I’ve been being beaten with the stick of “Your perception of yourself is wrong” of late.
So I’ve been singing. That’s been good. I’ve been very much enjoying singing… apparently my opinion of how good I am has little relation to the reality experienced by others. In so far as my singing teacher tells me that I’m hitting the notes I’m aiming for, for the most part. I’m okay at keeping time. I do suck at breathing, but I’m working on that. But it’s really just a technique thing — well that and an ingrained bad habit which probably relates to me being a bit scared of my voice* — it’s not an innate ability issue. Which is fascinating because I got such spectacularly shitty comments online about my singing. And y’know, I already thought I couldn’t sing so cue comments==true being set. Only they’re not. Only they never fucking are.
And for *reasons*, I ended up recently seeing a video in which there’s a lot more of full-length-me than I’m used to seeing – because in YT videos you only typically see the top half of me. And y’know what, my perception of myself as a weetabix shaped blob is not really accurate. I mean, part of this is just that I lost a lot of weight this year. Part of this is just that we don’t have any full length mirrors, so I don’t really know what I look like, to be honest. So anyway, seeing a video which has me from 2 years ago, and just before I started losing weight to basically now… it’s really thrown my perception of what I look like. Not in a bad way, just in a “huh, I am very wrong about how I look to others” type experience.
And then yesterday – yesterday I spent much of the day engaged in two projects. Both for Transport Evolved. One was to get my backup server working. So it’s an Orange Pi running Armbian, and into it is plugged a 20 Terabyte USB Raid array. It’s a shonk-ass solution, but it’s better than a no-ass solution, which is what we have for me right now. Sooo, off I went. And three quarters of a work day later I had it running. It involved a lot of doing battle with the OPi, and missing packages that should-be-but-aren’t when you install Samba. And then finding someone who’d got a Linux box to do a good job of pretending to be an apple time machine device. And lo, it worked. Well, I say worked. I realised this morning that it’s going to take 20-30 days for it to create a backup, so that’s waiting until I have a dedicated UPS and I have a box for the OPi. But technically, it’s functional.
And then I made a mic stand. Well, I took my old mic stand and I changed the clamp on it for a new one.
And at the end of all that I cracked some joke in the Alyson Greaves discord (which is where I hang out, because The Sisters of Dorley and Glow, Worm are absolutely my favourite writing right now. You should go read them if you haven’t). Anyway, I cracked some joke about worrying about not being a proper geeky transgirl because I’m not a programmer. And then… I realised as I was pottering around that this has basis in fact. Not that I’m not geeky. That much is pretty fucking obvious to anyone with a gram of knowledge. Just meeting me is probably enough.
But that I don’t think I’m good enough to be called geeky. That because I’ve forgotten more than I remember, because I have to remind myself how to do things, because they’re not part of my regular every day existence, that I’m somehow failing at being geeky.
Well, to coin a phrase, fuck that.
I am trying – trying – to work on being nicer to myself. I’m trying to work on the imposter syndrome. And I am going to take this as another thing to work on, because fuck that brain. Stop undermining me.
* By this I mean, despite the fact I’ve been transitioned +20 years I sometimes have this angst that I’ll suddenly and weirdly revert to my ‘old’ voice, not that I even remember what that sounded like, and I can’t actually do it on command anymore. In fact I have no idea how to do it. I know the *theory*, but I have little interest in practicing, and can’t do it just when I’ve tried.
