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.

I am a special snowflake!

(Video is tangentially relevant but mostly here because I think you should watch it.)

Almost my entire life has been an internal war between trying to make myself be normal and trying to figure out why I am so weird. I've slowly been peeling off layers of the person I was raised and socialized to be, to reveal the person I actually am. When I was twelve I realized I couldn't be Baptist and when I was sixteen I realized I couldn't be Christian at all. When I was thirteen I realized I wasn't heterosexual (and then again when I was 15 and again when I was 21 - I kept going in and out of my own internal closet). When I was 17, I realized I was probably not neurotypical, something I had suspected even as a little kid. I always knew I hated school, but I didn't quit until I was 16 and I didn't find the unschooling community until I was 22. And, since this is mainly a blog for close friends, I may as well come out and say that in the past year I have discovered I am not cisgender (meaning: my body says I should be a woman, but my sense of self says I am not.)

The process of figuring out who I am has mainly been a matter of hearing the right words. I've felt weird and funny and square-peggish my whole life but I couldn't know who I was without the words. I knew what my spiritual beliefs were but I didn't have the word "Unitarian"; as soon as I learned it I immediately knew what I was. I knew what sorts of people I found attractive but I didn't have the idea of "queer" (as opposed to lesbian or bisexual); once I did, I knew that was me. Sometimes I had half the idea but it wasn't enough. For example, I had the word "trans", and while I was inexplicably drawn to it I didn't see myself there, but the word "genderqueer" struck my soul like a bell. I had the word "autism" and I knew it was like me, but I didn't have concepts like "Asperger's" or "sensory integration disorder" or "highly sensitive person"; once I knew those, I knew where I fit. And I knew I left school to learn on my own, but I didn't have any word for what I was doing ("dropout" only being a word for what I wasn't doing).

Each of these discoveries has freed me initially, but the problem is that claiming them requires a lot of self-confidence that I don't always have. They're not only outside the mainstream, they're outside the words for being outside the mainstream! I'm not straight, neurotypical, schooled, religious, or a cis woman, but nor am I gay, homeschooled, atheist, or a textbook-approved sort of trans or autistic person. It takes a lot of courage to accept yourself as being outside the mainstream, but it takes even more to embrace living in all these in-between spaces. I don't do well with being in-between, and I've spent a lot of time trying to force myself to be completely gay or completely a boy, telling myself I'm either more disabled than I am or not different at all, and so on. One of the hardest things about collecting so many labels is that you tend to get accused of just wanting to be special and unique, of just wanting attention. No one's ever directly accused me of those things, but I've definitely thrown that accusation at myself. The first time I told someone I was questioning my gender identity I spent the rest of the day telling myself I was "such a fucking girl" and that I had some nerve coming out to a "real" trans person. I've spent the last eight years going back and forth on whether I'm "impaired" enough to call myself autistic, which results in long periods of denying and neglecting my needs until I sort of shut down and become impaired. And of course there's all the times I ignore my spiritual needs (admitting you go to any sort of church or believe in anything is just not cool in a lot of the circles I run in) until I have an existential crisis and become deeply depressed.

So I'm trying to start treating myself better and taking my needs more seriously. And maybe where that starts is by standing up and saying, goddammit, I'm weird. I like wearing nail polish while being called "he", I could spend the rest of my life listening to music in a rocking chair in the dark and be happy, I'm agnostic with regard to the fairies at the bottom of the garden, I'm attracted to quite random sorts of people with little regard to what genitalia they have, I think K12 school ruins kids and higher ed perpetuates the kyriarchy. I don't do any of these things to get attention, I do them because they come naturally to me, because they're what I enjoy doing or what I genuinely believe. But if I need to seek attention and make a fuss in order to have the right to do them, then I will fucking well do that. I believe in a world where everyone is free to be exactly as weird as they are, and if I'm going to help build that world, I need to start by living it myself.

Gratitude Post

So, my friend/mom of two of my friends (that is hella awkward wording but I'm never sure how to express being friends with a specific member of a whole family I love) posts a list of five things she is grateful for at the end of each day. I love that idea, but I am horrible at doing anything on a daily or weekly basis (see Exhibit A: this blog). But since I'm in a happy, lovey mood today I'm going to do one big fat list of many, many things I am really enjoying in life right now, in no particular order:

The really genuinely sweet kids I babysit (when I say sweet, keep in mind one of them is a 14 year old boy, so that's saying something)

"Tension Tamer" tea, of which I presently have a mug which is larger than my head

Housemates who have my back when other people are not so nice

Lavender incense

A rapidly increasing understanding of "love" and "friendship" as meaning so much more than anything in our culture ever tells us they should

Living in the part of the country I wanted to live in ever since I was a kid, seeing beautiful houses everywhere I go, feeling the seasons change (especially to spring!)

Looking in the mirror and genuinely liking what I see

Spending lots of time recently with people I really love

Rediscovering my love of creating music and art - I honestly don't feel whole without them

Being *thisclose* to driving again, but also appreciating how nice my ass looks I feel after walking two miles a day

Being called Elisha - finally for the first time in my life, being proud when I say my name, when other people say my name, when I write it, when I see it written...

Living in a nice cozy basement - yes, I actually like living down here!

Earbuds that don't fucking fall out of my ears every few seconds

My beautiful rainbow bracelet that my Buncy made me, even though it currently has an unsolvable knot in the cord

Finally having an appointment to start therapy

Feeling loved, respected and understood

This was going to be longer but Buncy and Roni and Fez got online and totally ruined my blogging mojo. I am grateful for them anyway though :p

I really need to blog but there is a horrible clacking noise outside

This is a visual representation of what my brain is currently capable of being aware of. Think of it like one of those horrible tag clouds, except clicking on it won't force you to post it on your Facebook with a link to my blog (OR WILL IT?!):

I feel kind of bad now because I opened this with a mildly amusing MSPaint image and probably made you think I was going to write something quirky and whimsical that might make you think I was ripping off Allie Brosh or The Oatmeal, but instead I'm going to write about how I paid a bunch of bills today and how I'm mentally unstable and need therapy.

:D!!!!

No, I really did pay a bunch of bills today. That is the good news. I paid the property tax on my house in Florida, which had been hanging over my head like an angry frowning cloud of doom, and also my cell phone bill, and I put insurance on my car which I was supposed to do like four months ago. You would think after getting that many things off my chest my emotional state would be similar to that of Jimmy Buffet on laughing gas, but instead I am sitting here fending off an anxiety attack because:

• My housemates decided to listen to "Struttin' That Ass" while I was trying to decipher an insurance form
• Someone on Tumblr said something irritating
• While I was trying to complain to a friend about the thing on Tumblr that was irritating, Google Talk decided to shit its pants
  
• CLACK CLACK CLACK CLACK

White people problems, I have them.

But no, seriously, I am way way oversensitive and have actually been having a really hard time emotionally these days. I am going to call tomorrow and try to make a therapy appointment. I've needed to do that for a long time, for various reasons, but lately I'm just freaking out way too often. The other night my roommate found me weeping on the couch for reasons I can't even remember now, although I'm pretty sure they boiled down to "everyone hates me and I will die alone". All of my emotional crises boil down to that, even when someone is clearly sitting right there demonstrating that they care about me.

The thing is, when I'm emotionally healthy I can be remarkably clearheaded, intuitive, even wise; I'm good at defending my beliefs, and people around me are even convinced I possess some sort of emotional tenacity that exceeds that of most people. When I'm emotionally healthy. When I'm not, which is far more of the time than I would like it to be, I am deeply insecure and ready to believe the worst of people. The more clear it would be to an unbiased observer that a person loves me, the more I become convinced they actually hate me and find me annoying and want me to go away. This of course tends to be really hurtful to those people because they are trying so hard to show they love me and I'm basically like "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" But the thing is, in that mental state, I really can't. No matter how loud or how often they express it. And that's scary.

So I'm going to get into some therapy. I really wish I had enough capacity for self-love* to be doing it for my own sake, but really I just want to stop hurting the people I love. In the meantime, I am trying to get into some more hobbies. I obtained a guitar via the means of someone in my house going "Here you can have this guitar nobody uses it," and I'm learning to play very slowly. I reorganized the craft closet so I can find art supplies when I want them. I'm trying to figure out how to get Minecraft to work on my computer, and I restarted Pokemon Pearl because I'm too cheap to buy the new gen. I've also been thinking my brain and body need more exercise, so I've been looking at math and physics videos on Khan Academy, and I want to find some sort of sport or martial art or dance or thing to learn. Anything to occupy myself with things that make me happy instead of just ruminating over all my fears all the time.


*Shut up, Kyle**

**I really enjoy the fact that adding a footnote telling Kyle to shut up resulted in Kyle following my blog

Weird Kids

Last night out of nowhere I had this sudden memory of my two best friends from second grade.

One was a girl, I'll call her D, who I was in Girl Scouts with. She was extremely tomboyish, and for a couple years in elementary school she asked everyone to call her a very boyish name because she said she was supposed to be born a boy. We used to play at each other's houses all the time and she taught me how to do cool stuff like climb trees and build forts and pee in the woods. She was also kinda mean and would tell me lies just because she knew I was too trusting and would believe them, or would make me do stuff "or I'm not your friend anymore". At the time I was too naive to realize it, but when I look back at things that happened at her house I'm pretty sure her stepfamily was abusing her in some way. She moved away in middle school, and I've never been able to track her down again.

The other was a boy, we'll call him B, who was older than everyone else because he'd repeated a grade. B was very shy and bad at sports, and only seemed to make friends with girls. He was an adorable, sweet boy who D and I both always had a crush on and would fight over sometimes. I caught up with him at my favorite gay bar a few years ago and gave him a hug. He's still sweet, but his life doesn't seem to have gotten much easier since second grade.

I think about childhood and childhood friends a lot, but what struck me was how all us kids who were so queer (or at least got treated like queers) found each other and stuck together. And I started thinking about my other friends in elementary school. There was my best friend S who was so hyperactive most people couldn't stand her (I thought she was fun). Then there was my fourth grade posse: MM, who had an extremely odd sense of humor; her best friend R, who was a boy who took gymnastics and, like B, had only female friends; and J, whose dad was in prison. There was MH, who was as poor as I was and whose mom I later found out was schizophrenic like my mom. (Her mom, at one point, was my mom's only friend.) Also in my life were the class "fat kid" J who once begged me to be his friend because nobody else would; and RM, who once threw a desk at a teacher and eventually got put in classes for the "severely emotionally disturbed". I was never close friends with either of them but I always thought they were nice, sweet boys who didn't deserve to be treated like they were. Later, my best friends were SB and SG; the former was the only Jew in our whole town, the latter had a delicate family situation and was being controlled to within an inch of her life all the way to adulthood. Both were "goth kids" who couldn't fit into the extremely Christian culture in our school.

My whole life my friends have been the people who weren't hanging out with anybody else. I just naturally do that; I go past the big crowd and find the people sitting on the edge with no one to talk to. I don't do it out of pity, and I didn't as a kid. Those are just the people I most want to be around. As a kid I absorbed a lot of cultural messages that said this is just proof that I was only good enough to make friends with people who are desperate for friends. But maybe that's my gift. Maybe going directly to the people who are invisible (or visible for the wrong reasons) to everyone else and finding something good in them is what I'm good for, what I've always been good for. I feel like this is coming across as "oh look what a do-gooder I am, being nice to the weird kids" and that's not what I'm trying to say at all. I'm saying I love the weird kids *for* being weird, not in spite of it. What I'm trying to do is remind myself that I matter. I'm trying to look at the little child that I once was and see what's really special about her the same way I would do with a child in my life now. And I think maybe that's it. That little kid I used to be was always going around loving people who thought nobody would love them. And she never had any idea how important that was.