Some Goddamn Accountability (Patreon)

As you might have seen, the last 7 months of my life have been chaotic as hell. A lot went wrong. A lot of that were things that were not my fault, but a lot were. This is a post addressing the latter first as there needs to be accountability for my actions (or inaction) that led to the massive delay of over half a year so I have nowhere to hide and can be held responsible if the same behavior starts again and I can explain how I am pulling myself out of the holes I have fallen in.

The Porn Addiction

Yep, we're starting off strong enough to beat up Goku. Buckle up, because explaining this is going to need some context.

Looking back at my life, I think I was genderfluid since at least middle school, but it might've been earlier as I have a distinct memory of going out trick-or-treating in a knight costume for 5th grade and getting this sudden sense of wrongness from wearing a Halloween costume of King Arthur I had been excited to wear that I stayed inside that night.

Either way, I was a fucking bookworm nerd in middle school who read in every class. I first had the concept of gender bender introduced to me by a 7th-grade teacher who handed me a copy of Naruto's first volume after insisting it was mine when I told her it wasn't. I didn't even like Naruto, but I saw my first (sorta) nude body within a few pages of the book with this...

Man, I shouldn't be getting embarrassed about this when I write porn for a living, but I feel like modesty is a virtue I should try to embrace just the tiniest bit more when I'm feminine.

Naruto has what is basically a ninja distraction technique to shapeshift into a hot woman. It's a goofy move mostly played for gags and nosebleeds (the "artistic shorthand" for erections), but it just fucking clicked with this hormonal kid going through what he would later realize was only his first puberty: "Oh, girls are attractive" but with a still-forming idea of "Oh, sometimes guys can be those attractive girls."

From there, I was off to the races. I didn't have much computer access due to a strict parent who took away all my video game consoles as a kid in a dramatic manner because she was worried about my introversion (which I'm still fucking pissed about 18 years later), so it took a while for me to be able to find out what this stuff was called looking around the family desktop computer late at night.

I eventually learned that it went by many names, but "gender bender" is what I think of it as in my head, and I became obsessed with it.

My DeviantArt account got made when I was 13 years old as you'll see in that "About CaptainCaption" section (a sign we're off to a healthy start). My unhappy and hormonal middle school life was spent looking at TG captions or whatever scraps of gender bender stuff I could find. It wasn't even porn to me at first but this concept that I had never heard of before, but it soon became porn to me. I remember printing out images on the family printer and trying to hide them in boxes, between my bed box frame and mattress, and even in a roll-up curtain like a Cold War spy. I felt clever about that.

Then I got put into a wilderness therapy program and therapeutic boarding school by my parents for my first 3 high school semesters. The middle of the woods and a cabin in the middle of the woods wasn't really a place where I had internet access, but I did smuggle in small printed images (I think of Rule 63 Sasuke?) between a set of playing cards. I always volunteered to be the chore leader to get the private 15-minute shower (instead of the 5-minute shower in the group cabin) and put those cards in a clear Ziploc bag.

When I got out of that place 17 months later, I came back home to find that my parents had found a lot of my stash and gotten rid of it, but they'd also missed a lot. But as my puberty wound down, my interest in porn slightly waned and my interest in gender bender porn waned even more.

I'm pretty sure part of that was that I got a girlfriend in high school. That sort of clear defining of gender roles of "I am the boyfriend, she is the girlfriend" made me more solidified in who I was and less eager to fetishize femininity, either as a concept or something I could project on top of me as a fetish.

I'm hesitant to incriminate myself like this due to the recent drama of my life of people assuming I was trans and pushing me very hard into being trans. It sometimes truly is "just a fetish" and should never be used as evidence to make an assumption about another person let alone used as ammunition, but it was both a fetish and an escape valve for me.

Even back in high school (2006-2011), I sorta knew what trans people were. There was one girl in my high school who was trans (shoutouts to how brave you had to be to do that in the South when gay marriage wasn't even constitutional yet!) but I barely ever saw her and she was more treated as an object of myth and gossip rather than a person (once again, shoutout to the bravery you'd need back then to go through with that!). But I also knew I wasn't like that... except when I worried I was. Every so often, I'd have a week or two where I really started to ask myself questions about my gender identity, and fraught with anxiety over what could be a potential looming revelation, I would masturbate, clear my head, and come out with confidence that I'd once again confused the porn, the fetish, with myself. I knew I was a guy, and it's like all those previous doubts got erased.

And I never looked into it further despite this happening every 2-3 months...

Yeah, I didn't know what "genderfluid" even was, but in hindsight, I was obviously compartmentalizing that into the fetish that I soon learned was called "autogynephilia" (even though I deliberately misinterpreted it to just be the sexualization of the female body and not "all that other baggage"). And like that one tweet about a girl in high school who tried to explain why she didn't want gay marriage to be allowed, I didn't have the right tools for proper introspection. I just thought it was relatively common to have the thoughts I did and that trans people were people who didn't have my ability to clear their head and snap out of questioning who they were. That was the start of a very dangerous rabbit hole, but I'm going to put a pin in that for now.

When I went to college to start my mechanical engineering undergraduate degree, my OCD flew off the rails. It too is something that I clearly had in hindsight, but it got so much worse from the stress of the new environment out of state and having to actually try in school for once instead of effortlessly getting a 3.8+ GPA from learning through passive osmosis or common-sense guessing. Instead of living up to my and everyone else's expectations of a fantastic first semester, I had a 1.5 GPA and was placed on academic probation. The thoughts of "Oh god, am I trans?" popped up again as my anxiety went through the roof, and while my OCD got so bad to cripple my ability to do any math more complex than double-digit addition without a calculator because I have this sharp terror about getting the wrong answer and have to keep endlessly checking my work (which I have to this day), the gender bender porn was there to prop me up again.

I don't know how I got through that first year without dropping out, but outside of a half-semester in 2012 where I managed to rally to get a 95+ on all of my finals for classes core to my major (Calc 2, Physics 202, Chemistry 102) that I only pulled of through an insane amount of studying because I realized I was going to fall my classes if I didn't do that well, I didn't go to classes, I became even more introverted and isolated, and all I ever seemed to do was eat, sleep, play games on my computer, read books not relevant to my classes, jack off, and tell myself that this was fine.

When I got home that summer, I got my shit together. I figured out I had obsessive-compulsive disorder, got properly medicated, and got therapy. I was kind of pissed about not knowing I had OCD when I had such obvious symptoms of obsessions (i.e., anxieties getting problems wrong, intrusive thoughts about viscerally murdering random passerby, gender bender porn and worrying I was trans) and compulsions (i.e., nervous fiddling with objects that had to be in their places or I couldn't think, random bouts of organization that weren't necessarily neatness but about creating a system, making lists in my head I had to keep adding to, making sure my feet were aligned with tiles and pavement when I walked, skin picking), but because OCD is portrayed so poorly in media as the "neat freak" mental illness (Monk is still a good show even if it's blackface to OCD people like The Big Bang Theory and The Good Doctor are blackface to autistic people) that I didn't know I had it. I've since tried to educate others and advocate on how OCD works to fight against that being falsely labeled or something a person doesn't realize they have, much like I have done recently with genderfluidity and against egg cracking.

If you'll check that list of my obsessions, there's something there that doesn't fit. Unfortunately for my gender issues, I compartmentalized it under the second layer of "it's just another intrusive thought I need to ignore." So I did, and I tried until the Fall 2013 semester to keep making progress for my degree and fulfilling my childhood dream of being a mechanical engineer who specialized in prosthesis because I grew up seeing such horror stories of shitty devices from veterans wounded overseas in the folly that was America's War on Terror and thought there had to be a better way I could help find, but I eventually had to admit that the even with medication and ongoing therapy, my math skills weren't coming back and I had to let that dream die.

And like every guy who needed therapy but refused to go to it, I'd gotten into studying Ancient Rome at this time, and I switched majors to Classical History that spring, with a focus on Ancient Mediterranean cultures as shaped by civil infrastructure and geography. It was the backup plan, but I was good at it and got close to a 3.8 GPA that semester. I has passion and love for the subject and would stay after my class making an impassioned argument about how Claudius was a severely underrated emperor for his focus on infrastructure projects and how he was a historian thrust into the purple he never should have been able to don and defied all expectations to be a competent administrator and quick study (I made similar arguments about Hadrian, who was a noted amateur architect). Ancient Rome's focus on civil engineering let me carry over part of my passion and understanding of the concepts of engineering without needing the math. I even had thoughts of writing my senior thesis (which would likely be delayed a year, but that was okay) on how clever the architecture of a seismically-active country like Italy was and how (intentional or not, but my thesis would argue the former) many of the buildings had been designed in part to withstand earthquakes with design principles similar to the ones that guide modern building design in earthquake-heavy regions or of tall skyscrapers.

I even visited my sister who was studying abroad in Italy and was so passionate about Rome that I managed to lead my parents on a tour through The Eternal City's unmarked relics and around Pompei as a tour guide (I didn't realize it at the time, but I had later been told a group of tourist had been following behind me thinking I was an official guide).

I'd had a rocky start to my academic career, but I wanted to teach a topic I loved (I was told I looked like a history teacher in the best possible way). Sure, the porn was still there, but it was such a smaller focus at this point. I was starting to like myself again and recover a sense of myself and I didn't need that escapism of self-inserting into anime women like I had before.

I even found a girlfriend I really cared for at the start of my Fall 2014 semester. I was clearly a clueless romantic who was in love for the first time in my life, and while we never had sex (unless you count a blowjob as sex) because I had this wall up (a mix of shame over what I'd been interested in for almost 8 years and that coming out, fear of having my own body issues, trust issues, and performance anxiety), I cared about her, and I was shocked she cared about me.

All that fucking flew out the window on my 21st birthday. I've covered the events of that day before a decent bit and shown how it was the worst day of my life, but I've glossed over what came after.

I broke up with that girl I cared about because I knew I was in a death spiral and wanted her far away from me so as to not get hurt. I stopped going to all of my classes and only left my dorm room when I needed to eat. My RA, roommate, and the people on the floor tried to have an intervention for me, but I locked the door on them and propped it close and vaguely told them I'd gotten bad health news and clearly told them to leave me alone. I started to drink (not heavily, but enough to dull the fear and terror of knowing all my plans for any future were gone). I tried to play video games on the days where I wasn't just crying in bed nonstop, but my speedrunning hobby seemed so transient when I knew I was going to lose my muscular coordination soon.

But the old reliable of porn was there waiting for me. Through self-inserting, I could project myself onto/into anime women and escape being me. They wouldn't be dead soon. I would be. My roommate even walked in on me masturbating. He moved out after. It wasn't a wakeup call. I was just glad he was gone so I could be alone. All I wanted was for people to stop acting like they cared and that what was going on with me could be fixed through hollow platitudes.

I medically disenrolled at the end of the semester, but before that had happened, I had started to write TG captions. I'd written a lot for school recently (being a history major leads to that) and figured it'd be easy to replicate what I'd been reading for so long. I tried some private writing that I don't think I still have, but before I uploaded my first caption I felt mildly confident in, my dad picked me up from his alma mater with sadness and disappointment. We drove around his childhood town he would never see again, but I never properly told him why I was medically disenrolling as I was too horrified to say the words aloud, like the spell I was casting over myself to pretend everything was okay would completely disintegrate. I was also so scared of making him sad since his dad had died of Parkinson's disease back when I was in high school. How was I supposed to tell my dad his son was going to be going through that and be dead in less than a decade?

I moved home and got a lot of what I now know is rather mediocre writing done as my life fell apart. My parents had ignored their best judgment and allowed me to transfer majors to something they viewed as useless, but I hadn't even been able to do that. All I did that year was write, eat, sleep, work shitty jobs that crushed my soul, and get my ass beaten and my stuff trashed by parents who made it no secret how much I had disappointed them and who to this day don't quite believe or understand my health issues.

But that hell ignited a fire in me. Those beatings, both physical and verbal, toughened me up like steel hammered in a forge. I got my shit together, learned I had more time than I was told (or rather, led to assume), was told my original doctor had been an idiot, was given new medications, went to therapy, proved I could follow a schedule of doing something I didn't want to do through pizza delivery, stopped consuming so much porn and stopped writing it (my last TG caption for a while being in May 25, 2015), an online friend offered me to visit him near Las Vegas for my 22nd birthday (I got my ass kicked at blackjack but had a great time), and I felt like and found confidence to stop hating myself and feeling sorry for myself like I'd been planning to do until I died.

And then I got back to school for the Spring 2016 semester and collapsed even worse than I had before. I don't like thinking about that time, but living in a single-occupant dorm room even smaller than Zach's made me even more isolated. I stopped going to classes right after my aging childhood dog died less than 2 weeks into the semester. I ducked the frantic phone calls from my parents and my sister asking me to say goodbye to her because I was so terrified of them having to say goodbye to me someday all too soon. The entire campus was a sad reminder of where I had been told that news, so I tried not to venture out into it. I drank beer in the AM hours (again, not enough to get drunk, but to get tipsy and dull my thinking), I played video games, I didn't shower or change my clothes, I ordered food whenever possible, and I went back to jacking off and writing porn all day (my first story back being a loose TG parody of my own trip to Las Vegas to try and make the self-insert factor stronger). I found out about Student Transfer around this time, volunteered to write for it, and joined aboard. I ducked my family for all of a spring break vacation and hid in a room to type the starting parts of Connie on a cheap laptop. If you ever wondered why that route is kind of dark, it's because my life was so dark at that moment.

Then I dropped out again (I didn't even bother to medically disenroll this time), went home to even worse abuse, and twisted in the wind working even shittier jobs I kept getting fired from. I was so despondent I let an online relationship with a long-distance girlfriend fall apart due to inactivity and an unwillingness to do the most basic of work to maintain that relationship. Why would I care about a girlfriend when the porn was right there? I'd started spending much of my minimum-wage paycheck on buying, ripping, scanning, and commissioning translations of gender bender doujinshi (which is how Espeon and I first "met") and on medical appointments.

The rest was spent on shit I didn't need, primarily gacha rolls (Fate/Grand Order is a tautologically evil money siphon even if Scathach is my primary envy/simp target; Azur Lane is a gorgeous example of art and voice acting that barely even registers as a game to me yet which I am so glad gets frequent fan art; Girls Frontline is dying but it was fun while it lasted and relatively fair to people who were free to play while providing a great story; Arknights is not only good but extremely fair for free to play, but holy shit there is way too much rambling exposition, and that's coming from me; Genshin Impact didn't exist yet but god damn why'd they have to make a game that can be so fun so boring with a story that bad).

I don't have much excuse for spending a number I refuse to look at on these games I no longer play, but to be fair, Abilify, a drug I was taking for my depressive schizoaffective disorders, OCD, and CBS (as it functions as a dopamine agonist) can literally give you a gambling addiction, and there are plenty of studies of how changing a reward outcome from a steady guarantee to a more random but lesser output can make pigeons gambling addicts and cause them to develop increasingly risky behavior (and while I can't find the study for this, I was told by my university textbook that some birds could be coaxed into pushing what was basically a slot machine for seeds until their beaks scarred or even broke), but for now, let's just say I am more susceptible to random outcome than most.

But during this time, I even had zero passion for writing until Espeon found me and offered me a job making a visual novel that had started out (at least in concept) as a purely gender bender version of something much closer to Student Transfer than it ended up being, which was a pivot I made at least partly to distance myself from what was a painful reminder of some of the worst parts of my life where I clutched to it to keep me upright.

I... wasn't good at developing re:Dreamer at first. It took me about a year to find myself and my footing with what I was doing (man, were those early versions rough!), but I realized this was truly my last chance. Much like that Spring 2012 semester that seemed like a lifetime ago where I'd rallied when push came to shove, I worked and worked and worked, and through that, I got better, and I slowly started to live again. I started to smile again. I felt happy again. I felt like I had meaning again, and that I was doing something meaningful, even if it was just a porn game.

Somewhere along the way, that porn game started to mean a lot to people who weren't me. I think it was because of how much of myself I threw into it, my own unrealized gender struggles and all, that it started to build this reputation as an "egg cracker" because even a fraction of my own experience would have made anyone who wasn't as stubborn and denialistic as I am realize they weren't cis long, long ago. But I got very good at lying to myself and pretending I wasn't me, and even though Zach is categorically not my self-insert, he and all of re:Dreamer ended up my brainchild love/hate letter to my OCD, my trauma, my ambiguous gender, and my heartfelt desire to be someone or something who isn't me because I think that'd solve all my problems in my life (spoiler: I can't stop being me, and even if I could, that wouldn't let me escape my problems and I doubt even getting isekai'd would fix me at this point).

Oddly, it was partly from working on re:Dreamer that I found more confidence in my masculinity than I had at any point prior. Maybe it was how it filled my every waking thought and didn't give me time to think about myself when I was so busy thinking about it and crafting Zach's character (again, he is emphatically not my self-insert but rather this enigma of a person that is intentionally designed to be a puzzle box that slowly gets "solved," which is probably why so many people have "solved" themselves reading his story)? Maybe it was hanging around all the trans women who flocked to the game's Discord server, many of whom (well-meaning or not) told me I was like they were yet lacked the evidence to convince me (until I falsely convinced myself more than once, which is definitely a thing you should put a pin in for now)? Maybe it was from the confidence I found as a writer who kept getting better and better that transferred over to confidence in myself and my identity ("I am the dorky guy making a gender bender visual novel with way too much worldbuilding that helped others find themselves, yet I remain cis and have beat the allegations")?

And maybe it was the absolutely prodigious amount of porn I was viewing and "writing" most days?

Somewhere in the latter part of 2020, someone (I think on 4chan's /d/ board) talked about AI storytelling through an AI chatbot like AI Dungeon. Curious, I started to look into it, and what I found was... I mean, yeah, the word is "addictive." Like how I got better with writing re:Dreamer, I got better with wrestling with and guiding the unruly AI of a service run by increasingly puritanical Mormons toward good NSFW content. Limited only by creativity, I could set up any scenario I wanted and play it over and over again, slightly tweaking and refining it each time to get better and better output that was still always just random enough to make me keep pushing the button, creating a feedback loop called a compulsion loop.

These weren't short sessions either. The incentive to pull the slot machine and make the story just a bit better with each tweak or slightly random output led to me being gone for hours at a time. Much of the reason for the 4-month delay of the 0.10.0 version was my poor physical health with lung issues that made me violently cough in the colder and drier winter air, and much of it was that I bit off way more than I could chew with those shitty arcade games, but some of it was that I was wasting potential working time when my health had periods of being better by masturbating. No matter what I tell myself or you, it'd be a lie to say that there were good reasons for this, like it being a way to storyboard ideas for re:Dreamer with an AI copilot. It wasn't that. It was a porn addiction I selfishly let myself get lost in.

Hell, I think my preferred names for gender bending with the AI of "Samuel" as the starting character and "Samantha" as the end character directly lead to me liking that name (and unwitting internalizing it as "my" name), naming Zach's mom Samantha because it was a name I like that stuck with me, later realizing I wanted that name and taking it back when I thought I was a binary transgender woman, then just turning it into Sam once it became clear I was a unclear non-binary person (and later clearer but still murky genderfluid person; yes, I am still genderfluid, and part of this accountability post is about that).

I honestly don't know if this constant hyperfixation on using that name in that way "pushed" me into being genderfluid (or even made me that way), but much like that Naruto manga I got handed and hadn't asked to receive, I think it's a little of Column A, a little of Column B as far as how much that influenced me. I didn't try to set things up for everything to play out like this, but maybe the fact that I unintentionally did is a sign that this was the only way "I" could be.

But regardless of my musings about my gender identity now or back then, I thought I pulled myself out of that hole. Sure, part of it was that AI Dungeon's service went to fucking shit with censorship, nerfed outputs, and data leaks (and NovelAI was a lot more work to set up for results that weren't as good), but a lot of that was that I'd gotten my shit together. The updates were consistently coming out, I kept sessions short with TG captions, my mood was better, and outside of some scary health concerns I knew were on the horizon, I was in a good place.

Then NovelAI's stable diffusion anime model dropped around October 2022.

But first, a word on this technology while I have you captive:

Generative AI is a genie's bottle whose cork has been popped. Outside of sweeping legislative changes in multiple countries that would entirely rework how the global copyright system works (the mouse kinda cooked that one from being solvable, at least in the U.S.) or all the models spoiling so badly from recursive training data (that one is a lot more realistic), it's here to stay. I don't think what it makes is art no more than I would argue what a paintbrush or pen can make is art, but art is a construct of human will and effort and this is another tool artists can use.

This is a technology mired in controversy, illegal art theft, and training data that likely has what Patreon is probably going to censor me for saying unless I call it something flowery like "indecent images of children" that belies the monstrousness of that, but much like an AK-47, it is still ultimately a tool even if it is a particularly dangerous one that has to be used responsibly (and so far largely hasn't).

Can advanced machine-learning algorithms based on human neural networks remove tedium in the workflow of industry professionals who know how to properly and ethically use it? Yeah, we've seen it happen already with a few 3D animated films and video games. Meanwhile, Google's AI header on its search engine telling pregnant women they should smoke 2-3 cigarettes a day or that you should cook chicken at room temperature for safe consumption. While that's funny, someone might be stupid enough to follow its deadly advice, and "AI" isn't any more intelligent than the dumbest of us because it is us in a regurgitated format our little bird brains pushing the buttons for seeds sometimes doesn't realize isn't new, yet unlike a human, a model can't take accountability for its actions.

I have faith that human problems can be solved by human solutions, but the ingenuity of the stupidest and meanest of us sure makes that hard. People get replaced by technology all the time (how many typewriter salesmen or CRT TV repairman do you see these days?), but as long as the human condition remains a problem, generative AI will remain a distilled symptom of it with many of the negatives of a human, very few of the positives, and needing the help of a human to work.

Getting back on track... I consider my own writing and the commissioned art I get for re:Dreamer art. Writing re:Dreamer makes me an artist. How I use AI for pornographic fodder of the lowest common denominator does not. It makes me a gambler who doesn't know when to quit, trading one worn lever I pull too much (or one cracked beak) for another.

That being said, I have used this image technology for art, but as a byproduct.

Yes, Zach's mom's primary reference started as an AI prompt, even if I had to reroll the dice a few hundred times to get here. Can you tell she's just Scathach? I kinda couldn't somehow!

And I eventually just went to town with Clip Studio Paint (an actual artistic tool) to clean it up.

Ah, so this was where that prominent mons pubis in the final art came from...

It then got passed to TiltSHIFT as a reference for a commission. I have a hard time seeing that creation of art and money changing hands for it as anything but the lightest shade of morally gray.

I've also used it for a very small number of minor design elements that simply wouldn't make sense to commission. For full disclosure, that list is:

• The brief moment when Zach reaches into his drawer filled with masturbation paraphernalia. The doujinshi that are briefly on screen (NSFW) are generated with stable diffusion img2img based on real gender bender doujinshi I have either personally scanned, commissioned translations of, or were relevant for the building blocks of this visual novel to even exist. Britney later finds this drawer, which serves as a plot point of her figuring out Zach has a gender bender fetish and her trying to roleplay that with Zach in the bedroom.

• The face in the top left corner of Zach's primary gacha uses stable diffusion, but I made the rest of the interface with commissioned assets, royalty-free art, or my own Photoshop skills.

• Zach's phone icons for his gacha were made with a stable diffusion program offered by DLsite for commercial use. It's since been taken down, but it was called AI CharacterMaker and was by SomaliStudio.

• A spot in the dream sequence has a purchased royalty-free background that gets distorted with img2img.

There could always be something that a creator offers in a royalty-free pack that wasn't declared as AI and that I didn't catch, but I've gone out of my way to check for that and to limit the use of stable diffusion to very minor assets that wouldn't make sense to commission, either from being needed in bulk, being smaller than a Twitch emote (zoo we mama are those expensive these days!), or which are intentionally designed to mimic the dreamlike atmosphere of stable diffusion. I could make more assets (like Zoey outfits) with this technology, but I also have the ability to commission artists who would produce better results.

I did have noble intentions with this technology as a nifty little tool in my kit for this visual novel. I got use out of it, and much like AI Dungeon (and later Poe, an AI chatbot that I used instead as AI Dungeon turned into to irredeemable by removing a number of my scenarios and forcing you to use a user interface that is hostile to one-hand "play"), I got good at tweaking it. I really, really wanted to be able to use this to hand artists outfit or scene references and have them go to town or whatever else my clever application my creative brain could come up with. I even had some notable examples with Molly's bikini, Samantha's base design, and a few outfits for Britney and Zoey that are being saved for a rainy day.

That doesn't justify the rabbit hole I fell down generating a little over 110,000 images from just under 200 GB of LORA, Lycoris, checkpoints, VAE, and whatnot running off stable-diffusion-webui, and that's after I deleted everything in April 2023 to kick what I knew was a ruinous death wish of an addiction that was burning out my dopamine receptors when my life depends on them holding together, only to start back up again a week later because I couldn't quit. At about 4-20 seconds for prompt generation, that's... a scary amount of time even at the most conservative estimate, but it's likely far worse and I simply have no way of calculating all the time spent with text models (and much like the gacha total, I don't want to out of fear). Maybe my fucked dopamine levels and my dopamine agonists are to blame to a degree for that addiction, but that's too lazy and convenient of an excuse that lets me off too goddamned scot-free. I know my second puberty did a number on my libido, but I'm not a teenager; I am an adult who should know how to control myself. My life falling apart in new and utterly terrifying ways that I was poorly prepared for and that I still need to get to explaining does not excuse me from running back to the ol' faithful of my poisons and losing weeks of that life I tell myself I would do anything to extend while possibly shortening it.

You can be sympathetic to the alcoholic, but that sympathy strains when he doesn't show up to work, barely works when he does, lies to cover his addiction, makes excuses, deflects, refuses to admit he has a problem, and is ruining his life without even having the decency to be fucking public about it.

I am done with excuses. All I have left is the context and explanations, but I also have an apology.

This past year, I let myself down perhaps more than I have ever let myself down in my life, and based on the sharp drop in the Patreon numbers, I let a lot of you down too. Unlike the OCD developing, I wasn't alone and isolated without a support group who would have listened and tried to help had I been able to get over my shame and embarrassment and admit I had a problem. Unlike the PD (later CBS) and the death spiral that it sent me into, it's not like I couldn't have predicted what I'd return to as my stress levels climbed through the roof. Unlike breaking up with the person who might be the only person I have romantically loved, I had far less selfless reasons for throwing myself under the bus. Unlike dropping out of college, I don't think I spent every waking moment wishing I could be dead already so I could get this contrived farce of a drama my life is over with (but I'll admit that it could have been a subconscious death wish). Unlike the disastrous return semester, it's not like I was simply naïve and had a crushing blow to my morale that made me give up a few feet after the starting line of what I had told myself was going to be my redemption arc but which turned into months of severe depression and PTSD episodes and hating myself for being unable to overcome them. Unlike those bullshit jobs I drifted between, I wasn't dispassionate about my work or felt like it was useless. Unlike the what had been the infamous 4-month delay of the 0.10.0 release over 2 years ago, I hadn't been biting off more than I could chew and having to learn how to actually fucking program to compensate. Unlike my prior transphobia or getting peer pressured or manipulated by trans women into identifying myself as a binary transgender woman after finally realizing I wasn't a cis man, I can't point to other people and blame them for any part of it. Unlike the closest I've ever come to killing myself, I didn't enter a fugue state and lose many of the memories of how I ended up in my bathtub about to take my own life.

No, this was all me. I was consciously aware of what I was doing, and I just didn't care about the consequences. That's not okay by any metric, and I am sincerely sorry. For those of you who were patient with me when I didn't deserve it, I have my utmost gratitude.

But saying sorry isn't enough when I would have been fired several times over if this was a traditional job. I will be doing my best to put this genie back in its bottle, and not with words like I am so good at sculpting and deflecting with, but with actions.

I have deleted my local collections of "my" AI writing, dating all the way back to late 2020 (save for small select screenshots of story concept demonstrations which still have use for work, like the fantastic results of a scenario I made for AI Dungeon to test the concept for the visual novel I would be doing after re:Dreamer). While I am not deleting my AI Dungeon, NovelAI, or Poe accounts as there are scenarios or bots there others still use, I am deleting my saved passwords to them; given that I used a password generator, this means I am effectively locked out of the account as I have also set up my Gmail to automatically delete messages from these services if I try to reset my passwords. This is ultimately a system I could still get around with enough persistence (something which I had to do with Poe as I forgot to cancel my $20 monthly subscription), but no lock is perfect.

As for stable diffusion... my PC is currently falling apart as my CPU AIO cooler's pump doesn't register with my computer anymore (I idle at a very hot 80°C). Due to my Clip Studio Paint files and workflow becoming so demanding on my computer (seriously, scaling sprites takes forever!), I've had the parts for a rebuilt upgrade for months, yet chaotic bullshit in my life and the difficulty of setting up my PC environment to compile re:Dreamer's Android version meant I was hesitant to change horses while the update was still in progress. I've deleted all the models and images, except for a few hundred select images for reference material (again, part of the reason I had a hard time admitting this was a problem was that there was some use out of it), and I won't be reinstalling it on my new PC.

Despite all this, deleting this much hurt, and I still tried to make excuses for myself to get out of this. I kept telling myself I should lie by saying I did delete it when I didn't or that if I can just get my shit together, I can make use of this technology and find a way to make it work for work. But this is a technology that should only be used by those who can prove then can use it responsibly, and I have proved that I can't. Much like most gacha, the only winning move from me is to not play the game, which is why I deleted it all from my PC and my Dropbox. There has been no hiding it in the rolled-up curtain. My hard drive and cloud storage are a few hundred gigabytes lighter, and I feel a bit lighter too even if I still carry that shame and guilt.

I'm hopefully optimistic that I am kicking this shit for good, but I'm not an artificial intelligence. I am a human, and like it or not, that's all I ever will be. And like a human, I will fall, I will stumble, and I will make mistakes. When that happens (because while I don't quite know who I am, I know myself well enough to know this is a "when" and not an "if"), I need to be held accountable.

Thankfully, there will be signs you can call out. I will duck out of text chats or voice calls and not be in contact with anyone for vague reasons for a few hours. I will dismissively mention "I've had a few beers" as I get into a VC or talk with someone in text in situations that don't warrant it (I seriously don't drink that much (less than once a week), but the buzz does help get rid of the shame and guilt I feel from this deception). My output at work will crater with only brief excuses given. I'll say that my hand, arm, or shoulder will hurt more than usual. I will appear way less interested in more "traditional" pornography (which again, is fine in smaller doses that don't involve me sitting in the bathtub I almost killed myself in for 12 hours as my knees bruise and I tell myself I can just put Vaseline on the torn skin after and lie about where I had been).

Yeah, this is gross and doesn't paint me in a sympathetic light. I need to get the fuck over that because that's why I didn't open up about that severity of this earlier. I would deflect and say "I have porn addiction" almost with a sense of joking pride, but I don't feel proud of having it even if I feel a bit proud of admitting I needed help and thankfully being able to provide my own help for most of this.

Yet despite the rawness of this admission, I'm still not done. There are other things I should be held accountable for because a 7-month delay was unacceptable, but this list starts with the one I was most responsible for and goes down in order until I am explaining things that were in fact out of my control, and the tone is going to get a bit more lighthearted after that extreme accountability that probably went too TMI before getting back to some heavy shit.

All I Can Ever Be Is Me

So, despite that big post I made about accepting myself as a trans woman, I'm not trans, but if my brain settles down, that might end up being a label that applies to me. From talking to my gender therapist about it, I've learned that being genderfluid is sometimes a transitory state to something more "solidified," but I sort of... just really didn't want to be genderfluid. I desperately wanted to be anything but that, so when what was possibly the first real lifeline appeared to escape that identity appeared (there being several weeks without a shift and me being unable to trigger them no matter what), I threw caution to the wind and grabbed hold, not even caring if that rope wasn't connected to anything on the other end or how much I would have to contort to fit a mold that wasn't for me.

I'll explain how I'm doing better in a bit, but I first need to explain how being genderfluid was (and still somewhat is) a chaotic hellscape of an existence for me, how I've been trying to deal with it, and why I wanted to escape it so badly that I wrote 35,000 words while trying to gaslight myself.

Unlike other people who might use it to mean, "well, I woke up today and decided, 'hmm, I feel more like a girl today than a guy' and now I am," it wasn't something in my control. My brain decided who I was for me in ways that were so hard to predict and plan for that I started to live in fear of them.

Every time a shift happens, I freeze up for about 15 to 90 seconds and I struggle to process information because I feel extremely disoriented. My sense of balance tilts to the left or right, I lean a bit to the side, my head starts to tilt on its own, and I can feel my sinus cavity develop pressure on one side or the other and "push" something to the other end. I feel like I'm about to stumble, even when sitting down. I get a bit of auditory and visual tunnel vision while the world seems to fade as I focus on me and my rapidly changing perception of myself, be it despair, elation, dysphoria, euphoria, or something else. All my senses blur into one blob, and then I come out the other side of that tunnel and have to separate the pieces of me and rebuild myself.

If I shift when I'm alone doing nothing (such as trying to get to bed), my entire energy level changes. I'll often have to completely change my sleeping position as my bodily perception is different, which wakes me up. Showering is an entire beast I am afraid of, not necessarily because of dysphoria, but because I am terrified of going in there, looking at my naked body I might feel some degree of comfort with, and having those parts of my body that caused me comfort and that I was using as rocks to hold myself together become the sources of extreme discomfort. It's happened about a dozen times, and I've had to stop shaving halfway once because of it.

If I shift when I'm in the middle of work, it takes me about 30 minutes to reorient myself and get a sense of what I was doing, because while I never "forget" what I was doing or have amnesia about the events from one side to the other (I would say that would be DID criteria, but DID might not even exist according to some psychologists), but the emotions and energy associated with it can fade or be hard to recall since how I process information is different when I am a man than it is how I am a woman. I am always me, but how that "me" operates isn't the most reliable, let alone consistent.

You might not be able to tell how my tone and style as a writer is different when I am a man versus when I am a woman, but I can tell you from my own observation that there are surprising nuances to it. One's more excitedly flowery and emotive to capture the je ne sais quoi of an idea in a roundabout yet surprisingly pithy way even if he is liable to get lost in its rambling cleverness, while the other is a bit drier and more direct because she makes an effort to trim the metaphors and allegories in favor of exposition and conversation that advance the scene to a conclusion based on meaningful buildup that sometimes goes on for too long. That's probably the opposite of how you'd think it'd be, but if you want an example, the first part of this post covering my porn addiction was entirely feminine, while this part has (so far) been entirely masculine.

I don't even have a good way to communicate who that me at the time of writing is. Personally, I don't think English was designed to accommodate a situation like mine. There's no "Sam/Samuel" and "Samantha" and I'm not a different person just because a bit in my head sometimes knows this person is a man and sometimes knows it's a woman. It's all just "me," and I keep using that "I am Sam. Sam-I-Am" reference for a reason: it's the most accurate truth I have.

Yet I also admit that I do want to feel clever and artistic (I have an even greater need to impress as a man than I do as a woman), and I think there is part of that showing with how I refer to the whole chaos of my gender identity, especially as it relates to me being a writer. The Author's Notes in the visual novel with changing sprites and textboxes does a good job in that format, but what about text that isn't multimedia? What about how I refer to my other side of the coin?

I've been trying to crack these nuts for a year, and despite all the issues associated with these and how they imply my identity disorder runs deeper with "alters" (yuck), the best I have come up with for referring to the part of myself I am not is through techniques such as:

• Present-tense verbs and third-person personal pronouns, (i.e., "I can tell you that she's really easy to embarrass and likes to be embarrassed, so even if she says she doesn't want to be called cute, she does. Don't force it, but if the situation calls for it and you can catch her off-guard, it'll make her fucking day.")

• A clunky "[gender] + me" approach that often gets mixed with the pronouns (i.e., "Fem me writes in a surprisingly tomboyish way, don't you think? She's got this confidence to her writing I kind of envy, and I don't love how I, for lack of a better term despite the sexism associated with it, 'write like a woman' when masculine, especially when compared to her.")

• Asides with context clues to heavily imply my current gender (i.e., "Man, it's weird that I've found more solidity and confidence in my masculinity than I've ever had in my life through taking HRT and acknowledging that there is a long-neglected and meaningful part of my identity that's feminine, but I suppose personal revelations come in all packages.")

• Conditionals based on my gender (i.e., "When I am a woman, I am arguably more misogynistic and transphobic than I am when I am a man because some part of me with a poor taste in humor thinks I get more of a 'pass' to make those somewhat mean jokes when I'm closer to that side than I am now. I could say it works in converse when I am a man as I am more likely to make fun of 'incel behavior' or ridicule how those swinging about their toxic masculinity have more fragile masculinity than the genderfluid dude with tits who is stuck taking HRT, but while a bit mean, I feel like I 'punch up' more when a guy.")

That last case is the most accurate way to portray me, but it also requires the most effort as a writer and the greatest degree of clunkiness. Sometimes, it's just easier to reply to myself as the opposite gender as "you," especially when I am calling myself out.

That led to a recent bit of drama with a friend who interjected with her own comments of my leaving notes for myself between genders to read later, which is something I've been doing as a suggestion of my therapist, (great guy, by the way; while I'm wary of him getting clientele or harassment from reading a Patreon post from a gender bender porn visual novel developer, if you're living in Georgia and looking for a specialized gender psychologist, I'll link you to him if you ask in DMs).

That particular instance was (while a woman) being upset and whining in the re:Dreamer Discord server's semi-private channel about how she had to compromise for being genderfluid instead of trans and telling my masculinity (hi, that's me right now!) that he needs to get over himself ("Maybe this isn't that there are two wolves inside of me, but the wolf and the sheep problem, and my masculinity can't stand that he used to be a lone wolf (not even that alpha or sigma bs) but is now a sheep, and he's punching holes in the boat in an act of defiance against me from eating him. It'd honestly track given how petty of a person I can be, as well as how misogynistic and transphobic I can be despite not wanting to be.")

When I shifted a few minutes later, I decided to take the opportunity to get my thoughts in order a few hours before my therapy session, so I called myself the fuck out, particularly for that "sheep" comment.

Forgive me for giving Discord money for the pirate avatar decoration, but like, c'mon, I'm the captain.

While I won't share what that friend has typed as she has apologized after I told her it felt like she was attacking my masculinity while making excuses for my poor behavior as a woman, you can check out the entirety that weird "conversation" between myself in this Imgur album if you're interested

But the point isn't exactly who typed what, but more broadly that there are clear communication issues that arise from me being genderfluid; or rather, the communication issues are that communicating isn't clear.

My single clear and distinct voice as a writer is something I need to write effectively, but now there are two of them. I am terrified of being misunderstood or people taking words out of my mouth or putting them in there, and it is beyond frustrating that neither of those "me" can figure out a particularly good system even when we put that head and those voices together.

And speaking of voices... If I shift when I'm in the middle of a conversation, I have to meekly mumble "ah, hold on" or struggle to type "wait" and hope people can pause as I recover, but I often just have to stop the conversation and leave as my brain feels like sludge and I feel ashamed of being this thing who can't decide what it is that needs people to accommodate it to exist. While useful, I hate that my voice changes on its own for my femininity versus my masculinity. I can never quite replicate how I sound on the other side. When I'm masculine, I hate that my voice sometimes lilts up in such a feminine way. When I'm feminine, I hate that I don't think my voice passes and I can become incredibly hyper-fixated on how I sound right after a shift which is a gateway to one of my most intense types of dysphoria. Even when I am a man and rocking it, I don't like knowing that I can't replicate a voice that is convenient for me to have when I am later and inevitably not a man. When I am a woman, I feel embarrassed that my laugh has shifted away from this rather deep chuckle and into this girlish squeal and giggle that I don't think fits me as a woman but leaves me wishing it did.

I'm driving a car, shifts are dangerous, and I don't mean that I only drive automatic transmissions (okay I see the joke now that I've started to type this sentence). I've almost crashed my car twice in the past year. If I wreck because of a gender shift, how am I supposed to give the other person my insurance or give a police officer a statement? Telling them my chaotic situation I myself barely understand sounds a lot like I'm crazy, have something debilitating with my mental health, or am high on something. Atlanta is such a low-density city that you pretty much need a car to survive in it, so if I lose my license or my car (or even get my insurance rates raised), any plan to live on my own is dead in the water. I'll have to rely on someone else (probably my parents) for help or pay far more to be a person who never leaves an apartment, and I simply can't afford that.

If I'm in public, I might have a complete mental breakdown. I've dropped groceries and broken down in tears in a parking lot from the sudden and intense wave of dysphoria that came out of nowhere from a shift, and I was afraid to leave my house for months lest that happen in public or behind the wheel.

Sure, I'll occasionally have a "moment of Zen" after a shift where my head feels clear or even slightly enlightened, but far more often than not, these shifts are stressful and something I loathed. I'll feel who I am with such certainty, only for it to get ripped from me over and over and over again.

Until recently, there was no good way for those shifts to happen on command (let alone to stop them). I could somewhat influence them with setting up a few dominos and hoping for the best, but the most reliable and "least bad" way to control it was through porn. I stand by how I was unknowingly self-medicating the chaos of my identity by compartmentalizing it to "it's just a fetish," and I think that was part of why I got more and more addicted to porn in the past year to such an unhealthy degree: It was the a poison I convinced myself was my best medicine against the shifts (except instead of attraction I didn't realize was envy, I tried to make those sessions a safe outlet for my masculinity so I could put it away when I was done).

The whole reason I call these "shifts" instead of a more easily understood word like "switches" or "flips" is because there is this sense of continuity to the event and no one distinct moment where the gears in my head spin a different way. it feels like I'm on shifting sands... but sometimes, "quicksand" is the more apt comparison of what I am in, as it feels like my identity is trying to swallow me up and drown me and it's all I can do to keep my head above it all.

Starting since that schizophrenic dream royally fucked me up (which I've covered in that post I'll be talking about), I was desperate for a sense of self to anchor who I was to reality. In that desperation, I was looking for an out, and I grabbed onto, "Oh, I haven't shifted for a few weeks! I guess I'd better write this massive wall of text about how I'm trans now because the genderfluid arc is over before I even talk to my therapist about it because I really don't want to go back to being genderfluid and this is how I force that!"

Even at the time, I knew I was still genderfluid. The language of that post is peppered with things like "I might still be genderfluid" or "I'm more trans than genderfluid." I wanted it to all be over, to just let my masculinity vanish and be a thing I could stop caring about, so I could stop binding my huge chest when I get uncomfortable despite how it can hurt to do that with large breasts (I'm at 38F after a growth spurt in the past month). I wanted to stop spending most days lying to myself that whatever gender I felt at that moment was the final truth that explained everything, and I wanted it to happen without changing my words in the slightest. I wanted to stop feeling like an increasingly emasculated man who knew he was the vestigial dead weight. I wanted to keep feeling that femininity that I'd started to like so much.

I really cherished the giddy discombobulation of realizing the name that fits me best, then making myself embarrassed and overjoyed from saying my name while trying to figure out how to describe the pronunciation, to say nothing of those moments of euphoria of feeling like there are parts of my body that belong (notice how my best friend is a menace) or when the hormones hit just right and I feel this bashful rapture as my interest in guys goes through the roof (seriously, I found Star Trek: The Original Series' Spock hot for a whole hour and didn't mind how weird and unexpected it was when TOS Kirk is right fucking there), but I think my favorite parts are the moments of quiet joy where I'm sitting there and typing as a little smile appears on my face, my eyes widen just a bit, and I think to myself, "Holy shit, I'm a girl!" in a way that feels so nice that I don't want to just think it but that I want to say it out loud with an embarrassed giggle, like I'm saying an obvious fact in an inane statement.

Is wanting to be the person who can do and be that without the burden of knowing that's not all of who I am so selfish?

This probably resonated a lot with any trans woman reading this, but I unfortunately know I can't be trans like you might be (and maybe if you're not trans, this current sentence resonated with you). Hell, I don't know who I am sometimes (I know I'm a woman right now, by the way; assembling the images in those hyperlinks triggered a shift), but I know I'm human. I make mistakes and want things I can't have, so when I set myself up for an expectation of who I was while hypocritically setting itself up as a way to break free of the same expectation those who really messed me up had, and when I failed to live up to my lofty and unrealistic expectation by having a shift to masculinity back in early March, I was devastated for an entire month and a half. I thought I was never going to break free of this cycle of cyclical... well, you get the point.

No need to be redundant, but I ignored some warnings from close friends even as I spent a week writing that update. I once again convinced myself I could just will myself into being who I told myself I needed to be. People tried to call me out, but once again, I didn't listen and hurt myself.

But no more. After this, I was done. I was going to figure this shifting shit out and grab it by the fucking neck.

Okay yeah I'm a dork who likes Star Trek and used a dumb clip to make a point. Sue me.

So I set up headphones, put on a drum beat like my bullshit therapeutic boarding school used for "meditation," lied down on my back, put a blindfold on, and tried my hardest to figure this out.

And, uh... it kinda worked?

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIc6GB_WQAk

I'm just as flabbergasted as you probably are that I have a cheat code I can punch in like a speedrunning input. This sounds like utter bullshit, but trust me, it's there.

My best guess is that by combining cognitive-behavioral therapy, a mantra, my synesthesia (you don't hallucinate like I do without it; I sometimes can't read while eating without my food changing taste on me), and possibly my corticobasal syndrome's perception issues led to a system that kind of works, even if getting it there wasn't as easy as my elation above makes it seem. When the excitement waned, I still felt despair and severe depression, but now I had something to work with, and I got to work, first by testing its limits.

Like I predicted, it's not held up in the worst of my dysphoric episodes or moments of true despair, but it soon became useful for reinforcement. Testing went well, except for that one time I got "stuck." My usual check is letting my brain autocomplete the statement "I am a... [gendered role]" but it fizzled out as the words tried to form. From talking to my best friend who has a whole mess of gender issues, it seemed like I was... rapidly oscillating between gender binary identities, but also one outside of that. As I aptly put it, "I feel like a boat going in circles because one side rows forward and the other back."

Much like my rhetoric of how I refer to being genderfluid is an imperfect solution, this trigger isn't without flaws. It took over 2 months of steady practice to do this with any sort of reliability, but even then, it still only has an 80% chance to stick for more than a few minutes and it feels less "solid" than the random shifts which can easily override it. But even though it's a slippery foothold, it is a foothold, and it's the first one I've had in almost a year.

With it has come a gradual perception change: I'm not "unfortunately" genderfluid, I'm just genderfluid. Ups and downs, it is what it is, and while I don't think I'm going to espouse "I love being genderfluid!" anytime soon like someone in a support Discord server did in a way that was hyper-triggering, I've started to appreciate the ups a bit more as of late, primarily through the usefulness of it.

Am I writing something and wondering what tone I'd be using were I the opposite gender? I can just check without waiting a week. Am I in a dysphoric spiral? I can ease it somewhat or even get myself out of it. Am I vibing with myself as a woman and want more of that? I can certainly influence that, and I can do the opposite as a man too. Am I about to go out in public as a man with a bound chest and afraid of a shift the other way at an inopportune moment? Now I have a backup plan (or at least the confidence in one). Am I able to get a better understanding of my core "me" and my commonalities from shifting more frequently and being able to treat it as a chance for analysis without it being a stressful event I live in fear of? Yes, and with it has come a blurring of my identity and what I think of gender. I'm not as different between the two halves of my coins as I thought I was, but while it's probably foolhardy to say I can keep it on one side facing up forever or balance it on its edge without it feeling like an uncomfortable mishmash of dysphoria, I feel promise with what I've found so far.

I've gotten a bit more emotive (and dare I say "effeminate?") as a man, and that's okay. Neither it nor the boobs invalidate me as a man, and to say it does spits in the face of almost every trans guy. Even with all that is going on and how I maybe should be feeling utterly emasculated by it, I'm really not noticing that as much as I used to. When I say HRT and getting boobs somehow made me cherish my masculinity and my identity as a guy more and explore it in ways I never would have before, I mean it. This is a part of me that matters to me, and I feel so much better about myself by not trying to bury it... him in a shallow grave he can burst out of. My masculinity doesn't just deserve a seat at the negotiating table: he gets to be a king and dictate his own terms sometimes, and I'm so glad I don't have to give up being him to be a woman (even if I now "default" to being she/they over 80% of the time).

From accepting my masculinity more, I've also somehow simultaneously gotten both more mature and more girlish as a woman, and that's wonderful. I can be this masculine tomboy of a woman who likes baseball (the 2024 Atlanta Braves aren't quite the "this is the best offense in baseball history" that their 2023 team was (seriously, check their SLG and OPS stats because they're bonkers), but I'm enjoying that I can get into the sport again regardless of my gender and not falling for any hangups saying I can't enjoy it as a woman), this absolute fucking dork who tells bad mom/dad jokes constantly and who gets some slight sadistic pleasure out of knowing how to fluster people (admittedly, it's not that hard), this girlish goober who is easily flustered and embarrassed in the best way just from being called cute by someone I feel comfortable calling me that (oh fuck you, past guy me, for leaving that fucking landmine I honestly forgot about until right now!), and this motherly and protective "cat mom" who took two gorgeous little 13-week-old kittens off my sister and the stray momma cat she took in who is already going "these boys are my babies and I'd kill for them and I'd die for them" within a day of them coming into my home and my heart (which they melted by snuggling up against me last night as I slept).

Ashton Cougar (since he looks like a handsome but depressed child star and keeps getting into trouble)...

And Pequeño Tigrillo ("Little Little Tiger/Oncilla" in Spanish) because he's this soft fluffy fuzzball keeps swatting at stuff (but I might be calling him "Babou" because of Archer). Like, "Pequeño 'Babu' Tigrillo" sounds like a luchador name, and I kind of like that.

What, did you think I wouldn't be a total dork with naming my pets or something?! For God's sake, I talk to you with an elaborate authorial OC!

Accepting myself as myself, as incomplete as I and that acceptance may be, is happening through finally getting some control over my shifts. I'm not "rebuilding" myself; I am finding myself, and that feels so much more genuine than anything I was doing previously. I'm sorry it took so long and that I've come off as so self-centered from it. Making progress and existing has been hard and will continue to be hard. I and my life have been different and will continue to be different. But I think for the first time, I'm starting to think that it all just might be okay in the end.

Someone Who Gets It

Sure, I'm starting to be more stable with the instability, but having any degree of control over my shifts isn't quite the "superpower" I've hoped it would be. While I can somewhat influence who and what I think of myself as and arguably have the title of the gender bender, I can't freely shapeshift my body and ascend to being the gender fluid.

I've been watching That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime (a.k.a. Tensei Shitara Suraimu Datta Ken) with that best friend I mentioned recently, and we're both unfathomably jealous of Rimuru Tempest for his effortlessly enby drip of being both handsome and cute.

God, fuck!

AND HE CAN ALSO BE COOL?!

GOD, IT'S NOT FAIR!

He even comes with what I learned is his own fucking Keisuke, and I shit you not, he is actually just how I'd write Zach and Keisuke's son if he had superpowers and looked a ton like Keisuke!

God, I'd say I'd be stealing that outfit for Keisuke if Keisuke didn't already have it.

God, I'm stealing that outfit for Keisuke!

I'm so pissed, but I'm gonna be here all day ranting and raving about story and characterization ideas I have for Keisuke if I don't move on.

If y'all haven't watched it, this won't contain spoilers (but go watch it since it's such good eating!), but he's one of them isekai fellas...

Why the hell am I doing this in a Southern accent?

It's a feel-good nation-building anime, but the main character who has been reincarnated as a slime has the ability to absorb the abilities and mimic the forms of those he "eats" (think "isekai Kirby"). He gets the ability to mimic a human in a moderately sad arc in the first season, and it gives him the ability to be this utterly androgynous child specifically stated to have a flat groin like a Ken doll who only gets bigger, taller, handsomer, and cuter as the series goes on and he gets stronger and more OP.

"Oh, uh, neat," I think I said, moderately triggered upon seeing he can turn into a human for the first time. I've joked about how my ideal gender envy goal is a non-corporeal blob that can still interact with things through telepathy, but the goop upped the ante in a way I didn't expect by also being able to be human.

My friend said, "But wait, there's more!"

Then they pressed play on the paused video to this one small, tiny section where he's testing his ability to mimic a human, so he creates a body double and turns it into an adult man and then an adult woman. And then he never does it again because it's easier for him to remain youthful and androgynous and he doesn't want the trauma of looking anything like the woman he got close to and ate on her deathbed to get this mimic power.

Source: KOTOHA on pixiv.

The words I wanted to say were, "Oh, that's not fair," like I was the bookworm bank teller in The Twilight Zone's "Time Enough at Last" after he breaks his glasses after realizing that everyone might be dead, but he had enough food, water, and books to survive a lifetime of solitude, but I was too hurt to be clever and articulate. All I could croak out was, "Oh, I hate this."

I just went quiet and tried to articulate how much seeing this stung. When the hurt gets bad, I go silent. Before I could find the words to explain why, my friend simply said, "Right?! Cap, I'm so fucking glad you get it!"

We did get it. And it sucks, but at least we found another person who gets it.

For the sake of privacy and out of respect for them, I'm only at liberty to divulge certain information about my best friend, but I will say this: they get it.

They get it like no other person I've ever met gets it, and that's an utterly awful burden. For as painful, sad, dramatic, traumatic, and "interesting" as my life is (and that's only the public side of it), my best friend is standing beside me on the podium of "most complicated person and life I know." I can't even fucking tell who has the gold medal and who has the silver one, but I can tell that the bronze medalist ain't even close.

They "got it" with all the people who came through the re:Dreamer server and left me with scars, bitter memories, and so much of my time lost to paralyzing anger and heartbreak, but I didn't trust their judgment or warnings and ignored the countless red flags I saw until I got hurt badly. They get it with this feeling of their gender and body being wedged in this awkward place between femininity and masculinity, and wanting to stay with the pain that is known, feeling compelled to take steps in only one direction but not truly able to, yet also wanting to greedily have both. They get it in ways I didn't until I talked to them about what it was that I wasn't getting, and the same has happened in converse like steel honing steel. Sure, "honing" is relative when you're got cracks, chips, and burrs that will never go away, but while we're both uniquely broken people, we'd be broken a whole lot worse had we never met.

In fact, I think we'd both be dead if we hadn't had all the astounding coincidences we needed to meet each other and build our friendship, and I know just how unlikely those odds were (there's more, but they had to have just the right conversation with friends to check 4chan at just the right time to find just the right post of me talking about re:Dreamer). Our friendship likely saved their life, but I can tell you without a doubt that it saved mine.

I had a night a few months back (I want to say in November 2023, but much of the last year is a blur covered with a dark gray fog of depression) where I started to write farewell letters with the intention of killing myself in the next few hours, but the one to them was so sad that I couldn't bear to finish it, so I broke down in tears and told them this before going to bed. The bitter anger and rage I heard from this person (over text messages no less) and the fear of me ever doing something like this to leave them played a big part in convincing me to never try anything like that again. I won't say I don't still think about my death constantly (which is to be expected when I have a neurodegenerative disease that, while not a terminal illness, does reduce my life expectancy a lot), but I'm a whole lot less enthusiastic about taking my own life when I know someone else might be following me into the dark.

I don't open up to people often. I might be quite "open" about what you see of me, but that's been curated and only what I have chosen to share. This person is quite literally the closest I have ever gotten to another person in my life, and while I can't risk taking off the last of the masks I use to protect myself because I'm a coward afraid of getting hurt or even being disliked, they've gotten close enough to look under the mask from the side and see glimpses of what my face truly is, and how deep that abyss of raw and unfiltered sadness, anger, and fear goes. In return, I've had the unique privilege of seeing the cracks in their mask, and even though I deal with my own abyss every day, I'm shocked by the depths of their struggles. I've been told a few times by people I've explained my life story to where the person listening goes from "wow, that's rough" to "Jesus Christ, how are you not dead from all of the bullshit life has thrown at you?" I had that with my best friend. You have to be in a position of trust to be shown that sort of thing, but you start to really care for a person when you see it.

I wish I could share more about this person, because I want to yap endlessly about how wonderful I think they are and how much their friendship means to me until it gets embarrassing, but I've been on a whole arc of respecting boundaries and privacy recently and won't. Instead, I'll just say that for as much as this close friendship has been good for them and for me (I cannot overstate how much us talking to each other has improved us and how our concern for each other and trust in each other has stopped us from being dead), it is nevertheless a friendship that has taken up a significant chunk of my time.

Sure, we might have those long late-night conversations about identity and come to personal revelations of our issues from watching an anime together, but that's still just watching an anime together. These aren't therapy sessions (although they sometimes somewhat pivot into that as it feels like we're two people huddling for warmth in a blizzard) because no matter how I spend that time, it is ultimately still hanging out with someone who gets it.

I can apologize for how much time that is (I'd say about 10-20 hours a week, but it's not exactly like I go out much), but all work and no play makes Cap a dull boy/girl. I can ponder how it might be detrimental for the "inner circle" of my support network to be this small and it could be creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of isolation, but I know I still have lingering trust issues from the recent dramas and it hasn't helped that I just had someone I trusted a lot tell me they thought I was simply a stubbornly repressed trans woman as they set up conditions to hurt me in ways that mirrored the drama of friends stabbing me in the back despite my urgent pleas to not hurt me like that. I can continue to work to find more stability on my own two feet to stand proud without leaning on another person so much as I help this person do the same, but I already feel like I have solid rocket boosters attached to me as I try to escape the grim reaper nipping at my heels in order to live while I still can and I don't think it's wise to force myself to make that breakneck pace even faster (and like my HRT transition, I think I've set an unrealistic example of rapid progress for those around me).

I can apologize for a lot, and you all deserve a lot of apologies, but I won't apologize for that friendship.

Gender Bender Ain't What It Used To Be

As I think I've demonstrated by this point, my gender is fucked. I almost certainly used my obsession with gender bender to cope with the fact that I always kind of knew I was sitting on a Pandora's box of an identity that would explode in my face like a claymore mine if I poked at it hard enough. After I (and others) certainly poked at it rather hard, it blew up like a nuke in a way that almost killed me several times over, but I'm still here. Now what? How do I feel about gender bender now?

I can treat it as pornographic fodder, but fantasizing about what it'd be like to grow tits and have them become a lot less romantic when I know precisely what that's like: it hurts a lot, they're often sore, they hurt my back and get in the way, and I frequently finding myself wishing they were more a more manageable size. It's also been a bit of a monkey's paw beyond just the boobs (seriously, the hormones kick my ass sometimes), and reality hasn't lived up to the lofty fantasies.

I can treat it as a wish-fulfillment fantasy, but a lot of this post was me admitting I need to break free of that loop of escapism because I risk gaslighting myself into thinking that I can substitute my own life for it if I try hard enough. And after how the CaptainCaption sprites made me feel and that dream I'm trying very hard to emotionally distance myself from, I'm loathe to set up the conditions of giving myself even more dysphoria and envy for something I can't have; seriously, I feel like I was a hair's breadth from developing bottom dysphoria after that, but I've either managed to work through it in a healthy way, bottle it up under the label of "intense curiosity," or just distract myself from it.

Don't get me wrong, I still love the whole genre of gender bender (minus the skinsuit, possession, and body swap crowd). But it's now a... more matured interest. It's become less of an obsession I desperately cling to both for answers about myself and a lock to keep those answers away. I have a lot of those answers (and am finding more of them all the time), and the lock is useless to me at this point.

The answer I've settled on is "I'm still thinking it over," but that's lazy. The answer, like my identity, is nuanced and complicated, and I'm similarly going to ramble about it.

First though, if I've learned anything over the last year, it's that one of the worst things anyone can do to a cis gender bender content creator is trying to crack them. That might very well trigger a transphobic arc, be it from annoyance at asking those questions as they are often perceived (or stated; seriously, the misandry I see from some transfem communities annoys me to no end) as being attacks on masculinity (some guys very much try to defend that), or from repression (guilty as charged, even if I was the only person asking myself those questions for a while).

(I need to use less parentheses for tangents...)

Even if a creator realizes they are trans (or at least not who they thought they were), it seems to be a coin flip as to whether or not they'll still care about the gender bender content they make after, because I've seen many people move on after "solving" themselves. Beyond all the reasons I think crack culture is fucked (I wrote a whole fucking manifesto on it), the people engaging in it might be depriving themselves of content they like so much, which is just kind of a chef's kiss of poetic irony because it might prevent people from finding themselves through that work. Speaking for myself and as a purely equivalent exchange, had I retired from making re:Dreamer after realizing I wasn't cis, the game would slowly have gotten less visibility, and less people would have been able to find themselves through it. Almost like it's never about helping other people for these people but helping themselves.

I still don't know how I feel about the fact that 112 people on the game's survey have answered "Yes, in part because of RD," but I've awkwardly accepted that this genre has that kind of power. It can mean a lot to some people. It still means a lot to me.

I'm only having to ask myself these questions about what gender bender means to me now because what I mean to me has changed so much and gotten all these extra and unexpected layers to it, and I'm only able to answer those questions at the rate I have because I'm a particularly introspective person who has a great urgency to find those answers. I think I'm a particularly complex person who will never find all the answers I want, but maybe if I find more of them, my answer about what gender bender means to me might change even more.

The singular, ultimate theme of any story made by a human is "what it means to be human" as writing is the expression of a human, but I think gender bender as a genre is a unique vehicle for stories about identity, and that's a very core question to ask about what it means to be human. Not everyone has struggled with the question of what gender identity they have, but almost all of us have at one point or another struggled to figure out who we are or who we want to be. You might not truly "get it" when you see a genderbent character struggling with their change (or embracing it), but you'll probably see a piece of yourself in them (and maybe, to your surprise, a bit more than that). At the end of the day, man, woman, or something in-between, we're still all human, and gender bender stories can remind us of that.

And yeah, gender bender is pretty hot (at least to me personally). Call it AGP, a fetish, escapism, or something else, but I don't ever think I won't find it at least somewhat arousing.

I'm still extremely interested in telling the story I am telling with re:Dreamer, but at least in regard to the pornographic and fetish aspects, I won't be telling it with the same fervent passion I used to have. That's still there, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't just a bit hollower now. Thinking about gender is cool and fun, but I've now learned that it also very much isn't sometimes.

This was already happening, but I'm probably going to be treating re:Dreamer a bit more like an introspective character drama about gender than I already was. Zach turning into Zoey (and how they deal with that) is a mechanism to tell a lot of stories I care about, such as:

• How masculinity, even at its most virtuous, can be a binding and self-reinforcing burden full of rigid rules and codes of conducts when it's served in a one-size-fits-all package that limits individual expression, and how I think what separates the boys from the men is learning how to stop blindly following those ideals and creating some of your own rules and breaking others.

• How femininity, despite being something half the planet identifies with, is similarly a restraint (or rather, something that is restrained) due to its perception of being weak and childish even though there's real strength, empowerment, and maturity to be found through it, and there's nothing wrong with carrying that girlishness into womanhood any more than it is to carry boyishness into manhood.

• How gender, in the end, is just another self-defined bullshit label that means something different for everyone and how "figuring it out" means figuring out what it means to you.

• How no matter how hard or how fast you run, you can never escape from being you, and while you can change that you, you can never stop being you. It's okay to not be who you thought you were, but it's not okay to try to not be you.

• How who you love or how you love them doesn't define you but rather fills out parts of you to make you fuller than you were before, and how even love can be too much of a good thing or be used as an excuse for shitty behavior.

So, no, don't worry, I'm not quitting. Things have been a chaotic storm for the last year, but I still want to write this visual novel. But even though I've still got this passion for what I am doing far beyond it being my paycheck, my health is ultimately the biggest limiting factor and my biggest unknown.

In Sickness and in Health

This is where things start to get heavy again.

So, while a lot of my health isn't in my control, some of it is and how I react to it fully is.

Late this February, my Hail Mary throw of getting approved for a brain pacemaker got swatted from my hand. I got told in pretty much no uncertain terms that I was not going to be able to qualify for the device I had pinned so much of my hopes on unless something drastic changes with my health or my doctors get more data to prove that this isn't just a risky Hail Mary done out of desperation.

That... was a demoralizing blow, even if I knew the chances of it were slim as those devices are designed for patients with more typical Parkinson's disease. While I show some of the dopamine level issues of more typical parkinsonism, I also have a buildup of tau proteins in my left amygdala with visible signs of localized white matter atrophying that complicates things. While I tell people that I have "Alzheimer's in a trench coat pretending to be Parkinson's disease," I and my doctors honestly don't know what I have. Corticobasal syndrome is a diagnosis of exclusion, or in other words, a sort of "umbrella term" that is more about the symptoms than it is about the underlying cause based on what it isn't. Without knowing more, that procedure is off the table. It could've bought me months (on average, it doesn't extend lifespan by all that much and is designed less for that than it is for easier medicating and more moderate symptoms), and it could've bought me years. I'll never know, and I'll never know precisely what I have going on without a brain biopsy I will never see as you can't exactly do that and be a living patient. I have a lot of nightmares about them picking apart my brain without realizing I'm still alive, but I don't think I'll have to worry about that when they start.

There are a lot of terrifying unknowns about what's going on in my head with things made even murkier by the HRT changing some of my brain structure. While that's somehow helped and bought me more time (I'm still leaning toward crediting my enlarged putamen for creating a larger physical barrier between the tau buildup and my brain stem), it's thrown out most of my health projections. I likely have a little bit more than the most recent prognosis, and while I likely don't have less, it's hard to tell.

I did walk out of that early morning appointment with some slight hope of a new dopamine agonist called selegiline. While it's helped a decent bit with the arm pain and twitching for the 2 months I've been on it (I had to wean off a lot of my meds for 2 weeks, and then an additional 2 weeks out of concerns for my nausea), I've since had to come off it because my blood pressure has spiked through the roof. Most of the time, high blood pressure doesn't have symptoms, but I've had shortness of breath, headaches, and a pounding heartbeat. Part of that is due to having to stay on a minimal dose of Adderall (10 mg) because my ADHD is so bad I need at least some of that in me, part of that is stress, and part of that is ethanol.

I've been careful to not drink unpasteurized beers (basically, no craft brews, no ales), but any drinking at all isn't going to interact the best. I'm not calling myself a raging alcoholic (seriously, anything above 20% ABV makes me throw up on the spot), but I played it fast and loose with my health in ways I shouldn't have due to depression and trying to numb myself to avoid admitting I had a porn addiction.

Selegiline was probably not going to be a good long-term fit for me due to how badly it interacts with nausea (which I can't exactly fix, even with meds) but I started to really hate it by the end.

It's rare I get this upset at a medication that isn't estradiol, but it's about sending a message.

A recent pounding headache so severe I was confined to bed with my jaw hanging open in a silent scream of agony convinced me to stop and tell my doctor. I was told I should have brought this up weeks ago, and while I'm still waiting to get on a replacement medication (likely the old standard of Abilify, carbidopa, and levodopa), I'm one day into a 2-week reset period with the medication.

So, speaking of nausea, my anti-nausea med ondansetron gave me severe constipation that required a hospital trip on April 2nd! I know I'm sometimes full of shit, but this was literally the case.

Every king/queen needs his/her throne.

I won't give you the TMI (some parts of it are in the server and on my Twitter), but I was there for a whole day, was both bored out of my mind and in a ton of pain, just barely avoided surgery, and had a $750 copay on entry and $400 bill after discharge, yet as awful as that day was, it wasn't even in the top five worst days of my life. Maybe top ten, but not top five by a long shot; seriously, it's hard to beat:

• A PD diagnosis on my 21st birthday where I almost killed myself then tried to drink myself into oblivion.

• Almost killing myself in a fugue state and breaking down from realizing that I wasn't who I thought I was yet again.

• My childhood dog dying as I faced the full dark maw of my own mortality just when I thought I'd recovered.

• A mystery entry.

• The day I fully realized that my childhood dream of being a mechanical engineer was dead as I transferred majors to something I cared about far less and felt nothing but sadness and bitterness for a whole month.

 ...I guess this was kinda funny though (context is that I took off my binder under my hospital gown, didn't bring a bra, and was worried I'd be clocked even through that somewhat thick gown because yeah, I do be having big breasts).

That took a whole week to recover from. I was fatigued as, uh, well I guess "shit" for a few days, then the hemorrhoids took a while to heal and I was pretty dehydrated from the laxatives and stool softeners despite more than doubling my water intake.

This whole experience has been a painful lesson that I'm really not as good with checking drug interactions as I thought I was, but I'll get back to that in a sec.

Truthfully, my health is quite bad. I'm committed to working on re:Dreamer until I get it done or I literally can't type anymore, but I won't mince words: there's a very real chance I die before I can finish the visual novel, especially if the poor output I've had recently is the new norm.

That's the big thing I was too afraid to say in the 4th anniversary update's "side route" and an inconvenient truth that I feared admitting as something that might kill this project outright (I mean, who wants to throw money at a doomed ship?)

My ability to do math is crippled, but even I can tell the numbers don't add up. Depending on how you count it, re:Dreamer is either 461,215 words (based on Ren'Py's "check script" linting) or 751,872 or words (based on a tool from the Student Transfer dev team to count every string in the story/ files). C.H.E.A.T.S. and branching makes this almost impossible to calculate, so I'll be using both values, with the "real" word count being about halfway between but closer to the smaller value.

Here's the breakdown by each route (9_misc includes the 4th anniversary stuff and the world information entries, which I forgot to include in this screenshot but are 73,919 and 63,015 words respectively).

I knew from the start this was going to be a top-heavy game since the setup of the events matters a lot to me (say what you will about the poor design philosophy), but based on the ratio of the difference between the reported word counts and the average reading speed for English being about 250 words per minute (roughly 3:5), each major route (Keisuke and Britney) is about 8 hours long right now (which seems about right, give or take an hour). I'd like both to be at least 30 hours long based on the outline from Britney's route needing about that much reading time to really do right. Let's give a bit more of a generous estimate and say that's 500,000 words per route, which is a bit longer than The Count of Monte Christo's 464,162 words (it's my favorite book and the longest I've read). The mom route is ideally going to be an additional 120,000 words (8 hours), so combined with some odds and ends, I'm shooting for... let's say 1,500,000 words on completion, which is longer than Umineko's 1,154,971 words (that's the longest visual novel I can think of and it is certainly the longest I have read). The numbers say I'm between 30.7% and 50.1% done, but my own heuristics say I'm what I would say between a quarter and a third of the way done.

This visual novel has been in development for a bit under 5 years (55.5 months, starting from mid-September 2019), but I consider the first year to basically be a wash (very little of that writing still exists) and the last year has been about half as productive as usual, so let's say it's had an adjusted development period of 38 months, but I'll be generous and say it's been 3 years on the dot. That's between 12,811 words a month to 20,885 words a month (or 153,738 to 250,624 words a year). That doesn't seem like a hard goal, but writing for a visual novel is a lot slower than it is for raw text and this job isn't just writing.

But I'm full of shit, and I don't mean constipation. I'll finally be honest and tell you all that I'm more realistically 6 to 9 years away from the finish line. That's a problem, because that "5 more years" figure is a lie I told to cover another lie, which is that my prognosis was 6 years when I said it, not 10 years, and that was given to me a few months ago. I think November 2023, but things are a blur. I know I almost killed myself that day and just barely didn't. I knew that adjusted prognosis was coming for a few weeks, and much of the 4th anniversary update dealt with me saying "a decade" and "five years" as if I could will it into existence like I could will my gender to be stable like I was hoping with that writing in February. But of course, I couldn't for either, and I got hurt for trying.

I heavily considered deleting this last section after typing that. My head is ringing in terror, and I had complete and total tunnel vision on the "6 years" for God knows how long. Everything after "6 years" to here is a later addition added once I calmed down. Admitting that awful secret I've been hiding might not kill the project, but my death surely will.

And it's not even my death that's the sole issue. It's not like things will be smooth sailing until I reach a literal deadline I cannot cross. I have a neurodegenerative disease that is going to rob me of more and more of my mobility, hand movement, and ability to communicate or even read. I'm so fucking sad, scared, and angry at the universe every single day. I just took in two kittens I love yet my heart that grew when I cuddled with them for the first time feels like it's going to die because I know I will not outlive them. My best friend has promised to adopt them when I die, but I don't know if I want to task someone I care about with something that's such a sad burden (update: they say they are fine shouldering that burden). I'm terrified of being forgotten and having made no difference to the world, but I also just wish I could die peacefully and quietly without hurting anyone, but neither life nor death is ever that simple.

I... truly don't know where I stand. My doctor in March said my neurological health showed "stabilization" on the HRT, but I can't tell if that's "no additional decline" or "slowed decline" and I'm too afraid to ask for an update on my prognosis. I can tell you that I have personally noticed my coordination getting better since January of 2024. The tremors, numbness, sluggishness, and lack of coordination in my right arm have been largely replaced with sudden twitches, severe pain, and a "warped" sense of spatial awareness. Maybe that's a reason to be optimistic that this monkey's paw wish bought me enough time, but I've learned life kicks me in the teeth every time I try to smile. Maybe the dopamine boost from jacking off less or the chance to actually exercise without being around my transphobic and emotionally immature monsters I legally call my parents will help. I don't know. I hope so. Maybe I'm a gambling addict who can't quit who is now playing with the highest stakes I can.

I wish I had better news on this front. I wish I had more time, an ability to type faster, or a way to shut off those negative emotions or at least not be bothered by them so much, but the only one I could maybe have is the first. Maybe the delay of 0.18.0 was the wake-up call, much like nearly dropping out of my first year of college until I rallied at the last moment, and the universe's way of telling me I need to get my shit together now while I still can. This is the last chance of all last chances, and while I wish I could be too angry to die with this unfinished, I'm so scared that there's nothing I can do.

I didn't cry like this before taking HRT. I got used to the sadness, fear, and rage, and I got very good at numbing myself to them. Now, they're so much rawer. I can't run from death, and I can't run from being me or feeling these neglected emotions that are a part of me. Not even passing this radioactive hot potato to my male side fixes it, but I fucking wish it did. All it does is blunt it. Sorry, guy me, you get the shit end of the stick yet again. Suck it up like the man you claim to be.

I shifted somewhere in that last paragraph. I don't remember where, but it was close to the end. Christ, "I'm" close to the end.

I don't even know if I can be blamed for not responding to my health well anymore. Maybe? It's hard to remember how I reacted to things when I didn't feel like I was getting inched into a meat grinder. Is this normal or understandable? I don't know. I'm tired and confused. Sleeping has been hard recently, but I want to go to bed and cry in the dark instead of at my desk. I might feel better and/or delete this when I wake up. I get kinda terse when the abyss stares back at me. The mask stays on for a reason. If I don't delete this, that'll be a segue to the final part of this dirge of self-flagellation that explains why I feel like I'm trading what time I have left to live for making a visual novel.

My life utterly fucking sucks, but at least I am alive for now. Such a wonderful gift and terrible curse.

Masks Off

I won't delete the previous bit of writing as I think it's important to know just how bad it all is even when I am trying to not actively remind people, but I would like to apologize for it. I feel utterly awful when going "mask off" because it is not only like unfairly forcing someone to stare at the abyss I face, but I also face it more when I do that which is bad for me in so many ways.

Sadness and fear, much like anger, are emotions you can get addicted to. I am a very angry person, but I learned how to manage that anger when I was a teen and make it work for me and provide motivation to move forward. I don't let it out with a yell or by punching a wall, and I don't bottle it up like a pressure cooker until it explodes. I slowly channel it through a nozzle and ignite it like rocket fuel. I can only function because I am too goddamned angry (and stubborn) to quit.

I am angry beyond belief that I am dead before 40, I am angry my parents are monsters and I am made of them, I am angry that no matter how good I get at communicating that is going to be robbed from me by this thing eating my brain and I can never use it how I want to use it, I am angry that I got the fucking monkey's paw of the HRT results, I am angry sexual predators and egg crackers got off for free for what they did to me and others, I am angry God does not exist or does not care and gave me all this fucking bullshit to the point that the little good often gets drowned out, but the key (and this is important) is that I am angry at myself for being so fucking useless and angry and this fucking piece of shit who can't make up my fucking mind about who I am or what I am doing or even my own goddamned name. That's the shit that gets me to do shit that's beneficial.

As I've mentioned, HRT changed how I process anger. It's a slower, hotter smolder that doesn't ignite so much as it simmers and scalds, but I'm getting better at controlling it again. There's a scary quietness to my anger that wasn't there before. It's kind of like being a gigantic volcano that you can feel the heat of the little bits of lava that poke through the cracks in the ground, but the terrifying parts are the heat you feel on the soil from the hidden magma, the low rumble and creaking of rocks, and the little puffs of toxic gas that jet out, threatening to be the harbingers of a massive eruption that evaporates and chokes anyone nearby and blocks out the sun far around.

Maybe all that heat and pressure is making a few huge diamonds under there, and maybe I'm just uselessly melting and regurgitating the same minerals over and over again. It's hard to say, but something's cooking. When I start cooking, something happens.

Think about all the drama, sorrow, and all the other bullshit directed toward me that I've covered in the last year. There were people that twisted knives into my back, chest, and places I didn't even know could be hurt. I was a wounded beast in pain, yet I would still say I was unduly polite and calm for a lot of it. I didn't go out of my way to name people and even tried to obfuscate their identities (i.e., covering up names and moving strings of text around in Photoshop to hide the width of those names). Think about how much I... went out of my way to blame myself for how I was treated and how much I tried to excuse some of those insane people when I can surmise one of them as "a hypersexual lesbian deviant living in the house she bought with her controlling boyfriend she dated back when she thought she was a gay man who tries to build a polycule harem of younger girls with no size limit though manipulative means that formed dependency on her as it was her act of rebelling against her extremely abusive mom, it was a surrogacy for her own inability to be a mom and prove her wrong by breaking the streak of bad motherhood on her own, and she clearly has a force feminization kink so the egg cracking was both the fetish and the means to grow the harem by doing that to people who didn't know better, but she is ultimately just a sex pest and no context provides excuses for her proudly admitting in a voice call to date-raping a girl too high on heroin to consent to her and getting mad at me and my best friend for being horrified."

Not to get too chuuni, but when the mask covering my anger gets taken off and you can see that rage, and I take the gloves off, I want you to think about how bad someone must have wronged me when nothing else before has done so.

Those people are my parents. They are monsters, and it is a miracle I am not as monstrous as they are.

My planned move out from my parent's house to an apartment scheduled for March fell through for a stupid reason. I got accepted on the application (conditionally, as the income threshold wasn't met, but my FICO credit score is 810 and I have ways to pay rent), but my dad, who had been attached at guarantor and had a credit score of 798, had a charge-off from 3 years ago when a European car rental company tried to spring a bullshit $70 charge on him once he was stateside and he refused to pay it as they wracked up interest for months until they agreed to settle with him for $30.

That... devastated me. It felt like yet another fucking cruel joke the universe had played on me at my expense, and I'd spent months trying to find a place to live that I could afford and which wasn't an utterly run-down building. All the cheap places were close to one of the world's busiest airport, and I am now a sensitive sleeper who can't plug my ears because I have sinus issues that cause very painful pressure buildup when I try, and due to my asthma, I can't take mold spores at all without coughing so much my lungs hurt and I throw up.

This house I live in, despite being 6,000 square feet, does not have a quiet room in it because my parents are hard of hearing and play music very loudly to compensate (I once complained that I could hear Bon Jovi playing through the floorboards of my bedroom; my mom, who was 20 feet away from the speaker in the same room, complained she couldn't hear the music and that I was making ridiculous demands that meant she couldn't be comfortable in her own home).

Making this even worse is how all the mattresses got replaced with stiff rocks when I was at college (including the one in my own bedroom), and my natural sleeping posture is on my stomach (but fat chance of that happening when I've got these fucking F-Cups on my chest). The pillow forts have failed because my ribs creak in agony if I even try now and I might have to spend an hour being forced to take painful shallow breaths if I get too stubborn. I've had to start sleeping on my back with a blindfold and earmuffs (since I can't sleep on my side with those on) even if I have to get up in the middle of the night to cough and choke from those sinus issues clogging my throat and waking me up. I have a lot of nightmares of dying from pneumonia, as that's the most common cause of death for those with parkinsonism because you eventually can't control how you swallow and your lungs get clogged with food particles and fluid you drown in. I can somewhat compensate by sleeping with an expensive air purifier next to my face that blows clean, dry air around me and functions as a sort of white noise machine, but it's really only able to do so much when my mom decides she wants to play NPR at a volume that shakes the floor just a bit or blow off the deck right below my bedroom. I even briefly tried a CPAP machine, but it did nothing for my lungs.

Since starting HRT, the lack of sleep has been kind of driving me insane. I get maybe 6 hours a night if I'm lucky and average about 4 hours a night, and I can't take sleeping meds due to being on medications with complex drug interactions. I might not be as good as I thought I was for checking those interactions, but I know combining sleeping pills with them is a bad idea and I can't risk forming a dependency if I change meds to something with even more complex drug interactions. I hallucinate a bit during the day and live in fear of being woken up at random intervals, so my sleep isn't what I would call "restful." I sometimes have to force myself to the point of exhaustion to even sleep, and for a while, I was terrified to sleep because of how much that dream messed me up and I didn't want a repeat of that (yet I secretly wanted it more than anything).

I've moved bedrooms 4 times while desperately trying to find a place where I could safely sleep, but my parents are borderline hoarders who have this massive house full of shit they want access to at all hours of the day and they get so, so mad when I sleep anywhere besides my bedroom since almost every room has something they want at arbitrary hours. Even my bedroom closet isn't immune, as my dad stored some of his shoes there he once fetched at 11 PM.

They bang around at night, they bang around at day, and there's no good option to avoid that, but the best is the basement. Sure, it's damp and a bit moldy and the concrete walls are leaky, but it's dark, quiet, and fairly out of way from the traffic areas even if its bed is maybe the worst of all the beds in the house. It's some stiff thing with a broken box frame resting on a cheaply-made 60's American IKEA frame that my grandma stored here when she moved to Florida because she didn't want to get rid of any of her stuff. My dad, of course, was livid that he had to sacrifice some of his storage space for her storage space, turning his war game room he played in with my transphobic and literal neo-Nazi uncle into her bedroom she never used because she never visited.

I wasn't thinking of that stuff on May 4th. I was just happy to be getting to bed at a fairly reasonable hour (about 4:20 PM) with enough exhaustion to maybe get some sleep.

(Content warning: The following writing describes transphobia and domestic abuse.)

But then my dad burst into the bedroom right as I started to nod off, screaming and shouting as he made his way to the bedroom closet next to the water heater to put away a new plastic scale model he'd just gotten but is never going to build. He'd just gotten out of surgery for phalloplasty he didn't need (he's been considering rhinoplasty he doesn't need) and was on painkillers for that, so keep that in mind as you read.

My memories of this are a bit blurry from terror and something else, but to my best yet still very likely fallible recollection, this is what happened next:

"This isn't your room, <DEADNAME>!" he shouted, enraged beyond belief at my mere presence in the corner of the room. "Go to your room! Clean your room and go to your room!"

"Dad, I can't sleep there. We've been over this. I need a separate room to work and sleep in or my anxiety goes through the roof, and you and Mom make too much noise for me to—"

"Go to your room! You don't fucking belong here!" he screamed as he threw boxes of plastic models, tools, and display cases at me.

I rolled over onto my side to put my back to him, hoping that would take the blows and protect my chest or face.

"Don't try to sleep! Go!"

The objects got heavier. I started to wince from pain as something hard that weighed about 15 pounds hit my head.

"I've never seen anyone as lazy, worthless, and pathetic as you, <DEADNAME>! You're a loser and all you do is fucking sleep and—"

"Does this look like me sleeping?!"

"You want to know why?! It's those fucking pills you shove into you that are making you miserable, and you have no idea what you are doing!"

"No, it's because you're beating me that I'm miserable."

"You call this beating you?! I'll—" (For transparency, I will admit that I don't quite remember what he said as things escalated. I have partial amnesia of the events for reasons you'll see later.)

He moved over to the bed and started punching at me, not really with a thrown punch from above so much as a chopping motion that dropped the sides of his fists against my upper shoulders and the back of my head, which I tried to cover with my arms and a pillow. I was terrified and desperate for him to stop, and I would have said anything in that moment to do that. I was too much in a scared panic to work out the logic of this like I am with writing, but I went with what I thought was the strongest thing I could say.

"Dad, please stop, the lack of sleep is already making me suicidal!" (I wasn't the most eloquent here, but I know I said some variant of "I'm suicidal.")

Much like I was hoping, he did stop... but only for a second. The fists came down faster and harder as if to punctuate the impact of his words.

"Suicidal?! What a fucking JOKE! You have NO IDEA what you are SAYING! You're a JOKE, <DEADNAME>, you PATHETIC, WORTHLESS, LOSER! I've never SEEN someone so PATHETIC! You make ZERO forward progress! I'd be FUCKED UP TOO if I shoved all those PILLS into me!"

Much to my relief, he eventually tuckered out and left me alone. I rushed to lock the door and noted down what happened, because this was "this man goes to jail" levels of bad, but before I could get far, he came in through the side door I had forgotten about and sat down in a chair as he pulled his phone out.

"Oh God," I thought, not knowing what he wanted but terrified of this man right now.

"Dad, please leave."

"No. You said you're suicidal, <DEADNAME>, so if something happens to you, that's on me."

"Says the man who just beat my ass." (Like Spider-Man, I run my mouth when scared and stressed.)

"Yeah, I did, because you are making yourself miserable with those pills that are fucking up your brain and your body and need to wake the fuck up about them."

"Dad, you just went in for fucking dick surgery to feel more like a man. You are the last person who gets to talk about messing with bodies." (I was probably less eloquent with this line, but I remember drawing the comparison between the HRT and his surgery and pointing out the hypocrisy.)

"Yeah, I did, but I'm fucking 66 years old!"

Things turned into my dad (more gently) berating me as I texted my sister in a panic.

I first wanted my sister to call the cops, but I was scared to escalate that lest something happen in the meantime, so I didn't talk about him beating me and switched to the similar-sounding "berating" at the last moment. I just wanted my dad fucking gone from the room so I could sleep, not arrested.

My sister then called our dad, who was... frighteningly chipper and calm when he picked up the phone. He kept trying to say things like, "I have the situation under control" or "it's taken care of."

Just then, my mom came into the room on a speaker call with my old psychiatrist. I don't remember the exact wording, but I knew I fucked up telling my dad I was suicidal. I was terrified of being committed, so I had a bit of a breakdown and told them all I'd been going insane from a lack of sleep, and that I just wanted to sleep and had been so desperate for my dad to leave that I said I was suicidal.

When I insisted that I wouldn't talk until my dad left (I remember saying lines like, "this is not the man who raised us and something is very wrong" a few times), he left as my sister joined in remotely from the phone my dad left.

I further explained to my mom, sister, and old psychiatrist that I used to be a stomach sleeper (and how hard that was now), and how I'd tried earplugs, pillow stacks, and moving to the quietest room in the house, but that I still couldn't sleep. My mom really insistently pushed sleeping pills, and when I told her that I thought they were a bad idea and that I couldn't risk taking any, she asked why.

I suspect (know) she doesn't truly think I have CBS, so I just stared at her as my old psychiatrist chimed in and suggested a sleeping pill. I asked if it messes with dopamine levels, and after she said it doesn't (it's pretty much a weak SSRI that makes you drowsy), I agreed to let her write me a prescription.

But then my mom left and got me her own sleeping pills since she wanted me to sleep tonight. I didn't even know what the fucking name of them were (I later learn Ativan and Sonata, but I had to pester her for that information and she got very upset at my asking). With my asthma, those drugs were dangerous and could have killed me, especially if I'd had even the faintest bit of alcohol in my system (I sometimes have a beer before bed).

That thankfully didn't happen, but these drugs have clear side effects with my depression and mental illnesses, there's a drug interaction between my selegiline and Ativan that can cause confusion, and Sonata lists how it can cause amnesia (hence my fuzzy memories of the 4th-worst day of my life).

My mom, with the metaphorical gunpoint of commitment, handed me the pills and a glass of water and "forced" me to take them. I was extremely dubious, but as I was so scared of being shoved into a psych ward, I took them and didn't even attempt to palm the pills or hide them under my tongue (which wouldn't have mattered, as she checked).

And then she left to let me sleep, and I talked to my sister over text as I got loopier and loopier.

Uh oh.

Yeah, I am fucking gone.

Legitimately, the pain got so bad I started crying.

That urgent plea for "Discord" was because this person has emergency alert text tones on and I was afraid the pings were going to enrage my dad.

During this, I was also texting that best friend I mentioned, and they were greatly concerned after I typed "this is easily the worst CBS pain I have ever had" before going completely incoherent. I tried to stay awake and tell them I was likely going to be alive, but my ability to read was gone. I'm not sure if it was aphasia or drowsiness, but I was just not able to read or type. (Man, why do I switch verb tenses so much in recounting stories?)

They called me and tried to keep me awake, and I tried to mumble something like "the pain is bad, but I'll live" and hung up, thinking I had communicated that clearly. I hadn't, and what's worse is that my phone fell down between that shitty bed and the concrete wall and lost reception.

They tried calling me over and over and over again, thinking I'd been poisoned as I sure made it seem like I had as I hadn't picked up my phone. Ignoring the domestic violence, that was a situation that demanded a wellness check.

And they were right to be concerned, as I just confirmed with my neurologist this week that I avoided a fatal interaction that would have stopped my breathing through good fortune alone. As he told me, the adrenaline prevented me from falling asleep and helped process the drug faster, and me not being able to access my medication when I normally would (for a reason you'll soon see) reduced the severity of those meds meeting in my stomach.

When I told my mom this, she said that my old psychiatrist (who doesn't know my current health or prescriptions) signed off on it (she hadn't; my mom had switched drugs from the one that had been okay to take) and then said, "You're entitled to your own opinions, but not facts."

Anyways, I either got woken up or snapped out of a stupor at 7:20 PM by my mom, who told me that the police were here. It was a combination of EMT and police, the former who I spoke to. Terrified of being committed, I told them I was loopy taking sleeping meds for the first time and told a friend who was concerned. They seemed to be pressing me to talk about domestic abuse, but I was so fucking cooked I struggled to mumble, "I'm okay," and they left.

I texted my friend in a panicked anger as I let them know I just almost got committed, and we had a huge fight before I passed out again.

When I woke up, I was coherent enough to talk, and we hashed things out in an argument with our very close friendship on the line. I can't share that personal conversation, but I eventually realized that it wasn't even that they called authorities out of a blind panic but a decision that had been made after careful consideration with multiple people and fighting hard to quell their own fears to pick up the phone to calmly explain the situation to the dispatcher (they explained that it was also a domestic issue, which was why both EMTs and police showed up). I had been the one who had surrendered to fear and anger and lashed out, not them, so I apologized, and I thankfully had my apology accepted.

I was starving and just wanted some fucking food to calm my nerves and help these drugs pass through me with less strength (and I realized I needed some of my meds), but there was a problem.

 My parents locked me in the fucking basement.

I was still a bit incoherent, but I needed food and at least some of my meds.

I should've said "cheap."

I started crawling through the crawlspace of the "understorage area" below the living room.

I got outside from that as it opens to a storage area under the deck that then leads outside, but I had no idea if I could get to the house's main floor from outside.

Thankfully, the deck door was unlocked, so I got into the kitchen with ease.

And that's how my dad beat the shit out of me while being transphobic and how my mom drugged me and locked me in a basement.

You don't have to tell me that this is omega-fucked. I know this is irredeemable, especially the behavior after. My dad never apologized (and everyone made excuses for him being on painkillers when those don't make you more aggressive and energetic, nor do they make you transphobic), and my mom got irate as hell when I said, "You know you drugged me and locked me in a basement, right?" when she asked why I wasn't saying "good morning" back to her. They had shown me what was under their masks and were trying to act like things could go back to normal.

Sadly, my sister was quite unhelpful.

I get why (she has trauma responses that cause her to deny things, she's stressed out of her mind planning for her wedding on June 1st and this is not the time for her to be burning bridges with our parents, and she's being just a bit of a bridezilla), but it still comes off as self-serving neutrality and even victim blaming after that night.

I simultaneously wish I could explain to her how just bad this all is and wish she can keep living in ignorance to get the love from our parents I never got (sorta; they're not even really gonna be that way and they've been nasty to her too).

So, I buckled the fuck down and packed up everything in my room but my PC as I rushed the buggy 0.18.0 update out the door with maybe 2 hours to spare before I had to vacate my room for the carpet to be ripped up. This was stressful as all fucking hell because it truly came that down to the wire, but thankfully, my dad "helped" relocate stuff down to the basement (breaking an output connector on my GPU and somehow damaging the CPU AIO liquid cooler's pump in the process, likely from bumping the back of the desktop case into something). A lot of my stuff is missing because he re-organized it and took stuff he thought was his or my mom's, like the tools I bought for myself or clothes he thought were his.

I tried to object to him doing this, but keep in mind, I was scared of this man right now (and still am). He just fucking beat my ass and I had a panic attack when he startled me by appearing in the doorframe as I was packing up. Have you ever tried staying calm looking up from the floor at the man who is supposed to be your father who very recently beat the hell out of you while denouncing your existence? It's pretty fucking hard. The mask had a hard time staying on for all of that.

Realizing how fucked the 0.18.0 update was, I set up in the corner of the basement and got to work with a bugfix and sorting out apartment stuff as this was a deafening klaxon alarm in my ear to move out. No more trying to haggle for the apartment I really wanted. No more caring about budget. Get something that's good enough and leave.

What was even louder was the space I was living in, which I've drawn a goddamned diagram for.

(He/She has headphones on, but his/her ass is NOT listening to his/her favorite music.)

My parents had finally realized that the basement walls of the northwest corner were fucked. Apparently, me telling them this as I moved my bedroom down there wasn't enough for them to try and fix the issue, but me moving all my stuff down there and the rehearsal dinner being near was the incentive to fix it.

They had a contractor over to tell them the obvious ("ayo this wall is leaking"), and while I was told they were going to wait until after I moved out to fix this since I desperately pleaded for stability after that last move, my dad was concerned about his books he never reads and his dioramas of scale models he didn't build that he never looks at.

So, while I was trying to work on the update, my dad started packing up all that stuff on the north side of the room to the area right behind me. I couldn't turn my head to observe him and had no other spot I could work, so to get a bit of warning should he approach, I set up my mics and pass-through line to my headphones that I use for voice training (yeah I'm slacking, but this isn't a safe house even if my parents have proven they're kinda deaf).

This awareness was a double-edged sword. That diagram shows he had two areas he could be where my mic would loudly register his presence, and my high level of anxiety from the fear of being in the same fucking room as this person and so close to that room he'd beaten me just skyrocketed, making me unable to get any work done for a few days that required the VN being up (so, you know, I couldn't look for bugs or test fixes), but he eventually finishes and I make real progress, both with the update and with moving out. The application for a new place that will actually talk to me is in, and by all accounts I am going to get approved.

But then on the morning of the 20th, I hear my dad loudly rummaging. I try to tell him, "Can you please do this later when I'm not sleeping?" but he either doesn't hear or doesn't care.

Anyways, I'll let my frantic text to my sister explain the rest (but man, why do I default to recounting past events in present tense?):

I know you're at work and can't stop this, but I need to fucking share this because I'm going fucking insane. Mom and Dad unceremoniously kicked me out of the basement to satisfy Dad's new vanity project of being able to show off the basement and his war stuff during the rehearsal dinner. It's a bit leaky and damp during rain, but it's still entirely functional and repairs could have waited until I moved out (which they said they would abide by).

I told them, no, I really can't afford to do yet another move of all my possessions to rebuild the house to go back to sleeping in the room I've been kicked out of for the carpet only to be kicked out of it again for the guests coming; they also said this repair was coming after I moved and I explicitly got confirmation when I told Dad I'd rather just tough it out in the basement for the next month instead of damaging my stuff in another hasty move. The last one saw my PC's GPU got a few connectors smashed when it got moved in the piano room, the PC's CPU cooler now barely works (the pump cables likely got shorted due to tilting), and Dad damaged some of my tools and went through my stuff because he got paranoid I took Mom's tools (I didn't, I bought myself a small collection). I need that specific PC to work due to programming build environments, and while I have parts for a rebuild, that GPU that got damaged is a $2,000 part and the only one I am reusing.

So, when I woke up this morning to Dad scrounging around the basement making one hell of a racket, I tell him to please let me sleep and wait until later to do whatever he is doing. He either doesn't hear me or doesn't respond, so I try to be louder.

I'm utterly exhausted, so instead of getting out of bed, I text Mom to talk to him.

 (I was so angry I couldn't even call them out for lying to me.)

It doesn't go well.

I get up and try to talk to Mom. I offer to pay a cancellation fee or whatever is needed. She's cold and dismissive. I beg her to let me know why this has to happen now since the basement is still functional. No conversation can happen. I tell her how hurtful it is that they once again chose their possessions over me. How much Dad telling me his new car mattered more than my health insurance. How they say they care for me yet drug me and lock me in a basement, then force me to move down there.

Nothing works. She runs off to make the bed in the room I got kicked out of, but when she gets back, she gets madder and madder and deflects everything to Dad (who is in the shower). I tell her once again that this is something Dad told me he wasn't doing and how all I want is just one safe room in an entire 6,000 square foot house for the next 3 weeks. That I can't move the PC again because it's truly on its last legs. With a sneer, she threatens to cancel her status as apartment guarantor and not help me move out.

I give up. I briefly think of barricading the basement to stop the workers and even get sort of the way there. From the other side of the door, I hear Mom tell Dad, "when <DEADNAME> says he can't 'do this again' he means he can't do this again psychologically" and then Dad say "he needs to get over it," but I relent when Mom tries to open the top basement door and I realize this only realistically ends with me losing everything or a police standoff.

I cry at my desk and shut my PC down as Mom talks about how she's sorry but there's nothing she can do. I sadly tell her this was a litmus test and one which she failed, and that I hope she enjoys the house when I'm gone.

Somewhere during all of this, I cut my foot. Maybe it was going out to the garage to get a cable to barricade, but it was probably on shit Dad left lying around. I'm a disheveled mess running on 4 hours of sleep and heartbreak, I'm stressed, I'm a bit uncoordinated but I can't take my CBS meds this early, I'm getting my ass kicked by hormones, and Mom packed up all my clothes in the basement into a box she put somewhere else so I can't put socks on.

Exhausted and giving up, I walk upstairs, likely getting blood on the new carpet that put this new arc in motion. I just want to sleep.

This is the pillowcase Mom put on the bed. (The blurred area is <DEADNAME>.)

(Seriously, my mother is a fucking child.)

I don't know what I did to deserve them loving me so much less, but it fucking hurts.

Mom has outright said she holds her love for me as my parent hostage.

Later denied she did.

Got mad when I read the transcript back to her, deflected with, "Well, it's hard to keep your name straight! That doesn't make me transphobic!"

I hope you're having a good day, because I'm certainly not.

So, for the second time in a month, I rushed to get an update out before contractors hired by my parents fucked everything up, and I was only feeling moderately more confident about second than I was the first. It was another buzzer beater done as the workers were coming in, and I could feel my blood pressure skyrocketing beyond the effects of the selegiline.

But do you want to know the funniest part? That little bit of the devil signing his work as he must do to let you know he was there?

THE BASEMENT ISN'T EVEN FUCKING FINISHED AND THE REHEARSAL DINNER IS TOMMOROW! ALL OF THIS STRESS WAS FOR FUCKING NOTHING!

Basically, parents didn't supervise the labor and the pump was installed in a spot where one of the bookshelves was. My mom, a woman with a juris doctor who should know the power of contract law and a signature, signed the order form with "I am fed up," which seems to have been enough to consider the contract complete, because despite her telling me the contractors were coming back this week to fix it, they seem to be fed up with my parents and aren't coming back, and I honestly think I want to follow that example.

God... I knew my mom was worse than Zach's mom, but I never thought my mom would be more demonic than Zach's mom.

I truly don't know whether to howl in laughter or scream in agony. I guess like my gender, I'll decide to switch between both.

I move out on the 8th and into a relatively dinky 700 square foot apartment downtown. My best friend comes down on the 11th, and we're going to have a fun time with a vacation we desperately need by:

• Hanging out.

• Building a keyboard together.

• Playing with my kittens.

• Going to the Georgia Aquarium (and petting the seals as that animal became a symbol of our friendship) (also the penguins).

• Going to Stone Mountain Park and climbing it.

• Going to the June 16th Atlanta Braves game vs the Rays at Truist Park (I've never actually visited as my parents never ask me if I want to go with them).

• Going to one of the best roller coasters in the world (ArieForce One) at Fun Spot Atlanta.

• Going to Six Flags Over Georgia (I was warned to not even attempt to wear a binder on a roller coaster, so this is going to be a pivotal moment of me presenting as female in public with a trusted friend to help). I'm gonna be the biggest baby ever on the scary rides, but that's life: scary with a lot of ups and downs.

Once that's done and they're back on the plane, I send my parents these texts in my group chat to them:

To Dad:

You're going senile. My guess is Alzheimer's given the slight genetic link to my CBS, but I'm not your doctor. I don't think it's Grandpa <REDACTED>'s Parkinson's disease, but there's a chance he was misdiagnosed like I was. Regardless, you have become irritable and controlling as a result of this.

You didn't get the dick surgery because you're 66 and can't keep it up. You didn't think about getting rhinoplasty because of any health reasons like breathing issues. You didn't spend $60,000 on a new car you barely drive because you desperately needed that luxury EV. You didn't spend $20,000 on your hobbies of scale models and astrophotography with redundant purchases you barely ever use because it's your lifelong passion. You didn't insist the basement needed repairs to be perfect because it was falling apart and in danger of collapse in the next 3 weeks if this didn't happen.

You did all of these because your world as you know it is falling apart and you are desperate to cling to something to give you stability or to tinker with something as a distraction. You have my sympathies as I know that feeling well, because like it or not I am your kid.

It's gotten severe enough for you that you probably have OCD. It was likely already there with the eyebrow plucking (skin picking) and the odd little "dad quirks" you've built up, but it's lately been going off the rails. You organize other people's stuff, you demand control and get irate when you don't have it, and you followed a routine like clockwork for work and now don't have that in retirement.

You're clearly miserable. You take frequent naps, you find solace in your dog and your online games, and you're resorting to all these desperate measures to avoid thinking about how you're getting forgetful, how you always misplace things, and how all your rigid systems can't hold you together well enough to stop you from falling apart.

I can't help with the big scary brain stuff, but you can talk to a psychiatrist about SSRIs to make that less scary. Admitting you need help is a form of control. You're not any less of a man for trying to seek help or for taking those pills. You'd be less of a man for not getting your shit together and boorishly trying to toughen yourself up to something you can't fight.

 

To Mom:

There are a lot more moving parts to you than there are to Dad, but I think it distills down to your anxiety, your prejudices, and your love. I'll try to tackle them in order.

You had a fucked childhood that likely gave you severe anxiety and PTSD. Your parents were inattentive, and your brothers were assholes. It's okay to let yourself think that about my uncles given the stories I've heard. It's also okay to be glad they're gone. That doesn't rob you of your grief and missing them. You also don't have to put Grandpa <REDACTED> on a pedestal (Author's Note: maybe I should take my own advice). You don't have to enshrine Grandma <REDACTED>.

You were so desperate to not repeat mistakes you had of your childhood that you overcompensated for me. The wilderness therapy and boarding school were genuine attempts to help me, as was the middle school handler, the constant praising of my academic success, the push to get me to blow up my childhood friend group and skip second grade, and so much more. You tried desperately to foster my success, but it was in a way that clipped my wings. It took me maybe 30 years to find the ability to fly and leave the nest, but you resent how I am doing that.

You're bisexual. It's okay. <SISTER> is too, and I'm trying to figure out my own shit on that front. Likewise, you might be non-binary given the friend groups and activities you had before marrying Dad, but I just had a whole long character arc of learning not to presume that people aren't who they say they are or pushing that.

If you are, it'd make sense why you push using "<DEADNAME>" with me so aggressively, and it'd explain your point of how I can't "make up my mind." Y'know, like you did marrying Dad? My gender shit is sadly not a thing I can "make up my mind" about. It's closer to OSSD, which is a dissociative disorder. I go to a therapist for it. I have bad days, but I also have good days. I've had a lot of those good days recently despite the hell of living in that house, but that was something I had to find in my own way. You can't come up to me and be, "Hey, want to try on this skirt?" I'm gonna get prickly about that. You shouldn't get upset by me rejecting the offer. Let me fly, and don't flap my wings for me, because I'll hit the ground the second that you step away.

You do love me, but your love is conditional on whether or not you can sate your anxieties through me. I can't do that for you, much like I can't be an ear for you bitching about Dad or <SISTER> or <BROTHER-IN-LAW>'s family. I'm your child, not your therapist, and not your friend.

And then, well... I don't really care. Not to emulate George W. Bush, but I won't negotiate with terrorists. This is their ultimatum: they improve as people, or they only have one kid they'd better do a whole lot showing love for than they did for me.

I think my productivity will improve living on my own. Stress is a toxin like no other, and while living on my own means I have to take care of myself more and that takes more time, how much of my time has been spent worrying about my safety and distracting myself from the dangers I face?

re:Dreamer's 0.19.0 update will be updating Keisuke's route with the swimming pool sex scene. I can't exactly show previews of the art since it's NSFW and I have to polish it, but it's a scene I'm really excited for.

My best friend is insistent that they get (anonymized) credit for the count. Good job!

I ran a poll on what 0.19.1 is going to cover, so we're going back to the weirdly wholesome mom route after this with a plan to actually have Zach (Zoey) talking to his (her) dad for the first time in the entire visual novel. Given the context of my own hellish parents, I hope you can appreciate the dysfunction of Z's family and how much their gloves stay on as redeemable people.

Until then!