Stepos Venzny

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Trans people’s very existence requires the rest of us to question our own upbringing. There are a lot of childhood experiences that boil down to you doing something or not doing something on no basis other than the fact that you were told.

You were told by your family, you were told by your friends, you were told by random strangers, you were told by the media, and they were all telling you the same thing. So you listened, even though you didn’t know why they were saying it. Surely EVERYBODY can’t be wrong, right? Some people might have told you something contrary but they were the losers, the outcasts, the villains. You don’t want to be any of that, surely?

For someone to transition, they are required to do the exact opposite of what so many told us all. They embrace the very outcome we were threatened with when we failed to conform, that we would not actually be the gender we were failing to conform to.

To accept that they are valid in doing so requires us to admit that many of our own guiding forces were actually just bullshit. We have to question why we are the way we are anew. If what they’re doing is strong, what we did, what we’re continuing to do, was weak.

When confronted with the idea that we were all just raised wrong and that much of what we collectively spend our time and energy stressing about is stupid and pointless, how many people do you know that will just shrug and say “oh well” and then move on with their lives? Easier to find an excuse to keep doing what you were already doing. “They’re just lying because they’re perverts that wanna cheat at sports.”

Some of these rich people are insidious and manipulative, no doubt, but the loud ones are usually just idiots no different from the uncle you don’t want to talk to except that being rich means they’re able to yell louder.

There’s not really any value in determining whether labels like good person or bad person apply to you. Either option tends to end in the same result: an end to the process of introspection and a continuation of the same behavior you’re already doing. “I’m a good person so I don’t have to change” or “I’m a bad person so there’s no point in trying to change” but change is the only thing that will actually affect the feelings that are inspiring you to ask the question.

The update looks like a step in a healthy direction. You felt scared so you looked for support and you felt guilty so you looked to apologize (and reimburse). Stay focused on the process of feeling better and stop stressing about absolutes.

To a degree it’s just reflexive, a knee-jerk reaction to being told things without proper explanation. I struggled with that since I was very young. People told me what to do, what to think, how to feel, and I tried to obey but the stress of that obedience in the face of reason would always eventually end in meltdowns and by the time I was a teenager I was so worn down from that that I could barely function as a human being.

I was within a few years of twenty (pretty bad with dates) when the world showed me I had permission to think independently. There was a perceived familial obligation that I was too hurt to weather, an invitation to visit a relative that I found annoying. You’re told that you’re supposed to love your family, all of it, no matter how physically and emotionally detached they are from your life. But the act of trying to love a stranger that you can’t stand the company of and who cannot stand your company in turn, themselves only really trying out of this same sense of obligation that society pushes on them, there’s nothing in that but stress for all involved. And then you feel like a failure as a result, because you stressed them out and you’re supposed to be making them happy. It was a very small thing being asked of me and something I had always capable of weathering on previous occasions but this time I was too weak from the rest of life and, shamefully, I politely declined. I was kicking myself for the next hour, until somebody actually close to me caught me alone for a moment and praised that show of strength.

In my mind, she had always been stronger than me because she was better able to meet expectations. In that moment I learned that, in her mind, she was weak because she was unable to stand up for her own mental health needs and that I had just surpassed her by doing this. That realization changed my life. I let go of this obedience that my bones had always told me was wrong. Other people wanting something doesn’t mean I have to want it, other people feeling something doesn’t mean I have to feel it, other people doing something doesn’t mean I have to do it. Success at attempting all those things is exactly the same amount of suffering as failure, the very same action is both strong and weak. There’s no winning that game. Neither of us felt what we were supposed to feel and neither of us would be happy in the other’s shoes.

Society tells you that disobedience is arrogance, selfishness, but I’m a better person that I was before it. It made me more humble because I no longer felt that I was supposed to be right, now I want to be right and that means learning where I’m wrong. It made me more generous because I no longer felt that I was supposed to be good, now I want to be helpful because helping people feels good to do. It made me happier because I no longer felt that I was supposed to be happy, and now any instances of unhappiness don’t cause me the shame that negates future happiness. And it made me more tolerant because, fuck, I’m not about to start enforcing arbitrary standards on people when arbitrary standards caused me so much harm in the first place.

Now that there’s not an internal struggle against prescriptive conformity in the way, I’m freer than I ever was to do most of the same things everyone wanted me to do in the first place while also being able to set boundaries about those few things I know would be harmful to do.

It’s not at all frictionless to think for yourself, mind. People can be frustrated when you ask more justification of them than others do. If they’re doing what they’re told is right, saying what they’re told is right, believing what they’re told is right, it can feel threatening to ask them how any or all of that is right when, deep down, all they’re doing is playing their assigned role because they never had your epiphany. And the boundaries you set can also be at odds with the genuinely felt desires of those you care about because sometimes peoples’ desires are simply incompatible.

But that friction is nothing next to the cumulative psychic weight of total obedience. Mutual somewhat-grudging acceptance of each others’ limits is better than any one person’s permanent unhappiness.

In terms of actionable advice: follow your logic, follow your feelings, follow observable reality. Recognize it as a red flag when people discourage you from that, and recognize the importance of hearing out people who are talking through their own logic and feelings and observations and scrutinizing each other.

I mean in the context of a serious setting where it’s not being used as a joke.

I thought kid gloves were for dealing with kids but actually they’re made from the skin of kids.

Also of note, I thought the kids were children.

I’ve seen people using “that’s what she said” in a very serious setting, as a way to say “good point/touché”.

As in there was a literal she who literally said that? Otherwise I can’t understand this.

A while back I set out to watch the entire Disney Animated Canon. (Not in a binge-y way, like a movie per week.) When I reached Frozen II and started looking up trivia about it, I read that the four note sequence Elsa keeps hearing calling to her is something a lot of composers like to reference: Dies Irae.

A couple other examples were named and it reminded me that I had sort of noticed this once before; I remember playing Aria of Sorrow and noticing that the Clock Tower theme had those four notes repeating in the background and I kept hearing “making Christmas making Christmas”. I had thought it was a coincidence at the time but now knew they were both making the same allusion. Neat.

Cut to a few years in the future, Dies Irae is my fucking Number 23. It’s EVERYWHERE. I can’t escape it.

I don’t actively recall smell or taste being a feature so I guess probably not. Every other sense I definitely have, though.

On the general subject of things people say can’t happen in dreams beyond senses, I can also read, feel pain, see color, urinate without doing so in real life, and die.

It’s absurd to give any amount of power over people, however trivial, to a thing which is incapable of thought.

There’s always going to be more dust but more than zero isn’t as big a problem as more than a layer.

For me, the answer is vacations. Not in the sense of “time off work” but in the sense of “travel somewhere special during your time off work”. There is nothing less relaxing than being pressured to spend your free time correctly.

That rule was designed to discourage you from faking it.

Oh, you mean you’re a cook. I thought you had a custom burger.

Arby’s, ironically enough. Not having burgers used to be their whole identity.

I’m interested in also having it your way. What’s the burger?

At my absolute lowest points of soreness and coughing, nothing beats getting a hot shower going and just sitting cross-legged on the floor of it. Just relax your spine and slump forward and breathe in the steam while hot water pelts your whole back.

Sour grapes.

There is nothing popular fiction hates more than somebody doing something everyone wants to do but can’t. Impossibility, when possible, becomes cast as immorality or immaturity or otherwise something arbitrarily undesirable.

To be a ghost is depressing and/or monstrous because when we die in real life we don’t stick around. Time travel overwrites reality with a worse version of the present because in real life we can’t change the past. Resurrection brings people back as monsters because in real life we can’t have our lost loved ones back. Immortality is sad and lonely and often requires you to do evil things to sustain it because in real life we can’t live forever. Traveling to alternate lifetimes where you’re more successful is emotionally hollow because you had the most important emotional stuff in your life all along and you wouldn’t trade that for the world.

These and other speculative crises always have to be fixed by making the fictional world abide be the limitations of the real one. Aren’t we so lucky that our world is randomly already like this?

Everything except pants. My legs are apparently within the bounds of normality but my head, hands, feet, and spine are simply too big.

You wouldn’t think being six feet tall would be such a hindrance to shopping. It’s not big enough to stand out in a crowd, so why is it so big as to be incompatible with mass production?

Either humanity gradually grows to despise you for your ancient morals

or they don’t ever meaningfully surpass where we’re at today.

I’d always suggest being direct instead of waiting for other people to take a hint. Tactfully, mind you. Phrase it in a relaxed, emotionally neutral way that doesn’t single him out. Something like “Really, I am doing fine. When I’m at work, I just prefer to focus on the work itself instead of talking with people. I’m more at ease that way.”

That being said, is this the kind of work situation where you’re one of many options to make friends with or is it more of a you and him stuck in a room together all day type of thing? He sounds like a lonely person and if the two of you are stuck together then the best idea might be to seek a social compromise between you two’s preferences, like designating some specific portions of the day as times when it’s appropriate to have a conversation. You try to be sociable for him when it’s on, he tries to be quiet for you when it’s off.

I’ve only met two people I would describe as narcissistic and they don’t align on this subject.

What they had in common was not feeling differently about cats than they do other animals, which is also true of almost everyone I’ve known that isn’t narcissistic.