journal: I wrote one and a half songs last night. (Patreon)

The first one talks about hope for new beginnings after I realized that the love I've had for someone for a very long time needs to end, and merging with my higher self in the process. I've been just starting to step into this actualization, which has been a long time coming.

I used to experience a huge amount of identity disturbance. My mood and gender and feelings were shifting constantly. It felt like having a stomach virus in my brain, trying to figure out who I was. For a long time I felt like a very nondescript human soul, a blank slate, with no discernable personality or features. I would try on different aesthetics but they all felt like costumes, because instead of organically building style based on things that spoke to me deeply, I was trying on other people's authenticity. It took stepping back from everything and everyone I've known for the past 10 years to finally get clarity in the stillness and quiet. You have to train a very specific muscle to be able to notice what it is you really want when your Self has been through so many soul-crushing ordeals that it puts what you want on the back burner for the sake of surviving the emotional content of the present.

I'm learning a lot. I'm starting to become the vision I had so long ago. I'm trying to breathe and let time and effort do its magic.

The second song originated a couple months ago as a song I was writing about my family. But my brain got an itch last night as I was going to bed, and I started writing it into a protest song instead. It would be nice to be able to dedicate a verse to every political issue I care about, but there are so many!!

One verse I wrote last night is about queerness, transness, and the 'freedom' to be a man by patriarchal standards that many MAGA cis men/cis men in general won't admit they could use an escape from - and that it maybe isn't the freedom it's packaged as. This verse was inspired by an interview with the nonbinary public speaker, style icon, & comedian Alok Vaid-Menon who has given me such a refreshing perspective on how I think of queer oppression, resistance, and joy.

In another verse, I wrote from my firsthand experience of how awful the healthcare/insurance crisis in America is. I talk about getting booted out of a residential mental health program in 2017 by my insurance and how camaraderie, art and rebellion exist in the darkest places, as evidenced by the other patients who collectively stood up and took over a group session to lift me up in a time of great pain for all of us.

Sometimes, when I think of wanting a better future for all of us, the song "Somewhere That's Green" from Little Shop of Horrors pops into my head.

Sending love, strength, resistance, and healing to all.