MeghanIsMe

And last but not least, a friend of Miriam's (and mine) helped me (well really, she did the whole process) dye my hair yesterday. It's only the second time I've done it: my hair has always been deeply important to me, and doing things to it like that has been scary.

The first time, I asked the stylist to match my natural color. This time, I decided I wanted try going a bit red. I think I really like it. But just as, or possibly more, important than the color was getting rid of that gray.

Image below is a woman with light skin from the lower chest up. She is looking at the camera and smiling. She has small stud earrings on her ear lobe and upper ear. She is wearing a pink knit turtleneck top and pink and gold cat eye glasses. Her hair is a reddish brown shade and is swept down over her near shoulder.

Hey, is it transition Tuesday time? I don't know if I've actually done one of these, but I happened to see an old picture of mine and think it would be interesting to match it up with one from a week ago.

First, me in the Fall of 2015, looking, I think, very much like the leftist, vocally car-free, grad student in human geography that I was. I was about 60 pounds lighter than I am now and biked a few thousand miles a year. I loved that pair of jeans so much! Jeans were the first clothes that I actually started caring about when I started buying women's jeans with fancy washes or embroidery at thrift stores. I was identifying as agender at the time, because I'd decided, rationally, that gender was oppressive and I wanted nothing to do with it.

Second, me a week ago Monday. I'd just done my nails and my eyebrows, and was feeling excited about going out for the night. If I had known, really known, in 2015 that I could be a woman... *sighs* I dunno. I know the prevailing wisdom is that you can't tell someone they're trans, but I can fantasize about someone at least telling me that it's OKAY to be trans. That *I* can be trans too, not just those other pretty trans girls I kind of longed to be like, but somehow felt like I wasn't allowed to be. The 2015 me would have been *thrilled*.

For that matter, I really believe that the 2000 me, if she knew that I would be living authentically as a woman, would have been so very, very happy.

Look at how I'm doing the same head tilt... that makes me happy, for some reason 🥰

Two images:

On the left is a woman with light skin, visible from the knees up, who doesn't realize she is a woman. She is on the thinner side, and has a mustache and goatee, and long brown hair that falls down each side of her chest, about 3/4 of the way to her waist. She is wearing a black T-shirt with a blue and black monochrome design featuring tree branches, birds, and a pair of headphones. Her jeans are a light blue with a wash leaving white marks that make them look like a certain kind of cloudy sky. Behind her is a bookshelf full of textbooks, books on urban studies, camera gear, CDs, and a bandanna emblazoned with EZLN, the logo of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.

On the right is a woman with light skin visible from the chest up. She is looking at the camera and smiling. She is wearing a peach top with a wide horseshoe neckline and a small base-down triangular cutout at the center. Her long dark hair falls over one shoulder and she has one hand resting in front of her upper chest and neck, with fingers spread to show pink fingernails. She is wearing light pink cat eye glasses.

( Pictures behind the cut )

I don't have any pictures with the new piercing because I don't seem to be happy with my face right now. But hey, I got new glasses earlier this month and I really like them!

Miriam bought me a corset, and I love it *so* much! I usually really avoid wearing this shirt (it's one I thrifted shortly after the fire), and felt very "guy" wearing it. But wearing a corset, it shows my reshaped silhouette in a pretty euphoric way.

Getting squeezed in a really tight hug for hours at a time is a really nice bonus. I've loved the way a corset feels since way back when I was with someone who did a lot of ren faires and got to try hers.

I've continued to be a mess. No surprise there I suppose.

My neck and shoulder continue to be in pain. This morning, though, it was improved enough that when I woke up I was able to roll over and lie on my stomach for a while. That's been mostly out of the question for about two weeks, so that's a relief.

I tried to go to a walk-in clinic on Tuesday, but the two that I went to did not have walk-in hours that day, and I gave up. It was nice to be called "ma'am" at the second one at least.
On Wednesday, there was a trans and allies night at a local brewery, Malty National, that Miriam and I talked about going to. We ended up not staying long because of Covid exposure, and I've been having a really hard time since then. I wrote:

Miriam and I got to the trans and allies event yesterday and only stayed for 10 minutes or so because even though the building wasn't very crowded yet, C0₂ levels were already pretty high. High C0₂ levels indicate poor ventilation, and are a proxy for one risk factor for Covid transmission. I bumped into someone I know from the online group who invited me to join them for pizza (which I couldn't eat because of the respirator), but I declined and went home with Miriam. And then I intended to be in the online meeting for the trans group on Wednesday, but I was too distracted and/or distressed and missed it.

I'm having a really hard time with this. I don't know how many more years of this I can deal with. I don't know what else to do. I'm sad and lonely.

I'm still having a really hard time with this, three days later. That, on top of being sick and being in pain have really destroyed what regularity I'd managed to find in my schedule with exercising and managing my food better. It's really hard for me to feel like anything is really worth doing in the abstract long term.

That said, I'm working on trying to get a CV done to either submit for academic library/archives jobs or to construct resumes from as necessary. If I get it done, I'm going to order some pizza for myself, because at least immediate tangible rewards feel somewhat motivating.

I do rather like the picture of myself I took when I got a little dressed up to go out, ane before I had to put a big ugly respirator on my face. This is the ear I'm going to get a helix piercing on, as soon as my mental health is good enough to manage taking care of it.



Yesterday, I was having something like a panic attack in the morning. I wrote:

My brain is a mess lately.

This morning, a combination of two things are in there. 1: I have to get out of bed to take care of animals even if taking care of myself doesn't matter. 2: What if something happens to Miriam (who is going to a job-related thing) and she's just gone without me even getting a chance to see her again, like my dad. I was in tears at the door as she was leaving, asking her to please be safe as though she's going to visit a war zone instead of driving across town to the university.

Today, though, with the pain reduced and the chaos in my brain a bit more under control, I'm going to write about my ideas for my upcoming name change.

A few days ago, Facebook showed me a memory from 1 year ago: a picture of me just before going to my first laser appointment. Here's that picture, followed by a picture of me from last week. Having bangs makes a huge difference and I love my hair so much now! But I think, even beyond that, I see some progress toward a place I want to be. My magical girl transformation continues!

( Pictures behind the cut: )

Details about the animal parade JSK:

This is a dress from Fluffy Tori that Miriam and I backed on Kickstarter for me to possibly wear to pride this past June. It wasn't here in time (which was not unexpected), and I wasn't at pride anyway due to complicated reasons. But I'm looking forward to marching with it next year!

The animals in the parade represent various identities, body types, disabilities, and orientations. That's Audrey the transgender lioness in the front middle.

Technically, it's a JSK, or jumper-skirt, rather than a dress, which is common in EGL (Elegant Gothic Lolita) fashion. It needs a blouse under it, and I hope to have one that goes with it better for the parade. It also needs a poofy petticoat so the parade is floofed out and fully visible!

Miriam is helping me so much with figuring these things out!

For the first time since I bought this parody CTA safety poster from the artist, I have it framed and hung up! I really love this piece! It's going to move to live over my computer, though, because Miriam, as much as she appreciates the concept and story behind it, thinks its visually hideous. I actually really love it when we find places our tastes clash and can talk about them because it's so unusual for it to happen and leads to funny conversations.

The story: years ago, I was working in Chicago and taking the CTA on the rare occasions I didn't bike for some reason. Someone named Bleh the Buddha was putting an array of stickers up on the Pink Line, covering up the official CTA signage that he was parodying. (The original version of this one, for example, said things like "Listen for instructions," and "Remain on the train".) This is just one example of half a dozen or so that I saw, all of which I think I have pictures of.

I loved these so much that I found him online and wrote him to ask to buy a print. I did, and when I got it in the mail, I shouldn't have been surprised to see that he sent me an actual sticker, not just a print. He signed it too.

I love this piece because I have so many good feelings connected to Chicago and my time there that this brings to mind, and because it's an anarchic reclamation of public space for public art, and because buying it supported a local artist, and because I really think it's really clever and funny.

I miss Chicago a lot, and having this up feels like a little contrarian piece of it with me.

(I got the frame plus matting from a thrift store and did a pretty lackluster job recutting it to fit. I'll do better with it one of these days. But for now, it contributes fairly to Miriam's distaste.)

Oooh! I found a writeup and interview with him! https://southsideweekly.com/bleh-the-buddha-emerging-artist/

I went to that little spot at the end of Cherry Drive again where I met a woman and her elderly mother who were there with their Chihuahua. We chatted for about half an hour about all sorts of stuff. I showed her pictures of my animals, talked about the fire, my bike, my animals, where I'd lived, and stuff. It was nice.

It was hard to photograph the sunset on my phone, but I do mostly like this one. That's the Co-op Refinery in the background. Most of bright spots on it are just lights, but that's a flame at the top of the stack that is the fourth structure from the left of the frame.

Thinking of doing more sunset photography may be the first time I've thought with any significant motivation about bringing my surviving camera out of the apartment with me since the fire.

I wish I'd found this little spot earlier than the week before moving. It feels kind of special and I'm going to miss it.

I got ready to go out just in time for drizzling rain to start and a severe thunderstorm warning to be issued. I went anyway, but stayed near home so I could get out of the rain quickly if it picked up.

I biked north on the path and then to the end of Cherry Drive, which is a little paved circle at the edge of the railway line and south of some farm fields. There was a cool, pleasant wind and I could watch lightning in the wide open sky. This is one thing, maybe the only thing, I really like about this region of Saskatchewan's geography. There is so much sky sometimes! It makes me wish I'd had my really wide lens with me.

Here's the Strava record if you're interested:
https://www.strava.com/activities/9565915182