in regards to the uterine lining thing.

    So I did the ultrasound back near home and it came out exactly as I thought it would, totally unremarkable in the uterus. So I cancelled my follow-up with that office and called my doctor again to get a new referral.

    The nurse heard my story and was appalled. Very gently, she said “Sometimes you just need someone who can sympathize with what it must feel like. Not to throw men under the bus-” I’m like oh I understand exactly what you mean and I’m inclined to agree right about now.

    So in about another week she set me up a referral to a doctor almost 3 hours west of me. I was like. O no.

    But to tell y’all the truth, this cyst has been bugging me and I don’t have an estimate for how exactly long. Random cramps, pain in specific times I won’t talk about publicly, stuff like that.

    So I go to this doctor the first time in June. That office is so wonderful immediately. They took my worries seriously, they wanted to check on if I was in other kinds of pain (your tissue down there gets brittle when you’re on T, y’know). They did all sorts of things like checking I didn’t have a low lying UTI or anything.

    The first thing we concluded is that the “tissue” I’ve been told about since people started examining me was not my hymen like I’d been led to believe but a septum. “Those are usually taken care of around the time menses start.” I’m like cooool I’m only 30 years old.

    They then decided to order me a proper MRI to see where the cyst was attached– from looking in they could only see a bit of it. They said there’s a chance it’s what’s called a Gartner’s cyst; a remnant of a duct that usually disappears in a later stage of fetal development. But they couldn’t be sure without the MRI. I said okay can I get that done back home. They said mmmm no, we want to look at the raw data ourselves.

    So I had to come back an get that in July.

    Then I had to come back again to get the results later that month.

    And oh my god I was bitching about travelling 3 hours every time but by the time I got to the office for the MRI follow up I very quickly became glad I had been making the effort.

    Let me show an artist rendition of the image that the doctor showed me.

    This is in fact traced over the original picture I had taken on my phone of the image from the MRI that my doctor showed me. I didn’t think anyone would believe the size if I didn’t have an image myself.

    It hit me like a brick. That fucker is almost as big as my squished up uterus and filled with fluid, most likely.

    So the doctor said “Considering the size and how it’s causing you discomfort, I’m guessing you’re opting for removal.”

    My voice cracked as I went “Uh, YEAH??”

    So that became the new leg of the process. July 28th I decided to get rid of this fucker.

    They scheduled me for pre-op tests on September 18th and then the operation on October 2nd.

    That itself was difficult. I’m a nearly 24-hour caregiver for my grandmother. If it wasn’t for the kindness of family and friends I wouldn’t be able to make these trips. Not to mention I’d need to have a ride and the only person I could have for that (in my knowledge at that time) was my dad, and he (in my knowledge at that time) works Monday-Friday. I’m like. Please help me. He agreed to help on the weekend of the 2nd.

    Pre-op was very sweet as well; questions, weight, blood, x-ray and ekg. Got me in and out before my appointment time was even scheduled for.

    Final step in my mind was that surgery. Up until the day of I was expecting something to happen to postpone the surgery, but hey, nope, at 6:30 yesterday morning I was in the car on the way to that hospital 3 hours away.

    I was scared. There are possible complications to any surgery, but as I laid there and the doctor went through all the necessary things for informed consent, I was almost getting cold feet. Possibility to injure the bladder or ureters, there were going to be sutures and bleeding for a while. I just had to think to myself “I’m taking care of my body.”

    I was in surgery for about 3 hours, so shorter than I had anticipated. When I woke up, my throat HORT. Which, duh, when you’re under general anesthesia they intubate you. I knew that. It doesn’t make it hurt less.

    I noticed I was suddenly wearing something new. Apparently post surgery bleeding required a pad and underwear.

    They offered me drink, I asked for Sprite. I wanted caffeine but they didn’t have Pepsi or Coke so Sprite was a good option to help me wake up.

    They told me it’s going to be a 6 week recovery process. No lifting, pulling, pushing, nothing heavier than 10 pounds at least. No tampons, nothing up there for at least 5 or so weeks, and the bleeding should stop by the end of the 3rd week. I laid there and possibly out loud said “Holy shit.”

    I had downplayed the surgery itself so hard in my head that I thought I’d be down a few days and be right as rain after the weekend. 6 WEEKS???

    Dad got the car and we drove the 3 hours back with me intermittently falling asleep in the passenger seat. It was impossible to stop the naps. My body just fucking knocked itself out.

    Got home, ordered food for Dad to go get for supper. I get Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to sleep in. Then back to work on Monday. I’ll probably take my post-op information to my boss since my job has semi-regular lifting involved.

    Today I was having some serious brain fog. I think it’s because I was refusing to take the pain meds. I didn’t feel pain the way I was expecting to, but I took one of the pills at about 1pm and my head cleared up. Couldn’t draw for shit though.

    Yaaaaay I tried

    I’m looking forward to being healed up. I think this will help a lot.

  • A Note to Those Who May Know Me

    SO. You’ve found me. I bet you’re wondering why I’ve gathered you here toda– Just kidding.

    You probably are wondering why I have a site dedicated to me faffing about discussing things that don’t matter much “in real life” like fandom and stuff.

    Escapism is all I have right now. That’s the reason.

    I have willingly given up most of what have been and will probably be years of my life to taking care of my mamaw as she declines to Alzheimer’s.

    I have a paying job that has me work 13.5 hours a week, and the rest of my time is taking care of mamaw and the mobile home park owned within the family to earn my place to live and eat. I leave the house for groceries and doctors appointments and try to make time out of the house as sparse and short as possible. I have a few people I’m friendly with in the area, namely one person outside of the park and most everyone else being associated with work or the park.

    I wake up in the night frequently, I don’t have a social life off the internet, all my hobbies have to be done as close to mamaw as possible and a lot of this has manifested into some serious hypervigilance and leaning into poor coping mechanisms.

    Not to mention the world is going to shit outside of my tunnel.

    Escapism is probably the least of my problems. Being able to enjoy anime and silly fiction is a good distraction from feeling like there’s nothing left. It’s not a perfect release from stress– censorship is on the rise as the hemline index gets more concerning, commodifying fandom has ramped up harassment to an extreme, and I experienced a fandom-based social trauma within the past few years.

    But it’s better than always fixating on the real world and crumbling under political and personal pressure.

  • A Little Bit About My Online Sona

    A Little Bit About My Online Sona

    I feel more like a dragon in human skin than an actual person sometimes.

    Wolf, circa 2022

    I kinda lost track of where I wanted to start this lmao

    I logically know this is a very common experience, but I’ve always felt very… isolated? It’s like there’s a pane of translucent glass between me and my peers, and part of that is a genuine lack of understanding social rules and “unspoken contracts” between people. Growing up I had my waxing and waning phases on whether this quirky inability to blend in made my life hell or gave me a weird superficial popularity. Maybe that was genuine, but even in the height of my senior year of high school when I won prom court, I felt like I wasn’t connected to most of the people who even voted for me. I had a core group of friends and even in that there was someone trying to cuckoo bird me out for about a year.

    In college people liked me well enough, but I really attached to very few, and those few understood that I was…quirky. Thankfully the bachelors degree I was able to obtain was in Theatre, so being unique played strongly into success. Even then, though, I was socially uncomfortable to be around– I was told I have outbursts, I made crushes feel awkward, I went to parties and while everyone was pairing off and drinking I was hijacking the aux cord to DJ based on vibes.

    I graduated and chose not to walk the stage, I missed a chance to make that accomplishment feel real because I felt like I didn’t have anyone to enjoy the occasion with, and then I got a text from an ex-roommate saying she wishes she could have gotten pictures with me. I felt awful, I just seem to lose social cues so easily.

    Fast forward past 2017, past my attempt to finish a second bachelor’s degree that failed, into 2022. At that point I’d been living in Texas with my mamaw for about half a year. I get a chance to see Beetlejuice on Broadway with a close friend and another one of my past roommates from college. I kind of butchered that visit a number of ways, but I remember telling my friend that I don’t feel like a human a lot. I don’t understand people, I don’t have common sense in the common meaning of the phrase. I’m still unpacking in therapy the concept that common sense still needs to be taught at some point in the learner’s life.

    So I said vaguely that I might as well be a dragon in human skin, watching people and trying to learn through mimicry.

    And then I got back to Texas and what I said stuck in my head. And I started having fun with it.

    The first doodle I have that leads to the dragon critter comes from the end of 2022. I’d spoken with someone online who encourages me to express myself as freely as I want to– they suggested a color that might fit me since I have the color sense of a toddler (“MY FAVORITE IS PURPLE YAAAAAY”) and I drew a draft of person me with dragon aspects:

    But the critter came about as shorthand, sometimes for comedic effect and sometimes with genuine intent. That started around when I joined Broadwaystuck (early 2023).

    I tried to do bipedal designs sometimes–

    But for the most part I use the “critter form”. It became a comfortable shorthand for myself. And I draw it constantly.

    Nowadays when I do draw myself as a human, I keep some of the aspects of this critter too

    Simply, this has become part of how I choose to put myself forward and view myself for now, and has been for a few years. It’s comfortable and easy to wear

    From meme draw-overs and redraws to sporadic doodles, I’ve enjoyed this process. As much as I look back with dread at 2023-2024 for a number of reasons, I am very thankful I’ve gotten to explore some dorky form of expression throughout the Horrors.

  • 30 years old and it feels so… feeling

    30 years old and it feels so… feeling

    Hiiii it’s meeeee the Birthday Boy.

    It’s currently, stream of consciousness, as I’m writing this, 7:30pm on April 7th. It’s my 30th birthday.

    Birthdays are deeply complicated, aren’t they? (Only if you make them, Wolf!) Shut up, imaginary peanut gallery. My birthday this year has been a thing I’ve sincerely… worried about, to put it lightly.

    Let me put this in context:

    • I spent almost all the time from age 11 to about 18 intensely depressed. Birthdays were a bit of a break from that; some years were good and some years were just “fake-it-til-you-make-it” theatrics.
    • Once I got into college, I still had a lot of problems with my mental health, but I was finding myself. I was getting better, slowly but surely. My birthdays became a celebration of “I may be on borrowed time, but by the gods I’ve made it this far and that’s a miracle”.
    • That continued for a while. I was celebrating each revolution around the sun because By golly I fought and continue to fight so hard for this
    • Now… I’m 30.

    In the sitcom Friends, I remember at least one of the group having an existential crisis over turning 30, and at 12 or so I was like “wow that’s weird, why would they do that?”. That was naive of me. There’s a sense of “I should be [there]” or “I should have done [this]” by now.

    My curse is thus: I can’t give anyone an answer to “Where do you want to be in 5 years?” but I can sure get to self-imposed lifetime deadlines and go “Well I have failed and therefore am worth less than I was a day ago”

    Did I have an altogether bad day? No! But it also felt. Sort of empty for most of it?

    Then I got a robo-text from the Misha Collins number that finished the birthday wish with “I’m glad you exist” and I spent exactly 3 minutes in the bathroom sobbing before sewing myself back up to make supper for my mamaw and myself.

    I am, however, very thankful for the things I do have. My friends may all be very far away but they make me very happy. My family drives me nuts but I’m making it work. My passion for a lot of stuff has not been killed yet, which is probably a bonus at my age now.

    It’s almost 9 now because I’ve been getting distracted, but it’s been somewhat positive distractions.

    For those who are younger and also dread 30 for any sort of reason– I know I went into why I have been, but honestly? We don’t really have to worry about those milestones and deadlines.

    Every new day is another chance to reach a goal.

    And life, and love, and having fun doesn’t stop at age 30. I just lost sight of it because I’m staring down Father Time and what he’s doing in my Mamaw’s case. But there’s a big difference between 30 and 84! I can’t spend all my time thinking like I’m also 84!

    Reader, don’t you get caught up staring down the barrel of your future either. You’ll miss out on today.