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i saw a boost on mastodon today, where charlotte hacker was asked: if they could do their life over but not be trans/gay, would they do it?
they pretty much echoed my thoughts on it:
it's an interesting question because life would be much /easier/ but the resulting person wouldn't be *me*
-videogame_hacker@tech.lgbt
that really resonated with me. it's not that i even care about "me"-ness so much, i'm an anxious pseudobuddhist whomst is fine with transcending self. but queerness can't be disentangled from my /experience/ of life, at all. my brain has queerness, a queer way of looking at the world, baked into it.
i remember as a child (7 or so?) being fixated on a bench scrawl that said "all queens are [something]" or "all [something] are queens", with a drawing of someone who was probably supposed to be a drag artist. i probably mentally blocked out the [something] because it was a slur, i legit don't remember it, but i remember being fascinated, what were queens, why were people writing graffiti about a man in lipstick+eyeliner. i dunno. i fixated on that question, scrawled on a bench while i waited for something i don't remember now.
i turned out to be aroace, so it wasn't that that drew me. i turned out to be sort of a trans man, but even more of a trans dragon. something i'd been since i was 2 years old, throwing my toy across the room because it was too human-looking.
from the beginning the mirror was an enemy, to be approached with caution. the mirror showed corruptions, not-mes, monsters trapped in strange pale skin. "i'm supposed to identify with this?", i scoff to myself, pointing at a reflection that i dare not look at directly.
11 years old. i draw comics. the good guys are never humans.
this feels dissenting. i take pride in my dissent, mocking the neighbourhood kids from the safety of my mother's manual typewriter. i just wanted to play videogames and pretend to be dragons; they called at my door one day, knocked and asked if i wanted to play. so i stepped outside, to the end of my driveway, and the whole neighbourhood full of kids emerged from bushes and ran at me, screaming. i don't really remember what happened after, i think they just ran home, but i was just so bewildered
and i channeled it into comics about how being a normie was stupid anyway, bluh bluh bluh. it was cathartic, something a million people have done before me and will continue to do after me. but it was needed. after a while i went on to writing fanfic, and still my author insert was nonhuman
i never really asked "why this". it was my queerness, my shame that i somehow knew to keep hidden, like my interest in tying people up, or my response to this book-on-tape i had of a superted story, where superted was captured and weakened by his enemy by use of a "voodoo doll". it was appropriative as hell, but i was literally 6 and we were british so nobody taught us that shit
ironically by the time i was actually ready to be doing anything kinky, my sexuality had just... dropped off. it just keeps fading more and more as i get older. i don't mind, since it's one less thing to get all up in my hormones and drag my feelings in directions i don't want. one more thing that leaves me alone, at peace.
i don't get why people don't like being alone. and that's another queerness of mine, an aro-ace-neurodivergent queerness that lets me thrive in cirumstances that most people suffer through (like global pandemics), and makes me suffer in most situations that social beings thrive in.
it's not that i don't like people. i just need the option to retreat. and i hate how i'm seen among physical folks, so online is easier
and that's all /me/, that's all things that people feel uncomfortable with me for, and changing any of them would change me
and, yeah, in some cases i would actually be okay with that. like maybe i would enjoy being more social. idk. but it means i can't really make a projection about how i would be if you removed those, at all