the ordinary world
i never talk about myself. but it is time for me to rip off salam and sicca (and maybe others who talk about themselves before i’m finished writing this). but i feel like i wanna take a longer approach with mine. for myself. stay and listen to my story for a bit, if you want.
so hey, i’m rainy. i was born november 2000. i’m a 23 year old girl. i just graduated from being a teenager last month (when i turned 23). i play melee and i’ve also done a few other things in my life. i did my best to live up to expectations around me. i still do, in some ways. but it feels different now. it feels better. lighter. i feel like cracking for a second won’t lead to my world crashing down anymore. i was scared of that for a long time, even up until very recently.
2015-2016
a pianist, a singer, a leader, a student, a martial artist, a composer, a comedian, and a 16 year old boy walk into a bar. and he’s having a fucking shit time with it all.
i used to be and do so many things. i grew up in church. i grew up as a boyscout. people liked me. i feel like i spent my entire childhood being looked up to or looking up to others. but as a result there was no one left to see eye to eye with me.
i never really felt like i really clicked with most of my peers. i got along with people but it was always difficult to feel like i got along really well with them for more than a couple weeks. i used to joke about how my close friendships had a shelf life of 2 weeks. i don’t think it was much of a joke, looking back.
it was nice to be needed. but for 20 years i never really felt like i was anyone’s first choice and that hurt.
i used to put myself into positions where i felt like i was the only one that could help them. i was a dumbass kid and i felt like that was really the only place where i felt like i had any meaningful value to the world, even if it meant hurting myself to take care of someone. i read somewhere that being an immigrant daughter comes with an incredible level of self sacrificing and people pleasing. it’s not an uncommon story. my home life wasn’t great; my family members managed to both abuse and neglect me somehow. sometimes i got beaten up for beating my brother in smash or some other game. sometimes my dad stole money from me or threatened to kill himself if we asked him to wash the dishes. i didn’t really ask anyone from my family to show up to my choir performances or my fundraisers or my concerts or even the few jazz nights i hosted. i don’t think i wanted them there. i think i explicitly told them not to come because it was embarrassing. i think that was a lie and i just didn’t want them there. i was usually either belittled or someone expected more out of me. i used to be chastised for not knowing things. sometimes they expected less out of me. i never really knew how i could be good back then, and i didn’t know that i could be doing anything better back then. all those things i did should have gave me some kinda recognition or fulfillment! but in hindsight, the only time i was ever happy doing them was when i was with people that appreciated what i did. it felt nice to be needed, but i still wanted something other than being needed. i wanted to be wanted.
i never felt like anyone’s first choice back then. things are different now but sometimes that realization comes back to weigh a million pounds in my heart again and i weep for the poor boy i used to be.
//////////
i started playing melee around 2015! i was a doc kid. i started with PM and i fondly remember apex 2015 as the first major i watched. fun sets, salty suites, and lore-filled storylines galore! i binged the fuck out of all of the PM and melee content i could. i was pretty much raised on foundry streams and grsmash. i made some friends during this time, and they were all good to me. still, there was something i felt i craved that they didn’t give me.
and then i won my first local! somehow i walked into the venue and people already knew me. i got no fucking clue how that happened but i guess i was a local celebrity (~_~). fun fact: i started as a marth main with a sheik secondary and then i said fuck it (i think i lost to a falco and i didn’t know how to navigate lasers or shield pressure at all cause i just sat in shield ROFLLLLL) and switched to fox mid tourney and won. ggs everyone.
i played a bunch more after that and i was pretty good at games in general but i never took a particularly structured approach to improving at all. i just grinded mindlessly on anthers under a bunch of tags (i miss u leffenfan69) for fun. but melee went on the backburner because i wanted to focus on school, extracurriculars, and socializing.
i wanted to be liked. i wanted to learn how to socialize so that people would like me. i felt like even when i was liked, it was in a way that didn’t really understand me. i just wanted so desperately for someone to understand me. i didn’t understand myself nor did i know that i didn’t understand myself. i just grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded (:P) and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded and grinded.
i thought that if i worked hard, things would just magically work out. that’s what i was taught. if i work hard, people would see and notice. things would go smoothly if i worked hard.
call of adventure
i have probably flopped around between dozens of friend groups at this point, many of which i thought would be friends with me forever. i think the longest standing one was when i left my high school friend group of overachievers. president of unicef, president of key club, all that stuff. it was a group of some of the most popular and hardworking kids and then i felt like there was me! i used to have such bad impostor syndrome hanging out with everyone because well. i’m just me and they’re them. they’re cool and all but.. it never felt right.
2017
one day i just up and left the group without a word. they went to prom and i think they went on a cute little summer trip after graduation as well. they didn’t check up on me. i didn’t mind too much. but i minded a little bit. i spent my lunches in the biology room watching anime and hanging out with a few of my bio friends. i never really felt worthy of the praise people gave me. being good at league of legends and being a kinda good leader and a silly guy was most of my identity. i thought briefly about how i used to do so much, but never really felt like it meant anything.
back in high school, i was pretty overweight and i felt like i was so resigned to being ugly. i don’t remember bringing it up very often but my friend kris tells me that the way i felt about myself was glaringly obvious. my self esteem was clearly in the fucking gutter, but i felt kinda free after leaving my group. it hurt to be alone and it sucked and i felt worse for a good while. but i also felt like i had taken a step forward. a very difficult but necessary step forward. away from the life i had always known up to that point.
this was around the time i started thinking more about why i felt different from other people. there were definitely a bunch of things that i thought separated me from others. but at the end of the day, it wasn’t anything that i could figure out at the time. all of the things that i came up with were things that i could also attribute to other people like me. i couldn’t find anything. it wasn’t about me being good at league or any of the other things i used to be good at. that wasn’t why i was different.
i dated a couple of people in high school and nothing really worked out, but i learned a lot from them. i had a bunch of situationships. i hung out in hypersexual online communities as a kid. i had a lot of fallouts in them. i never posted pictures of myself in them. i also went by aria but made sure to correct everyone that i was actually a boy! in case they thought i was a girl (i wasn’t!) i got groomed once or twice and cheated on once or twice and it sucked a little but looking back my baseline was so low that i didn’t feel much about it. i hear one of those people are in a polycule in pennsylvania or something now. really living their best life. i was also a pretty big flirt and i used to pride myself on how good i was with my words at times. i had always felt like being good with my words was a necessity because i just.. wasn’t physically attractive. i thought deeply about how i felt liked by everyone, but never really loved. the idea of me never being anyone’s first choice used to be so prominent in my mind. i knew my self loathing had something to do with my appearance but i thought that surely there was a lot more wrong.. and there definitely was. i just had no way to navigate any of it.
at this point, i wasn’t trans or a girl because both of those concepts were completely foreign to me. but, well, i thought about it a little bit. and surely that was enough to plant a seed. i vaguely thought about being happier as an ugly girl than as the me i was then. that train of thought cut off there.
2018
i graduated high school and started hanging out with some friends. i forgot how i met them at this point. i mostly just rotted in my room and played league or cs or some other game all day. i was grateful to have people to be around, even if i wasn’t necessarily having the greatest time all of the time. i played melee a bunch during this time too. i don’t think i improved for like 2 or 3 years straight but i suppose i had some other issues to sort through.
around this time, i learned about the male gaze and tried to work on unlearning this kinda stuff. i assumed i had it cause all men did, ostensibly. i liked women romantically and sexually. i didn’t really understand what it was at first. i didn’t really understand how it pertained to me. i always had this admiration for all girls and it manifested as some kinda weird desire between romance and lust. back then, i never once thought that i wanted to be them. i just thought they were cool and beautiful. i didn’t think highly enough of myself to believe that i could ever attain that height. i never really had the male gaze. i preferred women as friends and company but just didn’t understand what the feeling in my chest was when i saw other girls. it wasn’t lust or romantic love but i had no other lens to process it through. i figured out that i didn’t really have the male gaze because i met other people who did have it. and immediately it was clear to me that i wasn’t like that and that isn’t how i saw women at all. at the end of the day, i was just a horny teenager who read something on the internet that implied that i should feel guilty for having some thoughts. i still see people doin that on the internet today. (i read kink discourse on christmas dude i’m so over it.) and for the first time, i thought that maybe the emotion i had been feeling was somewhere between envy and admiration. but why do i envy them? i tucked that context clue away like a key item in an indie RPG about depression.
i started college and made some new friends and studied really hard! i used to be in pre pharmacy and i used to grind school for 16 hours a day and it was rough. my saving grace was that they had a lot of really delicious food. i think it was all catered by that one food company, bon appetit. save me giant breakfast burrito.. save me fresh fruit smoothie… i honestly think that if i did not eat yummy poke every day i might not have ever dragged myself out of bed to my classes.
i’m thankful to a handful of people during that first year of college because i do think they saved me or at least helped me so much. i wanna see how they’re doing. i hope they’re doing well. i hope you’re doing well, mimie, tammy, catherine. i rushed for a frat and joined some clubs and met some amazing people. they felt warm and i felt appreciated. i went to my first college party and probably drank about 20 shots worth of liquor. i’m still surprised i only woke up hungover for a day, or that i woke up at all. i remember an older girl getting me chicken nuggets and listening to me rant about why people have to be so evil. i think she was the president of the frat. i liked her. i had 2 bigs that loved me lots and their names were eileen and jessica. i loved them lots. i’d be over at their apartment all the time just hanging out. i had a secret third big named ayan. i liked him a lot too but i loved being around jessica and eileen so much. i feel like i never really felt comfortable with silence until college, and it was only with a few women. after all of that male gaze stuff earlier in the year, i pretty much had no romantic or sexual desire. i had a short situationship in may and june but it didn’t work out. but i did think women were really cool and that i just got along better with them in general. i thought that it was maybe because i was some kinda womanizer. (lmfao)
i also dressed up as a girl that halloween. i still didn’t really question my gender at all, even with that. but i think i was pretty cute. my friends did my makeup and gave me some cute clothes to wear. i think it was a cropped hoodie and a skirt maybe? it’s funny cause this was just a buried memory for me until this year and then i was like oh yeah i DID dress up as a girl for halloween.
2019
eventually i had some issues with my roommate and the workload was taking a huge toll on me. i was already working quite hard in high school but that first year of college really amped it up bad. i remember the labs being devilishly hard and taking about 10 hours longer than they were supposed to. i probably spent about 40 hours a week just on chemistry. i still got like a B average on the tests with curving (it woulda been a D otherwise). going from 6 hours of sleep a day to around 3 was a little too much for me to handle and eventually i broke.
i dropped out of half my classes and barely hung on to a few of the others. i stopped rushing for the frat. i hardly got out of bed except to get food, much less out of my room. when i ate i would probably eat 4000 calories in a day. i gained weight really fast and i did not take care of my skin or health in any way. even my escapes like melee and other games didn’t help me anymore. i talked to some counselors and they told me yeah dude you’re depressed as fuck. no one checked on me after i stopped going to things. i remember that hurting a bit. i thought a lot about self harm and suicide a lot back then.
it wasn’t their fault though. i would never blame them and i still have love for them. at least i still finished the semester.
i remember a conversation i had while studying for a chemistry test with one of my close friends. she told me i was almost too perfect. she said i was like a manic pixie dream boy. i thought about this for a long time. honestly it still pops into my mind sometimes. i was like ramona flowers if she was a boy, allegedly. was that an insult? i don’t think she meant it that way but maybe it was, looking back. (i like ramona in the anime though)
on my last day of school, i told the poke lady i’d be leaving. she said she’d miss me. poke is still my favorite food and i think it has extra meaning to me knowing that it probably kept me alive. it’s funny to think that a bowl of rice and raw fish and some toppings might have been part of the reason that i’m here today.
;
refusal of the call
i returned home. i didn’t leave my bed for 6 months straight except to binge eat and go to the bathroom. i tried doing some hobbies for a bit but it never felt right. i just hung out in the discord vc for most of the day and said nothing and did nothing. sometimes i would get annoyed that my friend was fucking around in our league games and didn’t care about winning. everything fucking sucked. food didn’t really even taste that good but i kept eating a lot of it. my weight has always fluctuated but i stopped exercising and continued to eat more and i think i developed prediabetes and went up like. probably like 50 pounds in the span of a year.
i started binging SO many isekai/reincarnation/cultivation manhua during this time. this life was terrible, but they got lucky and got a second chance. i feel like this message resonates so much with people. no wonder it’s such a popular genre and full of self insert fantasies. it’s hard to start over and put in the work. it’s easy when you have a god given power or a visible xp bar that sets the goals for you and then gives you a fucking lightning dagger for clearing a quest.
it’s a little harder when it’s just you.
it was a long 6 months. i felt like i had been in this same, 25 year old mattress forever. sleeping in the living room with nothing but a paper screen for privacy. i would try to leave my bed anytime earlier than 2 pm and it just didn’t really work that way. wake up at 3 pm, lay in bed and do nothing for a couple hours, get up, eat my one meal of the day, and binge manga. try to do something i used to love. i didn’t really enjoy it anymore. go to bed at 5 am. i wondered if i would ever recover from this. i knew i was burned out, but i didn’t know how long i would be like this for. i was so tired. i just wanted to rest. i didn’t really want to die, but i didn’t really want to live either. i didn’t feel like there was very much for me in this world.
//////////
meeting the mentor
and suddenly, i just had energy. just a tiny bit. maybe my body needed time to process the immense stress i’d been feeling that entire last year from my workload. maybe it was the stress i had been feeling since i was 14 and navigating the weight of parental expectations. maybe it was the stress from being forced to code for 12 hours a day when i was 12 so i could make my dad a website for free. maybe it was the stress i had been feeling from when i was 10 and getting hit by my brother for beating him in smash. maybe it was the stress i had been feeling from when i was 8 and my mom was crying and telling me that we’d be evicted soon because my dad fucked up really bad. maybe it was the stress i had been feeling from when i was 6 and my dad threatened to kill himself for the first time cause my mom asked him to wash the dishes. maybe it was everything.
my body was weak and shaking and my legs were trembling but i felt like there was suddenly a path out of the darkness. i didn’t want to be this person anymore, i thought. i didn’t know what i wanted to do at this point. i just knew i wanted to be more than the pitiful existence i saw myself as. i thought that if i didn’t take this chance, i might be here forever. and maybe i would’ve been. maybe i wouldn’t have been around to be there forever.
but hey, i made it, didn’t i?
;
i still spent a lot of time in bed and in that damn discord call. but i would spend a few hours thinking about how to get better. i looked into therapy and started that. the first therapist i saw was back at my college and he was a great guy and convinced me to leave the school for my own health. the next few therapists didn’t help me out too much. i remember one of them being some christian guy who asked me about if i thought premarital sex was moral and stuff like that. i kinda gave up on outside therapy after that cause what the fuck?
i just kept working on it little by little. it’s funny to think that the 50 redemption manhua i binged probably had a huge part in me persevering for as long as i did. i just kept going and going. i was honestly so inspired by how crazy and dedicated they were. they did it for revenge. i tried living my life out of spite for a little but i quickly came to the conclusion that it was honestly way too draining and that i’d be better off living for an actual good reason. i didn’t hate anyone enough to live out of spite.
;
i didn’t want to start meds. i didn’t really want to use meds before i tried without them. i knew so many people that didn’t like how they felt on their meds. i learned about cbt and kind of just.. slowly did it to myself. i just sat there for 3 months doing nothing but telling myself that most of the self deprecating stuff i thought about myself wasn’t entirely true. because it was a little true. and it was important to not lie to myself. i knew i was far from perfect, and i wouldn’t get anywhere by deluding myself and saying i was. being honest with myself didn’t mean overcompensating in the other direction.
i had always felt like i had extended love to others, but i wasn’t worthy of that love myself. (of course i was, even if i didn’t feel like it was true.) i figured that people needed to have things going for them and be likable to make it easier for people to love them. it was always about me needing to be better, and not others.
someone told me to stop being so mean to myself because i’d never be this mean to anyone else. they were right. whoever it was saved my life. i got better slowly. painstakingly. i would take a step forward a day and once a week i would hurtle 5 steps back. it fucking sucked. i kept going because there was nothing else for me to do.
;
slowly, it got better. i would take 2 steps forward in a day. then 3. then 5. the drawbacks got less frequent, but sometimes bigger. sometimes i would take 100 steps in a month and get set back 70 steps. it always hurt. but i could heal. i always have. i always did. i’m a durable girl. i remember not thinking those things hurt me very much because i assumed i was back to normal within a couple hours. but my baseline had so much baggage that it was hard to notice an extra 10 pounds of weight. and every time, it would be that much harder to undo. i made so much progress, but was blissfully unaware of how much more progress i had to make. and i had to figure out where to make the progress too, and how… it was a lot to do. i wish i had an xp bar and quests for these kinds of things.
there was so much to learn. so much to learn about myself. so much theory. so much to learn about america. the world. my community. the good. the bad. myself. propaganda. how much of what i believed was really just propaganda. how much of what i STILL believe is propaganda.
all of the healing i’ve done and will continue doing has to do with decolonizing myself and others. understanding that i was hurt in the past. how to deal with it. how to deal with myself and the people and things around me.
it’s such a long fucking process, dude. it’s been like 4 years and i still feel like i have so much to learn. but i have learned a lot.
my parents supported me. they didn’t wanna lose me. they told me that it didn’t matter what i ended up pursuing as a career as long as i was happy. a couple months before this i remember hearing that i would be cut off financially if i didn’t go to school for pharmacy or to be a doctor. pertinent death changes people’s attitudes really quickly.
i started working at a boba shop! it was fun and i loved the free drinks i got. i thought my coworkers were nice and my manager was a little silly. i got to watch movies and read manga on the TV on slow days and make tea for myself whenever i wanted. it was stressful at peak hours but so is any service job. i always had fun though except for when the manager was a little mean to me. i’d like to think it was tough asian love.
i played melee a little more during this time. i remembering rolling most people online and then i’d run into someone i’d lose games against and think about why i even play this game. it was a difficult time. it turns out that having some bad mental health issues also makes you stake your whole identity on melee sometimes. i got pretty annoyed. it was still better than just.. the nothingness and pure lethargy from before. it still sucked, but it was better than what it used to be. and i was better equipped to deal with it this time around.
i beat kjh! my biggest win ever! :D felt like the king of pop for a solid 2 days.
crossing the first threshold
2020
i went back to community college. i studied psychology and political science. i still felt a similar way about not being loved by people but liked by them. but i didn’t completely hate myself anymore. i tried taking it easier and going from 16 hours of studying a day to the community college workload was frankly a godsend. i aced most of my classes. i had a run in with a girl who stole phones for some reason. i had another run in with some girl in my group project that framed me for a death threatening email sent from a burner account. i had the police call me about it and i was so fucking confused. they tried to threaten me into admitting that i did it but i really had 0 fucking clue what was going on. i remember sticking up for that girl a month or two before that cause she was in the hospital and missed a big presentation but my teacher was kind of an asshole and didn’t let it slide. i think this was my only B+ for the rest of my college life. i think i also got a random c+ in a class where the teacher was completely absent and there was just 1 paper for the entire semester. it was bizarre.
i quite liked the rest of my group though. i didn’t really interact with anyone else besides them. one of those people was an artist named bre and i thought she was so cool cause she was the only leftist i knew from school. she was cool.
i was taking philosophy and sociology at the time and they were pretty important classes. i was starting to dip my toes in politics after 2016 but i only really had any concrete views after i took some sociology, philosophy, and government classes. before then, i just thought that republicans were evil and democrats were good. i remember writing an impassioned opinion paper about how shitty republicans were. i just had a vague idea that some people were really fucked up and just thinking that the world would be better if they were Not like that. (i looped back around and kinda think this now but with more nuance.) i remember being radicalized by my sociology class and learning about things like the prison industrial complex, the protestant ethic, the history of capitalism, intersectionality, foucault, why the police fucking sucked, and feminist theory and literature. i really learned a lot and it let me integrate my own experiences into intersectionality. learning about oppression expanded my world more. i had experienced it myself, but lacked the words or knowledge to really understand it. i lacked the emotional maturity to process it. i don’t think i would have had the chance to truly heal if i didn’t learn more about the world and other people’s experiences.
i didn’t like the discord call so much anymore after that. it felt stagnant and i was so doggedly moving forward at all costs. because i needed to. because i didn’t really have any other choice. i left that friend group after a couple of months too.
//
tests, allies, and enemies
i started dating a girl i met online. it was rough. she liked me and i liked her and i thought that meant i was responsible for her well being then. she had some big issues. i responded the only way i knew how — by throwing all of myself into keeping her alive. i would spend my work hours on call with her. i’d spend my school hours on call with her. i’d spend my home hours on call with her. i became solely responsible for her well being and everything was kinda on me. cause i let her do it. i tried to break up with her maybe 4 or 5 times but i think she would threaten to kill herself. i wasn’t really interested in intimacy after a while. i can imagine why. i enjoyed some of the time i had with her. i felt lethargic for most of it. i would later figure out that feeling was dissociation.
despite this, i felt good after getting that big kjh win! i signed up for emerald city 9 in seattle and was excited to travel out of region for the first time. i started practicing more in preparation because i felt like i could realistically make a deep run!
booom covid! covid booom booooooom! everything shut down. my will to play melee also shut down instantly and had no signs of coming back anytime soon.
i quit my job cause i was terrified of getting covid.
emerald city got canceled but i already bought my flight so i decided to say fuck it and go to seattle. my friend housed me but was busy with school so i just kinda went around pike place and walked around downtown. seattle has some good fucking food dude. i remember that bomb ass pierogi place in pike place. i wanna get some of that again. i’m dreaming about their potato cheese rolls right now.
i lost my wallet in seattle and my friend luckily bailed me out with some change for my train fare. i forgot to use it but thank you for caring. a little accidental fare evasion never hurt anyone.
me and her would fight a lot. i felt obligated to stay after a while because i knew that she had it rough at home. if i wasn’t her rock, i thought she might die. i thought it was okay to sacrifice my well being in exchange for someone else’s life. i still find myself slipping there sometimes.
it was a hard lesson to learn that the weight of someone’s life isn’t actually on me. it’s hard to remember because anyone would make the decision to spend their time and money and energy and happiness to stop someone from dying, wouldn’t they? isn’t that the clear and right thing to do?
it’s the kind of thing you can’t really understand or learn until you’ve gone through it once. and by this point, i had already gone through it a few times. but i was a dumb kid, and sometimes kids don’t take away the right lessons. sometimes they don’t take away any lessons at all. i have lived most of my life for others. because it was the right thing to do. because it was moral. because it was noble. it was so noble to hurt myself to keep others safe, wasn’t it? no one told me that i was supposed to take care of myself. i’ve been healing, yeah, but that’s just so that i can take care of people that need it more than me, isn’t it?
..
what was i healing for, again?
i thought it was for me? maybe it wasn’t and i just thought it was. i thought everything was good now. i thought i had identified all of my issues and trauma and was working on it. i heard somewhere that taking care of yourself was important because that means you had more bandwidth to take care of others. i probably thought, “oh, okay. so i should probably do that. for others.” because that’s the way it had always been.
because i felt like other people mattered more than me.
because all of my value in the world was dependent on what i could do for others. that was never true for other people. i always felt like other people were lovely and were more than what they could do for others. for the world. for capitalism. but i was different. maybe this is a form of narcissism that’s underexplored. “i’m different not because i’m better than any of you, but because i am the only one who isn’t inherently worth anything.” my health, my life, my experience, my money, my sanity — it was for everyone else. and i did not deserve a single bit of it for myself. because i should be grateful for what others have sacrificed for me.
approach to the innermost cave
things stayed the same for a while. i would stay with her for a long time. we met up one weekend finally and i thought we had a good time. i thought maybe the relationship might work out in person. i thought long distance was what was fracturing the relationship. i think i forgot about how bad i had it at this point because i felt like i had been stuck inside a dream for so long. it was a bad dream, but never a nightmare. i cried a lot because i just wanted her to be happy. she never was. i thought it was my fault. she said i should do more for her. i agreed. i wasn’t a very good boyfriend if i couldn’t do everything for her.
2021
i had a lot of time to think over covid. i also spent even more time with my girlfriend. it was the type of atmosphere where there was silence often because we spent most of the day together most days. the silence was never comfortable. it felt like thorns digging into my skin, pleading me to speak and keep the conversation going. i didn’t like this silence. neither did she. but i simply had nothing more to say to her.
slippi came out around here i think! i played a bunch of unranked and i remember it feeling better than the last time i played online. i tried entering some online tournies and then kept running into east coast players over and over again. i stopped entering them after a while. i didn’t like playing 100 ping melee very much. my melee fire came and went quickly.
but i did start spending more time in melee discords, and i found people to hang out with. i remember spending time in a new player discord and being like. a melee big sister. i like teaching people stuff. i’ve always been good at articulating myself, and as the years pass, it becomes more and more true. i remember back in high school and college, i would go out of my way to help my friends and classmates with material. i didn’t mind a bit even if they had a lot of questions. questions meant they were curious and interested. and i love it when people are curious and interested around me! i love passion. i love caring about things. i started to figure that out more around this time. i love it when others care about things. and i really cared about teaching people and seeing them improve, even if i had no drive to improve myself (at melee).
i think i met chai around this time, who is still one of my closest friends. i met yaku too. i love both of them.
i really don’t remember much else about this year honestly. i finished my associates degrees in 2020 and moved on to a 4 year college! the workload picked up a bit but it wasn’t anything i couldn’t handle. school barely mattered to me. it was so hard in high school and in my freshman year to keep up with everything, but switching majors and having better mental health and less things to do actually helps!
i started thinking more seriously about my gender after covid. i did months and months of introspection and trans research and found that a lot of the unexplainable feelings of ostracization and otherness were probably because i was trans. i initially resisted it for a long time because i knew how scary it was to be trans at this point. i thought i was okay just living as a feminine guy who painted his nails and stuff sometimes. i talked to my trans friend kris and i remember him telling me about how he thought i always loved women in a sapphic way and that i always reminded him of a girl. and also i went by aria online since like 2013. i played it off because i used to match names with a bunch of people on league of legends (we had a shiny pokemon theme) and i was shiny altaria cause that’s the first shiny i ever caught. sky pillar, right before catching rayquaza :) and when the group split, i just changed my tag to aria. cause i “liked music” or something. cause “music was a big part of my life”. yeah okay dude keep thinkin that! you silly lil kid!
i thought more about leftism and intersectionality. i thought about being a girl. i was so terrified.
the ordeal
it reached a breaking point around may 2021. i was at a family party and i looked in the mirror and suddenly realized that i could not live my life as a boy anymore. i was horribly overweight, my skin was awful, i didn’t take care of myself, and the feelings i had been feeling for so long finally fell into place. this feeling of otherness. my comfortability with women. not fitting in with other guys.
i called my girlfriend to tell her i might be trans and she told me i couldn’t be. i broke down. i was ugly and i was a boy. if i had to be ugly, i thought, i want to at least be an ugly girl. i would rather be an ugly girl than a beautiful boy.
things quieted down. i played a lot of valorant with friends during this time. my first girl name was just a silly feminine version of my deadname. one of my friends called me that and i kinda liked it so i tried it out. i told my girlfriend and she laughed at me and told me it was a weird and ugly name. i remember wondering why she hated the idea of me being a girl so much if she was bi. i fought with her more and more because i wanted to be free. a silly girl who yearns for freedom after reading in a book that it was real. i desperately chased after it. i was a bird trying to force myself out of a cage with no openings. i bled a lot and i lost most of my feathers in the process. i didn’t get any closer to getting out of the cage, though. but for the first time in my life, i had some clarity about what i really wanted for myself. get the fuck out of this relationship, i thought. i had never minded being caged before. i had nowhere i wanted to go. i didn’t have much i wanted to be. i thought i had to be great to be someone.
i wanted to be free. i wanted to transition. i wanted out of this relationship. i wanted to be myself. i wanted to live for myself.
i thought maybe i was genderfluid because sometimes i didn’t mind being a boy. i tried he/she pronouns. i really always wanted you to use she. i think you knew that. i learned about gender dysphoria and euphoria more. i realized that a lot of my depression was more dysphoria than anything. it was really important for me to learn that gender dysphoria isn’t literally just about my gender or gender presentation. it was so pervasive. it was weird to figure out that most of the things i felt about myself had to do with gender dysphoria. but it was cool to have the opportunity to move forward.
we kept fighting. i loved her. it hurt. i wanted to be free but i felt that i could never be. it was my role to sacrifice for others less fortunate than me. i loved her. i was miserable. i didn’t like her much. i didn’t love her either.
my family came up on some money troubles and i couldn’t be sure that we could pay our rent anymore. i started working at starbucks. it was awful. the managers and some of the coworkers were huge bullies. i couldn’t understand why. a few of the coworkers were really nice to me, though. i appreciate them for making that place a little more bearable to work at. at this point, i was working 30 hours a week on top of a full school load. but even this, i thought, was less tiring than what i’d dealt with the last two years. at least i was making beautiful liquid money and getting free drinks. eventually i got fed up with the treatment and asked to be transferred to another store.
thankfully i ended up transferring and genuinely making some really good friends from the new location. almost everyone was gay. and everyone was pretty. i felt comfortable in that store. i liked serving customers too. i liked doing my cute little latte art and befriending my coworkers and talking to customers. i honestly had a lot of fun there. i wasn’t out yet, but everyone seemed really nice. i think a coworker or two may have known i was in the closet. i looked a little more feminine than i used to. i hadn’t started hrt yet.
i flew to seattle to see her for christmas. i liked going grocery shopping with her and cooking in the little dorm. we didn’t fight for a week. i lost my virginity. my return flight got snowed in and i stayed for a little longer. it was warm, even if just for a little.
i tried weed for the first time with her. for some reason her mom had access to her phone and told me that she would be tried in federal prison. i thought that was fucking silly but she was serious. that family scared me a lot.
i remember being high and playing valorant with yaku and adem. i treasure them.
2022
i came back home. she tried harder to use she for me. but it was forced and, of course, i could tell. things started to fall apart after i left seattle. i tried my best to hold it together. the invasion of privacy hurt a lot. i told her i was trans, for sure. she told me i couldn’t be trans. i told her that i would be. she told me that i couldn’t change and be different. i was upset because i felt like she was holding me back from something i wanted so badly. i feel for her. i’ve always felt for her. but i found the courage to put my foot down and tell her that i wanted to transition. she cheated on me a month later. i told her it was ok because sometimes people get crushes and make impulsive decisions. i didn’t want to believe that i had sacrificed so much for it to all come crumbling down. it wasn’t even my fault. i didn’t think it was. i was a little angry about it.
i finally minded being the emotional support rock and the friend that everyone came to for advice. i never felt like i was owed anything from anyone. i thought that it was a cold world and that i had to fight tooth and nail for everything i wanted. i didn’t expect love or praise or monetary reward for the sacrifices i made because i had been told that it was wrong to expect any recompense for what i did. but i also felt obligated to take every request without wanting anything back. because that was what good people did for others.
on a side note, i really hate that people take mental health language and use it to justify selfish behavior. “oh you don’t owe anyone anything. do what you need to do for yourself.” i think you do owe other people things. i think you owe other people basic courtesy and respect. i think we actually owe each other so fucking much because we are people and we are just trying to get by in this shitty fucking world. maybe it’s not actually that much. maybe it feels like a lot to ask for because i hop on twitter and i am exposed to thousands of the most awful people ever constantly. i don’t know. i felt like all of the emotional work i did for her didn’t really matter in the end. but thankfully, i could still make use of my healing for myself. i guess that’s what i was supposed to use it for in the first place, anyway.
i wanted someone to save me for so long. i didn’t know that i wanted that. i wanted to be more than an emotional support rock, i thought. i like helping people. i really do. but i finally understood that this life was also mine to live. it took me 21 years to figure out that my life was mine and didn’t belong to others if i didn’t want it to. i’m sorry to myself for taking so long to figure it out. i did my best for a long time. i did the best with what i had. i’d like to believe that that’s what most people do, too. but i’m also grateful to myself for figuring it out. and it only took 21 years.
i was born march 2022, which is the month where i broke up with my long term abusive girlfriend. she didn’t threaten to kill herself this time. i took that as the sign that she didn’t need me anymore and that i had outlived my usefulness to her. for a long time, i used to joke about that being my role in a relationship. help someone grow until they figure they can do better than me. but it actually happened this time.
despite that, i felt free. i didn’t feel despair or sadness after the breakup, which surprised me. i just felt betrayed after i got cheated on.
i used to want to be needed, but i’ve learned that being needed by others is a prison that i created for myself. it’s so hard to reject people that need help, but i think i started learning how to do that recently.
i want to be wanted. i want to be desired. and i want the other person to be okay if i’m not around. i’m not a big fan of dependency or codependency.
i felt like i wanted to cry. i held it in until i couldn’t. i cried for 2 days, but i think they were tears of joy and relief. i was so happy she cheated on me. i forgot that i tried to leave so many times before.
i was free. i was free. i was free.
reward
a week later, i booked my initial hrt consultation. i started in april 2022. i was so fucking happy to be free to at least start hormones. i had been agonizing over it for what seemed like forever. once i knew what i wanted, i felt the walls of the cage closing in more and more the longer i was kept from it. squeezing me until i couldn’t breathe. i wanted so badly to not be a boy anymore. i wanted to like how i looked so bad. i was just resigned to the idea that i would always be ugly for such a long time. i wanted to be validated. by others, but mostly myself. the lack of validation from others hurt so much more when i didn’t believe in myself. i never fit in with boys. i had a handful of boys that i felt comfortable around.
i liked girls romantically and as friends. i was so at peace with them compared to boys. i felt like we were more often on the same wavelength since i was 13 years old. i never knew or thought about it. i had never wanted anything as bad as this. i never had big ambitions for myself besides being a pro gamer when i was younger. i didn’t think it would solve my problems, and i knew there was still so much work to be done. (there’s always more work to be done.) but regardless, i wanted to try. i didn’t care about being pretty. i thought that it was fine for me to be ugly as long as i was a girl.
after a month, most of my brain fog was gone. i didn’t even know i had brain fog. i was doing well in school. it felt easier. my mood felt better and more stable. i cried a little more often and felt more sensitive. but i’ve always been a crybaby, and i think estrogen only exacerbated that issue.
i cried at everything. no movie was safe. i’d cry at the goofy movie if you showed it to me. (it did have a tear-worthy scene, to me.)
i didn’t tell my parents. i didn’t tell anyone else or have any plans to. i stared at myself in tiktok filters for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours on end. i don’t think i’ve ever had that feeling of wonder and joy before. i’ve loved people and things in the past, but i had never liked taking pictures of myself. i didn’t like being in pictures. i could never really smile in pictures without forcing it. i didn’t like looking in the mirror, ever. and this only got worse over the last year.
but seeing my face in a feminine filter was probably the first time i had ever felt happy looking at myself. it was frankly such a bizarre fucking feeling. but it felt warm. and for once, it wasn’t because of someone else. it was all work i had done.
things started to fall into place more. i started spending more time with friends. i didn’t really have that much time to do that until now. i stared at myself in the mirror all the time now. i used to avoid mirrors like the plague. cameras too. i hated seeing my face and my body before this. i didn’t understand why until i realized that it didn’t feel like my body. it showed in my face. in my posture. in my body. in my acne. in my unkempt hair. in my bloated stomach. in my wide, sagging shoulders. in my triple chin. in my folds. but slowly, i learned how to learn how to love myself. i remember thinking that i had been doing all that emotional groundwork only to use it for others. something finally clicked for me when i started hrt. i felt better just existing. i felt like i finally had room to care about myself. it was really weird to care about myself.
i didn’t present feminine in public, though. i just settled for being a boy that had a suspiciously lumpy chest. i still don’t really prefer hyper feminine presentation in public anyway. i went into the boys bathroom. i wore big hoodies and long pants, even in 100 degree weather. especially in 100 degree weather. it was so uncomfortable but for more than 5 years i felt that showing my body off was even more uncomfortable. it might’ve been my weight; i think it was my dysphoria. i know it’s my dysphoria now because i was happy to be a girl, even if i didn’t fit conventional beauty standards. it hurt to be ugly. but it hurt a little bit less to be an ugly girl instead of an ugly boy. it hurt a lot less, actually. i started having boobs. i had to buy bras. i bought cute socks. my family didnt notice. my classmates didn’t notice. my friends didn’t notice.
i wanted to be a girl so bad.
i came out at work. my coworkers congratulated me and gave me hugs. my manager stammered over herself in a liberal show of praise and started crying and telling me how happy she was that i started to live my new life. she deadnamed me and misgendered me for about 2 months after that. but my coworkers and the customers that were kind to me let me feel more love in public than i’d ever felt before. being acknowledged the way i wanted to be, to me, was love. maybe that’s the bare minimum. but whatever the case, i was happy to be seen.
i don’t think i was ever happy to be perceived before.
on the road again
the manager at my old store transferred to my new store. i immediately handed in my letter of resignation. my manager asked me what was wrong. i cried a little. i cried so much i couldn’t say what i wanted to say for minutes. i said she was incredibly mean to me and i didn’t really want that to happen again. i ended up leaving despite really liking my coworkers and how laidback things were.
i started hanging out with some new friends. they were nice. i ended up in a polycule somehow. it was fun at first and exploded immediately after. i gave them a lot of rent money. i don’t know if they’re alive. i’ll probably never see them again. or that money, for that matter. but i like helping people. i told them that money was just a tool to me and that their lives were more important. maybe i’m too willing to give things to other people. but other people’s lives, as far as i’m concerned, is not something for me to toy with.
suddenly i was in another relationship. i loved her. i thought she loved me.
i played a little melee. i didn’t really care that much. i was too busy trying to figure out how to be a girl. i was busy figuring out how to navigate a friendship that hurt me too much. i escaped one difficult situation and immediately fell into another one. maybe that is how my life is meant to be, i thought. maybe it is my fault that these things are happening to me. i wanted to help her. maybe i should have focused on helping myself. it’s hard for me to help myself as much as i need because i always feel like someone is in more need of help than me. i feel good when i help people figure things out.
i felt fine a good amount of the time. i feel like shit sometimes. i never really understood why my mood was so inconsistent even though my schedule is more consistent than it used to be. i meditate. i exercise a bit. i try and sleep before 2 am. i never really knew why things were so difficult and inconsistent for me.
my first birthday as a girl! i got happy birthday sentiments from so many people. i remember one time i got a used napkin for my birthday. what the fuck was that? compared to everything, i really just can’t help but laugh at that. things used to be really bad, didn’t they? they’re a little better now. i worked so hard. it wasn’t good yet. but it’s better. i had a lot of fun this year. my heart exploded again this year. it felt weird to turn 22. i feel like i’ve been alive for so long. i felt so much more mature. i felt like i had grown so much. i felt like i knew so much more than i used to. i thought about how much i had grown since i was 16, 18, 20. all of those versions of me were completely different, almost unrecognizable from how i was now. it kept happening, except this time i was a girl. fucking bizarre. i had come so fucking far. it could only be up from here, right?
2023
genesis rolled around. i hadn’t been to a genesis in years. i flew out my girlfriend. i presented fem for the first time in public. i wore a cute all black outfit with a giant flowy skirt. i was decently happy with my fit. i got a compliment or two. i felt happy to be gendered correctly that weekend in real life for the first time. i met up with a couple friends. shoutouts to yaku again.
i hadn’t been playing much melee. i went 2-2 and didn’t make it out of r1. i was kinda annoyed at first but i realized that i had probably played like 100 hours of melee in 2022 and i didn’t actually improve during any of it. i didn’t work for it, so i don’t really deserve to be mad. i was still a little mad. i watched top 8 by myself. i cheered for jmook throughout the whole thing. my girlfriend was off with some other person she met during the weekend. that hurt a lot. i didn’t really know how to feel. she didn’t touch me. i wasn’t entitled to it. it still hurt.
after genesis, i wanted to start taking melee more seriously again. something i haven’t touched on much is how much of a constant melee has been in my life. it’s corny to say, but i really do feel like melee has helped me work through a lot of problems in my life. and when i felt like i had learned something or made progress in my life, i felt like i also came back to melee better, too. i started playing slippi a bit more. i started going to my locals again around march or april. some people were surprised to see me. i looked a bit different by now. i introduced myself as rainy. everyone was supportive. i made some great friendships. i also made some mistakes.
i think it’s funny how cyclical melee is. i run into the same problems over and over except they’re a little different this time. one more layer of mixup. one more layer of defense. yeah melee is like chess and jazz and boxing but no one has ever said melee is like real life, surely. i’ve always loved melee because it felt so expressive and fun. i’ll willfully forget all of the people that have planked me.
i noticed that a lot of the expression i craved in melee used to be missing from my life. i used to be silly or angry often. i used to be numb often. i didn’t really know how to take things seriously other than trying to put on my most serious face and be quiet. i did spend a lot of time in serious mode while never really understanding what i was in serious mode for. i just felt like i had to cause it was respectful or something.
this year, i was so much more engrossed in learning more about melee, and it was genuinely fun. the melee i used to play wasn’t ever really joyful. it didn’t really care about learning. i used to feel nothing when i won, and annoyed or angry or disaffected when i lost. i just needed to win because that’s all i cared about. it wasn’t about learning or improving. it was just about winning in that moment. and that’s all that mattered because who i am as a person is dependent on how well i perform in this set. i had nothing else going for me, and nothing else really mattered to me back then. my melee was empty because i was empty.
but things were different now. i earned all of my wins. i deserved all my losses because the other person prepared better or practiced more. feeling “entitled” to wins is such a shitty feeling that i see people in the community perpetuate sometimes. oh you’re better so you Should just win. i’ll win if i’m better than them motherfucker 😭 all of my wins and losses stopped mattering when i began a new set because, really, all that mattered was how well i played in this set. and if i didn’t play well enough, i would lose. and then i could learn. losing was okay now. and winning felt good. i studied a bunch of vods and took the things i liked. slowly, my melee became less and less empty. some may know me as “bad mot$/bad zamu/bad leffen/bad aklo” (none of these were nicknames i gave myself). learning is fun. i became less empty, too.
i lost a healthy amount of weight and felt a little confident in my looks for maybe the first time in my life. god it was so fucking hard to lose that weight. i felt like i was stuck for so long and then 30 pounds just bounced off me within a year. i wanna lose another 30. maybe a little more. i don’t really care as long as i feel happy with myself and how i look. i tried my hardest not to micromanage my calories too hard. i tried my hardest not to develop an ed. i think i did that well.
time passed. april came. i got my nose pierced. i got my hair dyed. i felt so fucking pretty for the first time. for the first time, some guy looked at me quizzically when i walked into the boys’ bathroom. i think he must’ve thought i was an international student. “this is the boys’ bathroom,” he said. “wrong one.” i carried that with me for a long time. i had never been correctly gendered at school before. i was elated and i still think about it sometimes.
i went to visit my girlfriend again. she promised it’d be better this time. we were poly and i was new to it so i assumed that what had happened at genesis was just normal and fine, but it still sucked. the same thing happened again, funnily enough. just with a different girl. i lied and said it was fine. later, she told me that she was never really attracted to me. that really fucking hurt. i had only just started feeling pretty, too.
i used to think that no one would really be attracted to me and i tried to accept that as an immutable fact. i used to hear that a bunch. “oh, rainy, you’re so perfect. but i’m just not attracted to you physically”. it hurt because i felt like there really wasn’t anything i could do. that was probably the dysphoria talking, although i wasn’t aware of that back then. i tried to do my best to be happy despite that until i figured out there was another way. i went along this path until i felt happier and pretty and attractive and desirable. i think hearing that opened a pretty deep scar in me that i had to nurse for a couple months. i lied and said i wanted to stay close friends. i wanted to value that friendship so badly despite a broken heart. but try as i might, i was not nearly strong enough to keep that friendship going after that.
i had started getting more comfortable with the melee people at my locals and around them. the atmosphere was comfortable and i felt like my presence was liked. i liked being liked. things felt so different now because i realized that all the love in the world for me could not save who i was back then. love without knowing how to support someone is just a bandaid fix, and i knew this now. i liked myself enough at this point that i didn’t actually need everyone to love me anymore. i loved myself despite all of the old cuts on my body and in my heart.
for the first time, i felt like i didn’t need to move ever so doggedly forward anymore. i didn’t need to struggle with all my might to grow and grow and grow and heal and learn and heal and learn and grow and learn and heal. i felt even freer. i took it upon myself to start looking out for people more not because i had to, but because i could. and because i wanted to help them.
i downloaded hinge and her. i had never used dating apps before because i never felt confident enough to post pictures of myself. i had a bunch of fun experiences and a bunch of people talked to me. it was honestly bizarre having my phone blow up like that. i was like.. wait do people actually think i’m cute?
fuck, that was weird. but i got used to it quick. regardless, i liked the attention. and i felt like i was stable enough to not need it in droves. i was thankful for that. i wore shorts out in public for the first time since 2016.
i joined a friend’s netplay server. this is probably one of the most important things that happened this year.
the arcadian happened! i made a pretty decent run. it was a really fun day. it was the first arcadian where i felt like i was part of a community. i’ve been in the community since 2015 but i never felt really connected to it until earlier this year. i was thankful for everyone around me. the energy in the room was electric and i had an amazing time. i got 5th and i got rolled by pidge and aerius but we go again. i felt like there were clear things i could work on and i was so incredibly happy for espy for winning. i got up on the stage with her and cheered. i was so proud. we weren’t even that close. but wow, she was cute. i always thought she was cute ever since she started coming down to guildhouse. honestly, i was dazzled.
i got closer with some people. one of them sexually assaulted me in may. all i could really do was laugh. well, that’s not true. i could also pull off a mean cry when i had to. i didn’t really cry, though. at least not at first. i don’t really think i processed it until later. but life went on.
i kept working on my degree. i made a couple new friends at school. i kept playing melee. i kept going to work. the only real difference was that i just had more trouble breathing sometimes. i figured i needed to exercise a little bit more cause i had been lazy with it recently.
espy invited me out to a fanime afterparty. i hadn’t been since pre-covid, back in 2018. i was very much on the fence about it because i was comfortable just reading manhwa in my room. she said she’d buy me a drink if i came. i was still on the fence, but she said i deserved to come out and party, since i just graduated. by the way, i graduated! psychology and political science :) she got a lil drunk and was really insistent on me coming. i wanted to see her really bad.
we went around guildhouse and the park and got really fucked up with our friend tyler. we played nidhogg (that one fencing game thingy) and i fucked both of them up. i was on top of the world that night. i was having so much fun. we ended up heading back to the hotel room to chill out for a bit because i Really wanted to lay down somewhere and didn’t want the night to end yet. also i was still pretty drunk so i couldn’t drive. our friend left to grab their controller. i plopped down on the bed and pretty much attacked her chest. she held me a little. i didn’t really want our friend to come back for now. i told her that. he did come back. but i thought about how safe i felt with her. i wanted to see her a little more often. maybe a little more than a little.
wavedash 2023 rolled around. i met and roomed with adam and juma. bracket didn’t go amazing for me, but i couldn’t really be mad losing to two top 100 players. i mean i could. but i played about as well as i could’ve reasonably expected so i was happy. i spent the rest of the weekend grinding friendlies and eating delicious food in rooms with my newfound friends. i watched kung fu panda with aklo and my new friend espy. and also adam and juma i love those guys. a certain someone knocked on our door and asked if we wanted to do ket. i had to pass this time around. the room started clearing out and we finished the movie and got sleepy. i inched closer to espy. i wanted so badly to be held by her. i got in her face and looked at her intently. she got the hint eventually.
my official graduation rolled around! i had been planning for months to come out to my family at graduation. my sister knew a little bit earlier and helped me with my makeup. i was terrified because my dad was transphobic and my brother was, well, a dude’s dude. at graduation, they directed me to a seat near the front. a few minutes later, someone sat next to me. i looked at their nametag, then up at their face. it was breanna, from my community college! what a twist of fate for her to end up next to me. she didn’t recognize me at first. i did look a lot different.
“it’s been so long, rainy! how are you?” i’m thankful for her company during graduation.
my parents and siblings saw me walk the stage as rainy. they were confused except for my sister. but at least i didn’t get hate crimed. some of my family struggles with my gender sometimes. i came out to my extended family about a month later. they welcomed me with open arms and shooed me over to take a “girls only picture”. i almost cried. my extended family has not messed up once. every time i see them, they tell me how much happier i seem and how much more beautiful i am. i simply smile back, but it’s not a courtesy smile. i beam back at them.
i am happier. and maybe even more beautiful.
on the road again (again) (and this road fucking hurts. for some reason, someone put spikes on the road.)
a few weeks later, i was at a smashfest with friends. it got late and i was alone with espy and ally while the others had either left or were out at the pool. i opened up to them about the assault. they told me i wasn’t the first person this happened to. i don’t really think i had processed the event very much until that night. everything came whirling in in an instant. i struggled to speak and breathe. it was difficult to meet their eyes. but i was glad to be able to tell someone, especially people i trust. i didn’t cry yet. but i did wonder why so many bad things kept happening to me. maybe it’s because i keep my hand outstretched. maybe it’s because i don’t know who’s safe and who i should avoid. maybe it’s because i deserved it. i knew in my heart that i didn’t deserve it. i was simply unlucky and stumbled onto all of this misfortune. but wow it fucking sucked.
things got really hard for me after that. i’m glad that i graduated already. if i had taken ten thousand steps forward since 2019, i felt like i had been blown back six thousand of them. enough to where i still had a foundation and could walk forward, but enough to make me feel like i had lost years of progress. i dissociated a lot during this time. i cried a lot. i thought about how betrayed and violated i felt. the body i had been loving so much felt foreign and uncomfortable to me. it was finally my body until it wasn’t anymore.
i thought about how i started presenting as a woman and immediately started getting hit on by creepy older men. i thought about how i started presenting as a woman and immediately got sexually assaulted after by someone i trusted.
but i never wanted to give up. i’m a resilient girl.
despite all my resilience, it took a toll on my health. i almost felt like i was 19 again.. almost. the feeling of having my work cut out for me returned. i had trouble sleeping. the night terrors i used to have as a high schooler came back for me again. i cried a lot. i had difficulty focusing on anything. funnily enough, i did well in melee for a month or two while this happened. i couldn’t tell you why.
i felt like a shell of my former self for what seemed like an eternity. i didn’t want to let espy down. so i kept clawing my way forward. up, and forward. up, and forward. in the end, i ended up desperately moving forward at any cost. doggedly. i tried to forgive them for assaulting me because i knew things were difficult for them. dryly, i realized that i was back to my self-sacrificial and martyring ways. but after all, it was my job to take care of the people that needed it more than me.
it’s probably a trauma response to see someone who wronged me and think that i should be the one who suffers instead of them. and i’m working on it.
i think the idea that anger is uncivilized is silly. that kind of thing only helps out the people who make other people really fucking angry a bunch. i learned how to truly be angry at someone, even if i knew their lives were difficult or they were struggling in some way. for me, that anger felt cathartic. of course i was allowed to be mad. as a boy,
////// as a trans woman, it was never okay to show people i was angry. but, well, i realized that a lot of ideas that people have actually just fucking suck. and i like not having to forgive someone of their sins if it’s what’s best for me. the anger helped me burn off a little bit of ice throughout my body, but it didn’t solve everything. it didn’t even solve most of it.
/////////////////////
i went to goml! i was originally going to go with my friend, but she bailed on me last minute. i did pretty decent but lost a losers set due to some circumstances out of my control. i was upset about it (and honestly when i think about it i have a lot of disdain as my opponent’s biggest fan misgendered me and jeered at me the whole set) but the rest of the weekend completely offset that. i also think they forgot to seed me and i was like. the 650th seed or something. i ended up placing 65th which wasn’t bad. i beat fitzy, love, and koobie, and lost to polish and someone else. but i had an amazing time with everyone there. kaylee, louis, nels, dean freezus, fahey, bambi, and everyone else i had the pleasure of meeting. i went barhopping with the boys. jmook was there too. how can a man be so mysterious and grounded at the same time. the boat was amazing. fahey introduced me to the beauty of the amaretto sour. i downed 3 and started singing payphone with hungrybox on a fucking boat. come the fuck on. that was so fun.
i danced my heart out on that top deck. i’ve never been much of a dancer, but that night i was. i finally understood in my heart what that man meant when he said “there is much sadness in the world but not in this room”. or this boat perhaps. i felt like all my problems stopped existing this weekend. i also tried poutine and it was Quite Good. i slept so well that weekend.
i started visiting espy more often. i’ve never slept well in my home. no matter how much i slept, i always felt tired. but next to her, i wouldn’t be surprised if that was how it felt waking up in heaven. maybe heaven is just the arms of the person you love.
i started looking for a job in my field. i did a bunch of research on a few companies that wanted to hire me. i picked the one with the best reviews (by far). i did aba therapy for a few months. my coworkers were nice, the place was nice, and all indications on linkedin and glassdoor and everything else seemed like it was a great company and industry to work for. it rolls around and i get about 5-10 hours a week. i liked working with kids, but not necessarily their parents. i liked seeing kids show progress. but i really never liked the goal-based system for kids with autism. as a kid with autism myself, i knew that there was 0 fucking chance i could get this 3 year old to draw when he didn’t want to.
there were some mean fucking parents too. my car got its windows smashed, so i called out of work last minute. then it got towed the next week and i had to call out again. i feel like a giant weight lifted off my shoulders each time i didn’t have to go into work and i realized that this work was way too draining to do for $20 an hour for 10 hours a week. i definitely could not do this full time or even for 20 hours a week without wanting to bash my head into a wall. so i said goodbye to the industry.
job searches suck. i probably spent 2 months full time searching for a job that was real and good and everything like that with my newfound degree. eventually i got a bite and came in and killed the interview! it was a job working with survivors of violence and assault. funny, i remember thinking. i’m really not much different from the people i’d be serving.
being free of the job search definitely improved my mental state more than i’d like to admit. having full time work and pay also helped.
i cut all communication with my assaulter in late october. a small part of me felt sorry that i couldn’t help them more. most of me was happy that they gave me a good enough reason to stop talking to them permanently. i guess there was already another reason but maybe i had been a bit too dogmatic regarding my personal views on rehabilitation. i think everyone deserves support and another chance. i didn’t think anyone else would give that to them but me.
happy 23rd birthday to me! i went to guildhouse and met up with a few friends i never got to meet in person before. i had a great time with them. let's hang out again soon! and lili bought me a drink. thank you lili. :3
i was back to being on and off with things, as i had been for most of my life. that includes melee.
things progressed. i still felt somewhat empty and lost. espy was always there for me. i made some more friends and deepened some of my existing friendships. i liked being loved. i liked being seen and understood. i’ve always wanted to be understood by the people around me.
i cried a little. i felt like despite all of the achievements i’d accrued this year, i was slipping so much. i graduated. i had a beautiful girlfriend. i did better in melee. i had a good job now. i was afraid that i wouldn’t be able to maintain it. someone stole my car’s catalytic converter and i thought they’d let me go and everything i had built would crumble. i cried a lot. i didn’t want everything to crumble.
thankfully, it didn’t. i was fine. but i did cry a lot.
genesis black rolled around. i underperformed a tiny bit. i was a little annoyed at the circumstances of the match again. i was really hoping to make a deep run, and i had the perfect bracket to do that. i got owned. but in hindsight, i think that loss helped me way more than winning and making a deep run would’ve done for me. i thought about the loss a bit and sat with it for an hour. i felt a little better because i knew pretty clearly why i lost.
the elixir
i went to get sushi with espy and ally after and we got some ice cream too. i remember it feeling like a switch flipped in my brain. i feel like i just remembered that i didn’t have to be sad anymore. as soon as i accepted that loss, my brain suddenly remembered all of the progress i had made throughout these years. like it just took out the bad SD card with no UCF and no characters unlocked and replaced it with the good one with UCF. it was so fast, like the last few months were just a bad dream.
hits blunt my brain is like an SD card with UCF on it. and my body on HRT is like a spark controller. everything just works the way i want it to and i don’t have to be worried about my inputs blowing up. (disclaimer: i have never used a spark controller but zaid if you wanna send one my way i won’t complain.)
did you guys know i’m neurodivergent. (i bet you did.)
thanks for beating my ass, omar. i’m probably happier for it.
i thought that maybe i was just having a manic episode. sometimes i fluctuate between mania and depression and it makes me think i might have bpd but honestly i think i’ve come so far that i don’t even really care whether i do anymore. i might be walking around with 5 acronyms under my belt but i’m doing well enough that i don’t care to be diagnosed with them. i like the way things are going, anyway.
either way, i’ll be fine.
that whole 5 month period of me feeling like a shell disappeared just like that. as if my brain said that i’d suffered enough. she told me to go love my girlfriend. so i did.
i’m thankful to myself and everyone else that has come along with me for a ride. i’m happier than i’ve ever been and more stable than i’ve ever been. i plan to get my own place in a month or so. i have great friends. i have so many friends now. it’s weird. i love myself and i feel loved. i’m like a big sister now.
i feel like a complete person. i’m still going to keep learning, but i am happy with who i am for the most part. i don’t need to chase progress so desperately anymore.
i’m happy to say that i’m ending the year on a happy note. i feel like i’ve lived a lifetime in this year alone; a lot of it heartrending, but even more of it beautiful. let’s hope there’s even more beauty next year. and less heartrending.
i’ll keep walking, onwards and upwards.
to 2024, and afterwards.
thank you for reading.
;;
shoutouts
to chai, yaku, lili, marcie, cora, ally, she-her, goml crew, and netplayge. i love you all dearly.
and to espy. i love you more than anything. to 2024, with you.