MeghanIsMe

I was a mess yesterday, for some reason. In FB I wrote:

"Anxiety is worse today and tonight than it's been for quite a while. I felt anxious and almost panicky driving around for errands this morning.I have my first appointment regarding voice therapy tomorrow morning at 9:15 and am anxious about everything and am having trouble relaxing enough to try to sleep.
I don't know why I'm a mess right now, but I want to be at the bottom of a cuddle pile with people petting my hair and telling me I'm a good girl and I'm doing my best and it'll be ok.
Gonna snuggle Miriam and my shark friends and breath."

That was some particularly bad mental weather, but the storm has passed, leaving just the usual clouds at the horizon.

I had my first voice therapy appointment today. It was primarily getting a baseline for the therapist on where I am in my transition and with my voice. It was interesting to look at the quantitative analysis of my voice after doing a recording and ask questions about it. I understood about 75% of the answers.
She said would have been very surprised if I hadn't already done some voice training or practice. Which I have, through those Youtube voice training videos I've mentioned. I have a second appointment in the new year and I'm really excited to get started on the work.

My homework in the meantime is to think about things about my voice that I like. Which is hard. But she talked about doing so a lot more broadly and about more than technicalities or the actual sound. Things like how I like reading to people. Maybe once I've thought about that for while, I'll write about it here.

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I just watched anime in which a high school girl made a bunch of zombies literally explode by reciting Lady Chatterly's Lover to them from memory. Train to the End of the World keeps getting weirder and I love it.
I'm still watching anime while walking on the treadmill. But I did, in fact, give up on Hidamari Sketch. At least for now. It was just...really dull. Some people really love it, and that's valid. I do not.

Instead I watched a couple episodes of something called Stardust Telepath. There's a girl who is terribly shy and socially anxious and finds it really hard to talk to other people. Becuse she has so much trouble with other humans, she has always daydreamed of meeting an alien and making friends with them. Then a new girl starts in her class who says she is an alien, and it seems quite possible she is. The Earth girl still has a lot of trouble talking to her, but the alien girl can use "foreheadpathy" to understand the Earth girl's thoughts while touching their foreheads together. It's really sweet! I'm not sure if there's going to be any romance, but it definitely counts as yuri to me.

Then, for a couple days, Miriam wanted to watch something with me, so it's been 5 episodes of Train to the End of the World. A technology company was ready to unveil the new generation of cell phone technology: 7G! But when it was activated, it entirely reshaped the world, turning people into animals, or making them tiny, or infesting them with mushrooms, or making them zombies. It's also possible that the entire rest of the world outside of the train line between Agano and Ikebukuro no longer exists, but we're not really sure? Four girls from Agano get onboard a train and make their way toward Ikebukuro, where the 7G thing started, and to find one of their friends who left Agano after a fight. As I noted, it keeps getting weirder, and I kind of love it.

On the manga front, I started reading the first volume of Goodbye, My Rose Garden. In Victorian England, a Japanese woman, Hanako, goes to England to meet a novelist whose work she loves passionately. She spends a month visiting the publisher every day, and is always turned away. Then, an aristocrat named Alice who also loves the same novelist meets her there and hires her to work on her estate. In time, during a discussion of the novelist's work, Alice says that she coul arrange for Hanako to meet him. But in return, Hanako must do one thing for Alice: she must kill her.

I think Alice is the ostensibly male novelist, personally. I'm enjoying this so far and the art is beautiful.

In case Toronto folks may be looking for a Covid-cautious roommate: this is a Bluesky post from a person I know. I haven't known her very long, but I really like her.

She is a blind and otherwise disabled trans woman who is looking for a place to live. She is Covid cautious and immune compromised. She cannot work, but receives disability benefits.

If you are Covid cautious and looking for a roommate yourself, I think she'd be a really great possibility. Miriam and I are in her parents' basement and not in a position to consider a roommate, but Yasmin really needs to find a place. If you can help, please contact her or me.

https://bsky.app/profile/glitterblossom.bsky.social/post/3ldm4r52xnc2g

So, that was a really lovely evening with Mississauga girl! There will likely be more of them.

She showed me a conversation she was having with her friends about me. She called me a MILF 🤣 If the shoe fits... She also thinks it's quaint that I call everything an IM instead of saying text. To me, text is when you send someone an SMS message? I am older than 95% of the people on Lex and T4T, and while maybe in a perfect world that wouldn't come up at all, I'm glad she thinks my occasional anachronisms are cute 😂
I very much enjoyed my time with her and am looking forward to more visits.

However, I am also realizing that I am very inclined to do things that give people joy *just* to give them joy. If those things include expressions of affection that I am performing that are not actually true representations of myself and my feelings, that's a problem for everyone involved. It's hard to disentangle the positive feelings from giving someone I care about joy vs positive feelings from knowing that I just gave someone joy regardless of my emotions toward them. Those reactions are both really strong, and the latter may even make me *think* I have more affection and feelings than I do. I feel like I'm pretty good, in general, at emotional self-awareness these days, but this may well be a blind spot for me. I'm wondering if this is a trauma response on my part, in some way. I have things to think about.

That thought brought to you by gender transition, the end of life-long emotional disassociation, and the letters HRT.

Car insurance has become kind of a disaster. I spent quite a while on the phone with CAA and got through the whole process of getting a quote. For some reason the agent's audio kept dropping out and we had to call each other back a couple times and that dragged things out even further. We got all the way to the end with a quoted rate of X. Then, after putting in my driver's license info, the quote turned into 4X because I have a G2 learner's license instead of a full G license.

When I moved from Amsterdam to Hamilton, I got an Ontario driver's license. At first they thought I was only eligible for a learner's license, which at the time was fine. The only restrictions are no more passengers than seat belts and zero alcohol, neither of which were things I would be doing anyway. Just as we were moving out of the province to SK, I got a letter saying that they had made an error, and I was actually eligible for a full G license. It said I should return as soon as possible so they could correct the error.
Well, I didn't make it back, and I swapped my license for a Saskatchewan one. There were no issues, and insurance (which is provincial in SK) was fine. Insurance here, though, because I have a learner's license, quadrupled.

But! I have a copy of the letter DriveTest sent me saying to come back as soon as possible, and explicitly noting that I should have gotten a G license in exchange. It's been a little over 3 years now, but this is as soon as I could get back. I've had some shit going on, you know?

I'm going to push really hard to get them to swap my license on the strength of this letter. My license number is even the same as it was for that month here, so...they should upgrade me? Right?

This has all been terribly stressful for Miriam and I both because it's causing difficult in getting the car registered too. Miriam may end up just getting insurance in her name only, at least for now, if this continues to be a roadblock.

And I wrote an update for my seeking companionship filter!

I haven't said too much here, in part because I was kind of a mess since the election and wasn't doing a lot of seeking. But my head's been a bit more together and I am not going to let anxiety take any more of my life away than I have to. I've done enough of that!

So I'm still kind of chatting with the person who was giving me egg vibes, but I'm not convinced that she/they will actually want to ever meet up in person. Which is fine. If they do, it would be fun!
I've played Satisfactory a few times with the girl in Peterborough, and am talking about more factory building this weekend. I think we might be factory friends if nothing else, and that's great! It's wonderful having people into the same weird games I love.

I kind of dropped the ball with the woman here in town who's post about looking for hookups I responded to a while back. Having thought about it, part of it has been anxiety about, like, not really having a script to follow in a few ways. I've never done hookups, so that's one new thing. She also hasn't expressed strong preferences about she's into, which puts me in a position of expressing things I want to someone without knowing what kind of reception to expect, and...that's kind of new for me 😅 But I messaged her again after something over a week.

Here's the most exciting part though. I made a post on Fet in a T4T group I joined recently, kind of expecting that, like my other intro posts on other groups, it wouldn't get much response.
This girl in London (ON) responded and she is *so cool*. She's a grad student who is researching local adaptations of Marxist thought and iconography. That sounds really fascinating, since so many political thinkers are anchored in a particular Western social/political/cultural world view (as all humans are). How do people with very different underlying assumptions integrate that kind of thing? She's coming at it from a history perspective, and I could easily have chosen to be a historian at one point in my academic career, and she thinks human geography is fascinating and, as a historian, really appreciates librarians and archivists too, and I think we have so much we could connect over. We also have pretty similar politics, which is a big thing.

She likes long communications in text. She's early in her transition and not very experienced with a lot of things, and to some extent and in some ways, that's true of me too? We're both looking for experiences we haven't been able to have before, and I think maybe we can find some of them together. She is young and searching and I feel a lot of responsibility to not fuck anything up for her if I connect with her, but I am very intrigued by her for several reasons. Looking at her activity on FL, I see she's quite new there, but she's also busy trying to make other connections, finding munches to go to, making friends, maybe finding other play partners, and that's awesome! I am just so damn proud of and happy for trans folks who figure out who they are and start living the way they want to. You go get it girl!!

We're talking about meeting up in person in London this weekend to see how things flow in person. I'm pretty damn excited. And I am now sort of micro-analyzing the way I communicate with her. She said she likes long messages, but are mine *too* long? Does the fact that her most recent response was short mean I'm being too much? I have fears of being too much for people, and while I'm not actively looking for a girlfriend instead of a friend and play partner...I also think she's really nifty. I have some tummy butterflies.

My emotions have been yoyoing a lot lately, sometimes by the hour. On the downswings, lying down in a dark place and removing stimulation helps, so I've been trying to do that instead of doomscrolling on my computer, or freezing in place because I don't have capacity to make decisions about what I should do next. It's not very fun. Talking with Miriam about it last night gave me some insights, as talking with her often does.

I have more positive things in my life than I've had in a long time. In-person events, in-person friends, and confidence to reach out and look for community and connections are really all pretty new. That's a lot of disruption, and disruption is stressful, even when it's good. And there's some big bad stuff too that doesn't help. The US. My living situation and the clutter.

I regularly have moments when I feel really great in ways I haven't regularly felt in years, and that gives me a lot of hope. I very much believe that things are better now, and will keep getting better. But I need to incorporate all this change and find a new baseline.

Anyway, I sent in another job application: public services librarian in London. Which would be a crappy commute, but for a job that pays decently and gives me library experience for my resume, we'll move further from Hamilton and Toronto, even though I really really don't want to.

I self-medicate with food, and I've been having a really hard time not stuffing myself to the point of real pain sometimes. I've been trying to be more active and bike more and lose weight for a long time, and I was getting somewhere this past spring and summer, but now, I don't know. I don't really know how to deal with what's going on in the US.

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I had a gender focused day a few days ago. Miriam and I drove to Tonawanda, NY to notarize and mail my affidavit to correct the sex on my birth certificate. I was waiting until I had documents to do a name change at the same time, but I decided it's time to get that done in light of current events. A friend there Miriam has known for a few years but whom we've never me in person helped tremendously. She then took me thrifting and was a huge help again in finding clothes, creating outfits, and getting them on me to try out. She's also talking about more thrifting and helping me put outfits together (which I've always had trouble with) and about helping me learn to dye my hair. I'm really excited about both of those things!

I found another weird irrational gender thing. I'm cleaning up, and crushing soda cans to fit in the small bin for recycling pickup here. Stepping on cans to crush, or actually, crushing them at all, them feels like a "guy" thing and makes me kind of dysphoric. I bought a wall-mounted can crusher, which does seem to help a lot. It also keeps empty cans from piling up all over, which is one less bit of debris to get in my way. There is *a lot* of stuff to get in my way down here. I'm working on it, but it's pretty stressful.

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Despite the state of the world, we need to keep taking care of ourselves. I need to keep taking care of myself. It's hard.

I got the flu and Covid vaccines on Tuesday. As always, I have no reaction at all (other than minor local muscle soreness which was gone the next day) to them, which always makes me wonder if they're effective. But I got them.

To sign up for the vaccinations, I had to list previous shots, and which vaccines they were. I can't remember details like that! I had the two original ones in the Netherlands, and a booster in SK before I had a health card so none of those are on any official record I can access. I gave approximate dates, and for the kind of vaccine, I wrote "I can't remember." That was apparently good enough.

Honestly, I was kind of annoyed when I've been asked which kind I wanted. I had the option in Regina, and I said that I didn't care, and they told me I had to choose one, but didn't have any information about the differences. What information am I supposed to use to choose one, if I haven't been keeping up with the literature? Isn't this what medical professionals are supposed to do?

It's good for folks who have knowledge and want options to have them, but the medical professionals are supposed to give me the best preventative available based on their knowledge and judgement, not based on my knowledge and judgment! I am not a medical professional! I actually trust experts, unlike a disturbing number of people out there who seem to think Youtube videos are the equivalent of professional knowledge.

A friend on FB said that the vaccines are of similar efficacy but some people have a strong reaction to one or another, and in that sense it's a matter of personal choice. I wish staff would have told me that. It made me kind of anxious to choose one without any data to make that choice with, and this process should be as easy as possible to get the most people to do it.

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On a happy note, four or five months ago, when I was looking for a swimsuit for the first time, I was terrified. I almost couldn't get myself to go to a store in person, but Miriam helped and encouraged me, and I felt pretty safe at Torrid, and I bought a one-piece swimsuit with a fairly modest skirt. I ended up really loving it.

And today? I am the proud owner of a two piece string bikini and bottom set. I will only be wearing that one around people I feel safe with, but I really love it too! And though Miriam came with, I was able to go into a women's clothing store that was *not* Torrid, and just look around and try stuff on.

Sometimes, something reminds me of the vast amount of progress I've made over the last years.

Not everyone wants to see pics like that, but if you do, let me know how to send them to you? I like sharing...

Why do I have all the fasteners for the furniture I disassembled *except* the bed frame? Now I have all these pieces of bedframe sitting around and nowhere to put them because they weren't going to be taking up space.

I'm so tired of moving. Including places I lived when I was a little girl, this is the 18th place I've lived. I'd really like to just *be* somewhere for a while.

My options with the bed are to go back to the U-Boxes and take out potentially 40 boxes full of stuff and the remaining furniture and go through them looking for those fasteners, or to order them from IKEA as spare parts.

So I'm now going through the Brimnes instructions to make a list of parts to order.

I just blocked someone in a trans group who is arguing against voting for Harris or Trump because they're equally bad. I have no patience for trans people who are complicit in their own oppression, and I certainly don't need to hear what they have to say.

And yes, that's where I'm at because that's where we're *all* at. If you're not voting because they're both just as bad, or "red fascist vs. blue fascist" doesn't make a difference, you are disconnected from reality and causing me direct harm.

I loaded and unloaded a king bed frame, a two seat sofa, a TV stand, and a bunch of miscellany, so I'm pretty wiped. But after I rest, I'm going to get the bed frame put back together so I'm not sleeping on a mattress on the floor anymore. Once, I was debating whether it was worth bringing the frame down into the basement only to take it back out again once I'm working, but setting it up will help me feel a bit more like I'm settled in to a home.

Putting the rest of the sofa together and attaching it to the chaise, then raising the TV up on the stand will make it so I can sit next to Miriam and write or play games, and will give me an at least sort of comfortable space to invite people over for yuri and snuggles.

I got my plastic rolling drawers full of electronic and stuff too, along with two of my toolboxes: the one full of typical hand tools, and the one full or random fasteners and other things. I ended up not finding that last remaining box with two more monitors in it. All the furniture came out of one U-Box, and I decided I wasn't up to unloading the whole other U-Box looking for that, or our winter coats. The coats were in the very first box I packed ("won't be needing those for a while!") so they are probably all the way in the back and at the bottom.

So as well as not being able to get a cargo van, When I got there, I saw two U-Boxes outside and thought they were ours. One was turned so that the door couldn't open, so Miriam and I went around front to ask someone to move the boxes.

It turned out those were not ours, but they got someone to bring ours out pretty quickly. They brought out two boxes, but one of them was the wrong one. So, last time we were there, we took enough stuff that we repacked our 3 boxes into 2. They brought out 2, but one of them was the box we left empty last time.
So I had some moments of fear about what happened to the other box, but it was still there, and in fact, our record hadn't been updated to show that we were no longer renting that third box.

So hopefully that's all been fixed now!

I would really, really like to find enough income to be in our own space again, unpack all of our stuff, and feel stable. Some day, right?

On a lighter note, have some gushing about yuri!

This scene at the end of the first volume of Our Teachers are Dating! Terano is wearing a sexy bra because she hopes that Hayama is going to see it. And once they have reached that state of undress, Hayama does see it and asks "Were you...hoping for this?"

Terano: "W- well, um... yeah..."

Hayama: "Please let me...give you everything you hoped for."

omg yes ❤💕🥰

I've already read this series, but I'm rereading it now that I have physical copies 🙂

And I'd completely forgotten the part near the beginning of volume 2 where Terano is kissing Hayama and leaving marks all over her, and she thinks "It's like how...writing your name on your favorite things isn't
enough...you have to put a whole bunch of stickers on them too."

Girl, you are so right! 😂