Introduction

My name is Rachael Ann Brown. I’m 33 years old. I don’t know how I ended up at this point in my life. Furthermore, I don’t know how to convey what my problems even are without relating to you my life story.

Early life

I was born in Warren, Ohio, around 9 o’clock on a Saturday evening. Alright – I’ll try and be a little less verbose, but you never know when we’re going to need that. I have no memories of Warren; my parents only lived there a few years for work, and moved away when I was a year old. My father described it as “the armpit of Ohio”; with all due respect to anyone with ties to this place.

My first memories are of growing up in a house my parents rented by White Lake, after we moved to North Carolina. I don’t know how exactly we afforded to live at the lake. Maybe that’s why we only lived there a few years. My memories of this time period seem… pretty gentle. I briefly remember going to daycare for a bit, before I started going to the baptist church in town for preschool.

I often played with Katelyn, a neighbor who went to the same preschool, and her younger sister Cassie. I also had some other playmates who lived further away. This other fellow named Ethan Bennett; not sure what ever happened to him. But it was mostly Katelyn and Cassie, particularly in those early years.

We moved from our house by the lake to a new double-wide trailer closer to town. We had quite a bit more space there, with a pond and a lot more woods to explore out back. I didn’t really have any neighbor kids to play with except for this much older kid named Walt. While this sounds isolating, I don’t remember it being particularly so. I was busy using my imagination in the woods and playing Super Nintendo, and we still invited kids over quite a lot back in those days.

I was enrolled in kindergarten at Bladen Lakes primary. And, I still have mostly fond memories of this age. But, it also might be the earliest age when I started to notice I was different. You see, I quickly became friends with this girl named Courtney. And, everything seemed pretty normal for a while. We played at recess, made long strings of Play-Doh together. I remember our parents arranging at least one play date. She lived in bum-fuck Harrells, though.

Things started to get uncomfortable when the other kids began to ship the two of us. “Ethan and Courtney, sittin’ in a tree” they’d say, teasingly. I became increasingly frustrated by this. I didn’t understand what was so weird about us, and why they weren’t making fun of anyone else like that. Eventually, it was explained to me that the problem was that Courtney was a girl, and I was a boy. The other kids were insinuating that we should date, or marry, or that we were already on the path to doing so. But, I was just trying to make a friend. She’s just the person I happened to first gravitate toward, for whatever reason.

So, I’m reckoning I have to make friends with boys if I want to not be made fun of. And as I look around at all the other boys, all I can think is… ick, really? They’re all just so… wild, and loud, and rambunctious. Perhaps even a bit violent. None of them felt particularly relatable.

Things felt a little awkward initially, when the first group of guys I approached wondered why I wanted to play with them all of a sudden. And, I didn’t exactly stop playing with girls entirely. But, this might’ve been the first time I made a conscious decision to try and act like a normal boy. It marks the point at which I became self-aware. And, it was the beginning of a pattern of behavior that has followed me ever since.

Mid-childhood

After trying on the various hats as one does at that age, it was clear by about first or second grade that I was interested in science, and electronics in particular. Bill Nye and Magic School Bus were among my favorite television programs at that point, and I really liked building the Radio Shack kits my parents had bought me; particularly the shortwave radio receiver. I also really wanted to learn more about computers; which was still a novelty in the 90s, especially out in the country. Bladen Lakes built it’s first computer lab on the other side of the wall from our classroom when I was in kindergarten, which probably makes first or second grade the first point at which they started taking us over there; to play Jump Start n^th grade, or to look up silly things on Yahooligans.

Just when I was starting to get jealous of kids who got to have actual computer time, we bought our first computer. And oh, do I remember that damn thing. #snipIt was a Compaq Presario with a Cyrix knockoff 586, something like 32MB of EDO memory, and a 1.2GB Quantum Bigfoot, preinstalled with Microsoft Windows 95. It had a serial port, a parallel port, and an internal dial-up modem that was either on-board or, probably more likely, a small form factor card that took up the only expansion slot. At any rate, I don’t remember any PCI or ISA slots available in the thing; and it also lacked USB, which may not have even been around yet.

#snipAnd, I hope I haven’t written about this computer with too much disdain; for as quickly as it was outmoded, it performed its duties quite well for what it was. We got dial-up internet, and I remember my dad bringing home Netscape Communicator on a bunch of floppies. I wanted to make a website, and my dad and I took to making one for our local 4-H group. Not sure what ever happened to that.

Second grade feels like a bit of a turning point in my childhood. We got our aforementioned first computer. I also placed into the gifted program (which we called AIG). Additionally, Josh moved to White Lake from the Fayetteville area that year; he would go on to become a lifelong friend. He was the first friend I made who went to my school and also my church; most kids who went to the Methodist church went to school at Elizabethtown Primary, which was in town and across the river.

When I was in the second or third grade, my father had a heart attack. He was only 39 years old, and was quickly taken to Cape Fear Valley once he was stabilized in Elizabethtown. I went to stay with Josh’s family for a time. My dad survived; he needed a stent if I recall, and it was strongly advised that he stop smoking.

Josh and I quickly became friends. He also placed into AIG, and within a year or two we were helping make a simple website for our 3^rd or 4^th grade class.

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In the mornings before school, I liked to go into my mom’s room and waddle in the bed while she got ready and listened to Bob and Sheri. And, I feel like I need to take a break to talk about how weird it must sound for normal people to hear me refer to “my mom’s room” when speaking of a married couple. But by now, my dad had taken to sleeping in the recliner, while my mom slept in the bed. And now that I’m older, I’m quite certain any spark of romance between these two people had long faded by this point.

But anyway, I liked to lie around in my mom’s bed before school while she was getting ready, and this was when the thought first occurred to me that I really, really wanted to try on one of her bras. And, I was old enough to know that those were for girls. I wondered if it was normal to feel that way, but I didn’t really think much of it at first.

I think I was around nine when my parents decided I was old enough to be left home alone. My dad was spending less and less time at home for work-related reasons, that for all I know may as well have been marital. This was decades ago, but I think it might’ve been at the very first opportunity when it occurred to me: what if I went into my mom’s room and tried on one of her bras? As long as I’m really careful not to disturb anything… who would know, right? So naturally one thing leads to another. And, the first time I probably only did it for a minute or two. I was so scared I’d be caught somehow, or that my mom would come home way ahead of schedule.

This quickly became a habit. When I was left alone, I’d get the family camcorder, an RF modulator box, a pocket-sized television, and a 50’ roll of coax, combining them into a rudimentary CCTV system. Nobody would ever ask what I was doing; playing with electronics was well within my normal range of behavior by this age.

My dad would sometimes jokingly sing that Cheech and Chong number when we were driving around in his truck. While there was certainly never any hurtful intent, this was my first time learning, both that boys sometimes had the sorts of urges I had, and that parents might disown their children if they do certain things. I was very confused why something so seemingly innocent would elicit such an extreme response.

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My electronics hobby grew to the point that I had a soldering iron in my room, which for all I know my mom still has clenched butt cheeks over. My dad suggested ham radio as a potential hobby. This rapidly drew my interest, and I got my technician class license just after my tenth birthday. The Morse code requirement had recently been eliminated, though I did have to muddle through learning it for the general class license I’d get in middle school.

My mother’s first stay at the mental hospital happened around the fourth grade. She went voluntarily, and I really only got bits and pieces at that age. I think she might’ve driven the van to the edge of the river and contemplated driving in. I think my dad mentioned she had a traumatic childhood. I do know she had panic attacks, for which she took Klonopin and an antidepressant. My father took care of me during that time.

I had my first emotional meltdown at school when I was in fourth grade. I grew increasingly upset with the librarian during n^th period, for some childish reason I don’t remember. I started making a fingergun-like gesture at Mrs. Price; which isn’t like me. I’m not really a gun person. I think she asked me to go to the principal’s office or something, and I sort of just lost it. I don’t remember all that much after that. I remember shouting “I want my mommy!” in the teacher workroom; though in that same moment I had a sinking feeling she wouldn’t be helpful.

I did eventually find myself crying in the principal’s office, where we had this sort of “life is short” talk. I was mostly a good kid, and I didn’t really get in trouble.

My mother quickly determined that I had anger management issues. She took me to see a therapist in Fayetteville a handful of times; this was mostly unproductive, and I certainly didn’t talk about my little habit with the guy.

In fourth grade, I was encouraged to do a science fair project inspired by my new hobby; no, not crossdressing, amateur radio. I had a lot of subsequent science fair projects that were mostly phoned in; but this one was actually alright, and went on to the state level. It basically looked at what effect the sun had on the noise floor and maximum range of radio communications, especially at VHF and above. Not exactly original research, but I was a goddamn fourth grader.

By this point in late elementary school, the girls were starting to wear training bras, and I was starting to have feelings toward them. But, my feelings were mostly just jealousy. Grown-ups started telling me I was getting to the age where I’d start to have feelings for girls. “Is this it?”, I wondered.

The corresponding process began relatively early for me. It was noted in the fourth grade that I had “started puberty”, and I entered middle school with an obvious mustache.

By now, my mother was very keen on bragging about how I had my amateur radio license. I could’ve done without the attention. She seems to have put me in a lot of uncomfortable situations, under the guise of it just being “what moms do”. I’ve needed a lot of hindsight to really see that.

I’m not sure whether it was due to a change in my mother’s behavior, or simply me growing older and more observant. But toward the end of primary school, I increasingly viewed my mother as “emotionally unstable”. My parents fought more often. “Her saddle’s slipping”, my dad said of my mother privately; a statement I was generally inclined to agree with.

I wasn’t really old enough to understand their arguments, so there was always some doubt in my mind as to who was right; but, my mother was very high-strung, anxious, and obsessive, in stark contrast to my carefree and at times lackadaisical father.

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By now, the mag-mount on a cookie tin had been replaced with a Cushcraft vertical on the roof; which in turn would soon be on a used 40’ tower we managed to pick up. It was eventually accompanied by a three element beam for HF, and a 14 element beam for 2 meters, along with a flagstaff-style pulley for erecting dipoles.

My dad heard about Linux from somewhere (the paper, perhaps), and suggested I should learn more about it. I was fascinated by the idea of trying a different operating system; although my dad would never let me use the family computer for that, I managed to get a cheap used desktop computer in late elementary school. I chose pre-Novell SuSE 7.something as my first distro; I find this amusing as an adult, considering I lived two hours away from Red Hat world headquarters.

Our church got a new preacher, Tommy. We went through a few others I won’t bother to mention, but Tommy was the preacher through most of my youth. Regardless of where I’ve found myself in life, I still think he’s a cool guy.

My mother and I first met Tommy and his wife at a sort of reception dinner we held for them in the church activity building. We managed to find ourselves at the same table somehow, and it was brought up that Tommy was also born in Warren, Ohio.

The new preacher undoubtedly mingled with other groups; but our table, oddly enough, happened to be the one out of a dozen or so that he gravitated toward. Him, his wife, the Richardsons, the Stewarts, and my mother and I. The festivities died down, and the people began to leave. Our group kept talking as the activity building fell empty. A couple of people from our table left; but the core group remained, and found itself in the much more intimate adjoining preacher’s office.

This was a long time ago, and I’m afraid a lot has happened that may have jumbled my memory. But, I do recall some vague discussion about the Freemasons between the remaining members of our party, save for my mother and I. And, something about Tommy and Jody being from somewhere. I could try and be a little less verbose, but you never know when we’re going to need that.

9/11 happened during math class when I was in 5^th grade. A lot of parents came early to pick us up, including mine. Although it was certainly made out to be a big deal, after Columbine and the Oklahoma City bombing, I honestly underestimated the gravity of the situation, and expected it to mostly fade from the news cycle after a period of weeks to months.

#snipI scored an old Thinkpad with the swappable disk drives under the keyboard for a couple hundred bucks not long after I got the desktop. It might’ve been showing its age by the time I sold it in high school, but now that I’m older I do regret getting rid of it so quickly. It was a lot more durable than the Inspiron that replaced it, which needed at least two hinge/lid replacements throughout its lifespan.

My other little hobby had similarly grown, emboldened by the couple of minutes of warning my ad-hoc CCTV system gave me, and my growing familiarity with my mother’s routines and early warning signs. I narrowly avoided being caught after she confronted me about her disheveled underwear drawer; defying a forthcoming explanation for my mother’s query, she volunteered one of her own: that I was looking for a utility knife she had taken from me and hidden in the drawer. It was like I was playing a video game, where the only choice was to press X and take this sort of plea bargain, which didn’t end in any sort of real punishment anyway. It wasn’t like her to take things from me, and she just gave it back eventually.

Middle school (2002-2005)

Sixth grade-ish

I entered middle school just before my twelfth birthday.

I want to place myself back there, for a moment. The love seat was moved nearer to the kitchen, in this sort of nook. And I’m laying on the love seat, bundled up with a heavy blanket or two. The second TV is in the distance in front of me, toward the back of the house. The main TV is in the living room around the corner. I’m not sure that either one is doing anything, but there could be a little background noise. There’s a seemingly military-grade Thinkpad brick plugged into the wall somewhere, and the other end of the cord is dangling in the couch somewhere with me, probably. There’s a copy of Lord of the Rings I’m reading for 6^th grade English class on the floor beside me, and I’m hacking away on the laptop. Figuring out vi for the first time with some docs I printed out on the other computer… probably trying to get XFree86 to work or something. I haven’t heard of emacs yet, by the way.

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An ancient thought experiment poses the question: if grains of sand are removed from a heap, one at a time, at what point does the collection of sand cease to remain a heap?

When Homo Sapiens begin puberty, it typically initiates a process of psycho-sexual maturation. This generality is one rare instance in which my puberty was not exceptional.

I don’t remember exactly when I first experienced sexual arousal, or how. But, it certainly happened by the end of elementary school. And certainly by the end of elementary school, a couple of things had become obvious.

You might (or might not) be wondering if I ever experienced sexual arousal while crossdressing. And while the answer is yes, especially in middle and early high school, that wasn’t really the most profound pattern to emerge. One of my first and strongest urges was actually that I really wanted to be tied up. I was really into bondage, ropes, cages… and always as a bottom. The universe just sort of delivered that to me at that age, along with my mustache.

When I was younger, I always enjoyed playing games that involved the aforementioned elements, as one often does with cops-and-robbers style roleplay. But by the fourth or fifth grade, I found that I enjoyed them a little too much, and that they had become “private” activities. I distinctly remember escaping after being tied to a basketball goal around age 10 or 11, frantically yet begrudgingly, because I really didn’t want to explain to Aaron why I had a raging hard-on.

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In sixth grade, I started attending Clarkton School of Discovery. I grew up in what some might call a rural backwater; the county generally lacked magnet schools, or even more than one or two AP classes at the high school level. The one exception to this was Clarkton, which had a sort of “magnet hallway” for AIG students. The AIG students took their core classes together in the morning, and afternoon electives were mixed between AIG and general education students. The general education students either lived in southern Bladen county (which wasn’t exactly “in town” for most people), or managed to get in through a lottery system. Clarkton had by far the best reputation and resources of middle schools in the county, and hosted a band, drama, tech lab, and AV program; at least the latter two were the only of their kind in the county.

I started getting bullied regularly for the first time in sixth grade. This was almost exclusively a problem during my afternoon electives, when the AIG kids were mixed with the regular students. One of the first electives I took was Christine White’s Greek mythology class, and one of the kids did shit like putting thumb tacks in my seat when I wasn’t looking. I think that guy might’ve eased up a bit as the nine weeks went on, but he still had an attitude with me.

The worse problem was this group of guys I sat beside in keyboarding class. The main issue with this class was that the assignments were designed for people who barely knew how to type, and eventually worked up to using one of those rubber pads that covered the keys. The assignments invariably consisted of merely typing in something on a hand-out and saving it on a network drive. So, I’d finish in the first ten to fifteen minutes of the period. And, I’d wait for the troublemakers surrounding me to finish. At which point they’d find various ways around the content filter to play flash games or look at porn. I was the one white boy from AIG, in between this group of black boys who all knew each other and wanted to do shady shit in the plethora of time even kids who weren’t Linux users would have after completing the assignments. And, I didn’t share their taste in porn.

After one of the boys had made a long-standing habit of popping me with a rubber band whenever the teacher wasn’t looking, I eventually lost it and took a swing at him as we were leaving class. I missed, and he gave me a black eye. We both got suspended for ten days. My mother wanted me to turn the other cheek. My father wanted me to fight like a man; his wisdom is something I’ve always agreed with since with respect to bullies, though I’ve unilaterally failed to carry it out in practice.

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I was getting older, and starting to have feelings I didn’t understand about mom’s lingerie. And, I increasingly had the urge to tie myself up for fun, with little bits of shoestring or lanyard cord that I could find lying around. I really wished I was born a girl, and was starting to think all adolescent boys must. Why would they want to be made out of snapes and snails and puppy dog tails? We all just drew the short straw, right? We have to be the men.

I remember first learning of the tradition of collegiate panty raids. “Is that what I’m doing?”, I wondered. I figured I’d understand when I was older.

I think it was in sixth grade when my parents announced their separation. By this point my dad wasn’t really around much anyway, so it didn’t really feel like a big deal to me. That’s not to say he wasn’t a part of my life and didn’t remain so - he was just out of town for work most of the time.

I remember being asked which parent I wanted to live with: the mentally unstable mom who already takes care of me, or my, at least well-intentioned, dad who’s never really cooked or cleaned much before. The choice felt more obvious at the time, though as I’ve grown older I have wondered what could’ve been if I chose the other way.

My mother and I moved into a house in town, beside the Methodist church that we attended. The house had a little bit less space, but still had three bedrooms and was plenty adequate for the two of us. That’s not to say my mother wasn’t a class I or II hoarder.

That same summer, I went on a trip to Iowa to spend time with my dad’s family. While I generally enjoyed myself, my grandfather (who I only remembered meeting once before) kept giving me a hard time. My dad eventually explained that I hurt his feelings when I last saw him as a young child, because I was very surprised when I learned he didn’t know how to read, and I wouldn’t drop the subject. I had completely forgotten that my grandfather was illiterate by this age, and didn’t even remember the incident.

#snipThere was a sort of tragic story underlying my dad’s family, and I’m afraid I could have a couple details wrong. My dad’s parents separated during his adolescence or later childhood. He went to live with his dad, but often saw his mom for holidays. The family was at his mom’s house (for Christmas, I think), when his mom’s previously-institutionalized mentally ill former lover opened fire on the family with a shotgun. My biological grandmother was killed, and my father, grandfather, and uncle were wounded. My dad would occasionally set off metal detectors with a couple shotgun pellets lodged in his neck and side, that had been deemed too dangerous to remove.

#snipAnyway, after the incident my grandfather quickly remarried a woman named Joan, who is the person I actually knew as my paternal grandmother.

Grandma Joan was not my mother’s favorite person. I never really knew her well enough to form my own opinion about her.

So, my dad’s family has this sort of underlying base level of trauma, I’m in bum-fuck small town Iowa spending time with grandpa Francis and grandma Joan, and if I didn’t know any better I’d say illiterate career-electrician grandpa Francis feels threatened by me. He dropped the skin effect, as if it’s relevant at 60 Hz, and kept calling me Sioux City Sue; which I guess is supposed to be an insult, but I secretly kind of liked it.

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Around the time of the move, my mother had gotten me this sort of birds and bees, going through puberty book. Actually, I think she might’ve gotten it for me a few years ago, but I was weirded out by it at the time. Anyway, it was around the time of this move when I first looked through it; perhaps because I had burning questions about my now obviously-divergent puberty experience.

Half of the book was devoted to male puberty, and half to female puberty. And, it was in this book that I first learned the role of androgens and estrogens in the development of secondary sex characteristics. And sure, it used more childish language, but I’m too pretentious for that now.

Upon learning this, a slew of related questions and biological conjectures flooded my brain, in what might as well have been the same instant.

• If I were to somehow “take” estrogen, would I start developing breasts?
• Is it even possible to “take” estrogen? Is it available as a medicine? Would I need to get a job working at a lab somewhere to even get access to self-administerable estrogen, or could it somehow be a common medication?
• What would it look like? Is it a pill? Do you have to inject it?
• I would also need something to block my testosterone, right?
• Do they even make that?
• Or, would they just have to cut off my testicles first?
• Could I even find a doctor who’d cut off my testicles if that’s what I needed to do?
• What if I became a pharmacist when I grew up, like Mr. Terry. Could I give myself estrogen then? Does Mr. Terry have estrogen in his store?
• Or, maybe I’d have to become a doctor. Can doctors write themselves prescriptions, or do they have to see another doctor? Jeez, I really wouldn’t want to explain this to another doctor…

At this point, I’m ready to switch my career path from computer-something to medicine if it means I could somehow take estrogen and grow breasts.

It was right around this point, perhaps even exactly at this point, when I had enough information to take to the internet. I was already teaching myself Unix and shit, so to me the internet was the obvious end to figuring out what was wrong with me. There were two things holding me back:

1. A lack of vocabulary to even explain the problem, despite an abundance of, generally unfavorable, allusions to the phenomenon in pop culture (My daddy disowned me ’cause I wear my sister’s clothes…)
2. An utterly irrational fear of the subject matter

This changed after I heard one particular word in passing: crossdresser. I’d learned how to use context clues years ago, and I knew exactly what that word meant, just knowing that it existed. Because, I was a crossdresser. I’d been searching for that noun for years! Good, bad, ugly… at least I know what the fuck I am now. I’m a crossdresser.

I’m transsexual

Now that I had a word to Google, I could learn about what it meant to be a young crossdresser. Although, I was actually partial to dmoz back in those days. Maybe it’s because I wanted to whoops-uh-daisically click through the lifestyle section and find myself scrolling through the LGBT pages, whatever that’s about, instead of very purposefully and incriminatingly typing the ‘c’ character, followed by the ‘r’ character…

For a month or two, I privately identified as a crossdresser. I’d nervously nibble away at the information at first, a page or two at a time, just like when I started sneaking into mom’s room. My nerves eventually settled, and I began properly learning about this stuff; feeling confident in knowing that I had my own room with a private computer, and a mom who could barely use her own without my help.

The acronym ‘LGBT’ stands for ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’, and… something else. I bet you think you know what the fourth letter meant; but unless you were there, I bet you don’t fucking get it.

Not long after I learned the term ‘crossdresser’ and took to the internet, I also learned the term ‘transgender’. Transgender was defined as an “umbrella term”, encompassing the entire range of gender-variant human behavior. “Transgender people” included crossdressers or transvestites, transsexuals, drag queens, and people who were generally averse to the concept of binary gender itself, for either personal or socio-political reasons; the latter group tended to identify as simply “transgender” in absence of a more precise label, and would likely be described as “non-binary” today.

Because ‘transgender’ has taken on a meaning that largely overlaps what ‘transsexual’ meant in 2003, I feel I have no choice but to present to you a pedantic little list of what all the different types of transgender people were in the mid 2000s; a list you’d struggle to reproduce without either an old-timer like myself, or lots of time spent on Wayback Machine.

Crossdressers and Transvestites (CD/TV)

Transvestites are (mostly) men who enjoy wearing women’s clothing in a recreational and non-performative capacity. The underlying motivation for the behavior may or may not be sexual. Contrary to what one might expect, transvestites are often straight men; but could also be gay or bisexual.

Transsexuals (TS)

Transsexuals suffer from an understudied congenital medical condition in which one’s cognitive gender differs from their physical sex. Although no obvious cause has been identified, the symptomatology reported by transsexuals overlaps significantly with that of intersex people who had their ambiguous genitalia surgically corrected at birth, only to suffer from gender identity problems later in life.

Transsexuals are divided between male to female (MTF) and female to male (FTM); the transsexual community was by far the most balanced between the two sexes, while transvestites and drag queens were comprised almost exclusively of men with male gender identities. While it wasn’t always the case with other flavors of transgender people, target gender was always used when speaking of transsexuals; thus MTFs were trans women and FTMs were trans men.

Drag Queens

Are amateur or professional actors who perform, typically exaggerated or burlesque, roles as women, for fun or profit. Drag queens are often gay men who otherwise have no connection to the greater transgender community; though they could be hetero transvestites, or even transsexual women. You… probably know what a drag queen is.

Transgender (TG)

People who identified as blanket transgender often rejected the concept of traditional gender entirely; either because they didn’t strongly identify with the idea of being either a man or a woman, or because they had social or political motivations for breaking down the gender binary. However, it bears reiterating that ‘transgender’ was also used as an umbrella term that included CD/TV/TS and other niches under its banner, without denying the individual identity of any particular group.

Intersex (IS)

While not generally included under the transgender umbrella, intersex people suffer from a range of different medical conditions that result in an ambiguity of their physical sex. Despite what one might expect, intersex conditions are actually fairly common, and typically don’t produce obvious disfigurement. The intersection between the IS and TS communities exists where intersex people do have associated gender identity problems, often in conjunction with corrective surgery they may not have asked for.

From around 2010 to 2015, a major shift in language took place within the transgender community. The term ‘transsexual’ fell out of favor, becoming associated with outdated information and conservative transmedicalism. Usage of shorthand like ‘GG’ (genetic girl) was replaced with newer vocabulary like ‘AFAB’ (assigned female at birth; a phrase loaned from the intersex community). MTF and FTM became adjectives instead of nouns, and new words emerged, like ‘cisgender’ for a non-trans person. Additionally, I recall minor shifts in idioms otherwise still present in the transgender community (read like a clock: “the barista ‘read’ me” would have been more idiomatic 20 years ago, whereas “the barista ‘clocked’ me” is more recognizable today).

I remember my initial shock after learning that crossdressers didn’t actually want to be women. Because, I really wanted to be a girl. And, as unusual as my problem appeared to be, there seemed to be an unexpected plethora of reasons why a boy might want to wear women’s clothing. I thought for sure I was good enough at context clues to know that I was a crossdresser.

At the time, it felt like the resources for the CD/TV community were both flashier and more numerous. It seemed like a lot of crossdressers were into the thrill and excitement of, wearing women’s panties under their boy clothes, for example. And, that wasn’t quite what I was looking for. I do remember that I was looking for advice on making DIY breast forms.

I wrestled with the concepts in my head for a while. Looked at transsexual resources a bit. Went through the CD/TV pages some more. Took all the silly little quizzes that probably didn’t mean anything. The conclusion I kept coming back to, was that I was transsexual. I was so certain I was a crossdresser, until I learned what transsexuals were. Now, I couldn’t get it out of my head that that’s what I was.

One of the earlier resources I found was Antijen. Whether or not it was ever stated publicly, Antijen was a pun on creator Jennifer “Aunty” Lynn’s name. Aunty ran a humble website and associated mailing list for transsexual youth aged 26 and younger, during an era when listservs were still the primary method of organizing semi-private group discussions over the internet. While there was also a Yahoo group or two devoted to the same niche, I have little doubt Aunty ran the largest forum for transsexual youth in the early 2000s and probably until large sites like Reddit and Tumblr finally took over.

It was now, in the year 2003 and just after my thirteenth birthday, when I decided to join Aunty’s list. I made a new email account for the purpose, and sent a message that probably had something like “Join” in the subject line with an empty body; thoroughly expecting an automated system to respond and add me to the mailing list, as was often the norm back in those days.

As I started wondering if the machine was broken, I found a message in my inbox 24 to 48 hours later:

Hello,

Could you tell me a little about yourself?

I immediately decided I’m not going to answer. Things are happening pretty fast, and I kinda just wanted to lurk for a while. Maybe I’ll try joining the list again in a few months or years, now that I know human interaction is involved.

A day or two later, I got a variation of the same message. “Could you tell me a little bit about yourself?”

I was home from newly entering the seventh grade at the time, waiting for hurricane whatever to pass on September something. I thought more about writing back, and eventually started putting something together.

I needed a name for myself, and I went with Elizabeth; imaginative as it might not be. I went through a lot of names. Elizabeth, Sarah, Morgan… I go by Rachael now. It’s actually my legal name.

---

I returned to find, probably, a few messages in my inbox. It’s been too long to remember exactly what was replied to my talking about the weather; though, it undoubtedly ended with

Hugs,
Aunty

I quickly learned that what Cheech and Chong were singing about wasn’t a joke; disownment, homelessness, familial abuse and runaway youth were all rampant problems in the transsexual community. There was an active member of Antijen who was pretty open about having ran away from home to work as an underage prostitute.

I soon observed a common thread between all of these bad family experiences trans folk often had; they were mostly Christian, with religion often playing a central role in the conflict.

There was enough apologeticism to be found for those who wanted to reconcile their faith with their gender identity. I ate that up, for a while. I began to resent my southern Methodist upbringing, and found myself wanting to run away to San Francisco to join a Unitarian-Universalist church or something. I also recognized that a “Methodist upbringing” is about as good as it gets in the south.

This was similarly instrumental in forming my earliest political opinions. There was a lot of peer pressure in Bladen county to be anything other than a Democrat; which often led to me adopting more outwardly-libertarian views in my youth to fit in than I probably would’ve professed otherwise.

I could tell one side might be summarized as saying “Yall’s lifestyle is sinful and unnatural and immoral!”; while the other was defensively claiming that “We were just born this way!”.

And then there’s, uh… me. I’m just… this. Whatever this is.

Drugs for trans kids

One of many things I didn’t understand about my unique situation, was that not every young transsexual got their start by sneaking into their parent’s rooms like I had. Then again, it isn’t exactly unheard of either.

Now that I’m older, I actually feel pretty weird, and pretty bad, about the extent to which I did this. This feeling is balanced out by the understanding that I was clearly just born with some sort of abnormality, and that I really needed help knowing what I was at that age.

I experienced my first orgasm right around this time. I had taken to tying myself up while wearing my mom’s clothes, because it felt good I guess, and pulled the vibrating motor out of a massage pillow, because it seemed like a good idea at the time. One thing led to another, and the rest is history. The feeling took me completely by surprise after I’d haphazardly tied my hands behind my back with a bit of string.

This quickly became a habit. About as quickly as I formed this habit, I hatched a sort of laundering scheme; both literally and metaphorically.

It probably started with one pair of panties or something, that just really needed to be washed; despite layers of protection that were, again, both literal and metaphorical. They can’t go back in the drawer. Somebody needs to wash them eventually. I suppose you could just fuck around and find out with the regular hamper. Not even I was so adventurous. Mom comes home in an hour. You don’t exactly have time do to a special load of laundry before then.

So it starts with, maybe, one pair of panties. At first you’re freaking out that she’s gonna notice one pair missing out of, probably more than a dozen or something. But the thing about it is, she’s probably not. Or if she does, she’ll probably think she’s just imagining things at first. Because, where else would they have gone to? The gnomes?

So, now you have a pair of panties under your bed. And, thus far, you probably have good intentions of simply washing them next time mom’s at work and returning them to their rightful place in mom’s drawer. But, as you think about it more, you realize you got away with it. You just took a single pair of underpants, and she didn’t notice. It’s just one grain of sand, and she has a whole pile over there. What’s more, I might actually raise suspicion by returning them, now that she thinks everything’s normal. So, maybe I should just keep this pair for myself. Because, this is clearly becoming a habit anyway.

I can’t help but laugh inside, when I remember that finding advice on making breast forms was what was at the forefront of my mind when I first discovered Antijen. Don’t get me wrong; breast forms have very much always been a subject of discussion in transsexual forums. But, I totally missed the point at first.

That stuff is like heroin for gender dysphoria, what I did as a kid. And, it’s great. But, you never catch the dragon. What you can do, is make a plan and stick with it. Grow your hair out, it takes a few years anyway. No, nobody is going to think you’re trying to be a girl. This stuff is actually really, really rare. I know it feels like a really long time at your age, but… you’ll be eighteen in five years. Maybe trust a guidance counselor or another queer kid or something, but you really shouldn’t talk to normal people about it. They won’t understand. It’s actually disturbingly easy to order prescription medications from overseas pharmacies without a prescription. And when do you turn eighteen anyway, the start of your senior year? What do you mean you can’t take hormones in high school? It doesn’t. Get. Easier. Just. Fucking. Do it.

That’s what I would tell myself, anyway. I did get reasonably far through this list the first time without my future self’s help, considering the calamity that followed.

Seventh grade-ish

So, I entered seventh grade thinking I was a closet crossdresser, unless I already knew I was transsexual by then. I had a new home, a new bus route, and a different outlook on life.

This was the first year I was actually able to take CSD-TV, which was the school’s AV elective. I had been eyeing it since I first saw their studio and control room as a middle school prefrosh or whatever. I soon proved myself to be one of the more knowledgeable students in the class, along with my friend Noah; who by now I was beginning to suspect was a closet homosexual. The future of the program was in question after the recent retirement of Mr. Jameson, who had a history both with the school and the local television station. Mrs. Fletcher had been recruited to teach the elective in the interim; she had no prior experience, but she was friendly, and we all did what we could with the resources we had.

I don’t remember having so many bullies in my electives at this point, but I now had a different problem: my new bus route. The crux of the problem, was that my new bus stopped at the middle school in town, where the parents of (mostly AIG) kids would often pick up their kids halfway so that they didn’t have to drive all the way to Clarkton.

So, this was a particularly busy bus stop, where about half the kids on the bus got off, and the remaining half got off at various stops around town; mostly on the black side of town, possibly contributing to racial tensions. The final matter that made the situation untenable was that ridership was inconsistent; lots of families would make runtime decisions about where to pick up their child, aided by the newly-ubiquitous nature of cell phones; by the time I graduated from middle school, even my broke ass had one.

Some days, there would just be way too many people riding this bus. It was an absolute madhouse, trying to get a seat; and, I usually had to make the bus from the tech lab because of CSD-TV, which was at the absolute furthest reaches of the school. The problem was compounded by a number of “tough” guys and girls, who would insist on sitting in their seat, with their boyfriend or girlfriend, or maybe just their regular friends. I could never manage to keep up with whom these people were, and what their absurd pecking order was. But, they were mostly black students from the general education side of the school; and I mean that in the least racist way possible.

Sometimes I could get a head start, or I’d get lucky and manage to find a seat. Other times, I’d find myself walking up and down the aisle, over and over again. The bus driver is yelling. “Sit down! Slide over!” She can’t legally move until everyone’s butt is in a seat. The other kids are starting to get mad at me for not finding somewhere to sit. They all want to go home. But, there isn’t anywhere. Most of the seats have three, maybe even four people in them. There are maybe a couple seats remaining with only two people, but they’re for Rayshawn and Shanequa or some shit, and they usually push my cracker ass out by force if I try to sit there. I seem to be the only kid who keeps pissing off Rayshawn, too. I guess all the other kids just know who the fuck he is. Or, maybe they’re friends with him.

(I’m sorry if these fictionalized names come across as a wee bit racist. But I mean, they were black…)

On these days, it would feel like the whole world was mad at me in particular. I know it’s nothing personal, but the bus driver is mad at me for not sitting down. The kids are mad at me for not sitting down. That kid is mad at me for trying to sit down. I keep walking up and down the aisle. “No.” “Nope.” “Aww, hell naw!”, I’d hear as I moved toward the only obvious remaining sliver of bus seat. I often had to fight with the worst of the assholes for the only remaining space, as they guarded it for extra legroom like a bunch of wild hyenas. Sometimes, I’d eventually get Rayshawn to move over after he pushed me around a bit. In fact, I usually had to. Because, none of us can go home until I do. “Tsk, maaaaaan…”

I had at least one or two mini-meltdowns over this before I eventually had the big one. One day, I just lost it. “There’s NO FUCKING SEATS on the FUCKING BUS” I screamed, punctuating my words by banging my trumpet case against the roof. Some other kids tried to restrain me, as I kicked and bit at anyone who tried to hold me back. The SRO was called over to escort me off the bus, and I was taken to the principal’s office. The principal called my mom, and the SRO drove me to the mental health center in the cop car. I got to sit in the front seat though, and he was nice about it.

My mother was quick to label this a resurgence of my “anger management” problems; I think this was the incident that ultimately lead to my first being prescribed Zoloft. It never really helped me, and in retrospect it was a total miss to think it would help with any of my problems. I stopped taking it by the end of middle school. I didn’t get to go on the field trip to the state fair because of my little “outburst”.

It was probably also around this time when I started seeing a therapist regularly. I was too nervous to talk about any of my actual problems, and thus the sessions were unproductive.

The tran who would be queen

It was in this same year that J. Michael Bailey published the now-infamous pop science book, “The Man Who Would Be Queen”. The book promotes the theories of researcher Ray Blanchard, who argues that there are actually two types of male-to-female transsexual.

Homosexual transsexuals (HSTS), he argues, are essentially just gay men who’ve (perhaps unconsciously) adopted a female gender identity as a sort of mating strategy.

Autogynephiles (AGP), on the other hand, are basically men who fetishize the idea of themselves as women. The affliction has been described as an “erotic target location error”, in which otherwise heterosexual male lust is directed inward instead of outward.

The main finding in support of Blanchard’s theory is the presence of what would appear to be two correlation clusters in demographic studies of male-to-female transsexuals:

Blanchardianism is… not very popular among the general transgender community; which overwhelmingly views transsexualism as a sort of neurological intersex condition. As evidence of this, the mainstream position looks to the similarities between MTF and FTM transsexuals, as well as intersex individuals, arguing that all of these phenomena can be explained by the presence of a neurological gender that can become uncoupled from one’s physical sex.

Blanchardians are accused of jumping to conclusions and implying causation from correlation, as well as hand-waving away inconsistencies by accusing trans women of simply not being honest. In turn, Blanchardians pan mainstream trans advocates as hysterical, or perhaps even “protesting too much”. Though it’s considerably off-topic from this text, I’d recommend the Contrapoints video on the subject for an, admittedly biased, but more modern take on a debate that is no less resolved today than it was twenty years ago.

Church

It was right around my seventh or eighth grade year when we had confirmation. This is a sort of class for adolescents, so that they can learn all the little details about Christianity and the Protestant and Methodist traditions, and decide for themselves what they believe in. We didn’t actually hold this class on a regular schedule, and it was the first one we’d done in recent memory; certainly since getting Tommy as our new preacher a few years ago.

I’d rather end anyone’s suspense now and tell you that I’m an atheist today. I don’t generally look back on my church youth experience with disdain, though. This wasn’t really a fire and brimstone church, and I still have a lot of respect for Tommy.

We’d go over to the activity building every week or two, I don’t remember. And we’d learn about early Christian history, all of these different creeds, the persecution of early Christians followed by the rise of the Catholic Church, and beyond and so forth. There was often a focus on having us think about what our individual belief or preference was out of a range of possibilities, and there was rarely if ever a right answer.

During one of the classes, we discussed emperor Constantine; and, after listening to a biographical sketch of the fellow, were asked to give our thoughts about him. I held the, somewhat contrarian, position that I wasn’t so keen on the guy; sure, he spread Christianity throughout the land, but he spread his version of it. It seemed like most of the other kids saw what he did as at least an improvement. But, I wasn’t even convinced this guy was sincere. He worshiped the Roman pantheon until midlife, until suddenly he converted to Christianity, then started killing everyone who didn’t follow his weird new version of the religion he probably didn’t really understand himself. I saw his actions as a, rather transparent, variation of the axiom “if you can’t beat them, join them”.

I’m probably recovering from a psychotic break or something.

There are a few points in this story, where recent events suggest my memory has short circuited. While I understand some of these things probably didn’t actually happen, I can only write from my own memory. I’ve never read Slaughterhouse-Five; however, I’ve read the Wikipedia page, and I probably sound a lot like its narrator.

It was at this point that Tommy made it clear he wanted to speak with me after class. And no, I wasn’t in trouble.

This was the first instance of Tommy trying to get me interested in the Freemasons. “The Freemasons think like you do,” he said. He made it sound like they had a closely-guarded early form of Christianity, like the early Gnostics had or something. He had something he wanted me to read. And, it wasn’t a physical copy of anything. He wrote the name of this introductory masonic text he wanted me to look at on the smallest slip of paper, along with a URL where I could find it. And, he made it clear that this was for my eyes only.

At the time, I took everything this man told me at face value. Now that I’ve grown older, and have heard a lot of, often contradictory, things about the Freemasons, I think Tommy was taking me for a ride. But, the question is why. Why would my childhood preacher feed me misinformation about the Freemasons? It only gets weirder from here. Let’s keep going.

As I left the activity building, Josh was standing outside the door, and asked what Tommy and I talked about. “Oh… he just wanted me to read something when I got home…” It seemed harmless enough. Josh and I are on the same level, right? Why can’t I talk to him about it?

---

Several days later, I had a follow-up conversation with Tommy about what I’d read. My memory’s a bit hazy, but here are some of the things that I recall from our talk.

• All sorts of things or entities are real that can’t be seen or touched. Like angels and demons and spirits and stuff.
• The Freemasons know about things that are basically indistinguishable from magic. There seemed to be some understanding between us, regarding the “crazy Christians” who didn’t believe in science and wouldn’t let their kids watch Harry Potter.
• Demonic possession is actually real. Freemasons study that sort of thing.
• His wife doesn’t know anything about this. I can talk to Terry, though.

I didn’t know what to do with this information. I think I was some combination of fascinated, skeptical, and spooked out. I didn’t like that the information I’d learned seemed unfalsifiable, and that I seemingly had no real way to independently research the subject matter.

While he seemed serious, I couldn’t help but wonder whether Tommy was both sincere and correct in his assertions.

Ultimately, I figured I’d file this away as something to maybe learn about when I’m older. I was obviously too young to join the Freemasons at this age.

Sex ed

Sometime in the seventh or eighth grade, a friend walked up to me in the hallway between classes and cracked a joke about masturbation.

Careful, Ethan! If you jack off too much your palms’ll turn green!

I laughed like you’re supposed to, and maybe even looked at my hands. It was a sort of made-you-look joke, after all. But, it took me a couple minutes to really get it. Why would jacking off make your palms green? Sam doesn’t… know what I do in private… does he?

It eventually occurred to me that normal boys do it by gripping their penis with their dominant hand and rubbing one out. Because, they’re normal. Right. So, Sam just thinks I’m a normal boy. That’s cool! I think…

Touching my genitals never felt particularly natural to me, even when there were otherwise no ill feelings associated with it. Even when using the bathroom for example, I’ve always managed my situation with toilet paper, and have avoided urinals throughout my life without exception. (Not that this makes me more trans than anyone else; I’m pretty sure this is highly unusual, even for trans women.) But suffice it to say, I had no urges to “turn my palms green”.

Barring nocturnal emission, the aforementioned vibrating massage pillow motor in my underpants was my first time doing it. And no, my sexuality didn’t get any more vanilla over time.

There were pros and cons to the little motor.

I continued using this little thing for a surprisingly long time, but even after discovering it I kept looking for something… else. I was probably driven by a similarly powerful impulse as my friend Sam, when he did the deed he psychologically projected onto me. I wanted to… stimulate… that area. And, I seemingly had zero desire to “jerk off” like a normal adolescent boy is apparently supposed to do.

I don’t know how I came up with this idea, but it worked surprisingly well. I pulled the fan out of an old Sun server and connected it to a 12 V bench supply; then, very carefully and through my underpants, held it at an angle to vibrate the head of my penis. The fan was relatively low power, but could cause discomfort or minor nicks to the peen if you managed to stall the blades.

A less creative, but still effective way I’d found to do it was to wrap this (non-massaging) neck pillow around my junk, and use a combination of moving my hips and grabbing the edge of the pillow. I could sort of forget I had a dick this way.

Anyway; the title of this subchapter is “Sex ed”. We’re a little past this point now, but it was in mid-to-late elementary school when my mom decided my dad should have the sex talk with me. He mostly just explained that the penis goes in the vagina on the way back from boy scouts, and that’s how babies are made; and I supposed the rest would make sense once I’m older. When we got back home I was visibly weirded out by it all, and I remember my mom being upset with my dad over how he explained it, for some reason. Maybe because he didn’t talk about how you aren’t supposed to have sex until marriage? Ugh, anyway…

The point is, neither of my parents really had much useful advice to offer me about sex or relationships. I’m pretty sure their marriage was a disaster, and neither of them appeared to have a successful post-divorce dating life.

However, my mother is particularly weird about sex. And, not necessarily in the way you might expect from someone whose religious. For example, she’s never suggested I outright shouldn’t be masturbating. She mentioned to me once that she had talked to her friend Gail, and wanted me to know that it was normal for boys my age to masturbate. They’re always the most awkward, abbreviated conversations, and she never quite seemed comfortable with the subject matter; though maybe I’m simply projecting my own feelings. She’s also very creeped out by porn, and is quick to label men she doesn’t like “perverts”; sometimes even disdainfully accusing them of looking as if they “watch porn in their basement!”

So, I’m learning that I’m just a little different from normal kids. I seem to be transsexual, first of all. And, tying yourself up for fun is called “BDSM”. My name is Ethan Alexandre Brown, for now, I’m in the seventh grade, I’m a male-to-female transsexual, and I’m into BDSM. This is fine.

We had sex ed in seventh grade. And we didn’t talk about transsexuals, or BDSM, or even masturbating without your palms. But, I’m starting to get it through my head that I’m just really, really weird. It felt like I’d always been the exception, like I’d always had to over-explain myself, for as long as I could remember. Football or baseball? Ham radio! Windows or Mac? Linux! Gay or straight? Transsexual! Blondes or brunettes? Whips and chains! I can’t even masturbate without two AA batteries.

I didn’t need batteries anymore once I came upon a more powerful “personal massager”. I didn’t know what a Hitachi was yet.

This was probably the first point in my life, when I really just wanted to be normal. I wanted to have normal kid problems, whatever they were. I wanted to get in trouble for sneaking out late, or smoking my dad’s cigarettes, or getting a bad grade on my report card. I felt a growing sense of incredulousness from my inner self, that I could really be this fucking weird. It must be at least partially my fault, right? Or, might there be an unexpected common cause that would satisfy Occam’s Razor? I doubt this will create any cognitive dissonance, trying to find a single root cause that would appear to make me a transgender sex pervert…

Mommy’s alright

My mother returned to the mental hospital again when I was in seventh or eighth grade. During that time, I stayed with my friend Cameron, who I went to school and church with.

My little habit was beginning to spiral out of control. I’m afraid I’m unable to resolve the original paradox at the beginning of this chapter; however, I can tell you that there were now two piles of sand in this house.

It started with a large shoebox. Then I needed a fucking Avon box. In which I could nest the smaller shoebox full of stuff. At first. I started crossdressing (for lack of a better word) every chance I got. I became increasingly more careless. I used to tiptoe around. Now I just chain lock the door when mom goes away on short errands. Sometimes Susan would come home early and bang on the door, screaming at me in that panicked voice of hers. It rattled me, at first. It was better than the alternative.

My mother found my¹ stash of clothes for the first time in middle school, probably eighth grade.

In my growing carelessness, I had taken to keeping the Avon box in the space between my bed and the wall. This was a spot chosen out of convenience rather than safety; I’d begun taking to my pursuits at night after Susan had gone to bed, and so I’d often move the box there from its more discreet hiding place to avoid making noise retrieving it on weeknights. I wouldn’t keep the box there if I was away for long periods or thought there was a chance Susan would clean my room;² she worked during the day and had a long commute, so there wasn’t really much time for her to even go through my room on school nights.

You probably see where this is going. One night, she got a wild hair to clean my room in a way that involved moving the bed, and I couldn’t get to the box in time. I hid under an afghan in the living room; listening to my mom doing… something, in my room.

… Oh my god…

…

… Oh my god…

It felt like an eternity had passed. I think she called a friend on the phone, but I couldn’t hear what they were talking about; which was more telling than anything.

After this eternity had passed, my mother came into the living room; where I was still hiding under the afghan. “What ‘cha doin’ under there?!”, she said. In the most saccharine tone imaginable.

That is all. We’ve never addressed this, and she’s never acknowledged that it happened. The box had clearly been disturbed, but all of its contents remained intact. In fact, she later denied she ever found it. It’s a good example of Susan’s bizarre gaslight-y behavior.

High school (2005-2009)

As you grow older, there’s a question people start to ask of you more and more.

Do you have feelings for any of the girls in your class?

The confusing part is that I did, but I don’t think it’s anything like what normal men experience.

It’s hard to pin down exactly what I even mean by that. Was it jealousy? Did I just think they were neat? When I did have these sorts of proto-crushes on people, two things were obvious.

1. I didn’t want to put my dick in them
2. I didn’t really think about them sexually at all

If you’ve made it this far, you know better than to conflate #2 with not having a sex drive. What I got off to was usually variations on the same theme: I wanted someone to have their way with me. I wanted to be tied up and disciplined. I wanted to be a damsel in distress. And, I never associated a face with any of those fantasies, perhaps simply because there was no face to associate with them. It was obvious none of the girls in class wanted to do that to me, and it was obvious none of the boys wanted to either.

The abstract and mostly faceless nature of my sexual fantasies made me feel even more alien, in a world that revolved around crushes and dating. I think this disconnect made me appear falsely asexual as I grew older, when really I just lacked a dating pool.

Ninth grade

I began attending East Bladen High School in 2005. I had known I was trans for a couple of years at this point, and my sexuality and gender problems were the same as they’d always been. By now, it was weighing on me that I needed to “come out”. To, somebody.

First of all, I was painfully aware of the fact that I could get medication to delay my puberty; if I could convince my parents I needed that. Or, if I was brazen enough to order it from overseas, which is actually disturbingly easy. While I considered myself to be basically “done with puberty” at this age, I still hoped antiandrogens might do something. And now that I’m older, I’m convinced they would help at most any age, if you couldn’t just go straight to doing “the thing” for some reason.

Maybe more significantly though, I was starting to burst at the seams trying to hold it all in. I really wanted to talk to somebody, but I lived in Bladen County. I didn’t have a single friend who was openly queer. I might’ve had my suspicions about one or two of them, but that isn’t as helpful.

I spent a lot of mental energy during this time, trying to do the calculus of figuring out who to trust. Like I was trying to crash-land a goddamn airplane. And, I’m not even good at calculus.

• My mother: Deeply religious, liberal (or maybe more “conservative Democrat”), still in touch with her gay friend from high school, rolls her eyes at gay people on TV, sort of cringed when she learned what “LGBT” meant for the first time
• My dad: Raised Baptist, doesn’t go to church but isn’t an atheist, Republican, never said much about queer people either way, more friendly with the lesbian neighbors than my mom
• Josh: Loyal, but sheltered; conservative leanings, too close, high probability of it getting back to my mom, can’t really avoid him if things get awkward, also can’t get me Lupron
• Emma: Casual acquaintance from middle school who sits at my lunch table and is in most of my classes

At the same time, I was weighing the choice between coming out and just ordering the meds myself.

My calculus resulted in a set of guidelines and principles for pursuing my goal of talking to someone, and ultimately getting medicated.

• There are risks either way, but I have to at least try to explain it to my mom.
• Susan is very obsessive and possessive; it’s unlikely that she would disown me, at least.
• Susan is also fairly gullible; I might be able to pass this off as an adolescent phase if I need to bail.
• If Susan makes it clear she won’t help me get meds, then I’ll look into DIY.

Milestone one: tell Susan

At some point during my first semester of high school, I decided that I needed to tell Susan. Because, I needed antiandrogens. And, I needed to explain what was going on with me before I could make a case for them.

She likes to read, so I thought I’d get her a book on the subject. In hindsight, I don’t think this was the way to do it at all; but, we’re both still here.

Susan is very high-strung. She’s emotionally volatile, she panics, she’s anxious, she worries about everything. She has good days and bad days. Some months it could feel like mostly bad days.

I spent a lot of time just thinking about when to tell her. I felt like I needed an imposing date in my mind, to prepare myself. The holiday season stressed her out. Everything stressed her out, really. Attempting to anticipate her future emotional state, I eventually settled on the day after Christmas. I’d be home from school for a couple of days, for better for worse, and the holiday season would be mostly over with.

On December 26^th, 2005, I spent a good portion of the day at Paula Conner’s house, performing a repair install of Windows XP on their family computer. I started getting cold feet as the date approached. I forget why exactly, but something about the impending situation compelled me to bail and regroup. I still commemorate the date privately somewhat, as the first time I at least tried to tell someone. It’s like gay Festivus.

---

My mother arranged for me to start working at the local Radio Shack franchise not long after I started high school. I was barely old enough to obtain a work permit, and was excited to start the position. I had known some of the folks there since I was younger; Susan also briefly worked there after the divorce, in between the camp for troubled youth and various Social Services offices as a caseworker. The store still provided dial-up internet service off a pair of T1 lines at the time, and had a cellular booth that resold Alltel and Cingular. The latter service probably brought in the most money, and was the only real competition in town to the US Cellular store across the street.

Now that I’m older, I wonder if Susan was just trying to get me out of her underwear drawer. We never were good at talking about things as a family.

Phase two

I considered whether I should resort to DIY or just push the date out and try again. In the weeks that followed, my mind quickly turned to telling somebody else first. It’s difficult to remember how one thing led to another; but telling a classmate started to feel safer, and telling Susan started to feel more dangerous.

I don’t know what I saw in Emma that made her seem like a kindred spirit. Frankly, I think it might’ve been her relative distance compared to the rest of my peer group. Though I was trying to crash-land an airplane at this point.

The time period between March and June 2006 is a blur. I started hitting it off with Emma in the spring around the time of the state Science Olympiad that year. We started “dating”, somehow, or whatever it is immature ninth graders do. I began playing this childish game of “I have a secret that I can’t tell you”, Emma eventually asked if I was a “transgender or intersex person” after a couple weeks of apparently dropping one too many hints or something, and… somehow I told her. I don’t even remember how, exactly. I guess it just stumbled out of me.

Emma initially let on like she was an FTM, before walking this back after about a week. I was gullible enough to believe I’d found a kindred spirit or something, and probably shared more about myself faster than I would have otherwise if I weren’t under this false impression. I still don’t know if she lied purposefully to extract information from me, or if this was a simple matter of immaturity; though in light of what followed, I’ve frankly leaned toward the former explanation most of my life. I told her I thought she’d pass well because of her build, and I feel pretty bad about that now.

Ultimatum one: tell Susan

For some brief, seemingly infinitesimal amount of time, this was a secret between me and Emma.

It didn’t take long for Emma to tell her mom. For a similarly short amount of time, this didn’t seem like that big of a deal.

In the months before Emma and I started “dating” or whatever, she began occasionally attending our church for weeknight activities like the youth music programs. This laid the backdrop for my first confrontation with Emma’s mom.

So, Emma tells me you want a sex change operation.

The three of us had found ourselves sitting on the steps outside my house, which was beside the church.

I was still very secretive about this part of my life, and found myself unprepared for the bluntness of Karen’s query. I don’t remember how or really if I answered the immediate question. Knowing the sort of person I was at that age, I probably stammered something about how it’s actually called SRS.

The outcome of this conversation wasn’t anything obviously bad. In fact, I was relieved, if not also petrified, to finally be talking about it with people. But, there was one problem.

I had to tell Susan.

Uncontrolled flight into terrain

Emma’s mother insisted that this couldn’t remain a secret between the three of us, and that I would have to tell my mother sooner rather than later. It wasn’t clear yet how exactly that was supposed to happen.

My “relationship” with Emma was… turbulent, and filled with petty drama. She soon proved to be a loose cannon. I was already dealing with some very adult problems at this age, and I’m afraid I overestimated the maturity level of people my age in general. I really needed to talk to an adult about this; but also, the right kind of adult.

We would have arguments over silly little bullshit, where she insisted things were one way, and I remained utterly convinced she was wrong. I don’t even remember what we fought over; but, it didn’t matter.

She started dropping hints, before outright gossiping about me with other people in our peer group. This made me very uncomfortable, and it seemed like I’d already lost control of my deepest, darkest secret. It felt like things were happening way too fast.

Emma eventually just outed me to my friends one day. She’d been passing notes with Josh and maybe a couple others, obviously snickering and talking behind my back about my little gender identity problem. I tried to grab the note out of Emma’s hand, at which point she accused me of hitting her and made me out to be some sort of batterer. Emma and her mother accused me of hitting a girl: a sort of cardinal sin in the southern United States. I could’ve done without the genderey implications.

So, Emma outed me to all my friends at school, and now Emma’s the victim. Ignorant sucker that I was, I arranged to go over to Emma and her mom’s house to try and smooth things over; probably having my mom drop me off.

Once I was there, this “fire” was quickly extinguished if it was ever even real. The subject quickly turned to Karen’s ultimatum. And as luck would have it, today was the day.

My mom returned to pick me up a few hours later. And it was then, with the help of Emma and her mom, that I… well actually, I hid behind the couch as Karen told her. This happened after a protracted session exceeding thirty minutes, in which my mother guessed multiple times that I had impregnated Emma, and multiple times we responded, “no”.

Susan actually responded positively, and gave me a hug. I don’t remember much directly after this; though, I was surprised when she acted like she never found the box. I expected us to finally… talk about that, you know? She nearly gaslit me into thinking today was the first day she’d learned about it.

Despite Susan’s initially supportive attitude, telling her was ultimately a mixed bag. The bottom line is that I didn’t get antiandrogens out of this, which is the main reason I’d been circling the drain about telling her in the first place. I didn’t continue nagging for blockers, because I was already planning to order DIY as a backup plan anyway, and I didn’t want her to suspect anything.

Susan’s advice to me regarding my situation at school was to “Lie and deny!” She’d say it over and over, like Johnnie fucking Cochran. Even back then, something just felt… off… about this. I was hoping for some back-up, so that I could be an out-and-proud transsexual girl at East Bladen High School. We were kind of already down the rabbit hole, and my friends didn’t even seem unsupportive.

My older self knows that this was, as my gut suggested, bad advice. I probably could’ve done better damage control by being openly transsexual at this point; but I’m figuring that’s not going to be easy in Bladen County, and not even my own mother wants me to be out of the closet yet. She’s always doting on about how she “loves me to the moon and back”, right?

Susan did start taking me to see a psychologist. We didn’t live in the sort of area one might find a career “gender therapist”, but my mother did manage to find someone in Fayetteville who at least had a transgender client or two before and worked with adolescents. Sylvia is the only one of my childhood therapists I can still name today.

---

On our way to our first appointment, we took a bit of a “wrong turn”. While looking for the office of Sylvia Clark, Susan got lost, and we stumbled upon a totally different practice. We went in looking for Sylvia, and were pressured into doing a session with these folks instead. I was already hesitant, knowing how niche my gender identity problem seemed to be.

Susan and I were taken into separate rooms to talk with two different counselors - who I suppose were just… idly standing by? After the session, the two of us came back together for a few minutes to talk about it.

• I was accused of having incestuous feelings toward my mom, or a sort of “Oedipus Rex” complex.
• It was made clear that I had violated my mother’s boundaries by going through her wardrobe.⁴
• They said that they help “All sorts of people like [me]! Sex addicts, child molesters…”

Fortunately, we didn’t return to this therapist. Sometimes, I do wish there was a middle ground between radical acceptance and… this brand of tough love. Because, at no point was it compassionately explained to me that yes, you were just born different and look, you really should stay away from mom’s lingerie. I kinda just had to… figure out how problematic that was as I got older. Sometimes it feels like I never really had “sex ed” at all. And I was just supposed to know not to be… well… a pervert.

---

Sylvia was an amazing therapist. This was curbed by the fact that I got to see her at most once a month; and with everything that was going on with me, I wasn’t exactly an open book. I could tell the drive to Fayetteville and back put a strain on Susan, and the greatest therapist in the world couldn’t do much for my problems with “one session every three weeks, sometimes”.

Now that I’m older, I think I would’ve been better off with a local adult, who wouldn’t insist on anything crazy like telling my mom. Sometimes I feel like I just had bad luck with Karen and Emma; but the extreme nature of my abnormality does make me think I could’ve had a similar, if not somewhat more tactful experience with the clergy or a guidance counselor.

---

Everyone knows rubbing alcohol kills germs. But, did you know 70% isopropyl alcohol is actually a more effective disinfectant than 91%? The reason is that the more dilute solution actually aids osmosis, allowing the alcohol to quickly kill the cell from the inside.

The thing with Emma eventually fizzled out after a few months of on-again-off-again drama. What began with her telling all my secrets, ended with her perniciously blending truth and fiction, in an often successful attempt to strain my relationships with my friends and make my life at school uncomfortable. For example, she told people I had crushes on Noah Cooper (which was true) and Cody White (which was not). Attempts to right misinformation were quickly met with a Streisand-like effect, and the ratio of truth to bullshit was typically such that the bullshit was taken seriously.

The relationship lasted in total just a few months, from around March to some diffuse point during the summer. I got dragged out of the closet, most of my core friends were actually supportive of the basic trans thing, but Emma had since taken to just making shit up, and people tended to believe her. What my old friends thought of me became a bit unpredictable, and I drifted apart from most of them in my sophomore year.

The utterly diabolical and seemingly unprovoked nature of Emma’s attacks has led me to draw a few conclusions about the situation.

• I suspect she was being coached on “mean girl” tactics by someone like her mother; unless this somehow wasn’t her first rodeo.
• Distracting me at school while we were contentiously applying to the School of Science and Math is something I highly suspect as a motive.
• I also highly suspect Emma’s mother was a TERF.⁵

---

In the wake of all this, Susan was repeatedly very curious whether I “liked boys or girls”. While I said “uh… both, I guess”, what I really meant was… I’m kinda just someone-fucking-me-sexual. But like, I have at least as much of a snuggle drive as I do a sex drive. But, I do have both. Is that… normal?

It didn’t feel normal, given the bluntness of the question and the expectation of an unambiguous response.

This has always been a difficult question for me to answer; there was a lot of peer pressure and social programming pushing me to “date women” when I was younger, but now that I’m older I think I might be more compatible with guys on a hardware level.

It often does feel like my sexuality is just “being the woman in bed”; as opposed to being explicitly attracted to individual people. This has at times made me feel like an autogynephile or a pervert throughout my life. I don’t really experience lust for the male or female body; except perhaps for my marked forced fellatio kink.

Although she’s warmed up to it over the years, my mother’s feelings toward my gender identity during this period were generally ambivalent; despite her initial enthusiasm about me going to therapy.

Tenth grade

My sophomore year of high school was defined by a number of key points.

• I started eating lunch in the band room to stay away from Emma and friends.⁶
• I was applying to the NC School of Science and Math.
• The Radio Shack experienced increasing financial instability, ultimately closing its doors over the summer.
• As I could tell I was getting therapy but no meds, my attention shifted toward ordering DIY.

While they usually had to beg people from our district to apply to the School of Science and Math, competition was unusually strong this year. Among the other hopefuls just from East Bladen were Anna, Emma, and Noah; with a couple other really strong contenders from West. Josh was conspicuously absent from the list of applicants; probably because he enjoyed the lake too much.

Anna and Emma were real straight-A types. They were the sort to really get upset if their grades weren’t perfect. And they’d probably bother the teacher over it, too. I was a “good student”, sure, but I was mostly unmotivated by academics. I did almost all of my homework on the bus or between classes, and considered it a near sin to let work encroach on the few hours I actually managed to get to myself each evening. Noah didn’t take it all that seriously, and hadn’t committed to accepting the invitation if it were extended to him.

---

By the holiday season, the post-breakup situation with Emma had begun to drive me mad. Shortly after Emma and I stopped “dating”, she started seeing Josh. The couple (who I referred to in my journals as “Jemma”) became a sort of new entity, which wasn’t really my friend anymore until the relationship’s end brought about its destruction.

Josh started to behave as if he thought I wanted to fuck him. My other old friends started treating me like some sort of creep and gave me the cold shoulder. I don’t know that I ever caught that vibe from Noah, but I started just avoiding them all.

To me, it was obvious Emma thrived on drama and loved gossip. It felt like she was running a 24-hour news cycle at my old lunch table, where all my friends would gather to hear the latest about how me and Cody were actually really scary and violent and would secretly get it on in private. Everyone else just seemed to view her as a charming, charismatic, smart young woman, and lapped up her seemingly endless stream of colorful stories.

I got totally new friends during this time period. Kevin, Jocelyn Paige… I was already friends with AJ from boy scouts, but we grew closer as part of this new group. A lot of the aforementioned folks were queer or rumored to be, which felt a little more comfortable. We never talked about what was going on with me. I think most of the school had heard some sensationalized variation of the tale that I “wanted a sex change operation” by now, though.

---

At some point in mid-high school, I had another puzzling interaction with Tommy in private. At least, that’s what I remember. It’s probably another one of those Slaughterhouse-Five moments.

While avoiding specifics, he said he knew I was going through a lot right now; but there was this little cabal at church that understood and really had my back.

He then told me that he wanted me to do the scripture reading for the next service, and that I should pay extra close attention to the sermon; that it would be about me. This was an unusual request; though I think I’d done it once before as part of a “youth Sunday”, this appeared to be a one-off affair.

While I didn’t seem to document these next two key points, they are at least accurate to memory (and might still be noted in a journal somewhere).

• The scripture reading was the first several verses from Revelation 21.
• This was for All Saint’s Day; 2005, 6, or 7 I think?

I recited the scripture reading without incident, for which my oration received minor praise.

The sermon was much more puzzling. I waited anxiously to hear what it was about. Some anonymous transsexual girl? It’s probably something more mundane. A couple of people conspicuously switched pews so that they were adjacent to me; in particular, the Richardsons or the Mitchells got the Lees to move from their pew behind us where they always sat.

The sermon wasn’t about me at all. It was about a woman in her early 30s. She was struggling with mental health; she had a traumatic childhood, which included sexual abuse. Tommy stumbled unusually over his words, and appeared visually nervous as he described her as having “multiple personalities”. Her family didn’t really love her. Her mother was described as obsessive, snooping around her daughter’s house, almost stalker-like. The relationship between the mother and daughter had deteriorated. #TODOWording?

The sermon went on to describe the woman’s frustrated romantic life, or lack thereof. She’d never been in a real relationship, or even really gotten a valentine.⁷ She felt almost undateable. She thought marriage wasn’t for people like her. She’d lost faith in most everything.

At the beginning, I really did some mental gymnastics to try and interpret the woman from the sermon as myself. Was he fudging my age as a cover-up? Was the multiple personality thing a metaphor for being transsexual? Eventually I could no longer suspend my disbelief, and I had to accept this sermon was simply about someone else.

This was a long time ago, so I’m sure I’m missing bits and pieces; but, the story had a happy ending. I think somebody heard how she felt, and she ended up getting asked out on a date that lead to an amazing relationship or maybe even a happy marriage. I think there may’ve been some element of drama with the man calling off some prior engagement. I don’t remember the details.

At the end, all of these people who had conspicuously gathered around me before the sermon told me, “We love you.” At least one person (I think either Patty or Tammy) said “We love you”… some girl’s name. It wasn’t Elizabeth, or Sarah, or Morgan. It could’ve been Rachael for all I know. I… don’t remember.

I think there was even enough commotion for Josh to hear over where he was, and he jokingly said “We love you, Ethan” or something. Neither of us really understood what was going on; except that I was supposed to be conspicuously loved this Sunday. And, I had been called a girl’s name I didn’t recognize.

I remember this woman’s story creating quite a stir at church; and, my mother was conspicuously vocal about what a bad mom the mother from the sermon was. She had an air of “methinks thou doth protest too much”; despite the fact that the sermon was clearly about someone else.

---

Regardless of whether there was any truth to it, it often felt like Emma and her friends were conspiring to torment me and make me out to be perverse or abusive throughout my sophomore year. My cringy high school journal reminded me that Anna would sometimes act almost as a human shield to “protect” Emma from me; and that some little old church lady I didn’t know approached me with questions about “what I did to Emma”. I particularly remember Emma viciously gossiping about me and distorting my little gender identity problem during the civics and economics class we both took together. I was driven so mad that I took to carrying a handheld voice recorder in my pocket, in a desperate attempt to show people what an asshole she was being when no one else was looking. While I did gather numerous recordings throughout the year, it was surprisingly difficult to convey what was going on without a “through my eyes” view of the situation; and, editing the recordings to find the relevant bits proved to be a very labor intensive activity with little payoff.

The most memorable incident happened between myself and this other girl who was in Emma’s gossip group in the aforementioned civics class. The class was really easy; I’d often finish my work in the first 20 minutes, and spent the rest of the time staring off into space and trying not to let Emma and her friends get under my skin. It was during this latter time in the period, when I was awakened from my meditative state to Emma’s friend very loudly shouting

EWWWWWWWW! GROSS!

Still, I was barely roused. I kept staring blankly into space, trying not to think about them.

STOP LOOKING UP MY SKIRT, YOU PERVERT!

It was at this moment, that I realized Emma’s friend was addressing me in particular. At some point during my trance, this girl who sat a few desks ahead of me in the next row had turned around in her seat to gossip with her friends, while wearing a miniskirt that absolutely did not pass the fingertip test; and she was now very loudly accusing me of looking at her underpants in front of the whole class. My gaze was higher up; but, it’s really hard to explain something like that as a guy and not look guilty. While I can’t prove she did this on purpose, I found it suspicious given her connection to Emma. I’m glad nothing more came out of it except for her making me look bad.

This incident, combined with the band director getting fired over an accusation of sexual misconduct from a disgruntled clarinet player that was widely known amongst the student body to be false, galvanized me as being an “egalitarian, not a feminist”. My mother even had her own story about some teenage boys from the troubled youth camp she worked at getting a female counselor they didn’t like fired in this same manner, and subsequently joking about it in the dining room. I was actually taken aback when my college women and gender studies class tried to teach me that false accusations were simply a misogynistic myth.

The behavior from Emma and her friends was usually more subtle; loudly giggling about “National Coming Out Day”, or accusing me of hiding an erection by standing behind the wall in the band room, for example.

Susan has always seemed to have an idealized view of Emma and I’s four-month clusterfuck of a relationship. She was quick to blame me for the tension between us; and didn’t really even seem to care that she outed me to all my friends and turned them against me.

Susan wasn’t handling my gender thing very well. Maybe she tried to be supportive sometimes; but she was an absolute wreck after she had a visibly transgender woman come into work for food stamps. She really didn’t want me to do it after that. She was also convinced I fucked some dude (Carl?) from Goldsteins, who I went home with one day after work to fix his computer.

---

Anna and Emma got in; Noah and I did not. In retrospect, I was probably not a good enough student to keep up with the curriculum anyway, and I mostly just wanted to go because they had a gay-straight alliance.

There were a couple of upsides to this, ultimately.

• Emma moved away, and I hardly ever saw her again except in passing.
• I was in a better position to start DIY.

I tried to obtain a PO box, but was turned away because I was underage. This meant that I had to receive packages directly at home; which was still doable, because Susan was a single working mom. I also had an after school job, which made funding the venture more practical.

I placed my first order during the summer of 2007, after sending off a money order that I was able to purchase underage. I received the package on a sunny weekday without any trouble.

At that age, I was really nervous about taking the pills. I learned how to take my own blood pressure, out of concern that the meds would cause electrolyte problems that I somehow wouldn’t notice.

Now that I’m older, I realize all of my fears were unfounded. Particularly as a seasoned elder tran who’s taken this stuff for years, I’m very confident what I received was exactly what was stated on the bottle: some number of generic Aussie 100 mg spironolactone tablets, labeled for the south Pacific retail market.

My plan was to start at 50 mg of spironolactone per day, and ramp up to a final dose of 150 mg/day. I executed this plan, also without any trouble. I had no unwanted side effects, save for conspicuous salt cravings.

It was around this time that I had my last appointment with Sylvia. I remember being nervous about telling her I’d started DIY; I expected her to chastise me for it, but instead she just seemed to support my decision and wish me the best. I could tell the monthly trips to Fayetteville took their toll on my single working mom, and I guess we figured I’d had enough therapy for a while.

The second shipment came on a Saturday. While this was the most perilous day of the week, I still made it to the mail before Susan, and played it cool with the package. Hey, I’m getting pretty good at this!

Eleventh grade

With Emma and Anna’s departure, the second half of my high school experience quickly returned to an earlier status quo, and my friends started acting normal around me again. The Emma years were rarely brought up, and we carried on as if nothing had happened. It was like the Bourbon Restoration, without the whiskey.

I had made some money over the summer by helping Radio Shack shutter its doors, but was then briefly jobless before taking up employment at a computer shop owned by a family I went to school and church with.

I continued going steady with spironolactone. Band camp, Caswell, Beta club… I’d put the pills in an old bottle of guaifenesin with my name on it or some shit. I was a good kid. Nobody ever suspected me of being on drugs or anything…

---

I bought a modern laptop during my second semester of high school, after I’d been working at Radio Shack for several months. The laptop was quite versatile, so lots could be said about it.

Anyway, I started looking at porn around the second semester of my junior year. The fact that I have a history of viewing pornography is, perhaps, the most normal and relatable aspect of my sexuality. In fact, at times it’s given me a false sense that I’m really just a “normal dude” who has some kinks and paraphilias to work through.

My earliest and most innocent urge was that I wanted to look at pictures of teenage girls in bikinis. I’d sort of fantasize about abstract encounters with them, but there was never anything penetrative about it. I sort of just wanted to… masturbate, while looking at a picture of a girl in a bikini.

One of the first things I did, was print out a dozen or so inkjet pictures of teenage girls in bikinis to serve as a masturbatory aid, which I kept in a large envelope. Although I had a laptop, it was difficult to work with while keeping myself in a hogtie. Yes, I was tying myself up with a vibrator while wearing women’s clothing and looking at pictures of girls in bikinis. I haven’t got the energy for analyzing this aspect of my childhood, and would rather leave it up to the reader to determine what I am, exactly. I kept the envelope under my bed, usually on top of the original shoebox I felt I had little reason to hide anymore. We didn’t really talk about what I did in private, but Susan always made a point of telling me she respected my privacy.

This innocent phase was short-lived, and my taste in porn quickly shifted toward the thing that I’m into, which is BDSM. Like the gateway drug theory or something. Except I only smoked pot for a few months before I started doing meth, or whatever the fuck BDSM is.

---

EEEEE-THAAAAAN!

She sounds pissed off. What did she find back there?

I frantically rushed into my room - half expecting to find her holding a bottle of spironolactone.

What is this?

She used a tone of voice I’d never heard before, as she stood there clutching the envelope with the bikini girls. As if I’d been caught cheating on her.

I absolutely panicked and snatched the envelope from her hands. I ran from the house and threw it in the nearest trash can, ripping it up in the process.

I returned, barely able to catch my breath, my mother still standing in my room.

… WHAT. Is in THIS. BOX??

I must’ve said something like “Look, mom, really… You know what’s in there…”; with the most “are you serious” expression imaginable.

She was concerned that I had made noose-like self tightening knots with shoestring and the like, which I tended to just keep in the box and not re-tie to save time. I didn’t think the knots were big enough to fit around my head, but it’s been a while.

DO I HAVE TO GOOGLE WHAT TRANSSEXUALS DO WITH ROPE?!

I eventually had to explain that I… tie myself up for fun. And no, I don’t have a breath play kink. And I’m also not suicidal.

Do you tie yourself up while you’re wearing women’s clothing?

… No… They’re both just… secrets I didn’t want anyone to know about. So I just… used the same box.

I think it was at this point, when Susan said what might’ve been the most creepy thing she’s ever uttered.

Soon, there’ll be no more secrets between us!

I forgot until recently the impact this event had on me as a teenager.

I had a lot of unhealthy ideas about sex, and female sexuality in particular. At this age, I was under the honest impression that women didn’t really want sex in the same way as men, and didn’t experience sexual arousal in the same sense. I was probably influenced by a blend of Christian modesty and my mother’s restrictive prudishness; as well as contemporary sitcoms like “Everybody Loves Raymond”, where denial of sex was often used as a plot device in which the responsible wife would discipline the chauvinistic or misbehaving husband. The implication, certainly in my impressionable mind, was that sex was something Ray needed, and Debra could provide, at a cost. I came to view normal sexual relationships as necessarily transactional and manipulative, akin to the relationship between the Founders and the Jem’Hadar;⁸ and to some extent, I came to view most heterosexual men as “pussy whipped”.

But me? I didn’t need sex, like these men. I just wanted it. I wanted somebody to fuck me like a woman. But, I was starting to feel like women didn’t even want to be fucked like women. My growing desire to be fucked, and to be submissive in the bedroom, started to feel like a mere fetishization of womanhood, rather than the genuine experience.

This nagging conflict between my awakening sexuality and my belief that horniness was a fundamentally “masculine” state of mind came to a head when I found myself doing exactly what Blanchard accuses trans women of doing: lying about their private experiences to make themselves appear less sexually depraved and more authentically feminine. Before the incident, I felt like I’d already told Susan what I did in private, basically. Sure, I left out the part where I masturbate with a vibrator while tying myself up in mom’s lingerie, but I gave her the gist, right? But, now it felt like I hadn’t really come out at all. And if there was anything recognizably feminine about what I was doing, I probably wouldn’t have gotten yelled at like I was a horny teenage boy who couldn’t contain his sexual urges, by his chaste mom who has an obviously authentic female gender identity.

I went to school the next morning, knowing I’d gotten in trouble for one of the most unquestionably masculine things a teenage boy can do: masturbating to pornography.⁹ There’s one thing I couldn’t deny; I did always want to have normal teenager problems.

This might’ve been the beginnings of a new line of thought: that I really could just be a normal man, if only I surrounded myself with a bit of normalcy. I lacked male role models. My dad wasn’t around. I had limited socialization growing up. And god dammit, I had been a weird little middle schooler. I started to question whether I really just went through a “crossdressing phase” when I was younger. Maybe I convinced myself I was ackchyually a Real Woman™ on the inside after finding weird shit on the internet, and lost touch with reality for a bit. At any rate, it felt like the evidence was mounting against me being a “true transsexual”.

I was really at a crossroads in my life, and I felt like my psyche was being pulled in two different directions.

In the spring, I was distracted by an impending Science Olympiad date; probably among other things. I forgot to take my spiro one evening. And then the next day, I forgot to take it too. I found myself not having taken my meds for a full week.

It was now, when I uttered to myself that I had found a more mature place that was beyond gender. I had… transcended gender.

What really happened is that I found myself in a less mature place that was beyond denial. I had… not transcended jack shit.

More importantly though, I think I determined that I simply couldn’t be the same thing as a real woman; even if I was born different. Women were like my mother. Women were like Emma. They were almost intrinsically incomprehensible from my perspective. Whatever it was they enjoyed doing in the bedroom, it wasn’t… what I was doing. Real women talk about having crushes on boys, or liking a man in uniform. They like… all of that girl stuff, that makes my eyes glaze over. A quarter of their brains seem to be devoted to gossip and being a mean girl to their enemies. They’re all like “that bride is SO LOVELY!” The older I got, the more unrelatable women seemed; and, the more it felt like it was probably just a sex thing. An application of Occam’s razor suggested it was highly unlikely I was transsexual and into BDSM; and sheer probability led me to assume my “gender dysphoria” was probably related to the latter.

Something I often forget about myself at this age, is that I’m not sure I fully understood that it was normal for women to masturbate. I mean, I’m pretty sure I knew what I vibrator was; so I’m not quite sure where the disconnect was, exactly. I don’t think I fully grasped how normal it was until I got involved in the BDSM community in college. I remember obsessing over how frequently I masturbated and had erections while I was on spiro; thinking that both of these numbers being lower would make me “more of a woman” or something.

When I was young, I remember my mother telling me in response to a question about sex, that she’d only done it once, to conceive me. Even at that age, I said I didn’t believe her. Now that I’m older, I’m not convinced she wasn’t telling the truth. This woman is really weird about sex; and she unfortunately passed that on to me. I don’t think she had a great childhood herself.

Despite the unpopularity of the theory, when I took an objective look at myself at this age, autogynephilia appeared to be the most likely explanation for what was going on with me. I didn’t really wear women’s clothing to do my homework, or play video games, or dabble with Linux, or watch re-runs of Seinfeld. I did it to get off. When I was younger, I thought that I was transsexual, simply because of my deep desire to be a girl. But now that I was older, I didn’t feel like I’d been born a woman. I felt like I’d been born a pervert. My problem just seemed too sexual. And I guess women at the time seemed too chaste.

I had dreams of being able to live an outwardly normal female life when I was younger. But now all I saw in the mirror was an overweight deep voiced hairy pervert. I knew better than to think I could ever be anyone’s “damsel in distress”.

I didn’t feel like I fit the “true transsexual” stereotype of someone who just needed to present themselves as a woman to feel whole and complete in everyday life. But, I did still wish I were a woman, quite badly. But, I couldn’t really get excited about make-up. Or the loveliest bride.

What I’m sure felt like a “small break to see how trans we really are” at the time, ultimately turned into a nearly ten year-long gap in taking my medication. Of course, even token autogynephile Anne Lawrence still takes her medication. So, I guess my plan seems a little bit silly in hindsight.

I suppose I just couldn’t handle the idea of transitioning, and knowing I was totally doing it as a sex thing that’s entirely detached from normal female sexuality.

---

I attended Governor’s School this summer, and didn’t re-up my spironolactone. I still thought of myself as “quasi-transgender”; but in light of everything going through my head, I sort of just wanted to try being a normal guy.

Governor’s School was probably the first time I was exposed to religious and political ideas that were very different from what I grew up with. It was the first time I really talked to an atheist about atheism. It was the first time I heard someone unironically utter the phrase “What’s wrong with Marxism?”¹⁰

It’s been a while, but I remember there being different “tracks”, and I was on the science track. One of the classes was Evolution, in which we were encouraged to choose a stance on the issue and defend it in debates with other students. Creationism, Darwinism… I enthusiastically chose “theistic evolution” at this age, along with a handful of others. It was a cool class. It was the first time I’d heard the theory that dinosaurs had feathers.

For one of the assignments, we watched a short animated video that was very much made from the hard atheist prospective. It essentially panned humans as obvious primates with made-up religions who wouldn’t stop flinging poo at each other, and who were somehow too short-sighted to see that they were clearly just slightly more intelligent monkeys. We were then asked to write an essay on how we felt about it.

I wrote of how I was offended by the film’s lack of perspective on more moderate religion; but as I was writing this, I couldn’t help but notice that I wasn’t really offended at all. It was just how I was supposed to feel, as a Christian.

For one of the later assignments, we were split into pairs, and I was to have a sort of one-on-one debate with a fellow student who was an atheist. I think this was my first time hearing the “God of the gaps” argument. I walked away feeling like I had a lot to think about. My partner dusted off his hands like he’d just finished his Tuesday night homework.

I didn’t leave Governor’s School identifying as an atheist; but, I was starting to chip away at some of the religious bullshit.

Twelfth grade

I entered twelfth grade with the idea that I was transsexual as far out of mind as it had ever been. I took dual enrollment at the community college in the morning, and thus only had two high school classes each semester of my senior year. I’m also pretty sure I took band that year, which would’ve made AP English and Calculus my only other high school courses.

While I was nominally enrolled in AP Calculus, I didn’t really learn calculus in high school, in effect.

For the first semester, I think there was a scheduling conflict, either with dual enrollment or band. I was told that I was smart and could catch up, and was allowed to enroll only in the second semester “integration” portion of the course. I was already hesitant about this, considering math is my weakest subject.

The bigger problem is that the only person at the school able to teach calculus, Mrs. Hall, had fallen gravely ill with a long-term liver disease she’d been managing. While I had a handful of lessons with Mrs. Hall, the vast majority were covered by a substitute who did not and could not teach Calculus; Mrs. Hall passed away toward the end of the school year.

So, I took one semester of a two semester AP course, that ultimately didn’t even cover that much. I did manage to learn the chain rule and Riemann sums, at least. It was ultimately decided that we didn’t have to take the AP exam, given the unusual situation.

When I look back on this, I wish I’d have taken calculus at BCC, and I don’t remember why I didn’t. I got a couple hard classes out of the way, but on advisement I also took a lot of things (biology, geography, psychology) that didn’t count toward my university program. To be fair, I hadn’t picked a college when I first enrolled.

---

I was accepted into NC State, UNC, and Georgia Tech, choosing to attend State along with Josh and a handful of other folks from East Bladen.

Sex ed

Like grains of sand through the hourglass, I eventually found myself with a complete pile of sexual education.

Okay - this is kind of a lie. I still don’t really understand sex, but I found myself with enough sexual education to be dangerous. Or, with enough rope to hang myself. Is that… too soon?

Two things seemed obvious by the twelfth grade.

• Masturbating in your mother’s lingerie is fucking weird.
• If something that fucking weird was a symptom of gender dysphoria, it would definitely be a bullet point in the DSM-IV, right? On the contrary, “weird sex stuff” actually seemed to be part of the differential diagnosis for “true transsexualism”.

Ergo, I’m not a “true transsexual”.

There must’ve been some point when I fully realized how fucking creepy it is to masturbate in your mom’s lingerie. I don’t remember when I had enough sand, and I didn’t seem to journal about it. It must’ve been akin to how Adam and Eve felt when they first realized they were butt-ass naked. Or like having to wean yourself off breast milk after realizing you’re way too old to be doing that.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to resent Christian conservatism and its desire to whitewash human sexuality, especially in children. They want sex to be something that’s “18+”, if not “for a man and a woman after marriage”; but, I was dealing with sex problems by the end of elementary school! Was I just… too young to know what was happening to my body? I remember getting hard playing with Katelyn and Cassie whenever our play involved themes like confinement. I just had to wait until I was older to have enough grains of sand to understand why I liked that so much? Then, when I was finally old enough, I felt guilty. Was that a scene? Was that consensual? I mean, there wasn’t anything sexual about it; for them. But, I really liked this stuff. Did I unknowingly coerce them into topping me by directing our child’s play toward themes that made me aroused, before I understood what sexual arousal even was?

Of course, none of this would’ve been a problem if another human could’ve just explained all of this to me at what I consider to be the appropriate age; but, Christians need to put sex in the same category as “drugs” and “rock and roll”. Increasingly, the Christian viewpoint seemed to be that the pious needed to avoid evil temptations, like sex, and porn, and maybe even homosexuality; but as I got older, these things didn’t seem like choices to me. They just seemed like variations of the human condition. You either like BDSM or you don’t. You’re either gay or you aren’t. I was even starting to laugh at some of my peers who already claimed to have “pornography addictions”. Bruh, you’re just a straight dude.

I was frustrated that, in my case, withholding information about sex when I was younger appeared to have the opposite effect as intended. If I had known more, I would’ve curbed my enthusiasm while playing with my friends. The problem is confounded by the fact that, if most adults did see a nine-year-old boy running around with two girls and a boner, they’d just assume he was getting to the age where he wanted to fuck one or both of the girls, when there could be something completely different happening in his head. For all I know, that’s why we stopped going to Katelyn and Cassie’s house.

---

My mother never really brought up the weird stuff from my childhood again; except, when she came to me in a panic after David Carradine died. She is… very afraid of “losing” me.

I carried on with my budding pornography habit undeterred; but, I didn’t make any more print-outs. I started downloading pictures and making slideshows with them. I initially kept these in an encrypted archive on my computer, before ultimately setting up a VM for the purpose.

I liked this better than watching videos or looking at any one particular image. After a point, it felt like I had a scene in my head, and I mostly just wanted to arrange a dozen or so pictures to go along with it. Videos usually broke too far with the fantasy I’d built up, and often had long cuts to things I didn’t really want to look at like her vulva.

I would sometimes seek out the video to a porn I really liked the pictures of, usually to be disappointed. Or sometimes, to be satisfied by that two minute segment I was looking for, or even a still frame in the video that just isn’t comparable to anything in the high-res photo shoot. I’m not sure I’ve ever even watched a complete porno, from start to finish. I always just skip around, because I’m trying to get somewhere, goddammit.

So, by now I had a marked forced fellatio kink, which only made me feel more autogynephilic. My perception of real women was that they viewed giving head as a chore; and indeed one of the battle cries of feminism seems to be “You men need to reciprocate oral sex more often!” My identity was beginning to shift away from being transsexual, and toward being a kinkster. Whatever I was, I didn’t think I was evil, and I wanted to explore it with like-minded people; who I assumed shared my plight.

College (2009-2013)

Freshman

I enrolled at North Carolina State University in the fall of 2009, majoring in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

I lived at the Avent Ferry Complex, along with Josh and Brendon. The latter two roomed together, while I was placed with a second year EE student from Fayetteville named Parker.

Before I went off to college, I was presented with a Bible on behalf of the church. It’s a nice book. I’ve considered getting rid of it on occasion, but I still have it.

This nice-looking new-in-box Bible inevitably found its way into my things for school. Like all of my things, I found a place for it in my dorm room when I unpacked; in this case, up on the top shelf of my desk. It seemed like the most obvious place to put it.

This spurred a brief conversation with Parker, who it turned out was an atheist. I explained that I was raised Methodist; he didn’t seem bothered, though we didn’t really talk about it much. I’m pretty sure I had de-escalated to some brand of agnostic by this point in my life, or was at least about to.

---

Unsurprisingly, I took Calculus my first semester. On the first day, the professor asked how many people had taken calculus before. And, basically everyone raised their hand. I didn’t initially, until sheepishly raising it half-way after a few seconds. The class was a review for most everyone, but I really needed first time calculus for people who were kind of okay at math.

I had always been a “B” student at math, despite the whole “computers and ham radios” thing giving me the appearance of being a “math and science kid”. This class began a tradition of me always being a “C” student at collegiate-level math.¹¹

Parker moved to Wolf Village the second semester, so I had the dorm room to myself. I spent most of my free time outside of class with Josh and Brendon, who lived on the next floor. I only briefly considered checking out the LGBT center, before deciding I was definitely just a normal dude with some kinks and paraphilias.

Sophomore

Brendon dropped out of school after his first year and went back to Bladen County. Josh lived at University Towers, getting placed with a roommate named Spencer who he didn’t really care for all that much. After initially declaring his major to be Nuclear Engineering, Josh decided to pivot to Computer Science after liking the Fortan class they still had incoming Nuclear Engineers take for some reason. I stayed at Avent Ferry again; this time being placed with an incoming freshman engineer named James Miko. I told my friends I got an Asian roommate because I thought his name sounded Japanese, but he turned out to just be a pot smoking aspie kid from Forsyth county.

I unpacked my things on the other side of Avent Ferry, surprised by the appearance of my new and very much round-eyed roommate. I unpacked the Bible and set it on my top shelf again, along with my little Lego NAS I’d built.

Josh, Brendon and I had experimented with smoking funny things our Freshman year, but we weren’t too serious about it and didn’t really have any connections anyway. I was surprised to find my new “studious Asian” roommate actually smoked weed. I was, by this point, just looking to try “normal college-aged dude” stuff, whatever that was. We started by hotboxing somebody’s car with a crappy little pipe and what might’ve at least been some decent granddaddy purple.

This quickly became a habit. We moved from hotboxing the car, to hotboxing the bathroom, to hotboxing the rear part of our room, to really just freely ripping the bong in medium-sized groups while playing Wii Sports or Black Ops or Brawl or some shit. Josh soon made Avent Ferry a virtual second home; and probably regretted choosing to live on the other side of campus that year.

I made new friends and acquaintances through smoking. Trevor, Dillon, Abdul, Jacqueline, Mason, Travis, Bobby… It was generally easier to obtain weed than alcohol.

---

We weren’t very far into the year when a group of us were in my room talking; me, Dillon, Miko, maybe one or two others.

So are you, like, a Christian or something?

No, not really. Why?

Well, what’s with the Bible?

Oh; I was raised Methodist. My church gave that to me when I graduated. I still just… keep it on my shelf, I guess.

We all had a laugh about it. I guess they were concerned I might be, like, really religious or something.

This was one of my earlier lessons about “normal, secular” life. A Bible just sort of blends in out in the country; and it sticks out like a sore thumb elsewhere. Where I grew up, the Bible wasn’t just how you learned about religion; it was a display piece, an accessory, perhaps even an heirloom of sorts. It fills up space on your shelf. It’s a centerpiece on your coffee table. It’s… the Bible. Everyone has a Bible or six, right?

In a university dorm room however, it becomes almost a sort of political statement. You’re on this college campus with atheists and Jews and Muslims and Hindus and yes, sometimes even Christians.

You look around at all these people in your lecture hall, and you figure some of us grew up hearing about God and Jesus, some of us grew up learning about Buddha or Vishnu, maybe a couple of us even have family back home who still expect them to pray five times a day. Some of us might’ve grown up with parents who believed in crystals and homeopathy, some of us might have Scientologists in our family; but I quickly got the feeling that whatever mythology we grew up on, most of us didn’t take that shit seriously here. We’re people of science and logic and reason, gathered here from all the world over to find actual solutions to life’s greatest mysteries. Religion is for people who need answers now. It’s for people who can’t handle the mystery and the unknown of real life. It’s the opposite of what drives science forward.

---

By some point early on in college, I got the distinct impression that being a “Christian engineer” was a little weird. It’s like they gave me a clicker question; and it turns out the vast majority of my peers are atheist or might as well be.

I lived in Bladen County long enough to build up a portrait of a “religious person” in my mind: paranoid, overly suspicious, authoritarian, afraid of everything, xenophobic, easily angered and upset by things they don’t understand. They crave the antidote to this: heightened surveillance and security, increased scrutiny, arbitrarily fewer degrees of freedom, a reduced number of unknowns that might spook out “us decent folk”; a return to a simpler time with fewer questions and fewer problems.

I had similarly built up a portrait of what I began to consider a “normal, secular” person: easy going, live and let live, tolerant of alternative lifestyles, assumes the best but prepares for the worst, open-minded about new information; is generally prepared for the challenges of modernity. They want to watch a new generation cast aside the superstitions of their parents, and add a feel-good chapter to the history books for once. They want to see the people have more freedom; they want an end to arbitrary inequalities. They want to see progress where there’s been none for centuries. They quickly lose patience in debates over whether gay marriage is “unnatural”, or whether stem cell researchers are “playing God”.

This discussion has gone on longer than I would like; anyway, I put up the Bible not too long after our talk. As I’m older, I think of this as an example of “positive” peer pressure.

---

I probably could’ve stood to focus on my studies more; but, I was just glad to finally be part of what felt like a normal group of friends. It seemed like I’d escaped Bladen County, and the ostracism I felt through much of high school. I’d come to view my earlier behavior as a “weird phase” where I thought I was trans, and was relieved to feel as if I had finally assimilated myself into “bro culture”. I was drinking, smoking, doing drugs,¹² enjoying first-person shooters… it felt like I’d mastered everything there was to being a guy, except for the “fucking women” part. This, frankly, felt more valuable to me than anything my professors could teach.

I grew a little nervous as we let our guard down more and more. The normalization of danger reminded me of my earlier habits.

We eventually did get busted while smoking in Trevor’s room at the very end of the year, during finals. Trevor happened to have a handicapped room¹³ with an extra-large bath we liked to hotbox, which could hold nearly a dozen heads. An RA apparently overheard us talking about getting high on the way to Trevor’s room, and alerted the campus police. Josh narrowly avoided getting caught, as he was at UT studying for an exam.

The matter was handled by student conduct; and, began coloring my negative perception of law enforcement, despite them not exactly being the “real” police. First of all, they accused us of having close to an eighth when we started the night with no more than half that; probably because they just plop the whole baggie on the scale. It’s not that an eighth is any more illegal than a gram; it’s just obnoxious when the neighborhood drug dealer is more honest about weighing your weed than the cops are.

Whatever.

A few disciplinary actions came out of this, ultimately.

• We couldn’t live in on-campus housing anymore.
• We had to write a letter for student conduct to send back to our parents explaining what we’d gotten in trouble for.
• We had to receive a substance abuse evaluation from a licensed counselor, and follow up on any of their recommendations.
• We had to complete a question and answer-based writing assignment.
• We were all on disciplinary probation for varying amounts of time, so we couldn’t fuck up again.

I already had plans to move into an apartment next year anyway, so the first item was a non-issue.

The second item was still less dangerous than ordering spironolactone from Vanuatu; I was home for the summer working , and saw nothing to lose by simply hoping to check the mail first.

For the third item, I looked up practices in neighboring Robeson County that offered substance abuse evaluations, and picked the chillest sounding one. I talked to a former heroin addict-turned counselor, and I had to follow up on his recommendation of attending two Narcotics Anonymous meetings so that I could see what harder drugs might lead to.

I was able to complete all the things over the summer without any trouble, and without Susan finding out. My friends had variously more difficult times; Trevor probably had it the hardest with an intensive counseling program over the summer, and I think Miko had a longer probation for being a hard-ass to student conduct.

I still think it was bullshit that they wanted to tell my crazy mom, when she contributed nothing in college savings. I paid my entire way through college with loans and Pell grants and scholarships and a summer job; if anything, she was siphoning money out of my checking account to pay for our “car insurance”.

Something that’s always bothered me, was the seemingly arbitrary and wide variance in the rulings issued. Me, Miko, Dillon, Trevor, Abdul, Jacqueline… we were just a bunch of pot heads who lived at Avent Ferry. We smoked in each other’s rooms and cars, we each had and shared our own pieces, we bought weed from the same pool of drug dealers, often splitting it amongst ourselves…

Student conduct (or more generally, “the cops”), are very particular about all their little offenses and bullet points. “Who was in possession of the paraphernalia? Who was maintaining the dwelling?”; As if we followed Robert’s Rules of Order. Now, even the more honest cannabis user who’d just as soon say “Guilty your honor, I’m a pothead” finds themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to “get their story straight”. Sure, we had Josh’s vape, and Miko’s bowl, and the green bong we all chipped in on; but we used my monogrammed bookbag to move our pieces around, so naturally we’re going to say “Ethan was in possession of the paraphernalia” when we give our official statements to student conduct. Because, it’s utterly illogical to just pile more names onto that list, and if we were totally honest we’d have to include Josh who wasn’t even involved otherwise.

This experience taught me a lot about how the criminal justice system works, despite the lack of criminal charges associated with it. Between things like plea bargains and the rapidly escalating need to “keep everyone’s story straight” as more than a couple of people get involved in an endeavor, I imagine relatively few folks are behind bars for something they actually did. That’s not to say they aren’t necessarily guilty of something.

Well… I guess the part where the leader of the IEEE robotics team later got his apartment flashbanged during a study group for having sheets of acid (allegedly) didn’t help color my perceptions much either.

---

We (or rather, Susan) moved to a different house around the corner, as the one we’d been staying in was now slated to be torn down to expand the church playground.

I helped with the move in between working at the computer shop and handling my student conduct bullshit. Keith let us repaint the walls, which Cody and I did.

I’d often put on music while I was working in the new house over the summer. I had my little iPod touch with a Sony dock, and I’d put on… whatever I guess, as background noise. I think I’d put on the Red Hot Chili Peppers album By the Way when my mother came in and incredulously exclaimed “What is that?!”… as if the fucking Zephyr Song was too hardcore for her or something.

If you’re growing impatient with this dull anecdote, I promise I’m going somewhere with this. It’s gonna take some time, though.

This is a good example of my mother’s behavior, that leads me to hide things from her. It’s not like I was in trouble for listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers or something. But, she also wasn’t like “Hey, that’s groovy Ethan! Nice music! Glad you’re putting that iPod I bought you to use!” It’s even more confusing that I grew up with my mom playing Q98 in the car. Like, I didn’t think this was some “foreign genre” for us. I wasn’t sure what to make of it - but I didn’t play any more RHCP around my mom, and was probably more conservative with my music selection in general around her after that.

Maybe I misread the situation, because it wasn’t long after this that my mother bought Josh and I tickets to see the Chili Peppers at PNC later that year, and similarly bought me a t-shirt to go with it. It might be worth noting that this is a band I’d never explicitly mentioned that I like to my mom. I think the occasion was my birthday, which was just a couple of months after the move.

Perhaps more unusual were the seats. My mother was about to buy Josh and I regular seats, when Terry gave her money to buy us floor seats. Because… we’re such good kids, I guess?

The show was supposed to be later that year; but was moved to the spring after Anthony Kiedis broke his foot.

Junior

I moved into an apartment at Wolf Creek my third year, along with a lot of other folks. Josh and I already had plans to take the places of graduating seniors Marc and Noah, moving in with remaining Bladen County native Will Potter; who was ostensibly going to NC State for something, it’s a matter of debate.

The other people I got busted with had to scramble over the summer to find housing; with Miko, Dillon and Trevor also finding spots at Wolf Creek, although not all in the same apartment like they’d have preferred. Over the course of the next few months, the remaining three consolidated themselves into a smaller number of apartments as space became available. Trevor would eventually move in with me, Josh and Will for my senior year.

---

I believe it was in the fall, when we had this “homecoming Sunday” at my old church. Tommy returned as a guest preacher, and we had a lunch afterwards in the activity building. I found myself at a table with Tommy, the Richardsons, the Stewarts, my mother… I’ll be damned if it wasn’t the same crowd as when we first met Tommy all those years ago.

We were making small talk, when the conversation turned to this weird nightmare I had as a kid. Basically, I thought “sharks” were going to eat me; but, it’s a little more complicated than that, and this was the first time my mother and I effectively communicated about the content of this dream.

“Tell them about the sharks!”, my mother says. As if to put me on display.

Oh… you mean the shark people?

Wait, they were people? You never said they were people!

Well, they had arms and legs…

What did they look like?!

Well, they were gray…

I started to notice some of the others at the table exchanging glances. As I continued telling this story, which my mother seemed more interested in now than when I woke up screaming all those years ago, it felt like you could cut the tension with a knife.

Did they have big jaws?

No, not really…

What were they doing?

Well, just standing over me mostly. We were in this strange, round room, and I was on this metal table.

How tall were they?

I don’t know. Like… normal human height?

Were you scared?

Well yeah, I thought they were going to eat me!

It was about this point when Tommy decided he needed to have a talk with me right. Now. He practically dragged me out of the activity building by the forearm.

We walked out into the church parking lot. It was looking pretty empty by this point in the dinner, but there were still cars and people around.

We got to the center of the parking lot. Tommy looked around us. There wasn’t anyone in earshot. It wasn’t. Private. Enough. We kept walking. Out to the far, northwest edge of the lot. He was brimming with excitement. He looked as if he could barely contain himself.

Tommy looked around us again. There was nobody around.

You’re different.

I know I’m pretty weird…

No. You’re different. You aren’t like these people, see?

“You aren’t like them!” he says again, gesticulating wildly at a couple of people underneath the covered walkway in the distance. Church, organized religion, the “Bladen County” life… he made it abundantly clear that these things weren’t. For. Me. They were for them. They weren’t for me. I was different.

Shit, man. This is pretty weird. I’m pretty sure my preacher just told me not to go to church. Not that I was planning to anyway…

I’m obviously unable to precisely recite the conversation from memory; but, these were the bullet points.

• I’m different. Very different. I need to learn about how I’m different, and Tommy can’t teach me.
• I need to “seek hidden truths”.
• “Freemasons” know about different people like me.
• “If you walked into a masonic lodge and gave them your name, they’d know who you are.”
• He made it sound like I needed to explore some sort of spirituality that was “beyond church”. He said that Freemasons know about it, but so did other groups.
• My mother… is not to be trusted.
• He seemed to know things about the future.
• He said my mother and I would have a falling out. That I would ban her from my property.
• I hope I’m not projecting recent events on the situation when I tell you I remember him saying it involves UFOs. And that there would be a UFO report in the future.
• He said there were “things going on I should know about”.
• He reiterated that church wasn’t for me, but that it was important I keep exploring spirituality. He told me I should find a group of people to learn about this stuff from, and that perhaps one of these groups that isn’t “Freemasonry proper” might be the best fit. This was a long time ago, but I think he used the word “coven”.

He went on to describe a sort of “vision”¹⁴ he had, where I was to show up at his new church years from now.

This is gonna sound weird… but, you were wearing a purple dress.

I was not out of the closet to Tommy; and in fact, had abandoned my plans to transition at all by this age. My face was probably very red.

He also made it sound like I would go on to make some unusual lifestyle choices; but, that it was okay. It was my path, actually. I… think polyamory might’ve been mentioned.

I didn’t know what to do with all of this. Tommy and I eventually returned to our table.

When we got home, my mother asked nosily what Tommy and I talked about.

I didn’t know what to say; especially since half of Tommy’s advice seemed to be about how I shouldn’t trust my mother. Can’t she see this was a private conversation for a reason?

Oh, Tommy just talked to me about the Freemasons. He thinks I should… join them, or something.

I feel stupid for telling her this much. It seemed harmless enough, though. I wanted to satisfy her curiosity.

My older self would’ve told me the woman’s curiosity simply isn’t satiable.

I thought about joining the Freemasons; but when I looked them up online, it was clearly a fraternity of men who believe in God. And, I was an atheist quasi-transgender subby boy; or, whatever it was I identified as back then. Even if I wasn’t planning on transitioning, I was generally irked by things that were gendery or exclusively male.

I was also unsettled at the news that my future self might choose to transition after all. Medical transition is something you should do sooner rather than later, and I wasn’t unaware of this. I just… couldn’t stomach it back then. I’d finally made it to normalcy, after years of being a pariah. Can’t I just be a pot-smoking dude bro? I don’t suppose Tommy might be wrong about all this…

---

I turned 21 at the beginning of my junior year, which was cool; though I can’t reiterate enough that cannabis has always been my vice.

Now 21 years young and an upperclassman, a couple things were weighing on my mind.

• I wanted to do other stuff on campus, besides going to class and hanging out with the same friends every night.
• I need to get laid.

I decided to join the IEEE robotics team around this time. I participated my junior and senior years; it was fun and I learned a lot, but the team lacked faculty advisement, which I think ultimately caused us to struggle in delivering a working robot. I did drink way too much Fireball at SoutheastCon once, though.

A full autobiography would include a more complete retelling of my experiences on the IEEE robotics team; however, that would be irrelevant to the purpose of this document.

The IEEE robotics team

I knew I was at the age where I should be having sex. I also knew better than to just start asking sorority girls to top me. I felt like my sexuality was utterly incompatible with the mainstream dating world; and I was still very deep in denial about the possibility that I might just be psycho-sexually “a woman”.

Of course, I’ve known BDSM was a thing since I was in seventh grade trying to figure out why I liked tying myself up in mom’s lingerie so much. I just wasn’t old enough to do anything with that yet.

I went to my first evening meeting of the IEEE robotics team in January 2012. I was hoping my roommates wouldn’t ask questions, but they probably did. They… usually did.

I sat in the car for about fifteen minutes, looking at the Cary IHOP in the rearview mirror. Like I was about to drop acid for the first time or something. But, I went in. I was a “take the red pill” kind of guy.

There were a vertigo-inducing 75 people crammed into the side room at the IHOP; a record-breaking turnout for any TMG munch, that may not’ve been paralleled since. Maybe everyone had a new year’s resolution to get back in the scene before the Mayan’s ended the world or something. I could scarcely find anywhere to sit; but I did manage to find a spot after some effort, and I didn’t even have to bang my trumpet case around.

I left with a couple new acquaintances, but I was looking for something that was both less overwhelming and closer in age range. Seems easy enough; I just have to wait for TNG.

The next TNG munch was at Tyler’s in Durham. I showed up to the restaurant 45 minutes late, because I’d never been to the ATC before and the GPS kept sending me by the Moe’s. When I did find the iconic Durham establishment, the wait staff didn’t know where “TNG” or “the computer group” was sitting, so I left. I remember hearing later that this was a weird one anyway.

I probably went to another TMG munch before making it to the next TNG at Tyler’s, not at the ATC but at Seaboard Station this time. By now, it felt like an eternity had passed since I started trying to go, but it was really only like March or late February. I remember seeing some now-familiar faces there. Erika, Jason, Ian, Isabel, Emily… I remember this other fellow Josh going on about different strengths of alcohol he’d tested for his firecupping demo¹⁵ when I thought to myself, “I have found the sex nerds”.

I went to my first play party a couple weeks after this. Josh gave his firecupping demo, an unusual but not unheard of feature. It was cool.

I kept going to stuff. I got in the loop for the TNG slosh that was very much undocumented at the time, kept going to play parties and shit… I was starting to wonder if I was doing it right, when I got my first scene in with a woman named Maureen.

Maureen is a fascinating woman deserving of her own paragraph. For the entire time period I’ve known her, Maureen has been in a relationship with a much younger fellow named Isaac, who for the longest time was a grad student at UNC and is only a couple years older than I am. I often refer to her as “Maureen the cougar” in my head because of this; however this is a misnomer, as the relationship was in fact initiated by Isaac, who I suppose has a thing for older women. She was otherwise over the age limit for TNG, but Isaac often guested her into the parties; she also showed up to the unofficial slosh we had at the Saucer quite a bit.

Anyway, some of you might not really understand how the “BDSM community” works, and might be under the mistaken impression that a play party is tantamount to an orgy. While there’s certainly no shortage of kinky orgies in the world if you were to meet those sorts of people, that would also be a considerably more private affair.

Play parties typically involve partial or full nudity on the part of the folks getting tied up and beaten with stuff, but there are clearly defined rules of engagement that prioritize enthusiastic informed consent and generally preclude outright sex. Where sex at play parties does happen, it’s usually in more intimate group settings, and at a house party as opposed to a venue.

So anyway, it was probably around May, and we were at Justin’s house for TNG instead of the Hangar like usual. This fellow Justin used to throw house parties fairly regularly before he moved to Texas. And no, this wasn’t a “kinky orgy”; though Justin’s house did have a well-deserved reputation. We could also drink there, which was typically both prohibited and legally problematic at an actual dungeon or venue.

I’m starting to wonder if I should be doing something other than existing as a subby boy at a play party who’s only preoccupation is his whiskey and coke, when I’m approached by this middle-aged woman. I’ve seen her around before. Not sure if I ever got her name. Maureen sat down next to me on the floor, and asked if it was alright if she touched me. We went through her toy bag and did some light sensation play, just sitting there like you do. She knew it was my first time. Eventually we did a proper impact scene once the equipment was free. Nothing crazy. We went through her floggers, and maybe some paddles and canes. Just your standard routine. I figured I was starting to make progress. Maybe I wasn’t doing it wrong after all.

It wasn’t too long after this that I started doing stuff with Erika. We did the Sunday brunch munch they had in Fuquay at the time, and wasted time sitting at Starbucks and picking up snacks before rope practice early that afternoon. We joked about how everyone including the staff at Golden Corral kept trying to ship the two of us, and we sort of hit it off from there.

Erika, to be clear, was always a play partner. This wasn’t a romantic relationship; it maybe could have become that under different circumstances, but I lacked desire, and probably don’t even have the DLLs necessary to seduce women without crashing.

---

Josh and I finally got to attend the aforementioned Red Hot Chili Peppers concert in the spring.

This was fun; but probably got the two of us a little too high for the pyrotechnics that ensued. We were both starting to wonder if we were too baked for this shit, when they started playing “Under the Bridge” and we both knew we were going to be okay.

We walked through the gates, and were confused at first when security marshaled us onto the floor instead of level 1. “Oh yeah… My mom said Mr. Terry got us floor seats for some reason.”

The weird part of this story were the people sitting around me. They all appeared to be… in on something I was not. They all seemed to be part of the same group, despite only now introducing themselves to each other. I didn’t think much of it at first. They were mostly sitting on my side, to the left and back of us.

The show opened with the song “Right on Time”. One of those people giggled to whoever was next to them at the line “Joan of Arc reincarnated”. “I love that part!”

I overheard a bit about it being her first time seeing the Chili Peppers since… something. I similarly didn’t think much of it; and I’d never heard the song before that point.

We kept watching this show, stoned out of our minds. Midway through, they played “Can’t Stop”. This was my favorite song by them at the time; so whatever hooping and hollering I was planning to do at this show, this was it. Some lunatic several rows in front of us stood up on his chair while wearing a Subaru t-shirt.

I don’t know if it was my enthusiasm or something else; but it was at this time, maybe at the end of the song, when another of those people taps me on the shoulder. It was a woman sitting behind me, middle-aged or perhaps slightly older. And, she asked me the most seemingly innocent question.

Where are you from?

I told her that I was born in Ohio, but grew up in southeastern North Carolina. This… didn’t answer her question.

I don’t precisely remember how the conversation continued; but, the woman’s follow-up responses were cryptic, and it was around this time when I exclaimed something to the effect of,

A bunch of y’all keep acting like you know something about me I don’t know! It keeps happening! I’ve got people from my hometown, people from church…

She responded with something vague like “Keep searching… you’ll figure it out…”

It was in the banter that continued with this woman and others who joined in on our conversation, when somebody hinted to me

“… You need to learn the truth about UFOs.”

---

This was the first summer where I didn’t go back to mom’s house to work at the computer shop. I managed to get an internship at Fidelity; I frankly didn’t have the grades to get one at a real tech company. I did very well in my programming and digital logic classes; but was quite dreadful at anything to do with hard math or analog circuits. I probably should’ve switched my major to Computer Science at this point, but I powered through out of my love for embedded programming; and also out of the knowledge that I really didn’t have the money to keep being a super senior or beyond.

I found myself in hot water after setting up a playdate at our apartment, when I thought all of my roommates would be out of town. Somebody, I think Josh, decided he was about to drive back from the lake like a couple hours before Erika was coming over. It was too late to call it off, and I kinda just started drinking beers and planning to tell Josh I was a kinkster when he got back. I somehow managed to divert Josh’s return trip at the last minute, but I basically told him I was having a girl over. I started to think I was only delaying the inevitable.

---

Josh’s brother stayed at our apartment for a while in the summer while he attended a summer camp at NC State during the day. I remember him coming back with a story one evening.

I met this girl. She said she was pansexual, and that there were like twelve different genders!

I died a little inside.

Senior

We moved from a three- to a four-person apartment in the same complex; eventually adding Trevor as our fourth roommate after briefly being stuck with a stranger from Wake Tech who we didn’t really get along with. My roommates were wise to the fact that I had some late night extracurricular I didn’t want to talk about, and “robot team” become a sort of joke at our apartment.

I thought about telling my roommates. I really did. Things got increasingly weird as I ran out of excuses for what I’d been doing out so late. The world wouldn’t have ended. There were a lot of reasons not to, though.

• BDSM is radically accepting and body positive. My roommates… were not.
• I’ve heard Josh complain about merely having to Skype with fat girls for schoolwork. He calls women “fat” who aren’t even fat! And here I am, play partners with Erika.
• Have you ever read “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie”? These guys had a habit of screaming BULLSHIT! any time I made a claim even half as sensational as being actively involved in the local BDSM community. I was concerned they might, well…
• So, my roommates were the sort of people Dakota would probably yell “Code pink shirt!” over the walkie for trying to slip past the gate at Debauchery, if you know what I mean.¹⁶
• So, what I meant to say was, I was concerned they might make asses of themselves. And that they did sometimes wear pink button-ups unironically.
• Or, that they’d demand I “bring home a dominatrix”.¹⁷
• Also, I can’t un-tell them. Like I wish I could’ve done back in ninth grade.
• Would Josh want to tape up his asshole around me again like after he learned I was trans?
• They were the sort to argue over whether Cameron was “gay” for enjoying pegging, when I probably had friends who matched the database query Gender = 'M' AND Orientation = 'heterosexual' AND Fetishes LIKE '%Pegging (Into)%'.
• My roommates are looking for hot college babes, not 18-35+ kinksters of various body types. The mouse is gonna bother the piss out of me until I give it a cookie, then proceed to complain about how my food sucks and I’m really just a pussy.
• And, my roommates are into the normal dating pathway, where you find yourself a nice woman to seduce, go out on a few dates, take her home to meet your parents, maybe pop the question and talk about having kids some day… BDSM is notorious for unconventional relationship dynamics like polyamory and wide age gaps, that my vanilla friends would probably find weird or even creepy.

It kinda seemed like the best case scenario would be for this to remain my private little solo activity, which is what was happening anyway. I figured it was obvious I was doing “weird sex stuff” of some sort; and that maybe some things were better left unsaid.

Living a double life soon proved to be a challenge, and I struggled to keep up. I was always double-booking kink and vanilla activities, and I really should’ve kept a schedule.

Erika’s engagement with a fellow named Kevin collapsed over the summer. While I’d love to tell you all about it, it’s mostly irrelevant; save for the fact that Erika now expediently needed a place to live, and she wasn’t made of money. She ended up moving into the spare bedroom of Heather, a (vanilla) friend of Justin from TNG. I think they used to work together or something.

Heather

When I was around this age, I often thought of what my life would be like when I was older. Because, I wasn’t planning to transition anymore. I wasn’t planning to be anyone’s husband. I didn’t want children. What was I, just going to live in a giant bachelor pad by myself my whole life with all my engineer money I didn’t have anything else better to do with?

As Erika’s move inched closer, I began hearing more and more about this Heather person.

• Early 30s
• Software engineer
• Used to work with Justin at Cisco or some shit
• Bachelorette
• Still gets high
• Lives in a giant house just outside the beltline, either by herself or with discretionary roommates who are statistically more likely than average to have natural or artificial red hair, probably by sheer coincidence.¹⁸

As I learned more about her, Heather was the first person I’d met in my field whose adult lifestyle felt relatable to me. I’d often wondered if there was a place for me in the world, as a man who wasn’t a “marriage and family” kind of guy; but now I figured I could just grow up to be a sort of subby-boy Heather type of character with a basement dungeon.

I helped Erika with the move, and often found myself at Heather’s house my senior year; eventually getting the door code to let myself in. The room wasn’t huge and there wasn’t much space to swing a flogger around, but it was certainly more discreet than my apartment situation.

We started getting to know each other during and just after the move.

What do you do for work?

I’m a student at NC State.

Oh! What’s your major?

Electrical and computer engineering.

Oh, ECE! Is Mrs. Such-and-such still the advisor over there?

Yeah! How’d you know?

I used to be in ECE before I switched to Computer Science. My advisor hated me for it, too. I was one of her favorite students.

She talked about how the predecessor to ECE220 was way too hard, and they eventually had to restructure the class because of it. It sounded like she switched out of the program largely because of this, and went on to get her master’s in CS.

---

Early on, I had the most fascinating conversation with Heather.

I overheard her say something about going to a pagan meetup when I was over visiting.

This… piqued my interest. At the risk of sounding cheesy, I saw Heather as a sort of role model. I thought of her as someone who was, probably, a better version of myself. We’re both people of science; and as I’ve grown up, science has caused me to believe in fewer gods, not more of them. But here she is, worshiping a whole pantheon of them! That’s assuming she’s sincere in her convictions, at least.

Naturally, I was curious why she believed as she did; and, my ears were still ringing with Tommy telling me I was “different” and needed to “seek hidden truths”, or perhaps some alternative form of spirituality.

When I pressed for more information, she got defensive at first. “That’s private!”

I told her I didn’t mean any disrespect; and went on to explain I was only curious because my childhood preacher acted like there was something else I needed to know that was beyond religion. And that I was apparently different in some way that involved the Freemasons.

Ooh, Freemasons! How much do you know about Freemasonry?

Uh… not much…

Bullshit!

No really, this guy Tommy just kept pulling me aside and acting like I needed to learn something about myself. And… it involves the Freemasons, apparently?

Huh… you really are new at this, aren’t you?

The conversation continued. And… it only gets weirder from here.

Who do you work for?

Well, I’m a student.

… Does anyone in your family work for the government?

Well, my mom works for Cumberland County DSS…

She seemed… unconcerned about that last part.

What do you believe in?

Well, I’m an atheist.

So… reincarnation is real.

… Sorry, I don’t…

No. It’s real.

She was so matter-of-fact in stating that last part. Like a doctor reading me my diagnosis.

She went on to explain that there’s… life on other planets. And, reincarnation is real. And, she happens to be from a planet orbiting the star Vega in the constellation Lyra. Apparently, these people are simply described as being “from Vega”, or “from Lyra”.

I… wasn’t sure what to do with this information. I couldn’t help but take it with a grain of salt; but Heather just sounds so goddamn serious, and she’s smarter than I am!

I wanted to learn more. I was still a bit “citation needed” on the inside, but it did seem related to the thing Tommy was trying to tell me. Heather didn’t have any resources to give me, and simply told me to “explore mysticism”. “Keep learning… you’ll get there someday.” I think she said something to the effect that it would be more of a thing in another decade or two, but it wasn’t really talked about today.

I looked up the Wikipedia page for “mysticism” when I got back home, but that wasn’t exactly helpful. And, it didn’t make me any less of an atheist. Still, I was fascinated by the whole “reincarnated space alien” thing; it was an obvious consequence of reincarnation, and one which I had never considered. However, it was unclear how this ties into paganism; that aspect probably yields more questions than answers.

---

The next time I went over there, Heather called up one of her friends to have her come over as well. It seemed she wanted us to meet; or that there was otherwise some purpose to this visit.

When her friend arrived, Heather proceeded to put on a sort of little demonstration; which she wanted to explain to me in particular. I… don’t remember all the details. Oh, how I wish I remembered all the details…

This had to do with Freemasonry; and how you’re supposed to talk about it with “people like Heather”. It was like this sort of “Simon says” routine you have to do with them. It went something like…

I feel like I’m missing parts; but I do remember part of this Freemason sudo command involving the Heather-like person lying and you having to call them out on it. As if they could only tell you something once. I distinctly remember Heather’s friend boldly exclaiming the phrase “Bullshit!”. I don’t remember if it’s required to utter that specific profanity or not…

High jinks

I had a lot of adventures and close calls while living a double life my senior year. While irrelevant to the story, I would like to share some of them.

---

For my 22^nd birthday, Erika set up this playdate for us to go to Bailey’s house.

Bailey was a student at Duke at the time. She was one of the few dommes¹⁹ in the area who was my age, so I was excited to see how things went.²⁰

Erika picked me up at Wolf Creek on Friday afternoon, and we drove to Bailey’s town house off Duke St. We’d go upstairs to scene, and then go downstairs to unwind for a bit, and for Bailey to have a smoke break. And, we did this a few times.

During one of our breaks, Bailey says

So, Erika tells me you’re transgender…

One thing led to another, and, anyway, I found myself getting birthday spankings in a mini skirt.

Erika would often later bring up how much I seemed to enjoy myself in this moment; as if to suggest I might have unresolved feelings about my gender identity. I couldn’t help but look to how hard I was during all of this as evidence that it probably was a sex thing after all.

What else? Erika gave me a collar, and a set of matching bondage cuffs to go with it. I think we went to Cook-Out. We ended up spending the night.

My mother was driving up on Saturday morning to see me for my birthday, so I needed to be back at my apartment before then. We were running on “Erika and Bailey time”, and we were not making the return trip as quickly as I’d have liked. I was trying to avoid a situation where I might have to introduce Erika to my nosy mother, or explain why I wasn’t home on a Saturday morning to see a-widdle muver for my birthday.

My mom was leaving Benson. We were on our way to get gas before leaving Durham. This was close. A real race condition. Plus, I needed to shower and whatnot. I’d be lucky if my mother didn’t catch me darting out of a gold Suzuki with a duffel bag like I was storming the beaches of Normandy.

I appeared to just barely beat my mother. I jogged up the stairs and power-walked to my room.

No text messages from Susan, and I didn’t see a blue Focus anywhere. Phew.

I. Need. A shower. Susan can wait. She knows where the McDonald’s is. I waste no time.

I dried off. I brushed my teeth. I put on some boxer shorts that I’d replaced my childhood tighty whities with after wanting better looking underpants, and probably grabbed some cargo shorts and a band tee or something, as was my uniform in those days.

I checked my phone. Still nothing from Susan. I combed my hair. I took one last look in the mirror that also served as the closet door.

I’m still. Wearing. Eye shadow. It’s really obvious. It did not come off in the shower.

Fuck.

So, I start scrubbing the fuck out of my eyelids with the corner of a bath towel and some hand soap. It’s really stubborn. Have you ever tried removing makeup without makeup remover? They sell it for a reason.

I’m starting to wonder if I even can get it off completely. Maybe it’s like when you go to the club underage, and you just have to accept you’re going to have the ghost of a Sharpie ‘X’ on your right hand for the next day or two.²¹

Eventually, I succeed. I carefully inspect my eyelids under all available lighting, and I can’t find any more obvious signs of makeup. It took me long enough, though.

I take a deep breath and check my phone again. Still nothing from Susan. Surely she’s arrived by now?

Anyway, I finally open the door to my room. At long last.

I’m surprised to find my mother sitting at the kitchen table and staring right at my bedroom door. That’s one question answered.

Do you always leave your door unlocked?

Uhh… no… we usually lock it…

Somebody could just walk right in here… I’m serious! Has it been open all night?

Uhh… no… I just took out the trash this morning, or something…

There are crazy people out there! You need to be careful!

Okay, we will…

… I bought you those headphones you asked for…

I’m just glad she didn’t ask who “Marseille” was.

---

Erika was a semi-professional photographer. It certainly wasn’t her day job, but she did side gigs for people and whatnot. One of these gigs involved the North Carolina Fetish Art Festival.

The door for this thing was at least $20, and I think more like $40. Erika was obviously getting in for free, and she managed to get me in as well as her “camera assistant”.

The dress code was “fetish attire or all black”. I planned to do a blacked-out look with my red collar. I needed to buy new clothes for the occasion and was laughably inexperienced at finding what I was looking for, but I pulled it off. That’s, unsurprisingly, not the point of the story.

First of all, I double-booked NCFAF with some big tailgate our apartment had planned, and I didn’t realize what I’d done until like a day or two before. It was difficult to back out of either obligation, but Erika and I had been planning this for at least six or eight weeks. So I chose… both! This was probably not the greatest idea, but I made it.

I rode along with my roommates to the tailgate lot; but, I knew I couldn’t stay for the game. So late that morning, I just walked back from Carter-Finley to Wolf Creek, took a shower, maybe even picked up some last-minute article of clothing I was having trouble finding at Belk or some shit, eventually making it to Holly Springs in time to get ready for NCFAF with Erika.

We disembarked, joking about how we looked like we were on our way to the kinky prom. When we arrived, they gave us special lanyards, as we were considered “staff” or whatever. They didn’t have a second “photographer” lanyard, so they gave me one that said “vendor” instead.

I really did hold Erika’s camera bag for her, and it really might’ve been a two-person job to juggle all of that, in all seriousness. I also bought myself a couple Yuenglings at the bar, so I’m not a complete scrub.

They didn’t seem concerned about collecting the staff lanyards at the end of the night. Erika and I left with both of ours. We drove through Cook-Out on our way back to Holly Springs. It wasn’t really a play party, but it was fun. Sort of like a mini-PUSH.

Anyway, some amount of time after this, I needed work done on my car. The work included a new muffler; maybe I couldn’t pass inspection without it or something.

There was (and still is) this mechanic beside the apartment complex called RJ&G. Unless you’re going to have friends drive you around or call an overpriced taxi, this was really the only place to take your car within walking distance for car shit. We were kind of in a weird area between Raleigh and Cary, and I don’t think ride-sharing apps had become mainstream yet.

I dropped off my 2001 Mustang at RJ&G for a new muffler, and probably came back in a day or two once they were done.

When I went in to pick up my car, the staff was unusually jovial with me. “We bet you get around in that Mustang, don’t you! She’s seen some things, hasn’t she?” And I’m just like “Sure, whatever.” I pay the bill and they return my keys.

I returned to my car, with two very obvious new additions to my floorboards.

• Those paper mats they put down after they vacuum your car.
• A lanyard that says “North Carolina Fetish Art Festival: Photographer”.

---

#TODOUnfinished but largely irrelevant

A group of us would regularly meet at this woman Dana’s house in Garner, for an even that came to be known as “Ponies”.

I’m… not a bronie. I’d tell you if I was at this point. The event’s name came from Erika, Dana, and a small group of folks who actually did follow that series as adults; but had since moved toward other media, as a number of the newer attendees weren’t really into that, or were even put off by it. I think we were doing The Walking Dead at the time, and probably Archer and another series or two.

This was a mostly vanilla gathering of kinksters, that would sometimes devolve into a kinky gathering of kinksters. This happened just often enough that you probably couldn’t bring your vanilla friends along without explaining how we all know each other.

#TODOI’ll write more about BDSM eventually, but this is mostly irrelevant.

#TODOVanilla life senior year

---

There was this Women and Gender Studies class that was required; certainly of all the engineering students, but probably just everyone in general. Josh took it before me and hated it.

Being a quasi-transgender subby boy who was thoroughly acclimated to “consent culture” through time spent in the BDSM community, I expected to like the class a bit more than Josh. This, unfortunately, wasn’t really the case, and I found myself bitching about it a lot to Josh throughout the semester.

This was a long time ago, mind you. I feel like one of the problems was that, despite considerable effort to the contrary, it made a lot of assumptions about you and your life as a guy. A big one was that you had women in your life (your mom, your girlfriend or ex-girlfriend(s)) to whom you owed respect. Because the women in our society are responsible for shit like emotional labor.

While this might often hold true for “normal” people, this kind of made me feel icky. Like I still wasn’t wuving a-widdle muver enough, and I was still being too mean to Emma. As if my mother wasn’t some child trapped in a grown-up’s body, or Emma wasn’t the asshole in our relationship. There didn’t really seem to be a path where a man could conclude that they’ve had no healthy women involved in their lives thus far. “Toxic femininity” wasn’t really a concept in this universe, and you’d probably get laughed at at least for suggesting that it might actually be a thing sometimes. It was never suggested that all the women in your life might actually have personality disorders; or that if you’re mom has one, you’re likely to subconsciously look for girlfriends with similar traits until you get therapy for that shit. Now that I’m older, I realize that simply being Susan’s child is emotionally laborious.

It also often felt like they were seeing patterns where there were none, looking for trouble or misogyny where there really wasn’t any; and maybe that they need to remember that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. “Peak feminism” for me may’ve been this reading assignment, where a woman worked at an ICBM facility with a bunch of dude-bros, and basically accused them of being sex-crazed perverts because they couldn’t help but make even the missiles penis shaped, while also referring to them with she/her pronouns. I came away feeling like this woman’s entire rant was mostly just projection; as if she’d had a traumatic life of sexual violence, and really it’s just her who’s seeing dicks all over the place. I’d implore anyone who thinks missiles are simply phallic-shaped because they were designed by men, to major in Aerospace Engineering and tell the world a more aerodynamic shape to construct them in. Of course, the point of the reading assignment was to try and illustrate the value of diversity and feminine input into design decisions; as if the missiles would’ve been shaped like a tulip instead if only it weren’t for that pesky glass ceiling keeping all the ladies out of the men’s club.

The class wasn’t designed to be indoctrination; though I often refrained from speaking my mind, because I felt like it wasn’t my place. It make me feel like maybe feminism really has started to run its course, despite the challenges women still face. I felt like “feminism” was an ironic choice of name for a movement that purports to advance egalitarianism in society and language.

There were points in the class where I cynically thought to myself, “It’s not like we’re ever going to talk about trans women…” But then, toward the end of the semester, we actually did have a chapter on trans people. Though you’d think I’d be excited about that, it sort of just felt weird and out of place. Like, this is just an introductory Women and Gender Studies class. Why couldn’t you just let me sulk quietly about how we aren’t talking about people like me? I would’ve gotten over it… Maybe I don’t know what I want.

Can I place out of WGS210 like I did E115? I was on Antijen, you know… (I didn’t actually ask this, obviously.)

There was actually an option, for one of the assignments, of either leaving the house dressed like a woman, or doing some other assignment instead. Most people chose the latter option; myself included. You might’ve expected me to jump at the opportunity, but, no… This gender stuff is very real to me. It isn’t just a game of dress-up to me. It’s what I am inside; even if what I am inside is just some kind of weird pervert. I feel like it’d be an easier assignment for a cis guy with low inhibitions.

---

I took this analog design class my senior year; and I knew I was going to be bad at it. I was really just into programming and digital logic and shit. It was with this fellow, Dr. Breen I think.²² I remember this because of the Half Life 2 antagonist of the same name.

And, I wasn’t that great at it. It was still a pretty neat class, and I remember him being a great professor. It was largely about analog design with field effect, as opposed to bipolar, transistors; something that isn’t ideal but is often pragmatically desirable when, for example, an IC might be 95% digital logic and only need a little bit of an analog front end or something. The big project for the class involved designing an op-amp.

This class was at like 8:30 a.m., and may’ve even been responsible for my future morning coffee habit. I walked in one morning, probably still a little slow from having a smoke the night before and holding a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. And I’d guess I was sipping on this coffee and getting ready to stare at a blank page in some multi-subject notebook, when Dr. Breen opened his PowerPoint presentation for the day and the first slide was a giant goddamn picture of Lynn Conway’s face.

So, if you were a transsexual (certainly, a trans woman) in the year 2000-something, there were three names you definitely knew. They were, in no particular order: Andrea James, Calpernia Addams, and Lynn Conway. They were the face of trans activism throughout the entire decade. I doubt anyone even knows who they are today.

My heart skips a beat. I’m probably starting to shake and sweat, and I feel like a spotlight has shone down from the heavens on me in particular. I really wished I hadn’t come to class today. Some panicked voice in the back of my head questions whether Dr. Breen and his alien benefactors can see right through me.

The left side of my brain starts pulling me together. Nobody knows you’re trans. Just… take a deep breath. She was like… a professor at Michigan or some shit. Just, try and…

I mean, I’ve known who she was since forever. Certainly since before I had to pick between Computer Engineering and Computer Science. And, I really did choose that path because I wanted to get into hardware and low-level software stuff, it felt like more of a mystery at that age, I wanted a wider breadth of knowledge after being mostly a tinkerer up to that point… but I’d always been acutely aware of the fact that Lynn Conway was an accomplished computer engineer in particular. And here I was in this 400-level ECE class, at this point thoroughly expecting never to learn anything about Lynn Conway as an undergraduate… and this is shaping up to be more than a mere mention. I mean, he didn’t have a giant goddamn picture of Carver Mead’s face anywhere in his presentation…

Okay. So Lynn Conway might’ve been a little bit of a role model growing up. Whatever.

With WGS210 still fresh in my mind, I expected it to be one of those lectures. We’re going to spend a third of the class talking about transsexuals, or transgender people, or whatever we were in the year 2013, and I needed to act. Fucking. Natural. Pull it together, Ethan! You’re not really even transsexual anymore, remember?

Okay. I think I’m prepared now. Nobody here knows about that little phase I went through in middle and high school… and it’s going to stay that way, as long as I can play the straight man. And so I’m braced for the punchline to this lecture that opened with a giant fucking picture of Lynn Conway’s face as the title slide, and…

There wasn’t one. The class was about the lambda design rules.

Not a single. Goddamn. Thing about Lynn Conway being one of the foremost trans activists of the 21^st century. Except for a brief mention that there had just been a write-up about her very fascinating life in IEEE Spectrum, and that we really ought to read it outside of class.

And I was So. Relieved.

I might’ve even walked away feeling a little big for my britches; knowing I was probably the only other person in the room that day who knew her deal.

I distinctly remember telling myself something as I walked back to my car, that always makes me giggle when I think about it. No matter how far I make it in life, no matter how notorious or infamous I might become… I just hope I never find my face blown up in some professor’s slide deck as large as Lynn Conway’s was that day.

Male phase (2013-2016)

Work (2013-2015)

I officially graduated in August, after taking a class over the summer I had trouble scheduling during the school year. I really wanted to get into embedded programming at this point in my life, after having thoroughly enjoyed playing with microcontrollers throughout my college experience.

I landed a job at a small company specializing in embedded cellular IoT devices called CrystalSoft. I told people I wanted to work at a smaller company; and it isn’t a lie to say I’m really not a ladder climber and just wanted to get my hands dirty working on real things. Though the truth was, I had just shy of a 3.0 GPA,²³ and didn’t really meet the cut for a job at a “real” company like Cisco or IBM unless the job was something like “sales engineering”. I knew I’d rather go back to work at the computer store than be a sales engineer at Cisco, and was concerned I’d be pigeonholed into non- or lightly-technical roles after that point. I was optimistic about advice on the internet claiming your GPA really only mattered for your first job, and frankly I didn’t have the money for another semester at NC State.

Folks on the IEEE robotics team asked me where I was going to grad school, not if. I guess they didn’t know how bad of a student I actually was.

I’ve often wondered if I’d have made better grades majoring in computer science as opposed to ECE. I think I picked that pathway, largely because it was more of an unknown.²⁴ I’d been playing with Linux for much of my life, but I still didn’t really feel comfortable putting a transistor on a breadboard without blindly following a schematic. I think I wanted to increase my breadth of knowledge, but I underestimated how math-heavy EE is. It’s probably one of the more math-intensive engineering disciplines, I really suck at pure mathematics relative to a lot of other things, and I don’t feel like I really even got a sound Calculus education at NC State. Most everyone my age had it in high school, and it seemed obvious that Calc 1 and 2 were taught mostly as a review as opposed to first-time mediocre math students like myself.

I sort of wish there was an “embedded computer science” degree that was ECE 109, 209, 309, 4-whatever-that-embedded-class is, and the normal computer science curriculum; but I didn’t really know what I was doing at the time and was too stubborn (and broke, relatively speaking) to change course part-way and be a fifth year senior.

Anyway, I landed this interview on a rainy afternoon over the summer of 2013. I wondered into the office, awkwardly wearing a suit my mother had bought for me at some point in college that was probably the wrong color for an interview. Everyone else in the office was considerably more dressed down, and Kevin cracked some joke about how he’d better not see me dressed that formally again. He handed me a whiteboard marker and told me to write atoi() from the C standard library. I produced an optimal implementation of the function on the first try; with only a single minor bug that got the place values backwards, which I found after he had me “debug it” also via whiteboard.

He extended an offer not long after this; which I was inclined to accept, as it entailed embedded programming in C and that’s exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I hadn’t really found anything else that suited my fancy, and my motivation to keep looking hit an all-time low once I had the job.

My lease was up on my college apartment at the end of the summer, and I was able to use my job acceptance as proof of employment to rent a decently-sized townhouse just across I-40 from the office. The rent was $850/month, and by-god I think it might’ve been my favorite residence to date, all things considered.

---

#noteThe level of anonymization of major companies that make things like cellular modules is probably going to sound a little silly to folks familiar with the industry. I’m sticking with it, though.

I started working for Kevin toward the end of August. We had a couple small rooms in this larger suite, and I was placed at a desk next to a window. “Shit… I guess I’ve made it”, I thought.

I wrote a couple drivers integrating cellular modules into our software stack that I’m not sure we ever actually used, before I was placed on my first project. This was the ill-fated OrangeTrack.

By now, I’d learned a decent amount about our software stack, as well as the history of our company. Kevin got his start working for Bay Wireless, and launched the company with a piece of software he’d written for their ConnectOS platform called CrystalCom. It’s purpose was to eliminate the often repetitive task of developing one-off applications to move data from something like an array of sensors to the internet, that would often be flashed onto these modules from vendors like Bay Wireless. To accomplish this, CrystalCom had at it’s core a system of endpoints and bridges, which could be connected together to move data between subsystems; usually with the goal of communicating with an outside server using CrystalCom’s proprietary ASCII- and binary-based protocols.

The idea was that, assuming the server side could cope with any arbitrary format, you could eliminate the need to pay your engineers to develop a whole new application, and simply provision our turnkey solution with AT commands sent over a serial port. You could bridge a meter reader endpoint to a TCP endpoint, for example; or even an ASCII command interpreter to an SMS endpoint to control the software with text messages.

The company started with a reputation for being a “Bay Wireless house”, but Kevin had ambitions of porting the software to cellular modules from other vendors; and even to general-purpose microcontrollers, which might communicate with a separate cellular module over a UART. To accomplish this, he hired senior engineer Steve to create OS and cellular module abstraction layers, which respectively came to be known as CrystalOS and CrystalConnect. These were relatively thin but very cleanly designed layers, in contrast to the sprawling and patchwork nature that often characterized CrystalCom development. CrystalOS simply wrapped the native operating system’s threading API and provided abstract data structures for things like linked lists and hash tables. CrystalConnect abstracted the AT command parsing and sequencing needed to set up and tear down TCP and UDP network connections with external cellular modules. We didn’t include our own TCP/IP stack, in lieu of leveraging the native platform or external cellular module’s network stack.

Kevin had since gotten the company acquired by Massachusetts-based DataCorp, a business that seemed to make most of its money selling $5/month SIM cards for these sorts of little embedded M2M devices that only use a few MB of data a month. He had also since hired senior engineer Dale to work mostly on continuing CrystalCom development (who may’ve started before Steve for all I know), Colombian-based hardware engineer Miguel to do things like PCB design, and cross-fit dude-bro Brandon to help with shipping and flashing modules.

Which brings us to me. A couple other engineers like Leslie and some other new grad had come and gone, but I didn’t really know them all that well, and this document is already long enough without talking about them.

By the time I started, CrystalCom had largely been ported on top of CrystalOS and CrystalConnect; and was now running on the original Bay Wireless hardware via the respective CrystalOS and CrystalConnect drivers, for the most part. One could thenceforth build CrystalCom for Win32, and even debug it with Visual Studio instead of Bay Wireless’ proprietary Eclipse-based IDE.

Kevin’s vision seemed to be that I would continue extending Steve’s porting effort to other platforms, without any shenanigans. This is not what happened.

Anyway, Kevin took on as a client a fledgling startup out of Orlando by the name OrangeTrack. Their goal was to sell a GPS tracker in a keyfob-like form factor, that you could attach to your kid or your dog or your backpack to keep from losing it. This was the year 2013 btw, in case some smartass was about to comment on the saturation of the tracking-things-with-GPS market. A differentiating feature seemed to be that the OrangeTrack device had both its own cellular module, and a BLE chip that might be able to detect nearby devices.

Through some series of talks, Kevin managed to convince CTO Joe that CrystalCom was the perfect turnkey solution to power his little device. This was a design decision I would eventually come to disagree with.

Kevin introduced the project to me, as an effort to port CrystalCom onto the ARM Cortex-based STM32. The STM32 would communicate with a ConnectIt-brand GPS module over a UART, for which I think a CrystalConnect driver had already been written by Steve or maybe Leslie. The STM32F2xx series had 128KB of RAM, and something like a megabyte of internal flash ROM. FreeRTOS was to be used for threading, which I think I ended up writing the CrystalOS drivers for, but it’s been a while. The hardware specs were a far cry from the reference platform; which had several times the RAM and a much faster CPU. Still, it was figured by Kevin that the goal could be reached by selectively compiling out bits of CrystalCom that we weren’t planning on using.

Getting CrystalCom* with some asterisks working on an STM32 dev board by a certain date was Kevin’s first ultimatum. And for a while, it felt surprisingly like I was back in embedded systems class. I set up an IAR project, got the thing building, combed through the linker map to get the thing to even fit the BSS section in the 128KB of RAM… I was thoroughly excited when I managed to get the dev board to even boot up CrystalCom just when I thought I might have to spend a long weekend getting it to work. I managed it by commenting out relatively large swaths of CrystalCom that either wouldn’t fit in memory or just wouldn’t build with the IAR compiler for some reason. And the margins were still razor-thin; using 90-something of the STM32’s 128K of RAM right out of the gate.

One of the asterisks I used in managing to get CrystalCom working on the STM32 was a “fake” CrystalOS registry driver, which always returned a successful result for write requests and a FILE_NOT_FOUND result for reads. This obviously meant that this hacked-together CrystalCom build didn’t have a functioning non-volatile memory, and creating one was my next major order of business.

The flash filesystem was… by far the most terrifying piece of software I’ve ever written.

The flash filesystem

Developers usually have opinions, and by now the opinions that comprised Kevin’s development philosophy were becoming apparent. Kevin’s biggest, and maybe only ethos, was

Generalize. Everything.

He disparagingly referred to anything that did one thing and did it well as “throwaway code”. He really wanted to keep the amount of OrangeTrack-specific development to a minimum; instead hoping to produce a general-purpose CrystalCom port that could run on anybody’s STM32F2-series microcontroller, with connectivity provided by any one of our supported CrystalConnect devices. As such, I could make very few assumptions about the geometry of the underlying flash memory device. One of those few assumptions was that I would be writing a filesystem a NOR flash, as opposed to a NAND flash.

#noteI wrote a lot more about this filesystem and why it was a bad idea, but you probably don’t care.

---

Two of the first luxury goods I bought myself after graduating from college were

• A Storz and Bickel Volcano
• A Hitachi Magic Wand

The first point was at least partially spurred by the slow failure of my Iolite catalytic butane vaporizer that saw me through the second half of college.

The second point is probably obvious. I was afraid my roommates would hear me using a vibrator through the thin walls, so I made do in ways that often led to uncomfortable chafing. I tried using a fleshlight to deal with this; but I honestly didn’t care for the feel, plus it’s a lot of hassle.

Kevin asked me if I knew of anyone else who was looking for a job, and I told him

No… not really…

Josh had to get some kind of surgery with his rib cage or something, and this set him behind in job-searching with the rest of our graduating class. Although, he didn’t seem as hurried as I was to apply for jobs at the end of his senior year. Probably because he had daddy’s money or something.

Josh asked if my company was hiring, to which I replied

Nah, I don’t think so… It’s a pretty small company anyway. We mostly do embedded C stuff…

Kevin asked a couple more times if I knew anybody, and I said

Eh, I don’t know of anyone really.

I didn’t really want to cross the streams. That’s how I’ve always handled my private life, and even aspects of my public one.

Josh seemed increasingly desperate, and eventually I hooked the two of them up. Okay…

Kevin interviewed him, and he didn’t say much to me about it except

He’s really green…

And I’m thinking “Well, he just graduated, and he wasn’t a Linux kid like I was, so…”

Anyway, he ended up hiring Josh because he really wanted somebody working on this other crazy idea of his, which I think basically involved porting CrystalCom to a cellular router device.

Kevin did a few more interviews over the next year or two, and briefly hired another engineer who quit after like a month. It seemed simple to me at the time; but he always gave people the same atoi() question, and usually got widely different implementations of it, even from much more experienced engineers. He pointed to the whiteboard one day on our way back from lunch, where someone had done it with a fucking case statement. I’ve always wondered where that leaves me in the grand scheme of things. Sometimes I feel like this is my thing, but I also feel like I’m far too disorganized and unmotivated to ever be a Dale or Steve-sort of person.

I think shortly after the new year, I had a bit of an incident that was likely spurred by my new vaporizer.

You see, I was downstairs hitting the Volcano, and I was pretty high… I decided to go upstairs for some reason, and just as I started to walk up I got lightheaded really fast. I immediately had this feeling like I was going to faint, and instinctively opened the front door on my way to the couch so that somebody might find me if I didn’t wake up.

I managed to unlock the door, and not much else. I woke up on the floor with a splitting headache. Judging by how I landed, I’d guess I hit my head on the corner of the coffee table. The floor was carpet, and I doubt that alone would’ve caused this severe of a headache. I was disoriented and distressed enough that I called my mom, just so I could have somebody on the phone in case I lost consciousness again.

I might’ve ended up taking some ibuprofen or something, but I thought myself to have more-or-less recovered from the experience by the next morning.

So, like a week after this happened, shit started getting really weird. I didn’t feel right at all, and I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong with me. I’d go into work and just stare at the screen until lunchtime. I remember us having a meeting in the conference room, and I just felt outright batty.

I was convinced something weird was going on with my body, and that I had to figure it out myself for some reason. I became paranoid that something strange had made it into my weed. In my infinite wisdom, I went to CVS to buy a blood pressure monitor and a blood glucose testing kit. And once I got to CVS, I couldn’t figure out what to buy and just stared at the shelves for what might’ve been over 30 minutes before something like “We’ve got a code 400” went over the intercom. Whether or not I had anything to do with it, I wouldn’t be surprised if I was acting so batty as to arouse suspicion.

I had tinnitus like crazy. I didn’t even feel like myself. I checked my blood glucose and it was always perfectly normal. My blood pressure was consistently 180 over something. After repeatedly checking the internet and ascertaining that this really was dangerous, I decided to drive to the ER. I got to Rex, told them I’d been feeling really weird and that my blood pressure was apparently stupidly high, and they quickly took me back and hooked me up to an EEG which found no abnormalities. I think my blood pressure was only 160 over something when they checked it at the hospital. They ultimately determined that there was no pressing emergency and that I might need to talk to my doctor about blood pressure medication.

I felt really paranoid, to the point that I thought I had to hide my cannabis use from the doctors. I didn’t think to mention my little fainting episode a week or two prior, which I perceived at the time to be completely unrelated.

I remember after work, driving down Avent Ferry to the intersection at Tryon Rd. And, I was still feeling really weird. I was waiting at the light, and suddenly someone started honking. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what they were honking at, and then a second person started honking. Eventually, I found myself at the white line with a green light, and I had no idea how long I’d been there. Anyway, I made my right turn onto Tryon Rd.

It was only with several months, or maybe over a year of hindsight, that I finally had my wits about me enough to diagnose myself with…

… A concussion. I had a fucking concussion. They really do fuck up your brain. I often think of this experience when I hear about the new protocols in football. I survived it, but man was I loopy. For like a whole six or nine months, at the start of this OrangeTrack project. So, like, most of 2014.

---

By some point in 2014, I was out of the honeymoon phase with this job. My opinion of Kevin started to be that he was a madman who wanted to solve every problem in the industry with one piece of software. A lot of his ideas were met with pushback from Steve and Dale, who as seniors were in more of a position to debate and haggle with him, as opposed to just asking “how high” like I did. This may’ve been heightened by the fact Steve and Dale worked from home, giving them more of a buffer between Kevin’s day-to-day whims than I had.

Exacerbating the problem was the mounting tech debt I’d accrued in meeting Kevin’s deadlines. I hadn’t yet learned this industry term, and I actually felt guilty for having it. Kevin usually wanted to know as soon as I got thing A working so he could get me working on thing B, and I often wasn’t as done as I thought I was with thing A when I told him I was there. I was really self-conscious about the hacking I’d had to do to get CrystalCom working at the very beginning, to the point I didn’t feel comfortable checking it in. This only led to me getting further bogged down with tricky merges, and inadvertently made me into a cowboy with this special version of CrystalCom for the STM32 I had to baby. This is something I feel pretty silly about, and I think it was entirely psychological; I don’t even think the work I’d done was that bad now that I’m older, but I felt like I had a lot to prove after making mediocre grades in college. I didn’t feel like I really had enough time to put my best foot forward, and I didn’t want to be judged based on that.

Between Kevin and Joe I was answering to two different masters, and I had to maintain a balance between fighting Joe’s fires and keeping Kevin happy by not writing “throwaway code” just for OrangeTrack. The need to implement everything as generic CrystalCom features that could be configured with our extended AT and binary command set drove development to a crawl compared to writing a traditional embedded application, and at times hid useful platform-specific features behind layers of abstraction that needed to be re-worked to expose them in a reusable manner. I fielded a steady stream of issues with my flash filesystem throughout my tenure, gradually eroding my confidence in the 5,000+ line monstrosity. CrystalCom was optimized for neither CPU nor memory, pushing the limits of what was supposed to be a low-power, low-overhead tracking device. Efforts to use lower-power hardware states bore noticeable improvement, but were ultimately lackluster compared to what could’ve been accomplished with a more streamlined application. I began to wish OrangeTrack could simply be its own application built on top of CrystalOS and CrystalConnect, but this pivot seemed out of the question. Half-jokes about adding an AT$BLUAZU command to CrystalCom were generally balked at by Kevin.

Kevin often accused Joe of being a “mad scientist” without a clear direction, whose project would probably fail sooner or later. This started to feel more and more like projection on Kevin’s part, as Joe managed to secure more and more rounds of funding for this thing I felt I couldn’t keep from moving in the wrong direction. Bearing some sense of responsibility and honor, I expressed my intent to “go down with the ship” in private lunchtime rants with Josh.

---

I had a conversation about my growing mystery with Josh at work one day. I think it started when I wore my Red Hot Chili Peppers shirt, and Josh brought up the time we went to that concert. I started going on about how there was something different about me that involved Freemasonry, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers… and apparently Terry and Tommy are in on it? I didn’t mention the stuff with Heather; either because it slipped my mind, or because I didn’t want to explain to Josh who she was. I think it was the latter.

When I left work for the day, this fellow Bill who worked for us as a salesman stopped me near the front desk.

I overheard you talking with Josh this morning about the Freemasons. I know what your problem is!

Okay… I’m listening…

He made it clear that… whatever I thought was important… it wasn’t. CrystalSoft? Doesn’t matter. My career? Doesn’t matter. My so-called “life”? Completely irrelevant. This was the thing. “Do you like travelling?”, I remember him saying. “… Do you like going places? You don’t belong here…” If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he was shaking in his shoes a bit.

I don’t remember if Bill actually used the phrase “blackballed”; but I’ve come to associate it with this conversation, because it’s one of the few things I can confirm Freemasons actually do.

Bill suggested the problem had something to do with my appearance; or perhaps, my beliefs or lifestyle choices. “Do you have any political signs outside your house?”, he asked. I think he might’ve also asked if I had any enemies, or if there was anything controversial about me. I thought I was a pretty likable person, if not introverted and a bit hard to relate to.

I’m thinking there is one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb: I’m a pot-smoking kinkster. If Freemasonry is the sort of venture where I have to look “normal” or “restrained”, or refrain from “unacceptable lifestyle choices” that don’t hurt anybody… I don’t think it’s for me. I don’t care how cool it is. If my “lifestyle choices” are problematic, well… fuck you.

While Bill sounded as serious about this as anyone back then… I’m afraid I just didn’t crack the case. I started getting the impression that I might have the insurmountable task of winning a popularity contest; something I’ve never been particularly good at.

---

Josh and I had both grown frustrated working for Kevin, but Josh was more inclined to do something about it. He got a job at a startup that was making some sort of ill-fated pill dispenser, while I doubled-down on waiting out OrangeTrack and going down with the ship.

I remember August 2015 being a big month. CrystalSoft changed hands from DataCorp to ConnectIt, one of the better cellular module manufacturers.

I lost my dealer from college, and had no other way to score weed. I drank a little more to take the edge off during this time, but not like drinking-drinking. It’s really never been my vice, and the equivalent of two or three beers after work would have me forgetting about the whole pot thing.

Shortly after that, the acquisition happened and there was notice that we’d be drug tested. That never happened, though. What a month.

So it’s September 2015, and I’m now working out of the ConnectIt office in Morrisville. It felt like I could’ve been done with OrangeTrack a long time ago if I didn’t have to make it work with CrystalCom. Josh has come and gone, I don’t really want to keep working for Kevin, and morale was at an all-time low. My new commute into Morrisville was considerably elongated, but it still wasn’t terrible all things considered. The office was a bit more formal and mostly sales folks, and I felt compelled to dress a bit nicer. The bathrooms kinda sucked, which was a bit of a sticking point because I was picky about bathrooms even back then.

In an ironic twist of events, Joe switched his cellular module from ConnectIt to Data Blocks just as we moved into the new office. We had the dev kit for the new module sent to somebody’s home address out of fear Data Blocks would put the kibosh on us. This was a theoretically minor change given we already had CrystalConnect drivers for Data Blocks; but we ended up having some weird problems that were ultimately traced to our test units having some flaky prototype version of the module on it. There was a lot of tense finger-pointing as Joe and I worked to figure out what was wrong with the new boards, and it probably took close to a month for me to definitively prove that the new Data Blocks modules were locking up without our software stack being involved at all.

Though we worked out of the Morrisville office, we were absorbed into this division that actually operates out of Ft. Lauderdale. We were flown down there for a week, and it seemed they’d really like us to think about moving down there eventually if we wanted to stay with the company; no pressure or anything. I’d probably be more enthusiastic about that now; I really felt like I had a life for myself in the Triangle back then, but now I feel I could stand to meet different people and see more of the world.

By now, I wasn’t taking the idea of working for ConnectIt long-term all that seriously; despite the fact that they didn’t seem like a bad company to work for or anything. I was kinda just sick of Kevin and CrystalCom.

Play (2013-2015)

Erika and I stopped doing things right around the time I graduated. The reasons were multi-faceted; Erika wanted something more serious than I did, with a former roommate and fellow kinkster named Jason. Jason wanted something more monogamous, and didn’t really feel comfortable with Erika and I sceneing in even a non-sexual capacity. I respected that; and honestly needed to find something more serious in the long term anyway.

It wasn’t too long after I graduated, when I found myself once again at the weekly slosh. Most of them will never be written about; but, this one is different.

I don’t recall how, exactly, but somehow we got to talking about UFOs. And it turned out, much of the table “knew the truth about UFOs”. Myself and a few others had no idea what the fuck was going on, and one person seemed to just be into “UFO conspiracies”. But, most of the table seemed to know something I didn’t. Like, they seemed serious; and they didn’t appear to be in a cult.

I mean; I doubt this really happened now. But, I’m leaving all the weird Slaughterhouse-Five shit…

After doing a double take and asking myself “Really? UFOs?”, I spoke up. “Wait, does somebody think they know ‘the truth about UFOs’ or something?” And, Maureen of all people answered my question. I’m obviously paraphrasing because my memory isn’t that good.

Yeah, lots of people know it. It’s really not that big of a deal. It’s actually kind of a big joke.

So I’m like citation needed; and Maureen asks what everyone believes in, and if anyone “works for the government”. Nobody within earshot seemed to be religious. I’m thinking, that’s probably not a watertight strategy, but go on…

Maureen then says “the thing”.

So, it’s just reincarnation.

I had a huge lightbulb moment.

Ooooohhhhh. Like Heather. She never said anything about UFOs…

Now I’m thinking, shit man. What does Heather have to do with UFOs? Does she get abducted by them? Does she fly them? Does she get to meet space aliens? I guess that’s kind of a given, right? I didn’t think it was like that. I thought she just remembered a past life on another planet or something. Dude.

Of course, I wanted more information; and like all the sketchy fucks who came before, she had little to give. I came away with a few more bullet points.

• Yes, they get to meet space aliens. I think she said that mostly happens “out west” or some shit.
• They’re just different. She made it sound like some people were more open about it than others, but it was generally a private affair.
• You kind of just have to… learn about this stuff from one of the different people, I guess?
• She made the Freemasons sound almost like a joke; like “reincarnation” was Freemasonry’s big secret. She said there are children who have the equivalent knowledge of a “33^rd degree Freemason”.
• At one point, someone else at the table told Maureen, in a friendly yet somewhat aggressive tone, that she needed to know “how she knew that”. Maureen responded that she had a friend named something-or-other… who was also from Vega I think? This appeared to satisfy the woman’s query.
• The government doesn’t know much about it; or maybe they do, but they lack any real control over the phenomenon. She made it sound like maintaining the “appearance of control” to the general public was the government’s main concern.
• I think she said something to the effect of the government pulling some kind of “stunt” in the future regarding the UFO phenomenon; but that it would all be bullshit, and we shouldn’t trust the mainstream government narrative.

I felt… confusingly behind in this conversation. Like I was the one country bumpkin at this table who didn’t already know “the truth about UFOs”. Like, y’all. I grew up in Bladen County. I went to Bladen Lakes Primary School. I figured maybe it’s common knowledge among folks who grew up in the city, with secular parents and whatnot.

At the same time, I felt like I had learned something a bit exclusive. Most of my peers from Bladen County probably still go to church unironically; Maureen may not’ve said “the thing” at all if one of them had been at the table and spoken up.

I went home that night, once again unsure what to do with all this new information. I always figured that if there was something different about me, folks better start explaining it. All I ever get is this dismissive advice to “follow my path” and “seek hidden truths” and “explore mysticism” and shit.

I actually remember this subject coming up a couple more times with this group.

#TODOFinish maybe; it doesn’t really matter though.

---

Not too long after I graduated, I was invited to Maureen and Isaac’s birthday party. Their birthdays are a few weeks apart, and so they had a combined party at Maureen’s house in Ben.

The parking situation was messy. It’s been too long for me to remember why I couldn’t find anywhere to park on the side of the road in bum-fuck Ben; but anyway, I ended up double-parking in the driveway with about a half dozen other people. Lots of people were spending the night; I wasn’t planning to, but my car got blocked in by someone, and I only put a small amount of effort into finding out who before deciding that “When in Rome…” adage isn’t terrible life advice.

I remember looking at my phone that evening and seeing that I didn’t have any signal; but I didn’t think much of it. It was the weekend.

We all woke up the next morning and were slow to get around. Pancakes were made. A lot of people took showers. I kept looking outside every once in a while, and I was still blocked in. It was solidly mid-afternoon before I left.

So, I’m a little bit of an introvert. I like going to small parties, but then I like going back home and spending the rest of the weekend recovering. We were already well into Sunday afternoon, and it would be almost dinner time before I got back.

At the same time, I don’t get out much; so I do like to seize the moment, at least when it’s convenient for me. I don’t generally have any regrets about seizing this particular moment, though the next part does get a little messy.

I unlock the door to my 2001 Ford Mustang. I plug my… I don’t know, Samsung Galaxy S4²⁵ into my cassette deck adapter, I put on some music and I take off.

Her house wasn’t very far from I-40. It was off a major road, and I didn’t need the GPS to get back. I was probably about a mile from the exit, when I heard my text message ringtone go off. I briefly thought to myself “Who’s texting me at this hour?!” before realizing “Oh, I just regained cell service. That’s just my mom texting me goodnight like she does.”

Another ding went off. I thought “Huh. I’ll look at it when I get back”.

My phone started blowing up. Fuck.

About a half mile from the exit, I pulled off onto a dirt road in a panic. What the fuck happened while I was away?!

I’ll tell you what happened while I was away. Sometimes Susan would decide to call me, usually on Saturday nights, to catch up; and I suppose, to see that I was alright. This didn’t happen every Saturday night; so it’s not like I viewed it as some obligation I needed to block off on my weekend schedule.

You probably see where this is going. Remember what I said earlier about Susan?

Susan is very high-strung. She’s emotionally volatile, she panics, she’s anxious, she worries about everything. She has good days and bad days. Some months it could feel like mostly bad days.

She basically just assumed the worst, based on the fact that my phone went straight to voicemail after she tried to call me on Saturday night, and I didn’t have signal again until the middle of Sunday afternoon.

She talked to Josh. So, she knows I was alive when I left work on Friday. That means…

… Something terrible must’ve happened to me in the last 24–36 hours!

I got a text message or three from damn near everyone my mom knew to get a hold of; as if they’d get a response if they sent more of them or something. My mother had driven up to Raleigh earlier that day to look for me, and left a note on my door. I had been missing for less than 24 hours, on a weekend.

My mother’s justification for panic, in this and most similar situations, is that this never happens. When a routine gets ingrained in her mind that involves a-widdle Efan; for example, that she calls me sporadically on Saturday nights when she doesn’t have anything going on in her life, that routine now can’t be disrupted, or else she’ll flip the fuck out like Rainman if you give him underpants that aren’t from the K-Mart in Cincinnati, Ohio.

I could tell this was going to be a problem early on in college, and thus started “weaning her off”. I didn’t answer the phone right away, even if I could; because if I honest-to-goodness can’t or shouldn’t for some reason, this woman will freak the fuck out.

Weaning is exhausting, though. Sometimes you just want to get it over with before you forget, but you have got to get this woman used to you not being around right away. Or else… this shit will happen. I guess I got complacent and answered my phone right away on Saturday night too many times in a row.

I called my mother in a panic and explained that I was okay. I wasn’t immediately forthcoming about where I’d been, because I really didn’t want to explain I’d been hanging out with kinksters. I needed to spend a couple of minutes calming down to understand that there was no need to tell anyone they were kinksters.

I have to admit though; at that moment, it must’ve felt like my mommy “caught me tying myself up” again.

When I got back in Raleigh, my mother was loaded with fears about where I’d been. Among them? That I left the country to get a sex change operation and didn’t tell anybody.

---

Toward the middle of the decade, I had grown frustrated by the apparent lack of people to scene with. After getting off to a strong start in college, things seemed to stagnate for me after I graduated. I was seeing the same people at the same events, and I didn’t get the impression any of them wanted to top me. To be fair, I rarely asked; but I guess, I want to be wanted, or something? Like, I want someone to have their way with me enthusiastically because they chose to, not because they were bored and I asked nicely. Does that make sense?

This sort of gets at a general dichotomy I had begun to notice between what could be called masculine and feminine submissiveness. Male submissiveness is based around service and humiliation; female submissiveness more on objectification and discipline. I began to realize part of my problem is that I wanted the latter, not the former.

But, the bigger problem was that I didn’t really even know who to ask. There were maybe a couple prominent dommes with pretty full dance cards. I was starting to think about guys more, but that seemed even harder than finding a domme; although maybe I was counting myself out because I didn’t think anyone would want to play with me over some cute little rope bunny, and I rarely took it upon myself to ask as guys are so often expected to do.

When I first got into kink, I saw “top” and “bottom” as abstractions of the traditional male and female sexual roles. But, I don’t think that’s accurate anymore. There’s masculine toppiness and feminine toppiness. Masculine submissiveness and feminine submissiveness. In a four quadrant grid, like the political compass or something. Most people don’t have the problem of being the wrong gender in the four quadrant grid, unless they’re fucking transsexual or some shit.

As I grew more frustrated, it didn’t so much matter that I wanted the top to make the first move, because there didn’t seem to really even be much of a reserve of queer male tops and straight female tops to awkwardly try and chat up to see if they’ll top me.

My first thought is that I needed to find a much larger scene. I planned to start driving to Atlanta and DC on the weekends to explore the respective cities’ kink scenes. This was actually part of the reason I ended up going with GPS and blind spot monitoring on my then-new car.

I never actually did this. Maybe it’s because I’m bad at following through on things. Maybe it’s because I’m a lazy pothead. A big part of it is that I started thinking about the numbers. These cities had more people, sure; but their populations weren’t so much larger as to turn a thimble into a kiddie pool; much less a full adult-sized dating pool.

I felt I had a very different problem to solve if I ever wanted to find a sexual partner; whereas normal people needed to solve the “fish in the sea” problem, I needed to solve the “needle in a haystack” problem.

I observed that all extant online dating platforms seemed to be geared toward the former problem, and not the latter.

It was around this time when I grew obsessed with the problem of rape. In particular, I was deeply bothered by the fact that there exists both rape and lonely bottoms and submissives. To me, the act of rape felt, not only heinous, but also illogical. I began to wonder how many men become rapists, simply because they believe no consensual outlet exists for their sexuality. I started hypothesizing that I could put a dent in the rape epidemic and get myself a date, if I could only match up the pots with the lids.

The year before the breakdown (2016)

Toward the end of my tenure at CrystalSoft/ConnectIt, there were a lot of things on my mind.

• I was 25 years old. I could maybe get myself tied up and beaten with stuff, but I felt like I was completely stuck with regard to my actual sex life.
• I was working on this absolutely hopeless project. I could tell this thing was never going to work right unless I could rewrite it as a custom application on top of our software stack, and pay off tech debt incurred from writing shit like the flash filesystem; things Kevin would never let me do. It felt like I was on a sort of death march, where I either needed to quit or wait for the project to fail, and the project wasn’t failing quickly enough. Plus, I began feeling guilty that this outside customer of ours kept pouring money into something I didn’t really believe in.
• I was burnt. Out.
• I wanted to try online dating, but a cursory look made everything seem shitty and gender-y and vanilla.

Really, my core problem was that I wanted to get fucked. Or maybe just find a date, but I’d grown to see myself at not a marriage and family kind of person; so I’d written off the normal dating pathway as an option for me. I needed to commit to being either a twink or a woman for something to happen, and I’d been too chicken shit to do either.

---

My death march at work had left me demoralized to the point that I was determined to quit my job sooner rather than later.

Among other systemic problems were that CrystalCom was a bad fit for the OrangeTrack project, and even had a number of design flaws for their use case. Whereas CrystalOS and CrystalConnect would’ve been useful on their own, having to do everything through CrystalCom felt like building a Rube Goldberg machine. It was slow and inflexible, and the AT and binary commands that had to be generically implemented for each new feature were incredibly tedious to work with. While the intent was for Joe to write his own CrystalCom setup script that he could tweak, in practice I had to write the backend feature and figure out the CrystalCom script that would use it in a way that hopefully suited Joe’s needs.

There was an additional problem with the “stall flag”, a sort of afterthought with CrystalCom’s endpoint system. A limitation was that it was really designed as an abstraction for stream-like transports, like files or TCP sockets. In an effort to support frame-like transports like UDP or SMS messaging, endpoints were given this stall flag, which could work like a sort of “end of file” signal. When an endpoint has its stall flag set, it can’t accept any more data until it’s receive buffer is empty.

The problem with the stall flag, is that there’s no real flow control, so it only works reliably if the frames are being sent slowly enough for the endpoint to handle them. It turned out OrangeTrack was the first customer to actually use UDP in CrystalCom, and the fact the endpoint system couldn’t actually queue up multiple UDP packets in either the RX or TX direction really sucked. There were a lot of server communication problems that ultimately boiled down to this, and all we could do is hack around it. It’s been a long time, but I think it was fair to say UDP was basically broken (or at least crippled) in CrystalCom.

One of my last straws, was when the time came to port my little filesystem onto the OrangeTrack SPI flash. Though it sounded like a fun project back in 2013, by now the flash fileystem scared the shit out of me. I just didn’t have the time to work on tech debt related to it, and frankly I shouldn’t have made it at all.

Once we’d written the SPI and I2C subsystems, this seemed easy enough. And, it was. Writing the driver for it may’ve even been relaxing.

After testing my new driver and briefly scratching my head when it seemed to not work at first, I found that it did, in fact, work just perfectly.

The problem, was just that this filesystem was impossibly slow over SPI. The fact that reading a file involved traversing a linked list of all the file’s stale metadata since the last garbage collection made the filesystem surprisingly read-intensive. This was not noticeable with the STM32’s internal flash memory, but introduced a deal-breaking amount of latency when the same operations had to be done over a comparatively slow serial bus.

What’s frustrating about this, is that early on Steve and I wanted to spend an extra month or more really testing this thing; and, Steve’s suggestion that we test it with an external SPI flash was shot down by Kevin, who argued that we didn’t have time for me to write “throwaway code” before having SPI and I2C as part of CrystalOS and/or CrystalCom.

Adding to the frustration was that Kevin didn’t really have a clear picture of how all these layers were supposed to fit together in the end. He fed the project to me as a simple series of steps, but by now I felt like I was assembling a piece of Ikea furniture with really bad instructions. For example, Steve had already made a CrystalOS registry subsystem for storing small bits of non-volatile data. The API for it was designed to make it easy to write a CrystalOS registry driver directly for something like a SPI flash with a lot of tiny erase blocks.

However, Kevin wanted to generalize everything to the extreme, pushing me to make this highly generalized filesystem that would work for large files, lots of files, and large block sizes. This turned out to be misguided at least; we didn’t (and really, couldn’t) use my filesystem for firmware updates, which was Kevin’s main reason for us needing to support large file sizes. The FOTA update bits are really low level, and require the firmware image to be in some contiguous space in memory. I ultimately reserved a couple blocks of the STM32’s internal flash for this.

So, instead of writing a simple little “throwaway code” registry driver for OrangeTrack’s SPI flash, Kevin had me write this overly-complicated thing we didn’t need, and it didn’t really even work right. I then had to write a CrystalOS registry driver for my flash filesystem, which did the job but just felt awkward. I’m pretty sure Steve and I both would’ve made our respective APIs a bit different if we knew they were supposed to glue together. But really, I think a simple driver for Steve’s registry could’ve been written directly for Joe’s SPI flash in a few days.

---

My earlier resolve to “go down with the ship” had given way to something else. I was nauseated that Joe kept securing more and more rounds of funding for this project I knew was being done the wrong way, and I felt entirely powerless to do anything about it. I was burnt out, and I needed to do something very different.

I sent out some job applications, but I didn’t really get anywhere before giving myself an ultimatum.

My mother wanted us to go along with my high school English teacher’s trip to Europe; which she assured me would be totally normal. I went my senior year without Susan. Anyway, I agreed to go, and I was not taking off work for it. I was just planning not to have work by then, one way or another.

I’ve never actually told anyone I quit my job working for Kevin because I wanted to make a dating app that would work for somebody like me and then proceed to use it. I’ve sometimes made oblique references to this, telling people I wanted to “focus on side projects” or something more entrepreneurial.

To be honest, I just didn’t know where else to go with what I was. I didn’t think I was a woman; and BDSM is fun, but I was obviously still missing something.

I already talked about wanting to drive to Atlanta and DC on the weekends in search of a bigger kink scene. I just wasn’t meeting new people as quickly as I had when Erika and I were doing stuff in college. Yeah, I’m shy and socially awkward; but ignoring that, I didn’t even really know who to be shy and socially awkward toward. I guess I always felt like a bit of an “acquired taste” with the whole quasi-transgender subby boy thing going on, and it seemed like it would be infinitely indispensable to simply have a mere list of gay male tops and straight female tops who were looking for, well… that.

I did the math in my head, and I figured sure, there are more people in Atlanta and DC. But the thing is, there aren’t that many more people. I could maybe expect the BDSM community to be around 3–4 times the size of the combined Research Triangle-Piedmont Triad area. But, it seemed like that would only increase my prospects from zero to maybe a half dozen or less. I started to feel like there was a deeper problem to solve, and I couldn’t help but feel like there are others like me out there somewhere.

I saw that people like me have a very different dating problem from normal folks. Whereas ordinary people need to solve the “fish in the sea” problem, I needed to solve the “needle in a haystack” problem. I concluded that this was a gap left by seemingly all extant dating sites; and that I would have to bridge this gap if I ever wanted to find someone I was compatible with.

In figuring out how to approach this thing, my biggest problem seemed to be my energy level. After writing code for Kevin all day, it was usually the last thing I wanted to do once I got home. And if I was going to do that, I’d probably feel guilty for not just working on the insurmountable tech debt I’d accrued at my job. I eventually decided that I wanted to do anything other than software development as my day job, with the hope that I would have more energy and motivation for side projects during my off hours. I just wasn’t happy, and I didn’t think anybody would ever notice my talent or pay me what I was worth working for somebody like Kevin.

An obvious pivot in my mind was to get Cisco certs and be a network engineer. I thought about getting a CCNA (and, I have no doubt that I could do this), but this seemed a little too time-consuming for the timescale at which I now wanted to escape this job. I was going off to Europe for like two weeks in March, and I did not tell Kevin about this.

I wasn’t getting anywhere with job applications; probably because I was getting filtered out for being over-qualified for a lot of IT work. Realizing this, I decided to make a “dumbed-down” resume that downplayed my software development experience.

Aiding this effort, I decided to get one CompTIA certification every weekend for the next few weeks; getting my A+/Network+/Security+ all in the same month with zero studying. I figured I might go back for the CCNA eventually; but I could tell I’d need to do at least a little studying for that one given my lack of experience with IOS.

I gave Kevin two weeks notice at some point in February, with 20k in savings and no solid prospects.

I was a finalist for a job working for a company off Duke St. that did multimedia installations, but they wound up going with the other guy. I think the tie-breaker question was

How afraid of heights are you?

They did work for Duke Chapel, and this sometimes involved going really high up on ladders and scissor lifts and shit. I was like “eh… maybe a 20-foot ladder or something…”.

In between quitting my job and going off to Europe, I had an interview with a small IT company out of Chapel Hill called Synapse IT. It was a simple job, but I really liked the atmosphere. I walked into their warmly-lit office and met the soft-spoken husband and wife team that manages the business, along with their lead tech Justin. I thought to myself

This is it.

We really seemed to like each other, and I came away feeling like I had a pretty good chance at getting the job.

The trip to Europe was… eh. I came away telling myself that I never wanted to spend ten consecutive days with Susan again. I’m not really a fan of tour groups in general, and going back with this younger high school class I didn’t really have any connection to just felt a little weird. I wished I had just saved my money.

I got a formal job offer from Synapse IT while I was in Europe; however, I didn’t tell Susan just yet. She didn’t know I even quit my job, and I just didn’t want to deal with… her. She quickly found out through Josh and was all like “WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME???”

I took a 30k/year pay cut to run away to Chapel Hill and fix computers; and I never regretted a moment of it.

I remember they wanted me to shadow Justin on a Friday for a little bit, which I think happened shortly after I got back. Friday morning was when they would go over all their outstanding issues, and they tried to keep the rest of the day open to tie up loose ends from earlier in the week. I went around town with Justin, checking on servers and I think replacing a UPS battery and a mini-switch along the way. And it was

Sooo chill. Like, this shit is relaxing to me, dude. I mean, that’s what it was always about for me. Love what you do and you’ll never work a day in your life, or whatever. I’m no ladder climber. I’m actually kind of a slacker, and I don’t really like doing homework. I dick around with this stuff for fun, and I don’t want my computer-related job to stress me out.

---

Around the spring of 2016, I was invited to a party at Erika and Jason’s apartment in Knightdale. Heather was there. I hadn’t really seen her much the last couple of years, since Erika and I stopped doing things.

We started playing Rockband at one point in the evening. They had the whole set with the drums and shit, so that was cool.

At one point, some dude I didn’t know played Can’t Stop by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Heather started snickering about it with me.

I love knowing what this song’s actually about…

(beat)

Wait; what do you mean?

Well, you know where I’m from, right?

I thought to myself “uhh, like Ohio or something?…” before my life started flashing before my eyes.

Ooooohhhhh. The thing. Heather’s from Vega, or Lyra or wherever.

Shit. What was that thing with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the Freemasons, and the, uh…

You figure out where you’re from yet?

Well, I figured out where Anthony Kiedis is from… I guess?

Oh… look, I’m not…

She told me I was going to be cool in the future, but I wasn’t ready yet.

Then, I’ll be damned if she didn’t say she had a vision of us all going to a concert in a few years; which I presumed to be a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert. My memory isn’t perfect. “Now you’re starting to sound like that crazy old man Tommy Warren!”, I said.

I’m pretty sure I asked, like always, if there was anything I should actually be doing. And, I’m pretty sure I got the same sort of dismissive “follow your path, you’ll get there someday” advice that I always get from these sketchy fucking people.

---

In the latter half of 2016, and shortly after moving to Chapel Hill to shorten my lengthy commute from highway 86 to Gorman St, I experienced what might’ve been a minor version of what started happening to me a few years ago.

After losing my dealer back in August 2015, I managed to find weed for the last nine months of the year. I couldn’t say if this is related, but I suppose I ought to mention it.

Aliens. I don’t know what got into me; but I had this overpowering sensation, for maybe several months, that space aliens (for lack of a better word) were involved in my life. And, they wanted to tell me… nothing, really. Except that they existed, they were around, and they thought I should know that.

I had to get all four of my impacted wisdom teeth extracted in my mid-twenties some time before the ConnectIt acquisition; and while high on Percocet and flipping through cable television channels,²⁶ I managed to find Ancient Aliens; a show I tended to avoid, out of some combination of my love for hard science, and perhaps some overall cringe factor. The mildly-intoxicated state I was in led to me making slightly different decisions, as I belly-laughed at the announcer who incredulously posed the pre-commercial break question “Could the moon… be hollow?!”

This began the start of a months-long tradition, where I would go out of my way to watch new and old episodes of Ancient Aliens in the most ironic way possible, in search of that same feeling I had the first time; usually while under the influence of cannabis or alcohol.

For the more skeptical-minded person who might want for a more plausible explanation for my late-2016 experiences, I suppose I could float the combination of Ancient Aliens and the end of a nine-month-long cannabis dry spell as one possibility.

It may’ve started when an ostensible Ancient Aliens fact actually managed to catch my attention enough, that I now needed to look something up on my phone independently. I also had that weird experience with Heather a month or two before this happened to me.

It’s been a while, but I didn’t really get into weird shit on the internet or anything; except for maybe that very early stage where something piqued my interest. And, I didn’t have this feeling like I was special, or in danger, or like anything big was about to happen on planet Earth. Again; it just felt like aliens were involved in my life at a distance, they were watching me, they were around in the craziest of places when you’d least expect it… and they just want me to know that they’re there.

I looked up at the night sky a lot, but I never saw anything. I remember wondering if some of the strangers I encountered in my day-to-day life might know more, or even be aliens themselves. I only remember it spooking me out a little at first, really.

This phase ended sometime around late December; after which I kind of just assumed I maybe went a little nuts and decided to bury the whole thing. I coincidentally stopped using cannabis again around the same time; and didn’t start smoking heavily again until late 2020.

Although I remember that weird exchange with Heather earlier in the year now, I don’t think I even thought about her during this weird “alien whisperer” phase later in 2016.

---

I quickly assimilated at my new job, and really liked it despite the lower pay. There were a lot of good things about the job, really. I drove around town a lot, and I think the changes in scenery really helped my brain context switch. I like how IT work is more episodic and chunked smaller; although I like software development, I feel like I often get stuck with large multistep projects that take weeks or months to complete. I liked how I could keep checking off the list with IT work; and I always went home feeling like I made progress and earned my pay. That often wasn’t the case with software development, where I’d sometimes go home feeling like I accomplished nothing that day and basically committed wage theft.

I’m probably just being hard on myself, though. Programming can be like that sometimes.

I quickly learned through our Friday meetings that Synapse did IT work for Mobile Development. I actually had to go to their website, because I figured it’s a generic-sounding enough name that there might be two companies called “Mobile Development”, but… no, there’s only one MobileDev.

Mobile Development was, in a lot of ways, a direct competitor to CrystalSoft. I’d liken the relationship between the two companies as that of Black Mesa to Aperture Science. I immediately grew wary I’d be accused of corporate espionage, and told Justin I’d rather stay away from MobileDev if I can.

Despite them mostly being Justin’s customer, I did need to go to MobileDev on occasion; where I’d often find the engineers using Steve’s CrystalTerminal application, a quite-good replacement for the no-longer-extant Windows HyperTerminal.

#TODOI could write more about my time at Synapse IT, but it doesn’t matter right now.

Transition (2016-2019)

That escalated quickly (2017)

Q1

January was a crazy month for me.

I had wanted to curl up and die ever since trans issues exploded with Caitlyn Jenner coming out. Even at this point, I think I identified as “a little trans but not trans enough”; I knew something was different about me, and I was sort of in denial about how serious it was.

It seemed like nobody quite “got” what being trans actually was, and all I could see were these two sides talking past each other. The conservatives were getting off to cringe compilations of college students with unnatural hair colors saying there were “twelve genders”, and in response their adversaries accused them of being insensitive ignorant bigots like always; often implicitly taking the side of the aforementioned blue-haired college SJW without modification.

It reminded me so much of the sensationalization of my own coming out in high school. There’s this sort of incredulity from a certain percentage of folks who find out. They really want to pick you apart; and you really don’t want to talk about how you used to masturbate in mom’s lingerie. People don’t treat you the same anymore, whether you tell them everything or pull back like I did. There’s a lot of conflation of terms with intersex people, “hermaphrodites”, drag queens and crossdressers… it was like they didn’t understand the sort of stuff I started to grasp within the first couple weeks of figuring out what I was. And that’s understandable, because it’s a niche subject; but, now you have to take on the somewhat condescending role of educating your friends about this new “transsexual” thing, just like when you have to educate them about ham radios, or Linux, or “spoofing the mac”, or any of your other special snowflakey bullshit. Nobody seemed to be listening to people like me, or what I saw as the classic transsexual advocates of the early 2000s. There was suddenly all this side-talk about what it is we really are, as if we weren’t in the room. And, nobody seemed to know the difference between a transsexual and a transvestite and a transgender person anymore. There’s this exhausting feeling of realizing neither liberals nor conservatives will ever understand you; but at least liberals are nice to you. Your life turns into a sort of joke, and a collection of quips and soundbites. It’s a dehumanizing experience.

So, I watch this tired old pattern unfold in the mid 2010s, where the two behemoths battle each other for control over society, while nobody seems to understand the small group of people who the fighting’s really about.

I was growing increasingly anxious at the election of Donald Trump. My earlier belief that he had adopted his present persona as a publicity stunt was yielding to the understanding that he seemed to be an honest to goodness modern day demagogue, with sketchy as fuck business dealings all over the place. It seemed his rise to power was fueled by anger about how there are now “12 genders” and you can “identify as” anything, and liberals want to take away your free speech and force you to use “pronouns”; when nobody on Antijen ever talked about there being more than two genders, and it’s a complete misunderstanding of the issue to think this is about pronouns or “identifying as” anything. It never even occurred to me that I could be “psychologically a girl inside” before I found the internet, and I was surprised at how warm and fuzzy being referred to as a woman by strangers made me feel.

In other words; the Republican complains about the blue-haired SJW who yells at the shop clerk for “assuming zer’s gender”; the Democrat scolds the Republican for being insensitive and the shop owner for not offering diversity training; and the transsexual just has a birth defect that makes them really like taking estrogen and wearing women’s clothing, and kind of just wants to be left alone. The “blue-haired SJW” is nothing more than a red (or perhaps, blue) herring; who would appear to be more properly described as a “product of the 21^st century”, and who would seem to lack the underlying medical condition shared by the trans men and women who comprised Aunty’s mailing list in decades past.

---

Perhaps the biggest upheaval of the 2010s was this sort of culture war between two factions of the transgender community.

One side was accused of harboring “transtrenders” who wore their gender identity as a fashion statement. They were branded by detractors as thinking themselves “too cute to be cis”; akin to the “college lesbian” trope of decades past.

The accusation levied against the other was that of gatekeeping; a sort of age-old dirty word in the transsexual community, traditionally used to refer to people like that endo who expects you not to show up to your appointment wearing jeans. They lobbed insults like “truescum” back at those who would accuse them of being “too cute” for their gender.

It reminded me of how I felt when Jacob said he met a pansexual who thinks there are twelve genders. Or, when I went to the last Debauchery in 2015 and there were suddenly a suspicious number of AFAB people with aggressive pronouns. I… kind of did think some of them were too cute to be cis. They certainly didn’t have the same “childhood crossdressing syndrome” I had growing up.

I really felt like everyone on both sides of the aisle was losing their goddamn minds, and lacked some sort of perspective I alone seemed to possess. For about a month, I fancied myself a blogger on a quixotic mission to restore sanity to the confused masses, as the seemingly lone tranny who actually remembers what the pre-2010 transgender community was like.

I started writing a couple of things, but I didn’t get far before I decided I needed to take a step back and absorb this “second wave” transgender community which I’d been mostly out of the loop on; particularly as I got the impression I was on the wrong side of history.

It was during this culture war, when the terminology shift between the words “transsexual” and “transgender” occurred. Transsexual became increasingly associated with the gatekeepy, true-scummy, “transmedicalist” position; though the archaic, non-politically charged meaning of the term hasn’t fallen entirely out of use as of 2024.

There’s an old joke in the trans community. I don’t know how old it is, but it’s certainly from well before my time.

Q: What’s the difference between a transvestite and a transsexual?

A: Two years.

A couple different interpretations could variously be ascribed to this quip.

• That it takes about two years for hormones to really start working; and to make it through the gatekeeping of the traditional “real life test”.
• That transvestism is really just a slippery slope to doing it 24/7; that, perhaps, a large number of “transvestites” just haven’t come to terms with how much they really want to be women yet.

The second interpretation always hinted that the hierarchy of the old guard “transgender umbrella” might be kind of bullshit; even when it did seem like there could be different types of us sometimes.

I was beginning to think this neo-transgender community might be the ultimate embodiment of the cynical reality conveyed by this joke; that perhaps, the only difference between the transsexual community and the transgender community was a couple decades. People who take hormones, get SRS and live as the “opposite sex” have often simply identified as “transgender” after the year 2015; avoiding the negative stigma both of being a “something-sexual” to laypeople, and of being gatekeepy truescum to folks in the community who might view “transsexual” as a sort of dog whistle.

The pinnacle of this culture war may’ve been when renowned trans man and baby boomer Buck Angel declared himself to be “transsexual, not transgender” on social media; sparking outrage from millennials and gen Z, who accused him of crimes ranging from transmedicalism to enbyphobia. At the time, I thought this was a problem of mutual incomprehension on the part of both sides. Now that I’m older, I’d like to think he knew what he was doing.

---

On Sunday, January 29^th, 2017, I cracked. I knew I had to do it. In a daze, I drove an aimless loop around Durham. I had reached… that point. I always wondered if I ever would. I always wondered if I would be a pot smoking subby boy forever. Most people have a plan for what their future will look like. I didn’t know. I couldn’t see anything there for a while.

The next couple weeks were a blur. I’d come home straight from work, sit in bed with my laptop, a writing surface and a ream of printer paper, and think there until I fell asleep. I was lost in a sort of web of ideas, writing down and following up on anything I could think of. I tried to consider everything. I played my own devil’s advocate. I later hole-punched the pages into a document I call “the Purple Book”.

I always wanted to do it, really; but, I just didn’t think I could stomach the gatekeeping and the hostility. My high school experience was bad enough. The idea of being held to some regimen where I couldn’t get meds without continuing an RLE where I very much didn’t pass was terrifying when I was younger; but if I could just take estrogen for shits and giggles and see how things go from there…

It was just too easy not to. You could just… get HRT on an informed consent basis now. And what was I, waiting to move to a more liberal city? I had already just moved to Chapel Hill. I wasn’t planning to get any younger or move to San Francisco, so this was kinda it.

By some point in March, I knew for sure that I wanted to call a doctor. I was too chicken shit for like a couple of weeks, but then I did it.

Orange health, maybe? They were pretty booked up. I was referred to Triangle Comprehensive Care, who was able to get me an appointment with Dr. Meier in three weeks.

Somewhere in the midst of this… epiphany… I kinda just started taking my spiro again. I still had it from high school. It expired in like 2010 or something, but I figured it was still good. I actually have one pill left or so, after using it multiple times as an emergency reserve over the years.

Q2

I went to my first appointment with Dr. Meier on Thursday, April 13^th. After briefly debating it, I decided to be completely honest about my medical history; just started taking DIY spiro again, history of cannabis use but recently quit and am now back on the path to transitioning like when I was younger. I was surprised to get a prescription the same day, but the fact that I was DIY probably greased the wheels a bit.

I booked an appointment for cryopreservation the same day. I had a hard time without being able to bring my Hitachi;²⁷ but I made it work… eventually. I stuffed a tube sock in my pocket so I at least wouldn’t have to “grip it”.

I was prescribed patches, I think out of Dr. Meier’s concern over my family history of heart disease. I put my first one on that night.

I told her I briefly took Zoloft in middle school and was diagnosed with “depression”, and she really wanted me to be in therapy because of that. I eventually started seeing a woman named Vickie Carter for counselling after folks kept badgering me about it. I do feel a little dumb for even bringing it up, because I know it was a bullshit diagnosis.

Various external forces were encouraging me to seek some sense of community and to create a support network or what the fuck ever, and so I started looking into groups at the local LGBT centers.

I think the first one I went to was TT, or the Trans Talk group. When I first arrived there was one other trans woman waiting at the table, occupying herself with a book of crosswords or Sudoku or something. I started to wonder if it would just be the two of us awkwardly sitting there, when a handful of other people trickled in.

I think Lauren wasn’t able to make it this time, but there were a couple faces that would become familiar.

Lauren

The usual group leader. An early transitioner, disowned by her parents and previously homeless, OG, cis-passing, truetrans as fuck (not that I’m gatekeeping anyone).

Samantha

A software developer who was a couple of years older than me and just getting started. She had already gotten laser and was about to go full-time, despite us having both just started HRT. We went on to become good friends. She often ran the group when Lauren couldn’t make it, and eventually took over once Lauren stepped down.

Michelle

The first person I met there. Quiet and didn’t talk much; I never got to know her very well.

Julie

An older transitioner but really cool. It seemed like she had one rough family situation after another in a prior life; she was also working as a developer or DBA or something.

There were two other people there who were non-binary; an AFAB genderfluid person, and an AMAB they/them. Neither of them were pursuing medical transition, save for the latter person getting hair removal on their face.

I never got to know the two enbies very well; they split off a separate non-binary group later that year.

Another group I started going to was facilitated by a transmasculine fellow named Rory. There were a few marked differences between Rory’s group and TT.

• Rory’s group was significantly larger at first.
• The demographics of Rory’s were more varied between 18-50+; whereas TT was skewed mostly toward millennials, and later zoomers.
• Rory’s had a two-hour runtime, with heavier discussion and a circular seating pattern that made it feel a little like group therapy. TT only ran for sixty to ninety minutes, was usually less serious, and used a longtable seating layout that somehow made it feel different.
• TT also met earlier, which often led to the group getting food or drinks afterward. Rory’s group ran from 8-10 on Wednesdays, eliminating any possibility of the now-hazy eyed dozen or two of us putting on any sort of an after party.

There was briefly this third group called “trans_irl”, run by a trans woman named Regina. This lacked any formal discussion at all, and was just trans people going out on the town sporadically.

There are other groups in the area; but I won’t bother to talk about them, because I’ve never been.

Q3

There were a lot of reasons I was thinking about buying a house.

• You don’t accrue home equity every month as a renter.
• Landlords were often nosy. I had stopped using cannabis for now, but was annoyed by the lack of privacy often afforded to rental properties; particularly at the complex I was presently living in, who would send maintenance in with 1-2 days notice to change the furnace filter, or replace the smoke detector batteries.
• I was legitimately concerned at this point in my life by my future ability to “pass”, and how that might affect my ability to buy real property in the future.

I started taking the idea of getting a realtor more seriously as the year went on; and ultimately went on to buy a house.

#TODOThis doesn’t matter

---

I found myself unexpectedly in love with HRT at every turn. I shaved off my body hair, and it stopped growing in as thick. I smelled different, and my hair and skin was way less oily. It takes a while to grow breasts, but I was getting there.

The body hair. I couldn’t believe it. I was like, I’m never going to look that way again. I think I just let it get to my head when I was younger that “real men” didn’t shave their body hair, and it became part of my mask. Ugh.

I was surprised, maybe even a bit pleasantly, that my urge to look at porn evaporated after I started HRT. Don’t get me wrong; I was still into the exact same shit, and got off simply by fantasizing about it in my head. Based on my past experiences, I began to feel I’d unfairly characterized myself as a pervert when I was simply a young trans woman on testosterone. Any weird sex stuff surrounding women’s clothing had long since evaporated, and I felt immensely better.

Q4

#TODOProbably nothing important

The magic year (2018)

Q1

I closed on my house in late January or early February.

Around this time, Regina and Samantha started dating. This took me by surprise, as there had never been any crossover between the two respective groups. I think they met online or something.

#TODOIt doesn’t matter

Q2

In April, I left the house in something resembling girl mode for the first time. I went to Atomic Empire with a small group of us from the aforementioned group trans_irl; after which we went downtown for drinks, ending the night at Arcana. It felt good to finally have that out of the way.

This quickly became a habit. What started as one of my bigger fears soon became something I actually looked forward to doing after work, once it became obvious the vast majority of people don’t. Give. A fuck how you’re dressed in a modern American city.

---

I was in the car with a coworker one day after having come out at work, when he asked the most innocent question.

So, how are you planning to date after you transition?

I hadn’t really thought about this before. I never figured out how to date before I transitioned. My sexuality is pretty different from most guys, and I saw transition as something that could only help me in that regard. I think he was projecting normal male sexuality onto me; I figured this might be a common point of confusion.

Q3

I heard a group from the Triangle was driving up to the Philadelphia Trans Wellness Conference.²⁸ I had heard about it, and it was something that sounded cool to go to with other people someday.

The trip was headed up by Leslie, who I’d never met before; she has a difficult work schedule. Sarah Anderson was also instrumental in helping out; who I’d also never met because we were in different groups I suppose. She was actively involved with a different event, which I didn’t know about at the time because it was on Facebook and I am not.

The trip was a blast. We took two vans; Leslie’s minivan and a rental. We loaded most of our baggage into the minivan, with most folks riding in the other vehicle that looked like an unmarked church van. I volunteered to help drive, and took turns driving the minivan with another trans woman I’d never met. Maybe I’ll remember her name eventually.

After a day’s journey, we arrived at our AirBnB; a three-story loft in Philadelphia’s Gayborhood, about a fifteen-minute walk south of the convention center.

I made a lot of new friends. Sarah, Brittany, Stacey… I didn’t actually know any of the people on this trip, despite going to TT and Rory’s group regularly for the past year.

Stacey was an internet acquaintance of Samantha. Samantha messaged me, saying Stacey was at Philly and didn’t have anyone to hang out with. Our group sort of adopted her for much of the stay.

By the end of the conference, Brittany had developed a crush on Stacey, and they began a long-distance relationship with Stacey still living in Delaware.

One evening when we were back at our AirBnB playing cards,²⁹ some of us started talking about how we first figured out we were trans. Brittany’s story went something like this.

I was laying in bed one evening, when the thought occurred to me: I think I might be transgender. It was really late, but I texted my best friend. My friend called me right away, and she found an online quiz and started asking me questions from it.

She went on to re-analyze elements of her prior life: how much she enjoyed going to school in drag one day, her history of bisexuality and fabulousness… ultimately landing at the realization that she was trans, and should pursue medical transition.

I didn’t bother to scrutinize Brittany’s story. It wasn’t Q1 2017 anymore. I didn’t like all the infighting that resulted from the explosion of trans issues in the 2010s. All that mattered to me was that we were all here, now; taking hormones, getting surgeries… doing the thing. I really wanted to believe that it was just our moment in history; that the world was always full of people like me who really wanted to do it, but society and medicine just wasn’t there yet.

The same woman and I drove the minivan back to Durham. It was just the two of us, so we had a lot of private time to ourselves.

This chick was OG, pre-Tumblr. We laughed about how much things have changed, and how you can’t say words like “transsexual” and “GG” anymore. After some initial caution, she opened up to me about two of her concerns.

• She wasn’t so sure about all these “non-binary” people.
• She didn’t think Brittany was really transsexual.

I talked to her about how my feelings had evolved over the last couple of years. This seemed to make her feel better.

---

Shortly before or after Philly, I started wading into the local BDSM scene again. I started to figure my real problem might’ve been my gender incongruence, and that maybe I should actually try being the rope bunny I always wanted to be; instead of trying to make things work as a subby boy, which it turns out isn’t really the same thing at all.

Somewhat inexplicably, Regina broke up with Samantha. Samantha seemed to have a hard time with this. Regina had recently met her family; it happened shortly after the three of us went out for drinks with Samantha’s brother, who flew helicopters for the Navy.

Sailor Jack

The four of us went to Arcana, where Samantha’s brother bought drinks for everyone and encouraged us to drink heavily.

So, Samantha’s brother. I guess everyone in the Navy’s a “sailor”, but that’s a bit of a misnomer because he’s really a helicopter pilot. He couldn’t tell us much about what he did, but I do remember him mentioning that it involved, of all things, UFOs.

In an extension of this conversation that seemed related to that last point, I remember us briefly talking about spiritual beliefs. I don’t really remember enough to say much more about it. We talked about lots of other inconsequential stuff, and got way too drunk.

We all slept at Samantha’s house. I was in no shape to go home, which was anticipated. Me, Regina and Samantha slept in Samantha’s room, while Samantha’s brother slept in the guest room.

Regina broke down crying in Samantha’s bathroom. Like, the floodgates. She hasn’t talked about most of what was going on with her with Samantha, yet. I remember she said she felt like she “didn’t belong anywhere”. There was a lot more going on than that, though. We were all very drunk.

I got sick, and was still throwing up and browning out in the bathroom the next morning. I felt like I was very dehydrated. The low alcohol tolerance seems to be a side effect of my medication, and it’s gotten me in trouble a couple other times; I’m guessing it’s the spironolactone, since that’s the one that gets metabolized by your liver (I think).

Regina and I weren’t able to drive until solidly mid-afternoon the next day. We had since procured some drinks and snacks to nurse our hangovers.

---

I went to Durham Pride in September; this was my first time going. My mother had never been to a pride parade before and really wanted to go, so I obliged. I had a decent enough time, but it’s always a drag going to something like that with your mom; she’s physically slow, can’t hold her bladder very well, wants to do things I don’t really care about, somehow makes me feel like a child and a caretaker all at the same time, and generally mom-blocks you from spending time with your actual friends.

Whatever. Pride was cool. Around this time, Susan also accompanied me to the LGBT center once or twice, and managed to become Facebook friends with Brittany. I didn’t exactly feel comfortable with this; Brittany wasn’t the sort of friend I’d “take home to mom”. My younger self would’ve protested loudly, but I gave fewer fucks now that I was older. It’s not like I’m dependent on Susan; if anything, it’s quite the opposite.

Q4

I had grown more confident leaving the house in girl mode, and did it every chance I got. I set a goal of going full time by the end of the year, and had a running joke of saying “December 31^st, 2018” to my new friends whenever it came up. It was starting to feel a little silly, as some of them started HRT after me and were already full-time.

Brittany’s long-distance relationship with Samantha’s friend Stacey continued. This morphed into a sort of love triangle, when Samantha and Brittany began seeing each other. This arrangement gradually shifted into a more equilaterally polyamorous structure over the following months.

Stacey made increasingly frequent trips to Durham, and quickly started making plans to move to the area. She was living in northern Delaware at the time, working for Amazon, and I think maybe even still living with her parents. She was hoping to transfer to a new Amazon warehouse that was opening in the area.

It’s Rachael now, dammit (2019)

Q1

I went full-time just before the new year and never looked back.

I really felt like I was getting my shit together, in 2019. I was starting to explore the BDSM scene again as myself, I had done the thing at work, I had all of these new friends… I felt like if I could actually get an intimate partner and get my career back on track, I’d be set.

By now, Brittany and Samantha had picked up that I was a kinkster. It wasn’t something I historically went out of my way to evangelize, but I had stopped going out of my way to hide it around friends; particularly in light of how pervasive the trope of the transfeminine tech worker as a submissive had become. It felt a bit like hiding that one was a gay hairdresser who liked roller derby.

I’m afraid I piqued Brittany’s interest when I took off an outer layer at Samantha’s house, inadvertently revealing marks from a day or two ago. Samantha already knew at that point, and we had actually gone to a thing together a few months prior.

I took Brittany to her first play party early in the year; it turns out she really likes needles. It’s fun to watch, but it’s not really my kink. She also really likes lemons for aftercare.³⁰

---

Around this time, it was brought up in a conversation with Samantha that Stacey was plural. This meant that she had the feeling of having multiple parts, or perhaps crudely, “people” in her head. I thought this sounded pretty weird, but I’m open-minded. She always seemed cool.

Q2

I wanted to take more of a “divide and conquer” approach toward my intimate life, or lack thereof. I felt I was making no progress toward any sort of long term relationship, and started to think I needed to be way less persnickety and way more open-minded. I’ve never exactly felt like I was on the right side of the supply and demand curve for getting my sexual needs met. I chose to start thinking about the search for a sexual partner and the search for a nesting partner as two separate issues. I had long since given up on anything traditional or conventional, and mostly just wanted to be less lonely.

At the same time, I was cautiously optimistic about how things might be different now that I was living life as a woman. I hoped I had found (or maybe rediscovered) the special sauce, whose absence had held me back since I’d first ventured into the kink scene some eight years ago.

It felt like the world was my oyster; again, finally, for maybe the first time since I graduated from college. I started taking the idea of looking for a new job more seriously.

I had pivoted away from any aspirations of starting a “side project”. I was content with being a middle class, workaday tech person with a steady supply of sex and snuggles from somewhere. I was nearing age 30; I never really had the energy level to do much of anything cool in addition to working a full-time job, and I needed to pick my battles when it came to life goals. A lot of my friends had been married, or even divorced with children before figuring out they were trans.

Q3

After the time I had last year, I was excited to return to Philly again this summer. The group had a bit of a different feel, though.

• Sarah couldn’t make it because of work.
• Pretty different crowd; not very much overlap from last year.
• Fewer people overall (though the conference itself had grown).
• Cliquier feel somehow. Brittany and Stacey were back along with Samantha, but the three of them being a triad meant that they usually kept to themselves.
• The AirBnB was closer, at least.

New attendees included Persephone, Stephanie, and a handful of other people who aren’t relevant to this story. I didn’t really know any of these people, except for Leslie from last year and the aforementioned triad.

Persephone

Typically, one gets to know somebody better as time goes on. This rule holds true for most everyone I’ve met, with one exception. And that, is Persephone Laura Hoffman.

Persephone is an unusual person, and I feel I uniquely need to forward-declare attributes about this individual, in no particular order.

• Thrives on novelty.
• Rides around on an electric unicycle.
• Energetic; charismatic; a mover and shaker; craves the inner circle; if not a natural-born leader, at least a natural-born filler of power vacuums. Whether she has the personality of Steve Jobs or Jim Jones depends on who you ask.
• Started a Discord server for trans people in central North Carolina this same year, which rapidly grew into a several hundred-person community.
• Was dating Jade at the time, from Steven Miller’s group. #TODOExplain
  
• Anxious, paranoid, high-strung; a control freak. Mountains from molehills.
• Her mom has schizophrenia.
• Her full name is Persephone; she used to go by “Percy”, but has since decided she doesn’t like this shortened form of her name. The longer form hasn’t caught on so much.
• Really into Buddhist shit; though her spiritual beliefs ultimately seem idiosyncratic and esoteric.
• She has BPD. This checks out; though I’ve never really struggled to have a decent, casual relationship with this person.
• I might’ve seen her at TT once or twice, but didn’t really know who she was before Philly 2019.

I could tell throughout the conference that Persephone was trying to brown nose her way into Samantha, Brittany and Stacey’s triad. This trend would continue.

---

I was at our AirBnB with a small group of us one afternoon, when Percy had a conversation with another attendee that eventually grew heated. It mostly went over my head; but, the other person kept insisting that Persephone must or should know something, and Percy kept denying and stonewalling. I got the impression Persephone was a member of some organization, which required strict confidentiality or rules of engagement that this other fellow clearly wasn’t following. I didn’t think much of it.

Several hours later, in the same room but with a different group of people, Persephone volunteered some information about the earlier commotion for the couple of us who were there. There were a few peculiarities regarding Percy’s discussion with us.

• She made it very clear that the following discussion was not in response to any question; and in fact, could not be, for some reason.
• The conversation proceeded to involve, among other elements… the Freemasons? The earlier stuff with Tommy and Heather was entirely out-of-mind today.
• Stephanie mentioned she had an uncle who was a Freemason; but, they never talked about it.
• She said that there’s some piece of very important knowledge, without which society as we know it could. Not. Exist. There was some nitpicking from others about whether the big secret was necessary for literal life itself, or mere civilization. Her answer was vague, but suggested the truth was closer to the latter.
• There was something most people know who know about this stuff, but she couldn’t say what. She made it sound a little silly that she couldn’t say what, but rules were rules.
• I think she said that some people are just different in some way, concerning the last bullet point. I later interpreted this statement to be about people like Heather, though it was off my radar at the time. It was as if “the Freemasons” told the special people they were special; but, you didn’t actually have to join “the Freemasons” to learn, because lots of groups also know, I guess?
• There was some rule for talking to these Freemason people, that I think mirrored the one Heather and her friend taught me all those years ago. Again, totally off my radar, what a ditz I am…

I came away with the impression that, whatever Persephone knew sounded cool, but that it also didn’t concern me.

---

It turned out Stacey wasn’t the only one who was plural. I learned that Persephone, Stephanie, and now Brittany identify with this phenomenon. They were all going to a workshop put on by this fellow who was trans and plural; along with Samantha, I think. I had better things to do during the time slot.

Their group had this sort of after-event that evening, a reasonable walk south of the convention center where they were able to secure a room upstairs at the Philadelphia LGBT center. I didn’t have better things to do this evening (and was actually a bit disappointed I hadn’t been able to spend much time with my friends), so I tagged along. I figured Samantha would be there at least.

This was an unexpectedly large group; especially for it being a pretty weird and ancillary thing to the purpose of the actual con, and for this being the follow-up discussion after party to the aforementioned weird and ancillary thing.

I had a talk with Persephone during all of this; which may’ve been the first one-on-one discussion I had with her. I didn’t really know what to make of all of it. A few things piqued my interest, though.

I managed to leave thinking that I might find relevance in this community. While I considered the effect of peer pressure, I ultimately decided that I needed to descent down this rabbit hole.

---

If Persephone had anyone single “thing”, it was this Discord server of hers. It was inspired by her then-girlfriend Jade’s server, though much more elaborate. She had set up lots of crazy automation and shit with bots, which would assign you to different sub-communities based on roles or tags, or whatever Discord calls them. It actually reminded me of a simpler version of my idea for a web application I had since given up on.

She had sub-communities for all sorts of things. Politics, food, medical discussion (in which the handful of actual professionals had special flair after being vetted), mysticism and magic; and yes, even these strange new plural folks.

I don’t know that I want to get too into this, but… it’s a whole subculture, alright? They have parts in their head, they report a feeling of switching between these parts… folks with particularly bad trauma apparently experience full-blown amnesia between these switches, but folks with less severe versions of this ostensibly only have a bit of memory fuzziness, or even no memory problems at all.

I soon learned the latter community had its own variation of the too-cute vs truescum debate. This phenomenon of having “people living in one’s head”, multiple streams of consciousness or however you might describe that, is classically associated with intense, prolonged psychological trauma at a young age. Some of these newer folks argued that this same state can exist in someone much more healthy, either by accident or on purpose. Neologisms like “traumagenic” and “endogenic” to describe these two camps had been coined; with occasional infighting between these two groups, but a seemingly modern consensus that people could be whatever and should play nice. The extreme end of the former group comprised dissociative disorders, or what the general public might label “multiple personality disorder.”

My friend group gradually started to change. A couple of weeks after Philly, a bunch of us went to Cocoa Cinnamon; me, Persephone, maybe Stephanie and a few others who don’t matter. It came up in conversation that Persephone had been into ham radio. This never happens;³¹ neither of us were really involved with the hobby anymore. I was starting to think I had an unusual amount in common with this person.

I went to Persephone’s apartment for the first time not long after this, along with Stephanie. We ended up on her balcony at some point in the evening; and it is here that I really draw the line at shit having gotten weird.

Persephone had this notebook of somebody’s (maybe Stephanie?); and she was doing… magic stuff with it, I guess? She had this little book in a plastic bag; which I suppose needed to be… cleansed? Of some harmful energy or voodoo, perhaps? I don’t remember really. It’s been a while. I think it might’ve been somebody’s journal from a rough point in their life, or maybe something relating to an ex. It doesn’t matter.

Persephone sat the bag with the notebook out on the porch, and poured a ring of salt around it. I think it had been soaking in some liquid prior to this; hence the plastic baggie. I didn’t understand what was happening at all. Stephanie seemed to, at least somewhat.

I had questions, somewhere along the lines of “what the fuck is that supposed to do exactly?”

What do you believe in?

Well, I’m an atheist.

Persephone proceeded to somewhat belittle me for my spiritual beliefs, or lack thereof. Not in any serious way; but she seemed to know things I didn’t, and she seemed very confident in that. Given the amount we appeared to have in common up to this point, I was very curious what the devil makes her think a ring of salt could ever be anything but salty.

Stephanie left, and I chose to stay a little while longer. She talked enthusiastically about the power of merely believing in things. That the power gets amplified, the more people there are who believe. I tried to keep an open mind, though I struggled to grasp at any real substance to what she was trying to say. At the same time, it sounded like there were other things she couldn’t tell me, analogous to her kitchen discussion in Philly last month.

As we returned to the couch, and I remained skeptical, Persephone made a slight change of subject.

You wanna know what Freemasons do?

Wait, Freemasonry? My preacher tried to get me into that when I was a younger.

She seemed a little thrown off by that last part; but, the conversation continued.

You wanna know the truth about UFOs, Rachael? You wanna meet space aliens? I have friends, you know…

“Uhhh… UFOs?”, I replied incredulously. I didn’t know what to think of this person anymore. Once again, I’m not thinking about Heather and Maureen right now. I do think I mentioned Tommy, though.

It was getting late, and I left not long after this. I wasn’t sure what to think of my new friend.

---

As the year went on, I started carting off more trans people to Tomfoolery than just Brittany. I remember in September, there were a lot of trans people, and they didn’t even all fit in my car. Brittany, Samantha, Persephone, Stephanie, April… I guessed the stereotype about trans women and BDSM exists for a reason.

It was here that I was propositioned by April, a trans woman who I’d first met at TT earlier in the year. I forget exactly what happened. I think she said she had a crush on me or something, then I messaged her a couple days later and we hit it off.

April and I were both bottoms, which made it unlikely she alone could fill the role of a sexual partner. I hoped I might at least get somewhere on the nesting partner front, and wanted to keep an open mind. Applying linear extrapolation, I might not get another chance at this until my mid to late thirties.

April was married to a woman³² named Diana.³³ This bore little concern; polyamory was thoroughly normalized to me after my on and off years in the kink scene.

Durham Pride later in the month led to a conundrum. Me, April, Diana… we were all queer, and we were all going to Pride. My mom wanted to go again too; which begs the question, how do I handle that?

I chose the second option. She’d been asking increasingly difficult questions as I grew older. “Are you going to give me a grandchild?³⁴” “Are you dating anyone?” “Why don’t you ever tell me anything?” “Are you sure you’re not dating anyone?” “You can tell me anything…”

I would try explaining that I really, really, was not on the path to securing a long-term relationship at the moment. And once I was, it would take considerable additional time to begin a relationship and grow it to the point of “taking someone home to meet mom”. She never seemed to understand this; and often suggested there shouldn’t even be such a delay if I were to start dating.

Ugh. I hoped by giving her a glimpse of my private life, she’d understand me more. She didn’t seem to have all that many negative feelings about Brittany, Stacey and Samantha’s situation that she kept learning uncomfortable details about through Facebook; and frankly, I didn’t care if she did. I was tired of her asking, and I figured she could fuck off if she didn’t like my “lifestyle choices”.

Telling Susan ultimately proved to be a bit pointless; it was a huge event, we rode separately, and she only saw April and Diana for a moment anyway. She’s never voiced any outward disappointment over this particular lifestyle choice, but I could tell she wasn’t thrilled. It might’ve been the biggest giveaway that she’s rarely honest about her feelings. She always says she just wants me to be happy, but I don’t think she means it. I think she has this fantasy in her head of getting to be the quirky mother-in-law in my budding affluent suburban family or something, and she doesn’t understand how far removed that is from the actual reality of my life.

---

I had a job interview at Avalon, where Josh worked. I already had a rough phone interview with them a couple months prior where I could hear myself not keeping my pitch and resonance up with a one-second delay, making it very difficult to complete the interview. Josh stuck his neck out trying to get them to take me seriously, which seemed to have worked.

I didn’t feel like I nailed it quite as well as my interviews with Kevin and Synapse, but I got the job. I was nervous about interviewing for a job in girl mode for the first time, I still wasn’t a hundred percent confident in my appearance at that point, and my real world experience was mostly embedded programming and IT-type work, not high-level SQL-backed applications. I felt like I had no trouble getting up to speed though, and I’d probably do a lot better at a “CS”-type interview now that I’m older.

Not long after I told Susan about April and Diana, Susan showed one of her more blatant signs that she would never be a reasonable… mother-in-law, or whatever equivalent title might be afforded in my unconventional relationship structure.

I remember driving down the road, when I got a call from Susan. I answered the phone to her sobbing; she was afraid April and Diana were going to replace her or something. I didn’t know what to make of this. Does she not… want me to see other people? She basically made me promise I still “needed her”. And all the while I thought, I obviously haven’t needed this woman since I left for college. She provides me little to no real support; emotionally, monetarily or intellectually. Sure, she pines to be part of my emotional life; but I’ve historically regretted letting her in. I would later re-discover this fact.

Q4

My relationship situation escalated, incredibly fast.

We had already shifted toward calling ourselves a triad by the time of Durham Pride. I don’t remember if I ever mentioned this to Susan; I really wanted to keep it as simple as possible for the time being.

AJ was the first change in status quo. She was a trans woman in the community, who had a really bad fight with her long term partner and needed a place to stay. April and…

Okay; I feel bad that I’ve kept doing this, but I wanted to convey the proper chronology.

Diana was queer, and had been questioning their gender identity to the point of now going by Drew and using they/them pronouns. So, it’s Drew. Not…

AJ needed a place to stay, and April and Drew offered their spare bedroom/office area for the purpose.

AJ was dating a trans woman named Crystal.

Crystal

I was already vaguely acquainted with Crystal, who started going to TT a few months back. She was actually one of these plural folks. As was now Drew. And even April and AJ a little bit.

Huh.

Crystal actually claimed to have full-blown Dissociative Identity Disorder; a real case of people living in her head. I learned over time she had a difficult childhood; she’d been sexually assaulted by a neighbor, and basically had to raise her younger brother due to her parent’s negligence. She was a senior developer at the time, but was struggling with her job on account of her condition, and in the process of filing for disability to work through it. It was difficult to believe she was a real person.

Crystal had an apartment in Raleigh, where as a single occupant she’d been placed with a fellow who happened to be a neo-Nazi. This understandably concerned her, which led to both Crystal and AJ essentially making April and Drew’s house their temporary residence for the time being.

Crystal and AJ were quickly absorbed into our increasingly amorphous polycule, a five-person structure we began ironically referring to as “the coven”. I never told Susan about Crystal and AJ.

---

I started my new job at Avalon around the first of November.

I felt like I finally had my shit together. I had a job somewhere I might be able to make a name for myself, and I had good insurance that would cover SRS if I wanted that, which I did. And, I had this new relationship situation. That’s like the whole, uh… Maslow’s³⁵ hierarchy, right?

I felt a little silly for only having just started a 401k at my new job. I hadn’t really been saving for retirement after I took my little detour to run away to Chapel Hill and fix computers; and, I could’ve gotten one through DataCorp, but there was no matching so I was less enthousiastic about that versus paying off my student loans quickly. (I’m still not sure that’s the smartest calculus though, now that I’m older.)

---

We struggled, to say the least, with sexual compatibility. The thing about me is, I’m incredibly subby. I briefly thought I could be a switch because of some fantasies I had as I grew older, but this turned out to be very mild and unsubstantial. I’m really, really, a bottom, who could maybe sheepishly top someone I was really close to.

April and I ultimately never really… did… much. I’ve never wanted to take the initiative to do much of anything other than snuzzle my partner and make funny noises. I’ve never really felt like I would be a starfish in bed or anything. It was like we were waiting for each other to go at a four way stop. This was essentially the same problem I had with Erika when we tried fooling around.

I guess I’ve always just wanted someone to, you know… fuck me. And, I keep doing what I feel like is the most obvious thing to look for rough, kinky, reasonably safe sex in my current body, and it’s always eluded me. It’s no wonder I’ve had complicated feelings about feminists, who complain about drowning in the ocean while I’m dying of thirst in the desert.

---

There was a lot going on with me at the time.

I (and everyone else, it seemed) had been thinking of myself as a system of parts for a while now. I didn’t think it was anything serious. This plural stuff did seem correlated with being transgender for some reason, and I couldn’t help but wonder why. It’s crazy I guess, being trans.

Ugh

I have this weird childhood memory. And I didn’t talk about it earlier, because it doesn’t belong back there. It belongs right here.

I have this memory of being very young, between three and five years old or so. I rode with my mom kind of far away, to Fayetteville I think. We arrived at a town house I don’t think I’d been to before or since; that stands out in my mind, since town homes aren’t a very common housing format in rural Bladen County.

I remember finding my way upstairs with an older fellow. Based on my memory, I don’t think I could tell you if he was in his teens, twenties, or maybe even early thirties. Everyone over the age of twelve is just kind of a grown-up when you’re that age.

Anyway, things started happening upstairs, and this fellow wanted me to lick his penis. I, at this age thought this was nasty. He was very insistent. He said he’d lick mine if I licked his. I did not find this argument persuasive. It did happen eventually. It’s actually the last thing I remember happening.

That’s it. It’s just this weird memory fragment. It usually doesn’t feel like anything. It’s like a puzzle piece of an owl’s head in a box of 499 pieces of the Egyptian pyramids of something. I don’t know what to do with it or where it even fits in with my life; but it’s in the box.

This dissonance came to a head #TODOphrasing

This… issue reached a climax #TODOphrasing again

My sex life, or lack thereof, is defined by a handful of noteworthy attributes.

• I have a huge lifelong interest in BDSM.
• I have a similarly huge forced oral kink.
• I wouldn’t rate myself as anything more than an 80/20 switch.
• I invariably freeze up during sexual encounters, often unexpectedly; as if I’m missing the DLLs or something.

I’ve variously blamed my problems on a number of different things over the years; that it’s my gender identity, that I’m a submissive man and it’s hard to find tops compatible with that… It wasn’t until this point in my life that the problem felt like

Dick

It’s here. I’ve always wanted it, right? What’s wrong? I gave April an old fashioned, but I’m not sure I was entirely in my body when I was doing it. What’s missing? Is there something missing? April’s not having any trouble fucking. Or Brittany or Samantha, AJ… maybe Crystal a bit sometimes; but there’s a lot going on her, and she still gets it on. Hell, most of those people have been married. What do I, think it’s my gender identity still? It’s something else. It has to be. Why don’t I want to do this thing I’ve always wanted to do whenever I finally get the chance to do it?

It started to feel like it was this. Something happened to me a long time ago, and I probably needed to get to the bottom of it.

Alright, folks. It’s Q4 of 2019. My new polycule has expanded alarmingly fast, I just started a new job, I think I’ve uncovered latent sexual trauma… what else am I forgetting?

Oh, right. UFOs.

It felt like Crystal and AJ had been living at April and Drew’s house (“the cottage”) for a year, but it was really only four to six weeks. The two of them rented an apartment nearby in north Durham, and we’d often migrate between these two locales, the cottage and the apartment.

Crystal had this old, long term partner named Josh.

(Crystal’s) Josh

Is a trans guy, and is plural if you’d believe it… At the beginning of their relationship, Josh was trans and Crystal was plural. Or, maybe I’ve got it backwards. Anyway, They both apparently found each other, and they both turned out to be both of these things.

Crystal and Josh. They decided to see other people, I guess? But they still really seemed to like each other.

Josh had moved to Texas. I forget the details, but it sounded like he was in an abusive relationship that he needed to get out of. There was a kid involved, and there were questions about how to handle that.

Anyway, that isn’t important. Josh was in town for Christmas, and I got to spend some time with this guy.

I met them at the apartment after having spent Christmas with Susan, and I don’t think I’d been there long before Josh says

I’m looking for someone who knows the truth about UFOs.

After a moment of thinking “uhh…” to myself, I didn’t even stop to think before blurting out

Wait, UFOs? Don’t Freemasons know about that stuff?

To which Josh replied

Can I ask how you know that?

Oh, I have this friend Heather. From… Vega, I think. Vega, Lyra…

It was now that I did start to think about what I just said. Isn’t this stuff kinda private? How private? Is it okay to talk about it casually? So I asked.

No, you’re fine. We just want to know where you’re learning about this stuff from.

That’s… cool, I figured. It reminded me of what happened with Maureen at the saucer all those years ago, when she started talking about Freemasons and UFOs and somebody else at the table needed to know how she knew. I instinctively did the same thing as Maureen, and told him I had an acquaintance from Vega. I guessed that’s just… their process, or whatever.

When I inquired further, it sounded like he was maybe looking for a therapist who knew about that stuff. I never thought about that being a need before, but I guess there are therapists for everyone.

Huh.

Susan

I don’t know how to describe my mother at this point in my life; except that she’s a one-of-a-kind piece of work whom I can’t seem to communicate with effectively in what I would consider “plain English”.

In various ways, Susan reminds me of several people I’ve encountered throughout my life, both real and fictional.

(This is a very disparate list; the perceived likeness to Susan usually does not follow the transitive property, and is sometimes just based on a single personality trait.)

• Eric Cartman’s mother
• Sadie Miller’s mother
• The mom from this comedy sketch
• South Park’s “Michael Jefferson”
• GLaDOS
• Charlie’s uncle Jack from Always Sunny
• Rose from Two and a Half Men

A sketch of “Susan”

Attributes

• Terrified of abandonment
• Terrified of losing access to me
• Afraid I will go to “white collar prison” for some reason
• Won’t cut the umbilical cord, and acts like it’s “just how moms are”
• Is idiosyncratically progressive and conservative in different contexts; a classic “Christian democrat” in many political regards.
• Pines for more information and access into my personal life, but fails to act rationally and follow social norms when given it. Wants the bleeding edge, but can’t handle the bugs.
• Almost as if she worships a “cult of Ethan/Rachael”. It feels beyond normal parent-child admiration.
• Used baby talk way too late in my development, if she’s ever completely stopped. I thought it was our little in-joke when I was in high school; but, she just sort of kept it up way after it got old.
• She’s resisted the idea of me growing older in general; her attachment to me feels unhealthy, and she now views me as “all she has left” now that my dad/her ex husband has passed on.
• This sounds mean, but… I don’t think the “logic” part of her brain works. I used to think it was me; I was a computer nerd, and normal people were all emotion and no logic like Susan. Then I thought it was just women who were like that, and that there was no way I could be one of them. Now I think my mom is just a whackadoodle.

Anti-patterns

• Asking whether I want something, then proceeding to ignore me when I answer “no”. She does this with food, gifts… I’ve inquired as to why she asks if my answer doesn’t matter. She usually responds telling me to “be nice to a-widdle muver” or some shit.³⁶
• Asking leading questions that discourage honest answers. (“Are you still a Christian even though you watch South Park?”; “Are you going to let me live in your guest house once you’ve built your wealth?”) This can feel a bit like brainwashing in the most extreme of cases.
• Extremification (“I drink Sam Adams sometimes” → “He only drinks Sam Adams”)
• Conflation (“He downloads his music ‘through the backdoor’”; “She said she listens to ‘emo’ now” (I said ‘indy’))
• Extreme emotional reactions #TODO
  
• Shuts down virtually any complaint or grievance with thought halting statements like “Don’t me mean to your little mother!”, or a derailment about how much she loves me. Will start to cry if you keep pressing for something real, and will probably recall this argument later as one of the times you were “weally mean to a-widdle muver”.

Questionable advice

She filled me up with all sorts of bad advice, which I still might not’ve entirely deprogrammed all these years later. If I’m anything resembling a decent person, I think I’m that in spite of her, not because of her.

• Lie and deny
• Fake it ’till you make it
• Don’t tell Cody you’re a “liberal”

The iPad incident

As my 22^nd birthday approached, I had a conversation with my mother that went something like this.

Have you thought about what you want for your birthday?

No, not really…

Well, do you want an iPad?

Eh, not really.

YES YOU DO!

No, I really don’t. It kinda just looks like a big iPod Touch.

I naively thought this was the end of it; until I received, for my birthday, a brand new Apple iPad. I didn’t bring up our prior conversation, and thanked her for the gift.

I took the iPad back to my apartment and began setting it up. Shortly after I installed Skype, my dad called me on it.

After I picked up, I was confused why I couldn’t get the front facing camera to work like in the commercials. At first I thought it might be some proprietary FaceTime bullshit, but I eventually figured out the real problem; this was a first generation iPad, which lacked the selfie camera. My initial impression that my mother bought an older iPad because she was poor, yielded to a deeper understanding when I found an invoice buried in the packaging with the actual dollar amount she paid. There were… a few obvious problems with this purchase.

• She bought the iPad through QVC
• She bought a first generation iPad, despite the fact that the second generation had been out for several months
• The purchase price was considerably more than a new second generation iPad. I think she paid around $1200, when it should’ve been closer to $800 before it was superseded by a newer model.
• The iPad included the optional 3G cellular modem, which added a non-trivial amount to the purchase price. Apple had an exclusive agreement with AT&T at the time, rendering the rather expensive add-on useless; my mother and I had a phone plan with US Cellular.

I conjectured that she bought the iPad through QVC because she wanted to finance it and had shit credit. Okay. If that was all, I probably would never have brought it up.

An ethical quandary began weighing on my mind: what if my mother could return this iPad for a cheaper one which at least lacked the 3G modem? She bought me something she couldn’t really afford in the first place, then paid way too much for it, then paid a couple hundred more bucks for something I can’t even use. Shouldn’t I at least… talk to her about it?

When I raised my concerns, Susan began crying inconsolably. She tearfully explained that she wanted me to have the very best iPad. I tried to explain that it wasn’t better, it was just more expensive. She didn’t seem to understand the bit about the cellular modem at all. After it became clear she couldn’t return the iPad even if she wanted to, I realized I needed to do damage control and extract myself from this situation.

Phew. No good deed goes unpunished, I suppose.

I wish I could tell you this was the end of it. It was not.

The iPad eventually found it’s way into my college life. It was nice to use for internet browsing sometimes, and I found this neat app that let you simulate circuits. I didn’t really miss the front facing camera; I was only confused when I took it out of the box and couldn’t do the one thing Apple had been showing people doing with it on TV for the last six months. I never would’ve bought it for myself, but I really did use it quite a bit.

Christmas time arrives. There’s a giant red bag with… something… in it, and it’s the biggest gift. We’re saving it for last.

Would anyone care to venture a guess what was in the big red bag? I could use spoiler tags for the HTML version of this document, you know.

At the bottom of this comically oversized big red sack was a brand new second generation Apple iPad. My mother had apparently corralled my father into chipping in for this gift; which I apparently needed after my disappointment(?) with the earlier iPad.

So, this is fucking great. I now have two iPads. I didn’t even want one of them. Shit, man. When it rains it pours.

I was given the option of keeping both iPads or returning the newer one. I, uh… returned the newer one. And vowed never to comment on any of her gifts again; even if it was only to be helpful.

---

I fucked up at least once since then.

For some subsequent holiday, my mother bought me an unsolicited Nintendo 3DS. I attempted to accept this gift while smiling and nodding.

But, she kept fishing for a compliment from me. Didn’t I do good? Aren’t I a good muver?

Eventually I just snapped. And said something about how the Nintendo was childish.

I do feel a little bad about this, because it isn’t even fair to say that I’ve “outgrown” Nintendo. I’ve actually wasted a lot of time this year playing Ship of Harkinian.

I forgot about this incident, until a couple years ago when Susan decided to bring up how mean I am to her sometimes. I think it was in response to me having bought myself a Nintendo Switch.

I didn’t understand; until I remembered that I really can’t communicate with this woman.

#TODO

I like beer

I turned 21 at the beginning of my junior year. The rest of us were close enough to 21 at that point in college.

Over the course of several weeks, our apartment accrued a beer pyramid on our kitchen counter. We also had a bunch of empty liquor bottles on our top shelf that we would illuminate with a blue rope light; most of which were left over from Marc and Noah’s residency. And there was a large collection of bottle caps, which we intended to make a tabletop with eventually.

We had a routine of putting all this stuff away in Will’s room whenever somebody’s parents were coming over. This grew tiresome, especially as the amount of self-censorship increased. We probably took up half of his floor space with jugs and bottles and smoking paraphernalia.

My dad decided to pay me a visit one day, and I had grown complacent. I knew my dad drank and even smoked pot; I still cleaned up a little and didn’t leave our pieces laying out or anything, but I didn’t relocate or recycle the beer pyramid. And, I don’t think I moved the liquor bottles either. I didn’t think my dad would care all that much; in fact, I thought he might actually be a bit proud of me for lightening up for once.

Indeed, my dad didn’t make much of a fuss about the evidence of alcohol consumption; but he did tell my mom, and she is a basket case.

My mother seemed very concerned that I was, like, an alcoholic or something. Given her family of origin, I can kind of see why; but, I really have never felt an urge to get drunk every night. High, certainly. It’s fun, but too much of it makes me sick, then I wake up with a hangover, I can’t cross with weed without vomiting from the spins, too much wine really sucks…

Dude. I’m a pothead.

I didn’t tell her that, though. She, somewhat expectedly, pried into the drinking habits of me and my roommates.

Is anyone there drinking underage??

… No…

Who all is drinking over there?? Does Josh drink?

He isn’t 21 yet… so, no.³⁷

Does Will drink?

Will turned 21 in November… so, yes.

What do you drink?

Well… different things, I guess…

Do you drink beer? Do you drink the hard stuff?

Well, I like beer…³⁸

What kind of beer do you like?

Well, I like Sam Adams…

The more bizarre part were the echoes back I got as a result of my mother’s inquisition. Multiple friends told me she cornered them to ask about my drinking habits, and she seemed like she was losing her mind about it.

This culminated in Josh telling me

Hey Ethan! Your mom says you only drink Sam Adams!

I was confused at first who would even say such a thing about me. I drank Dogfishhead, Bell’s… hell, I’d settle for a Blue Moon or even a Miller High Life. But the smell of Natty Light made me dry heave. Anyway, who the fuck came up with the idea that I only drink Sam Adams?

#TODO

She wants to talk to my boss?

Not long after I started my first job out of college, my mother sent us a message through our website. My boss brought it up one morning, and we had a laugh about it. I forget what it said, or if Kevin even mentioned that much. I cringed a little, but it sounded like it was just one of those things moms did; so I tried not to think much of it.

Not long after I started my second job out of college, I found myself alone at the office. The phone rang, and I was thrown off when I saw our family name on the caller ID. I answered the phone, confused, but as professionally as possible.

The thing about this place is, that it wasn’t a fully staffed office. We all had various customer sites we went to, we checked email and voicemail, and there was someone in the office sometimes.

I think my mom had been “trying to get a hold of somebody” for a bit and said something snarky about it. I started rolling my eyes once I realized this wasn’t a case of my cell phone being unreachable. Anyway, it eventually became clear she wanted to talk to my boss; and I think she was a little frustrated that she couldn’t find a way that wasn’t through me.

Another thing about this place is, the family who owned the company was probably the least predictably in the office. They were actively involved in the business, and we usually saw them at least a few times a week. It was certainly expected that we would handle day-to-day bullshit, and the request puts me the awkward position of either getting into a fight with my mom or sending Ben and Barbara a really weird Slack message to call my mommy. I tried to take a message, but she really just wanted to talk to them in person.

I was understandably put off. The request made me feel like I had some kind of secret handler; like I was some special needs adult, whose mommy was letting me play engineer in the city until it was time for supper. The lack of transparency as to the phone call’s purpose was incredibly unnerving.

I actually forget how I ultimately handled this situation. I do very much remember fussing with her about it. I don’t remember if she eventually wore me down or not.

Dressing rooms

After I started transitioning, Susan often wanted to go clothes shopping. It was early on in this process that Susan decided she wanted to go in the dressing room with me. This was something I strongly objected to.

At first. She eventually managed to wear me down after some amount of insisting it was a perfectly normal mother-daughter thing to do, and would help streamline things. Or… something.

I once again think this is creepy as hell, if I ever really felt comfortable with it at all. I think this is a good example of how she has a way of normalizing really bizarre behavior, by incessantly badgering you into feeling like you’re the weirdo for being uncomfortable.

Forgetting stuff

Susan does not respond well to forgetfulness; particularly surrounding important events like holidays. She will get pissed off if you forget to give her a card and a gift for Mother’s Day and her birthday (which are a week or two apart), or similarly manage to botch Christmas. This has been a thing since at least early in high school. I don’t mean a little pissed off; I mean like if you were her husband and forgot your anniversary or something.

Rachael’s house

I told Susan I was about to buy a house. It was fall, and she eagerly told me not to get her anything for Christmas. There was a lot going on; I considered, and ultimately did take her up on this. I really should’ve known this was a bad idea.

At least, that’s what she’s told me over the years as she’s berated me for literally not getting her anything, just like she told me to. And, it isn’t like she only offered once either.

She didn’t say not to get her anything big. She didn’t say just to get her one tiny thing as a symbolic gesture.

Don’t get me anything for Christmas.

I mean it! I don’t need anything! I know you’re doing a lot right now, buying your first house and everything.

Well, you could’ve at least gotten me a book or something…

Yes Susan, I fucking could have. But you told me…

My descent into madness (2020-2023)

The new something (2020)

Q1

This is so normal! I’m gonna make March the most normal month ever!
-Rachael Ann Brown; Tuesday, March 3^rd, 2020

Our polycule imploded a few weeks into the new year. April broke up with me, feeling like she barely knew me after five or six months. By that point, I’d begun to feel like the fifth wheel in my own relationship; a problem I’ve felt I’ve had with friends my whole life. I dropped the trauma bomb at this point without really thinking it through, which didn’t help matters.

April said she needed to “not be around me for a while”. I briefly retained a superficially better relationship with Drew, before ultimately drifting apart from them too.

Shortly after, Josh (Crystal’s friend) temporarily moved from Texas to the apartment in Durham to escape his abusive relationship. This created tension with AJ, and they broke up. AJ ran off with some trans woman named Molly who she’d recently started dating. Crystal and Josh moved to Colorado just as COVID started, so that they could be closer to Josh’s young daughter.

Fin.

I heard that April had a sort of mental breakdown shortly after this and may’ve had a stay at the mental hospital; but, I don’t know details, and thought it impolite to pry.

I began to turn my mind toward a search for normalcy and simplicity. Our polycule was complicated. I didn’t think of myself as very jealous or otherwise incompatible with polyamory; but, I didn’t want to be the awkward wheel in my own primary relationship, and given my lack of experience that’s what was likely to happen in a similar situation without extra effort.

I actually remember, eating a slice at Pie Pushers after TT one evening in early March, thinking to myself “2020 is going to be the most normal year ever!”

Q2

Susan kept asking how “April and Drew” were doing. Ugh…

It was really annoying, having told her so early in her relationship. I was always having to manage the gap between where we were and what she knew, because she just gets… weird when you tell her stuff. She panics, she thinks you’re abandoning her or something… She never says what she means or tells you how she really feels; until she’s boiling over with some crazy bullshit because she’s just so goddamn obsessed with you, when you just want to be left alone to live your life.

Fuck.

I eventually told her we broke up under vague pretenses. I tried to explain that I was dealing with something that was hard to talk about. Which was met with little more than

You can tell me anything… Why won’t you tell me anything? You never tell me anything…

I wasn’t really sure why sex was so complicated, and why I struggled to connect with anyone in bed despite at least having some kind of libido. I actually identified as gray ace for a while because of this; but, I’ve started to think my problem is more that I haven’t found the right person yet.

In my struggle to process my post-breakup life, I’d been swept up by Persephone and friends somewhat.

Persephone, by now, had proven herself to be a complicated character. She’d alienated a lot of her former allies in the community with her antics. Her once bustling Discord server was losing momentum fast. She recently found out she had BPD. Kristina was filing for a divorce. Oh, right.

Kristina

Persephone was married to a cis woman named Kristina. The relationship proceeded Persephone’s transition by several years.

I grew closer to Kristina over the next several months. I was clear from the beginning that I wasn’t looking for anything sexual or romantic; we weren’t really compatible on either of those fronts. I sort of became part of their infection circle; and wasn’t really getting physical interaction anywhere else given the times.

I was initially really private with both of them about what happened between April and me. I opened up to Kristina about it around June, after having brought it up with my therapist a couple of months prior.

Oh yeah. This was COVID year right, I was dealing with trauma stuff, I was dealing with breakup stuff, and I kinda just forgot Mother’s Day. Susan loses her shit when this happens. I’m not sure that it’d happened in my adult life.

Anyway, message bubbles.

Well, that was lovely. I remember trying to explain (outside of SMS) that I had been dealing with a lot lately, and she wasn’t having it.

Why won’t you tell me anything? You never tell me anything… I’m your mother!

Ugh…

---

Persephone was keen on evangelizing concepts from Buddhism and various mystical traditions, and seemed to follow her own idiosyncratic blend of western paganism and eastern spirituality. While I never quite succumbed to Persephone and her enthusiasm, she did have me doing mettā for a while.

I want to insert this conversation with Persephone that I found while putting this book together. It’s a little off-topic, but I think it provides useful character development.

The context for this exchange, is that Kristina had just come to my house and kicked my ass at Mastermind.

Q3

I had drifted closer to Kristina and further from Persephone; the latter of which I could increasingly tell was problematic from various sources, even if she was alright in small doses. Kristina broke up with Persephone after years of emotional abuse, and Kristina and I started a weekend tradition of alternating between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Star Trek: The Next Generation; as well as going to the pool with Liam that summer.

Later that summer, Kristina moved out of the apartment with Persephone, and into a house being rented by fellow trans folks Stephanie and Tristan. Their son Liam moved with Kristina, while still seeing Persephone periodically.

Liam

Probably about 7 or 8 at the time. Good kid.

After consideration I decided, almost certainly incorrectly, that I should tell Susan about the whole sexual trauma bit.

I told Susan what I was going through in… late August, I think. There were a lot of feelings, but I hoped to convey that I was alright. I was just processing a lot. And I might just not be as available and attentive as usual. So, it’d be nice if you’d, you know, cut me some slack when I forget Mother’s Day during COVID year when I’m dealing with a rough breakup and maybe sexual trauma I didn’t know I had until now. Okay?

Susan had a rough time with this. She wanted to do a joint session with me and my therapist, but backed out at the last minute. She proceeded to get a therapist of her own for a while. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say she was having a more difficult time with it than I was for a while.

Simultaneous with this, Susan pushed us doing a regular weekly video chat. This tradition would continue until, well… we’ll get there.

I soon grew uncomfortable with the extent to which Susan wanted to involve herself in this process, and began to pull back. She kept asking me what my diagnosis was, and I didn’t really have a diagnosis. She kept asking me what workbook I was using, and I didn’t have a workbook. I told her I had read things independently, but was intentionally very vague about this. I was frankly uncomfortable with her questions, and was worried she’d pressure me to switch therapists because my trauma recovery process wasn’t comprehensive enough or something. Although I don’t know that it’s caused any problems, I regret describing some guided imagery work I’d done with my therapist as “hypnotherapy”; as that is both misleading, and something Susan would be likely to distort and misquote to others.

• Extremification (“I drink Sam Adams sometimes” → “He only drinks Sam Adams”)

Jeez, Susan. I just wanted you to know what was going on with me, you know? Because you’re always complaining about how I “never tell you anything”, or whatever? Ugh…

I didn’t bring up the, uh… plural stuff, or whatever. We’d talked about enough. I did talk about how a lot of my childhood seemed like a blur and I had a lot to process. This was already too… ugh, goddammit

#TODOI haven’t really been doing this justice, but I’m trying at the last minute.

She kept prying for more and more information. I didn’t really want to talk about it, and just wanted her to stop being an asshole about me being distant and having a rough time. And, I was not going to talk about this weird plural stuff that maybe kinda started it all. She kept prying, and… look, I didn’t mean to misrepresent myself, but she did manage to pull the term “amnesia” out of me, I think, and like, ugh, half my friend group was ostensibly dealing with shit like this, and… this might’ve created a mess. I still don’t really know what happened.

---

I “fell off the wagon” with cannabis right around September, if you can call it that. I never decidedly gave that up for any particular reason, but hadn’t really smoked or wanted to since the end of 2016 or so, isolated incidents aside. I suppose I felt it might keep me on an even keel, and never felt it had a particularly negative effect on my life. It isn’t as if I’ve ever exactly “had it together”; but the long stretches of not using cannabis between 2015 and 2020 don’t really show any improvement in work ethic or reduction in laziness. Frankly, I’m just a messy, lazy fuck.

Q4

Susan’s accident characterized virtually the entire month of October.

It sounded serious, so I rushed home to take care of her and see what happened.

By around one week into my stay, I had the distinct impression that Susan… didn’t want to get better; that she was hamming it up, whatever happened to her. I didn’t want to believe it, but I couldn’t deny the feeling that Susan was using this to grapple with a perceived loss of control over me, in light of my aforementioned recent struggles. Phrased differently, it felt like she needed to reclaim some lost sense of victimhood; as if I was supposed to be the one taking care of her at this point in our lives, and she needed to flip our relationship back around to where she felt comfortable.

At the same time I had these thoughts, I tried to examine myself for my own biases. I really don’t like spending large amounts of time with Susan. We slip into this weird routine, where we’re like some kind of bitchy old married couple, except for the parts where Susan treats me like I’m a fucking child or something. Ugh… one week really is about the max I can handle with this person without losing health bars, and I mean that in the nicest way possible.

One week turned into two. Two weeks turned into three. The goalpost kept moving. Her family doctor said she wanted her to see the neurologist first. “Oh, she didn’t say ‘see the neurologist’, she said ‘get an EEG’. The EEG is the next appointment.” The goalpost is the next appointment with the neurologist in Wilmington, until it turns out that’s just the consult for the EEG.

Ugh. Look. I know the healthcare system is slow, but… if there were something seriously wrong with her, wouldn’t the doctors have a little more expediency in their triage efforts? Not helping trust any was the fact that I often couldn’t go back to see the doctor with her because of COVID; so, I kinda just had to take her word for it when Susan said the doctor said he doesn’t want me to go back to Durham just yet.

The passing weeks and moving goalposts eventually led to a nightmare scenario.

I’d been talking to Kristina and my therapist in private. By now, Susan had long since taken to looking after me; she’d tell me when dinner was ready, I’d quietly try to masturbate without a vibrator in between the church bells going off loud as fuck, often failing at the task… I realize I sound like a pervert, but I really don’t do it more than a few times a week. The church bells go off at least three times a day for like fifteen minutes, right there, and I swear to whoever it seemed like it was always at the worst possible time; when I’m trying to talk on Zoom, or do the deed… Saccharine church hymns blaring right when I happen to be in the mood is so not my kink. I guess I was just used to it when I was younger.

It had become a truly miserable experience; but the point is, there was no more emergency, and there was no more need for a live-in caretaker. Susan was never going to admit it, and I was getting the impression she’d keep me until Christmas if I let her get away with it. So, I had to do it.

I had to tell her no.

And, you know what? I felt so much better, being on the other side of it. And, I doubt she was any worse off.

But, I had a lot of health bar to refill.

---

After telling Susan what was going on with me, my mental health focus took an unexpected turn toward her.

Historically, I’ve viewed my mother as a survivor. She’s been through a lot. She has a lot of mental health issues. I don’t think she had a great child herself; while I’ve often felt I have little to complain about other than my little first world gender identity problem.

From my perspective, I’ve never had a great relationship with Susan. We have little in common, she’s very religious, she’s afraid of everything, and I think she’d like to keep me in a little bubble for ever and ever if she could. I’ve kept her in my life, mainly because she’s the only real family I have; everyone else is people in different states who I probably don’t even know how to get in touch with. Our relationship feels, oftentimes, obligatory.

Susan often insinuates that I mean something much more to her. She calls me her “best friend”. She says I’m “all she has”. She longs for more closeness with me. I don’t know what’s normal. I don’t have much family in my life in general; much less another mom.

It makes me uncomfortable, but I don’t know what to do. I try and talk about it with her. She shuts down everything with her aforementioned thought-halting statements.

I feel bad for her; I really do. She never seems to have found a man, or whatever. But, what about me? I’m just this, trying to find my way in this crazy world; and I don’t even have a uterus to pop out a kid to force my relationship needs onto. If I want a family, or a long term relationship, or a sexual partner, I just have to create that. From scratch; organically, out of real, voluntary relationships I’ve managed to cultivate with like-minded people over the years. It really has been a background task throughout most of my adult life, despite my apparently lackadaisical attitude toward relationships. I’ve just had… a lot of trouble finding my dating pool, I guess.

I’ve increasingly felt like she’s “cheating” at building a family, in some sense. There’s little genuine connection present from my point of view. I feel like I’ve sort of just been brainwashed to take care of this person. She seems to have exercised an ironic and uniquely female privilege that allows one to bypass the need to build genuine, mutual connections with people. She just gets to decide to stop looking for voluntary companionship, and let the responsibility of showering her with gifts and affection fall to her “son”; the distorted role of which I don’t think I ever really stopped playing after I transitioned. She’s my problem, and I’m my problem.

To anyone else, I’d just say look at me. I like getting tied up and beaten with stuff for fun, I kinda just want somebody to fuck me but not like a gay man, dommes turn out to me into different stuff or just looking for actual men… like, I’m struggling over here. Yet, Susan seems to be the only person in my life who’s actually more pitiful than I am.

---

Susan kept asking about my “workbook”. I kept trying to explain that I didn’t have one per se, and had done nothing more than independent reading. She didn’t seem to get it.

About a month after I “escaped”, I reconnected with Erika. We’d fallen out of touch over the last few years, and she messaged me after I think having lost my number in the interim. It turned out Erika was now non-binary, and was sometimes Eric. Birds of a feather or something, I guess. I think they’d heard about my transition and subsequent polycule from Dakota or someone.

Tran of La Mancha (2021)

Q1

One of my major concerns over the last several months since the beginning of COVID, was that I really just wasn’t getting any work done.

I’d smoked a decent amount of pot in September, November, and December. I… didn’t think that was my problem.

I just couldn’t make my mind work. I blamed it on not being able to go into the office because of COVID. I’ve never been very good at working at home, and have always been more productive with an office or library to context-switch into; even if the trip would be otherwise unnecessary.

I brought this up with my therapist. I wondered if I should get tested for ADHD for something, and began to think that might be my problem. She suggested I talk with my primary care doctor.

Dr. Reid, who I’d since switched to after missing an appointment with Dr. Meier and having trouble getting rescheduled was, with a letter from my therapist, alright with just prescribing me methylphenidate to see how I did on it. She started me out with a low dose of Ritalin. This was initially helpful; but, I could soon tell I’d need a larger dose, which seemed to be expected.

---

Susan kept reeling me in to take her to various doctor’s appointments. She ostensibly still struggled to drive long distances, and agreeing to help her with this was part of my bargain for getting away from her after a mere month.

She kept on asking me “how my workbook was going”. I remember trying to cut yet another weekend with her short, and she couldn’t understand why I couldn’t stay wif uh’widdle muver just one more night… She sort of volunteered that I probably needed to “get back to my workbook”, and I was tacitly like “sure, whatever…”

I remember this happening around Valentine’s Day; and she seemed deeply resentful.

---

I had a surgery consult for SRS in March, after having done a virtual appointment with them some number of months prior.

I remember telling Susan this around Christmastime. And, I remember her telling me she couldn’t go because of work. It was just the consult anyway; she was very into being involved with the actual surgery process.

When I reminded her about my consult a week or two before, she acted as if I never told her; and did not react well. She panicked, talking to herself out loud for a bit about whether she could still go somehow with her work schedule as I thought to myself about how I’d already booked the AirBnB based on her negative response a few months back; before she ultimately concluded that no, she could not go because she had to work.

I myself had not been coordinating this trip well. I booked the accommodations at the last minute, and hadn’t planned specifics other than deciding months ago I was going to park the car in New Jersey and take the train into town to avoid the traffic.

She made a big deal about how I didn’t tell her about my trip sooner, and called me up crying about something before I was about to leave. I tried my best to console her. This woman’s feelings… ugh. It’s no wonder I decided I couldn’t be a woman “like her” when I was younger.

I made it to New York just fine without her. She got bitchy when I didn’t want to do the things she was suggesting and send her pictures. COVID was still going on; I didn’t even take all the days off work that I spent up there, and didn’t really want to do much except eat different food and drive up to Massachusetts one of the days.

Anyway, it was cool. I spent the better part of a week in New York for a 15-minute consult, but I made the best of it. Have you had actual New York bagels?

NYC Bagels in Cary is actually pretty spot on, and I certainly wouldn’t drive all the way up there for one given the alternatives; but they’re good. Real New York bagels. Maybe someone who’s from there would feel differently.

This isn’t about bagels. I’m sorry I’ve made you read all of this.

When I got home, I noticed something a little unusual: the key inserted and turned in the lock easier than I was expecting. This historically has been an indicator of Susan’s presence. I’ll explain.

I gave her a spare key to my house when I moved in; I guess because it seemed like a good idea at the time. After not even trusting her with the door to my room unlocked in my early 20s, I had… relaxed my policies with her a bit.

When she visits Durham and uses her spare key, she complains that it is nearly impossible to turn in the lock. This is a problem I’ve never been able to reproduce myself, and I feel like you’d need to have either really weak hands or be a fucking Neanderthal who can’t finesse the lock right. But, whatever.

She started bringing WD-40 with her when she comes to Durham, which she says helps her. My lock always turns real smooth for a few weeks after she visits.

So when I came back from New York and it felt like my lock turned real smooth, I had this initial feeling of panic run down my spine. Did she… do what I think she did? As quickly as the thought occurred to me, I told myself I was imagining things. We had an exceptional amount of rain while I was away, and I figured that might’ve had something to do with it. I also couldn’t convincingly reproduce the smooth turn I got when I first opened the door. I grew evermore convinced it was mere luck when I returned to my room upstairs, with all the mess and disarray from haphazardly packing still just as I left it a week ago.

I got back after dark, and hit the bed not long after taking a shower and undoubtedly having myself a smoke.³⁹

Tomorrow was Sunday; this had since become the day we did our weekly video chat, after I told my mother I was dealing with childhood trauma last summer and she handled it poorly. Every Sunday at 7pm, for like the last six or nine months or so.

At 7pm on Sunday, March 21, 2021, I had fallen asleep after getting high and watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. My phone was on silent, and I didn’t notice what had happened until about 7:45. I think I saw my phone lighting up on the table, and picked it up right away.

Susan was panicking. She had called a bunch of her friends trying to figure out what to do, and was about to call the cops if I didn’t pick up in the next 15 minutes.

45 minutes late. For a “tradition” that had gone on for no more than nine months. I can’t even say this is the first time something like this has happened.

Her side of the story is always the same. “You’re never late! This never happens!” Meanwhile, I’m left thinking to myself “this always happens; every time I give Susan anything on an even semi-recurring schedule”. I swear, this woman is absolutely unreasonable.

Oh, I almost forgot. The main reason I was late? The time had just changed, and it was still light out. You could be 45 minutes late to a video chat the day after daylight savings time and this crazy lady still would find some reason to expect the worst from your absence.

Our brief and uncomfortable video chat revived my previous concerns. She made various snarky references to the presently disheveled state of my house; but in such a way as to very thinly veil that she had just visited.

• Have you still not gotten the fireplace fixed yet, love?
• Have you not done your flower beds since I last saw you?
• Well, sometimes you just get another pizza and another pizza and another pizza box…

This reinvigorated a panic of my own. A bigger concern than the invasion of privacy itself was the gap between what my reality was, and how I knew Susan would interpret the things she found in my home out of context. When I noticed there were tissues lying around my bed, I knew she wouldn’t think I was dealing with seasonal allergies. She would think I was crying myself to sleep over my childhood sexual assault or something.

Who knows what she’d think of the toy box. It doesn’t matter, but it’s just annoying. Like, the fleshlight I bought in college to try and help with chafing from doing it other ways without a vibrator? It was a lot of hassle, I honestly didn’t really like the sensation of it, and there’s a reason I bought a Hitachi as soon as I was out of earshot of vanilla roommates. But her? I bet she thinks I masturbate with the fleshlight every night or something. How do I inform my mother of my actual sexual habits after she’s probably gotten the wrong idea by invading my privacy? I shouldn’t even have to do that, goddammit! I should just get to have a decent, normal mother like everyone else.

Oh no. The workbook. She thinks I have a…

Personal reading materials. I actually did own a copy of the text “Coping with trauma related dissociation”, which I purchased acutely aware of how weird that was, in the hopes that I might find relevance in it, what with the weird plural stuff and the…

Goddammit!

I hadn’t really even done much of anything with it, except badmouth Susan a tiny bit…

Okay. So… Susan may’ve angrily torn through my house in search of my “workbook” that was taking time away from her. And, she would’ve assumed based on placement and context that this was my “workbook”.

• Extremification (“I drink Sam Adams sometimes” → “He only drinks Sam Adams”)

I know Susan well enough that… I’m just gonna assume if Susan has looked through my things, she will assume I’ve been diagnosed with

Dissociative identity disorder.
“Multiple personalities”.

Ugh…

---

About a week after my return to North Carolina, I went to visit Susan for reasons. I think the main one was to get the COVID vaccine. I decided to work from her house that day.

It happened to be therapy day, so I did it in Susan’s living room that morning while she was at work. I don’t usually remember therapy sessions years later. But, I remember this one; partially because of the different venue, and partially because of what we talked about.

The conversation meandered between Susan, some rant about religion I managed to go on… but, somehow the conversation turned to “mysticism and magic”; and how a lot of my friends seemed to be into that? And, I kept hearing things that lent credence to the idea that there really was something to it, after being an atheist most of my adult life. I brought up the time, then a couple years ago, when Persephone was all like “You wanna know the truth about UFOs, Rachael?!” To which my therapist quickly replied

You know the truth about UFOs, right?
(beat)
Reincarnation…

Vickie’s reminder jogged my memory.

Oh, yeah! I have this friend! Uh… Heather! From… Vega!

Wow; I almost forgot. By now, I’m starting to feel like most everyone must know the truth about UFOs. I bet just about everyone who’s chill and open-minded has a friend like Heather. Hell, maybe everyone has a friend like Heather, and they just don’t know it yet. Maybe it’s really private and they don’t want to spook out religious people or something.

I got the impression that stuff was somewhat private, and felt a little bad for bringing it up. I should maybe be more careful. But at the same time, it’s not like anyone broke down any real rules for me, or vetted me or anything. It can’t be that big a deal, right?

---

When Susan got back after work, and after I had gotten my shot, she gave me a sort of belated Valentine’s Day basket or something. Among the things she really wanted to gauge my reaction to in person was this charm that read

I’d smoke my last bowl with you.

This re-reinvigorated my fluctuating anxiety that my mother really did do the unthinkable. I turned to my new friend Kristina for advice; who urged me to be wary of her while at the same time encouraging me not to give in to paranoia. “The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.”

There were a lot more minor incidents that continued rousing my suspicions. She was convinced I was crying in the bathroom stall when I took more than a couple minutes at the Chick-Fil-A.

When I noticed there were tissues around my bed, I knew she wouldn’t think I was dealing with seasonal allergies and not picking up the trash. She would think I was crying myself to sleep over my childhood sexual assault or something.

During what might’ve been our next call, she asked how my workbook was going; like that woman asked Jake from State Farm what he was wearing. And I tried, one last time to explain that “Look mom, I don’t really have a”

Your workbook!

She snapped, cutting me off mid-sentence.

At this point, I felt I had little choice but to just lean into it.

Uh… good! It’s… going well…

She seemed… very jealous of my “workbook”.

Q2

After some initial success with the Ritalin, I was switched to Concerta (which is just an extended release form of the same thing).

Working through the levels of methylphenidate, I could tell that it could be helpful when used carefully; but, it’s a drag to take every day, and I felt I was building up a tolerance pretty fast. I eventually worked up to 36-54mg of Concerta, which I quickly backed off of taking daily.

Around late May, I started getting this really weird feeling that I was on the verge of… something. Like, a breakthrough of knowledge or understanding of something really profound. It was strange. I’d elaborate, but there isn’t much point.

I went on a, likely methylphenidate-induced thought experiment binge. Judging myself now, I did have some neat ideas, but there ultimately wasn’t anything substantial, and my reasoning as a relative layperson was likely flawed in various ways.

Anyway, by mid-June I felt really weird about all of this. It was normal for me to casually think about science stuff, but not to this extent. I didn’t know what had gotten into me. Thoughts, ideas… I didn’t know where it was coming from. It didn’t really even feel like it was coming from me. It felt like I had inadvertently tapped into something. Or like, the collective consciousness had just gotten an upgrade.

For a little less than a week, I grew obsessed with various ideas of a collective consciousness. I thought that might explain what was happening to me.

It was now that, when scrolling through the front page of Reddit, I saw the thing. (paraphrasing)

Congressional UFO report to be released on Friday

And I thought, goddammit dude. It’s that.

Like, maybe some academics had early access to the report, and started learning about weird physics beyond the standard model. Then, maybe when I started daydreaming about it, I started pulling related ideas out of the collective consciousness without realizing it. It’s like… a poisoned cache entry, or something. We normally wouldn’t notice the collective consciousness, because we generally have access to similar information at a population level. We’re probably “hitting the cache” all the time without realizing it. But maybe if there’s a sudden imbalance, like the intelligentsia just learned how flying saucers work and is subsequently going nuts re-evaluating everything about the standard model at the same time…

Lots of people on Reddit were discussing various UFO theories. Extraterrestrials, breakaway civilizations, secret histories of Earth… it’s been a while, but I know it didn’t take very long before I thought to myself “Well, the truth about UFOs… that’s just reincarnation. Everyone knows that…”

I was expecting the UFO report to contain something crazy because of what was going on with me. I was a little disappointed to find that there wasn’t much of anything substantial.

Q3

I made a few, initial, seemingly logical presumptions on which to base my initial search for an explanation.

• Heather, Maureen, and my therapist knew what they were talking about when they said it was “reincarnation”. (Along with Persephone, who knows “the truth about UFOs” and “what Freemasons do” but never said the “r” word; she’s merely into Buddhism and weird shit like that.)
• Whatever the truth about UFOs actually is, way too many people seem to know it for it not to be on the internet somewhere.
• “The truth about UFOs” is related to whatever is happening to me right now. This feeling of… expanding consciousness, or whatever.

Everything that was on the internet at the intersection of UFOs and reincarnation, spirituality, etc. was absolutely bananas.

There were people talking about some kind of a “big shift”; people talking about a “5D new Earth”; some well-SEO’ed site purveying the “Law of One” with content that would make L. Ron Hubbard blush; some chick on Reddit who’s either nuts or trying to start a UFO cult; these people called “starseeds” who think they actually have souls from other planets; some weird shit about waves of volunteers…

When I saw things about a “big shift”, my initial thought was “Goddammit; it’s that! I’m… shifting or some shit!”

I hadn’t lost insight into the bizarre nature of my experience. Knowing the possibility of stimulant psychosis, I discontinued my use of the aforementioned medication. I did not discontinue my usage of cannabis.

You wanna talk about stress, you wanna talk about STRESS? Okay? I’ve stumbled onto a major company conspiracy, Mac, how about that for stress?

At some point in July, I managed to blurt out what I was dealing with to my therapist. I have a really hard time talking about things, especially something this… weird; but, I remembered that “the truth about UFOs” had recently come up in therapy a few months back. And, I remembered her unconventionally bringing up a sort of alternative shamanistic “soul retrieval” process around the fall of 2019, when I first nervously mentioned something about parts in my head. So, I figured Vickie was one of “those people” who knew “the truth about UFOs”; and, whatever it meant for people like me.

I didn’t get it out of me until the end of the session. I remember I felt very paranoid during this period; I was all but jumping at my own shadow on the wall. I forget what all I blurted out. There wasn’t much time, and I’m really private.

The next session, Vickie basically opens by telling me

I’m so glad you know about the big shift!

I’m so glad you know about the 5D new Earth!

Do you know about the Law of One?

So, I’m thinking, “phew… I guess that… is right?” I really don’t know. I just know “it’s reincarnation”, and I have no idea how to fill in the gaps.

Woah, dude. This is a lot to process. I started to remember the stuff about Heather. I always wondered how she found out she was “from Vega”, or whatever. I guess… this is it? Your shit just starts breaking down, and yadda yadda or something?

I was freaking out. I didn’t know what to do. “You know about souls, and shamanism and stuff, right?! What do I do?!”

Over the next few months, I pieced together all the weird stuff about Freemasons and UFOs that had happened to me throughout my life. There was one thing, though, that stuck out: the shark people.

It’s what we were talking about, right before everyone at the table got really weird and Tommy pulled me out of the activity building at that dinner a long time ago. Remember? It was the first time Susan realized the sharks were shark people. And everyone started acting sketchy when I started describing them, and the round room and the metal table…

Holy shit, dude. What was I; abducted by aliens?

How many times have I been abducted by space aliens?! Is it just the one time? Dude, what about the time I woke up locked out of the house as a kid? I woke up outside to the neighbor lady shaking me awake. She said she saw a bright light. We had to knock on the door for a while for my parents to open it, ’cause they didn’t initially realize it was me trying to get back in. Didn’t that happen again like a month later, except I woke up by myself?

And goddammit, what about that time in middle school? I woke up outside with the chain lock still on the door. I let myself in through the back window that wouldn’t close all the way on account of the RG-8. I didn’t think too much of it, but it was one hell of an unsolved mystery how I managed to sleepwalk my way into the church parking lot with the doors still chain locked and dead bolted. I’d argue its neigh impossible; but I was too much of a skeptic at that age. There was an extra-wide two post rack with a bunch of junk and wiring piled up around the window, and it was a challenge to climb in and out without making a mess while awake. Dammit, if only I’d have considered…

Okay. So that’s… three alien abductions? At least, right? Goddammit, what the fuck is this all about?

Vickie referred me to her friend Doris the Shaman. Everyone was still doing COVID protocols, so we met over Zoom.

Doris needed my address so she could… locate me psychically, I guess? She purported to do various things over the next 90 minutes or so. I think she… temporarily grabbed my soul into a teddy bear so she could do things with it in person? Removed a reptilian that was attached to me by pulling it out of my crown chakra? Gave me a sort of psychic protection? Suggested I start burning sweetgrass and sage my house? I wouldn’t have taken it seriously at all if it weren’t for the weird shit going on with me…

Oh, right. The biggest, overarching thing might’ve been toward the beginning, when she proclaimed

You’re different. You’re not from here. I’m not either.

I guess this meant I was… a starchild or something? I had a lot of questions. We spent some amount of time trying to figure out where I was from, before settling on Arcturus.

I kept talking about my experiences to my therapist. I had the feeling of being able to see shadow-like figures in my periphery and sometimes head-on, especially while I was about to go to sleep and after meditating for several minutes. It felt like I was getting messages in my head. My therapist and I used the word “download” to describe the sensation.

I hadn’t lost insight into how weird this was. At the same time, I couldn’t deny what was happening to me. My paranoia began to relax after my talk with Doris convinced me I wasn’t in any imminent danger.

This company is being bled like a stuck pig, Mac, and I got a paper trail to prove it; check this out

After having seemingly been dubbed a starchild or whatever, I proceeded on this sort of quixotic adventure to figure out what it meant to be a reincarnated space alien. I mean, this shouldn’t be hard, right? Aren’t, like, half my friends into this stuff?

I was only missing one thing.

Sancho.

---

I started keeping a handwritten journal of my thoughts and experiences during this time. It was a few weeks after that when I made a series of connections that led me to yeet my phone across the room in excitement.

Facts about Anthony Kiedis

• From space to teach you of the Pleiades
• Part of an unstoppable wave
• Would seem to be into sex magick
• Rose to fame after covering Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground”, a 70s funk song about reincarnation
• Has other songs referencing reincarnation, weird spirituality, and maybe even UFOs (I won’t enumerate them, but they are pretty egregious.)

Naturally, I started remembering my bizarre history with the 90’s rock band, which I was never really even that big a fan of to begin with. The floor seats, those weird people who were sitting around me, that conversation I had with Heather back in 2016…

Q4

After a couple months of this, I really needed to talk to someone other than my therapist.

I considered Persephone, since she seemed to know a lot about this stuff before. The thing about that is, Persephone had increasingly proven herself to be “problematic” within the greater trans community; I’ve never had a falling out with her, but it seems most of my friends have. She’s just a little “BPD” and can be a bit of a control freak.

At this point, it seemed like a lot of my friends were into “mysticism and magic”; whatever that was. It seemed like maybe I didn’t have to go to Persephone; at least not right away.

I had a little bit of a crush on Stephanie for some reason, and started inviting her over to watch stuff on the weekends. It was late into 2021, but things still felt pretty COVIDey. I knew she was into… mysticism, magic, shamanism… whatever all that weird shit was that I apparently needed to get my head around.

At one point, she was flipping through memes on her phone; and stopped to laugh at one making light of the recent UFO report. It seemed to be poking fun at the apparent gap in knowledge between practitioners of mysticism and magic and the general public.

This emboldened me to proposition Stephanie, based on the information or lack thereof I had at this point in time.

#snipWell… I was going to paste what I sent, but I’m afraid I deleted it. I doubt I wanted to remember the part where I told Stephanie I figured out I was a reincarnated space alien from Arcturus, or a starseed or whatever. Ugh. I understand why I did that, but I kinda wish I hadn’t now.

We kind of started quasi-dating; in a situation somewhat comparable to what happened with April, because we’re both bottoms.

It felt good, having Stephanie to talk to as I started remembering more and more crazy shit. It pretty quickly became clear that Stephanie didn’t really know anything about UFOs; but she was into this stuff, and seemed willing to lend an ear.

I made this sort of seamless transition; from finding some really weird shit on the internet when my brain was doing crazy stuff, to thinking what I really needed to explore was comparatively “mainstream” mysticism, magic, esoteric occult stuff. This felt a little more palatable, at least; and, a bunch of my friends are into it for some reason, right?

I set out to the internet, to look up… I don’t know, the subreddits for mysticism, magick with a funny spelling weirdos use… I quickly found a reading list of about half a dozen things to get started exploring the subject matter.

One of these texts was titled “the Kybalion”: a public-domain work released under mysterious circumstances around the turn of the 20^th century, seemingly associated with the poorly-aged theosophic and “new thought” movements.

By the time I finished reading the first page of “the Kybalion”, I knew I had read it before. Like, a really long time ago. I don’t even have to look this thing up again to remember the line “if indeed man he was”. Where on Earth have I seen this before?

Oh, shit.

This is the thing Tommy had me read. When he pulled me aside after confirmation class that one time, remember? He gave me that slip of paper? He told me not to tell anyone, but I told Josh anyway?

Uhh…

The Wikipedia page. That same fucking picture with the green cover, that says it’s from the “masonic press” or whatever. I remember looking it up in middle school. I’m sure the article has changed somewhat, but they’re using the same fucking Wikipedia picture.⁴⁰

I kept looking through it. All those different laws. The law of correspondence. The law of gender. That one was so weird. I remember reading that in middle school and thinking, “Uhh? Does he know I’m trans somehow? Is that related?”

Something that really stuck out to me in this text, which I still don’t think I’ve more than skimmed all these years later, was the so-called “law of correspondence”; summarized by the adage “as above, so below”.

I was convinced that Tommy and I were related by this mystical law; because, we were both coincidentally born in Warren, Ohio. We both happen to be born far away but from the same place; we both made our way along our separate paths, until we met in the small town of Elizabethtown… to cross paths there, against all odds. Applying this axiom to my present situation would suggest that Tommy and I are from the same place, in more ways than one.

I began to remember the discussion that happened in elementary school, when Tommy first came to our church. It was me, my mom, Tommy, Terry, the Stewarts… Tommy said he was from somewhere.

This is what I remembered; decades later.

• Freemasons. They started talking about Freemasons, and they seemed a little “on the down low” about it. Terry was a Freemason.
• Tommy. He said he’s from “the Pleiades”. I remember it now. That’s the place.
• Jody. She said she was from Vega. I remember it. Jody and Doug knew about this stuff, but Jody was the one that’s different. Shit.

Phew. Deep breath.

Okay. So, Tommy had me read this in middle school. I suppose I’m that much further behind on learning it, first of all.

So… he knows. About the reincarnation, and the UFOs, the Heather people…

Shit. So, what do I…

That right there is the mail. Now let’s talk about the mail. Can we talk about the mail, please, Mac? I’ve been dying to talk about the mail with you all day, OK?

I didn’t have Tommy’s phone number, and I hate social networking. I didn’t really want to ask Susan for it, because she’s fucking nosy. I don’t think I spent more than a few days thinking about it before I just decided

What if I show up for Sunday service? Just drive over there to Cary and see what happens. He’s still at Cary, right?

This might’ve been the strangest part yet: my atheist skeptic ass anxiously looking forward to Sunday morning. Maybe I’ll get some answers about what I should do next.

I attended Cary United Methodist Church on what happened to be All Saints’ Day.

Today’s scripture reading is from Revelation chapter 21, verses 1 through 7

Then I saw “a new heaven and a new Earth,”…

Wait, did she just say “a new Earth”? Like all that weird 5D new Earth stuff I found online?

Uhh… Maybe it’s a coincidence? (I didn’t particularly think so at the time.)

I went up for communion. He walked down and gave me a hug.

Okay. He knows I’m here.

He seemed really excited to see me. He later remarked that he’s never left church to go home so fast. I followed him home, and Nancy made us lunch.

He definitely seems like he’s excited, beyond just wanting to catch up. But, nothing’s happening. Is he gonna make the first move, or should I…

It felt like we were exchanging innuendo at the time, but nothing overt was happening. I obviously wanted to talk about UFOs and that time he had me read the Kybalion for confirmation class, but I never got a moment alone with the guy. And, you’d think he’d make it easy, right?

We exchanged numbers. At least I can contact him easily now.

Eventually, we made our way to the couch, and I think Nancy ultimately asked the big question.

So, why did you come to visit us?

I dropped one final hint at Tommy about not being sure if we were all “on the same wavelength”, before going into a frank yet sanitized version of the last several months; free of UFOs and explicit mentions of reincarnation.

Well, I actually left the church not long after I went off to college. But, I started going through this spiritual awakening earlier this summer. I’ve had to face some difficult facts about myself, but the reality is, I can’t deny the fact that you don’t really die when you die; and, I’m having to contend with the reality that atheism is simply not correct.

There may’ve been a couple shots across the bow about how Tommy doesn’t believe in hell, and how he’s got Nancy not believing in hell. It wasn’t after much more conversation that Tommy left me with Nancy, as he had to leave to teach confirmation class. I resisted cracking any jokes about whether he’s had any of those kids read the Kybalion.

I talked with Nancy a few more minutes before driving back to Durham.

As I returned home and reflected on what just happened, a couple less obvious things stood out about the service.

Tommy used a seemingly unusual appellation “Jesus the Christ” in part of the bulletin, and correspondingly part of the service. First of all, this seemed to match up with a lot of the weird, esoteric stuff I had read lately; referring to Jesus as “the Christ”, as opposed to using Christ as a pseudo-last name as would seem to be the norm in mainstream Christianity.

More importantly, this awakened a core memory. That weird church service Tommy wanted me to pay close attention to. I think it was the same one, at least. Was it… yeah, I think it was All Saint’s Day. In, like, 2005 or something. Because, Emma wasn’t there, and my Junior year would’ve been too late.

I remember Tommy making a somewhat bigger deal out of All Saint’s Day than he usually did back then; and we did an unusual joint youth group with both Tommy and Paula Conner for the next session. I remember him asking if we noticed anything unusual or different about the service. And I mentioned it; Jesus the Christ? I saw that in the bulletin. That seemed a little unusual…

There was more. It was the scripture reading, which I had done. We talked about that, too. I remember Tommy making a somewhat peculiar point at that youth group; that as the preacher, he got to chose what went in the service – and what stayed out. It was that last part that he wanted us to reflect on; where he cut off the scripture reading, which I had read. The very next verse was all about hell and damnation; I remember it very clearly condemning “the sexually amoral”, “practitioners of magic arts” and “all liars”.

It felt so familiar. That scripture reading. Wait…

I actually pulled my old Bible out of the closet.

⁸But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.

It was this! He had me read this for the scripture reading! The same thing, some fifteen years ago! I mean, the exact same verses, cut off right before all that fire and brimstone bullshit.

Shit, dude.

Okay. So… he had me read the Kybalion in middle school, he had me do this scripture reading and made a big point about how he could just “nix” the part in the Bible where it talks about gays and magic people going to hell…

If I recall, it took a month or more for the really big one. Like, December.

Fuuuuuuuu…
…
…uuuuuuuuck

The sermon. It was me.

That woman. The one in her early 30s. She was dealing with childhood sexual trauma, she had “multiple personalities”, her mom was problematic and kept invading her privacy…

It was me.

I… became her.

Fuuuuuuuuck

And, all those people, who went very out of their way to surround me and tell me they loved me afterward.

Didn’t Jody call me some weird girl’s name? Shit, I think it might’ve been…

Fuck.

Okay. So, lots of church people know. Well, not lots. Like, The Stewarts and the Richardsons and maybe the Mitchells. And, well… Tommy.

What are they? Like, Freemasons? Occultists? Starseeds? Dude, what?

How do they know? The same way weird shit just started happening to me, I guess? They have visions and stuff? Visions of the future, like people from the Old Testament or some shit?

Dude. What?

---

I had remembered more about Heather too. She seemed to know things about me from the future back when we talked in 2016, just like that crazy old man Tommy. And, I remembered her saying something about a concert. She said I’d be really cool when I was older, but I wasn’t ready yet. Or… something.

I checked to see if there were any Red Hot Chili Peppers concerts in the near future.

My fucking birthday? This is too good to be true!

---

The insanity of the second half of the year had since widened the distance between Kristina and I. “Star Buffy” was essentially on hiatus by this point.

#TODOCan I not end a document with message bubbles?

Boxes full of Pepe (2022)

Q1

My relationship with Susan rapidly deteriorated after the new year.

I was, at this point, certain that she snooped around my house while I was away in New York. She simply revealed herself to know way too much about changes (or lack thereof) in the state of my property.

I’d talked about the issue at length with Kristina and my therapist. Vickie thought it unlikely she would ever admit to having done it, unless maybe I simply told her that I knew she did it.

I was waffling as to how I should proceed, and was a bit preoccupied with the whole Freemason-UFO thing. Susan forced my hand when she basically invited herself over early in January; at which point I had little choice but to tell her “no” in no uncertain terms.

I did the necessary during our little weekly call I’d better not forget about. I told her I knew she did it; and that I didn’t feel comfortable with her coming to my house.

The acronym “DARVO” stands for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender”. It’s a neologism in the self-help community for the sort of abuse often reflexively spewed out by people with certain personality-disordered traits.

I can’t write a blockquote encapsulating everything Captain DARVO said, or rather screamed, over the next fifteen minutes or so. This’ll have to do as an approximation.

You’re so STUPID!
How could you DO this to me!
I’m your MOTHER!

One thing was certain after our chat; she definitely did it. I struck a nerve.

I had a rough time with this. I want to believe Susan; I really do. I’m afraid this person might just be a pathological liar; a phrase I first learned in elementary school as my parent’s marriage was beginning to fail. I’m afraid it might just be impossible to have an honest relationship with this person.

#TODOI should probably backfill more about Susan; but I probably won’t for a while because this is about UFOs.

---

By the new year, the last few months had been a whirlwind of bizarre, unexpected insights into something that was different about me; the exact nature of which still seemed to elude me. I was relieved by the idea that I at least wasn’t the only person going through this; but, it had been a few months since I talked to Doris, and the situation had grown to the point that I really needed to figure out what I was supposed to do. No, I don’t mean sageing my house or burning palo santo. I mean, what is it I’m actually supposed to do here?

My therapist had encouraged me to seek out groups that were into this, uh… sort of thing. I compiled a small list in the fall, but never went to any of them; there was a lot happening in my head, really fast.

I kept remembering more about the woman from the sermon; who actually appeared to be me. I remembered that a lot of the congregation was moved, and wanted to help her. As more came to me I thought, wasn’t there a bunch of money raised for this woman or something?

Shit, what am I even supposed to…

I kept seeing Stephanie on the weekends. She wasn’t able to provide much useful advice, but was into this stuff and had an ex who was ostensibly a medium. She was one of the people at Philly back in 2019 when Persephone had that weird talk with us. She also had an uncle who was a Freemason; though he never talked to Stephanie about what he did.

The talk with Tommy made me feel better; but I needed to see other people.

I needed to talk to Heather.

Smooth move, Ex-lax.

Pepe Silvia, this name keeps coming up over and over again. Every day Pepe’s mail is getting sent back to me. Pepe Silvia! Pepe Silvia! I look in the mail, and this whole box is Pepe Silvia!

---

I had a doctor’s appointment in mid-February; I believe it was the first one since Triangle Comprehensive Care was bought by Avery Primary Care during COVID times. I had put off going in person when I could get away with telehealth, and hadn’t had any problems that required going in.

I’d done labs beforehand, and hadn’t really paid attention to them other than to see that my hormones were normal. The first thing Dr. Reid wanted to talk to me about was

Your vitamins, Rachael. How much B12 do you take?

I was taken aback, because I’d never brought up the fact that I take vitamin B12. So I’m thinking “Oh shit, what’d I do?”

I started taking vitamin B12 several years ago before I transitioned. I’d felt off for months in numerous vague, non-specific ways, and I found that taking a multivitamin seemed to make me feel better. I wanted to try narrowing down exactly what was making me feel better, and arrived at vitamin B12.⁴¹ I was a little surprised to find it actually seemed to help; but as time went on, I second guessed myself and assumed I was probably just chasing ghosts.

Several months after I stopped taking it, the same feelings came back. I reflected on what changed, and decided to try B12 again; only to find the symptoms gone again a few months later.

I repeated this process a few times, before ultimately concluding that maybe I should just take vitamin B12. It’s a water-soluble vitamin that’s harmless in excess.

Anyway, Dr. Reid said my vitamin B12 level was too high. I didn’t think that was possible, but I’m not a doctor; granted, it was an order of magnitude above the reference level. I figured this was because I took a sublingual B12 right before I left home for my blood draw.

After learning my doctor was checking it, I decided to stop taking it once and for all. If I really did have a problem I supposed we’d find it.

Simultaneous with finding that my vitamin B12 was too high, she also pointed out that my vitamin D was low. I saw this as an attempt to show me how much better I’d feel if I actually took the right shit; or something.

Seems fine. She prescribed me vitamin D to pick up at the pharmacy. It was a something-thousand IU pill that you only took once a week. It may’ve made me feel a little better. She didn’t prescribe more once I took the course.

---

More kept coming to me. I felt like I was on some sort of path. I felt like I had some purpose or destiny to realize; and had the feeling of experiencing visions or revelations, for lack of a better word. I thought I was meant to start an experimental community, become the president of a new breakaway state, and get assassinated at exactly 12:26pm on Friday, May 8^th 2026 before continuing on through countless subsequent lifetimes.

I was acutely aware of the optics of doing anything that would look like “starting a UFO cult”. And yet, I couldn’t deny how overpowering all this stuff in my head was.

I decided to engage Tommy for the first time since my surprise visit last fall.

With the Heather connection still a bit up in the air and the ball now in Tommy’s court, it was only a matter of time before I reached out to Persephone.

Followed shortly after by

---

I thought the Freemasons were going to show up to my house and take me to an initiation ceremony. These messages showed up in my head that I was supposed to get in the car with Terry and Tommy, who wouldn’t be able to say anything. They’d ask me some questions, I guess to prove that the things in my head were genuine, and at the end I was supposed to curtsy.

A week or so later, a very loud message in my head told me to bow, not curtsy. I guess that first part was a joke?

Though I was optimistic this was a sign we were about to do “the thing”, this would actually be the last time I’d get anything out of Tommy for over two months.

Somewhere in the midst of this, I grew utterly convinced that Terry commissioned Josh’s artist-mother to paint a portrait of me practicing my curtsy in my room; something these people were ostensibly able to remotely view through occult means, despite the physical isolation.

I told Kristina around the middle of March. She was outwardly supportive; but, I could also tell she was a little skeptical, and would want to see the receipts sooner rather than later.

Things were starting to feel a little hit-and-miss. My therapist, Doris, and Persephone made me feel like I was on the right track. I was initially thrown off by Persephone saying she “didn’t know much about Freemasonry” in our Discord conversation; but this seemed to mimic the Freemason’s “Simon says” rules I’d been exposed to over the years, yet failed to retain accurately. After Josh appeared ignorant in this last conversation, I briefly held strong in the belief that this would all clear up over the next few weeks.

My capacity to get any work done had only gotten worse since last year’s pre-UFO problems. Somewhere in here, I briefly started taking my ADHD medication again, after having not taken it for around nine months.

She thought she read minds, she was not right (Q2)

Somewhere around the winter or early spring, the Red Hot Chili Peppers connection took a turn. Where I previously thought it was just some sort of an in-joke that Anthony Kiedis was one of the different people or something, I grew convinced there was some personal connection. I thought I remembered visiting Tony, who I was now on a first name basis with, in April of 1990 as an unborn spirit or something. I thought there was going to be some kind of a special SNL where I’d be in the audience. I was to catch a flight, meet the chauffeur, and then meet “Tony”; all based on intuition and these messages that were showing up in my head. Or… something.

I started getting all this weird stuff in my head about how I actually had a future with Anthony Kiedis; someone I’ve never exactly fantasized about or been attracted to.

I still believed I was generally on the right track, but I desperately needed a sort of help that seemed to keep eluding me. I hoped Stephanie would know more, but she didn’t. Then, I couldn’t get Heather’s attention through our mutual friend. Persephone made me feel better, but had little practical advice. And, that’s what I needed. Practical, concrete advice. What is it I’m actually supposed to be doing?

Frustrated that Tommy kept blowing off my attempts to meet with him, I eventually just went for it in a message he never responded to.

Although it didn’t strike me as problematic at the time, it was probably somewhere around here when Vickie and I started losing each other. The problem with me is, I have a really hard time with disclosure. I need to really think about telling someone before I tell someone. There are reasons for this.

So I say to myself I gotta find this guy, I gotta go up to his office, I gotta put his mail IN the guy’s goddamn hands otherwise he’s never gonna get it he’s gonna keep coming back down here

At some point, the rate of information flooding into my brain began exceeding the rate at which I could comfortably relate the information to people in my support network, like Stephanie and my therapist. Vickie was still talking about the “big shift”, when I was already twenty steps ahead of that. I was painfully aware of how much the new stuff in my head about Anthony Kiedis looked like classic delusions of reference; and I didn’t want to scare off Stephanie, or make my therapist jump to conclusions.

---

I kept waiting, weekend after weekend, for the Freemasons to show up and take me away. Somehow I kept moving the goalpost. It feels utterly ridiculous now.

During a Sunday chat with Susan, I brought up the Warren, Ohio connection with my mom, just to test my memory and make sure I hadn’t lost it. I mean, that is pretty crazy, right?

Tommy was born in Warren too, right?

That’s right! Tommy was born in Warren, Ohio; and so was Dave Grohl!

Oh, yeah! I forgot about Dave Grohl! That’s probably just a coincidence.

Wait, what’s his band called again? The fucking Foo Fighters?

God. Dammit.

In a desperate attempt to reach out to another “UFO kid”, I sent a letter to Heather’s last known address; as well as the Grand Lodge of Ancient, Free and Accepted Masons of North Carolina. I forget what all I put in there, but I know it didn’t make much sense. I’ll spoil the surprise now by telling you I never got back any sort of response from either.

I was convinced I’d somehow roused the suspicion of my mail-person, and left them a weird goddamn note. I got a weird response back about how someone else was running the route and to enjoy my trip; a reference to my weird visions about being in the audience for SNL.

Near the end of the month, I had in my mind what felt like the equivalent of Morpheus telling me to jump off the ledge of the building.

Send a letter to your closest friends and family. Deadline, this Friday (or something).

I fucking did it. I sent weird handwritten letters to Josh and my mother, with similar content but a customized cover letter. On, like, the last Friday in April or something; barely meeting this imposing, ostensibly very serious deadline. With all that weird shit, including my anticipated assassination at 12:26pm on whatever day.

So, what happened?

---

The SMS thread with my mother during the same timespan was considerably more spartan.

By this point, I had a feeling that I can only imagine is akin to that of a bomb tech after they pull the plunger and nothing happens. I felt I needed to defuse this situation, very carefully.

I attempted to ask, while making it sound like the most boring, banal thing ever, if anyone had talked to her recently about Freemasons or reincarnation or anything. I honestly can’t remember if I mentioned UFOs or not.

Unsurprisingly, Susan didn’t seem to know anything about what was going on. Already assuming that would be the case, I attempted to find a way to get in touch with Jody; as I had since ascertained she was from Vega, as well as being one of the people who surrounded me after Tommy’s weird sermon.

In retrospect, it seemed like we were both dismantling a bomb. Susan said she’d talk to Jody, but she never did. My letter to her had apparently gotten lost in the mail.

The weirdest part might be how Susan just kept going through the motions in our already hollow relationship.

It turned out that, in my addled state, I used the wrong zip code.

It was at this point that Josh gave me a chance to catch up and take my mind off things for a while.

I showed up wearing my shirt I’d gotten from the Flying Saucer when I joined the “UFO club” years ago; still hoping to coax something out of him. He had this hurt-ass look on his face when he first saw me. I still thought he might know more than he was letting on at the time, mostly because of his grave expression; but I really don’t think that’s the case anymore.

I tried to explain what had happened and how I ended up at this point in my life; but I struggled to make coherent sense without linking against a vast amount of information that I’m painfully private about. I couldn’t explain the Tommy stuff without going back all the way to middle school, I couldn’t really explain how I knew Heather and Maureen without explaining I was a kinkster, I couldn’t explain how I thought I was the woman from this sermon without talking about the aforementioned trauma bullshit… it was like the fucking Sweater Song. I tried my best, but I could tell Josh was really struggling with the gaps in information I was hesitant to fill in.

We enjoyed the concert, though.

At one point toward the end, I kind of just started crying. He clearly didn’t know anything about UFOs; but he made me feel better than anyone had up to that point.

---

It was on the eve of Friday the 13^th, when I started envisioning something that had happened to me in a past life. It was… Friday the 13^th.

Just to reiterate, I don’t believe any of this anymore. It felt very real at the time.

It was revealed to me that, in ancient times long ago, UFO people like me and Heather lived openly among the people. As we began to spook out the Romans, that led to, well… Friday the 13^th; a pogrom against us UFO folks, carried out by the then-fledgling Catholic Church, which may as well have been the religious branch of the Roman imperial government.

I remembered living in a village in modern-day France, as I watched them build this prison up on a hill where they were eventually to house us different people upon its completion. As the Romans’ objective was to discourage us from incarnating on Earth in the future, they were to torture us over the course of a year or two before killing us off and rounding up the next group of UFO people.

Because of the nature of visions and past life memories, we were all aware of our fate by adolescence. I lived into my late 20s or early 30s before being taken; a (cisgender) man who never married but had, unlike myself, a normal and average sex life. I lived in a small dwelling on a steep hill, that I think was connected to other dwellings in townhouse-like fashion. It was comparable in size to my dorm room at Avent Ferry, maybe a bit smaller. I spoke Latin and was able to write, keeping a journal on a desk. I was surprised by the sophistication given the time period, though formal education appeared to be the norm for “UFO kids”, or whatever.

I had actually been someone else in a lifetime before this; the Roman senator who arguably caused the deboggle. I ostensibly ran for the Roman senate and won handily on a platform of being a common-sense progressive from the Pleiades.⁴² The establishment found this disruptive and threatening to their power, leading to the aforementioned pogrom.

Anyway; I thought I was the Roman senator who caused Friday the 13^th, who subsequently got Friday the 13th’ed. Extending the story arc further, I was concurrently envisioning that I had a multi-lifetime career in politics; once serving as a well-liked president of my entire homeworld. I would “remember” more about this over the following months.

Most of what I remembered on the eve of Friday the 13^th was about the thing itself. They came for us on, well… you know the day. This woman rounded up about half a dozen of us, and we rode up the hill to the prison on this wagon. I remember us being in weirdly high spirits. One of the people on the wagon was apparently the preincarnation of Heather.

We arrived at the prison. I remembered it having an L shaped corridor, and I was placed into I believe the first cell; all of which were on the left side of the hallway. We were housed in individual rooms, about 10’ square with a small view and a hole for waste to go, which would roll downhill.

The prison was run by this woman, who I called the “warden chick” in my head. She was not very sadistic, and maybe even a bit childlike. She did diligently remove an arm, a leg, an eyeball, and my dick and balls over the course of my stay. Despite this, she was never particularly mean to us in terms of her demeanor. It was actually a pretty surreal thing to remember; and not what I would expect my subconscious to come up with.

We were eventually killed off after around 12 to 18 months of this. I remember a higher-up official coming to our prison periodically to check on us; who was later dissatisfied with what he viewed as too kind of treatment. We were the guinea pigs; which seemed to be a good thing in this case. I heard reports that they started cutting people open at another prison.

I was killed by being stabbed in the chest. My friend, the preincarnation of Heather was beheaded. I remembered something peculiar about that moment; despite having grown up with her, I never asked where she was from. This came up during our final words, when the executioner proclaimed that he was about to “send us back to wherever we’re from”.

---

Back to the SMS thread with Susan.

Hold up; what? That’s my number! The exact time I’m supposed to die, or whatever.

Okay; she has to know, right? She’s at least in on something. Sure, she texts “I love you” every day, but it’s almost always at night. Not precisely at 12:26pm on Friday the 13^th, right as I’m dealing with this fucking shit.

Alright, you crazy old men. I can take a hint.

Liam’s birthday was today, so I went over there after work to hang out with him and Kristina. I remember trying to make conversation with Kristina and one of her friends that was there, but I was frazzled and not good for much of anything. I was somewhere else in my mind.

Continuing on with Susan.

Somewhere around now, likely during our Sunday chat, Susan said she thought I should “get my meds checked”. To which I replied something like

Okay… I can tell I’ve taken a wrong turn. I’ll… talk to my doctor.

I explained that I had stopped taking my ADHD medication, which I foolishly told her I had started a year back. She… didn’t like this.

YOU’RE NOT JUST SUPPOSED TO STOP TAKING STUFF, YOU NEED TO TALK TO YOUR DOCTOR!

And I’m thinking goddamn, woman. They’re fucking stimulants. I stopped taking them because I was worried about what was happening to me. Now she’s all freaked out and wants to get doctors involved, and I just want to know how to be a UFO person like Heather and them. How does Heather know how to be a Heather? Why won’t anyone teach me how to be a Rachael? GODDAMN IT, TALK TO ME PEOPLE!

It was now that Susan just decided to drive up to Durham without notice to take me to “get my meds checked”. My initial response was “Hell no!” We need to slow down. I haven’t lost insight into how crazy this is. It’s real. This is happening. I’ve got my therapist, and Persephone, and Doris the Shaman, and I know Heather and Tommy and them can’t talk to me yet but… we’ll sort this out soon, right?

Goddamn it.

I was firm in my stance that she was no longer allowed in my house, and thus she rented a hotel room nearby. I met her at the Chubby’s and we talked for a bit. I was understandably nervous about Susan clawing her way into my healthcare needs.

After thinking about what was going on, I reached the conclusion that Susan wasn’t in town for a med check. She was in town for a “med check”. Since she sent the text at exactly 12:26pm on Friday the 13^th, she has to know something; but she can’t talk yet, just like the rest of them. I guess I just have to play along. I actually started getting the impression that I should go if someone showed up to my house wanting to take me to get my meds checked.

Susan subsequently “arranged” for us to meet with Tommy. I say that with quotes; because, while Susan essentially forced this meeting to take place, she made it my responsibility to arrange a venue and chauffeur her to and from the hotel.

I arrived at Cocoa Cinnamon, utterly overwhelmed with both excitement and frustration. I could tell Susan was freaked out; despite her own very big emotions, she really doesn’t like it when I get emotional, and frantically tries to pacify me. I just wanted to get to the bottom of what this crazy old man Tommy was trying to tell me all those years ago.

As for me, I didn’t know what was going on. I was slow to be reassured Susan wasn’t somehow in on it on some level, especially after that weird text on Friday the 13^th at 12:26pm. If she didn’t know what was going on, I assumed Terry or Tommy must’ve at least put her up to it.

I couldn’t contain myself by the time Tommy showed up. I remember greeting him, saying something like

I don’t know if my convictions will have me sent to the masonic lodge or the psych ward; but I think I’m from the Pleiades, and I think you are too you crazy old man!

He dodged my question. And kept dodging it. He wouldn’t say “No, I’m not from the Pleiades”. He wouldn’t say “Sorry, I don’t understand the question”. He’d just say shit like “Let’s get drinks first”, or just start talking about something totally different from my very blunt and direct questions about Freemasons, UFOs, being from other planets…

It was the weirdest fucking thing ever. Just say you aren’t from the Pleiades and I’ll leave you alone. Hell, just tell me I’m not making any sense and I’ll go away. But goddamn it dude, why do you have to be such a goddamn sketchball?

What. The. Fuck.

I left feeling like I must be right about something; because if I was wrong he would’ve just told me. I’m clearly being strung along. For what purpose I haven’t got a clue; but, I’m starting to get the feeling it has to do with that little thing I caused in a past life called Friday the 13^th.

---

On what might’ve been the very next day, I was listening to music in my room. I was a little faded, when I slid off my headphones after a music break and heard a loud banging at the door.

(knock knock knock)
DURHAM POLICE DEPARTMENT
(knock knock knock)

So I panic, and think about what to do with the Volcano and the half ounce on my dresser. I couldn’t hear the police at all with my headphones on. For all I knew, they’d been there for the last twenty minutes announcing they had a search warrant.

After quickly trying to channel the Pot Brothers at Law, I decided I should step outside and talk to them; but, I was planning to be real careful and lock the door behind me. Nobody gets in without a warrant.

We’re here to take you to get your meds checked…

God. Dammit.

Okay, sure. I’ll go without any trouble. I was wearing my pajamas, and they offered to let me go back in and change. I probably needed my ID, too.

After carefully unlocking the door to do the aforementioned things, this son of a bitch wedges his foot in. Now I have warrantless cops in my house despite my best efforts.

Goddammit, I fucking hate cops. Pieces of shit.

They offered to follow me upstairs to where I’d been smoking pot so that I could change and get ready. No.

I put on a pair of jeans that were laying out downstairs as the cops kept the door wide open. Pieces of shit. I know it’s their little bad boy protocol, but I fucking hate cops. I wish they’d just leave people like me alone. They’ve done nothing but fuck with me while I try to survive in this crazy world and mind my own goddamn business my whole life. They exist for the comfort of normal people, and they don’t give a fuck about people like me. Goddamn it, I fucking hate cops.

I left braless and sockless with a cardigan over my frumpy tank top. The cops asked me uncomfortable questions as they drove me to Duke Regional.

Your mom says you won’t let her in your house.

My mother is presumed to have borderline personality disorder, I have reason to believe she’s been snooping around my house without my permission while I’m away, and I’ve told her she isn’t welcome because of it.

What’s this about you having an altar? #TODOBackfill

My spiritual beliefs are none of your concern.

He apparently wanted to make sure I wasn’t… sacrificing animals, or something.

We waited at Duke for some amount of time before I was handed off to the hospital staff. The police were respectful overall, but goddamn it, I fucking hate cops.

And yet, with everything in the news I have little to complain about.

They asked for my side of the story, and I gave them my elevator speech. Mom presumed to have a personality disorder, I’m dealing with trauma and things, she’s not taking it well…

They got me into a gown and put me in a safe little room with the few belongings I had taken away from me, before they asked the big question.

So, what’s this about you thinking you’re an alien?

I took a deep breath, and tried to explain what was happening in the most collected, logical way I could muster.

So, I know this sounds really weird, but I’m just different in a way that Freemasons know about. I know I’m not physically an alien; it isn’t like that. You can call the Grand Lodge of North Carolina, give them my name, tell them I sent you and they’ll explain everything.

I might be over-extending myself with that last part; but I’ve just got to keep my confidence up at this point. I don’t know where else to send them. Doris the shaman?

I was there for close to eight hours. Initially, they seemed bent on figuring out what crazy drugs I was on before seemingly deciding I wasn’t worth their time. For example, they had me pee in a cup, but hadn’t collected the sample by the time I left. They took my blood, and gave me a potassium supplement because it was apparently low. I remember thinking, “I take 200mg of spironolactone a day, isn’t that like, contraindicated or something?” Judging by the gown I was wearing I was in no position to argue with anyone; and the nurse waited for me to swallow the pill like I was in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest. I figured one potassium supplement wouldn’t kill me.

I laid on the hospital bed most of the time, not watching the Hallmark Channel. The woman I saw first, who seemed to be an MD, at least appeared to take my request to contact the Freemasons seriously. Several hours into my stay, another woman with the air of a psychologist came in; who seemed to not have communicated with the first doctor. I could see in her eyes that she didn’t believe a single word I said. After we talked, I didn’t think I was going home that night.

Toward the end, they brought in a cordless phone for me to talk to my therapist. I hadn’t told her about the letters yet; the gap between what was going on with me and what I had shared with my therapist was at least that wide.

Eventually, they just let me go without explanation. I was given meaningless discharge paperwork about following up on my condition. I left my cell phone upstairs when the cops came into my house, so my only way back was to use the phone in the lobby to call a taxi. Fortunately I had the cash in my purse.

If there was ever a date to put on the death certificate for my mother and I’s relationship, it was this one. I was just… not going to talk to this person anymore; at least not until I got some kind of an explanation as to what happened.

So many mixed signals. My head’s spinning. Tommy’s acting suspiciously weird, and dodges my now very direct questions about whether he’s “from the Pleiades”. Susan sends me an obvious “wink and nudge” text at 12:26pm on Friday the 13^th, then has me locked in the psych ward days later. What is happening?!

I reached back out to Persephone, hoping she’d make me feel better. That did not happen.

---

So I go up to Pepe’s office and what do I find out, Mac? WHAT DO I FIND OUT?! There is no Pepe Silvia. The man does not exist, okay?

Somebody, I think the psych doctor after we first talked, took the liberty of filing FMLA paperwork for me without asking; which she didn’t care to un-file. I was greeted with multiple Slack messages about this the next day.

I figured I’d just tell them it was a mix-up and to cancel the paperwork. HR wanted to get me on Zoom anyway for some reason, and it turned out that because an FMLA request had been filed I wasn’t even supposed to be at work until I had a doctor sign some form.

God. Dammit. I fucking hate a lot of people right now.

Serendipitously, I already had a routine doctor’s appointment scheduled the very next day. So, I figured I’d just take this goofy form to Dr. Reid tomorrow, and hopefully she won’t ask a lot of questions about it.

As soon as she heard I’d been in the hospital, she said “hold on, let me look it up”. Ugh…

She kept typing away, failing to find it after a couple of minutes. She asked me to explain what happened. Okay. I kept it as vague as possible. I was accidentally involuntarily committed to the psych ward because my mom’s an asshole, and I just need you to sign this thing so I can go back to work.

Oh, if the cops were involved it’s in a different database. Let me look it up there…

Ugh.

“Found it.”

God. Dammit.

She spent an awkward minute reading whatever was on the screen, before simply asking me to explain what happened in my own words. I eventually had to explain that my mom told the cops “I thought I was an alien”, and that it really was just related to this spiritual awakening thing, and ugh… She said something about how she doesn’t judge her patient’s spiritual inclinations, and eventually signed my thing.

So, how are you doing with your medication?

Uh, well… I haven’t been taking the Concerta; but my HRT seems fine.

That’s fine. So… I want to try taking your spironolactone down to 100mg a day.

Okay, that’s cool. I don’t have bad side effects from it, but the low sodium problems can get annoying.

I know down-regulation is a thing, and you often don’t need as high a dose after a couple of years. It’s pretty common for us to tweak my estrogen dose up and down, but we’d never tried halving my spiro. I was curious to see how I’d do.

---

Unsurprisingly, Vickie wanted to talk to me. I was understandably freaked out that I had taken a very wrong turn. I didn’t know what else to make of my situation.

During that session, we both came to the conclusion that I should sign a release for Vickie to talk to Tommy. I couldn’t get anything out of the guy; but clearly, something’s going on, because he won’t just fucking tell me he isn’t from the Pleiades.

That’s what I kept telling myself. Just say “I’m not from the Pleiades”, you crazy old man. He wouldn’t fucking do it. But, he wouldn’t say he was either. Ugh!

Somehow, I had no trouble getting a straight answer out of him this time.

---

Susan kept texting me. I stopped doing any video calls with her or really interacting with her; though out of sheer concern that she’d continue using the police to harass me with “wellness checks”, I did start sending her a very basic “I’m alive” text once a week so she wouldn’t have a fucking excuse.

The first part of the thread is incredibly vague. She appeared to be apologizing for something she felt immeasurably guilty for; yet, to this day I’m still not sure what that was, exactly.

As much as I hate to say it, if I was talking obvious nonsense, a visit to the psych ward may’ve been in order. For all I know, her actions were perfectly justifiable given what she knew.

The other side of this is, if I’m talking nonsense why won’t someone just fucking tell me? Everyone’s being really sketchy and dodging my questions, like they can’t talk yet, or like I’m not doing the Freemason “Simon says” handshake protocols the right way.

It’s like I’m hitting some kind of a block in all firewall rule with them, and they’re never going to send me a NACK, or an ICMP error, or anything that’ll tell me there’s a problem. It’s like these Freemason people are some kind of black hole; and much like a black hole, I can surmise the existence of something massive yet invisible by observing the chaotic orbits of all of my friends and family as I get closer to whatever it is.

---

During this period of limbo, I showed up to the one-on-one with my boss, with Paul’s Zoom avatar changed to a very “realistic” plastic figure of a shark person. He kept this picture for the stand-up later that day with Josh and I,⁴³ before changing it back. He’s never done this before or since.

I took this to be yet another wink and a nudge about something. I didn’t know if it meant Paul knew what was going on and wanted me to know; or if he was subtly asking me for more information. Shit just keeps getting weirder and weirder, man.

---

Suspense built as I waited a couple of weeks for the meeting between Vickie and Tommy to transpire. I had prepared myself to learn Tommy wasn’t really from the Pleiades. I was expecting to have to go back to the drawing board to sort all of this out.

Somehow, what happened in this session still managed to shock and utterly baffle me.

So, I talked to Tommy…

Oh, good!

Tommy isn’t from Warren, Ohio. He was born in Cary.

He isn’t from the Pleiades. He isn’t a Freemason, and he doesn’t know anything about Freemasonry.

He does want to be part of your life if you do. You need to think about what kind of relationship you’d want to have going forward.

Then, there was the final blow.

She client-patient broke up with me.

She suggested I seek substance abuse counselling, as well as dialectical behavioral therapy; a methodology for helping people with personality disorders and severe trauma regulate their powerful emotions, which Vickie remarked multiple times throughout the last couple of years I needed the opposite of.⁴⁴ She offered to text me a list of resources for that, which I never followed up on.

If Vickie had just said Tommy “wasn’t from the Pleiades”, I would’ve believed her. I would’ve gone back to the drawing board. Just like I planned.

I was not prepared to hear Tommy wasn’t from Warren, Ohio. That’s basic, autobiographical information about the guy. I’ve heard it throughout my life. I had confirmed it several times over the past year. Tommy may not be from the Pleiades, and he may not even be a Freemason; but he’s definitely from Warren, Ohio.

The idea of Tommy being from Cary was particularly unbelievable, because he’s a Methodist preacher. The United Methodist church has an extensive tradition of travelling preachers. This concept has settled down considerably since the circuit preachers of the 19^th century, but it’s still a defining feature of Methodism. The bishop or deacon or whatever he’s called, will just move preachers to a different church every few years, with little to no input from the preachers themselves on where they’re to go next. I had several different preachers growing up; none of which had any ties to Elizabethtown. The idea of a Methodist preacher actually getting to preach in their hometown is… unusual, to say the least.

The suggestion that I pursue dialectical behavioral therapy was equally sketchy. I’d joked lately that I didn’t want any cluster B personality traits, and would go to DBT without question if anybody ever told me I needed that. Under more reasonable circumstances, I would have.

As absolutely crazy as it seemed, I could only reach one logical conclusion from the day’s events.

My therapist… lied to me.

And I thought, “That’s illegal, right? A therapist can’t just… lie to you…”

So I decided aww, shit buddy I gotta did a little deeper, there’s no Pepe Silvia, you gotta be kidding me I got BOXES full of Pepe

This hastened my withdrawal from public life. Stephanie was still supportive, but I could already tell I was starting to lose her. With this latest development… I just couldn’t tell anyone I didn’t believe my therapist. Nobody’s ever going to believe me.

But… I know there’s something to this. Everyone’s just acting so sketchy. The things that have happened to me seem highly improbable. I can’t just… forget about all this and check myself into rehab…

Actually, I could have if Vickie said “Tommy is from Warren, but not a Freemason or a reincarnated space alien, and I’ll see you next week!” The circumstances were just too sketchy for me to brush off. Particularly with the DBT suggestion, it seemed like she was trying to give me intentionally bad advice; as if she had been coerced into no longer providing me counselling, and couldn’t communicate that directly.

I mean, if you had a patient in as delicate a situation as I was, it kinda seems like breaking off a client-patient relationship like that is the last thing you’d want to do. It’s almost like she was asking me to stop seeking mental health treatment.

Where we’re going, we don’t need roads (Q3)

I feel a little silly, telling you that July might’ve been the first month I actually had visions in my head about an actual spaceship; and, that I’d get to use one, apparently.

#TODOI’m not sure I’ve mentioned this yet; but the writing convention for this section is that I’ll try to talk about what was in my head then as opposed to now. I don’t actually believe any of this at the time of writing.

Reincarnated space aliens. UFO kids. Whatever you call us. We get access to advanced craft, for health and leisure.

People like me should be having regular alien “doctor’s appointments”. We start to lose mental cohesion after some number of years of not getting fixed up. Young children who are different get “abducted” for their appointments. Adults, summon the craft and walk in of their own free will. After they’ve been vetted, that is.

Why haven’t I been vetted yet? What’s wrong? Oh, right. Friday the 13^th. Fuck.

I guess the reincarnation of that dude isn’t getting off so easy.

The idea in my head at this point was that with practice, you could see the spaceship before it materialized into physical space. You’d go somewhere very private, wait until you can see it with your “third eye” or whatever, and give the signal when you’re ready for it to land. The TV-static ghost-like outline of a flying saucer would give way to an incredibly bright flash of white light; which would last several seconds, until the ship was done shifting into three-dimensional space.

Generally speaking, there were two types of visits one might schedule: overnight doctor’s appointments, and spacetime travel. An overnight user of the spaceport would essentially occupy the entire landing area from midnight to dawn, as the ship needs to shift in and out of physical space repeatedly and in the same place as part of their work. Travelers would only need a few minutes; as their future self would be able to land just after they took off, or even before. As much as I struggled to suspend my disbelief, it apparently was somehow possible to time travel “science fiction” or “causality reversal-style”, and to have a conversation with a past or future version of you. As such, an overnight user needed to let any travelers who scheduled the space take off and land first before they went in for their night’s sleep.

It was really unusual and disorienting, having all these oddly specific things flooding into my brain; mundane details mixed with spectacular, otherworldly things.

I started remembering things about my homeworld. I had been the president there once, and people really liked me. Most all of my incarnations made it back eventually. I had a second home there that felt like a townhouse for giants; my natural species was about a foot taller than the average human.

There’s a lot I could say about everything I remembered and envisioned during this time; but the reality is, it doesn’t matter, because it’s all bullshit. I started writing about it, but it was incredibly tedious. Maybe it should go in an appendix or something eventually. #TODOPut it in a details tag or something

---

Josh tried engaging me, while continuing on with his very adult life things. He was busy planning his wedding with Caroline; who he was really eager for me to meet. I figure that might still happen someday.

---

I’d been convinced for months that something big was going to happen with this Red Hot Chili Peppers concert that was on my birthday. I took time off work around my birthday, and didn’t really know what to do with myself when inevitably nothing spectacular happened.

Having not really been able to perform my duties for some time now and seeing little recourse, I sent a message to HR basically saying I was dealing with problems that didn’t exist according to the United States government or mainstream science; and that I was basically stuck because the Freemasons won’t talk to me, presumably because I’m the reincarnation of the Roman senator who caused Friday the 13^th. When I got a, somewhat understandably snarky message from HR saying I was expected to return to work, I sent a reply stating that I quit effective immediately.

So; I quit my job because I was to the point that I couldn’t really work, or even live a normal life anymore. I’d been paranoid for a while about people being able to see in the window in the front door, and decided to put a curtain over it.

About two days after I sent the email, and about a half hour after I finished putting up the curtain, there was a hard knock on the door.

(knock knock knock)
DURHAM POLICE DEPARTMENT
(knock knock knock)

God. Dammit.

I was not about to open the door this time. I actually decided to take a shower. After a few minutes, they started repeating my name over and over; like they were looking for a stray kitten.

Rachael?

Rachael?

They eventually left, and I started getting calls from the police department. They were simply responding to a wellness check, and were satisfied with the explanations I gave over the phone; though the woman talked to me like I was a nine-year-old.

So we heard you quit your jawwwwwb…

Look, I’m just going through some life changes right now…

I tried to feel out if it was my mother or people from work who did it. I couldn’t really get anything out of the woman on the other end of the line.

Today, my assumption is that Paul or someone from work called it in. At the time, I was convinced it was Susan. The timing seemed far too suspicious. Like, I spent more time than I expected getting the rod up there, I adjusted it a couple of times to my liking, and then I went upstairs to have a smoke. And… then the cops showed up. Coincidence? Probably; at least this time.

This fed into another fear or “realization” I developed, based on these weird messages in my head: Susan thinks I’m retarded.

Yep. It was true! It explains so much! You know how she’s always infantilizing me? She still does her little baby talk thing a little too much? She kinda treats me like a fucking nine-year-old sometimes?

Oh. She thinks I’m retarded. Right.

We were asked to paint a landscape in kindergarten, and mine was not particularly good. Later in life, I learned the reason I’m bad at art is probably that I have aphantasia. Susan, on the other hand, kept displaying the painting longer than she should have, using it as evidence of my “special needs” when convenient. Her goal seemed to be to keep me off the short bus, while also keeping her retard adult child on a leash as (s)he played engineer in the city like a big grownup…

I remember when I was in first or second grade, she was convinced I needed extra help with math. It’s always been my weakest subject, but I don’t remember getting particularly bad grades in math at that age. It’s just my worst subject is all. She drilled me after school with flash cards and worksheets and shit, and I hated it. I don’t feel like it helped me much in the long term; but who knows.

I think it’s bullshit now; but I thought I remembered there being a test she was afraid to have me take, because she was convinced I would fail and be put in “special classes”. A message in my head told me that there were two kids at Bladen Lakes whose parents wouldn’t take them to get the WISC; mine and Shawn Breck’s. Lacking standardized test scores to know where to place us otherwise, they administered the AIG test to the two of us in-school.

I placed into AIG at “level 2” in second grade, as I recall.

I remember as us AIG kids grew older and were nearing the sixth grade, most of us were retaking the AIG test; as you needed level 3 or 4 to get into Clarkton. I remember telling my mom a couple times that I think I needed to retake the AIG test for Clarkton like the other kids; and she assured me I didn’t need to.

Then, I remember orientation at Clarkton. I was going around on the tour, but… there was some unexpected “clerical error”. My name wasn’t on the AIG list. My mother went to the office, and suddenly my name was there.

In my state of paranoia, I couldn’t help but assume the worst about what Susan did back then. Did I not even get into Clarkton on my own merits? Fuck. Susan.

I could hear her justifying her actions in her mind. “I just wanted to give you everything”… “You didn’t have a chance at life otherwise”… “I did what any mother would’ve done”…

Anyway; the curtain. I was convinced the reason the cops came so quickly after I put it up, was that Susan was actually collecting video evidence to use in court so that she could re-gain custody of me. Or get the Britney Spears conservatorship on me or some shit. Assisting her was a dirty lawyer she managed to procure pro bono after crying about how her “special needs child was out of control!”; the lawyer thought she might be able to win, and line her pockets with my engineer money even if Susan was broke.

Fuck. Susan.

I was utterly convinced even more weird bullshit was about to happen to me. I took a dress to get dry-cleaned, and bought some new boots at DSW in preparation for my surely-impending day in court that this dirty lawyer was going to spring on me at the last moment.

Tommy reached out to me as I moved the goalpost around; but a meeting never transpired.

Monkey wrench (Q4)

In early fall, a message came to me that was somehow even more disturbing than everything that’d happened before. I haven’t really mentioned it up to this point; but the messages in my head had long since taken the form of some vague, Morpheus-like person guiding me through whatever process-of-a-lifetime I was going through.

There are charges pending against you.

Charges? For what?

Murder.

Murder? That’s a joke, right?

The problem involved time travel to the past; something that was somehow possible with the level of access I (or my future self) had. The murderer is/was actually my future self; an individual known to the state of California to be armed, dangerous, and pissed off. What happened?

Well you see… My future self went on to have a relationship with fellow UFO kid Anthony Kiedis; who’d be more like a “UFO daddy” if we maintained the present age gap. Except, we didn’t. At least not all the time.

I traveled back in time to the early 90s to be Anthony Kiedis’ secret wife; we would actually be about the same age at the beginning of our relationship. I started to feel a little silly for thinking otherwise.

The deal with time travel was, you could get away with about ten years of age slippage before people really start to notice and ask questions. So, I had ten years to spend in the 90s before I was destined to become the president and get assassinated; at which point, I’d have subsequent lifetimes which I’d be able to remember through the correct process. I was starting to feel a bit immortal.

The state of California knew the truth about UFOs, and had a program for folks visiting like me where we could get ID and even have a job; essentially an extension of the witness protection program. We needed to pick a name for myself in this timeline, and in a spur of the moment went with the clerk’s suggestion of Dani. It wasn’t until later that we realized I was “Dani the tranny” and “Retard Rachael”.

Burnt out and frustrated that I could never quite make it as an engineer, I vowed to relegate computers and electronics to hobby status, while devoting my professional career to photography. I enjoyed the last years of film, setting up a dark room in a spare corner of our house.

We decided to start time travelling our future human incarnations to come hang out with us in Malibu. In the spirit of my new career in film, we produced in our home a Wayne’s World-like series called “Time Travel Time”; for which I was also the host. I had visions of having to drive a couple of hours out into the desert to land the ships. It felt so real at the time.

My next incarnation was a woman named Megan Murphy. She had a better childhood situation with no legal or administrative hold-ups, and was able to learn what she was at the age of 12.

Megan was pretty different from me, and was destined to become a musician and an artist at a young age. What a ride.

So, me and my adolescent future self are hanging out with my new boyfriend or quasi-husband Anthony Kiedis in LA. This is fine.

Somehow we became close friends with Dave Grohl. Anyway; one thing led to another, and my future self began having underage relations with Anthony Kiedis and Dave Grohl.

When this came to me, my first thought was “That can’t be right. Dave Grohl lives in Alexandria, VA or some shit.”

I checked Wikipedia, and it turns out he did live in LA for a few years in the mid-to-late 90s; right as all this was ostensibly happening. And he’s still from Warren, Ohio.

Shit, dude.

So, my future self is having safe sane and consensual, albeit underage relations with 90s rock stars, that occasionally involves elements of BDSM. This is fine. Right?

Or rather, was having relations. This is ancient history to everyone involved except for me. They know who I’ll grow up to become. I’ve been surrounded ever since I was eight.

So eventually, some nosy neighbors grew worried because they wanted to know what this adolescent girl was doing hanging out with rock stars. Folks were concerned for her safety.

This is when the cops got involved and raided our house. After they found sex toys with Megan juice on them, they basically said “somebody’s going to jail”. I took the fall for Dave and Tony; hoping to explain in court that she was really just my future self. Are they going to convict me of raping myself?

Despite having allies who understood, we had a really hard time getting the court and law enforcement to take us seriously. After we tried to demystify what being a UFO kid really meant, many of them only grew more distrustful; crafting their own theories about how we were really running an intergalactic child sex trafficking ring, and might be able to brainwash and alter memories.

We brought Megan’s future adult self with us to testify; but, her testimony was ruled inadmissible because she was the alleged victim.

Leading up to this, “Dani” had been filming a sort of underground documentary about this whole process; for which she was already prepared, being older than I am now. We wanted to show how we talked to Megan’s future self first and consulted different Megans from different timelines, before following through on something that was unconventional, but ultimately harmless or even beneficial to Megan.

After fighting a long legal battle up a really steep hill, the tide finally started to turn in our favor. We had some luck arguing that Megan and I were the same person; and thus, anything sexual between the two of us is tantamount to masturbation.

Of course, I wasn’t really fucking my future self at all. I was only taking the fall for Dave and Tony; while keeping in mind that I would someday become Megan and enjoy myself; having the opposite of the sexually-repressive experience I had in my youth this lifetime.

After being acquitted of the charge of statutory rape, things only briefly looked better, until somehow the law caught wind of the, uh… “BDSM” element. This sparked a whole new round of debates. Sure, you can fuck yourself; but where do you draw the line?

The judge was particularly disturbed that Megan got tied up for fun; and wasn’t having any of it. It was ruled that in the state of California, it is legal to fuck yourself, but it is not legal to tie yourself up.

I was convicted on assault charges, and sentenced to 18 months of house arrest.⁴⁵

While all this was going on, there was this dirty cop who liked to fuck with the pedophiles. He abducted me a handful of times along with Dave Grohl, to do shit like shaving part of my head or raping me with a clothes hanger.

Law enforcement was highly suspicious of my various lifestyle and career choices. I was into photography and had my own dark room, and had found a workaday job as a photographer when I wasn’t touring with Anthony Kiedis. I was hired to do all sorts of work; though I was often taking portraits of children. We had a PRI circuit which I ran the area’s first dial-up ISP off of, and I had some Sun servers and an SGI workstation I used for the ISP and for Rachael stuff; no, not child porn. They didn’t believe that, though. Oh yeah, and then there was all the shit we had for producing Time Travel Time. They were convinced it was all a cover for producing elaborate child pornography, despite their failed attempts to actually find anything of that nature. They really assumed the worst of me.

I was prohibited from continuing to produce Time Travel Time; though I continued to do so clandestinely, covering such topics as music and pop culture.

During my house arrest, a child was abducted by a woman vaguely matching my description; and they were certain I did it. I had one of the first ankle bracelets, but they thought I was using alien technology to defeat the mechanism and leave the house. There were demands that I decrypt the storage containing my documentary; something they had begrudgingly given up on after pushing for it at the beginning of my incarceration. The dirty cop abducted me and hit me in the head with a cinder block in an attempt to get me to reveal the password; however, I was knocked unconscious for a few hours, and when I woke up he was merely relieved he wasn’t on the hook for murder.

Anyway; I made it through roughly a year and a half of house arrest. Other than being a registered sex offender in 90s California, it would seem I’ve done my time.

The registry simply listed my crime as having “tied up a child”; something angry women would often come to my house and yell at me for. I made VHS tapes to explain what happened with Megan, and why it wasn’t as bad as the courts made it sound.

I generally made myself scarce around Malibu after this happened, though I still maintained a residence there. We’d often go on long trips out of state or in the wilderness, illegally summoning Megan’s spaceship once we were out of view.

As a registered sex offender, there were certain shits you had to put up with. And no, I never looked up to see if any of these things were true in 90s California, but they probably weren’t.

The cops could come and search our house any time without notice, basically as if they had a standing warrant to do so. If we didn’t open the door, they’d just beat it down most of the time; we returned at least once or twice to there simply being no front door on the house because the cops decided to show up and make sure we weren’t raping anyone.

After some amount of this injustice, I finally just snapped. And I became…

Dani California: Modern-day outlaw

I sent letters to all levels of government, declaring my personal sovereignty. I’m a multi-lifetime intergalactic world leader, goddammit! I’ll have no more of this violent, insulting nonsense from you animals and your banana republic of a planet!

Nobody took the letters seriously; which I expected. I armed myself with an assault rifle and sidearm, which visitors would invariably see the barrel of sooner rather than later. When the cops kept coming to our house because of their sex offender policy, they’d be greeted with my rifle in an increasingly tense series of encounters. These encounters with law enforcement were usually met with retribution from Dani’s army of past and future selves; eventually resulting in Dani burning down the Malibu police station with Molotov cocktails. No, I wasn’t able to fact-check this. By this point, if I couldn’t find anything online about the Malibu police station burning down in the 90s, I’d have just assumed there was a cover-up.

It was now that Dani had become a killer. She’d had enough; she wouldn’t seek out cops, but would kill any of them who got in her way. She ended up killing a few cops in the nineties.

Dani was eventually classified as “unapprehendable” by the California authorities, which led to my case being turned over to the FBI. I was secretly considered part of their most-wanted list. And, I was just a wee little kid living in Elizabethtown, NC; when I’m not back in the 90s causing terror, that is.

Alright, so I start marching my way down to Carol in HR and I knock on her door and I say CAROL (knock knock knock) CAAAAROOOLLL I gotta talk to you about Pepe

I tried getting hold of Tommy again; but he never returned my text. I took that as a sign the Freemasons couldn’t help me anymore.

I’m telling you, this was, like, the scariest time period of my life. It was like that trope from the old west, where the clock strikes noon and the shutters on the saloon close and suddenly the town falls silent, and there’s no one around to help you.

---

The legal precedent that one couldn’t “tie themselves up” in California had ramifications in the greater BDSM community; resulting in a self-bondage workshop at a con getting raided by police. This led to the NCSF taking on my case in order to overturn the ruling. Because of this work, by the mid 2000s self bondage was legal in California, and my conviction for “tying up my future self” had been overturned; all before I graduated from middle school.

Of course, I was still on the hook for murder.

My case prompted a whole discussion about convicting people of crimes they haven’t yet committed. Many in government were uneasy about my future self’s proclamation of independence combined with my access to advanced technology, and they considered me a national security risk. The FBI was content with taking California’s word that I was some crazy tranny who was probably running a child sex trafficking ring they never could manage to bust.

---

After building up the courage, I tried walking into a masonic lodge and telling them I wanted to talk about “visions and past life memories” I’d been having. I left after being told they were “really just a fraternal organization” or something to that effect; and sheepishly responding “I don’t believe you”, in an attempt to invoke the thing I remember Heather and her friend teaching me all those years ago.

I think it was around late November when the message appeared in my head

They want to send you to Gitmo.

Over the following days and weeks, it was revealed that because of Dani’s proclamation of sovereignty in the 90s, the courts ruled I was technically not a US citizen. A lot of soldier boys are real spooked out about a crazy sovereign citizen tranny pedophile with a flying saucer on the loose, and they have to be sure.

Which brings us here: the head or tail of this temporal ouroboros, depending on how you look at it. I appeared to be locked into a sort of fate, where certain things were bound to occur. Part of it appeared to be karma for Friday the 13^th, and part of it appeared to be that I didn’t want to change my past timeline. It was as if my intentions had arrived at this steady state; where a bunch of really bad stuff was bound to happen to me, and yet I wouldn’t have it any other way in the end. The timeline would simply be different otherwise. It was as if the universe found the worst possible fate that I apparently still wouldn’t change with access to a time machine.

The debacle appeared to reveal something fascinating about the universe, if not also a bit terrifying; if you want to understand how to change the timeline, you have to understand intent. Once you give somebody free rein over a craft that can travel backwards through time, the problem is really obvious; whatever past our timeline is based on is ultimately derived from the mere intentions of everyone who possesses such a craft. On one hand, it’s just an exchange of property. On the other hand, it’s like a sort of “magical artifact” that grants the immediate wishes of the bearer. As long as one maintains the intent for something to happen in the past and ultimately follows through, it can be considered “good as done”.

You might be thinking, wouldn’t all intents modify the timeline? And the answer is, of course they do! Everyone has intentions, and they affect the forward and/or backward timeline as soon as you intend to follow through with them. We’re always in a sort of negative feedback loop, looking at our past and present and formulating new intents based on our present state.

This was apparently the true nature of spacetime; we experience it linearly, but affect it non-linearly and seemingly in real time through our intents. Far out!

I was bolstered by the strong feeling this was something some of these mysterious UFO folks I’ve encountered throughout my life tried to explain in a roundabout way, without really saying the thing. It particularly reminded me of the talk I had with Persephone in 2019, when she tried to explain the power of thoughts and intentions. I didn’t really get it at the time.

---

As the year went on, there was something unrelated to UFOs that had grabbed my attention in the meantime: this lower dose of spironolactone wasn’t cutting it. I’d been avoiding the doctor ever since I needed her to sign that thing. I missed an appointment and never rescheduled; but she was still refilling my meds, so I wasn’t immediately concerned. I had… bigger things going on with me.

It was a bit silly in retrospect. What was she going to do? Send me back to the looney bin?

I didn’t really need to make a mental note to bring it up with my doctor after several months on the new dose. It was gradual, but I could tell my body hair was getting thicker, and I had grease on the bridge of my nose again.

---

I drifted away from Stephanie late into the year. I remember her inviting me to a Thanksgiving thing with her family, and I was just not up for it.

After having quit my job, Josh was getting really anxious to know what was going on with me. He was starting to have trouble finding Pepe’s office himself.

At the same time, Josh’s mom was messaging me.

---

A little after Thanksgiving, another message popped into my head.

You still have sideburns.

This is something I’d actually been paranoid about since before COVID. I was never entirely convinced my stylist and electrologist collectively found the boundary between my sidehair and sideburns. I brought this up a couple of times; but neither of them seemed concerned or suggested anything.

Shit. I have sideburns; and Susan’s dirty little lawyer friend is eating it all up.

Something had felt wrong for a while. Like, I have this weird, different hair that won’t tuck behind my ears right. It feels kinda course and curly, and I don’t think it’s the same thing as women’s side hair.

Ick!

After carefully weighing my options, I decided I just needed to go on a mission to clean up my sideburns. I started to think I may’ve fucked up when at some point in my transition I kinda just stopped shaving my sideburns. And, that wasn’t really coordinated with Lawrence or Shannon.

The troops went in to tame the wilderness, and I definitely went up too high the first time. With that being said, I do think I had a bit of an overgrown sideburn problem, despite my otherwise addled and confused state of mind during this period. But again; this was an insecurity I had for a while before UFOs became part of my life.

I started taking biotin and wearing a hoodie while my side hair filled in, whenever I wasn’t awkwardly pulling it over my ears or something. I grew obsessed with the phenomenon of side-hair; and the fact that humans seem to have wildly different amounts of it, either by choice or by nature. Some people’s stops just above the ear. A lot of women do have fuzz down to around mid-ear; but it’s light fuzz, not course, gnarly beard hair.

I looked at trans reddit to see what other folks in my situation do, and it’s also pretty varied. One girl got laser all the way to the top of her ear, and I thought it looked pretty good. Some folks managed to grow out some lower hair and make it work; but I really don’t think I have the facial hair type to blend it in without looking gross.

I don’t like beard hair. It’s rough, course and irritating… and it gets everywhere. Not like girl hair. Girl hair is everything soft and… and smooth…

It’s time for Time Travel Time, I’m your host Dani California (2023)

Rachael Brown: Escape from Guantanamo Bay (Q1)

By the end of the year, I had thoroughly prepared myself to be sent to Gitmo; as much as one can, at least.

There was a lot of debate within the government, and they were going to take it relatively easy on me; but, I was going to get waterboarded so that some spooked out soldier boys could be certain the Earth wasn’t about to shift into a new dimension or some shit.

After that, some incredibly misinformed fuck was going to rape me with a thorny dildo for “being a pedophile” to the point I’d need immediate surgery. And, that’s the point when Dani California’s time travel army would emerge out of thin air to commence firing on the facility.

I was often having these visions of multiple perspectives. Being the version of me in Gitmo, being Megan Murphy, being each individual soldier in my time travel army…

While the firing upon Gitmo started earlier and was mostly symbolic, the real bargaining position came after midnight on the west coast; when Dani’s army descended over every US air force base simultaneously and sabotaged virtually all of the airplanes. It was a very low casualty, but also very expensive, statement that led to my signing a peace treaty with Joe Biden the next morning.

I had a couple demands; which mostly boiled down to

• Grant UFO kids equal rights, citizenship and safe passage to and from the planet.
• Recognize Dani’s sovereignty.

I had since grown convinced that I was being followed by agents everywhere I went. They wanted to watch me as I went from thinking I was just some boring queer kid from Durham, to realizing I was destined to become a cold-blooded cop killer.

A thread developed around the same time when I thought rednecks were going to kidnap and torture me for “not respecting my momma”; after they heard only her side of the story on Facebook or something. After torturing me for a day or two, they were to “baptize” me at the Lake Church after hours before tying cinder blocks around my feet and throwing me into the middle of the lake. I would narrowly survive after freeing myself and swimming back, after which Dani’s time travel army would firebomb the church and the homes of the four kidnappers in retaliation.

Phew.

This all felt so crazy. Like I was in one of those stoner movies like Pineapple Express or The Big Lebowski, where some dude is caught in a jam between the feds and organized crime, and all the protagonist really wants is to go home and smoke a bowl. And, maybe get White Castle or Cook-Out or something.

Rachael and Dani go to Bojangles

---

By the start of the year, I noticed the first signs that my hair was beginning to thin. My ears felt cold when I was trying to sleep, and I started covering them with a light blanket. I didn’t think much of it at first; but then I noticed clumps were pulling out really easily.

In between the hair loss and the regrowing my side hair, I started wearing my blue hoodie around basically everywhere I went. I think it makes me look like a little Muslim girl with the hood up, so I’ve been calling it my halal hoodie.

My friends were continuing on with their very grown-up lives, planning weddings and whatnot.

Christ; Friday the 13^th was about witches (Q2)

By around April, it was clear that I had a serious hair loss problem. My previously thick mid-back length hair was obviously not maintaining its thickness to the tip; and I observed a marked thinning in the “Cousin Itt” hair that would’ve been my bangs if I had them. I was now able to clearly see through the thinning hair as I brushed it out. I started taking biotin again more religiously, after already having started a while back on account of shaving my sidehair too high.

One theory I had was that the hair loss was from excess detergent wearing off from my hoodie; which I was wearing most days to hide my sidehair problem. I started double-rinsing my hoodie just to be safe, but that clearly wasn’t it.

A second theory was that it was from improper use of a detangler. I think I can rule this out as well; I’m pretty sure I’d be hurting if I pulled out that much hair.

My HRT regimen was also starting to feel abysmal. My body hair had thickened, and I swear my voice even felt a bit lower. My breasts were flat and my nipples had lost whatever perkiness they had. I was actually struggling to masturbate, at the risk of giving the reader too much information and panning myself an autogynephile. What am I, the only person who expects to be able to feel their breasts when they do it? I can’t go back to doing it in a guy’s body… The overall grossness I felt was a stark reminder that despite my self-doubt yes, I really did still have gender problems.

While I considered my hair loss may be hormonal, it doesn’t appear to be male pattern. It’s incredibly patchy all over my scalp, in a manner not consistent with what was setting in just before I started taking HRT.

My apparent health problems escalated in mid-April, when I experienced the first of what would become several gastrointestinal flare-ups over the next several months. I was eating myself a pan pizza, when all of a sudden I got really bad, sudden abdominal cramps. A few seconds later I could hear the ocean in my ears, and I felt like I was going to faint. I eventually came to, lying in my bed in a cold sweat.

There were a few commonalities with these attacks.

• Usually during or right after a meal
• There’s immediate cramping and syncope or near-syncope combined with cold sweats first
• Then there’s diarrhea for the next 30 minutes or so
• Then you feel better but still feel kinda shitty for the next 4-6 hours, often with chills and mild vomiting. I’ve never actually had the flu, but this last part is what I’d imagine it’s like. During this phase I’d often struggle to find a comfortable body temperature; switching multiple times between sweatpants and shorts or underpants.

Ugh! The first time I thought it was just something I ate, and decided to stay away from Domino’s pan pizza for a good while. It then continued happening after other meals; with attacks usually spaced weeks apart.

---

I was missing out on my friends’ weddings; but I just couldn’t, with everything going on and whatnot.

By spring, I was feeling really drained; and I really didn’t want to be Dani California. At first, I could kinda see the purpose of such a path. Dani was a very misunderstood person who maybe had lessons to teach about the harmfulness of stereotypes, the motivations for human violence, and the pointlessness of religiously-motivated sexual repression. She also kills a lot of people, gets tortured a bunch, and I don’t even know if I like Anthony Kiedis. I certainly didn’t really before UFOs happened…

Okay; so I really, really don’t want to become Dani California. I’m sure of it.

The ouroboros isn’t eating itself anymore. Why does Dani California still exist?

I actually checked Spotify a couple of times as a way of pinching myself. Okay - Dani California is still a song, Monkey Wrench is still a song… Why isn’t the picture of Marty’s parents changing? If I don’t want to do something in the past anymore, that part of the timeline should just snip out. It just folds back on itself and nobody remembers it.

---

I think it was sometime in May, when in frustration I asked the voice in my head “What am I even called? A reincarnated space alien? A UFO kid?” I’d been using that sort of roundabout language, because not Heather, not Maureen, not Persephone… nobody’s ever said what the different people are actually called.

The voice in my head responded in a most sarcastic voice

a witch?

Oooooooooh boy.

I’m a witch. Friday the 13^th was about witches. Goddammit Rachael, it’s witches. Mysticism, magic, the esoteric, the occult, Friday the 13^th, the Freemasons…

You’re a goddamn witch, Rachael.

Fuck. Okay. Witches are real, and I’m a witch. This is fine.

All of this stuff started popping into my head, that utterly demystified like, all the stereotypes about magic that exist.

Summoning demons

The demons are just space aliens. There was all this stuff in my head about how crazy Christians coined their own alternate vocabulary to describe a nonexistent, sinister version of the truth about UFOs. The demons come from hell in a vessel, they distort your senses and cloud your mind… you can’t trust anything around them things!

Sorcery

It’s just a fucking book; a book from your future self. You write questions in the front, and your future self answers them in the back or some shit. You still have to do the work, and you still have to follow through on your intents; which becomes a lot easier if you carry a little magic book with you everywhere you go.

The book is actually how you land the spaceship. The steps were ostensibly as follows:

• You request a visit in your book by asking your future self.
• Your future self responds with a special hash that uniquely identifies your present timeline. This is necessary, because there’s a nearly infinite number of Rachaels trying to land a nearly infinite number of spaceships. It’s actually possible for them to get crossed up and land in the wrong timeline otherwise. If the hash isn’t uniquely identifying, it at least differentiates your present timeline from adjacent ones.
• The hash is in the form of something that can be displayed in your present spacetime; a sequence of lights to flash, a number to hold up, markers or candles to place on the ground, or something analogous to that. If you’re landing one out in the woods, flashing the high beams is probably the most straightforward. I later had visions of landing them in my garage by writing a number on an overhead projector, and giving the “now” signal by plopping a green or blue transparency circle on there.
• Thus; to get to your homeworld, all you need is a connection to your future self; who is already on your homeworld. They can schedule your visits in your homeworld’s computer system, so long as you can trade magic books with them.
• I don’t know if I mentioned this yet; but not once did I have a vision of actually being able to pilot the craft. There are workers who do that.

Magic tricks

… are really just sleight of hand with causality reversal. The magic of causality reversal can be infused into all sorts of ordinary household objects. You don’t even need to be a witch; you just need to be friends with one, who can time-travel your objects around for you. The practice of increasing efficiency and productivity by reordering tasks with time travel constitutes the study of real magic; the stuff most all of Earth’s superstitions are really based on. Religion started to feel like a cargo cult version of this.

The full moon

… is really just a convenient way to keep up with your doctor’s appointments. We’re supposed to get work done every 4–6 weeks to maintain peak condition. In the ancient world when ordinary people lacked timepieces, we’d need to pay attention to the phases of the moon to remember our visits. The full moon also makes it easier to travel by night; assuming you can’t land in your backyard.

So, there you have it. The truth about UFOs is really the truth about witchcraft. Some people are special and get access to alien technology; but it really spooks out Christians, and they’ll think you’re the devil or something if they find out. Being an out of the closet UFO kid essentially meant opening oneself up to a range of accusations from folks who don’t really understand what it is, and you might end up with a stake driven through your heart.

The Freemasons

… are notoriously secretive. The organization serves but one purpose; to make sure the different people know who they are. Everything else is just misdirection and bullshit. As such, the “real” tradition of Freemasonry could be described as simply the current generation of witches passing the torch to the next generation. It’s… the world’s oldest phone tree; fascinating in terms of subject matter, yet utterly mundane in day-to-day operation. It’s supposed to be a sealed-off society; a back office with no front entrance. If you want to learn magic, you just need to make friends with a witch. The Freemasons don’t even teach magic to witches; save for taking them to their homeworld the first time. For reasons I’ll explain in a moment, “the Freemasons” considered their job so important that, by design, they would never explain what they did in response to a direct question about it. Merely asking the question of whether Freemasons should do what they do creates a decision point where, at least part of the multiverse might ban “Freemasonry”.

In short, Freemasonry exists to fulfill these requirements:

• There’s a club called “the Freemasons”. Everyone knows about them. They’re secretive, but it’s really just a fraternity made up of people like you and me. I wonder what they do…
• There are these “masonic lodges” scattered about. They don’t really get used all that often; but they serve as a reminder that there is some secret club, that people sometimes join for some reason.
• If you’re one of the lucky ones, a couple “Freemasons” will knock on your door when you come of age and show you a magic trick. Everyone handles it differently; reactions to folks learning they’re a witch range from exuberance to sheer terror. However they feel, we need to make sure we all know who we are. It’s really important. The Freemasons never miss a spot.
• And, nobody’s going to trust you if you don’t have the backing of some already-infamous secret society while you try and explain all of this.
• Years after the Freemasons knock on your door, you’ll put on the “Freemason cap” and go with a friend to knock on somebody else’s door. It’s the circle of witchcraft.

As such, Freemasonry is both one of the world’s most important organizations, and also not really that cohesive an organization at all. It needs to be big enough so that people know it’s reputable and isn’t some kind of weird UFO cult. People see masonic lodges in their neighborhoods, and they see the Shriners driving those little cars around at parades. Everyone knows it’s a secret society, but they aren’t like… Scientologists or something…

The core organization was ostensibly designed to be unadressable; “the Freemasons” come to you. They don’t need your help, they don’t need to recruit any more members than naturally exist, they have a really important job to do, and they merely want to be left alone to do it.

So, who the fuck is Dani California?

Alright, folks. Hold on to your butts. We need to move the goalpost around some more.

Dani isn’t my future self; she’s an alternate self from a different timeline. An evil twin, if you will.

So, why is there an evil twin of me? Well, it’s a long story.

The year is 1980-something. The satanic panic is in full swing. The FBI is inundated with reports of witchcraft and devil worship. It’s gotten to the point where they have to do their due diligence; not to mention, some of the boys on the force are starting to get spooked out themselves.

They start getting tips, and they start following leads. “Witches are real.” “The Freemasons know about them.” Some people are really sympathetic. “They’re just different. They just want to be left alone.” Others… not so much. “The public has a right to know.” “This is a matter of national security!”

Well, the FBI had a lot of questions. They didn’t think it was cute how the Freemasons liked to be vague and speak in riddles. They need answers, goddammit! This is a matter of national security!

The FBI learned enough to confirm that yes; witches… are real. Every once in a while a child is born different… but they just have a soul from another planet; or they’re demon spawn, take your pick.

The boys went crazy after learning this.

You gotta be shittin’ me…

Look, we gotta know what these things are capable of. Can they blow stuff up with their minds?

Can’t we get just one of ’em? I only want one of ’em…

I’ve been looking through our list of cold cases, boss… Some of these, I don’t know how a human being could’ve done ’em. I reckon witches have gotta be responsible for at least some of ’em…

Look now, this is a matter of national security. We need to know what they’re planning!

What if we just had one of ’em in a basement? For whenever we wanted to try something out…

Look, we gotta try sparkin’ one of ’em off. Knowing is better than not knowing, we don’t even know how to begin defending ourselves against them things!

The cops and soldier boys had little interest in “learning magic” from a witch the traditional way. They kinda just wanted to bulldoze their way in. There’s a reason an ancient process is in place; people get really spooked out when they learn their friends and neighbors are just… different, sometimes. And, related to funny-looking monster people. It doesn’t help matters that these cops and soldier boys are often the sorts of close-minded conservative authoritarians we try and filter out of being exposed to magic; and that witches are often the sort of live-and-let-live peace loving hippies that offend the sensibilities of the former group.

Phew.

The cops and soldier boys got to the point where they really wanted a single witch to experiment on. They thought the risk to national security immeasurable, and considered the collateral damage acceptable.

A court ruled in favor of the FBI; ordering “the Freemasons” to hand over the name of a single witch for human experimentation. The Freemasons appealed the decision; escalating the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which upheld the ruling.

They still. Wouldn’t. Budge. Freemason after Freemason happily went to jail for contempt of court. The situation escalated to the point plans were drawn up for the national guard to raid and destroy all masonic lodges in the country.

The government forced their hand to the point they had to give them a name. Ethan Alexandre Brown; to be born in a couple of years on September 1^st, 1990. I was chosen because of my ostensibly old “spiritual age” and pedigree as a world leader. Oh, and maybe Friday the 13^th. Shit man, it all just flows together I guess. You might say I owed them one; however, there was never any punitive intent in me being back on Earth for this. It would seem we just want to minimize the suffering of everybody as much as possible; and, time travel doesn’t really allow for regrets anyway. We’re just trying to make the best of a crazy planet.

What a mess. Their research plan consisted roughly of:

• Watching me like a goddamn hawk starting the moment I was born.
• Never telling me where I’m from; under penalty of, like, all the laws. They don’t want my mind to be tainted by the Freemasons. A lot of these cops and soldier boys are very Christian, and they just know in their heart-of-hearts that I’m demon spawn. They want to catch me being evil before I know to hide it.
• If I figure out where I’m from somehow, then they’re interrogating the fuck out of me. Whether they let me live or turn me inside-out depends on whatever happened before.
• If I’m not doing anything obviously witchy by my early 30s, I’m getting disappeared into some three letter agency’s basement for the rest of my miserable life.
• If I live a boring life and do nothing spectacular in captivity, the feds will assume “the Freemasons” are just full of shit. If I grow up to be really, really evil (like a lot of the Christians are convinced will happen), they’ll assume the Bible is right and witches are wicked. Hopefully a sample size of one will satisfy everybody’s curiosity.

Okay; we’ve got ourselves a ballgame. Let’s go to the Freemason’s dugout.

• They have time travel, and can see every possibility in the multiverse. I’m never going to figure it out unless they tell me. Yeah there’s always a first witch on every planet to which the task of bootstrapping all the other witches falls… but nobody climbs Mt. Everest like that.
• The community thinks the idea of me never learning what I am is really sad. I’m supposed to be out there, exploring the galaxy in a multi-lifetime, multi-bodied experience. They want to take that away from one of us, just because they don’t understand.
• Blocking witches from leaving the planet in general is really, existentially dangerous. This next part is (sigh) a little convoluted.

What do witches actually do?

Okay; so, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, somebody invented a spaceship. They popped themselves out of spacetime, and could observe the tree of every possible outcome at every possible decision point; all the quantum states which could possibly exist. “Wow!”, this person thought. “All of these things exist simultaneously!” Wonderful things, horrible things, everything in between. We can see it all!

They start travelling to these different timelines, spawning from all of these decision points. They watch as the highest and lowest points in the multiversal history of their world unfold somewhere; but, there’s something they didn’t understand at first.

By landing the ship in these timelines, they were observing what was happening there. They essentially… collapsed the wave functions by doing this; bringing physicality and the essence of experience.

Those people didn’t have to experience anything. They didn’t have to feel anything. And without somebody landing a spaceship, they wouldn’t have.

The reason anybody is aware of anything, is that ships are landing in our present timeline, somewhere.

The independent discovery of how to build a spaceship seemed like the most magical event in the universe. Mere thought – existing without physicality, without awareness or space or time – conceives this… thing somewhere in the universe… pops it out of spacetime, and observes itself; the imaginary essentially becoming real.

Basically, there were three tiers of civilizations:

Tier 1

Independently discovered how to build a spaceship somewhere in their multiverse.

Tier 2

Eventually grow to the technological level of building ships, though not independently.

Tier 3

No timelines in their multiverse will ever construct a spaceship.

For every civilization, there is one question that invariably needs to be answered: who’s going to collapse our world’s wave functions into observable timelines, so that we can experience life? And, which ones are they gonna light up?

The good news is, we don’t necessarily have to experience bad things. In fact, a lot of things in the multiverse are best avoided. We can see the possibilities; but we don’t have to observe them. Doing so would often be irresponsible.

However, someone does have to make the decisions. Somebody has to decide what gets to be real; what characters to pull out of Imaginationland.

Tier 1 and 2 societies generally have no trouble reaching the point of a cohesive world government to make such decisions. Tier 3 societies may or may not. A real “Mad Max” sort of place would probably have an unsophisticated ad-hoc system, where witches and their homeworlds would try and make sensible choices on behalf of the comparatively primitive planet. On the other hand, some tier 3 worlds find themselves on a cooperative enough track to make their own decisions about which timelines they want to observe.

By comparison, tier 1 and 2 worlds usually have very tight controls on which timelines are observed; and have clearly defined processes for spawning off one’s own custom timelines.

So, timelines can be observed or unobserved. But there’s another dimension, and that’s real and imaginary. Travelling back in time and changing the past creates imaginary timelines; these timelines are similarly unexperienced, but are fundamentally different from unobserved timelines. Imaginary timelines are created as a result of the negative feedback loop established by the presence of intelligent life with spacecraft. Each witch’s intentions in the past manifest instantly, and they react instantly; as if adjusting themselves in a mirror. There are a number of imaginary versions of you on any timeline where you have a spaceship and can thus alter the past; but only the top layer of back-and-forth intent is experienced. This is the real timeline; the outermost layer of an observed “track” in spacetime, after the feedback loop has achieved a steady state.

The existence of imaginary timelines allows for some fascinating (and confusing) possibilities; one can obtain a list of regrets from their (imaginary) future self, ensuring they’ll never become that version of themselves. In turn, the topmost imaginary layer likely obtained a list of regrets from the subsequent layer in the stack, in a recursive fashion.

I had images in my head of a sort of large box the ship would pass through, in order to switch between real and imaginary timelines. It was actually possible for your real self to visit an imaginary (as opposed to an unobserved) timeline. There was a perception of having to wait, sometimes an hour or two in the box to move over. The creepy thing is, you experience nothing while imaginary, yet you remember it afterward once you’re real again. And no, you can’t actually perceive the cutover. It’s like resuming a virtual machine. You just have to accept the science that you didn’t actually experience any of the things you remember on the other side of the box.

Y’all; I know this is a lot. I feel I have to convey it, just to give you a sense of my reality during this time. Again; I clearly lost my mind, but I also have no idea where this bullshit came from.

And when I open the door what do I find, there’s not a single goddamn desk in that office, there IS. NO. CAROL IN HR!
Mac… half the employees in this building have been made up. This office is a goddamn ghost town.

So much stuff, man… real and imaginary, experienced and unexperienced… if you’re truly aware, it invariably means that you’re either in a real and observed timeline, or you’re on a spaceship. Having access to this sort of technology gives one access not only to their past and future real selves, but also the “imaginationland” of alternate realities from which they can, well… do magic.

Okay. So, Earth. It’s a tier 3 world, where folks are really spooked out about angels and demons and stuff; and no, we never really get to the point of making our own spaceships. On a planet like that, magic comes from witches. History has proven time and time again that witches on Earth are better off keeping to themselves. Sure a lot of people are chill, but there’s a large enough percentage that is not okay with living in a world with people like us; which is unfortunate, because they wouldn’t even be real without us.

Through some twist of fate, I’ve found myself here: a timeline that is both real and observed for some reason. About that.

It’s the 1990s now. “The Freemasons” are still fighting for me. The FBI has been pulling more and more thread from the sweater, and they really don’t like the idea that they’re imaginary. They don’t understand that it’s just the nature of the universe. All sorts of possibilities get to exist as thought, but we only want to bring the light of experience to the best possibilities.

Well, we are the best!

They boldly proclaimed, in what may as well have been a Texan accent.

Look; we gotta be real, now!

They didn’t like the idea of us witches getting to decide what’s real and imaginary, and they pushed to democratize the process.

The thing of it is, this is sort of the goal, right? For a civilization to develop a cohesive world government that can manage its own multiverse?

Despite the obvious concerns, we had little room to argue with the conservative’s push toward democratization. We concluded our only choice was to campaign for the electorate to vote for our side; the witches who are telling you that, despite what your knee-jerk reaction might be, you really don’t want to be real. This timeline is filled with war, poverty, violence, hunger… Sure, humans never build their own spaceships, but they build all sorts of things nicer than this! A vote for existence would be a vote for human suffering. Some versions of us should only exist as thought.

This witch stuff was classified; thus, the electorate comprised the entire intelligence community, or folks who otherwise had a security clearance. And I suppose, witches and their friends. This was considered fair enough.

The conservatives ran a catchy “Vote for Reality” campaign. In usual conservative fashion, they relied on quippy one-liners, folksy wisdom and overwhelming pathos. The witches, who appeared unified against the conservatives, tried to explain the complexity of the multiverse which these laymen failed to grasp; even mildly undesirable timelines like stubbing your toe in the morning can be left unexperienced through magic. We can build a literal utopia! Truly civilized planets work nothing like this! Imagine never seeing an ambulance. Imagine only hearing about murder in very rare cases where it was for the best somehow. The gap in understanding was mind-boggling! You don’t have to be real to exist. The intents and thoughts already exist. You’re you! You just don’t have to feel anything bad. We don’t have to…

Just because something’s imaginary doesn’t mean it’s not rear!

#TODOJust put the video in

Partway through, the conservatives pushed to expand the electorate to more government agencies; thus, increasing the number of uninformed voters who were easily persuaded to “vote for reality”.

You should pinch yourself to confirm that yes, the conservatives won their vote for reality. At least, if you can see Barney.

Barney? Who the hell is Barney?

He’s the guy who tipped me off to Pepe Silvia.

Ugh… So it would’ve been an imaginary version of me getting tortured by the FBI if I ever learned where I’m from; but now, the crazy fucks had to vote for reality too.

Alien worlds saw the vote as a no-brainer. To them, this shouldn’t have been a close election; anyone who’s able to think clearly should be able to see all the bad in the world today. To us witches, it was only a matter of perspective; this timeline only seems good if you don’t know any better. Which, the electorate overwhelmingly did not.

There was actually debate in the galactic community as to whether we should “light up” this clearly dystopian timeline; even if it was voted for fair and square. The witches or our collective homeworlds could just… not honor the results of the election. Ethically, we felt we had no choice. We shouldn’t have had a vote if we didn’t want to hear the answer.

Okay; so we’re being held hostage by crazy Christians who are all spooked out about angels and demons and witches and shit. We’re real, I’m the unlucky witch in this timeline… The vote actually caused a sort of “spur”, or tangent in the multiverse. There’s a whole “good Earth” multiverse the community of witches has manifested, and it looks nothing like this. It’s like a streak of black paint on a nice portrait we’ve been working on that’s there because some goddamn lunatics wanted to democratize art, and thought the only apprenticeship they’d ever need was the fucking Bible.

Alright. So this is actually a dystopia. It shouldn’t exist, and we’re in fact living on what humans from other timelines might liken to a sort of “North Korea” planet. Other timelines don’t have things like holy wars and violent religions. It’s uncomfortable to some folks that Christianity is not only absent from alien worlds, but also from most of Earth’s timelines; certainly the ones collectively manifested by witch-kind.

The Freemasons; whoever they are. It’s really just a bunch of witches in a trench coat. They’ve been court-ordered not to tell me what I am ever, because the government really thinks they need to know what’ll happen if the Freemasons aren’t doing the world’s ostensibly most important job. I’m never going to figure it out without their help. And, they consider it really important, both ethically and symbolically, that I do figure it out eventually.

So, the witches devise an elaborate magic trick. Instead of explaining that it’s really just science and advanced technology, they’re going to try and make me think it’s some kind of mysticism-spirituality thing. It’s perfectly legal; it isn’t the truth about UFOs. Tommy’s been in position ever since… well, let’s just say everyone on this timeline who’s a witch knows who Rachael Brown is; because I’m the witch. Vote for reality, “cain’t we get just one ub’um”… Everyone who learns the real truth about UFOs here also learns the truth about why this timeline sucks; and, they usually start a parallel if not totally new life for themselves somewhere a bit more sane.

So, the entire thing was a ruse. The Kybalion, all of that stuff from Tommy and Heather and Maureen… all hundreds, if not thousands of years in the making.

Right. Dani. She’s from Imaginationland. They pulled her through the box; or, my past timeline is pinned on something weird because my homeworld has intentionally broken the usual feedback loop where you un-intention time travel to the past when the results are undesirable. It depends on when you ask me, because this is a weird year.

They’re onto me dude, those guys are sharp as nails up there!

They want to demonstrate the multiverse. This is how they do it, when they can’t communicate with you otherwise; show you a really base, primal-instinctive version of yourself. Someone you would never actually be in real life; yet, someone you know and recognize as nobody other than yourself, straight from your own mind. You’re ultimately supposed to reason that the fabric of the universe allows for an alternate and sometimes incorrect version of you to exist; and that you’re in possession of some unique power, tool, or ability which you need to “return to the manufacturer”. It’s usually how they get the very first witch’s attention on any given planet.

Okay. So they’ve got my attention. The government wants to keep me in a fishbowl, but at this point I’m thoroughly convinced that as long as Dani California and Monkey Wrench exist in the repertoire my evil twin really was out causing trouble back in the 90s.

The FBI’s investigation was hardly impartial. The people involved had little to no respect for the scientific method, and seemingly no awareness of cognitive biases. I’d been given the nickname “Evil Ethan” before I was even born.

Every little thing about me was construed as evil by the researchers. “Look at that thing he does with his lip! Look at what he’s doing with his jaw! Don’t he just look demonic?”

They’ve been sadistically watching me my entire life from a distance; while joking about what’s going to happen to me once I’m “theirs”. It’s like the Up series, except with torture.

Further attempts by activists fell on deaf ears. “Look, we already decided they can get one of ’em. This is the FBI’s baby, now!”

It would seem the only chance I have is to learn the truth about UFOs without anyone violating the court order, and get the fuck off the planet.

It wasn’t until later in the summer or fall that this next bit came to me; but, I want to put all the crackpot shit together.

The “great laminator”

It explained so much! Goddamn, I’ve lost it…

It’s an analogy, for how time works. Pull yourself out of spacetime, and imagine being on the outside looking in with a different, more universal time reference. You can see the timeline, in a sort of infinitesimal filmstrip view. From this perspective, everything appears still and lifeless. Where does the experience come from?

The “line of experience” actually sweeps backwards, from future to past. As the line approaches any given point on the filmstrip, it attracts a dimension of the filmstrip toward it. This is the pull of time; oriented past to future, toward the great laminating head which moves toward the past. Once you’re laminated, you’ve experienced. You’ve felt things. They’ve genuinely happened. They can’t be undone (mostly; I’m getting to that).

The “laminator and filmstrip” form a very large circle; as the great laminator moves counterclockwise, we experience time pulling us clockwise. The head rotates continuously, carving out a corkscrew pattern such that the exact same things are always happening at each phase in the rotation. I suppose this might imply a big crunch.

This has obvious implications. For one, the past hasn’t happened yet. But, the future has. Doesn’t magic make more sense now?

The great laminator could be thought of as the direction of wave function collapse; the quantum state of everything in the future from whatever point you’re currently experiencing now has already been determined. You can go there in a ship (and experience in the future, when the laminator was there), and write down what’s happening in your magic sorcery book. You can go to the past and tell people what’s “about to happen”. It isn’t chance, it’s set in stone!

Conversely, whatever it is you think has happened in the past, it hasn’t even been experienced yet! The past can be thought of as a staging area. It affects the quantum state of the present, but we haven’t really been there yet. It’s only real to us. This means there can be wild discontinuities in the timeline, which are completely imperceptible without the technology.

Holy wars, Friday the 13^th, inquisitions, the holocaust, Dani California… none of it has happened yet. Hell, the Chicken McNuggets I ate a few hours ago haven’t even happened yet. It was late and not much else was open.⁴⁶

It’s beginning to seem like a harmless lesson, right? The government needs to know what’ll happen if somebody interferes with the Freemasons, for “national security”. The answer is that it fucks up the multiverse, and now there’s a bunch of dystopian violent shit going on… and the problem witch is running around in the past killing cops and declaring herself a sovereign citizen! It’s like, an obvious alarm bell, right?

It’s only the past. We can change that, no problem. The future, on the other hand…

This idea was fascinating, the more I thought about it. When you’re a witch, it’s actually your oldest self steering in your younger selves. They look at their past timeline, write down anything undesirable at all… the bad stuff in the past never even gets laminated; and the version of you that both remembered it and felt it’s after effects stays imaginary. By the time you’re experiencing anything, you’re just coasting along with your magic. You know everything not to do from your imaginary selves, and your past timeline is peachy and normal.

So, once something is laminated, it’s happened, right? Well, first you have to “observe” it which sort of lights it up, then there are imaginary layers from people with spaceships, and then there’s the topmost layer, which experiences life whenever the great laminator gets there.

Well, you can still undo things somehow. But, it’s really complicated, and you have to leave the universe. I don’t mean spacetime, I mean the whole thing. The big wheel, the great laminator, all of it.

You can pull yourself out with the technology; but it’s a weeks-long trip and a very big deal, even by my homeworld’s standards.

What does the universe look like? Well, it’s actually… a star. It’s just a fucking ball of gas with sufficient gravity, in somebody else’s universe. We seem to live in a regress of stars and black holes. Did I mention “souls” are made of the stuff of black holes? Probably not, because I’m trying to get through this writing. It’s a bit of a drag, and I have boxes full of Pepe.

When black holes swallow mass-energy, it “falls through” to a lower layer in your same universe; so there are actually arbitrarily many four-dimensional spacetimes, stacked in at least one other dimension, which comprises the “filmstrip”. Jeez, this is dizzying.

So, everybody’s “soul” is associated with a black hole in another spacetime layer in the greater universe. When worlds fall onto a black hole, it’s actually the entire span of timelines and lived experiences that gets absorbed; this ultimately influences the character of the sentient lifeform with which the black hole is associated. In other words, you are what you eat; it may be conjectured that somebody with innately violent tendencies has a soul that has devoured many worlds with violent histories. A world’s timelines (which I’ll sometimes refer to as the “world’s multiverse”, though I don’t mean that in the same sense as, well… nevermind) are gravitationally bound to the associated planet; thus, nested gravity wells create a structure akin to a sort of hierarchical namespace. All of our knowledge and experiences are ultimately destined to be devoured by a very wise fellow who might as well be named Sagittarius A*; and probably, some less wise fellows leading up to it.

Okay. I swear I wasn’t on any drugs other than pot. I don’t know what happened to me. I’m on pot now. I feel like I’m still glossing over stuff despite the convolution of what I’ve already written. It really doesn’t matter, but I do feel like I need to get it all out of me; because it all felt very real at the time.

What was I talking about? Oh right, can you un-fuck-up something after it’s laminated? It seems to be a bit of a philosophical question, but seemingly you can rewrite that section by stepping out of the entire universe and modifying it (our star, that is), from the outside. Our universe’s star ostensibly exists in a binary system, which some alien race was using as a power source. You can talk to them, the people on the outside. Everything is much larger there.

Apparently, if you went up enough levels you’d get to the root universe; a highly unstable thing that spawned off the beginning of this… fractal of universes.

Similarly, you can dive into our stars and find universes of decreasing complexity contained within.

Okay, so that’s how magic works. The past is mutable and the future is immutable, you just need the technology. I swear, you could at least make a B-grade anime or sci-fi flick out of this.

#snippetRight, I think my addled brain was trying to relate the fate of the outer star to the fate of the inner universe (big freeze or big crunch); but I think that betrays the concept of time repeating cyclically.

So, that’s how life works. On one hand, nuclear fusion somehow spawns off the necessary dimensions to create a structure mirroring the one containing our universe. On the other hand, gravitational collapse consolidates a fuckton of mass-energy into an exotic, massive, bosonic energy cloud that comprises one’s soul, and is ostensibly the densest stuff in the universe. It exists outside three dimensional space, yet is attached to our bodies and gives us sentience. The humanoid form could ostensibly be derived from this exotic energy; explaining why most all intelligent life is humanoid or similar.

Dani. She isn’t me, she’s just someone who was intentionally pulled out of my imagination and placed into real life. A bunch of people left bread crumbs so that I’d eventually realize what happened. It’s really, really fucking illegal for anyone to directly tell me anything about what I am. That’s why everyone’s acting so goddamn sketchy. All they can do is lie to me and hope I get it.

The cops and soldier boys. If they have their way, they’re just going to abduct a very confused Rachael at the age of 33 or something, and torture the fuck out of me while trying to get me to blow stuff up with my mind. You know… just in case. They’re all into angels and demons and shit, they don’t want to hear about timelines and the multiverse. It’s like trying to explain global warming to Alex Jones times a million.

What the witches have got is cunning. They’re going to put me in the weirdest goddamn situation imaginable in the most legal way possible, until the only message I can possibly pull out from it all is

Tag. You’re it.

---

In June, I finally got my hair cut. It looked really bad on account of the hair loss, and I had little choice but to have it cut to around shoulder-length or a bit higher.

More came to me about the witches. We never told the normal folks our true numbers. I presumed us to be no more than one or two percent of the population. The seemingly big reveal came when the witches in my head told me.

Ten percent.

I went dizzy for a moment.

We’re ten percent of the population? One in ten people?

All the names started flooding into my head.

Gail Richardson. Kimberly Richardson. Bill and Tammy Mitchell. Dalton Cox. Abigail Bastiaansen. Seth Conner?

Dude. What?

They’ve all known. Since, like… high school. They couldn’t tell me. Because of the government experiment, and the court order, and…

Isaiah Baker? Cole White?

Have you ever heard… of FOMO?

Goddamn dude. They’ve been out exploring the fucking universe and learning actual magic… and I’m stuck here in the goddamn Truman Show, trapped by a bunch of lunatics who think I’m an intergalactic pedophile or some shit.

I didn’t need to hear very many of these names before I… got it. Why Christians hate us so much. I mean, I don’t get it, but…

We’re the queers, dude. I mean, not everyone on that list is LGBT; in fact, most of them aren’t. But the vibe, though…

It’s why they hate us. The faggots, the introverts, the artists… the non-conformists, the quiet, sensitive types…

Fuck. It’s like… a conservative’s Kryptonite. They can’t stand people like us.

They like the opposite of that; strong, pragmatic, dogmatic… loud, opinionated, evangelical…

So we’re like, just a little different in a way that seems harmless enough. Then again, I was just a little different when I was a kid, and I inadvertently learned about disownment because of it. Oh, and then we summon space aliens that might as well be demons from hell…

We even look a little different. Witches from Vega have catty eyes, and witches from my homeworld of Alanon (?) apparently do a weird thing with their jaw.

Shit. Abigail, Kimberly, Heather, Bill and Tammy… they’re all from Vega, and they all have those kinda squinty, catty looking eyes. Or maybe I’m way off, ’cause I have fucking aphantasia…

That cat’s something I can’t ex-plaaaaaaaaaaaaain

We’re demon spawn. That’s… what that is. Demon spawn is a slur against witches.

Regina?

We’re from the same place. Me, Gail, Tommy, Dalton, and…

Sailor Jack. Didn’t he say he did something with…

What the fuck is Sailor Jack doing to my friends with his helicopter?!

Regina. Right. So, I guess that’s why Regina broke up with Samantha…

Ten percent is, like, the perfect population ratio for something like this. You’d hear whispers about it if you run with the right crowd, and you probably even know a person or two; but they’re just really goddamn private about it, because people will literally flip the fuck out and torture you to death over it. It’s probably like being gay before the 20^th century.

It’s a big coming of age thing, when you turn eighteen or even younger. “The Freemasons” knock on your door and show you a magic trick, then they take you to get your magic. Goddammit, why am I the one witch who doesn’t get to go to alien Hogwarts?!

It’s a whole subculture, that’s just really secretive for their own safety. The country folks know about it. They know all about those bright flashes from those wicked witches.

How’ve I not heard about this before? I guess it’s because I’m not really that country, and my family isn’t well-connected at all. A lot of folks are sort of just “born” on one side or the other; learning either about how the witches are real and “just misunderstood”, or learning about how “Demons and witches really do walk this Earth, son. Hell, some of your classmates are probably possessed by demons.”

Shit, dude. All I’ve ever really wanted to do is fuck around with computers and smoke weed and take hormones and get tied up and beaten with stuff for fun, and it’s like the rest of the planet is on a totally. Fucking. Different wavelength from me. How am I even the same species as these people?

Right. I’m kinda not. You can even see the difference in people’s “soul”, or whatever you call it when you leave three-dimensional space. A visible energy cloud surrounds you, and I’m this blue giant from the Pleiades. Most people on Earth are amber-colored, and their souls are younger and not as large.

I don’t mean to sound pretentious. Again, this is all bullshit. It’s bullshit that somehow managed to take up a year of my life, though.

My worldview quickly pivoted away from anything involving spirituality or religion. Continued use of the word “vision” to describe the messages in my head was met with

Don’t say “visions”.

This is real, Rachael. It’s science. You don’t understand yet.

You aren’t having “visions”. It’s just technology. You could just call it the thing-o-scope.

Right. Because this is a rouse, because we’re trying to cross up these cops and soldier boys who are “just asking questions” about ostensibly rampant demonic possession that “the Freemasons” know all about.

What are they hiding, huh?

There’s a refrain that kept echoing in my head, in the wake of all this.

I’m so glad it’s space atheism!

That earlier shit was just… weird.

Tilting at windmills (Q3)

So, it’s the summer. I think I’ve learned the real truth about UFOs and a bunch of other crazy shit by doing nothing but living in my bedroom, stressing the fuck out and smoking pot. It seemed what ultimately needed to happen, was that I just needed to learn all of this without being told directly.

I really need to get off the planet. The only people who know can’t interfere because of the court order. Now that I understand what’s happening, the rest is up to me. I have to make my move; right?

Tommy, Heather, Maureen, Persephone… there’s only one of these UFO people who’s both already involved and has given me the time of day.

I summarized my present understanding into a three-page handwritten note; which I planned to give to Persephone after inviting myself over.

I arrive at Persephone’s Morrisville apartment on a Thursday afternoon, a nervous wreck. I hand Persephone the letter. She reads the first bit, before visibly growing about as panicked as I was.

Let’s go outside. Come on. Let’s go outside.

I bundled myself up in the hammock while Persephone finished reading my thing. I didn’t know what was going on, to be honest. I felt I had little choice but to assume it was all real; and it did feel very real at the time.

Going in, my impression was that Persephone wouldn’t know of the court order, because she isn’t a witch. She’s just a friend of witches who knows about this stuff. She certainly didn’t seem to know anything.

Let’s go back inside

We move from the patio to Persephone’s bedroom; where we’re joined by Stacey. I wasn’t expecting her to be there, but I’m not sure why. I’d heard they were joined at the hip lately.

I laid down on the floor; anxiously making eye contact with the ceiling.

Feel the pine cone, Rachael.

She hands me the aforementioned object to use as a form of anxiety relief. It was a very Persephone thing of her to do.

She started to talk a little more openly about the contents of the letter; something she seemed to avoid at first.

So you think the FBI is following you, huh?

She proceeded to use a VPN to do an internet search for the “color of the sky on Vega”; one of the details I included in the letter that, in my addled state, I thought would prove the authenticity of my experience.

Show Stacey the letter. She knows about this stuff.

Stacey silently reads the letter without comment. I kept laying on the floor and avoiding eye contact.

The mixed signals were killing me. On one hand, they were both acting sketchy enough to suggest there was some cause for alarm. On the other hand, she did sound a bit sarcastic about the idea of government agents following me around. I figured she decided some combination of both transparency and misdirection would be ideal; after all, the agents are probably listening to everything we say.

After an extended amount of time really beating around the goddamn bush it felt like, we decided to go to Duke Gardens. When I almost left the letter on the couch, Persephone said

Take that with you. I don’t want anybody to get hurt.

Stacey played this sort of ambient jazz-like music in her car while we crawled through rush hour traffic from Morrisville Parkway to Davis Dr. I figured I was on an adventure to somewhere.

Persephone started engaging me in conversation; talking to me about weird spiritual concepts that didn’t really make any sense. I interpreted this as an attempt to throw off the eavesdropping of agents; particularly given my mention in the letter that the witches had successfully bait-and-switched the cops and soldier boys into thinking it was religion and spirituality instead of mysticism and magic. As if those were really different things, and not just all bullshit.

I wrote my own Bible once.

Did you know there are 284 hells, but only 93 heavens?

There’s a nexus point approaching. Can you feel it?

It was like, well… (sorry I’m such a nerd)

We arrive at the gardens after, I don’t know. Let’s call it 45 minutes. It sounded like they went often. I think they said it was their third time that day. Geez…

I attempted to leave my phone in Stacey’s car “by accident” to make me more abductable. Stacey pointed this out as she locked the car, leaving me little choice but to take it with me.

We meet one of Stacey’s friends briefly. Stacey left with her friend, leaving Persephone and I to walk through the gardens by ourselves a bit. I interpreted this as an attempt to clandestinely spot anyone who was trying to follow me; as I did the remainder of my time at the gardens. Persephone engaged me in superficial conversation about the blooming flowers and exotic Asiatics.

Eventually, Persephone and I reunited with Stacey in a quaint, private little clearing I’d have probably walked right past if I didn’t know it was there. It looked like somewhere Link would meet Princess Zelda.

We decided to lay down in this clearing and vibe, picnic style. I was at least enjoying the time outdoors.

The nexus point, Rachael. It’s growing closer.

Uh… yeah, sure. The nexus point.

Between me, Persephone, Stacey, and maybe the other chick who didn’t really stay with us, I got the distinct impression that we were methodically checking to see if anyone was following me. First Stacey and her friend walked around, then they left me in the clearing by myself for a time, and at the end Stacey and I walked around while Persephone stayed in the clearing. It’s… exactly the sort of experiment I would’ve devised if I wanted to test if the government was secretly following someone, and had multiple bodies to assist. It felt like we were trying to kite the agents around like zombies in Call of Duty.

As we were laying in the clearing, Persephone continued to engage me with pseudo-spiritual bullshit.

The third level of attainment is object permanence.

This appeared to be a reference to my letter, where I accused the agents of lacking “object permanence” for failing to understand Dani California was a result of their experiment. She didn’t actually call it “the third level of attainment”. I don’t remember exactly what it was; but she kept saying bullshit like that.

The nexus point. It’s here. Do you feel it?

It’s passed. I feel it slipping away…

We left not long after Stacey and I made our loop around. At least at the time, I had the impression Stacey’s friend was enlisted to help with the experiment.

We went back to Persephone’s apartment. It eventually became clear I wasn’t going to find the answers I was looking for that evening; and I really just wanted to go home and smoke a bowl.

The next morning, she… basically did the same thing as my therapist; after spouting what I interpreted to be pseudo-spiritual word salad. Although, she might’ve just been telling me I was a pothead.

I felt I had little choice but to double down.

---

After avoiding Dr. Reid for the last year, I finally had to face the music. I couldn’t phone in any more refills until I showed up for my annual physical. This happened to be the following Monday.

The reduction in my dosage of spiro over a year ago was a real drag, and there’s no way I’d have ever gone this long without complaining if I hadn’t been dealing with the crisis of the entire fucking timeline. I could feel all the little things I loved about being on HRT slipping away.

I had recently started cutting the spiro in half and taking it twice a day, which I think made the best of the low dosage. Though it seems wise considering I’d always taken it twice a day before, the prescription was for once a day, and they make 50mg pills for that if she wanted me to spread it out.

I was nervous; though all the bullshit that’d happened to me in my head over the last several months numbed the fear. Nothing about Freemasons or UFOs was mentioned; much to my relief.

How’s the medication working? You’re still taking the 6mg/day estradiol and 100mg/day spironolactone?

Yeah! Uh, so I can tell I definitely need more spiro…

I was hoping to take you off spiro.

Oh, really? I’ve got way more body hair and skin oil lately, I really feel like my T is too high.

So, after a couple of years your gonads down-regulate, and you don’t need spironolactone anymore. You could still take it, but you don’t need it.

Well, I’ve heard of monotherapy. Most of my friends who are doing that are on injections…

Okay. Well, we’ll check you’re levels today and the front desk will call you if we need to change anything. Does that sound good?

I was highly skeptical about the idea of just being pulled off spiro, but I wasn’t about to argue with my doctor over it any more than I already had. I figured I’d just wait for the numbers.

I also brought up my inordinate amount of hair loss; something Dr. Reid didn’t seem all that concerned about. She suggested I try using minoxidil and a dermal roller on my scalp. I never followed through with either.

She asked me if I’d experienced any unexpected weight loss; maybe because I’d been taking the stimulant medication in the past. I said no because I hadn’t thought much of it, but it made me reflect on the fact that I had lost a lot of weight. There’s been a lot going on; I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m not eating right, but I’m fat anyhow.

After the test results came back, I got a voicemail from the doctor’s office. I listened to the first few seconds of it while reading the poor speech-to-text transcription; enough to tell I’d been taken off spironolactone and progesterone.

With everything going on, I felt I had little choice but to see how bad things could get on monotherapy.

---

I forget if I told Dr. Reid about the GI problems I’d been having or not, but the sudden attacks that started in April continued to the point that I knew it wasn’t just something I ate. It really wasn’t normal; I woke up on the bathroom floor with my glasses all bent out of shape once; and had the less dramatic version of that happen to me after making it to my bed a few other times. It reminded me of what was happening to Walter White at the beginning of Breaking Bad; and I may’ve been more on top of it if it weren’t for me thinking the entire history of Earth was fucked up because I was the subject of a government experiment.

My hair loss at this point was really bad. It clearly wasn’t the hoodie, or careless detangling or anything like that. It was getting worse. I supposed I couldn’t rule out stress…

You wanna talk about stress, you wanna talk about STRESS?!

I felt like shit all the time. I felt like I was 70 years old, and was starting to look it too. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror one day, and I looked like a fucking ghost. I could hardly catch my breath, and was ready for a nap as soon as I got out of bed. It’s how I imagine being anemic would feel.

The witch goes
“Pheeeewwww”

It was later in the summer when I got mail in my head again.

You’re on chemo.

I’m on what?!

The agents. They replaced my hormones with chemotherapy. It’s why my hair’s falling out, it’s why I keep getting sick after meals and losing weight…

God. Dammit! I’m on fucking chemo! This is fucking America! What gives them the right to put me on fucking…

It’s standard procedure to fuck with the pedophiles, Evil Ethan…

Right. They think my future self is running an intergalactic child sex trafficking ring in the 90s.

God. Dammit!

They’ve been fucking with all sorts of shit. They’ve gone to all the restaurants I frequent and told them I’m a huge pedophile, and to fuck with my food. The agents interview nearly everyone I come into contact with in my day-to-day life, so most of my friends and co-workers think I’m a pedo, too. It’s probably why I struggle to make friends. Jizz, laxatives, chemo, WD-40… How long have they been doing shit like this?

Since I was a kid. Right. Evil Ethan. They’ve just been waiting for me to grow up and realize who I am; at which point I’ll realize they’ve already gotten their revenge.

This is when I really started losing it. I went out for a drive late at night, and went crazy down a lonely stretch of highway.

You don’t FUCK with my FUCKING MEDICINE

Punctuating my words with the horn, I aggressively pulled into a Sheetz; where I hoped to grab a modest pre-packaged meal the agents would need magic of their own to fuck with.

I don’t like agents
Mob of crooks, that’s all they are

Everything about my life. I was a “submissive” while exploring the BDSM community. “Evil Ethan is just stalking his prey…”

Dana. Remember, you used to go to her house for ponies? She was a government agent, Rachael.

Most people who’ve been “nice” to me throughout my life were probably agents.

Goddammit!

By the time I transitioned, they were more than certain about the monster I was.

Now, we know some of these people might really be transgender, but a lot of folks are worried about predators posing as women to lure ’em in. We all know Evil Ethan has a history of this, now…

They continued following me around while conducting their unblinded study with utter lack of scientific controls; basically just looking for evidence of my being evil. Surveying the bathroom stall to make sure nobody beside you can see uncomfortable shadows or whatnot? “There goes Evil Ethan again, peekin’ on ’em in the ladies room…” I could tell I’d be in for a gish gallop if I’d ever even meet my accusers face to face.

You don’t FUCK with my FUCKING MEDICINE!

I looked through my stockpile of estradiol, to see if I had anything old that the agents might not’ve gotten to. I didn’t have much left at this point; but I did find one bottle from 2021. I switched over to it in the hopes I would stop getting sick.

---

This is about the time when I really started losing it. I devolved into bouts of road rage over the government agents I knew were fucking with me and following me around. I was convinced they were putting laxatives or cum or worse in basically everything I bought. I became more and more frazzled as I attempted to procure meals and household items that the agents hadn’t fucked with.

Peak insanity may’ve been reached when I drove all the way out to Mebane in a desperate attempt to get unadulterated Zaxby’s. When my meal added up to exactly $13 even, I was convinced the agents put them up to it as a gesture that they’d made it there before me. I pulled off to wait for my food for what felt like an excessively long time even for Zaxby’s, before driving off to circle the parking lot while honking the horn in a fit of rage.

I FUCKING HATE THIS COUNTRY!
FUCK AMERICA!

I got behind somebody with an “In God We Trust” license plate, and I just fucking lost it.

GOD DAMMIT I FUCKING HATE CHRISTIANS!
Aaaaaa (static)

I ended up passing them aggressively on 40 while flipping them off.

This person did nothing to me. I really need help.

I was going on spiritually racist tirades about the “amber coloreds”; calling them “amber swine”, “the scourge of the galaxy”…

You people NEVER loved me!
I’ve been unloved since the DAY I WAS BORN!

I’ve been unloved since the DAY I WAS BORN, and I’m gonna hate you amber fucks until the DAY I FUCKING DIE!

I hope the neighbors didn’t hear me.

I started throwing things at my walls. Broke a glass mug and a bathroom tile when I “learned” amber coloreds in Africa enslaved the first witch.

Dude. I need help.

---

The things in my head grew more morbid in the second half of the year.

It wasn’t just me they’re after. They’re after everyone. Anyone, really, who’s spent a non-trivial amount of time around Evil Ethan. Evil Ethan is the most wicked witch ever, and we’ve gotta stop ’eem at any cost!

The FBI has a term for anyone who becomes friends with “Evil Ethan”.

Collateral damage.

The Johnsons, the Whites, Susan, my classmates… hell, even the actual IEEE robotics team.

They couldn’t just interrogate them. They had to torture the piss out of everybody.

They assumed anyone who had anything nice to say about me was under the influence of demonic mind control or some shit.

There were so many people to torture, they had to open an enhanced interrogation facility in Rob-co. It’s legal somehow. Something about domestic terrorism. The Bush administration had it rammed through.

They’ve used it on so many people. BLM, MeToo… they’ve all been secretly classified by the FBI as “domestic terror fronts”.

They increased the maximum amount of time you can be held without charges from 24 to 72 hours for suspects of domestic terrorism; as well as authorizing “enhanced interrogation”. They make you swear secrecy before they let you go, and they will kill you if you tell anyone. They make you go to their Nazi doctors for any medical care needed as a result of your interrogation; who may or may not give you an anesthetic, depending on your classification in the system as a “domestic terrorist” or “collateral damage”.

What they do to “domestic terrorists”. They round up all your friends and family whether or not they have any intelligence value, they torture the piss out of them on camera… and at the very end, they make you watch it. It’s supposed to act as a deterrent… or “yee-haw justice”, or something. The entire program is highly classified.

And, highly controversial. I thought Sandy Hook happened after a gun enthusiast was misidentified as a domestic terrorist. Changes were made to the program, but it wasn’t eliminated. There was always one super villain the treatment was made for.

So, they’ve been torturing the piss out of all my friends and family (what exists of the latter), so that they can get revenge on me “America style” for all the little girls I’m going to rape. Or… something.

Dude. Fuck them.

There’s magic, though. Can we fix this? Do we have to experience any of it? Do they have to experience it? This is outrageous, even for Imaginationland!

---

So, it’s almost September. Dr. Reid’s monotherapy thing is going abysmally, even with me taking the maximum sane dosage of 8mg/day estradiol out of my stockpile. I considered ordering DIY, before thinking to myself “Oh come on, that’s ridiculous! I’m a full-grown adult!”

At any rate; I hadn’t actually picked up my new prescription since I last saw the doctor, because I knew it was just estradiol and I had a stockpile of it. It wasn’t until now that I decided to take a few minutes away from witches and government agents to open the CVS app and fill my estradiol. And, that’s when I saw it.

Woah, those are purple!

Wait… 1mg?

I had an unfilled prescription in my CVS app for a bunch of purple 1mg estradiol tablets. I always get the teal-colored 2mg ones. Everyone gets the 2mg ones.

I scrolled through my voicemails to find the last one from my doctor.

The doctor said you, uh, your estradiol is very high.

Your testosterone is within normal levels…

You are to stop taking the spironolactone, and the progesterone.

She’s cutting your estradiol in half, to 1mg twice a day.

First of all, she had me on 6mg/day. Half would’ve been 3mg/day, not 2.

This took me from suspicion to outright disbelief. I would consider 2mg/day of estradiol with no antiandrogen to be… a fuck-you dose of HRT. That’s… not an adult dose of hormones.

Shit. My therapist gave me obviously bad advice, my primary care doctor is giving me obviously bad advice… Fuck the government, dude.

So, the agents just want to watch from a distance as they force me to detransition? Fuck them.

Alyssa Jones and me (Q4)

The character of the bizarre experience in my head had changed a little since the beginning; but only slightly.

At the beginning, the origin of the messages and things in my head seemed more vague. Over time, the feeling emerged that these were specific people, who were able to see life through my eyes. Famous people, boring people… people from history, people from the future… It all seems highly unlikely. I’m probably mentally ill. I suppose at this point, it felt in general like “the witches” and their friends were in my head; trying to guide me through a game of charades, where they couldn’t merely blurt out the answer.

I skipped ahead earlier, but I don’t think it was until the fall that I started getting all that stuff in my head about the “great laminator”. It’s probably not that important if you missed it. It offered hope that maybe we don’t all have to experience getting tortured for national security. Maybe we can “magic it out”.

That’s a phrase I often said to myself during this period. “Can’t we magic it out?! Can’t we magic that out?! We have time travel!”

For a while since the beginning of this process, I had a deep feeling I just wasn’t cut out to be an engineer. Sure, I like dicking around with computers. I was starting to think it should’ve remained a hobby.

Science Olympiad, robot team, high school, college, CrystalSoft, Avalon… I’ve had so many chances to hit a home run, and I just can’t get anything on the score board. I feel like I peaked in 4^th grade when I got my ham radio license. I’m pretty sure everyone just thinks I’m smart because I wear glasses and use Linux.

I started having visions, or thing-o-scope messages, or whatever you’d call them, about my future at the conclusion of all this; which was not going to end without at least 72 hours of government-mandated torture. After everything they’d done to my friends, I didn’t even care.

I was so done with computers. That wasn’t even me! My real future self…

Her name’s Alyssa Jones. She went back to an alternate timeline in a new body to get a better childhood. We lived in Mordecai Village with a bunch of witch gold we pulled out of the time travel bank, with Gail Richardson as my adoptive mother and Kimberly as a sort of step-sister. Terry was amicably not in the picture anymore for some reason. I learned I was a witch young, stayed away from computers, had generally very different life priorities, and graduated from high school to become a basic bitch at Peace College.

I drove a while Mini Cooper with black racing stripes. It felt so real. Just like all the other bullshit. You probably don’t want to waste your time reading it, but here I am writing about it anyway.

She was a kinkster. I met her. Wait - I guess that makes this not an alternate timeline. Oh I remember, She lived her childhood in an imaginary timeline and came back through the box. So she never really experienced it in present tense, but she remembers it and experiences the effects from it now. So it’s… a real history, indistinguishable from any other…

Sheesh.

I’ve met my future self. I went to play parties with her. She did stuff with Ian, in fact.

Lol, what?

Okay… whatever. I’ve met her.

I thought I remembered her. Ian girl, drives the Mini Cooper… whether or not it was real (and I presume it not to have been), I seemed to remember my actual future self hanging around me when I was younger; unable to say who she really was.

She went to your apartment, Rachael…

Goddammit. Do I remember one of the Peace girls looking like someone from TNG, and brushing it off as coincidence?

Alyssa apparently had a… complicated relationship with Josh Johnson.

Okay, I did not see that coming. The dude who wanted to tape up his asshole around me in high school?

Alyssa was in a biologically normal female body, and couldn’t immediately explain what her deal was. Josh was destined to get tortured by the government for being my childhood best friend, but we were going to get him through it. And… partially out of it.

There was a plan akin to breaking Dani out of Gitmo, except on a much larger scale. I had a real time travel army, not some amateur hour bullshit like the last fever-dream iteration. Incarnations of me studied at West Point and shit. We were clean and professional. And yes, we used flying saucers. Or really, just one flying saucer. You only need one flying saucer. Entire civilizations get by with just one flying saucer.

There was a point where the agents came for Josh a second time (or so), where we just weren’t letting it happen. The agents came in a relatively simple van, which we jumped before it left town; detaining the agents and springing Josh. The feds returned in waves, with much more firepower; The Akasha guard continued matching their strength. That was apparently my, uhh…

I guess all the “me”’s have a name, collectively? And, it’s not some weird karmic destiny bullshit.⁴⁷ It’s space atheism, I was born different, but I can procure an essentially arbitrary number of new bodies for me and my close friends. You want to guess how many of me there are?

Like… hundreds of thousands of me. At least. I’m going to be all of those people; starting, apparently, with me, the person who I am now. Supposedly, the brief amount of torture is going to be all worth it.

How many people am I? How many people… are Akasha?

I’m not Anthony Kiedis; but I am Dave Grohl. We had to do all that crazy stuff in the 90s, to get the government’s attention. We needed to demonstrate the absurdity of conducting human experimentation on a witch; but, we also saw the opportunity to end this domestic terrorism program that would otherwise continue on for several more decades.

I was just going to get locked up and experimented on for the rest of my life, if it weren’t for this Dani California ruse. We pulled this weird shit with me being really crazy in the 90s, to distract them from experimenting on me and goad them into really making asses of themselves, to the point of getting their program shut down entirely.

The Akasha guard shot down a helicopter into a golf course, while Josh was still living in east Durham a couple years ago. They were really quick to cover it up. Guardsmen courteously directed traffic, to the point folks just assumed the road was closed for some mundane reason. We were prepared to deal with the cops when they eventually had questions about what the fuck we were doing blocking off Lumley road on a Tuesday afternoon.

One of the operations involved using a nearby storage unit as a very high traffic spaceport.

I had an entire “lifetime”, as a humble Portuguese forklift operator. Eventually, you’ve just done every job there is to do, to the point that there isn’t much left to experience but the mundane. This dude’s entire life (or my entire “thread” as this guy) had but a single purpose: landing a fuck-ton of Akasha guardsmen on one fateful day, then just disappearing. The forklift made for a good excuse to own a giant storage unit, although the unit was still vastly oversized for this ostensible purpose.

Dude. There’s so much bullshit. It doesn’t matter.

I was so many people. I was Dave Grohl. I was Steve Schewel. I found this hilarious, if not dizzying. I don’t know why I’m focusing on the famous men I was; except maybe that I found it easier to wield power and influence that way.

I seemed to have found the cure to gender dysphoria; which might just be magic. I could go back to being Alyssa at any time; it was just a flying saucer away. On some level, it was like having hundreds of thousands of bodies in the garage; all with their own threads that you can start or resume.

Netflix is boring. This is real life (except it isn’t).

While this all felt very real at the time, I struggle presently to believe I wouldn’t mind living all of those lifetimes as dudes. I kinda feel like I’d just be various women over and over again if I had unlimited extra lives. Granted, the Akashas did ostensibly have something like a 75/25 gender ratio.

---

Shit’s pretty bad with my hormones. I’m still taking as much estradiol as I can every day, but I really need the spiro.

Body hair, facial hair, hair and skin oil, male BO…

I saw a man look back at me in the mirror, for the first time in years. This must constitute some emergency for a trans person. What’s a girl gotta do to get some spiro around here?

I was cautiously optimistic that some reprieve might come on Friday, October 13^th. Once it did not, it was a very short throw toward…

I need to order DIY.

(website redacted). Looks different, still exists. Still has spironolactone. That’s good.

Shit, looks like they’re out of estradiol. At least the 2mg generic. I waited a week for the E to get back in stock, before I found an acceptable substitute; sublingual estradiol valerate, sold in other countries by Bayer under the brand name “Progynova”. I… didn’t know valerate came in sublingual form. We have valerate injections in America…

Some quick “I do my own research” confirmed my suspicion that there was no gotcha with substituting sublingual estradiol with sublingual estradiol valerate; save for the valerate part adding extra molecular weight, resulting in a 2mg Progynova being the molar equivalent of only about 1.5mg plain estradiol.

I quickly ordered 400 tablets of spironolactone and 336 doses of Progynova. The highly variable shipping from Vanuatu only took three weeks this time.

A new message arrived in my head, just as my order was about to ship.

It was… an experiment. To prove that I was really transgender.

They gradually replaced my hormones with a placebo; before finally replacing them with something that would actually make me sick.

If I really had gender dysphoria, I was supposed to go to the doctor and talk about how my hormones don’t work anymore. The UFO situation short-circuited this, and isolated me from my doctor. Then, I self-medicated from my own surplus out-of-order; defeating the gradual dilution I was supposed to experience as the months went on. Finally, I started taking the poison pills as I randomly grabbed from the pile of surplus medication; never realizing they were making me sick while they never made the connection that I was still trying to take my medication in earnest.

I was pissed off; especially since this apparently couldn’t be revealed until I ordered DIY; a choice that I hoped would end this experiment one way or another.

I’m about to go H.A.M.

The thought occurred to me that I could ramp up my spironolactone; but only the thought. The louder voice in my head was yelling

FREIGHT TRAIN!

The risk of serious consequences seemed to be non-existent. It just makes you feel shitty, potentially. You should ramp up your meds, though.

I did take a half spiro to start, but I got on the 200mg/day freight train over the next 24 hours or so. I planned to take 8mg/day of Progynova in a similar freight train strategy; the molar equivalent of about 6mg.

I woke up for day two of Progynova. Took one of them, ate a handful of peanut butter-filled pretzels, and right after “the thing” happened. The full-blown cramps, the ocean in my ears… I rushed to the bed before coming to in a cold sweat. I’d never had it happen with that little food before.

Alright, you fucks. I get the message. I’ll call Dr. Reid.

I scheduled another appointment with the doctor; hoping I just needed to be really crystal clear about the hormones not working, and that they might actually be making me sick, in order to call off this wayward experiment.

I showed up to my appointment, probably looking dreadful at this point. I was thrown off when I sat down in the exam room, and the nurse asked me in a most sincere tone

Are you still taking the 1mg estradiol twice a day?

I didn’t even know what to say to that. It’s a yes or no question.

Uh… yeah, sure.

I eventually saw Dr. Reid; hoping to blow the lid off this whole ridiculous charade.

I feel like I’m in the twilight zone with these levels, doc! I was actually taking my previous dose and sometimes a little extra, it still wasn’t working, and when I opened my CVS app and saw my new prescription was for 1mg tablets I was like… that’s a joke, right?

My hopes that she would recognize this as a clerical error and give me an adult dose of hormones were crushed in an instant.

Woah, how much have you been taking? You could really hurt yourself!

Uh… okay. But like…

She remarked on how high my estradiol ostensibly was at my last blood draw. I once again tried explaining that I’d had problems ever since she lowered my spiro a year and a half ago.

Oh, you’ve been on hormones so long don’t need spiro anymore.

I reiterated that I haven’t had SRS or an orchi yet. I thought there was a chance she might be confused, because I did get a WPATH letter from them with good intentions of getting SRS before all this space alien business started.

It wasn’t that. She just earnestly seemed to believe I no longer needed to take spironolactone, despite still having functioning testicles.

Like, dude. I’ve been learning about hormones since I was a kid. Yeah, down-regulation is a thing, and so is monotherapy. But like…

So, monotherapy is historically something trans women have had to fight their doctors to get. The reason is that one usually has to take an excessive amount of estradiol, usually administered through intramuscular injection for reasons of safety and practicality, which makes one’s blood clot more easily to the point of making DVTs and shit a real danger. Some people think it’s reasonably safe, a lot of more conservative-minded doctors are a bit freaked out by it… some trans women insist on monotherapy, out of a belief that spironolactone hinders breast growth or is otherwise unnecessary; lack of FDA approval makes the widely used alternative cyproterone acetate unavailable unless you’re going to, you know…⁴⁸

Order it from Vanuatu or some shit.

Anyway, I seemed to be getting nowhere. She had me go in the other room for blood work; I think a little frustrated I didn’t bother to get labs done beforehand. I was left hoping “the numbers” would be in my favor this time; and had the impression that Dr. Reid must be a really good actor if she wasn’t serious.

I anxiously watched the portal for the lab results. Something that bothered me ever since the summer was, I couldn’t figure out how to get the lab report on the actual letterhead from the lab company. You could do this with Quest by logging into their portal; Dr. Meier and Dr. Reid’s quaint little Triangle Comprehensive Care had been bought by Avery Primary Care, and they got switched to LabCorp. I presume that’s why the process is different, and I can now only find my lab results on the Avery patient portal; where I hope the numbers are being entered either by a script or a very steady hand.

Dude. If you want me not to think there’s a fucking conspiracy, at least show me a piece of paper from LabCorp saying “You don’t need grownup hormones, you increasingly hairy smelly tranny you!”

I was relieved to find that the results agreed with me this time; my testosterone was in the hundreds and my estradiol just wasn’t there.

My relief was very short-lived, after reading that she simply blamed this on the fact that I stopped taking my meds after I got sick. Also confusingly, she told me to “[p]lease restart at the 2 mg 3 times daily”, but I don’t think she ever wrote a prescription for this new dose. I guess she expected me to keep using my stockpile, but I didn’t really have much of one by this point. Well, except for the…

She also commented on my once-again low level of vitamin D. I knew exactly where to find the bottle of Target brand vitamin D I wasn’t taking, and took a few thousand IUs. I figured it couldn’t hurt.

I was also amused to read that she wanted me to start taking vitamin B12 again at the same dose I was taking a couple of years ago, seemingly unaware that she previously chastised me for taking it. I still had a bottle of that too, I think unopened.

Looking through my past and present lab results, I noticed for the first time she’d complained about my vitamin levels previously.

Lab results

November 2023

Name	Value	Reference range	Notes
Testosterone	826  H	8-60 (ng/dL)	High testosterone level. it is hard to say what it would have been if you had not stopped the estrogen for 48 hours. . Please note that this is pretty normal range testosterone for a cis-male. I presume it will drop back down into the undetectable range when you restart your estradiol. Please restart at the 2 mg 3 times daily and then we will check labs again at 12 weeks.
Estradiol	27.6  (pg/mL)	BN	low estradiol level. Again, hard to discern what this would have been high do not stop the estradiol for 48 hours. Please resume your estradiol medication and we will repeat labs at 12 weeks
Vitamin D, 25-Hydroxy	15.3  L	30.0-100.0 (ng/mL)	very low vitamin D. Please purchase over-the-counter vitamin D3 and take 5000 IU by mouth daily. Goal level = 50+. This could very well be causing some of your current symptoms
Vitamin B12	435	232-1245 (pg/mL)	low normal vitamin B12. While your vitamin B12 level appears to be normal here, it is a bit low. We prefer to keep the vitamin B12 level = 500+. Vitamin B12 deficiency can lead to brain fog, fatigue, headaches, and other neurologic symptoms. Please purchase over-the-counter vitamin B12 liquid. Please place 2000 mcg under the tongue daily for 1 month, then decrease to 1000 mcg under the tongue daily. Please plan to stay on the 1000 mcg dose indefinitely. We will recheck the levels at your next lab draw and will adjust the dosage as needed.

July 2023

Name	Value	Reference range	Notes
Testosterone	18	8-60 (ng/dL)	normal testosterone, appropriately suppressed
Estradiol	492.0  (pg/mL)	It’s complicated (methinks green/yellow/red 150/300/500)	very high estradiol level. Goal = 100-200. Please decrease your current dosage by half, so it will be 1 mg by mouth twice daily. I have sent a new prescription. I would like to please check labs again at 12 weeks. My staff will call you to get that scheduled.
Vitamin D, 25-Hydroxy	15.0  L	30.0-100.0 (ng/mL)	Low vitamin-D. Your vitamin D level is quite low. We prefer to keep the level = 50+. A recent study suggests that vitamin D may not be as helpful with bone health as we had thought, but it does help with balance and energy level. Please purchase over-the-counter vitamin D3 and take 4000 IU by mouth daily. Please plan to stay on this indefinitely.
Vitamin B12	378	232-1245 (pg/mL)	low normal vitamin B12. While your vitamin B12 level appears to be normal here, it is a bit low. We prefer to keep the vitamin B12 level = 500+. Vitamin B12 deficiency can lead to brain fog, fatigue, headaches, and other neurologic symptoms. Please purchase over-the-counter vitamin B12 liquid. Please place 2000 mcg under the tongue daily for 1 month, then decrease to 1000 mcg under the tongue daily. Please plan to stay on the 1000 mcg dose indefinitely. We will recheck the levels at your next lab draw and will adjust the dosage as needed.

February 2022

Name	Value	Reference range	Notes
Testosterone	20	8-60 (ng/dL)
Estradiol	116.0  (pg/mL)	It’s complicated (methinks green/yellow/red 150/300/500)
Vitamin D, 25-Hydroxy	18.0  L	30.0-100.0 (ng/mL)
Vitamin B12	1507  H	232-1245 (pg/mL)	Hi Rachael, I know we have a visit soon, but thought you’d like to see your labs in advance. Labs all look pretty good, though we need to tweak your vitamins a bit. I will look forward to discussing these in detail at your visit. Thank you, S. Reid, M.D.

This all just seemed so crazy to me. I keep going to the doctor trying to get more hormones, and I keep coming away with less somehow.

Like, is she doing this with all her trans patients? I can’t imagine she’s very popular if that’s the case. Then again, if I’m to trust all this crazy stuff in my head, there’d seem to be a motive; the government’s fucking with me, and for all I know Dr. Reid thinks I’m a child sex trafficker posing as a woman.

Shit, dude. Well, I thought it was kinda dumb that she wanted me to stop taking B12 to begin with, so that’s going back on the list; and, it’s true that I didn’t spend enough time outdoors before magic and witchcraft turned me into a recluse, so a few thousand IUs a day of vitamin D shouldn’t hurt either. Hell, maybe I should take a multivitamin.

One thing’s for sure - I’m through with Dr. Reid. I figured I had a better chance of getting un-tampered with medication at the correct dosage via the DIY route.

---

My self-confidence was at an all-time low. I had no idea what was going on, and I was really starting to doubt everything. What do these people even still want from me?!

Presuming at least some of the mail-order hormones to have been replaced with chemo, I set about cautiously and systematically trying to narrow down what it was, exactly. “It would be nice if I could at least take the spiro”, I thought.

This same week, my mother was on a tear to try and “see her child” for Thanksgiving. Some back conversation is added for context.

Ugh. Goddammit… who knows what kind of stunt she’s about to pull. Just… no.

It was now, with me trying to get hormones and dodge Susan, when Tommy sent me his first text message in over a year.

Right. On. Time. I guess we’re still doing 12:26pm, huh?

Goddammit. This has to be the most frustrating game of charades ever played.

First of all, I’m almost positive the Whites bought those. I have one from either Cody or Edward. It’s a commemoration of when the church youth group went to Ft. Caswell during the off-season, and we scared the little kids by constructing a costume of a Tusken Raider.⁴⁹

Whether or not it was Tommy’s intent (and I’m assuming it wasn’t), it led me to think about how, despite Susan’s obsessiveness and incessant giving of petty gifts, she wouldn’t buy anything so thoughtful. Susan doesn’t even know what a Tusken Raider is.⁵⁰ She has bought me generic Star Wars gifts over the years in the wake of this; presumably under the assumption that I “like Star Wars” now. This is how her brain works; it’s like trying to be friends with the Youtube search algorithm.

She doesn’t really adapt, or understand more than bullet points. It’s like every once in a while, she’ll just go memory updated and it’ll be our thing now. It reminds me of when I was a kid and my (maternal) grandma found out I liked Toad from the Mario universe. I must’ve gotten mushroom-themed Christmas gifts for the next ten years, long after my favorite Mario character had shifted to Yoshi, and finally to not really having one at all.

Anyway, continuing on…

I managed to avoid the dogs this round. Out of paranoia, I parked my car in an adjacent neighborhood in the hopes that she wouldn’t camp outside my house in protest or something. I thought I at least might be able to slip in and out the backdoor that way.

I drove by the same hotel I picked her up at for us to meet Tommy a year and a half ago. She’d left her car parked in a handicapped spot with her thing on the mirror from when she fell. This frankly bolstered my suspicions of her malingering; there was plenty of non-handicapped parking within a very reasonable distance to the door. It seemed like a thinly veiled attempt to get me to drive by the hotel and see how frail my old widdle muver was; but it kinda backfired on account of its own transparency, just like a lot of her bullshit lately.

Dude. There’s something wrong with that woman. I’ve known it most of my life; I just haven’t known what to do about it. What was I, not going home for the holidays anymore?

---

Seeming to lack other options, I attempted to cobble together a workable HRT regimen with what I had, while continuing to systematically determine what was safe and what might be making me sick.

The first order of business was the spiro. I got up to speed with it, and I could tell I had at least one clean bottle of it. I never imagined I’d be clamoring for spironolactone this late into my transition, but there I was. Once I knew one bottle was good, I switched to a second one halfway through without changing anything about my estradiol, to make sure there was nothing qualitatively different about any of the four bottles of spiro.

I got another refill of those bullshit baby estrogens, ’cause I figured hormones were hormones at this point. Inspecting them carefully, I observed subtle differences in shading. There seemed to be light ones and dark ones, and I took to tediously sorting the bottle into the two groups; theorizing that one could be chemo while the other might be unadulterated estradiol.

What am I, a fucking lab rat? Of course, I think I was just chasing ghosts now.

For a time, I thought the “dark estradiol” was the good stuff, before ultimately concluding that there seemed to be no correlation.

---

My belief that I was being subjected to an experiment evolved into something else. Something… that almost made sense.

I’m blackballed.

You know. It’s a thing that can happen to you, with the Freemasons. Granted, I didn’t know I was trying to get white-balled. It’s, like, one of the few things about the Freemasons I can verify is a thing.

Okay. So, for a witch to get their magic, they have to basically be convicted innocent by a jury of their peers. Because this “reverse-trial” is held as a ceremonious coming-of-age in adolescence, it’s usually more of a formality; there generally isn’t much dirt that can be dug up on a teenager. It’s meant to instill trust that witches aren’t running rampant, doing unethical or immoral things with their technology. Every once in a while a kid won’t get all their white balls, and they’ll issue a re-trial after a few years’ time. After so many blackballs, one is eventually blackballed for life.

In most countries, the jury process is a closed-off form of self-regulation. This is not so in America. Did you know a number of the founding fathers were Freemasons? I’ve heard that before, and I’m not going to fact-check it. It sounds right, though.

In America, it’s a jury-jury. A jury of laypeople, after being screened and sworn to secrecy, is told the truth about UFOs and magic and shit, and they get to vote on whether little Harry Potter gets to have his magic. They can ask any question they want, no matter how silly, and “the Freemasons” will use magic to reveal the answer instantly.

Okay; that’s cool.

It’s the mid-2000’s. The names of all us Bladen County witches are coming up. Me, Dalton, Seth, Abigail…

Ethan Alexandre Brown. I get randomly assigned to a district in Baltimore, where a jury is convened to hear my case. Despite attempts at a diverse mix, the jury is mostly black people.

Already knowing with time travel how they would vote, my legal council advocated unsuccessfully for the right to inform the jury I was transgender. This fact was deemed irrelevant by the presiding judge, as the process is supposed to be highly anonymized.

They were encouraged to ask questions in order to get to know this faceless, adolescent male witch. After learning they could ask any question, a young black juror jovially asked a most innocent one.

What kind of porn’s he look at?

BDSM porn, folks! I look at BDSM porn!

They oblige the jury with a sampling of my taste in pornography. It’s all bondage porn of men topping women with a clear emphasis on forced fellatio.

A number of female jurors are immediately “concerned”. They’re worried I might grow up to be the BTK killer or something.

We wanted to explain to them that I was trans. We couldn’t solicit answers to questions they didn’t ask, and thus campaigned for the right to tell the jurors I was a “teenage girl” instead of a “teenage boy” so that they’d ask appropriate questions and interpret the answers correctly. Our request was denied, and I was subsequently blackballed.

That’s okay. I have another two strikes, or something.

Round two. I’m assigned to the Memphis district. It’s mostly black people again, coincidentally. We still can’t tell them I’m trans, but we can at least tell them that I’m now actively involved in the local BDSM community, and that I’m actually a submissive. See, I’m not the BTK killer! It’s the other way around!

The jury was heavy on conservative old folks, and they still weren’t so sure about my “lifestyle choices”. They decided they’d feel more comfortable if we “waited until I was married”.

Sheesh. I’m not even gonna fucking get married. Unless someone just decides to sweep me off my feet, and ugh! This is so annoying!

Round three. At this point, my council is really pushing for what we would call “a fair trial”. The new jury is carefully hand-picked and brought up to speed.

Am I married? Hell no! But I am…

T r a n s g e n d e r, now.

They’re told everything from the beginning; and asked to vote, finally, on whether I get to receive my magic, fifteen years late.

Two of the jurors were TERFs.

Goddammit!

Things seemed bleak. The TERFs eventually agreed they would whiteball me; if I passed an experiment of their own design, to prove I was really transgender. My hormones would be replaced with a placebo, before being replaced with something that would make me sick at the end. They theorized that I wouldn’t notice the placebo, and wouldn’t complain to the doctor until I was taking poison pills.

Their experiment didn’t really allow for enough time on the placebo for me to catch it. Instead, we created the wildest distractions imaginable to occupy me for well over a year, causing the experiment to end in me avoiding my doctor and ordering DIY instead.

This was the thing we needed. We’d been magicking it out. The TERFs blackballing me despite the fact I was making an effort to stay on a working HRT regimen was enough for us to successfully argue this to be a mistrial.

Which brings us here; wherever this is.

I began thinking about what Bill said, when he pulled me aside a long time ago after work. I almost forgot about that.

For all the people who seemed to know something I didn’t, Bill is the only one who suggested the problem might simply be that I look bad to anonymous strangers. I remember him asking if I had any “political signs” up at my house, and it seemed like the most peculiar question to ask. Could it really be that simple?

---

It’s late in December. Most people are out buying gifts for their family, but there’s only one thing on my Christmas list. Well, other than an end to these shenanigans…

I need more hormones.

I was relieved that I at least had spiro that didn’t make me sick; and, I also had a bunch of the Progynova still that I’d been too squeamish to start taking again after I got sick that one morning.

I could already tell I was not okay with my body remasculinizing; I remember thinking the gender problems were worse than I’d have thought with everything else going on. I had to try something, even if it was a complete “Hail Mary”.

I hatched a plan; albeit, a far-fetched one. I was going to rent a PO box, order the meds over public Wi-Fi with a VPN and a fictitious name, and pay for them with a money order purchased in cash.

First, I needed the PO Box. There was no good time to go to the post office in mid-December, and I was just going to have to wait 15 or 20 minutes even as an unemployed UFO chaser with a flexible schedule. I eventually accepted this and bit the bullet.

I opened the box with my new key before I left, testing that it worked. There was a piece of hard orange plastic covering the rear of the box, which being new to PO boxes I didn’t think much of. I mailed myself two test letters; one addressed to Rachael Brown, and another addressed to the very real Dani Elizondo.

I was surprised to find both of these letters returned to sender; as if my mail person doesn’t think I’m crazy enough.

Dude, what? Am I not the proud owner of PO Box 51009, Durham, NC 27707?

Thinking maybe I needed to wait a day after getting the keys or something, I sent myself another pair of test letters; this time to Rachael Brown and Alyssa Jones. I left off the return address.

I kept checking the mail, and there was dead-ass nothing in the box. No junk mail, nothing. Just an empty box, with that same orange plastic at the other end.

Mister postman
do you have a letter for me?

Finally, about a week later, I checked the mail to find the orange plastic removed, revealing the work area behind the wall; and a single, well traveled letter, addressed to Rachael Brown. Hardly a confidence-instilling amount of packet loss.

My attempt to ensure I could receive mail addressed to a fictitious name fell surprisingly flat. Considering how much misaddressed junk mail I get, I considered that part of the experiment to be a formality.

I found myself at a crossroads. Do I send Alyssa Jones or Dani Elizondo another letter? Or, should I just YOLO it? This attempt at getting unaltered medication is already a long shot, right? And, this is the fucking postal service we’re talking about. They just put the mail in the goddamn mailbox. They don’t give a fuck; as long as I don’t get myself in a situation where I need Alyssa Jones to show her ID. While legally possible, this seemed unlikely with the combination of parcel lockers and the already-large-enough mailbox size.

I didn’t exactly have the smoothness of James Bond as I struggled to find public Wi-Fi stable enough to complete the task. Isabella Costello eventually ordered a bunch of spironolactone and estradiol off flaky Wi-Fi I picked up in my car from the ATC. I added “Don’t fuck with me” to the delivery instructions that get printed on the label, to at least give them the middle finger if it came to that.

Around the same time, I decided to hedge my bets by trying to get up with my previous physician, Dr. Meier; and planned to involve Kat C. if I got nowhere with her.

#TODOInsert or put in appendix