Happy Phantom!

I am making one extra post because I just remembered a song I should’ve added to the class playlist. Coincidentally I made it my username for WordPress at the beginning of the semester. For me this song means hope and transcendence. I used to listen to it all the time before transitioning. The lyrics really spoke to me:

“And if I die today I’ll be the happy phantom
And I’ll go chasin’ the nuns out in the yard
And I’ll run naked through the streets without my mask on
And I will never need umbrellas in the rain
I’ll wake up in Strawberry Fields every day
And the atrocities of school I can forgive
The happy phantom has no right to bitch”

The line “I will never need umbrellas in the rain” was super important for me because it felt similar to my desire to take my shirt off and feel the rain on my chest. It was all I dreamed about before getting top surgery.

Now looking at the lyrics I think of the word transcendence. Being a happy phantom seems to Tori Amos like she would not feel the limits of being in a human body. She sings about how she can do anything she wants: “I’ll run naked through the streets without my mask on.” That line in particular paints the picture of a mask giving her the feeling of immanence. Wish I remembered this in class!

Wait, Can I Dance?

My last formal dancing experience was in the sixth grade, when I decided to take dance as an elective. I had never tried it before and I was curious about how I would fare. I remember my favorite part being our lessons on ballet. Beyond the basic positions, I do not recall much from that class except how liberating it felt to be able to move my body in a way that was not to endure labor or stress. Evidently I was not very good because I was always placed in the back during performances. Facing dejection, I have since then subconsciously internalized the notion that I am not meant to dance and I am not ‘good enough’ to. 

As I have matured and spent more time in my own company, I have grown to appreciate music. Music has been there through all of my car rides, relationships, breakups, breakdowns, and the many other aspects of my life. Similar to dance, music has allowed me to feel liberated by providing a space where I can feel different emotions. But now I realize how much I have limited myself. Aside from the occasional dance session when I am alone in my car, I have not considered dancing to music. I have limited myself to a life where I can appreciate music but not be able to express it through my body. I feel that dancing along to music can make my lived experience more enjoyable, as that is the case for numerous people. 

LaMothe, within “As the Earth Dances,” explores the relationship between dance, philosophy, and the human body. She advocates that the human body is constantly changing and can develop with the help of dance and movement. I resonate with her idea that dance is a method of expression that embodies individuals’ relationships with the world and ourselves. Engaging our bodies can help to shape our relationships, experiences, and personalities. I look forward to reconnecting with a lost part of myself by allowing myself to dance and express my emotions.

Trans comfort music, volume 100

The reason I like the coed 7v7 soccer league that I play in is because I get to play the sport that I have always loved, it makes my body feel good to move and run and think all at the same time, I get to play with all kinds of people and bodies, and no one is really policing gender. No one is really policing gender until there are not enough girls that show up. The rule the league goes by is that there should be a max of 5 men on the field. Even though I am non binary and I “used to be a girl,” people read me as a boy when I show up to play. That is fine with me because no one is counting us off as men and women/boys and girls. I am safe under the radar and no one is picking apart my gender. But a few days ago we had 7 total people, and only one girl. My sister is usually the second girl, but she was out of town on a work trip. Her boyfriend, however, was set on all of us playing because he knows I am not a man and the rule only stated 5 men max can be on the field. He told me he was going to talk to the referee about it and that was cool with me. After he talked to the ref, he walked over to the other team and talked to them as well, presumably asking for their permission for me to play as a non-man and for their trust about there actually being a non binary person on our team. When he came back he told the team we could all play. Naturally, they asked how/why, since we have 6 guys and 1 girl, right? I was hoping he would say that maybe the other team was okay with just letting us all play just to have a fair game instead of playing a player down. Instead, he told them all that I was non binary. I just kinda stared off into space. Then I thought to myself… “I think maybe I was just outed?” Then the ref blew the whistle and we all ran onto the field. I was shaking and wondering if I was overreacting. I just felt very anxious and was hoping that my teammates weren’t still thinking about the conversation.

On the car ride home he apologized because I think he realized I was uncomfortable. I was glad he checked in and we got to talk about what he could have done differently.

Now to the point of this post. Once I dropped him off, I was sitting in my car and decided to put on 100 gecs. As soon as the song Dumbest Girl Alive started playing, followed by Money Machine, I immediately relaxed and felt so much better. The music got me back into my body. 100 gecs is not usually my go-to artist. The music is very electronic and experimental. It serves very specific purposes for me, the moment in the car being one of them. The group is made up of 2 people, and one is a trans woman. I like listening to her voice and the sounds of the songs. 100 gecs uses autotune and pitching on their voices, and a lot of electronic sounds. The techniques they use are often considered fake or unnatural in music, and the fact that this is the case makes it even better that they lean so hard into it. Their music embodies a lot of trans experiences. At that moment in the car, I was feeling really anxious and nervous and unintelligible to my sister’s boyfriend and my teammates, and playing the music immediately put me at ease. It was like I was in the room with Laura Les singing about how she “did science to [her] face.” Most 100 gecs songs are almost too much for me because of how experimental they are, but that honestly makes them even better. They are a big “fuck you” to what you would expect, just like being trans is.

Love for Artists

Up until now, I do not think I have had a music artist that I am attached to. There probably is not an artist that I would cry about when they are gone. Although I do have love for many musical artists that I listen to, I do not think I am passionate about them. When listening to the podcast “Fresh Air with Hanif Abdurraquib,” I realized how sad it was that I did not have an artist that I was passionate about. At one point in the podcast, Abdurraquib and his class all took a moment when one of their favorite artists died, and he spoke about how hard it was for them. They all went around and shared their favorite songs and talks about that artist throughout all of class. I have had friends who have had the same experience with other musical artists. I think it is a beautiful thing to be attached to someone because of the words they use and the emotions they invoke in others. All of this without personally knowing that artist must meant that that artist is special and dear to them. I look forward to when I can be that passionate about a music artist one day like them.

Here is one of my favorite songs So Good by Dove Cameron. She sadly deleted all of her past songs, but I listened to this song all throughout my first semester at university so it means a lot to me.

I DON’T WANT TO DO MY FINALS

I’m not a writing person. Before I was but after 8th grade I became a math person. Maybe it was because of my 8th grade English teacher Mrs. Linthicum and how she constantly had to yell or lecture my class for not behaving while she TRIES to teach.

During High School I excelled at math, except for my junior year we had a new teacher from Texas and she taught complete differently compared to past teachers. I struggled a bit but I made it through. I maintained straight A’s for each quarter in all of my math classes excluding the class from junior year.

I originally entered college as a Psychology major but I soon realized how much reading and writing it demands and caught myself missing math on most occasions. I switched it to computer science and hopefully it works out for me.

The reason why I titled my blog as “I DON’T WANT TO DO MY FINALS” because my teacher (one particular class) assigned 3 short essays due on Tuesday, along with a discussion post and 2 page paper due on Sunday. It is doable, but my other class is asking for a 5-6 page paper, an analysis paper, and a presentation. It’s all so much but I know the long term goal I need to reach. I just want to finish everything and pass my classes so I can enjoy my winter break and sleep all day 🙂

Being Girly Against the Grain

In the early years of Facebook, 2009 or so, my mom came across a long post that was being shared around by some people who were friends of her friends. The post was essentially an essay about why parents should never let their daughters play princess, because it would teach them to fall into traditional gender roles, think they need a man to save them, and to only value frivolous things like dresses and parties. My mom, having a 5 year old daughter (me) who loved all things princesses, was annoyed by this post and commented on it in disagreement. Her comment was immediately pounced on by a dozen people calling my mom a terrible person for letting me play pretend with princesses, saying that she is part of the problem and upholding the patriarchy, among other things. To these people on Facebook in 2009, allowing little girls to engage in stereotypically feminine behavior was a bad thing.

This is the kind of messaging I would receive for my entire childhood: being interested in “girly” things was bad and being interested in more stereotypically masculine things was better. I know a lot of AFAB people had the opposite experience and were forced into standards of femininity that they didn’t connect with, but that wasn’t my personal experience. I have always been a “girly-girl,” preferring purples and pinks, loving dresses and skirts, and being obsessed with princesses and fairies. From a young age this had made me the odd one out, but by the time I was 9 all the other girls in my class had fully moved away from ballet and Rainbow Magic books in exchange for soccer and Warrior Cats.

In no way am I saying it is bad for girls to like stereotypically masculine things, quite the opposite actually. Everyone should be allowed to enjoy what they want regardless of gender identity. But I do think that the pushback against femininity that I faced was in part an overreaction to previous waves of feminism. I think that in an effort to establish that girls were just as capable of being interested in and doing stereotypically masculine things as boys, it came back around to implying that stereotypically girly things were somehow lesser. I’m still very girly. I still love Disney princesses and Barbie, and I couldn’t care less about sports or superheroes. That’s just who I am. 

In the past year or so I have been so excited to see things primarily targeted towards women breach the mainstream through things like The Barbie Movie, Beyonce’s Renaissance Tour, and Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and so happy to see other people embrace feminine fashions in public through Cottagecore and Princesscore aesthetics. It makes me feel like maybe society is starting to value femininity as equal to masculinity and androgyny.

Music and Me

I truly believe that music has shaped my own life for the better, and that I would be miserable without it after being exposed and listening for so long.

When I was a freshman in high school, it was the first time I even thought about getting Spotify and listening to music; all I knew at that point was Taylor Swift and some Coldplay, and any one-off songs that I would recognize from other pop artists. But after getting Spotify, I set myself up to construct a playlist of everything I had ever heard and liked, and now it stands at 1,453 songs and over 82 hours in length. I simply have to press shuffle when I’m in the car and it will always be something I hadn’t heard in a week or so.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

But having the music itself isn’t the only aspect of it that’s changed my experience and connection to music. I’m part of an a cappella group on campus called the UMBC Cleftomaniacs (a fun little pun on the word kleptomaniac because we always steal the show), and performing as part of an a cappella group is not like any other kind of singing; doos and dahs and dms and ohs aren’t exactly solo singing and more choral, but adding the rhythm and the attempts to take on instruments and chords that existing songs have is what brings a kind of thrill and challenge to the singing. Plus, it feels like I’m part of a family; without one section of our group there, our singing would always fall apart. Everyone giving it their best shot and putting a step forward creates a bond and a great composition when we finally take the stage and perform. Phenomenology works in mysterious ways, right?

As a member of the group for almost two full years now, I can’t help but be nervous about my last semester. I’ve never had a solo, and so I fall victim to imposter syndrome regularly even though every other person I’ve heard sing in my life, and more importantly, my group, sounds amazing. I practice and practice and I’ve begun recording myself and even gaining the confidence to share it with the world through a click of the button, so I just hope to get a solo in my last semester with my friends.

P.S. If you would like to see my group’s performances, you can find them at this link:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsauUuU0WoIyw3lC2JKbm7g

And if you like a cappella in general, please, please, please give any of these a listen. It’s worth it:

Why Me?

Anxiety sucks. Depression sucks. There’s really no way around that. No way to spin it. “bUt AnXieTy iS jUsT TRyinG tO kEep yOu aLiVe” shut up, stop it, it definitely is not. I’ve gotten treatment, seen a therapist to help my mental health issues, so I feel a lot better now than before all that. But even still, there are times where my anxiety and depression just come back full swing. Sometimes something happens: a fight with a friend, parents getting divorced, etc. But other times? It all just happens without reason. I will be sitting in my dorm having a pleasant day, when all of a sudden I am just hit with a wave of “nothing matters, why do anything at all”, which will usually define how I feel for the next week or two or three. Sometimes I will be laying in my bed after having a very nice day, when suddenly my mind decides to remind me that I will die someday, that I will die tomorrow, that I will die in ten minutes. I can’t argue because if I end up thinking about it for too long I give myself a panic attack, so I just lie there trying to think of anything else. I’ve gotten to the point where I can manage this anxiety fairly well. I can distract myself, or do exercises to calm myself down. I wish I didn’t have to do this. I wish I could just be myself. Why me?

It is infuriating that I just spiral so easily. That I can be so fucking happy one minute, and in the next I can hardly breathe. That I cannot just go through my day unbothered anymore and enjoy myself. Before I developed anxiety everything was so peaceful. I need not worry about death, about what others are thinking of me at every second of every day. I used to have hope that I could “conquer” my anxiety. I do not have that hope anymore. I know now that I just need to live with it. To co-exist and to just deal. I can’t help but feel jealous of those who do not have to deal with what I do. Something close to 40% of adults suffer from anxiety or depression, so I am certainly part of a community. But that means that around 60% of adults just do not have symptoms of anxiety and depression? That absolutely blows my mind. I’ve talked with friends about what I have gone through and they cannot relate at all. I am jealous of their… innocence I guess. I cannot even fathom not feeling the way I do, and I feel like a great injustice has been put on me. Why me?

The only positive thing that I can get out of all of this is that I am better than I used to be. That I am in a better space now, and I can manage my feeling much more effectively than before, including feelings other than anxiety and depression. And yet I still can’t help but ask the question: why me?

It’s just stress, don’t worry!

As a young teenager, I embarked on the annual pilgrimage to my primary doctor for the customary check-ups. Each time, I would muster the courage to bring up my persistent issue – irregular menstrual cycles accompanied by excruciating cramps and debilitating nausea. However, my concerns were consistently brushed aside as mere byproducts of teenage stress. Little did I know that a visit to a gynecologist would change the trajectory of my health journey and unveil the silent struggle I had been facing – Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS).

The Frustration of Dismissal:

Year after year, I found myself grappling with a seemingly invisible adversary that disrupted the natural rhythm of my body. The irregular menstrual cycles were not just a result of the stress associated with school, as my primary doctor insisted; they were indicative of an underlying hormonal disorder. Despite my persistent complaints, my concerns were dismissed, and I was left feeling frustrated and unheard.

The Turning Point:

One day, my mom, sensing the urgency of the situation, decided to take matters into her own hands. She scheduled an appointment with a gynecologist, hoping to find answers to the questions that had lingered for too long. As I poured out my experiences to the specialist, they listened attentively and decided to delve deeper into the issue. It was during this visit that I received a life-altering diagnosis – Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.

PCOS Unveiled:

Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, or PCOS, is a hormonal disorder characterized by enlarged ovaries with small cysts on the outer edges. The syndrome can manifest in various ways, including irregular menstrual cycles, severe cramps, and nausea – all of which resonated with my experiences. Finally, I had a name for the silent struggle that had haunted my teenage years.

The Prescription for Relief:

With the diagnosis in hand, the gynecologist recommended a treatment plan tailored to alleviate my symptoms. The prescription was simple yet transformative – birth control. By regulating my menstrual cycles, the birth control not only provided relief from the severe cramps and nausea but also brought a sense of normalcy to my life. It was a solution that had eluded me during years of visits to my primary doctor.

The Frustration of Delayed Diagnosis:

Reflecting on my journey, the frustration of a delayed diagnosis looms large. It took just one visit to a specialist to unravel the mystery that had confounded my primary doctor for years. The dismissive attitude towards my symptoms as mere stress not only prolonged my suffering but also highlighted a gap in understanding and awareness surrounding women’s health issues, particularly those related to reproductive health.

Conclusion:

My journey with PCOS serves as a testament to the importance of advocating for one’s health, especially when faced with dismissive attitudes from healthcare providers. It underscores the need for a more comprehensive understanding of women’s health issues, ensuring that young individuals are not overlooked or their concerns trivialized. By sharing my story, I hope to raise awareness about PCOS and inspire others to persist in seeking answers to their health concerns, even when faced with skepticism. After all, our bodies often speak louder than words, and it’s crucial to listen.

Hypochondria

Living with the constant fear of having a serious illness really takes a toll on you. I’ll never forget that one day last year when I got a headache out of the blue – something that rarely happened to me. Instead of brushing it off, I made the mistake of Googling my symptoms, and the search results made me think I had a brain tumor. Cue a major anxiety attack that kicked off my struggle with hypochondria.

In the weeks that followed, I became hyper-aware of every little sensation in my body. I went down a rabbit hole of health websites, learning way more about the human body than I ever intended. If something felt even slightly off, I’d convince myself I had some serious illness, leading to many sleepless nights filled with panic attacks. But over the next few months, things slowly got better. I’m happy to say that I’ve moved past that phase of hypochondria.