Yes, self, I actually have gone through shit.

MyHeritage (a website I’m using to learn my geneology) is telling me my sibling is turning 19 in [#] of days and my father is turning 51 in [#] of days and it’s uncomfortable to think of these people at those ages when I have seen neither in years. I want to think of them like a time capsule because thinking of these people of changing and growing with time would do a disservice to myself and my lived experiences of who they have always been, as long as I have known them.
My father sends me emails maybe twice a year with some phrase or another about a holiday or the weather.
The last I heard my sibling was getting questioned by police for targeted harassment towards a trans classmate.
My mother (whose birthday is also in September) somehow had my Facebook (which is under an alias with most relatives blocked) and told me last December that she put $50 in my bank account “for Christmas” and my “birthday”.
I had asked her in 2014 to never contact me again after I had been homeless and she cried because she was offended by it, she withheld money she was given to help me survive and told me, “I didn’t think money should come between a mother and a daughter”.
Growing up she would berate me for everything. My body hair, my clothes (I didn’t get to pick my own clothes until tenth grade and when I did she was horrified regardless of what I picked), my weight (when I starved she said that was a good thing because I would lose weight), the way I ate and if I existed in what was supposed to be the common area. I was never allowed to eat with the rest of the family when we were in our own home or watch TV, or sit on the couch. Whenever I visited after I had moved out, my mother made me pay for my own food as well as my sibling’s a lot of the time. She stole my coin collection as a kid and lied to me about it. She suicide baited me all the time and said it was “immoral” and when I had homework for sex ed she refused to let me write down the word “abortion” because she didn’t “believe in it”.
I tried to come out as some equivalent of bisexual at age 12. My mother tried to “reassure” me that wasn’t true. Tried to act like this was something I wanted to hear, like telling me I wasn’t this awful thing that I definitely need to be able to be, was going to help me flourish.

I could have never been a happy captive so I became an anarchist.
When I was 16 I came out to my peers as genderqueer (“androgynous” at the time but it was synonymous with genderqueer for me then). They outwardly supported me but later would use me to make themselves seem more educated and interesting, telling their other peers about me and making up things about who I must be and what I must experience because of the labels I chose. One of them actually came out as gender neutral much later after having bullied me for much of high school, largely as a result of my gender identity. I haven’t heard from them or ever forgotten this. It is the reason I have no friends from any part of my childhood, high school etc.
When I told my mother, she again took the approach of this being debatable. Of this being something she was supposed to reassure me I wasn’t. Because of course it’s scary to be trans in this world, whyever would I chose this life? Why would I chose to survive? When I had the option to die of the suicide attempt I made later that year, with my mother still in my life, asking me things like, “why are you so offended by the idea of being a woman?”

I signed up for 12+ extracurriculars and volunteered 117+ hours by the time I graduated at 17 with honours (it was called something different here but you get it). I was in plays and musicals and my mother saw only one of them, in grade 9. One time I was so angsty and I knew she wouldn’t bother, that I wrote a monologue from my diary about her into a play I was in, that she never saw until a month later when I made her watch a recording.
My sibling contacted me in 2014 to get angry with me for all that I was, blaming me for upsetting our mother by cutting her out, blaming me for being such a failure of a person despite being an overachiever in high school and having everyone compare us or whatever the regular younger-sibling shit is. Only when I explained that all I did, I did because I wanted to kill myself, they said that was selfish, because I made them want to do the same.
There was more that happened to disinegrate my relationships with these people. There were more steps to me letting go. I still have had to live my early twenties and late teens navigating things without the privilege of being able to move back in with any parent, or ask anyone outside of my peers for help.
But now, for the most part, the issues are more outside than in. Now, if somebody kills me, they kill me. I’m fighting to survive and I’m doing it because I need to, and the pride of resilience and hope for the future I have every time I think of all I have survived is filling my heart over capacity. The fire inside me keeps me warm and it could destroy everything.
What if this is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? — Valarie Kaur
I went to art school in 2014. I later dropped out but in the meantime I found a better idea of who I was, my skillset, and learned a lot of great things and found there could be a place for me there if I was doing well enough. My art school clique used my pronouns to some degree and after hearing so many people “they” and “them” me during critiques, my drawing professor approached me after class to ask about my pronouns to make sure he knew them for future.
I ended up in [another] abusive relationship dynamic for a while but during 2015 (? I think?) I met my queerplatonic partner, Val, and we’ve been living together and/or been homeless nomads together ever since.
I don’t really do much these days, at least as defined by others and their ideas of doing things, and productivity and all the ableist baggage that has.

But I am on hormones.
I garden. In my home! In the windowsills, the kitchen, on a roof ledge by my window even.
I do art.
I read webcomics.
I listen to podcasts.

I get out of bed most days and shower sometimes (and clean up in the necessary ways in the between times as often as I have the energy for).
I spend way too much time advocating online.
I go to protests. (When I have it in me to do so, which isn’t very much.)
I’ve got a friend who is a bunny rabbit named Snicklefritz who loves me very much and lives in my room. I often feed him my home grown heirloom romaine leaves.
I am learning things as much as I can and doing whatever I can to help myself feel like I’m moving forward.
I have been able to do more chores more often than I used to.
I drink water! Daily! Several times!
I take my medications.
I am patient all I can afford to be, and vulnerable all I can afford to be, with extra effort to bridge the gap for those who cannot afford it.
I knit.
I’ve made a lot of lifestyle changes recently in hopes of reducing the garbage I produce and it has been working. I now produce probably three times as much compost and recycling than I do trash. It’s much less overwhelming to bring stuff to the curb, and a good way to work on my own hoarder upbringing. (If you don’t have to throw out stuff all the time, it’s harder to feel guilty about throwing stuff out.)
I make my own skincare miscellanea from starches and powders and clay, toothpaste and deodorant, etc.
When I do nothing, I am still surviving. I mean, arguably, because of some medical stuff and whatever, but: existing anyway.
I have a lot of C-PTSD and it’s ramifications to catch up with the healing of. There is too much that I will never be able to do. But I am here. I am somewhere still.
