So I watched the Barbie movie last night and just thinking about humans and the overwhelming beauty of existing and feeling and creating and loving and the inherent wonder and awe of the world and just being human. I’m emotional
I have been in a weird mood lately, and today was cold and rainy. I think it's the isolation getting to me again. I have had one dose of the moderna vaccine, but I can't wait to get the second. So I'm taking a bit of time tonight to to have a fire in my fireplace, and making some s'mores while watching some critical role. I also watched a movie yesterday and I really needed that.
SO AS PROMISED, HERE’S SAGE’S MASSIVE TRANS FEEL DUMP
Basically I wanted to make this post because transitioning has been one of the most incredible experiences of my life, and I really wanted to make this post not only to express my feelings, but as a sign to other trans people, that it really does get so much better. I’m slapping a readmore on this for anyone who doesn’t want to scroll forever
(if you wanna skip to post-transition feels, skip to the second par, first par is abt pre-transition self)
To say I’m seeing the world in a new color is to completely understate how transitioning, both medically and socially, has completely revolutionized my very existence. I don’t wanna yammer on about the pre-transition/transitioning process to long, because that’s not what this is about, but what I do want is to give my early trans-realization feelings, because I think a lot of you either relate to them or did at one point. Like a lot of trans people, I felt hopeless for most of my teens, realizing I was trans at 13 and subsequently launching into an ever deeper depression than the one i was already in. I think a lot of people felt as hopeless as i did at this stage in pre-transition, believing I could never look how I wanted, and even if I did, feeling fundamentally artificial. I thought being trans would be the death of me, I thought that if I came out, I wouldn’t be able to find a job, find love, or even find friends who understood, but I also knew that if I didn’t, I’d be always feel hollow on the inside, no matter how much my situation improved. I should correct myself and say that it wasn’t always a hollow feeling, to say i felt hollow might imply a lack of emotion and an emptiness, but at times, the way I felt about my body, and my role in society felt more like drowning. Everything about myself I found repulsive, from the way I looked, to the way I acted end even the way other people felt about me. I wanted to skin myself alive whenever i felt present in my body, but transitioning didn’t even feel like a beacon of hope then. I thought no matter what I did I would always find myself disgusting, never a “real woman” always something fake. I felt like even if I looked, sounded and acted like a girl, I would know that fundamentally deep down everything was wrong about me, my very DNA was tainted with a male-ness i couldn’t scrub off. There was a decent chunk of time where I legitimately believed this eternal hollow feeling would be the better option, because to me transitioning was a societal death sentence with no benefit. I felt this way for nearly 5 years until finally, I realized that everything about this thinking was immutably wrong.
I had been taking hormones for 6 1/2 months when I finally came out in April 2018. I had long green hair that when tied up looked very feminine, but masculine let down. This androgyny allowed me to cop out whenever being a girl seemed scary. However, just a week before, my friend Marie gave me a bob cut, something that, no matter how I wore it, looked like a girls haircut. Although it removed my choice to look male when I wanted, fundamentally it was what gave me the strength to finally push and come out. When I finally did, I found the world to be a much different place than the one I had imagined. The cruelty, mistreatment and hatred from other proved to be far more rare than the love and support I received from others, and even just plain neutrality was entirely welcome. I had constructed this world where just being trans made myself a target of open harassment on the street, and instead people barely batted an eye, to them I was just some normal girl, maybe a little bit taller and broader than average, but nothing about that made me not a girl to them, and pretty soon I could say the same thing about myself. Things I hated about myself as symbols of male-ness, my chin, my shoulders, my muscles, became things that made me unique as a woman. Women are broad, women are tall, women have body hair and acne and aren’t in shape . To me womanhood and conventional beauty were immutably linked, and that for me to be otherwise made me an impostor. When I was younger I lived in constant fear of my lack of conventional beauty, and how that would always make me a man, but finally I could exist as a woman, no matter what I looked like, and to my surprise, so did many other people. Strangers would comment on how tall I was for a girl without even seeming to imply there was something manly about that. I was tall, with a broad chin, large shoulders and a deep voice, and to myself and everyone else, I was a woman.
The feeling to be able to exist as myself no matter what I was like was something that completely shook the foundation of everything I had felt before. i had spent my entire teens, in all aspects, separating myself into two people. I would abuse myself relentlessly because the way I acted wasn’t in line with the way I thought I was. I wanted to do well in school but would get exhausted after so much as looking at an assignment, and similarly I thought my higher self as a girl was at odds with everything else about me. Because of this I had an incredibly hard time associating with myself, to the point where I was regularly having delusions and started to think I was schizophrenic. I couldn’t be myself, I was either god, a genius, the radiance of the sun itself, or satan, the lowest human being could sink, or the creator of the evil falsehood that was my existence. A lot of this time I couldn’t think of myself as a real person, just a 2 dimensional character, a cryptid living in the woods, a lonesome cowboy, an extraplanar being with no earthly contact. These are some the ideas I used to cope with myself. I couldn’t envision myself as a real person, so I used ludicrous fantasy scenarios in order to cope with this, a 2D paper person trying to forget I lived in reality.
It took a lot of hard times and radical self acceptance to realize that all of these parts about me were the same, one person, and fighting myself was never going to help. I was a girl who worked her hardest, even when I felt like a boy who never did anything. Realizing this caused me to realize that the lazy boy I thought I was in reality did not exist, I was my self, there was no higher and lower self, there was just Sage, with all of her qualities, what I saw as a contradiction before, I soon realized was only a unique marker of myself. As soon as I realized that I was not at odds with myself, these delusions, which I had been having for years, started to slip away until gradually they stopped. I wasn’t some angel being corrupted by my own inner demon, I was just a girl who had trouble keeping up with a college’s workflow through no fault of her own. This feeling of being in myself caused a euphoria that I cannot even begin to express. I finally wasn’t a fleeting phantasm, I wasn’t a character in my own play, I was me, I had finally begun to feel present in my own body. Something that was fleeting at best before, had now become a constant in my life. This feeling of presence was probably the most revolutionary part of my entire transition, and by far the most incredible feeling I have ever felt in my whole life. The ability to look down and see myself rather than a foreign vessel was earth-shattering in the best way possible. This resulted in a gargantuan loss in dysphoria as well. Even the small things changed, as previously the idea of relaxing my underwear was one of the more disgusting things I could think of, soon became a comfortable testament to my love of my body. To simply wake up and see my own breasts on me makes me feel a sense of universal beauty I could previously only see in natures most beautiful formations. Not to break tone or anything but fucking seriously, literally looking at myself makes me feel so happy and peaceful in a way I only felt looking down mountain tops after long hikes. I feel so amazing in a way I never thought I would, and for that reason alone everything about transitioning was so worth it.
So that’s mostly why I wanted to write this, I went from a little boy horrified at the apocalyptic glimpses of the future I saw, to a young woman with more confidence and self love than I ever could have dreamt of. I wanted to not only express to the world how much I’ve changed, but I want to stand as a beacon for other trans people who feel like I once felt. I know it can seem hopeless, because I was once exactly like you, and it got so much better, and I want you to know that it doesn’t have to be that way, and that everything can and will change for the better, so please, don’t give up, no matter who you are, you have so much to look forward to.
Toxic.
People can really be toxic.
Like a drink that has been poisoned.
They seem refreshing and nice,
But they end up being the death of you.
You shouldn’t care about them.
Still, you seek their attention
And their approval.
Maybe this time they will love you…
But you break.
It was all a manipulative ruse.
They want to hurt you.
You shouldn’t care about them.
You decide it is best to cut yourself off.
Do not talk to them.
Do not message them.
Do not even think about them.
It works…
Until…
You remember the good times.
I keep thinking of the good times.
I shouldn’t care about them,
But I do.
Not only does she now know how much she loves him... he is gonna know how much she loves him. Lydia’s going to give Stiles all that. She’s going to tell him why she could never forget him; never leave him.
She acted the same way he would have. She. Loves. Him. Too.
("She's in love with someone else."
...
"I didn't get to say it back."
"You don't have to--"
"I do. I do, I do, I do, because I do love you. Stiles, I love you too.")
He’s her best friend. The power behind the girl who can scream-- he's the one who told her, all those years ago, that she should try to scream to shake out her fear. And she takes that strength from him and she gets power and protection.
She fell in love with him, with his goofy smiles and idiotic side comments and incredibly quick wit. She fell in love with a nerd, but he's more than that, he's just Stiles, he's the only person who matches her blow by blow but somehow also manages to steal her breath away.
And when they’re standing in that locker room, she tells him that she didn't get to say it back. Back. Back. Like it's the same. Like they're on equal footing. Like she knows that this boy has had a crush on her since they were eight, and she knows he liked her throughout high school, and she knows that he's the only one who saw through the parts of her she kept hidden away.
But she loves him so much, so strongly, that she tells him she has to say it back.
It's equal. They're equal. She loves him with all the rushing, agonizing feelings with which he loves her. She loves him so much that it literally hurts that she didn't get to say it. She loves him so much that the longing she felt to say it back, to reach him and whisper the words to him, literally opened up a rift.
I didn’t get to say it back.
His last breath on this plane of existence was telling her that he loved her and she would cross time and space to tell him she loves him too. Yet another example of how Stiles Stilinski gives Lydia Martin power.
Because the girl we met, back all those years ago? She didn't fight for the things she cared about. She didn't care deeply enough about anything to truly fight for it. Maybe she didn't even feel whole enough, or worth enough, to fight like that.
The girl in season three, who was just starting to learn what really loving other people was in a way that wasn't volatile, she wasn't brave enough to fight for what she cared about that deeply. The closest she ever came to fighting was "I don't want to be with the bad guys."
And now she is tearing a hole in the sky to get back the boy she loves. Now it's not a question of whether she will fight, whether it's worth it, how long it will last, how damaged she will be. She will break a hole in the universe because something thundering through her soul tells her that he is the person she is supposed to save. And god fucking damnit, she has things to say to him.
She spent this whole season caring so so so much. This girl who could never care about anything except for herself because she was scared of the worst happening, before she even know what the worst was-- never mind that, before she even knew what a soulmate was.
And then hers gets taken and she feels everything, every little goddamn thing, she feels his absence, his loss, the weight of those words pressing against her, the lightness of the kind of happy he had the ability to give her when he was right in front of her.
It's not about not caring. It's not about hiding. She. Wants. Him. She wants him back. And she isn't walking away from the instincts that tells her that he is so much more encompassing, so much more important, than all of the other things she never fought for.
I think the thing that's fucking me up about Stydia tonight is the idea that Stiles carries this love that he has for Lydia around with him literally everywhere. It's embedded into him.
Whether he's an eighth grade boy or a senior in high school, he just carries this thing around with him. There's this big, enormous care in his heart-- this gut feeling that lives inside of him-- and it's literally ever-present. It has never gone away from him.
He loves and he loves and he loves until it breaks him, until he can't love her anymore because after eight years he has fallen so hard for her that he literally cannot handle its weight anymore. After all this time, it builds, and they become friends and oh my god that is when loving her hurts the most.
She's on his bed, she's grabbing his hand, she's telling him she believes in him which is the most painful part of all. And it aches and it aches and it aches
The thing is, she used to not know he existed. She used to not acknowledge his existence even when he worshiped hers. Even when he was discovering new pieces of her.
And now? And now she's telling him that he's the one who always figures it out. She's telling him that she knows him well enough to tell him that he's smart-- him. Stiles Stilinski. Being told that he's smart by Lydia Martin.
She's starting to know him too. She listened. She paid attention. She remembered.
She pays. Attention. To. Him.
She wants to be his friend.
Him, the boy who brushes his teeth at night and looks in the mirror and tries to see what other people see that isn't enough.
Him, the boy who brushes his teeth at night and looks in the mirror and wonders what kind of dream he's going to be having about the girl who is in his heart, who occupies his thoughts, who he gave himself to while expecting nothing in return.
He would allow her to walk all over him because he knows, right at the bottom of his chest, that if he does, if he helps her, if he is a springboard for her, she could do fucking incredible things.
Lydia Martin has the ability to save lives. She's so smart. She's so fucking smart.
And he loves what her brain can do. He loves how small she makes him. Loves her significance. She matters, she is bigger than the stars, bigger than the moon, she ripples across this world and impacts other people.
Stiles just knows that whoever supports her gets to stand by her side and watch the aftershocks, the quakes, or her brain. Of her lasting presence on this planet.
(He wants to tell her that she makes him giddy. Instead, he tells her that she's been right every time something like this has happened.)
And here's what he gets to do. Here is Stiles Stilinski's contribution to the world, as he wants it to be:
He stands next to Lydia, the girl who is permanent. The girl who makes things last. And he makes her smile. Makes her laugh. Makes her a little less serious. Makes her glow.
And her story is a little brighter because a semblance of his completely inferior brain made it so. Because he loved her as completely as an eight-year-old boy could love an eight-year-old girl, and a thirteen-year-old boy, and a fifteen-year-old boy who doesn’t know her at all, and a seventeen-year-old man who knows her better than anyone does, and an eighteen-year-old man, and a twenty-three year old man, and, and, and, and...
