Category: General

So I’ve joked for the longest time that I’m ‘probably neurospicy’. I can’t remember where I stole the term from, and I can’t entirely remember when I realised that my brain probably didn’t work in a neurotypical way, but genuinely for the longest time I presumed that it was pretty marginal.

Like “eh, maybe I’m a bit neurodivergent but probably not at a level that’s diagnostic.”

Ha.

Ha ha.

Ha ha ha.

So over the past few months – years, if I’m honest (which I said to my therapist yesterday and she was like “well, yes, this is therapy, the point is to be honest.”) I’ve noticed a… shall we say, a deterioration in my work performance.

Like I’m still doing okay in the ER – clearly – like I’m still running the department fine – but unless we’re hammered and I’m entirely adrenaline I don’t feel like I can focus to the degree I used to. I have to keep going back and finding the threads of what’s going on to make sure stuff is happenening and yes – I get shit done – because it’s the ER and I need to, but I don’t feel the level of total understanding of what’s going on I used to. I used to know where every patient was in their journey, what the plan was, and so on. And part of that is the difference in culture between the US and the UK – I talked a lot more with the doctors about the plans in the UK. And I was a lot more in control of the plans in the UK. It was my responsibility – here the doctor is much more in charge. But I blamed that feeling on being burned out.

And literally, as I’m writing this I’m having more realisations.

Fuck.

This is just how it’s going to be for a while. So the realisation: there was a bit of time when I started feeling like I was doing better. I was feeling closer to my old self. It was when Biden was elected. And suddenly I felt a bit less stress and was more generally copic. It wasn’t the burn-out improving, was it. Well it might have been. But it was also…not feeling constantly attacked by the entire mechanism of the US government. It was my stress levels dropping and me being more able to focus.

Wow.

Okay.

Anyhow. To return to what I was going to say before my unscheduled realisation.

What I’d noticed recently was that I was increasingly struggling to focus on anything. To focus on writing scripts, to focus even on writing my fiction stuff, to get any project over the line to actually finished. And I was on the discord (for the work of the awesome writer Alyson Greaves, you should read her stuff), and having a nice chat about something or other and someone posted something about their ND traits and I muttered something about y’know, at some point maybe I should get checked because I feel like whatever coping strategies I had are not working well anymore. And a couple of my friends popped into my DMs with a quiet “yeah, maybe you should.”

And I flailed around for a few hours. Cried a bit — not because I was upset about being neurodivergent – that’s been pretty fucking clear for a long time – but because it’s just one more thing, and right now the last thing I felt like I needed was one more thing.

But it turns out that is what I needed.

Because I sat down with my therapist, and she pulled out the screening questions, and I just laughed.

Because it was literally like this (thanks to another friend for this link, it’s perf):

Like the first question is do you have trouble finishing projects…

And right at this moment I’m sat in our house which is an 8 year long unfinished project. Opposite me is a CD player that still needs some capacitors changing – but it works enough – and a record deck that needs a bunch of stuff done – but it works enough – and next to me is a piano that I never finished restoring and… and.. and…

And like all down the list it was so fucking obvious.

And I just laughed.

I just sat and laughed.

Because all this time.

All this fucking time I could have done something.

I can be shitty to myself.

I’m the first to admit that (except when I’m joking with my wife about how I’m always lovely to me). And it turns out a bunch of the stuff I’m shitty to myself about is ADHD traits. Stuff that, well, is just the way my brain works. And yes, I need to continue to work on ways to support myself and scaffold success or whatever the current terminology is. But the fact I’m fucking atrocious at finishing things? The difficulty getting started on things? The distractability when it’s a repetitive job? The trouble following people when they’re talking? The inability to relax?

Fucking hell it’s so obvious it kinda hurts.

In fact if one more person says to me “Oh, I thought you knew.” I am going to run into the forest and scream. Because no, I didn’t. I’ve just been “Well this is how brains work”ing my whole life.

I got in the shower yesterday and mid-shower realised that in the two-step process of turning on the heated blanket so it’d be cozy when I got in bed I’d failed to achieve step two of turning it on, after step one of plugging it in. And again, back to laughing.

My life has just constantly been full of these ‘I get half way through a process and get distracted’, and christ on a bike it was so fucking hard to study. I did okay and then when my dad got sick I just wasn’t able to – and I put it down entirely to grief. But actually, now, looking back I know I was so wildly unable to do it because me and stress are not good friends.

Stress in the moment – the adrenaline dump of the ER being on fire – that I can do. The way I’ve been getting scripts out the door is the “oh fuck I need this for tomorrow I need to write it right-fucking-now.”

And hilariously, the way I got the last round of trim done was the anger and adrenaline coursing through me the day after the election.

But the rest of the time?

Not been so much.

Anyhow. Imma get some drugs and see if that helps with focus.

Sorry for the brief outage – I’m a pillock and broke the website. Buuuuut after a battle with my hosting provider (who’ve changed, and seem to have disabled basically all the normal ways to upload files) I actually have not just fixed the shit I borked, but also finally managed to fix the site editor which had been broken for a long time and been running using a legacy plugin.

So go me, and if anyone wants to hire me apparently I can still unfuck websites.

I don’t think I normally write anything for TDoR. It’s usually, for me, a personal affair. Moments to think back on the people we’ve lost: the people who could have gone on to do amazing things; and the people who could have gone on to achieve nothing spectacular. Who would have lived quiet little lives.

It does not matter to me what they would have done. It matters instead that their opportunity to wake up and eat cornflakes, to watch the sun rise, to sit and play PS5 until late in the night was ripped from them by cis society. It matters instead that their parents, their families, the people they thought were their friends, that random people on the street, that our public media would all rather see them – and others like them – dead than happy and trans.

When I came out there wasn’t the huge body of evidence there is now that the best treatment for transgender people is gender affirming care. That puberty blockers work, and work well, and that transition and gender affirming care massively reduces suicidality. That trans kids and adults – mostly their pain comes from living in a society that consistently demonizes and diminishes. Their trauma from living in a society that sometimes tacitly, but often overtly, encourages cisgender people to harm or even kill transgender people.

And so as the literal bodies of evidence have mounted that the best way to support trans people is just to let us live our lives, affirming who we are, allowing us to just be? I have become increasingly angry. Because when I came out no-one knew about trans people. Mostly we were just a weird anomaly and subject of ridicule. But now? Now we know. These studies are riven with blood and loss and pain. And despite that – despite that – across the world people are choosing to harm us.

They are choosing to inflict pain for the sake of what? A few votes from pathetic people who can’t accept anyone different from themselves. Because they fear anything outside their world view. Because they can’t empathize with what they can’t understand? Because they’re scared that the tiny number of us will somehow destroy society?

It’s TDoR, again. More people who should be with us are gone because our cis allies and their cisgender friends have let laws go into force that kill us. So this year as the candle burns and I’m shredded by the pain of another year of unnecessary loss, facing down the uncertainty of the next presidency, most of what I feel is anger.

I’ve changed my presentation a lot over the past couple of years. I mean, that’s pretty obvious to anyone who’s been on here, or knows me in real life. I exercise now, for nearly an hour every day. Which is astonishing and weird and y’know, when did I become someone who casually does a 30 mile bike ride with a 360m/1200ft climb (granted on an ebike). When did I become a girl who runs 3 miles every day? Someone who gets pissy that they missed a swim, or that the weather’s inclement enough to stop her running. I don’t really know. When did I become so femme in my presentation that wearing trousers feels…odd.

I actually hit a point a week or two ago where I put on jeans and 1) realised it’d been months since I’d worn jeans, and 2) realised I really didn’t like wearing them very much. At least at that point. I’m sure I’ll get over it. But I’ve got super used to the light casual skirts I’ve been wearing through the summer and y’know; leg coverings that are heavy and tight, kinda meh. And I’m hardly high femme these days, just much more femme than I was.

But it ran into something odd today.

We built this house. At least, effectively. I mean, sure, some of the original exterior framing and most of the original sub floor and the structure supporting that is here. But everything else has been replaced. Mostly by our own fair hands. And today we had to work on the bathroom. The leaking toilet, and pipe that’s leaking in the wall (well, would be if that zone wasn’t turned off). And I found myself needing to connect with the self who did that work. And it felt super distant. I’ve not done anything much with working on the house (and yes, I do still need to finish the trim), but it was *weird* seeing this face, and this hair, and my grubby work jumper in the mirror before wandering out to pull out the toilet. Like I haven’t met this me. This me who is more femme in presentation but still does the same shit of working on the house, working on the car.

It’s interesting feeling the different facets of who I am shifting and fitting back together.

It’s not that I’ve not been up to stuff. We went on holiday to the UK to see my mum (it was a wonderful but exhausting trip – my mum planned stuff for every day we were together which was…intense. But a lot of fun to see her having so much fun. In the list of things I’ve recently discovered that are terrifying: canoeing on ‘white water’ with your 80+ year old mother in another canoe. In things that are fun: Watching her face when the guy driving the motorboat on the sea tour starts doing fast turns. It’s apparently where I get my love of going fast from.)

On that trip I got to see one of my oldest friend’s book-launch and listened to her reading and talking about it. It was *amazing*. I can’t express how cool that was.

I also got to see another of my oldest friends.

I stripped my bass guitar down. And I’ve been playing the loaner bass and singing and also running further (I do 2 miles on the regular now, and sometimes I do more).

We’ve had a water leak at the house, because fucking American plumbing and…yeah. That’s still needing to be fixed. Turning off the water to the toilet seems to have stopped it getting worse, but we’re going to have to take the toilet out. And it looks like the toilet is faulty.

And we’ve got new chickens.

I’ve made a new group of friends who are awesome and cool.

I’ve written most of another book.

I’ve spent some time beta reading another friend’s book.

I got a Calvin Klein LBD altered so it fits now, and I’ve got the cutest red dress and heels. Just need some time to wear it.

So yeah, it’s not like I’ve not been busy. I’ve been rambling on Mastodon and Bluesky and Discord. And I’ve been working for TE.

Oh, and obviously I had more (very minor) surgery – I had the lipoma that’s been causing me pain in my upper arm, removed.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about things – y’know. Dealing with the undealt with stuff that I’d kind of ignored for most of my adult life. The fall out from having an abusive ex which has affected a bunch of things about the way I perceive myself and present myself in the world.

Sometimes I’ve thought about writing something here about it, and maybe I will. But mostly I’ve been exhausting my writing on writing fiction.

Anyhow. That’s kinda it.

Apparently June went by without a post. It’s not that I didn’t do anything. I wrote more novel, I submitted my existing novel to more agents, I cut trim, I worked both jobs, I played in a band (only in practice but they’ve started threatening me with us going to do an open mic), I sang. I made some new (online) friends. I moderated a discord about novelty mugs. I read some more of Whipping Girl and a lot more of various things by Zoe Storm and Alyson Greaves.

But…

…some how I didn’t make time for journaling.

Probably should, it’s good for my head.

Anyhow, I just dropped in today to fix the SSL certificate, which I’ve done, and now I’m gonna go write my second novel some more. It’s terrible at the moment, but it’s a first draft, so that’s fine.

I – as usual – have struggled with not working today. I’m back at work proper tomorrow so it’s very reasonable for me to have a day off, and I’m officially off sick, recovering, but that doesn’t stop me from guilting myself. I’d actually planned to use today for working on the house trim but then remembered that I needed to get the tyres swapped on the car. That’s a 3 hour process (seemingly regardless of whether I book it in or not, once time I booked it in and it took 4 hours so…). Anyhow, after that I decided to go look at a guitar amp.

Because see, yesterday, I bought myself a bass guitar.

I can actually play a bit now, although I need something in front of me – I don’t know anything by heart apart from These Boots Are Made For Walking. So anyhow. I bought this guitar which needs some love. Quite a bit of love, really. It’s a 1960’s hollow body Norma – which is basically the equivalent of an Argos/Walmart guitar – they were made super cheaply in Japan when Japan was busy churning out the stuff that China now churns out. But they’re moderately uncommon now, and I thought it was a fun thing to have.

But see, the amp in that picture is just for show. It’s my guitar amp that I brought from the UK without twigging that it’s just a plain transformer in there, so it’d need a step-up transformer to work, or a new transformer. And guitar amps aren’t well suited to bass guitars.

Which leads to the mistakes. I went to see a guy who was selling an amp on craigslist – now had I remembered the advert when I got there I should have been more suspicious. He seemed like a nice enough guy and I’m going to choose to assume that his story was true (his wife’s died, he took up the bass while she was sick, but got a better amp). However. He was in the process of soldering a connector onto the speaker cable and explained that when he’d tried it today the speaker didn’t sound great and he’d switched it for a spare he had around.

And when we powered it up it crackled. And the power light flickered. And in the end I agreed a price for it as-is suspecting a dry joint somewhere.

And there was:

However, fixing it hasn’t fixed the amp. Which is annoying because now I have two projects instead of one. And this one is barely worth fixing at the price of its replacement.

*sigh*