globetrot

...these are just predictions. i might have some massive self discovery period and become a travelling one woman band.

this is just how i see my life going, and it'll all be better if i transition.

...maybe if everything magically works out, i'll be actually really happy, and i won't have to worry about my stupid, singular, 16-year-old xy chromosome ever again. i can just focus on being a normal human being.

my mental health also isn't gonna get any better if i leave it by itself.

maybe i'm being kind of hasty and self worshipping when i say that there's a glimmer of hope of me working through my issues (apart from dysphoria :D) by myself, without a therapist. but i'd need to focus my full attention onto them... which might be difficult without hrt.

see where my problems are coming from, now? no hrt makes anxious. anxiety makes me scared of hormones, which makes my anxiety worse. :(

and as for work, i'm trying not to think about it. neither of my siblings have ever worked a full time job, so maybe i don't have to either. but if i'm importing drugs that my parents deem "unnecessary and unsafe" i have pretty few options...

as for my highschool education, it's going fine. i'm still behind on everything and i don't know if the things i've chosen to study will actually make me happy.

and, eventually i'll be carted off to university, and i'm scared of that, too. i'm only going to be there for like, three years if i want to get a degree, and, how much of that will i be able to meaningfully spend on myself as an adult?

if my parents don't like it, i'll have to wait until i live alone, or at least have my own money, to buy hrt. this is not a thing i'll be able to do for a while. living by myself is also something i'm a little scared of, i have very few life skills, i can barely cook, and i'm pretty socially anxious...

and if i leave my mind in the millions of places it is now, i can't really focus enough to try and fix or learn any of these things.

my parents are pretty avidly opposed to my transition. and, if i start looking to the far future...

i think i'll be a lot comfier with myself if i had estrogen. i have almost no desire to get bottom surgery, and i don't know if i'll still want facial feminisation surgery after ~2 years of hrt.

i think i'd probably be a little easier to talk to, and be in a relationship with, and be more hardworking, if i was always this comfy, and this undistracted by the world i have to live in. when i can say stuff like this and really believe it, it seems kinda silly that i spent so long in that questioning period.

and, i think about transitioning a lot. i always have. one thing i did quite late in this month, is really, truly come out to my dad. and at first he seemed ok with it, but he seems to have a very transphobic rhetoric, and is being almost more spiteful than helpful. he seems eager to rush me to therapy and confirm this is nothing but puberty blues. and maybe it is, is what's sad.

althouogh, i'm still allowed to be excited, right? estrogen is meant to improve focus, and reduce that kind of hanging brainfog that i've been worried about for so, so long...

in the past section, i said that i was entering a kind of self loathing, because i see the people around me all doing better than me. and, this will sound super stupid, but i think i might not be doing these zany projects for myself anymore, i might just be kind of toiling away for weeks for a tiny moment of external validation, or to look cool, maybe.

...my hero, gregg turkington, wasn't making a zine, being in 10 bands at once, writing movies, performing live shows, all to be cool, like gregg turkington. he was doing all that because it's what interested him at the time. i could use that critical thinking.

one thing that i know i like is trying to be funny. i'll probably try writing shorts for a while, and putting them on youtube...

hell, maybe i could even try and animate them. that could be interesting.

that should be the thing i focus on after my next game. i'm gonna get kinda good at drawing.

...all those things i thought about doing were just from this month. i've been thinking a lot of thoughts, i wonder why?

and, because i wanna experiment... what about a zine, too?

i think i might know enough interesting people to just, ask really politely for them to write passionate articles and send them to me. i'd also love to get it printed on shitty newspaper, in black and white...

hm. would this make me happy?

i was this excited about the blog. and, as fun as it was, it wasn't as fun as i thought. it became an obligation too quickly.

i'd also love to keep making music. it's a thing that i definitely don't love as much as drawing, or designing, or even writing honestly. but i value music quite deeply. if i can bother to put in some time, i'd love to make something special.

i think that, i could probably benefit from getting a *real* DAW. although, i'd almost never use this hypothetical DAW, and since i've always been reluctant to spend on my hobbies...

...this ambition might just tight-fist itself out of existence. that'd be frustrating...

so those'll roll out each month. it's low pressure. i have to do pretty little for most of them, too... it could be fun!

the other thing that i wanna finish is that silly game i'm making with Amps. i really like it. i'd hate to leave it on the cutting room floor.

if i can get better at javascript, i can also see myself doing literally miniscule experiment-games for my website before that's finished. reusing assets, less than a minute long... you understand.

well, i guess, the only deadline i've had over my head for the last few months are... these!

i think going from doing a full blog, back to doing no blog, might be too big of a goodbye. so the first thing i wanna try, is, looping back through each blog, and fixing all the bugs in them.

i'm not gonna update the text in them at all, don't worry...

this is probably a less silly idea than talking about my past, like, come on. who's gonna be interested in that?

so, firstly, we'll talk about when i think i'll finish some of the things i started this month specifically. then, we'll go further, and talk about the things that i think will happen in my life.

...oh! i see you picked the future path, good for you.

this one will kind of focus on... predictions, i suppose. blog9 kinda picked up that i was bad at handling them, so, i'll try and be very generous, so i don't get upset later.

hello, hello... this is the last one.
i hope it doesn't sound like i'm being aloof right now. i'm a little sad it's ending...

i thought it'd be interesting to try something a little different, so...

<-- past . . . . . . . future -->

oh, by the way, maybe i should tell you,
use left and right t...

no, you figured it out. :)

this way leads to the past. firstly, to last year, 2023.

so, around last year, i was struggling with dysphoria a lot. you knew that.

it was the year i started keeping my little dysphoria diary (more on that later) and it was the year i made the very brave experiment of changing my display name to "sasha".

after that, i'll talk about some older memories.

some of them will be about dysphoria, and, some of them won't.

it's a weird idea. i'll make it work.

alright, well, most of my struggles in 2023 stemmed from coming out to my family,
something i had figured out i had to do a few months ago.

to this day, my mum is kinda scared of it, i feel comfortable talking about it with my brother, my sister barely mentions it, and my dad is a little skeptical.

and, after the poor reception from my mum and maternal grandma, "sasha" went into hiding for a little while. in september i started keeping a daily, extremely passionate diary about how i might not be trans after all.

...girl, come on.

i can't act too high and mighty about this now, though. i still feel intrusively like it might've been a misstep.

if we keep going through 2023... eventually we can see me making my wetdry account, and using sasha for the first time outside my diary.

it's probably worth mentioning that i'm really so thankful for all the people i've got to meet. you all are fantastic.

...even if some of the talents you have fuel my self loathing. but that's not something i can ask you to stop doing, haha.

jeez, me uploading my website only feels like yesterday. keeping the blog for this long has certainly been an experience. it hasn't been fun the whole time, but, i think i can look back on the whole thing and be proud of it.

i do not have a favourite. but blogs 9 and 10 are part of a very very short duology where i briefly knew what i was doing.

if we wanna talk about the past, too... that counts me making them. i can tell you that both of them took about 3 weeks, and the sprites for both went through enough redrafts for me to still be pleased with them now.

and if we get to the more recent past, then maybe we can see that "being pleased with something i made" isn't a feeling i get so much anymore, which is a little disheartening. i hope this isn't too much of a bombshell... i definitely mentioned last month that i was insecure about my own abilities.

but that's ok, right? it's gotta be ok, because i'm still learning. a pretty big chunk of the processing for this page is done in css! that's not something i could've ever thought of doing before.

as for the very very recent past, i played ufo50 some more this month. it's a strange game, but, i kinda like it.

i also worked a little more on that new project with Amps. it won't be out for a while. that's ok too.

sometimes i feel like it's important to put here that, even though i talk about myself and my mental health a lot... none of this has hit me so hard that i've stopped enjoying all the stuff i usually do. i really don't want anybody to worry about me. i'm ok, i promise :)

...why don't we go back a little further than just last year, hm?

i noticed i was trans two years ago, in november 2022. i forget the exact date.

i had read a kind of schlocky, cheesey tiktok slideshow of egg_irl level memes. but it wasn't anything i had ever heard of before.

like, it was a very lighthearted description of dysphoria, and estrogen, and, it just resonated with me quite quickly.

i don't really like the idea that if i hadn't seen that slideshow, i wouldn't've ever come out. i probably would've. there are a handful of trans people in my life, i would've eventually started relating to them.

if we go back further, we can see... me starting to write lua in my bedroom. i'm almost embarrassed to talk about this. i really haven't learnt much since then.

even then, i really struggled pitching projects into a frame that matched my abilities, and time, and willpower... one of the first things i finished was a cute snow effect. i think i kinda wanted it to be like, a tech demo style thingy... the source code is less than 2kb for sure.

i first started thinking that i wasn't good at this when i couldn't make the snow demo into a single tiny .exe file.

and these days, i'm too lazy to bother writing lightweight code like that. i really hope i haven't lost my passion for this stuff. because when i do get that special, magic, "my thing is good" feeling, it's only after i've spent hours and hours on that familiar, annoying, "that thing is better" feeling. it's shit.

keep going back, and there's... my first playthrough of celeste. and i wanna tell you something a little touchy.

i liked celeste but it didn't cause much of a "self discovery" for me. but after i found that it was made by a trans woman, and even after i had known i was trans, i just started developing a kind of unhealthy jealousy of women and their achievements. it was really disgusting. it's not even properly gone, yet...

these days i can stomach to replay celeste. but i was constantly kind of upset that it was completely on a different level to everything i've even thought of making.

if we keep on going, there's a handful of signs that i was trans that i dismissed a little.

not many, of course! i don't wanna make this into too much of a sob story.

the ones i remember are, being really happy that my mum gave me a thin, girly sweater to wear, really wanting to joke unprompted about looking feminine when i was younger, and, probably the least consequential...

i really liked the powerpuff girls reboot growing up. i know that people hate it now, but, i don't know. i'd say that kinda counts as a sign.

and if we go even further, there's...

prepubescent me. i barely remember them. i used to be really flakey and embarrass myself a lot. i think i've grown out of that a little. and, even though i AM grateful for all the friends i've made, and i love you all... i think i would rather not be trans sometimes. it feels like a little more trouble than it's worth, having to risk everything for hormones and stuff...

if i had stayed cis for a few more years, i'd probably still be with my old friend group, and, maybe i'd pick up that most of them were dicks eventually.