who only by moving can balance

Two clinicians at CHX GIC have approved me for top surgery, no-hormones, in spite of everything that's physically wrong with me, even though I have been absolutely clear and explicit and unflinching about being genderqueer and having retained my given names as forenames despite their being gendered and my mental illnesses and autism.

If I'd been definite about which surgeon I wanted to see I think they might actually have referred me today, after my second appointment. As it is I get to go away and think about it, and let them know where to send me after my third appointment.

is that it is full of people who think like I do and love like I do and manage interactions like I do and have relationships with ethics like mine; and this reflection doesn't require that I be more human but it does make me feel more okay, more real, less toxic. And that's why I've read getting on for 300k words of MCU fic despite not having any familiarity at all with canon, and it's why I'm working on reading everything she's ever written and why I'll keep reading all the things she writes. Because: these people? They have no ladder and they have no rope; they can't see where the sun is rising; they can offer no hope; but they see me and I'm not alone.

It was Discworld, I think, that taught me it was okay for me to be a monster, and that being a monster didn't mean I had to be what other people thought that meant. It was Discworld that first managed to communicate to me that we work so hard to believe the little lies because it makes it possible for us to believe in the big ones. It was my first real fandom and it gave me somewhere to exist and it talked about worlds that had space for me in them. Pterry told me I could be a witch of the land and a teacher and that I could endure and make hard choices. He made and makes me kinder.

(Internalised ableism, capitalism, etc.)

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( Some good things. )

Words are the piecemeal sacrifice I make
upon the altar of humanity:
I'm half-convinced that if I merely take
sufficient care in choosing them, there'll be
some minor miracle. I'll burst awake
from dreaming myself lost and, lossless, free.
This could be all. What else is there to say?
Well, everything, of course -- unless I mean
to halt. A truth: I've learned the only way
to changelessness is death; to be unseen,
ignored, unmade. Fear craves silent decay
of self. Of hope. Of all we might have been.
So we'll know loneliness; we will know grief.
Now: here begins the hard work of belief.

Perhaps the big thing for me is that I conceptualise myself as relying not so much on scripts as on roles. Figuring out new roles to play is generally the hardest; it's easy enough at this point for me to Nice White Posh (Disabled) Lady at shops and customer service if it'll get me the outcome I want (as discussed); it is easy for me to slip very quietly into the body language that cues other people to treat me as an authority figure (which I picked up via spending time around animals); it is easy for me to step through my specific scripts for teaching. ("Okay, please tell me if I'm going either too fast or too slow - and what's your background in X/what do you know about Y/are you comfortable with the concept of Z?")

New situations are harder: when I switch to a new role (being someone's PhD student! Meeting someone's parents for the first time when it is totally unclear whether they are thinking of me as a friend or a partner!) I have to feel out the shapes that are expected of me by trial-and-error, which is stressful. Mostly I handle it by asking lots and lots of questions about what I should be doing, but that is sometimes intrusive, so I flap around feeling sadly and anxiously as though I'm a failure. It is easier for me to act within paradigms I understand, and so on.

-- actually, that's a lie, I totally do use scripts some of the time. With doctors it's more obvious if I'm helping someone else prep for an appointment, but - it's a case of running through the plausible discussion tree (time-limited conversation with constraints on topic matter) and work out what we'll want to respond under various circumstances. But - working out scripts for myself, as opposed to other people? Not so great. Mostly for that I use Captain Awkward.

Which is the how, to some extent. As for the when -- mmm. Mostly I care less about what the situation "looks" like and more about what it feels like to me; if I'm getting stressed and clumsy and feeling unsafe in terms of just working in good faith towards a mutually-agreeable arrangement (which! happens a lot! I hate capitalism!) then I will slip into a-script-(or-role)-I-prepared-earlier. It's not really about the other party, to any extent.

Hmm. Perhaps not terribly clear. Apologies.

Write your dreams upon me.
Carve them bone-deep, filigree
and fretwork of my flesh:
I'll bear your weight. I'll bear
the wait. Here, hear
as my heart beats. For all that's wrong,
for all I cannot do, this,
at least, is steady, sure.
You're not the first. I am a beast
of burden. I am strong.
Beloved, if you'd only dare to ask
you'll find me more than able for this task.

The good Captain has several times now recently said "assume that if people don't get back to you/respond to contact that you should back off", and I am having problems with this for all the obvious reasons, namely:

1. I am terrible at responding to e-mails, particularly during depressive flares. One of the things I am genuinely enormously proud of is that I now respond to the vast majority of e-mails I receive within an hour of getting them, as opposed to letting them languish for three weeks unread, even the terrifying ones. This doesn't mean I don't want people in my life.

2. ... I have a whole lot of friends who do very similar things, including two or three of the people I consider among my closest friends, who routinely do not respond to text-based comms because of anxiety or depression or elsewise lack-of-cope.

3. ... and my at-this-point-instinctive reaction to a lack of response (and one I stop coping with if the lack-of-response rate goes above about 30%, even if it's "to pings on IM when I know our clients don't play nice" and even if it's "someone I'm dating who has made it very clear that they feel positively toward me") is "this person clearly hates me and I should disappear from their life as completely as possible with immediate effect", which is (see above) almost never the right answer.

This is one of the reasons DW/LJ works for me so well as a platform - I get to keep in gentle approximately-continuous touch with an awful lot of amazing people and let them know how I'm getting on, without triggering my comms anxiety.

I know I need to keep working on 3 - "I haven't heard back from this person and it's been TWO WHOLE HOURS, clearly they want to ERASE ME FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH, I am the WORST THING EVER" is obviously a disproportionate response - but the thing that the Captain's making me a little edgy about is how to balance giving people-in-general enough space with known factors 1 and 2.

For my own part I try very hard to make sure I say "if I do not reply to your e-mail it is because my memory's shit, if I haven't got back to you by date X please feel encouraged to remind me, I'm sorry about the extent to which this requires you to do extra work"; I try very hard to be someone it is easy to say no to -- but obviously that doesn't mean I succeed.

I suspect that my perspective on this is pretty alien to a lot of people, hence the ?inapplicability of the Captain's advice; I wish I knew what the middle ground in this situation looks like.

If the highest calling is utility
then show me I am useful
by using me.

Make of me a book,
vellum of my skin,
a vessel for your stories and your selves.

(art is good if it arises from necessity
ein Kunstwerk ist gut, wenn es aus Notwendigkeit entstand
I am good if I am necessary--
or at least I am sufficient)

(fill me with your breath your hope
your need
your dreams of being as sufficient
as beautiful as necessary as all
that we must be)

(o please gift me belief)

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okay, I'm going to leave this with a reminder to y'all about the vid Puncture Repair, because. (I've already cried my eyes out once today remembering that Galileo is a vid in this world-- and of course I did, because they are both about thinking you are different and monstrous and learning to trust yourself sufficient to be loved anyway, over and over again, because you never quite internalise it enough.)