emily - rough mix by my chemical romance

my outfit is going to be as accurate to the theme as i can get it - black and gold; black and yellow. her dress is going to be blue. i find it hilarious how, if there is some godly entity controlling the universe, they decided to make my current dilemma of asking a pretty girl to prom a reference to some emo band.

and it's all in how you mix the two 🎶

my therapist told me that your experiences as a child are one of the main factors of the person you become, and i think this is why so many parts of my identity both co-exist and contradict. i am a trans boy, but i am inherently some kind of lesbian with my own experiences and my own feelings. i am jewish, but to say that catholicism and all of its teachings and practices aren't engraved into my identity would just be incorrect. i'm hard of hearing, but i can hear, and this is a privilege, but the time i spent with no hearing whatsoever before it began to recover and the memories of how people treated me during that period is crucial to my person. i try not to mask as much anymore (at least where ASD is concerned) but i spent fourteen-fifteen years masking until i forgot how to be a person - both my identity as a 'high functioning' autistic, and i know that is an outdated term, and my identity as whatever autistic functionality label a doctor would try to put on me now are important and real parts of my identity.

in short,

i am a transgender man, i am a lesbian. i am jewish, i am catholic. i am hearing, i am deaf. i am autistic, but i try not to be. it makes sense. it might not. hell, it probably doesn't, maybe not at all, who am i to tell you if it should or shouldn't make sense to you? it makes sense to me - identity is one of those very personal things and you can't expect people to understand you or accept your feelings as truth all the time.

mom

yesterday, i was talking to sophie and alice. i don't know where to start with this conversation; it was a lot of me yelling and a bit of me crying and a lot of sophie and alice calming me down. my opening sentence was, "sometimes i am so fucking glad my mom died". (sophie doesn't really care if i swear in front of her, especially when i'm in a state like that.) she said a few things to me. quite a few - i need to finally get bereavement counselling, it's been two and a bit years and i'm finally going to engage with it.

she also told me that i'm allowed to be angry. after i screamed about everything my mom did to me and how i wish i had been the one to kill her, she told me it was okay to be angry. i have never really been an angry person. i was a bitch in my mainstream, i slagged people off, i guess i was a bully, but i was never an angry person. the way i acted wasn't anger, it was insecurity and struggling to deal with trauma. i am not an angry person. being told it's okay to feel that way - to loathe and resent my mother with every passing moment, even when people tell me i'm supposed to love her, even when people tell me i shouldn't speak ill of her because she's dead now - was almost surreal? nobody's ever really sat me down and validated that specific emotion, especially not a member of staff who i really, really respect.

it's okay to cry." sure.
"it's okay to feel sad." sure.
"it's okay to miss her." sure.
"it's okay to hate her." i've never heard that one before.

the thing is, nobody wants to validate a child's anger, because it might make them worse. sophie knows this won't happen to me, for two reasons. one: all my anger is towards one person, and that person is dead. two: i am not an angry person by nature. the fact that i went into her office and let everything out and i actually showed anger shows to her that something is seriously up with me. these two points are good reasoning for her to trust that validating my anger won't cause me to become hurtful towards other people, and i'm glad she has that trust in me.

another point she brought up is that there's a whole kind of dispute on how people are "supposed" to act and feel when their abuser dies. i didn't really know about this; or, i guess, i never really considered this, because while it should've been perfectly obvious that other people have been in my situation, it just wasn't to me. it's like, i've never personally met anyone in the same situation as me, so how can i be sure they exist? how can i be sure people have had my experiences? it was weird to hear.

one other thing - she brought up and helped me understand that part of the reason i feel so conflicted is that, in a way, she got the "ultimate punishment" for her actions, and this is perfectly reasonable to me. i realised part of my anger was the fact that yes, it was the ultimate punishment, but nothing comes after. in a very, very small scale sense, she got the ultimate punishment (death) and i got the ultimate reward (freedom). this is not true. i am not free, and that's what pisses me of. three years later, if an afterlife doesn't exist (and i can't say for certain if it does or doesn't), she is free from her actions because she feels nothing. i am still here, still alive, and still suffering the consequences. even in death, she managed to find a way to make me hurt. it's the after effects of it all. she remembers nothing of that year because she isn't alive. i remember all of it and i am still suffering because i am alive.

eva get off my dreamwidth in class you prick

so like, my friends turn eighteen next year and it's sooo fucking strange to me. i was 14 when we met and they're 18 next year. like wtf? it never seems to make sense that i'm the youngest because they both look about 12 years old (i mean that lovingly) but i was born in august so.

i put the smiths on to write this next part because i needed some scene-setting music for the emotional shit.

it's kind of weird, but like, not really? i think i'm proud of them, if anything. i know they're only 16 now - but next year isn't really that far away, so. i mean, i'm proud of them for making it to 16. sixteen is the age i never thought i was going to live to when i was twelve - i mean, i still haven't proven i'll live to be sixteen, but unlike when i was twelve, i have no plans to kill myself to prevent me from being 16 anymore. does that make sense? no idea.

i love them both, and i think the knowledge that we're, like, growing up together? is actually really calming. i can't wait to do stuff with these guys - i wanna go to concerts with them, go grocery shopping with them, decorate a house with them, raise pets with them. they're both so cool.

i think a lot of my more emotional rambles end up being about my friends or people i despise - i don't really write about people i hate anymore because i think it upsets me more than it needs to. i love my friends, though. i'll probably always write about them. blue and eva are, like, the coolest people alive, and i want them to know they are.