who only by moving can balance

this set of Max Gladstone recs
Nnedi Okorafor: The Book of Phoenix, Binti, The Girl with the Magic Hands, The Shadow Speaker
Genevieve Cogman, The Invisible Library
The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, Natasha Pulley
misc by Linda Nagata
Rivers of London, Ben Aaronovitch
THIS ONE BY THE AUTHOR OF THE SCARIEST LIBRARY

Gingerbread waffles @ smitten kitchen; cinnamon berry muffins.

Insight would be appreciated but mostly I'm writing this down this time so's I have it when I come back to this after the weekend. ;)

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Also worked out last night: part of the reason I find it so very hard to ask for help is that I still - still - think of myself as toxic and unwanted; I work really hard at not vanishing from social groups, not deliberately fading, because for most of my teens that is what I did. I would show up for long enough to help, and then I would try to vanish again before I did any serious harm. (The reasons I believed I would are... long and tedious.)

So I position myself as caretaker and as advisor; I listen well and carefully and I offer opinions and I try very hard indeed not to "impose", even in the slightest, by requesting (or expecting!) reciprocation.

This is, as it turns out, a really bad basis for an equal and mutually-supportive relationship.

The Captain & the Awkward Army on forgiveness after breach of trust (a brilliant comment thread on a good post).

specifically, there's a lot of "give me your current age so I don't ask you to time-travel", but actually... I'd like to time-travel, and it will be genuinely good for me to envisage two separate (positive!) scenarios. If you're interested in answers for past ages, then ask & I'll reply in comments.

I picked 25 fairly arbitrarily as a quarter century; I'm a little surprised - mostly pleasantly - by how close that is these days. :-)

I lived in:

Now: a ground-floor bedsit room in college accommodation, next to the Botanic Gardens, with huge south-facing sash bay windows. My room contains a sofa and a desk and a sink and a bed and a fair number of bookshelves and a coffee table covered in my tea collection, and I'm next to a kitchen that contains fridges and a freezer and horrible electric hobs and a nice-enough-but-not-lovely electric oven and a microwave. The front door's up 6 steps, and the shower's on the first floor; the back garden contains purple and white crocuses and narcissi.

At 25 (i): A two-bed flat in South Kensington, in London, shared with a friend, with level access (be it by lift or not). We've got a kitchen with gas hobs and an oven and a fridge and a freezer that we're not sharing with 8 other students, so it isn't full of gross months-out-of-date raw chicken; we've got a sofa that doesn't try to eat people, and a media set-up a bit more satisfactory than craning over people's shoulders to stare at laptop screens, so we can watch shows together without being uncomfortable. The tea collection's got somewhere sensible to live, and we've got a shelf in the living room dedicated to storing the shared perfume collection. The bathroom's big enough to store my shower stool in without getting in the way, and in my bedroom I've a double bed and a view of a tree. We go to the Science Museum Lates, and I spend lunchtimes in parks or visiting another gallery in the Natural History Museum.

At 25 (ii): I live in my home town, and here I can afford to share a house - rather than a flat - with friends. We're on a bus route or two, and I'm within easy pushing distance of my mum and the Various Other People I want to see regularly. The best bit? I get to do whatever I damn well like with the garden, within reason, so we've got herbs and bulbs in tubs, and a bay tree, and roses and wisteria up the back wall.

I drove:

Now: Nope: I'm officially Too Crippy To Drive, in ways that are highly unlikely to change, and positively-imagined futures don't erase that. This doesn't mean I'm upset about it, or the prospect of not being able to drive; it just means that my life's rather better when I'm not desperately hoping for the impossible or, at the least, improbable.

At 25: See above.

I was in a relationship with:

Now: Some Boys and a Girl and some extremely intense, close friendships built around poetry and music, and a few other ill-defined things, and it's lovely.

At 25: I've got no idea, but I'm looking forward to finding out. :-)

I feared:

Now: A depressive relapse. Not doing well enough this year to take up the PhD place I've been offered (which is not necessarily a sensible thing to fear; see scenario (ii), which is plausible and lovely, just different!). Everyone I love or care for dying. Being shouted at. Hurting people. Coming out. Moving somewhere more than a phonecall and fifteen minutes from my mum. London buses.

At 25 (i): Hurting people. Another depressive relapse. Breaking the mass spec. Hydrofluoric acid. Presenting at conferences. Disappointing Julie. Not doing enough activism. Being authentically myself in an academic setting.

At 25 (ii): Hurting people and another depressive relapse; they don't quite go without saying. Navigating meetings with Equalities ministers. Getting things hurtfully wrong. Not being able to help as much as I want to.

I worked at:

Now: My final year of a degree in Earth Sciences, specialising in volcanology. My student union's LGBT+ campaign. Lashings. VagPag. (Dreamwidth.)

At 25 (i): The second year of my PhD in isotope geochemistry, spending endless hours in the clean lab in the basement running columns, and even more time doing the three a.m. I'm-the-only-person-in-the-building dance around the mass spectrometer. My university's LGBT+ campaign. Lashings. The Big Sibling Project. Dreamwidth. VagPag.

At 25 (ii): The Big Sibling Project, including organising regular workshops. Lashings. National campaigning for trans* equality. Collecting a book of my essays for publication, self-pub or zine or maybe traditional publishing houses. Counselling - I'm beginning to be let loose on actual clients, which is daunting and exhilarating. Dreamwidth. Copy-editing, to bring in a bit extra. VagPag.

I wanted to be:

Now: Trustworthy. Safe. Welcoming. Brave.

At 25: Probably still the above, but I'll defer to my future self on that one. :-)

deadline 18th, 6 hrs lecture/practicals on 17th

... I have pre-emptively spent forty quid on Really Nice Tea because godDAMN I deserve a treat for being so nearly here

you guys

you guys

... I could hand in what I have now and not fail

I CANNOT EVEN with how much of a change this is from last year

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