tdov 2026

feel headsick. gendersick. replayed a twine game the other night (porpentine's The Sky in the Room) that, years ago, was a major re-crack in my egg after the first time I was forced back into the closet. that game struck the first blow that Isabel Fall's "I sexually identify as an attack helicopter" finished years later. i could still perfectly feel the crystallized cyst of poison and suffering that was that life. it's all still there in some way, or its scars are; i don't think someone can spend so many years living like that and then just get better. i changed my pronouns to it/she most places online recently because it feels more true than she/it, or the relatively short-lived she/her i tried to backtrack to. everything in me that feels "it" and not "she" is from that poisoning. or it is the poisoning. the cause and the effect are indistinguishable.

i feel it every time i realize how little i integrate with the friend groups i've infiltrated. perhaps an unflattering word choice but i saw them online and they seemed cool and i wanted to be part of it and we seemed compatible. and it worked and as far as i know they like me and we have a fair amount of shared interests. but i know i am apart from them and that's just the reality of it. that's fine; it's just how it is. i'm not going to bemoan it. but i do feel the, what? evidence of damage? or just difference?

i'm closer with a few other friends and they are kind and sweet and strange and one or two of them have something in them that the it in me recognizes in kind. i'm glad to know them. i still feel a gulf between us but i think we see each other across it.

i feel it when i lean into this very specific kind of almost-mania that feels nearly like an altered state. i think it's what underlies the best of the art i make, the things that are most true and most real. and that, along with it just feeling like it's what's most true and most real about me, makes it intoxicating to lean into, and i am not someone with a great capacity for moderation. but at the same time it is by its nature a zone created from such alienation and damage that the further i inhabit/embody it, the more alienated i feel. the less i fit even among the majority of the niche and weird people whose circles i've drifted through. it makes me feel unwell, although i know that's really the friction between how i am and how the world wants people to be, and that really there's nothing wrong with me, like so many others i'm just fairly far from the norm and the norm holds no intrinsic value at all. intellectually i know that, but it's not really the felt experience.

i saw a post the other day about how the only people who seem to really understand or respect it/its pronouns are other transmisogyny-affected women. of course there are exceptions and that's a pretty sweeping statement but it gels with my experience so far. certainly i feel other tma women who see themselves as an "it" are who i most relate to in any material capacity. i've been on e for a little over 1.5 years, my body and face and looks and style have changed and continue to change, i am without doubt a woman and feel better and more at home with myself and how i am than i ever have. that's great. but all of those tracks of poison and suffering from paragraph one are still there and trying to alienate myself from them is just alienating myself from myself and i don't think i'm really game for that anymore. what is the benefit? every power structure in the world hates us and is actively trying to stamp us out. fuck it, man. i'm way too tired to even attempt to live out of spite; i just have to live. but mutiliating the shape of me to be more palatable -- to who, even? the world? myself? -- is just another closet and the closet is death.

this isn't really intended as complaining or anything. i know it's rambling and without thesis. it's just me trying to get at it, understand it with words and not just emotional vertigo. the further i open myself to this core of me the more severely the rest of the world feels tilted at dutch angles. i don't know where the future is taking me but i know i'm going to get weirder, more abrasive and annoying and unrelateable and unsavory. i'm not going to feel bad about it. happy tdov. death to everyone who opposes us.