High Definition New Years Resolution

Crippling anxiety issues are a constant companion, but like everyone I have good days and bad. On a particularly good day I was able to draw myself out of the house and go to help a friend of mine celebrate her birthday. She is bit of a social butterfly, at least far more so than I am, so there were bunches of people I didn't know and I was twitchy but over all very happy to be out of the house. I was nearly ready to bolt after a drunk lady asked if I was someone's husband while I was washing my hands in the bathroom, but I had already ordered food so I sat back down.

This friend of mine, you have to understand something about her, there are few people I know that I have more respect for. She is smart, well read, hard working and she's gotten far on her own merits and hard work and is set to just keep going farther.So imagine my surprise when she brings up that she reads my crappy little blog. Not only that she reads it, but she thinks its good.

Normally my anxiety and self doubt would just make me believe she was just saying it to be kind. Either it was because I was having a good day or it was because she brought it up without prompting but for some reason I was able to just take the compliment at face value. When I told her I've been working on a book about my life that is basically one long blog post she said, "I'd read that."

I am not big on new years resolutions. Twelve years ago I resolved to transition and every year since then my resolution has been, "just keep going." This year though, with some encouragement from my friends, I am going to resolve to take this blog and my writing more seriously. If there are actually people who want to hear my voice I can at least try not to be so quiet.

This blog will now be paired with my brand new tumblr. Tumblr has a far less intimidating format and I think it will lend itself to more frequent but shorter posts. Long form posts will show up here and there and I will actually try can come up with some for of writing schedule and keep to it. Some of the the older posts may get copy pasta-ed over to tumblr as well.

No promises, I am very nervous about letting people read anything I write, especially when it is so personal, but I will try my best to get a final draft of my book done this year and get it to some people who have agreed to help me edit it.

Thank you all for your support. I'll try to stay feeling good, and try to discipline myself to work through the times when I am not, because you never know when an unexpected, and much needed, boost is coming your way.

Happy New Year *crosses fingers*

Pardon me, do you have any tacos?

Friends are among the most important things a person can have. I consider myself very lucky to have friends that got back ten, sometimes fifteen plus years. Today though I ended up thinking about someone who I haven't been fortunate enough to keep track of. Suzanne.

It is sort of funny but I don't actually remember at all how we became friends. Just in my memories of high school she appears all smiles talking to me with her hand. It was a very large school and a lot of this happened before I had a car so all but a few of my precious memories of her are just at school, between or before classes. I remember just how easy it was to talk to her about nothing at all or smile when she was around. Those were both things that were hard for me to come by in those days. I was starting to realize that I was trans and in a lot of ways I was hiding from it or even running from it.

Two of the best memories I have with Suzanne come to mind easily. There was a "Twin Day" at school where you were supposed to dress up with one of your friends in the exact same clothes. Suzanne and I both wore these T-shirts I had with a big yellow smiley faces on them and blue jeans. We got up on the little stage at lunch for the judging, which was just a thinly veiled popularity contest, and it didn't matter that i get stage fright and don't like big crowds of people. I was all smiles.My whole day was bright, at least until Spanish class when some jerk decided to give me guff about doing twin day with a girl.

The other memory is, for me, one that just defies reason. For her birthday she decided she was going to have a sleepover, and honest to god slumber-party. A bunch of her girl friends and me too. Now I was just barely aware i might be Trans* myself and it would be at least a year before I would come out to anyone(That disaster is a whole other post). It wasn't anything Earth shattering. We played a few games, there was a Ouija Board, we ate food, just like any kind of party but then we went to sleep at the end. It seems simple, trivial even, but by all rights it is the kind of memory I should have missed out on completely, and it is one of my most important memories.

I have no idea if Suzanne saw some part of the "real me" that at the time I was trying so hard not to accept, but when I look back I can realize now that I was most myself when I was just hanging out with her. When I close my eyes and think back, these and a precious few others are the memories that I can see myself as I am today as I reminisce.

Sadly, I can't remember how we grew apart. I wish I could. Maybe she got moved to that other school that half my class seemed to disappear into after sophomore year. Or maybe it was my fault. I wish I could remember.

We don't always know how much we will cherish the memories we make with people at the time. These days I try to remember to let my friends know how grateful I am to have them in my life. Because I should have said so much more to Suzanne to let her know how much her friendship meant to me.

TERF

A friend and I were discussing the fact that some acts have pulled out of MichFest this year because of the Womyn-Born-Womyn, or Trans* exclusionary policies. This made me recall my first encounter with MichFest YEARS ago and I thought it might make an OK blog post.

Well this was years and years ago so it was before either of my assaults and therefore before my PTSD and anxiety issues. I was also all doe eyed and all fired up about feminism and woman power because I had gone full time and the veil of privileged had been lifted from my eyes and I was all, "Whoa! Why didn't I notice this before!?" 

Anyway I had NO CLUE that this sort of anti-trans sentiment even existed in the community at the time. I just figured lesbians, and feminists, and trans women were one big happy family. Largely I suppose because I did and do identify myself as all three. And I hear about this big music festival up in Michigan in passing from a friend on line. Well I was all about music and road trips at the time, so I go to the website to see about getting some tickets.

While I am there I see their WBW thing and I am just perplexed. So I make the mistake of signing up to their forums so I can ask about it.

BIG MISTAKE

I make a post stating that I am a trans woman and I am confused about the WBW thing and whether or not I can buy tickets. I get a few replies that were basically, "Oh just come anyway, as long as you don't make a big deal about being trans you wont get kicked out." This left me even MORE confused. The next reply I got was someone who tried very calmly to explain that trans women weren't allowed be cause WBW spaces are for women who have known they were women their whole lives.

This is where I made my next mistake. Still unwilling or maybe unable to believe that such a rift could exist between two communities that I felt a part of, I came to the conclusion that they meant that drag queens, cross-dressers, gender fluid, and other NB people were not welcome, but that Transsexual women, who fully identify as female, were since gender is, at least in the LBGT community, accepted to be something you are born with. I said as much in a reply and asked for conformation.

THEY CAME, from the four corners of those forums they came to my little thread to tell me JUST how wrong they thought I was. It was my crash course introduction to the level of vitriol that TERFs can spew out. I was caught COMPLETELY off guard. For weeks and weeks this went on and they much have gotten my email off of the info I used to sign up to their forums or something because it spilled over to there. (had to ditch that email account)

Just hateful, angry, message after message. Death threats, people wishing for me to be raped, people "explaining" how my very existence equates assault, you name it. I was so indignant about this coming out of, for me, nowhere that when I discovered there was a protest associated with this I almost went and joined. In the end Michfest was too far away for me to drive to and not even get to see and bands.

And that is how MichFest taught me about TERFs

As for what I should have said... I sort of wish I had gone to that protest. It wouldn't have been as FUN as a music festival, but it would have been more important maybe. It is important to speak up when you see something wrong. Who knows maybe without Camp Trans the issue wouldn't be as visible today and those acts wouldn't have backed out. You can't live your life focusing on people who do things to tear you down, but you also can't just sit around and do nothing at all about it.

I'm ok, how are you?

I have been posting links to my blog in places that I go because, well it's always nice to be read. One of the effects this has had is a lot of people asking me, "Are you ok?" In my last post I included a few lines about how I try to keep things light and humorous and try to end on a bright note. I even apologized for sounding too sappy and viewing things with rose colored glasses.

This is apparently this is not how this blog reads to other people. After talking it over with some of my closest friends I think I know what is happening. Some of the things that happen to me, just don't happen to most people. This is especially true of some of what I write about here since this is largely about things I wish I could have handled differently.  I think maybe people like to believe that they don't happen at all, or at least they like to not think too hard about. When they read some of my posts, even if I write them with the best spin I can muster, they feel uncomfortable and even dismayed.

Having said that, now please allow me to depress you with the amusing anecdote I had intended to write about today.

Discrimination is a very funny thing. Years ago after my transition I lost a lot of things. Some friends, a lot of the closeness I had with my family, the stuff you would expect. What I was not fully prepared for was how odd discrimination feels. 

I was pushed out of one pretty good job after my approved medical leave was retroactively de- approved when they learned what the surgery was for. Of course believing my time off was approved I didn't call in "sick" and there went that job. I tried going to various temp agencies, most never called. One however went so far as to 'politely' tell me that they "don't place people like me." Even fast food was a bust with one place "losing" my paperwork four times after one manager agreed to hire me on without checking with the other one. 

It isn't all just job stuff. I like to think I look pretty good, but I am tall and not really very into being really femme unless I am in that sort of a mood, so I get read sometimes. When that happens I get looks, mis-gendered etc. You know the drill. All of this used to really affect me. Recently though that may have changed.

I was getting gas and tic tacs and a soda at my local gas station. It was early and I didn't really have anywhere in particular to go later so i was dressed comfortably with minimal makeup. Anyway so I slide into line to pay behind this maybe 50+ guy and a very short crew cut and he sort of glares at me. Reflexively, I try to smile disarmingly as I have taught myself to do. Well his reaction was to scowl and exclaim, "Don't you smile at me, freak." 

It all just seemed so absurd to me  that I couldn't help but laugh in his face right out loud. I told him to buy his gas and leave me the hell alone and he did just that. All those years that sort of thing has made be feel small or uncomfortable, I should have been laughing instead. 

Now I see that post as uplifting and a personal triumph. When I look again though, through the eyes of someone who maybe hasn't gone through anything similar, I can see how it might be shocking, even disheartening just to hear that some of those things had happened.

I am ok. In fact, I'm doing great!

For the longest time I couldn't talk about the things that happen to me. Transition and the depression and uncertainty of it all was "too much" for many of my "friends" at the time so they just sort of peeled away and vanished. Since then I just taught myself not to talk about what was bothering me. I was so sacred to share the difficult stuff. "What if they don't want to deal with it... or me?" I've held my tongue for a long time and now I have things to say. It is nice to be finding my own voice.

Even without talking about it, all of these things still really happen to me, and other people. Worse things happen to others. Maybe people close by or even people you know. Ignoring that, not talking about it, well that doesn't help anything. It might be nice to just pretend they don't happen to us or to those near us, but they do.

I'm sorry if some of the things I write about aren't exactly pleasant to read about. They happened, but I'm ok.

I'm ok. Are you? I'll listen if there is something you need to say.

Hello Again for the First Time :: A Reintroduction

Hi and welcome to my oft neglected blog. I'm Ellie, your blogger for this evening.

I started this blog in 2009 when I was 28 years old with delusions that I am terribly interesting. Well it is 2014 now and I am still 28, but now I think I actually know what I want this blog to be. For me it has been a safe-ish place to vent when I am my most frustrated. Often times I hold things in and regret doing so. Enough that I need a place to let it all out, this is that.

For those reading this who don't know me, ( I assume you arrived here by mistake and for that I am truly, truly sorry) I suffer from depression, PTSD, GAD and and assortment of other goodies that really make my head a FUN place to be. This is relevant because it affects the tone of what I post here. My anxiety and depression tend to make me view things in the worst of all possible ways.  This is not a healthy thing to do and I try to be very conscious of when I am doing it, to rein it in and keep my headspace as healthy as I can. When I wright things here normally it is something that has been bothering me so I make an extra effort to see a silver lining and not a catastrophe, and learn from it if I can.

If my posts seem preachy, or rose colored, or read like a fortune cookie, I swear I am not drinking the cool-aid, I am just trying to keep myself sane.

Thank you so much for reading. I'll try not to bee too dull.

Ellie Wilson

Dreams

Over the course of my life I have had several dreams. One of the earliest I can remember was to join the air force and be a pilot. That dream was cut short by a middle aged man waiting in an optometrist's office who kindly told me that they want pilots to have perfect vision and that eyes tend to get worse as you get older and not better I was a sad child for a while after that but I found new dreams to chase.

The next big one was that i was going to be a physicist and discover exactly how everything worked. I had a note book where I would write outlandish ideas and thoughts expound on them almost endlessly. Still just a kid I am afraid I didn't do much experimentation but I did better in science classes and read everything about the stars and space and anything else "sciencey" that I could in the hopes that one day I'd be able to prove some of my ideas. At some point there was an adult in my life who was probably trying to encourage my interest, but her way of doing so was to over inflate the value of my scribblings and to put the idea in my head that they could be published. She "knew someone at NASA" and they were very interested! I was a fairly clever kid so I did eventually figure out she was blowing smoke up my ass.

When I did I felt  ashamed in myself for believing her. More than that I looked at my notes, and my enthusiasm for science and my dream as silly and a waste of time. Over the years I instead became interested in computers and finally Psychology and I had other dreams, some of which I also gave up on and others I worked towards and realized.

Today I was watching episode 5 of Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson and he was talking about light. He used a pipe organ analogy to explain wave length. All at once every article I'd read and half understood about dark matter and how this unobservable stuff is literally everywhere. There was a flash in my brain and I was asking "What if light is more like sound than we thought?" "What if those electron jumps create a compression wave just like sound, but instead of through normal matter, through dark matter or even some other stuff that is as yet unobservable?" "Could that help explain why other particles seem to have resistance when we accelerate them?"

I was excited, exhilarated even! I felt that that kid carting around that stupid note book again... For all of about ten second. Then I realized that it was VERY unlikely that I was the first to ask these questions. That somewhere there is probably some grad student a decade younger than me handily disproving it all and moving on to more interesting topics that I don't have the background of study to even properly conceive of. Even if by some fluke I was the first person to think of these things that I have chosen to do with my life haven't given me the skills and knowledge to even begin to prove or disprove any of it.

Regret is something everyone has in some measure. Over all I am very happy with the things I've done. Could use a bit more money, but I feel good about most things. This blog is supposed to be about things I should have said so here it is, "Screw you lady! I could have been a great physicist." Giving up on a dream always hurts, but as long as you have a new one to chase it will probably all turn out ok.

Shezow

Thanks to One Million Moms being crazy and stupid, I am now aware of and have watched the first episode of Shezow. It is not a genre transcending masterpiece or anything, but I am over all quite pleased. It is about a boy and his sister (and other family members) who inherit a house from their deceased aunt. While cleaning the basement they stumble upon a secret panel hiding a ring. The sister immediately recognizes it as the Shezow power ring. Doubting his sister the brother, named Guy, takes the ring and puts it on to prove how silly she is being and of course immediately is transformed into Shezow, a super heroine that wears a pink skirt and heels.

Guy's personality is very stereotypical male, brash, impulsive, sporty. His sister is portrayed and more mature and knowledgeable. Shezow's power set and costume is VERY stereotypical "girly". A boomerang brush, high heels, light saber lipstick, and pink EVERYTHING.

I have already seen some comments deriding the show. Some saying that these stereotypes are harmful. I disagree though in the case of this show. While I agree that pegging fashion, and pink, and beauty products as definitively girly can be a very bad thing, here I feel it mostly shows that it is ok if you like those things and like being active and strong and heroic. The two are not mutually exclusive.

The main character, Guy, is not what most people think of when they think of a trans character. He has no initial desire to be or dress as a girl and initially he is put off by the unexpected transformation. Having only seen the pilot episode so far, it seems to me that Guy will be more of a gender fluid character. After the initial shock wears off Guy shows no strong aversion to being Shezow, even when teased by his male friend. At one point Guy says the line "Come to papa!" to which his friend teases, " Don't you mean 'come to mama'?" and Guy simply says, "Meh, depends on what I am wearing". Guys seems perfectly comfortable being being a rather overly typical boy and then excusing himself to go put on a bright pink skirt so SHE can go fight crime. The transformation is generally not used for cheap gags and over all it is very positive.

The writing probably wont pull in much of an older audience like can happen with some cartoons, but it is exceptionally well done for the target demographic. This show isn't going to revolutionize how gender roles are used in cartoons, but it sure is a step in that direction. I hope it does well when it comes to the HUB.