This Means War

Here's the thing: I have a demon living in my head, and I don't like it.

No, I'm not about to start vomiting pea soup. But I do have something, some part of my brain, which likes to attack me from time to time. Sometimes the attacks are very severe. Some have almost killed me. I've been putting up with this all my life and haven't really done all that much about it.

But lately it's been attacking my friends. And I have decided that that's where this ends. Demon, you are going down.

My previous attempts to fight back against this demon were more like halfheartedly swatting a fly because you know you're not going to hit it anyway. This time, it is war. And you don't win a war without some pretty serious strategic planning. So right now, I am attacking this thing from all sides.

I'm writing stuff just for me, where I used to never write unless it was going to be a public blog post. I've been doing 750 words every morning and a gratitude journal at night. I've also, in general, been trying to reach for a journal when I need to just dump my brain, and reach for friends when I actually need to talk to another person. Learning the difference between those things is a big thing for me.

I've been meditating every morning and every night before bed. I've also been going to church again - something I specifically stopped doing because I didn't respect myself enough to tell the hip, radical people around me that I go to church. And I've actually been talking to people at church! I forced myself to go introduce myself to the young adults group, whose meetings I now plan to attend. I'm making plans to actually become a member - something I was pursuing before I sort of fell off the wagon back in the winter. Tomorrow night, I'm going to some kind of "self-compassion" workshop. And I've scheduled a meeting to talk with the minister about some of the problems I'm having and about how to feel comfortable as a trans person in the congregation.

Now that it's (kind of) summer, I'm trying to get outside more. Today after work I went for a walk around the reservoir by my train stop, which helped a lot to burn off some angst. And I've been going to the park with a notebook and art supplies and lunch before work sometimes.

I'm still on a waiting list for therapy, and in the meantime I've found a support group that might help. I'm also trying to expand the pool of people I reach out to when I need help. When I first realized I was trans, I narrowed my circle of friends quite a bit, which resulted in me leaning on just a few people. Now that I'm out, I can - and really need to - talk to more people and give the ones who've already been helping me a break. More importantly, I'm focusing on spending time with people who accept me exactly as I am, not ones who only like me if I play along with their idea of who I should be.

And finally, I'm making sure I have stuff to look forward to. Now that I have Saturdays back off from work, I'm trying to fill them with fun things. My next three are filled with Memorial Day and Pride activities, and then I can figure out more stuff from there.

So those are my plans for winning this war. Give up now, demon. You cannot win.

Reasons why I love my church

I go to a pretty big UU church in Boston (pretty big by UU standards, which is probably kinda small by evangelist Christian standards) and this morning's service reminded me of a lot of reasons why I really like my church:

• The guest speaker was Lama Surya Das, which is the sort of name you expect someone very serious and monk-like to have, except actually he was this very white Jewish guy who had a thick Boston accent, used words like "schlepp" and made fun of yoga.

• During one of the hymns (please note UUs use the word "hymn" very loosely; see below) they asked different sections of the congregation to sing different verses, but instead of saying "men sing this part and women sing this part" they said "people with lower voices sing this part and people with higher voices sing this one".

• One of the "hymns" today was a rousing singalong of "Let It Be"; this was designed to tie in to the theme of Buddhism.
  

• The lead baritone in the choir was inexplicably in drag today. This already seems like a perfect situation, but it was made even better by the fact that this person also had a major solo during a very traditional Jesus-oriented hymn.
  

• When I was having lunch with the young adults group after the service, a guy came up and took our plates away for us; when he left one of the people at my table informed me that his name is Batman. Batman soon returned and made a comment to the effect that "all of our transporters are online".

I like my church.

I don't know what this post is going to be about

The reason I am blogging is because I drank a cup of coffee this morning, except actually it was more like noon, and then started yammering to a friend (who is inordinately patient with my various forms of madness) about starting a religion based on cake and how I should be made a major prophet in this religion because I know how to make rainbow cupcakes, and my friend's response to this was to ask if I am interested in some unwanted energy drinks he has in his fridge and then advise me to go blog, which I think actually meant "you are really amusing right now, but probably not in the way you are trying to be, and you should record this for posterity." Or it meant "you are hurting my head please go do something else." One of those.

So I decided to leave him alone, mostly because I needed to go to the bathroom real bad and then I had to do laundry, but while I was in the bathroom I realized I can't do laundry because I didn't charge my cell phone last night and I have to do that first or I will be ultra bored at the laundromat. So I put my phone on the charger and I decided to read this old Hyperbole and a Half post because we had also been talking about ADD and how I probably have it. And then I decided to blog but then as soon as I started writing my other friend sent me a text asking if I'm feeling better today which reminded me that I had a paranoid freakout last night which reminded me that maybe caffeine was a poor choice today. And I said I'm fine today and then she started texting me about how she is going to Phoenix Comic-Con and is going to see Leonard Nimoy and George Takei and I was like "omg you are a jerk" and she was like "I want a costume, I want a Harry Potter costume" and I advised her to go as Naked Dumbledore from Potter Puppet Pals which reminded me that I saw PPP live in December which I had totally forgotten about because mostly what I was concentrating on at that show was the fact that various strangers kept inadvertently putting their butts and crotches near my butt and crotch and probably most of them were under 18 so that was weird.

I'm pretty sure I did intend to go somewhere with this post besides recounting conversations with people who have not consented to have their conversations shared except it's probably okay because they are the only people who read this blog.

Oh! I could tell you some things I am going to be doing soon! This Saturday I am going to New Hampshire to see a friend's kids in some kind of children's art festival. The following weekend I am going to a friend's Memorial Day gathering all weekend, and then the next two weekends after that I am doing various Boston Pride things with other good friends. Yay.

Also I stopped writing just now to go to the bathroom again and while I was in the bathroom I started thinking about how I like seeing drawings of layouts of things so I decided to draw a map of my kindergarten classroom because I can still remember how everything was.

Key:

1 - Big ugly pink carpet square on which we had morning circle and also where we had to do these evil "games" you played by yourself that no one ever told me how to do and I couldn't pay attention long enough to do them and always got in trouble over
2 - Chalkboard
3 - Location of American flag which we were supposed to look at while we recited the Pledge of Allegiance but I spent most of my time trying to understand where to position my hand so that it was on my heart without being on my boob because in kindergarten I was already starting to get boobs
4 - Play kitchen which was my favorite thing in the world but I didn't want to play in there with other kids so one time I tried to drag all the kitchen things into the middle of the room and the teacher yelled at me
5 - Kidney table at which I remember getting in trouble for coloring human skin yellow and was told instead to just "leave it white"; this table is also where I tried Apple Jacks for the first time
6 - Kidney table at which we did activities where an adult actually bothered to help us so I have neutral-to-fond memories of this table
7 - Sandbox at which I used to play with plastic dinosaurs alongside two quiet boys who would've probably become my friends if elementary school culture didn't make such constant efforts to prevent boys and girls from seeing one another as potential friends, but it does so I just didn't have any friends in kindergarten
8 - Window
9 - Main doorway
10 - Wall of cubbies and coathooks
11 - Some type of computer which was crappy even by the standards of 1991, which we never got to use
12 - Big circle table which is just two kidney tables pushed together which is where we sat when I had my class birthday party to which my mother brought a cake with pink frosting even though I hated pink frosting, and every time I brought that up later in life she just started talking fondly about how this one boy in my class loved the pink frosting so much. At least until the end of 6th grade when that boy got hit by a truck and died, after which point we didn't really talk about it anymore.
13 - Door to the bathroom, in which on St. Patrick's Day we all arrived to find "leprechaun poop" (green Play-Doh) left in the toilet
14 - Counter and sink for doing arty things
15 - Kidney table at which usually an adult sat at the back and several kids sat around and did stupid "art" projects which actually involved following very precise instructions to create things which all came out identical, which to me sounds like the opposite of the definition of "art"
16 - Door to the ~secret teacher room~ where no student was allowed to go except this one time during nap when a girl for some reason started choking on a nickel
17 - Record player
18 - TV

So I know I have a bunch of friends who never went to school and a few crazy friends who really enjoyed school, so I want to clarify that despite all the talk of dinosaurs and strawberry cake and leprechaun poop, kindergarten was actually hell for me. I am pretty sure most of the psychological problems I am currently trying to overcome began in kindergarten. My teacher was mean and would yell at you and punish you for crying, which I did a lot because I had separation anxiety from being away from my mom. I got headlice one time and the teacher gave my parents a condescending lecture about how they needed to wash my hair every other day when they'd only been washing it once or twice a week, which I think is why I have decent hair in all my pictures before kindergarten and a horrible frizzy tumbleweed in all the pictures after. I was constantly in trouble for not finishing work I didn't understand how to do, and if I asked how to do it I'd get yelled at for not paying attention the first time. And my teacher was obsessed with coloring. I'd do all the problems right on a math paper but get points taken off because I forgot to color the puppy at the top. One time I wasn't allowed to have a cupcake on some kid's birthday because I didn't finish coloring a picture of McGruff. (If you don't remember McGruff, he is brown. He was the only thing in the picture. That is not a fun coloring page.)

I still hate her.