~5:30pm May 31, 2024
Mood: triggered
Listening to: Sybyr - If You See My Face, Good Luck. God Bless ⧉

well, the puppy finally showed up to the house. it's been rough. he's caged a lot and cries for hours. it reminds me of myself when i was a kid and i was locked in my room for days with no food or bathroom. in the spring heat, with the extremely long yellow spring sunset, listening to the maddeningly repetitive spring bird calls, breathing the stale carpet. then i remember that's what i'm doing now and nothing's changed, that's when i flashback and spiral.

i've been crying a lot. very often. i can't stop thinking, er, i guess my inner child can't stop thinking how much i wish things were different. she desperately wants an honest soft hug from my mother. she wants to bury her little head in her chest and smell her one last time. nothing messy or awkward or difficult or distant, just a simple genuine hug and a quiet sob. but i know, me, i know that won't happen, it can't happen, and it never has happened. there has never been anything genuine, not distant, or not strained about them. that visceral want has only ever been an idealized dream. my inner child always waited patiently for it and it never came. it never will. i yearn for her. i love my mom so much and it hurts so bad. i so so so badly want to leave her a letter explaining my trauma, our trauma, and please implore her to follow my lead and save herself. i think i'm going to be a lowkey mess in transit. i can already see myself breaking down in my friend's arms in the airport. i keep asking myself what i'm more afraid of, going there or leaving here? i always come to the same conclusion, i'm most scared of leaving here.

one more negative topic before i move on. i've been so tempted to self harm during these flashbacks, and i don't think i feel like resisting the urge this time. the burning afterwards is very grounding and calming, and it's something that i would like to accompany me on the long plane trips. especially since i'm probably not going have a lot to do with my time during the 29 hours. luckily i'm one of those people who can occupy myself by sitting and thinking/dissociating, but only up to 12-16 hours, only half. all my portable electronics are on their last legs and i'm not even that interested in their games. i could try downloading books on my phone but its battery is almost cooked. this brick is 10 years old. anyway yeah i might just cut my shit up for the slow release pain. also i really really really like the way scars look i think i look sexier.

on a more positive note, tons of little things are going right about this arrangement. my friend's sister just moved out so her old bedroom is available for me to have for the 2 months we'll be at the parent's house. one of my old college friends came in clutch and will drive me to the airport after all. i'm still mega stressed that i'm missing something about luggage, but in reality it will probably be totally fine. i bought static bags, vacuum seal bags, and bubble wrap so i can try to fit everything and keep my pc parts safe. i'm leaving behind the case and psu. i can squeeze in 1 monitor. i'm really not confident taking out the water cooler. regardless i probably won't have computer access for at least 3 months, so expect an extended hiatus. i'll try bringing my old laptop but there's no guarantee it still works right.

i'm so excited to go. i timed it so i can show up to a house party like 3 days after i arrive lol. might as well meet everyone in the community i'm stepping into asap.

~5:00pm May 25, 2024
Mood: distracted
Listening to: Sybyr ft. guardin - No, It's Not You It's Me ⧉

i'm gonna be honest here gang this entry has a weird energy. i am SO FUCKING HOT i cannot fucking stand it. every single day this week it's been 31C including today and it still isn't over. i still have ZERO air conditioning and ZERO window air flow. the afternoon sun beats relentlessly on my poorly insulated side of the house to the point that i can feel the heat on my palm through the drywall. i actually feel like death and i can't adequately hydrate or regulate and my fucking head is constantly throbbing and i haven't slept properly in a week. i get no respite at night because it stays hot with a thick, oppressive mist.

BUT IT DOESNT FUCKING MATTER BECAUSE I GOT MY VISA!!!!!! im fucking GONE in like literally 3 weeks. i never have to put up with this or fucking anything ever again. my life is mine to live and i will chase it and catch it and clench it in my teeth and kill it and eat it and love it and cherish it forever. i mean i just have to figure out luggage and all, specifically my pc, but whatever i'm still just celebrating. i got so drunk yesterday lol.

i also finished dark souls 1 and i feel unstoppable because it felt so easy on my 1st ever blind playthrough using parries only.

also also i'm playing the gay mecha lesbians in space vn my friend gifted me and it's amazing. we had a really deep convo about it and the next day she felt the need to confess her feelings for me again and i STILL don't know how to respond. i want it but i know i'm not ready for it but i don't want to lose my chance but i don't want to promise something for later either and get her hopes up for nothing. but i also don't want to send mixed signals especially when we're living together. i don't fucking know. feels like i'm trying to eat my cake.

~3:00pm May 20, 2024
Mood: panicked
Listening to: LiL PEEP - Life Is Beautiful ⧉

my head has been messy, i feel all over the place and it's sickening. yesterday my f*mily was supposed to bring the new dog to the house, but that didn't end up happening for some reason. i found the cage they plan to use in the garage and it is so fucking small. i hate them so much, i already know they think all you need to do to keep a dog is give it food, water, and look at it a couple times a day. evidently they don't believe there's any problem in keeping it locked up all day by itself, kept away from everything, in the hot garage. this poor fucking dog is going to get a 1:1 parallel of the neglect i got.

the other day my future roommate got really drunk and showered me with affection. i fought my reactive urge for flight, allowing myself to accept compliments this time. somewhere in the exchange she decided to gift me this scifi lesbian vn she's been obsessed with lately, which was endearing even if it only worsened my flight trigger. i still don't really know what to think about all this, maybe i'm so damn autistic that i literally can't tell what the most obvious flirting is until it's clearly outright stated.

yesterday though she went to visit some houses for rent with friends and recorded them so i could weigh in. this one place they were so stoked for, they kinda loved it and were hyping it up even at the other houses. unfortunately, looking at that place gave me so much anxiety it was unreal. it was so big and old vintage. it seemed like there were multiple additions made over the years without any cohesion at all, in the structure, in the color, in the design, in the planning. rooms that lead to nowhere, indoor windows that look into nothing, carpets exposed to elements, cheap foam walls, sunken floors on no foundations. it was like the backrooms mixed with my late great grandmother's section 8 house, a total fucking nightmare for me. i can see how they were attracted to its eccentricity, but that shit is liminal horror. i felt really bad shooting it down, and she was really disappointed. frustrated, even. i apologized, i don't know why, i shouldn't have, but i got my 2nd least favorite response back: "it is what it is". we haven't spoken since then and it's eating at me. i'm so fucking deep in a fawn trigger i hate it. and it's right off the back of affection, making it so much worse. i hate hate hate my fearful avoidant attachment. i'm suffering through this invisible tug-of-war back-and-forth of craving attention and immediately withdrawing upon receiving any, only to crave it more and recoil harder over and over. how the fuck is anyone going to be able to put up with me if i'm not masking? i feel like i don't deserve love. logically i know that's bullshit but trying to tell myself that is like trying to demolish a brick wall with a sheet of wet paper. because, like, what if it IS fucked up and toxic and i'm gaslighting myself into thinking it's not that bad again? am i walking right into another hot/cold disaster? am i just overreacting? can i ever fucking trust anyone? i can't even trust my own damaged perception.

it doesn't help that i'm waiting in visa purgatory. it could be 1 day or 7 months and it's killing me. i'm powerless and it could ruin everything.

humid fog keeps washing out the night sky. white haze creeps up the sides of the celestial sphere, gradating into brown, obscuring every star below the zenith. the only ones i can see are vega and altair. my voice dysphoria is the worst it's ever been too so overall it feels pointless to take walks lately.

~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.