I Don't Even Know What To Caption This. I Am Suffering Academically

at about 10 or 11pm on the night of december 5, 2021, i arrived home to my house in LA from a show a friend of mine was playing. it had been a relatively small affair but the music was quite interesting and it was a nice opportunity to catch up with someone i hadn’t seen in awhile.

before leaving the venue i’d done something which at that point was an every day thing, using the bathroom and then examining everything about my face and body that looked slightly off in the mirror. my hair was never right, my face was an odd shape, i hated the patchy stubble jutting out of my lip and chin. for the past year and a half i’d thought about this discomfort every single day, and pushed it to the back of my mind. following that rabbit down the hole always lead to inklings of a conclusion that i didn’t feel ready to reckon with just yet.

i got home to find that some of my roommates had taken acid. at the time i lived with my brother alex, his partner, a bandmate of ours and another friend. my brother was not partaking on this particular evening but he had procured it a month earlier in san francisco when we went to go play a gig there. an old drum line coach of his from high school was living there with a much older hippie boyfriend, who gave us a 10 strip of the Real Shit when they pulled up to the show.

i tried half a tab on the drive home and confirmed that it was indeed the real shit. alex and i listened to ween (i highly recommend the entirety of the mollusk on an acid trip) and 100 gecs, laura les’ vocal performances on the latter bringing me very close that afternoon to the aforementioned conclusion i’d been avoiding.

anyways, on the night of december 5 i arrived home and a couple of our roommates were having a great time. although it was late i didn’t have work the next day and it was really good acid, so i decided to join in myself.

i have a pretty good track record with psychedelics — with a couple exceptions i’d always treated the experience with a certain amount of respect and didn’t like to overdo it. i was content to disappear into headphones and let the colors and shapes of my favorite music guide me through seussian landscapes, never really subscribing to the idea of the trip as, well, a trip unless it compelled me to do so against my will.

this time, however, before taking my half tab for some reason i decided to set an intention. i’m not sure where this came from but there had been questions bubbling underneath my ill fitting skin for some time now, and i resolved that if the opportunity arose on this night i would confront whatever it was i hadn’t been confronting. i hadn’t consciously acknowledged this mystery problem yet even though in a funny way i’d thought about it every day for over a year.

a few hours in and i was tripping pretty hard. it was a very warm and safe and colorful feeling; i put on the dijon album that had come out not long before and sank into the redwood tones of mk.gee’s baritone guitar riffs and dijon’s gorgeous voice. to this day big mike’s sounds a little extra crazy every time i hear it.

everything changed when i took my phone and opened up instagram.

death grips was a band i’d been getting heavily into over the past year alongside the presence of my persistent little mystery question, music that to me bristled with raw and determined spirituality and a deep love for the entire spectrum of the human condition. i’d already had a bit of a bizarre experience soundtracked to their music — months prior i was walking around echo park in a skirt and a full beat (for absolutely no reason haha) and saw a group of christian protesters up ahead marching against the sins of the gays and carrying signs explicitly stating this intent. worried they might see me and by proxy see trouble, it possessed me to put airpods in and put on no love, the title track from death grips’ third record. as soon as the first two bars were done i looked up and it was like the mob had despawned from reality itself with no trace. i’m not fully unconvinced i hallucinated them, but the experience tripped me out nonetheless.

death grips had been completely silent since 2018, not posting on social media or releasing any music.

fast forward to december 6 now at around 2am, and i open instagram to immediately find an image of death grips drummer and mastermind zach hill peeking out from behind the wooden door of some kind of medieval tavern, holding a bar of gold out from between the iron bars of the door as if urging me to come and take it. since i was on acid, i absolutely flipped the fuck out. in a rational sense it looked like death grips was back and that was really exciting. in a spiritual sense, i felt this gold bar was the key to the thing i wasn’t confronting.

i sat in bed giggling and writing silly poems in my notes app and marveling at the synchronicity of being alive, an alkaline sensation rising up my body through my spine. something came unprompted but not uninvited, less of a cataclysmic epiphany or revelation and more of a gentle and loving acknowledgment.

i’m trans.

i am a transgender woman.

i have been this whole time. and ive been thinking about it every single day and pushing it back into the depths to deal with later.

looking back now it’s hilarious and obvious and really dumb, but this knowledge was not fully conscious. i’d think to myself that i’d feel a lot more happy and calm and in sync if i was a woman and that there was probably something within that i needed to face head on, but i’d tell myself i’d figure it out when i was 30 and push it back down. this would all happen so fast that i never really was able to pull it to the front and examine it closely until now.

it physically felt like i’d been watching the scene from the land before time where littlefoot’s mother dies for the past 25 years, and now my own mom had materialized to give me a hug.

i will never forget the actual sensation of it, so calm and gentle and loving yet determined. there was no going back from this, no putting it in a box and shoving it into my subconscious like i’d been doing every day. i was gonna have to have some heavy conversations tomorrow, but the prospect of doing so didn’t really scare me. i laid down and pulled my covers up and drifted off to sleep as the acid wore off.

the next morning, i awoke to two things: the knowledge that i needed to tell alex and a text from alex. unprompted he’d sent me the two headed calf by laura gilpin, which to those unfamiliar goes like this:

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this

freak of nature, they will wrap his body

in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north

field with his mother. It is a perfect

summer evening: the moon rising over

the orchard, the wind in the grass. And

as he stares into the sky, there are

twice as many stars as usual.

i read that several times and through a violent barrage of tears asked him to come into my room because i had to tell him something.

i told him i was trans and he said he’d kinda figured and we cried and hugged and marveled at the weird psychic synchronicity of it all. id made my peace with it the night before on my acid trip, but i think it took this sober revelation to somebody i love more than life itself for the weight i’d been carrying to finally lift.

that was, as they say, the first day of the rest of my life.

one of my roommates at the time was my best friend, someone with whom since then i’ve unfortunately had something between a falling out and a loss of contact with. i will not elaborate on that in this post. there was something they said to me once that i’m thinking about right now — i’d shared a meme phrase with them i thought was funny and topical, something about wanting to give your inner child a gun. they countered with the idea that maybe my inner child needed a hug, and that’s probably one of the most important things anyone has ever said to me.

i try to give my inner child a hug every day, but today i think writing this i’m choosing to give that hug to my inner 25 year old. she had a lot to figure out and a long road ahead of her, but the death grips two headed calf acid trip bonanza was certainly a big first step.

over the course of the next year my band would break up, the population of my house would shift around, i’d begin taking hormones and start work on what became music 2. i’d also fall in love and have some even weirder experiences thinning the veil between here and whatever lies beyond, but those are all perhaps for different posts or my own memory.

until coming out as trans i wanted to opt out of living every day. i felt like a walking mistake and my eyes looked sad and my skin hung off of my bones in a really uncanny shape. it was really hard to get up in the morning and i often just wouldn’t.

i would be lying if i said it was all sunshine and daisies from there, but for the past three years and some change i’ve woken up each day having already made the choice to live. and as the country in which i live by that choice shifts further toward the fascist right and seeks to eliminate the very existence of people like me, i cling on to that resolve harder and harder with an iron clawed grip. if they want me dead they’ll have to kill me, because i’ve seen the other side and there is no fucking way i am ever going to do it myself. i like being alive because the world is beautiful, and after viewing that beauty through the kaleidoscopic lens of being trans i am determined to fight for it until my last breath.

thank you for the gold, zach <3 i spent it on magic beans

what’s it called when you’re so disconnected from reality that cold water doesn’t feel like anything and you can barely taste food anymore

The funniest homophobic notion out there is the whole, “you’re just a lesbian because you can’t get a man” thing. Like, do you have any idea how easy it is to get a man? It takes a smartphone and ten minutes of time while trying to get a girlfriend is like trying to win the lottery with a single ticket you found on the sidewalk. 

artwork from the Game Freak website, 2004

I haaaaaate how porn-rotted men's brains are. You can't even have a normal conversation with most guys these days- especially Gen Z. Almost every word you say to these guys, they'll find a way to make it sexual. Seriously. With no context.

For example- I was telling a male I know about one of my friends who managed to convince an owner of a local bakery to give her one of his popular recipes. ALL I said was, "He wouldn't give her X (most popular recipe) so her gave her the Y." Of course... "that sounds weird!! hahahahaha! He gave her the Y."

Or when you mention the word "stuck" they follow it with something about step-brothers (absolutely vile). God forbid you say the word "size" in reference to anything!

...But noooooo, obviously, porn has no effect on the brain! It totally doesn't make men sexualize every single woman they see IRL.

Men couldn't care less about male victims of SA, rape or any form of abuse. They only say "Men also go through this" when a woman is talking about a tough situation she's facing. All men want to do is invalidate women's feelings and hardships. When was the last time they mentioned men going through mental/emotional/physical abuse without it being a response to a woman being the victim of an injustice ?

"Everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is."

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology.

Born: 26 July 1875, Kesswil, Switzerland

Died: 6 June 1961, Küsnacht, Switzerland

Genuine question from me, a trans guy.

Why are so many current, self-identified Jungians super conservative and transphobic?

They hide behind ideas of the anima and animus as some kind of "proof" that trans and genderqueer people don't exist but tbh it's easier to argue the opposite, that the animus and anima are proof that we're all a bit non-binary and for some of us an aspect coult be out of keeping with sex assigned at birth anyway.

I wonder if some of them believe that archetypes are something immutable and in some way "proof" that the "natural order" is sticking to gender and other stereotypes, but when you look at archetypes from a more cross-cultural lens you can show that archetypes are fluid and ever changing.

It just reminds me of Jung's description of the dreams of former Nazis as becoming more escapist and filled with increasingly archaic traditionalist symbolism as a way to dissociate from trauma and cognitive dissonance?

But yes, interested in what other peoples' thoughts are.

I think I am the opposite of a pick-me girl. Like a pls-don’t-pick-me girl. As in I do not, under any circumstances, want to come across as a girl who gets along with men. Or has any sort of relationship with them. I never want a man to look at me and think oh she seems approachable and agreeable. Like no.