nefola

cw: covid, dysphoria, suicide, poor system practives

On july 28th 2018 i purchased a line a day journal. I purchased it from a gift shop on a somewhat regular trip to New York with my father. As of today I have written a journal entry (almost) every day for five years.

I have complicated feelings about my journal use. There is very little space to write about each day. My notation does not help. I can only fit about six sentences about my day into each entry space.

On the last line of each entry I write what day of my life it is, each day without fail. An old rwtxt document lost to time holds a similar tradition. Entries with less consistency and emotional depth scrawled in markdown, file locations obfuscated by my poor understanding of go at the time. I always know how long it's been since my birth. I keep track of it because I like the numbers.

Starting September 27th of 2018 I have rated each day on a scale of negative to positive fourty. (initially -50 to 50). Zero is true neutral, my day was not overall good or overall bad. Ten is satisfactory; The minimum of good a day should be. 11 through 20 are definitely good days, the good in them sufficiently outweighs any bad and them generally being satisfactory. Days above 20 stand out, they are fucking amazing. Negatives are definitely bad days. A day has noticeable good in it up until -15, it was just bad overall. -20 and below is a sign that something is wrong. At both positive and negative 35 ratings are concerning. There is either mania or egregious depression. What an autistic way to interpret emotions.

It's hard to say what a day means to me looking back. Again there are only six sentences and a number to go off of going back. My handwriting is rather poor, to the point that I sometimes struggle to read it. It also isn't feasible to just read entry after entry to get a sum of how I felt. What I can do is look at how long each entry is.

My first two years were pretty verbose, using most of an entry's space each day. Ratings are pretty neutral due to how my depression was at the time. My ratings pick up for a bit and then I am saying less during 2020. oh right covid.

Even if I am doing better under the hood, getting less dysphoric and more social, I am doing less. Of course my days will still be mediocre.

I begin to say more during the summer before college, but not as much as I did in 2018. I am rating many days above ten, which has been rare. All of university since then has been about that good. I have less volatile emotions, less dysphoria of the day to scrawl away.

My ratings have gotten generally better over time. I have been more confident to rate a day more expressively as I have multiplied my life experience by 1.33. Also helps that I recovered from my depression. I have more room for the joys of concerts, conventions, sex, and games. No longer numb to my bad days but thats worth it.

I celebrate days of my life with cool numbers that are not birthdays. 6969, 7k, 6k, etc. Day 7000 felt very impactful. It shouldn’t have. There isn’t a good reason to count like this.

the days counting thing was a timer.

to not kill myself before i could get my hands on estrogen

to not kill myself before i got on pubery blockers

to not die before things got socially better

a challenge to endure a finite amount of time before things would get better

and they did

i kept counting. i got older every day.

I had an estimate on what was the earliest and latest day we of my life I could get estrogen in the rwtxt days. I don't remember what they exactly where but they lined up almost perfectly with when I actually got hrt.

This journal was started in the wake of great horror. If you are trans and fully realized before the onset of puberty you know exactly what I felt. Each day you feel like your body is taking damage. You know it's so incredibly gradual and you don’t care. It just builds up over time. Two months pass in a blink and you know your voice is deeper than when it started. You fight the good fight against budding facial hair and you know it will get harder over time.

Then it was over. I got approved for blockers and there was a definitive limit to the “damage”. The start of the journal is about me coming to accept exactly exactly how much happened to me. I exist in a catastrophized post dysphoria for literal years in the journal. I learn how alienated I am from my peers gradually. Both alienated in gender and in neurodivergence.

Waking up to my plurality is documented in this book. My words are messy and wrong. Stena and Kai are under mentioned in entries. We still haven't truly figured out non astral entries.

I don't think any other 5 year capture of my life will be able to hold the same meaning as this. I literally became a woman while holding this book. Breasts grew, gender changed, I became a more realized person.

The spine is slightly damaged and the binding has weakened. Much of the golden page edge has been abraded away with time and getting tossed between my divorced parents' apartments. There is faint water damage. The pencil of older entries has smudged ever so slightly before fully setting into the paper.

An old name and discord handle note the please return to page. Stickers that no longer fit my aesthetic sensibilities scattered across the cover pages. Ideas of how to notate from an entirely different iteration of myself inform the very nature of this book's use.

This book is what it means to grow up as a trans woman.

+13

Day#7478