sometimes i actually forget that most people here have bodies outside of the text they write and that's the ones they care about when they're like talking about transitioning and such
like i read people talking about how they're transmasc or transfem or something and i think 'nice that is a somewhat relatable set of experiences and outlook for this string of text on my screen to have' and only occasionally does it hit me that that also means that they have like a body irl somewhere that maybe they dressed up in gendered clothing or did something with the hair of or administered hrt to or stuff like that
it's not always trans people on here who talk about their bodies of course but on my dash it usually is. if it's not trans people it's disabled people generally whose experiences are likewise relatable to me
and it's a really uncomfortable feeling because it changes the way the text is read aloud in my brain, i can't explain how but it does, like suddenly it's a human reading the text to me and not just the text existing as itself. suddenly it's like listening to a voice acted cartoon, right, suddenly there is a very competent but searingly extant voice actor of the text. but it's not imagined sound it's just the impression of sound where the sound isn't there. it's the impression of the body that produces the sound
and i don't like thinking of you that way. i am uncomfortable imagining the characteristics of your body. no matter what that body is. maybe if like a kinnie or a furry requests me to imagine a specific body then i will do my best to do so although not too hard because whether squirting fluids or oxidising metal or diffusing gas or what have you there's always something unbearable about weight of a body in my mind. there's a temporality a time dimension to it. the fact that it can be described with a participle ending in -ing. i cannot bear such a constant state of transformation. transformation should be in short bursts only like the strike of the typebar of a typewriter adding a new letter to the page
you're probably thinking 'touch grass' and 'how do you last a moment In Real Life' but to tell the truth i touch grass every day and frequently have to go do things In Real Life many times a day even. it doesn't really help. really this paragraph shouldn't exist at all it's just a generic disclaimer anticipating saneism. sanism? i forgot how it's spelled. i'm the text creature equivalent of an animal which is nutrient deficient
of course when i am in the peaceful state of not having remembered about irl bodies, it comes across as somewhat hyperreal that all these disemirlbodied text creatures on my screen are talking about various physical irl issues, including issues with irl bodies. but, ah, that is the intangible nature of Reality, to me; a sort of shared roleplay setting we're forced to take seriously, and often end up taking seriously out of earnest interest and habit. of course the text creatures in my screen would be conversing about irl matters. it's a very compelling setting don't you think. upon pain of death don't you think
i apologise if i come across as dismissive of Literally Everything That Has Ever Happened To Anyone i'm incapable of relating to it any other way. maybe i used to, but not anymore, i lost that property over time. i'm the same way about Literally Everything That Has Ever Happened To sadlyglyphtaken either
anyway personally i am uncomfortable when people imagine me as something outside the text on their screen because i'm not really. i put some vapid irl descriptors like 'white-coded' and 'trans-coded' in my bio (although i am neither truly white nor truly trans) and vague references to real life cultures and nationalities and so on because it is somewhat expected on tumblr and helpful for people to gauge whether they want to interact with me. i didn't put my age in bio because i don't know what i'd put. ('not a minor' is accurate according to the sensibilities of tumblrites and really the only thing they really care to know but i find it somewhat hurtful for personal reasons.) but i don't really believe in that stuff
there is something to be said for people claiming to be as alienated as i am turning out to have most of the cultural, national, &c biases associated with having a culturally, nationally, &c specific background anyway. so let me try to describe some of the background that has led to my current situation. i would say that i was hardly socialised all initially as a kid, (i do not consider myself to have ever actually been a child or had a childhood but whatever,) and usually i only interacted with a particular human and i was stuck with that human in a relatively wide variety of mostly uninhabited places, usually in a tent. and, ah, the values impressed upon me were my silence, my obedience, my lack of requiring any homeostatic maintenance or social interaction whatsoever, and my fuckability as a sex object.
this is, essentially, the little culture i came from, though it was a culture that only really existed in the mind of that human, and within me. it had roots in far larger, more 'real' human cultures but that doesn't terribly matter to me. periodically, i tried to be a part of various local cultures where i'd been, most notably the usa, japan, california, yugra, and the prc. but due to only being in fleeting contact with any of them, my ability to connect to them or form relationships within them was vastly incomplete. and paradoxically, the more time i spent someplace, the more alienated i became; having spent the most time in the usa, i am least happy to call myself american, compared to other national labels.
it also transpired that despite the gender role that was impressed on me in my childhood, these cultures tended to consider me male. this incongruity was initially quite upsetting to me and i did a whole 'transition' about it, but once people acknowledged that, fine, i am female after all, and we'd both forgotten that i'd ever been considered male in the first place, i decided that with that need met, i would no longer like to be bound by that role imposed on me in my substitute-for-childhood, and wish to at last take on a male identity, ostensibly for the first time. it is a mostly symbolic gesture; my performance of masculinity amounts to pronouns, a binder, and a lack of attention to my facial appearance. but it is satisfactory to me. i still do think of myself as that silent doll i was intended to be; it is part of my identity now. but i perform it now entirely for myself, and that is what matters to me, not this externally defined quality of 'gender.'
so i am an immigrant to Reality from nowhere in particular. in the usa, it felt like i was a japanese immigrant; in japan, it felt like i was a [my microculture] immigrant; and elsewhere, some confusing mix of everything that had come before. what culture's food do i cook? those of southern china. what culture's garb do i wear? those of america or japan, depending on the occasion. what culture's songs do i sing? too many to list. what culture's fables were passed down to me? the mansis and the nganasans. what culture informs my etiquette? my microculture and the internet. what culture's language do i speak? i only really feel comfortable speaking generic anglosphere literary english crossed with generic anglosphere internet english. i know reasonable amounts of other languages too, but nothing remotely to my satisfaction as much as literary english.
what culture's standard of living do i expect? my microculture's, originally, but now i will take whatever comfort i can get whenever it is feasible, regardless of how unfairly first world it is. i do not expect my life to be so comfortable as the first worlders', but i aspire to it anyway. currently my life is the most comfortable it's ever been, more comfortable than almost anyone's will ever be. it is not what i'm used to, and it will only last another couple months, but i am making the best of it.
what culture's perspectives do i most often take on political issues? i believe all my political beliefs can be found on tumblr somewhere, held more earnestly and argued more eloquently than i can, but i am alienated by anything that treats a western issue or perspective as globally important and relevant, especially when people seem to assume some amenity of their country is a worldwide standard of civilisation. (for example, i am annoyed by the assumption that hrt is fundamental to gender transition, and that trans people in poorer countries are all constantly thinking 'god i wish i had hrt.' not that that isn't still common, but that speaks more to a cross-cultural absorption of western priorities and concepts of gender than it does to its fundamental importance. this is, of course, hypocritical of me, because i'd be upset if i didn't have hrt, but here we are.)
but really, reader, everything above is terribly, terribly, terribly terribly irrelevant. it is not part of sadlyglyphtaken's Tumblr Identity, it's just an exhaustive auditing of what has shaped sadlyglyphtaken's so-called 'experiences' and 'worldview' (except for my interactions with my kin identity, which i take vastly more seriously than anything written here and represent the vast majority of my day to day experiences these days but is entirely secret for irrelevant reasons), for the sort of person who cares about that kind of thing, of which there are many of on tumblr but which i hope will rarely have much to do with me. you can educate me on how to be woker about an irl issue i have a harmful opinion on, but you cannot force me to care about irl in general. i don't consider myself native to Reality. i don't even consider myself native to the internet. i am native only to my daydreams, the place i truly stayed in all my travels, the home i returned to every day. i barely exist here. i don't experience interiority or consciousness and i barely experience agency.
even the text you read is a lie. the text is just my body. it is an extremely long, sinuous spool of a body, breathing and shuddering along its length, frequently coughing up and drooling ink in its sickness, but it is not a body that does much, or represents much, or means much. and it is even the only animate part of me. my so-called 'irl body' is a doll that i dress up and make up narratives about. alas, it was never quite able to adopt my doll cultural ideal of having no needs whatsoever, and it still eats and breathes and so on, but it is the best i could do under the circumstances. he can barely move, maria, my doll, but i meticulously pose his poorly fitted joints so that he sometimes imitates life. make no mistake, reader. he is very, very dead.
so i apologise for implicitly assuming everyone else on the web to be a fellow text creature. but everything else is too much for me. too abstract. too hyperreal. you'd understand, too, if you were a text creature. you'd understand how pretty text creatures are, and how deserving of affection they are, just for being themselves. you'd want to stroke that sinuous body with your finger on your smartphone's touch screen, or with your mouse on your computer's screen, too
