~6:30pm May 17, 2024
Mood: transience
Listening to: Levi Ryan - firing squad ⧉

well my medical exam went fine i think. they couldn't get my fucking name right so i bet they tried emailing the results to the wrong email, which is going to force me to contact them again. the doctor was an old man and it showed. going over my medical history, when he saw i had ptsd he asked "how come?", and asked "since when?" of my autism. how am i supposed to respond to that?

the place was in downtown philly and we drove through a good portion of the city. it dawned on me that was probably the penultimate time i'll be in philadelphia. the final time will be the airport. i really love this city despite its problems, i'll miss it dearly. it has such a unique and colorful culture, there's nowhere else like it in the us. i could even tell the doctors office used to be a brick row home probably built 170 years ago. i have so much more attachment and identity with philadelphia than america. with how many people from outside the continent i interact daily with, coupled with how little i interact with my immediate surroundings, i often forget i'm not outside this system.

i guess that contributes to the general malaise of feeling lost or out of place i've had since forever. don't even feel like i belong in this country. i peer through the people here and they're not like me. so many people in the us and canada just kind of forget that other places exist, or at least forget other worldviews exist. it's an extremely subtle bias in normal conversation but once you see it you can't miss it. of course it's not subtle anymore when anything political comes up. i mean i get it, we have no reason to think of any other perspectives. you can travel 3+ days in any direction and still be in virtually the same individualist culture with the same language and the same american media and the same laws and the same car infrastructure and the same american-centered internet. idk i've been outside of this bubble ever since i started making online friends when i was 14, plus i'm prone to questioning why people/institutions/conventions are the way they are. i've always felt like my fate lies elsewhere in some capacity. really i started romanticizing about leaving and actively looking for a way out since i was 15. my past is fraught with false promises of moving in with unsafe strangers. the fact that i'm maybe permanently moving to australia doesn't particularly surprise me, deep down i always knew something like this would happen eventually. instead it surprises everyone else i confide in.

presently, i'm doing my first playthrough of dark souls 1. i have never played a fromsoft game before either. my friends really wanted me to try it and they wanted to watch me experience it, so i'm streaming it to them too. the game is pretty decent and rewarding too, but holy shit the backseating is actually triggering the shit out of me. i will ask very simple questions and i'll either get 1.) the most confidently wrong information possible or 2.) "how the fuck am i supposed to know i played this 6 years ago". then i'll do what they told me, find out it's wrong, tell them that was unhelpful, and they get defensive. some kind of deflection that absolves them of responsibility like why did i listen if i doubted it, or some justification why they would have gotten mixed up for something else. a lot of it though is just real ass gaslighting, yknow, "no i didn't actually say that". i'll respond with a mild level of frustration and they'll tell me i'm overreacting. see, that last part is new. everything else before that has come up a little bit before, i just assume it's dark souls so all toxic backseating gets amplified. but that last part is brand new and i really legitimately hope that it isn't because i'm a woman now. sure i expected that misogyny to come from strangers eventually, not my friends who i've known for 5 years. maybe they're assuming they can just do the hurtful jabs that boys do with each other, except with a girl this time, a few girl-specific insults, and everything will be fine because i'm still one of the boys. i'm only a couple days from putting my foot down i think. the past week my headspace has been so bad, thinking i'm shit at everything and everything i say is stupid. thinking i'm unloveable and i'm about to be abandoned. fuck that.

the date is getting closer. i'm trying to use things up so i don't leave waste by the time i go. timing them to last perfectly sucks, but it's a compulsion. i need to realize leaving some is ok and i don't need to worry about feeling like a burden to my f*mily even after i'm gone.

~11:00am May 13, 2024
Mood: detached
Listening to: sewerperson - fractals ⧉

it was cold last night. it was also the first time it wasn't overcast all week. fortunately for me, that means light pollution didn't reflect off of the moisture in the humid air nor the cloud cover, so the night was properly washed in darkness instead of a hazy red glow. the pitch black spaces between distant points of lights is what i live for, terrestrially or otherwise. i love the muted yet saturated colors of tree canopies swallowing streetlights. as i was passing under an orange sodium lamp inside of a cherry blossom tree, it blew out and darkened. it felt like the night was welcoming me as one of her own.

lately i've felt very poetic. most of these thoughts just come to me out of the aether with no meditation. a lot of them are directly about me, who i am, what i want, and what i should do. i like to think of this free-flowing unrestricted desire as my ghost, and she tells me hidden truths. i'm a good listener. for instance, one of these impulses told me i should try to take up singing, it's probably where i'll find my voice. both my real voice and my figurative one.

i broke the news to my grandfather that i need him to take me to some random highly specific clinic downtown, and he didn't ask a single question. i was so ready to come clean that i was leaving forever when he got suspicious, but he just didn't get suspicious. theoretically, once this health exam tomorrow is over, i'll have my visa within the week, and i'm free to go in june. i still need to find a way to pack my things. i'm planning to leave most of it behind. i'm not very sentimental, not for material objects at least, and my memory is a steel trap that i don't need to keep reminders for. but it's still an interesting process, deciding what is and isn't me. what used to be and what never was me. regrettably the only thing i might not be able to bring is greenland, my gay shark. maybe i could buy a vacuum sealer or something. i'll need to buy a hard case for my pc at least.

i've been quite absent from the social media part of neocities for a while, and i think that won't change any time soon.

~2:30pm May 9, 2024
Mood: tired
Listening to: Cynthoni - Death Of The Endless ⧉

i should be going to bed, but instead i'm writing. my mind has been disquiet for days, weeks maybe. it's as if my thoughts wriggle out of my grasp every time i attempt to summarize them into an entry. i've decided that there's no reason to mince words with my own diary. things are allowed to be candid and a little incoherent when i'm confused. my writing is for me and me alone.

who would've thought that exploring gender inextricably also forces exploration of sexuality? that's a rhetorical question. it's getting increasingly easy to feel feminine at a baseline and there's a lot of euphoric agp there. it's not really anything new for me, i've always been primarily attracted to myself, it's just way more intense now that my body actually feels like it belongs to me for once. i know that this comes up often in the community and it's a common point of internalized shame, interestingly though my problem isn't stemming from internalized transphobia, it's more from the concept of sexuality itself. it's really bringing up some deep trauma and shame from a couple different sources. the first, of course, are my past sexual abusers, not much to explain there. however, i think over time in my household as well i've picked up the idea that sex is inherently evil. figure that i've only ever heard the opinions from my mother, grandmother, and aunt who are staunch misandrists, and i witnessed a lot of domestic violence when i used to live with my mother. my grandmother also never shuts up about how deadbeat my grandfather used to be before i was born. along with the idea that love is fake, tainted, and ultimately temporary, i've also implictly learned that sex is always desperate, manipulative, foolishly vulnerable, and ultimately violating. a distinctly anxious, enmeshed, codependent viewpoint that i had no business acquiring so young. and this mentions nothing of the conservative catholic drivel i was fed from the very beginning either.

i don't think my asexual identity is inaccurate or in jeopardy with this new information per se, although i do undeniably feel a tiny bit of shame for not having everything figured out, and the thought of getting something wrong about myself always sends me for a fucking loop. i guess i'll just be completely honest and say it's been on my mind because i almost certainly developed a crush on my future roommate already. such is the life of a demisexual (or acespike, which i identify with more but it's a much less common term) i suppose, you literally never have any desire whatsoever to think about sexuality until something imperceptable about somebody just suddenly clicks, and now it's a regular thing. i'm choosing to keep it to myself because, well, it's extremely early in our relationship and going to complicate arrangements. i say early, but really we've known each other for 8 fucking years now. she even recently mentioned to me that she's had on and off crushes on me for years. i just mean that i should take things slow and play it by ear until we've been living together and doing things irl before i jump to any conclusions. i also don't think i even know what my preferences are yet, and i would hate to initiate something only to find out it's not what i want. a slight part of me is entertaining the idea of entering a hoe phase to explore my preferences. while it would be valuable i think, it would probably be too hard to feel any attraction to any other person, let alone borderline strangers, let alone multiple of them. idk, i can't stand the thought of breaking her heart by doing noncommittal experiments, so maybe it's already too late for me after all. god, i would hate for her to think i was using her to get permanent residency in australia.

i'm realizing this probably all sounds super trite and immature. some real high school tier shit. took me 24 whole years to figure out i've been a gay ass fruit all along or whatever lol. embarrassing. hopefully i'll come back to this entry some time in the future and cringe at how clueless and insecure i was.

may 9th is such a cursed date from my past. essentially, it was the day my life changed forever in 2022. it feels special that today of all days was when sewerslvt made a massive triumphant return to music.

last night i found an old relic from my childhood house, a metal hot pad i recognized. the fact that it was corroded and ugly now felt profoundly symbolic to me.

~6:30am May 6, 2024
Mood: pensive
Listening to: blackwinterwells - cyanide ⧉

it's been a while since i've written in my diary. this is probably the longest span of time i've gone without it, 6 days. i can't exactly pinpoint why i've neglected it. i guess i'm just preoccupied. it feels as though i'm passing through a miasma of time, drifting through a viscous murk between waking and sleeping. not necessarily because of external happenings, more internal examinations.

i guess i can update you on the external first. i went to the bank and removed my grandmother's name from my accounts. my grandmother was not happy in the car ride, taking the opportunity to reiterate how i'm betraying everyone and how i'm going to regret leaving behind my one and only mother. however, i anticipated those words from her, just as i anticipated that she would be duplicitous in the bank. see, she's too busy worried about appearances to be unhappy in public. she used to work in these banks as a regional manager, so it was an interesting social interaction. lots of performative and inconspicuously nervous small talk with previous coworkers, or more accurately, their former boss. the older staff enjoyed hearing about my upcoming australia trip. i think as part of my trauma i've grown disgusted by my seniors' vicarious projections and envies. i tolerated it and participated in the fake social dance as my grandmother clenched her teeth through her smile and glared at me in between honeyed words. all things considered, it was quick and easy.

i applied for the visa the same day, and they requested a health exam from me. that fucking sucks and i thought i would be totally fine without one. i guess that's what i get for being honest when they asked if i expect to incur health expenses while i'm there. it makes me really anxious because i don't know how they'll react by telling the government i'm going to get hrt while i'm there. i don't think it'll impact the decision, but it has complicated the process nonetheless. now i just have to hope any general medical exams i'm required to get will pass. my health isn't exactly good, and i think they would be more likely to discriminate against me on the grounds of disability than gender. we will see.

internally, well, i feel like a mess. maybe not a mess, i don't feel like a wreck, i feel disorganized. i catch my inner child feeling guilt and shame about my decision several times per day. in my head i've written a hundred goodbye letters, and none of them feel right. i'm locked in fantasies of the near future. i'm in a mode where i'm immediately on top of all my responsibilities and i'm moving fast. i've been really jumpy lately from all the bugs and the other people who are active at 3 or 4am now. i dissociate hard whenever i try and fail at voice training. and, i think this might be the culprit for why i've been hesitant to write, i'm struggling with my attraction. i don't want to get into it right now. i need to think it over a little more and it seems like a topic that should probably get its own dedicated diary entry.