I used to wonder if I was done writing about sexual assault. Turns out: nope! As the world is confronting the Cornell gang rape…
on my bodily autonomy
A year ago today, I got sterilized. Today I’m talking about why that was an important step for my bodily autonomy.
Road to a Name Change: Part 5
Hi, everyone. With everything going on in Texas and Ukraine right now, I haven’t been able to update as regularly. Sorry about that! (We’re also approaching midterms week, which means my life is messy currently.) Because I want to be able to come back to this in more depth later on, I’ll be taking you through a little of my announcement week and my hearing today, but the actual changing of a name does not end when you get the piece of paper granting it. A lot of that process is still ongoing for me, and I’ll probably opt from here to post an update at maybe the six-month and one-year marks to explain how a lot of that shakes out moving forward. (If you’re not aware, an Order Changing Name doesn’t actually make anyone swap anything for you; it just gives you the Certified Piece Of Paper that you then submit to everywhere you’ve ever existed and hope they agree to change it. More on that in the coming months.)
I’ve largely blocked out announcement week in my mind—it was mostly a blur as it happened—but there were a few crucial items of business remaining. First, I had some last-minute troubleshooting on my website to figure out, which I sorted over a period of several days with the help of a handful of trusted friends. I’d already changed my Twitter handle and name, since I tend to preload things on there more in advance, but in the two days before December 1, I had to change my name on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and a whole bunch of other places. (I didn’t get to sort Snapchat, which I thankfully only use for about ten people, until this past week!) Going through and finalizing my name change on socials meant I also had to lay low for the rest of November; I stopped posting and stayed out of conversations, even when I desperately wanted to jump into them. Even though it was only a couple days, I was nervous that someone would notice before I’d announced and . . . I don’t know . . . be extra transphobic in my direction, I guess. That didn’t happen, but the pressure was mounting.
Road to a Name Change: Part 4
As November 2021 rolled around, I had a hearing date. I had a list of documents I needed to submit prior to my hearing. I had a growing pile of scores with my new name on them, and I was drafting the email that would accompany them on their journeys to commissioners and past purchasers.…
Road to a Name Change: Part 3
By the time I submitted my name change petition, it had only been two or three weeks since I realized I’d need to move on it quickly. That haste turned out to…
Road to a Name Change: Part 2
When I decided to commit to publicly changing my name, I knew the right decision for me would be to legally change it as well. Not everyone who changes their name (for any reason) makes…
Knowing Stories and Art In Chaos
One of the unexpected side effects of government-imposed solitude and a new work-from-home life has been my willingness to get back into video games. (Cutting down on commute helps exponentially with freeing up time.) I’ve been P2 to my brother’s P1 my entire life, following along from one epic adventure to the next but never quite leading or developing my own individual relationship with a lot of games. Growing up, I was the epitome of the casual player—willing and capable, but not the kind of person who’d put in hours upon hours in pursuit of perfection. As I’ve become an adult, my partners have joined forces with my brother to suck me into various games. This has made room in my life for some pretty great things, but it usually also comes with a steep learning curve as I step into worlds the people I love have inhabited for years on end. In short: I spend a lot of time playing catch-up.
So when the end of March rolled around and my partner suggested* I try out Rocket League, I was more than game. The early hours were painful for everyone involved—I am a mouse-and-keyboard player as a default, and RL is most definitely not designed to be played that way—but one controller later, I’m well on my way to zipping around and absolutely already capable of wreaking havoc on the pitch. (Maybe not always in my team’s favor yet, but still.) With this new adventure, too, comes a contingent of new people. Folks who used to mostly play with my partner are now helping me learn to suck less and hit the ball more consistently. And, true to form, I’ve hijacked the whole system and made them my friends. More nights than not, when I’m finished grading and responding to messages and whatever else the world has thrown my way, I’m online, battling it out with strangers or friends or myself.
Things I Do That Men Have Assumed Was Flirting (or being slutty) (or looking for attention) (or playing hard to get)
Hostile Work Environments and Unraveling Tapestries: A Follow-Up to Untouchable
Untouchable took me a month and a half to write, but I spent four years trying to articulate its content. As (the blessedly many of) y’all who read it probably saw, I referenced fifteen other pieces I’ve put out since early 2017. This morning, I piled all sixteen posts into a single document to check the word count, and it came out to just under 29,000 words—or about half of the minimum requirement for a full-length novel. It was 47 pages of material. While that bodes well for any potential doctorate I may choose to pursue in the future, it says some interesting things about the likelihood of being both believed and understood within our community.
You see, I don’t expect people to believe me when I start talking about most of the things I discuss on my blog. Part of why I started writing the thoughts down was because my in-person conversations with peers were so often derailed by some level of disbelief—sometimes in the form of “[other woman] doesn’t say that,” sometimes manifesting as “I’ve never seen that so it must not be too bad,” sometimes in other forms that are intricate and nuanced and harder to illuminate. I was only rarely allowed to communicate a thought beyond its first couple sentences and almost never given the space and time to puzzle through something that felt important. On paper, though, I had the freedom to do just that, to make sure an idea was complete and concise before putting it out into the world. And while no one’s obligated to read the entirety of anything I post, I find a lot of people do. (For this, I’m incredibly grateful. Yes, that means you, sitting at the screen.)
In Another Universe, I’m Already Dead: Costs of Traumatic Activism
[I wrote this post over the course of October and November and genuinely did not mean to put it up the night before my twenty-fourth birthday. Somewhere, the universe is laughing at me.]
Last night (not actually last night), I lay in bed at 1am, clinging to my partner as I tried to get my heart rate down. Normally, I’d say panic attacks aren’t particularly common for me—usually, I have one or two a year—but over the past few months, my body has truly become the biggest testament to how difficult this transition back into Phoenix has been for me. Very few people besides those I’m close to have an understanding of how fear-based my interactions with this region and community can be. It’s difficult to return to a situation that previously was very, very bad for me, especially since I know I’m going to do far too much to try to fix problems that aren’t my responsibility to address. And my body holds that knowledge. It tells me—quite loudly—when it knows I’m about to do something scary, and it hits me with the consequences of dealing in this much tension and stress on a regular basis.
Normally, I average two panic attacks a year. Since moving back to Phoenix, it’s closer to one a month. So far, I’ve realized that while I do a pretty good job processing my trauma at my own pace, aspects of the way I’m treated by colleagues who either are angry with me or want to talk in-depth about the things that drove me away in the first place, things I haven’t fully been able to articulate to myself even after two years, tend to kick my trauma in ways I’m not prepared to deal with yet.
