So, this is gonna be at least a *little* bit of a lighter topic than my last post. It’s something that has…had an undercurrent for a large portion of my life, certainly my adult life, but I haven’t actively participated in most of the time. There’s one notable exception, which I’ll talk about as well. What I’m talking about here is tattoos. It’s a very broad subject with lots of variable meaning to different people. For some, it was a thing they got spur of the moment on a vacation or in celebration, possibly something rather non-specific or impersonal. For others, they find beauty in the sheer act of becoming the medium on which the art sits, and that can take many different forms in terms of what the actual art pieces become. And for others still, each piece has meaning, each piece represents something important to them in some form, something that carries meaning heavily enough in their lives to want to permanently make it part of themselves. Now, as with anything else in the human experiences, these nice, neat little categories don’t actually rigidly define every person’s experience or motivation, and often there’s some combination of these going on.

So, let me now bring this back to a more personal level, and dive into my feelings around them, my experiences, and my plans for the future. To start, I do have a set of tattoos, one on each shoulder, that I got 13 years ago, when I was 18. These are the 7 tenets of Bushido, as well as the kanji for Samurai. I know, I know, Japanese characters in a tattoo, how cliche. But these hold meaning for me. They have since well before I got the tattoos. These are character traits I don’t want to forget. That I don’t want to allow to fade from my life. Rectitude, Courage, Benevolence, Politeness, Veracity, Honor, and Loyalty. Each of these is something I strive to maintain and utilize in my life. And of course, this leaves the last one. Samurai. Why this one? It seems strange, out of place. The literal translation of Samurai is “servant”. Now, historically, this is because the samurai were servants of their shogun, their lord, so it’s a fairly mundane translation. The word itself, however, happens to carry meaning for me. That meaning has expanded somewhat, and I’ll touch on it in a moment, but let me focus on what I was focused on at the time I chose to get the tattoo. To me, being a servant is a vital aspect of the character I want to carry through the world. It requires humility, it requires attentiveness, it requires being alert to the needs of those around you, and being willing to be the one to help in those times of need. It is a value I hold close. Now, as I said, the meaning has expanded for me over time. It also plays a significant role in the way I relate to kink and my place within kink dynamics. That is a wildly different aspect, and one I will touch on in another post later, but I wanted to include it as a duality of what servant means to me.

So, as I said, I got those tattoos at 18. I actually got really lucky, my best friend was dating a guy who was apprenticing to be a tattoo artist, and he needed pieces for his portfolio. He’d done a piece for her, so I trusted the quality of his work, and since it was for portfolio building, I got the entire thing for literally what I tipped him. Pretty awesome deal for an 18-year-old without much in their pockets. My parents weren’t wholly thrilled with the idea, but I was 18 and the money was mine. My mom just kind of accepted it and we moved on, but my dad( who, as I’ve mentioned before, is an asshole) decided that he was gonna capitalism the fuck out of this and literally offered to “buy” it off me. “Yea, like advertising space, like a billboard or something” literally came out of his mouth. I thought about getting indignant, or angry, but instead I replied that I’d need $10,000 per shoulder. He did not really respond. The matter was basically dropped, and I got to be smug that I’d turned my dad’s asshattery around on him. I proceeded to get the pieces, and to this day they hold up very well.

Now, I mentioned that I only have the one set, which may make it seem odd I’m devoting an entire post to the topic. I’ve had something of an odd, meandering journey from that point as far as getting more. For a long period of time, I simply didn’t have the money anyway. It also quite honestly fell down my list of thought priorities while dealing with my internal gender identity struggle, and confronting the ways in which I’d blindly accepted things growing up that were thin veneers of fallacy covering up a jumbled mess of the reality. In dealing with gender and the subsequent body dysphoria it caused, I also developed some difficulty believing *I* could look good with more tattoos. This only became further exacerbated as I gained weight. After I met my partner, and finances weren’t a concern in nearly the same way they had been as we ended up in a better position than paycheck to paycheck, I still would sort of…deflect in my mind from ever really taking the steps to do anything. I had some ideas that I would talk about but never really fleshed out. I never searched for a shop or artist to work with.

A few things have happened over the last 8 or so months which have caused some shifts. First, I met someone back in November with whom I would end up developing a fantastic relationship. They have several tattoos, and meanings for all of them. The way they talk about them reignited that sense in me, that feeling that I, too, wanted more than the couple I had. I also was working toward losing weight, and getting weight loss surgery. That happened on April 2nd, 2019, a little over 2 months ago. I’m going to write about that experience later, but the way it has impacted my weight, and consequently my view of myself, is highly relevant to this topic. One of the things I’d been using to hedge was that I was always intending to lose weight, in no small part because it is a gatekeeping factor for transition-related procedures, and I need to hit the appropriate numbers to jump through those hoops. Because of this, it didn’t make sense to go get tattoo’d when it could very well completely change the landscape of the skin it was on after weight loss. I have lost *quite* a bit of weight at this point, and certain areas of my body are more or less going to stay stable, enough so that there’s a lot less worry putting ink on them.

Perhaps the greatest evolution has been the mental factors that were holding me back. I talked about how my body dysphoria was a serious blocker to feeling as if getting tattoos would look *good*. I still struggle with body-image and self-esteem issues quite a lot, but I am in a much better place after the last few months, thanks in vast majority to the two partners I have mentioned in this piece. They have pushed me to examine some hard truths and some deep-seated issues that I had been avoiding. The partner with the tattoos, whom I will refer to as C, has tirelessly served as both sounding board and gut checker. They have helped provide me the space to find my voice again in things I care about, to feel validated in expressing what I like and pursuing things I want. They have challenged my every apologetic or excuse or misplaced belief in why *I* couldn’t possibly go forward with things. Not to mention they have shown me pretty much constantly, intentionally or not, that tattoos are just really hot.

I found a place here in the city that I like. They’re a block away. I talked to an artist, and he was awesome. We had a back and forth, and we fleshed out a plan for the first piece I want to start in on. He is already drawing up the artwork for the Eastern-style version of Caliria, my dragon. Most likely I will have it within the next 2 weeks. Then we will start looking at the other 10 or 11 things on my list, the things that flowed out once I stopped finding ways to hedge and realized I needed to do what I wanted to do. So much of this is thanks to my partners (my other partner, whom I live with, I will refer to as T). The two of them have listened when I needed them to, and formed a stone wall when I was trying to find the cracks to slip through. It wasn’t always easy, *I* wasn’t always cooperative, but it got me here. There’s much more work to do, in other areas I may or may not touch on later that are much deeper, but this is a start. And I’m excited for it. I can finally become the canvas I’ve wanted to be. I can commemorate those things that are important to me the way *I* want to, and stop worrying over what it looks like to anyone else.

Because of this, and so many other things they’ve done for me, one of the tattoos that is high on my list is, to me, a vitally important representation of T and C. They both are huge fans of Neil Gaiman, and eventually got me to sit down and read some of his work. One book in particular they were both *adamant* that I read. That book is The Ocean at the End of the Lane. It is a book with many elements of fantasy and other realms. It is also a book with some very real connections to how trauma manifests in our lives. There was one scene, in fact, that was a direct trigger for me. Thankfully, T was there laying in bed with me as I read it, and was able to help me through the reaction. It was intense. That was the kind of book this was.

There is a character in this book by the name of Lettie Hempstock. She is…not exactly of this world. This is sort of central to the book. She has an ocean on her farm. It is exactly the size it needs to be. There is a point in the book where otherworldly creatures are, for plot reasons I’d rather not spend a paragraph or so explaining, attempting to kill the protagonist. They are nightmarish creatures, and they use shadows and images against the protagonist, things that will make him scared, whether because of who it is, or what the person is saying he has to do, or the implication that it is an order from his parents he cannot disobey. Lettie puts him in a fairy circle, a ring of land where the creatures cannot enter, and tells him she will return. He waits there, as these creatures do everything to find a way to make him leave the circle. He is confronted with nightmare after anxiety after self-doubt. Finally, Lettie returns, carrying a pail of water. She walks up into the circle, places the pail in front of him, and says this:

“I couldn’t get you to the ocean,” she said. “But there was nothing stopping me bringing the ocean to you.”

I will again not go into detail in case anyone wants to find out for themselves exactly what happens. But she saves him this way. There was no way for her to easily bring him to safety, to walk him through his nightmares safely. So, instead, she finds a way to take a portion of safety and bring it to him, and through it bring him back into safety.

My partners have done this for me, time after time, over the past months. They each have a…character, for lack of a better term, that represents them. So, I am getting that quote as one of my next tattoos. And on either side of it will be one of them, carrying a pail of water. This is the kind of thing tattoos are to me. I will not forget that, ever. And more importantly, I have set aside a piece of me, physically, to acknowledge openly and in plain view that this is what they have done for me. To acknowledge that I have had moments where I could not do it alone, and that they were there to hold me up and carry me forward.

Not every tattoo is that intense, but they all have some meaning, some memory or value I hold dear that is important to the journey of my life and where I am now, and also where I’m going in the future. I’m looking forward to being able to revisit this from time to time and talk about the pieces I have gained, and the things that have happened to make them that important to me.

I want to preface this with a bit of a content warning. This post discusses some themes around alcohol, alcoholism, and suicide. Please be aware of this as you read.

One of the most pivotal things about me is that I’m trans. I do not mean this to say that it defines my identity entirely. I mean that it has inextricably played a major role in the way my life has formed and evolved. Now, to explore this, I need to lay a little groundwork. In my last post, I mainly covered why this blog is here now and a brief overview of what led me to start writing it. Here, I need to cover a little bit about *who I am*.

I am an AMAB(Assigned Male at Birth) trans person. While this narrative is used too often as *the* narrative, I do happen to be one of those people who has felt very *off* about their gender from a very, very young age. Some of my earliest memories involve me struggling with gender and the way it interacted with society, and the confusion I felt that I didn’t seem to see things the way everyone around me did. I grew up in a fairly affluent area, went to a private religious school until 8th grade(I’m American), and attended the church that governed that school until I graduated high school. My environment was very conservative. Things were a certain way, and you conformed to those ways.

Sometimes, throughout the course of growing up, things would manage to poke through the facade I built around myself, trying to protect myself and fit in and be who they all told me I was supposed to be. This usually was a matter of poking through the *mental* barriers and remaining entirely within my mind, where I would wrestle and struggle with things, trying to keep them down and out of sight. I won’t say there was ever a major incident, in terms majorly outing myself to people, but there were some close calls revolving around parents. My mom noticed once something was out of place when I was 13. I almost came out. But I didn’t. That was the one that really stuck in my head.

As I got older, into high school, I started having a little more autonomy overall, and got rather better at being able to at least think about and research things without my parents catching on. I had brief moments of clarity, and occasionally would stumble across someone I could tentatively talk to about things, though it never lasted very long. In one of these moments, I actually picked a name. I *never* thought I’d do anything with it. I thought it was just something that stood out and it’d be a way for me to mentally classify *that* part of me. The joke in all that, of course, is that it’s now my legal name. It seems the universe likes to let the audience have a laugh at the protagonist’s naïveté just as much as we do when we craft stories.

Going to college began, quite frankly, a slow, ever so slow, painstakingly slow descent into the end of this farce. I finally had space to confront my problems with the idea of the church and the idea of faith and a deity that had been impressed upon me for 18+ years. It really didn’t take terribly long for me to drift from that social circle. I discovered alcohol and partying. This ended up being somewhat less than ideal. I suddenly had something else to latch onto. Some other means of trying to appear like a normal social person who was perfectly at home in their assigned gender. Drinking gave me a way to be free of the burden in my mind and live in the moment in front of me. Of course, it didn’t actually do that, at least not for terribly long. And of course I built a tolerance to it. So I spent the next few years continually chasing that feeling, needing more and more to get to that point. I got to the point I could drink a fifth of whiskey or a case of beer on my own in a night. And I would. Often I could count on one hand the number of nights I *didn’t* do that in a month. A therapist, some time later, asked me if I was an alcoholic at that point. Because I am the type of person who mentally struggles with definitions, I said that my understanding was that, to be an alcoholic, someone has to compulsively return to drinking, and even if they had quit for a while, would immediately return to the quantity they had been drinking before. That didn’t really fit me. But even in that conversation with the therapist, I said that, unequivocally, I had been drinking at a level which fit with alcoholism.

So now we reach the inevitable point of this story. It failed. And it continued to fail over and over. I couldn’t hide from it anymore. I tried. I tried *really hard*. Then, one night when I was 25, I came to a branch in my path that did not provide that option any longer. I had, very intensely, been rocketed through a sequence of looking at the future I was trying to make happen, of graduating with a degree as the guy everyone saw, of being a husband, a father, of all these things that were supposed to be awesome, and feel good. And I hated it. All of it. Every last goddamn second of every scene that played out in my head. Because in all of them, the person doing those things was *a man*. And I finally let the thought cross my mind, the thought that it was wrong because *I wasn’t him*. Which left me with the two options I mentioned. On the one hand, I could try to go down an incredibly difficult path, try to transition, believing that I could never possibly be feminine enough to not be read as who I’d been(which everyone around me continues to this day to assert is wildly inaccurate). On the other…I could stop. Entirely. Stop being. Pick a method, carry it through, and no longer allow the spectre of a person I was at the time to haunt the earth. I came *very* close to picking that one. There seemed to be so little possibility for anything positive to happen down the other path. But, in the end, I couldn’t do it. So, I stood up, I gathered myself, knowing how awful the thing I was about to do was, and I went and talked to the woman I was engaged to at the time.

It was a nightmare. She was completely destroyed. She didn’t immediately throw me out of our house, but she made it clear we were done, and she gave me a deadline to move out. The first person I came out to, and it shattered. Needless to say, this was really, really hard to process. I was devastated, I was scared, and I had no idea what I was going to do. Thankfully, my family reacted much better. My mom took some time to process and understand, but she really did try, and has come to be an advocate for LGBT youth at the school where she works. My brother and sister were instantly supportive. My aunt offered her basement to me to rent out. My dad…my dad gave what initially appeared to be support. My relationship with him and the ways it’s affected my life may very well be a topic I cover later, but suffice to say, this was far more complicated than I’m spelling out here.

So, I moved from Southwest Virginia back to where I’d grown up, in the northern area of the state. And I started my transition. I got hormones, I started evolving my wardrobe, and I was able to start living my life as the woman I was. Or at least where I understood my gender to be at the time. Turns out I had far more evolution to undergo and knowledge and understanding to gain before I got to where I am today. But at the time, it was what and who I needed to be. I stayed there for roughly 2 years. I met the person I would marry there. And when I left for California after those 2 years, I had learned how to carry myself through the world as who I was.

Transition is a tricky phrase, when it comes to being transgender. There are ideas about what it means generally, but the truth is it’s an individual and unique process for anyone that undertakes it. And really, there’s more than one transition that may be occurring. Socially, my transition to being a woman was, by a broad definition, a few months. I could also zero that in to when I was moving fully through my social experience as a woman, which could easily be pinpointed to one day. Medically, some people may never “transition” in the sense they may never opt for medical procedures. Some may only opt for a few. The order of those procedures can be any slew of things the individual and their journey allows. For me, I started over 6 years ago on hormone therapy. I have actually not had a single transition-related surgery. I have a few I’m going to do, but between money and logistics and my struggle with my weight, I haven’t yet. Others go through a few different surgical procedures within a couple years of coming out. So it’s really hard to say what “transition” actually means, or when it’s done, or in a lot of cases exactly when it starts. Or even that it’s only one thing.

As it relates to me, to the story I’ve been relating, there is one thing I feel confident asserting around transition. When I got on that plane for California in January 2015, it defined a transition in my life as complete. It was not the last or only one I’d undergo, in a lot of ways. It didn’t even encompass every transition I was undergoing at the time, as I was well into my medical transition by then. But it did signal the end of my first social and mental transition. I was pretty universally accepted in social spaces as a woman. I rarely faced any difficulty or crippling anxiety around whether or not I’d be perceived and accepted as such. But bigger than that social portion was the mental one. I had made a vital mental transition. I understood, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it was not only possible but in fact vital to challenge those societal expectations which seemed unfair and burdensome. I knew it was possible to rebuke those ideas and assert that I be accepted for who I am. And I knew that the more it happened, and the more people saw me, or my trans friends, or anyone like us around the world refusing to cow to those standards, the more we’d move the needle and allow people to open up to themselves. It’s a slow process. It’s too slow, far slower than it should be. But it does make things better, little by little. And at the very least, when things feel bleak, I know I can fall back to the people who have told me how much seeing me be who I am has bolstered their ability to be themselves, and find some strength in that.

So this blog has probably been far too long in the making. I used to write any time I could get my hands on a computer. Usually handwritten stuff was out because it’d invariably hurt my hand after a little while and also my handwriting is atrocious. Not much point to writing if *I* can’t even read it later, nevermind sharing it with anyone else. Be thankful this is an electronic blog. My handwriting has given teachers nightmares.

I stopped writing at some point. I don’t know why, I don’t know what prompted it. Probably it started because I had thoughts and feelings I never wanted to share. Then I went to college and there were more distractions, so I chased after ways to not even have those on my mind, let alone on any kind of paper or disk. So I didn’t write. And I kept on not writing for years. Even after addressing those thoughts and feelings and transitioning, and a whole slew of other changes I’m sure I’ll start to delve into in later writings, I never picked it back up. I had forgotten not only how, but even that I did.

Over the course of the past several months, a bunch of stuff in my mind basically exploded. Not physically, that would make it very difficult to write. Barriers and walls I had, subconsciously, kept up for years. Needless to say, this unleashed a slew of things into my psyche that I had been keeping locked away for years. This has changed my life in an uncountable host of ways. During this time, I left my job so I, my partner, and her partner could move to a new city, I developed a relationship with someone who has been pivotal in many of these realizations (as well as provided valuable smacks upside the head during times I’ve slipped into my pitfalls), and I had major surgery for weight loss. So it’s been *busy*. And the journey has involved tons of struggle, and processing, and fighting, and figuring out why I even fought in the first place, and just generally being the emotional equivalent of Come Sail Away by Styx: things seem fun, then it gets confusing, suddenly it takes a wild left turn, but eventually it seems mostly positive and I guess that’s all alright then.

I have watched my partner on their own blog for a few months now, processing and exploring their motion and exploration through some of the worlds they’re delving into. It’s been a fantastic thing to watch. A few days ago, I was reading through one of them, and it suddenly just smacked me in the face that this is *absolutely* something I should be doing. I write. Sometimes it’s songs, sometimes poems, sometimes it’s prose in short story or just free-writing form. But I write. I just needed to *do it again*. And here we are.

So, that’s why this exists. Strap in. It’ll be fun.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton