surrounding myself with folks who ALSO love speculating and mentally rotating ideas around is such fun!

no more "it's not that deep".

what if it IS? what if it COULD BE?

i love having friends who intellectually stimulate me

tags: #thinkyThoughts #joyAndWhimsy

Some people buy lottery tickets. I buy packs of annual flower seeds by the handful.

Do any of those many seeds germinate and survive to bloom? A few, usually. A fair number, sometimes. Always enough to bring me joy.

I'll take those odds.

#Gardening #ThinkyThoughts

Warning! This post contains spoilers, marked and unmarked, for I Saw the TV Glow. Proceed at your own risk… and if you haven’t seen the movie already, I encourage you to stop reading and go watch it before proceeding any further. It’s a film that benefits from being seen unspoiled.

0. before i saw the glow

The day after my 51st birthday, I took myself out to an actual movie theater—a rarity in this peri-pandemic world—to see Jane Schoenbrun‘s 2024 film I Saw the TV Glow. My social media feed for weeks prior had been filled with multiple commentators, mostly trans (and specifically transfeminine) people alternately waxing rhapsodic about the movie and decrying how emotionally devastated it had left them: sobbing in the theater or the car afterwards, staring blankly into space for days afterwards, and having lots of Thoughts™ about the movie, what it means, and what it has to say about queerness and transness. After a few weeks spent dodging spoilers for the film like a hyperflexible gymnast/secret agent infiltrating a high-tech laser security system, I finally gave in and took myself out to the movies to see it, and now I too have thoughts.

Oh boy, do I have thoughts.

What follows is not a review, and shouldn’t be mistaken for one. I’m not especially qualified to review the artistic or technical qualities of a film and, other than under very specific circumstances, I’m entirely unqualified to say whether a given person “should” see a film or not. Artistic appreciation is an intensely personal experience, and I can think of few films which demonstrate the personal nature of art as emphatically as I Saw the TV Glow.

So, rather than a review, this post is me thinking out loud: a record of my own mental processing of a film which traumatized a number of people on my social media feed and managed to work its way into my dreams before I’d ever seen more than the admittedly well-crafted trailer, and about which I’ve since made the debatably humorous comment that it gave me psychic damage.

1: starburned and unkissed

I suspect the way a person feels about I Saw the TV Glow will depend entirely on a variety of factors, including their own relationship with gender, sexuality, identity, and ’90s youth/teen pop culture. I could easily see this movie leaving a viewer baffled, confused, even angry. I can also see it leaving a viewer sobbing in their seat during the credits, or in the theater bathroom afterwards.[1] I can even imagine, however dimly, someone sitting through the entire 100-minute runtime and responding with a diffident, “well, that happened” shrug.

That last reaction is the hardest to envision, though. I’ve rarely ever seen a film which more openly squares off with the viewer and demands they engage with it on its own terms, and I have never in my life seen a film which more fully deserves the adjective “dreamlike.” I Saw the TV Glow conveys its unrestrained, yet weirdly quiet dream logic with a visual style which relentlessly bombards the viewer with weapons-grade strangeness while consistently drawing us in. The film wears its artistic antecedents—Buffy the Vampire Slayer, various Nickelodeon shows, Twin Peaks—on its sleeve, but rarely in a direct, obvious fashion. It reads very much like a coming-of-age teen drama directed by David Lynch… but I doubt Lynch could have made a film as defiantly, unrelentingly queer as I Saw the TV Glow.

Of course, it takes more to make a film queer than proximity to queerness. If that weren’t the case, simply noting the queerness of the film’s writer/director would be sufficient. Observing Maddy’s explicit lesbian identity or the ways in which Owen’s depression and isolation can be easily read as an incapacitating gender dysphoria[2] would be more than enough. However, a film can have queer characters or be made by a queer filmmaker and still fundamentally reify cisheteronormative attitudes about queerness. What makes a film queer, at least in my not-a-film-studies-major-but-having-a-gender-women-and-sexuality-studies-degree opinion, is the extent to which it fundamentally pushes back against those cisheteronormative attitudes and ideals. In other words, it doesn’t matter how many gay folks are cast, or how much the soundtrack slaps: does this movie depict a queerness that queer people can recognize? Is this a movie that looks at queerness from the outside, or a movie that shows queerness looking back at the world?

In that sense, I Saw the TV Glow is the queerest movie I’ve seen in a very long time, and quite possibly the most trans movie—and specifically the most transfeminine movie—I’ve ever seen.

I realize how bold that statement is, and if I were a real movie reviewer, I might start quantifying the queerness of the film in an effort to trying to justify that claim, to argue you around to my way of thinking.

I’m not gonna do that, though, because as stated earlier, this isn’t a movie review. This is emotional triage.

2. feeling like a psychic wound

I’m not going to bother with writing a synopsis. They’re all over the internet, if you want one. (Then again, if you haven’t see the movie yet, you really oughtn’t read this.) If we’re gonna talk about I Saw the TV Glow, though, we kinda have to talk about that ending.

If you look on the internet, you’ll find dozens of actual reviews of the movie, along with multiple commentators analyzing the movie itself, independent of any critical assessment. If you do just such an exploration, you’ll find that much of the hubbub you’ll find center’s around the movie’s third act, which can be said to start roughly about when…

…Maddy tries to take Owen out past the football so they can bury themselves in the earth, believing that if they do so, they’ll wake up as Tara and Isabel in the world of The Pink Opaque—or, as Maddy/Tara insist, the real world. However, Owen shoves her to the ground just past the 50-yard line and runs away, locking himself in his house for days afterwards.

From this point forward, Owen narrates his life for us in classic television-main-character style, speaking and often looking directly at the camera. He sketches over the next few years of his life in dismal detail: his father dies, he stays in his parents’ home, he ostensibly starts a family (referenced once, and never shown on-screen), he loses one job and gets another. At one point, he rewatches The Pink Opaque (now on streaming!) only to realize the show is nothing like he remembers: silly, cheesy, childish, and kind of stupid. It’s also notably nothing like the clips he (and we) saw earlier in the film: no Isabel, no Tara, no mythology, no genuine horror, no “big bad” in the form of Mister Melancholy. It’s just a silly kids’ show.

Just a silly memory.

A twenty-year timeskip later, Owen is looking rough: grey, wan, dissolute, shuffling around his job at the Fun Center (ha!) where all the games appear to be based on references to The Pink Opaque. We see split-second visual signs that things are dire indeed, such as the “money tornado” game with an LED scroll above it reading “YOU ARE DYING.” Of course, only Owen seems able to see it, and it affects him not at all… until he has a total freakout during a children’s party, screaming that he’s dying and begging for help, while the entire room freezes. Later, locked in the bathroom, he cuts his own chest open with a boxcutter. Earlier in the movie, he tells Maddy that he’s terrified that, were he to be cut open, there’d be nothing at all inside him. Now, though, he literally does so, only to reveal coruscating light, static, and sound. Voices. The Pink Opaque lives inside him. He laughs, looking almost ecstatic, and then…

…and then we see him dress in his uniform and walk back into the Fun Center, shambling like a zombie, mumbling apologies to everyone he passes, none of whom see him or respond to him.

Smash cut to black. Credits. </end>

So, like, not to be overly harsh here, but what the fuck, movie?

3. the apparition knocking at my door

Welcome to the uncomfortably personal part of the blog post. Please, help yourself to an ice cream.

So, here’s the thing.

I was born in 1973. My teen years spanned the ’80s and early ’90s, so the setting of I Saw the TV Glow is a little after my time, but it’s close enough that I can feel the breeze as the bullet goes by. I didn’t grow up with Are You Afraid of the Dark? or Goosebumps as childhood touchstones, but I came to Buffy and Twin Peaks in my twenties, and I still vibe with the soundtrack. In many ways, I carried my adolescence well into my twenties, perhaps into my thirties.

That’s what being a closeted trans girl can do to you.

I almost transitioned when I was 28. I spent hours on the internet with search terms like transsexuality and transgenderism, poring over dense blocks of text and being distressed by medical photographs. Eventually I stopped, noting that everything I’d found suggested that surgery was the end goal of transition. If I didn’t want to pursue surgical sex reassignment, I thought, I must not be transsexual, or transgender, or whatever the right word was. Whatever the particular experience or state of being was that made these women pursue biomedical transition, I must not have it.[3]

I’ve spent most of my life struggling with dysphoria. Of course, I didn’t know that word until relatively recently. I just felt as though there were something intrinsically wrong, with me or with the world, something broken or misaligned or out-of-sync on some fundamental level.

I didn’t learn the language I needed until I went back to college at 41. As it turns out, a gender studies degree is an excellent way of both hiding from your own gender issues and training yourself in the tools you’ll need to deal with them when they come roaring back with a vengeance.

And they will, my friends. They always do.

I was 46 years old when I realized, or admitted, that I was a girl. I’ve told that story elsewhere, so I won’t repeat it. I will merely note that my egg was cracked by a question to which, on some level, I already kinda knew the answer.

Like many trans people, I’m quite good at hiding from myself things I don’t want to know, or don’t feel ready to cope with yet.

I was 47 when I legally changed my name, when I started taking the feminizing hormone estradiol, when I came out to the world at large. I’d already told many of my closest friends and family, and I let everyone else know through the time-honored method of making a Facebook post… on Transgender Day of Visibility, no less.

I was 51 when I sat in an empty movie theater and watched the last few seconds of I Saw the TV Glow, then sat in the silence of the blackness before the credits rolled, stunned and reeling and very, very still, the only thought in my head being, that could’ve been me.

That wan, grey ghost. That broken shell of a human. That could’ve been me.

I could have died never having admitted the truth to myself, never having actually known myself. I could’ve spent my life never having been Tamsin, to myself or my wife or my daughter or the world. That could’ve been me.

It wasn’t, of course. I avoided that outcome. I found the courage—prompted by my wife’s question, true, but answered under my own volition—to embrace myself, at long last. My story is not Owen’s, or Isabel’s. I reclaimed my own heart, and the world in which I live now is as magical and beautiful as any I could hope to find.

In the final seconds of I Saw the TV Glow, I see a vision of what my life might be if I’d taken the other path, if I’d never come out of my eggshell. I feel the breeze of the bullet as it goes by, and I know just how close I came. A few inches to the left, a smidge less courage or will or whatever force drove me to finally admit the truth about myself, and that could’ve been me.

4. my heart is like a claw machine

One of the most brilliant things about Schoenbrun’s film lies within the central metaphor of the film, the conceit on which the whole film turns.

Being an egg or a closeted trans person, Schoenbrun suggests, is like being the central character in a kind of reverse-isekai drama. You’ve been transported from the real world into an alternate reality, an unreal world… but rather than being a mundane human thrown into a realm of pure fantasy and adventure, you’re a magical being ejected from the fantasy world, imprisoned in an ill-fitting suit of raw flesh, incorrect assumptions, awkward silences, and depression. Your true self has been taken from you, and you are left, hollow and false, to move through the midnight realm in which you find yourself trapped.

The metaphor is especially poignant because, in the world of I Saw the TV Glow, there’s never any confirmation of what we suspect to be true, what we desperately want to be true: that the world of The Pink Opaque actually is the real world, and the decaying suburb through which Owen shambles is nothing more than a psychic prison. The movie encourages us to embrace hope—that Maddy really is Tara, that Owen really is Isabel, and that there really is a way out, if only Owen/Isabel can find the courage to embrace it—without ever once confirming that hope is anything more than wishful thinking at best, or a dangerous, self-destructive delusion at worst.

The film never gives us this confirmation, because—and lean in here, kids, this is important—no one can tell you if you’re trans or not.

No one can tell you your truth, because no one else can know it. They can guess it, they can suspect it, they can be pretty goddamn sure, but they can’t know. The most they can do is suggest it, or maybe ask some well-aimed questions.

The only one who can know, of course, is you. As cheese or cringe as it may sound, you have to be the hero of your own story. You have to find the courage first to tell yourself the truth, and then to choose to embrace it. Maybe you aren’t literally a psychic heroine buried in a shallow grave, poisoned with Mister Melancholy’s Luna Juice and dying by inches… but as metaphors for being a closeted trans person go, that one’s not bad.

4. believe in me as i believe in you

As I coast towards the end of this particular blog post, I want us to glance outside the present film for just a moment.

The trans allegory of The Matrix is well-trodden territory, so I won’t belabor the point, but there’s a scene in Lana Wachowski’s The Matrix Resurrections (2021) in which we are shown Neo—firmly trapped in his “Thomas Anderson” persona—squatting on a toilet in a public bathroom. While doing his business (hilariously set to a orchestrally augmented version of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” complete with tuba accompaniment), he’s shown staring at the heavily graffitied stall door. In the midst of all the other marginalia is a line from Don DeLillo’s 1971 novel Americana, written with a paint pen in classic Matrix green: “It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams.” 

The profundity of the quote in a crudely quotidian and intensely gendered space was deeply poignant in the content of The Matrix Resurrections, but resonates even beyond that movie, or even the franchise as a whole. The line is practically the beating, coruscating-static-light heart of I Saw the TV Glow, and could easily have been the film’s epigraph. It depicts the figurative and literal burial of reality as a way to dispose of the dream of being beautiful, powerful, or authentic. Of mattering. Of being real, at long last, when all you’ve ever known is a disconnected abstraction of life.

Art always has a message, a meaning, regardless of the claims of the artist. We may agree or disagree with the message, but it’s intrinsically there. Even art that purports to be “about nothing” is, in its own existence, saying something to us. While still allowing for individual interpretations, Jane Schoenbrun has been quite explicit in interviews as to what meanings they intended when making I Saw the TV Glow. It is an explicitly queer, trans film[4] with a message—one which, while potentially universal in its applicability, has a special resonance for us.

At multiple points in the film, we see the streets in Owen and Maddy’s suburb covered with multicolored pastel chalk scrawls, not unlike static. Images appear in them, but they too are largely an abstraction. The one moment we are shown these childlike chalk drawings unequivocally, explicitly communicating a clear message—almost certainly from Maddy/Tara—it’s both desperate and hopeful: there is still time.

Time to do what? To admit and accept the truth, of course. To disinter yourself from an early, unwelcome grave. To reclaim your heart. To live.

There is still time.

Drifting through Void High School’s halls, Owen passes “motivational” posters stenciled in red and yellow, all bearing macho mottos about strength and courage, but courage isn’t fearlessness; it’s doing what needs to be done, even when you’re afraid. The world is filled with terrors and torments, but also with comfort and pleasure and a wild, ecstatic joy. To avoid the risk of the former is to amputate the possibility of the latter, encasing yourself in a shallow grave: what iconic lesbian comedian Robin Tyler calls the “vertical coffin” of the closet. If you’re still breathing, there is still time. Any moment can be the right moment. Do it forcefully or quietly, in defiance or with support, with a voice firm with conviction or quavering with fear, to the whole world or to those you trust most or only to yourself.

It is never too late to come out, to be real, to embrace your authentic self… even to transition, if that’s your path. It’s never too late, until the moment you’re dead. It may not be easy or painless, but if this is your truth, if you’re reading these words, I promise you—not a rhetorical “me” or “you,” but the real me typing these words, the real you reading them—I promise you, on my own heart, you can do this.

There is still time.

coda: the things that i say in the dark

I rarely do this, but something niggling at the back of my brain is prompting me to add this post-script:

I’m not a therapist or any other mental health professional. I’m just a middle-aged nonbinary trans girl who came closer to living the Bad Ending of this movie than I like to think about… but I didn’t. That doesn’t make me any better than anyone else, but it does give me a certain perspective. If you’ve read this post and want to talk to someone about it, you can find me at any of the social media links in the header or footer of this post, or you can email me from this contact form.

I can’t promise to have any answers, but I promise to listen, and if I can do something to help, I will.

🖤

[1] This outcome doesn’t take any particular insight to imagine, however, since I first heard about I Saw the TV Glow through several social media posts from transfeminine people stating they did exactly this.

[2] Which is [SPOILER ALERT] alleviated only in a brief moment of euphoria while dressed as Isabel, one of the two main heroines of The Pink Opaque, the TV show over which Maddy and Owen bond. It’s notable that this is the only scenes I recall from the film in which Owen is seen smiling.

[3] This, by the way, is one of the dangers inherent in the lie of transmedicalism. It actually convinces trans people that they’re not actually trans, which makes it not just factually untrue, but needlessly cruel. It’s a tool of oppression, and I will never stop hating it, or being disgusted at the ways it’s used to harm trans people.

[4] And yes, there are multiple readings for the film and its ending, and yes, those readings can be much more universally applicable than a strictly transgender reading… but I’m wary of the impulse to immediately brush aside the trans reading of a trans creator’s explicitly-and-by-design trans-themed film in favor of something more “universally”applicable, i.e. something cis people can appreciate. To phrase it more succinctly, I Saw the TV Glow is emphatically a trans movie: made by one of us, about us, for us. I’m truly happy that cis people can get something out of it too, but to disregard or dismiss the inherent trans content of the movie is a bit like ignoring class warfare in Saltburn, sexism in The Handmaid’s Tale, or racism in Get Out.

https://reimaginedgirl.com/2024/06/24/the-glow-holds-me-now/

#film #howToBeTrans #iSawTheTvGlow #janeSchoenbrun #thinkyThoughts

The warm-up and the rain have pretty much washed away the frozen landscape. It's kind of amazing how quick the change is. But I can get out and walk around without having to "penguin walk" and focus on each individual step.

Tomorrow is back to work after my weather-extended staycation. It will be good to get back to a routine. Although video gaming and web surfing all day didn't TOTALLY suck, it would be nice if I could actually get paid for it.

#adayinthelife #thinkythoughts

Hello, beautiful creatures.

So, it turns out that recovering from facial feminization surgery is a lot.

A lot of what, you ask? Everything. A lot of pain, a lot of swelling, a lot of time, a lot of frustration and tears, a lot of wondering just when the hell you’ll be able to eat a burger or a burrito or a friggin’ cookie without feeling like you’re doing damage to areas that are already damaged quite enough, thank you very much. A lot of contemplation of the choices you made that brought you to this point, and a lot of questioning whether or not it was worth it.

The genuinely wonderful thing is that I’m home now, safe and sound. I can relax and emotionally decompensate in the comfort of my own home, with my own cats and my own bed and my own everything. The Airbnb we stayed in was perfectly fine, but what I’ve learned in the past few weeks is that it’s impossible for me to fully relax in a space I know belongs to someone else. A hotel room is easier for me, because it’s fully a liminal space which belongs to no one.[1] Home is best, of course, but failing that, an anonymous hotel room is pretty okay.

So, I’m home now, and recovering. How am I?

Objectively, I’m doing okay. I have fair bit of swelling around my eyes, which is causing some vision problems (see below for more), and along my jawline and chin. My forehead is still quite numb, as is most of the top of my scalp. My scalp incision line is healing nicely (though having scabs still falling out of my hair is, frankly, kind of gross). My lips are still tingling and a bit sore, and they’re getting chapped like whoa, but of all my facial renovations, they honestly look the closest to “done,” or at least to fully healed.[2]

About those vision problems: So, the swelling around my eyes is pretty fierce. It doesn’t look horrific, but it’s definitely noticeable. The real problem, though, is that it’s constricting my eyeballs, which means it’s affecting my vision. I can’t really focus on screens for longer than a few minutes without my eyes watering, my vision blurring or doubling, and an eyestrain headache starting up almost immediately. What this means in practical terms is that I can’t return to work yet. Even writing this blog post has been difficult, and I’ve done that in small bursts of work over the course of a few hours. As a result, my medical leave has been extended through the end of January, and I’m doing my best to take it easy on my eyeballs.

And now, I’m going to do just that. Cheers, y’all.

[1] Despite what Republican politicians want us to believe, corporations are not people.

[2] As my 18-year-old daughter put it, “Like, you have lips now!” Yeah, thanks, kid. 😑

https://reimaginedgirl.com/2024/01/21/home-again-home-again-t17/

#operationPolymorph #thinkyThoughts

#thinkyThoughts

Oil is power.

If alternative energies like Solar, Wind, and Water give power to more people, what does it do to those power bases?

What does it do to US and its policy in the middle east?

Hmmm.

Hello, beautiful creatures.

In a characteristically typical move, I was clever enough to have come up with the title for my first post-operative blog post, but not prescient enough to have written its content. Really, though, I don’t think it could’ve been any other way. After all, it takes no great powers of prognostication to have forecast that I would have all of the qualities given in this post’s title. Knowledge of the actual experiences of which those qualities are the markers, however, does kinda require having actually lived through them. So, to an extent, I’m starting this blog post without knowing where I’m going. It is both tabula rasa and terra incognita, if you will.

Having an organizing theme does help me get my thoughts into some kind of accessible order. Sometimes I try to be super clever with that organizing theme, but clever requires a hell of a lot more energy than I have right now, so instead, you get the easiest one imaginable.

the good

Well, what can I say? I wanted to know if I was someone who could do the thing. Turns out, I am. I am officially six days past my facial feminization surgery, five days past discharge from the hospital, and one day past my first post-op check-in. I’m ambulatory, my pain is being managed, and my swelling has diminished to the point where I can actually start to see some of the changes. The weirdest part of this whole process has been the realization that I don’t actually know what my new baseline normal is. I won’t really have the final-final version for up to a year from now, and I’ll only have the ~80% final version at about three months from now, so being able to see the changes starting to reveal themselves is especially exciting.

the bad

Here’s the hard truth: I’m in a lot of pain. There’s pain at all of my surgical sites, of course—my brow, the staples inside my hairline, my cheeks, my upper and lower lips, my chin, along my jaw, and the insides of my mouth where my cheeks and lip meet my gums—as well as my abdomen, where they borrowed some fat to transplant into my face. I also have a persistent headache, which no medication or hydration is quite touching, and a general, persistent sensation of pressure all around my head, which is both painful and just uncomfortable.

What I want to be careful to stress here is that none of this is unusual or unexpected. Everything I’m experiencing is entirely within normal parameters. Point of fact, both my surgeon’s office and my wife and friends have commented that I appear to be healing really quickly. This is likely due, at least in part, to the post-operative hyperbaric oxygen therapy I’ve been doing. It’s also probably due to the fact that I’ve spent a substantial amount of my non-HBOT time sleeping or resting. Seriously, I overestimated the amount of time I’d have for playing Baldur’s Gate 3 or reading books by an awful lot. Most of my time, I’m asleep… or, y’know, lying in bed trying to sleep. And failing. Because pain.

So, to recap: pain. Healing fast, yes, but lots of pain.

the ugly

Laverne Cox’s hashtag campaign insists that #TransIsBeautiful, while a transfeminine friend of mine insists that “Trans is pain.” Both are true, of course, and I’ll add another one: trans is messy. There’s no getting around this, so I won’t try: living with a swollen faceful of bruises and stitches is hard. It’s hard waking up every morning in pain and discomfort, often far earlier than I’d like, knowing that what greets me in the bathroom mirror is going to be a slightly color-corrected version of the same battered, war-torn landscape of discolored skin, smeared ointment, and goopy eyes I went to bed with. Even with my stitches removed, there’s still a line of angry, crusty, red-black barbed wire impressions separating my nose from my upper lip, ready to inspire any number of cocaine-fuelled elegies about lovers separated by political and/or aesthetic divisions.

Okay, that metaphor got way, way away from me[1], but you get my meaning. It’s messy. I don’t mean “ugly,” in the masochistic, self-destructive way trans girls so often use to hurt ourselves: “OMG I’m so ugly, I’ll never pass, I’m such a brick/hon/whatever,” and so on. I mean it’s messy, in precisely the same way all human bodies are: gooey, sticky, oozing, swelling, inflamed, crusty, and gross. All bodies are like this, and trans bodies are no exception. When we have surgeries, we have to recover just like cis people do: one stitch at a time, so to speak.

This morning, I woke from what I’m guessing was about four whole hours of sleep, my bandages having all slipped off or come loose, with my face throbbing and pounding like a righteously angry funk band.

It’s moments like this where I feel at my lowest, and I think, Why did I do this to myself? Was this necessary? Couldn’t I have just, I dunno, lived with the dysphoria?

The really annoying thing is, knowing the answer to those questions doesn’t actually make things hurt any less in the moment. It just reminds me that I’m paying now for choices I made in the past, in hope of a better future—or, to put it another way, pastTamsin did this to presentTamsin so that futureTamsin can be happier.

And right now, I kinda hate pastTamsin an awful lot, so futureTamsin had better appreciate this.

So, there you have it: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Sounds prety dire, right?

As I said at the beginning, though, I can kind of see her, the woman underneath the swelling and soreness. I can almost make out the shapes and lines of her face: the way her Cupid’s-bow lips sit beneath her retroussé nose, the way her eyes capture the light so much more than they were able to before, accentuated by the sweep of her cheekbones. All of those were present in potentia in the original, but none of them were made fully manifest—incarnate, if you will—until now.

Almost.

Or maybe that’s all wishful thinking and projection on the reality of the now, which is swollen tissue and angry nerves playing the most bellicose version of Rhapsody in Blue you’ve ever heard, like George Gershwin being mugged by Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music in a New York alley sometime in the mid-’70s.[2]

Either way, though, I am where I am, good and bad and industrial jazz mashups and angry funk bands and all. Things are rough right now, but they’re also honestly amazing. I thought I’d never actually get to this place, and when I realized it was an actual possibility, I had to ask myself if I could actually follow through with it.

The answer is “yes.”

I’m struggling, but that’s part of the adventure, too, innit? I knew this job was dangerous when I took it. No risk, no reward. Fake it ’til you make it. And so on. (Insert your preferred motivational cliché here!)

At some point I’ll have a whole list of people I want to shout-out and thank for everything they’ve done to support me, but at this exact moment I want to specifically name five:

Okay, I’m all maudlin and sappy now. That’s a good note to end this post on, I think. More to come.

Cheers, all of you, and thanks for reading along. 🖤

[1] And, as Tolkien slyly noted of Bilbo’s wishes to have never gone on that stupid uncomfortable adventure which makes up the bulk of The Hobbit, not for the last time.

[2] See? Toldja so. The really funny thing is, I haven’t taken any narcotics since yesterday morning. Apparently this is just how my brain works. And, for the record, I would never invoke such a fate on Mr. Gershwin, nor would I ever think Mr. Reed capable of such a thing, and I wish them both nothing but loving-kindness in whatever state they exist beyond this present incarnate moment.

https://reimaginedgirl.com/2024/01/11/bandaged-bruised-swollen-stitched-and-sore-t6/

#howToBeAGirl #howToBeTrans #music #operationPolymorph #thinkyThoughts

Well, here we are. One week out.

In a handful of days, I’ll be in California.

A couple of days after that, I’ll be under the knife.

My brain has been in what you might charitably call “a state.” In addition to planning and managing all of the moving parts of a cross-continental trip, I’ve also been focusing on the fine and coarse details of getting everything sorted out for my medical clearance and insurance authorization for the aforementioned trip, and occasionally taking a break from all of that to speculate about the somewhat gnarly specifics of my upcoming Special Guest Star role in a remake of the Twilight Zone episode “Eye of the Beholder.”

For those of you unfamiliar with the episode, you can just click on the Wikipedia link to get a synopsis, but if you can find it streaming online—many platforms have The Twilight Zone available—it’s worth watching. Like many TZ episodes, the plot turns on a particular twist which may seem a little hokey to our jaded, adult 21st century eyes, but was still pretty shocking when I first saw it as a wee slip of a girl in the 1970s.

If you continue reading from this point, I’m assuming you’ve seen it, or spoiled yourself with Wikipedia. You’ve been warned.

So, yeah. I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about this episode, and about that jarring moment when Maxine Stuart is unmasked to reveal Donna Douglas under the bandages, followed by a series of smash cuts to the other medical staff in the room, who look a bit like Boris Karloff in prosthetic “old-school D&D orc” makeup. I think about that moment, and I wonder who the hell thought it was a good idea to let a kid watch that TV show, because all I can think now is, oh gods, what if they unwrap my head and I look like a truffle-hunting Uruk-hai?

Welcome to my brain.

More seriously, though, it’s starting to actually sink in that this… is… happening. This is real. In roughly the same amount of time from now as a caffeine-fuelled marathon of all the modern Doctor Who episodes and specials, I’ll be waking up (much too early for my liking), showering (and washing myself with a scary chlorhexidine body wash), dressing in something comfortable, and being driven to a hospital where I’ll be COVID-swabbed before sitting down to have a nice chat with my surgeon, who I’ll be meeting for the very first time. Then, I’ll change into something somewhat less comfortable, get jabbed with an IV, and sit around for a while before they decide to wheel my silly self into an operating room. Then, they’ll give me the good drugs, and I’ll start counting backwards from some number I won’t even be able to remember because I’ll suddenly be in a recovery room, coming back to consciousness, swathed in bandages and high as a kite, and it’ll be all over but the recovery.

This is, as you might imagine, incredibly weird.

A GIF of David Tennant looking out of frame and saying, with a dubious look, “Bit weird.” He then looks straight at the camera and makes an “eugh” sort of facial expression.

However, as weird as this all is, I have to find a way to shelve the weirdness for the next few days, because I have Things to Do:

• Laundry. Oh, gods, so much laundry.
• Meds: securing, double-checking, packing.
• Finalizing cat care.
• Getting spare keys made.
• Miscellaneous paperwork things.
• Dishes and other house-tidying things.
• Packing. All the packing. Pack all the things!

…and like that. I’d be more stressed by this list of chores and responsibilities, but it’s actually helpful to have a full docket. I don’t have time to stress about medical procedures or to fret about whether I’ll be a pretty girl once a semi-random stranger has taken a scalpel (and other tools) to my face; I have to make sure my kittens will be fed!

If beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, so too are all other subjective states: fear, insecurity, anxiety, dread. Maybe it’s okay to live, at least temporarily, in a liminal state of not knowing what I’ll look like in two weeks’ time, of not knowing how well I’ll handle my pain eight days from now, of not knowing how people will react to my new face. Maybe it’s okay to feel a bit like Maxine Stuart, swaddled under all that gauze, hoping that my big reveal will be less Boris Karl-orc-ff (see what I did there? that’s called a callback!) and more Donna Douglas, or at least my own twin sister. She would’ve been kinda cute, I think, even at 50.

Only one way to find out, I guess.

Anyway, this post is far more “Tamsin uploads her brain-fluff” than earlier installments. This is just me woolgathering, rambling, letting my brain kinda spiral out on things, and I think that’s okay. I don’t always have a point to make, a moral to offer, or a tidy hat-trick wrap-up to perform for an appreciative audience.

Here, have a creepy picture of a beholder instead.

I hope you’re all doing well and moving into the Western new year from a place of security and safety. Further updates as events warrant.

https://reimaginedgirl.com/2023/12/29/eye-of-the-beholder-t-7/

#beholder #dungeonsDragons #eyeOfTheBeholder #howToBeAGirl #maundering #operationPolymorph #theTwilightZone #thinkyThoughts