Validate My Life @validatemylife - Tumblr Blog

Posts

The previous ask was In reference to your tags on the trans post . The article about the transitioning to a guy. The james frankie commentary one.

I promise it gets better.

It’s hard, too - aside from my Tragic Backstory (a tale for another time) I have to live with the acute knowledge of what’s wrong with my body, rather than the old, vague sense of foreboding. My mom still calls me my deadname. I got a Christmas card addressed to “Aunt Eli.” I’ve been wearing a binder for almost 9 years and it’s starting to hurt. I have too much blood and sweat like a hooker in church.

But it’s so much better. There is a reason I keep the date of my first T shot in my bio. I celebrate that anniversary every year, but now it’s so mundane that I often don’t realize until a week or a month later.

One of the first things that happened was that I started growing curly, luxurious leg hair. I started hearing my voice, seeing my face. I walked past a glass door in my women’s skinny jeans and went, “holy shit my legs are shaped like man legs.” I got denied service at a bar because they didn’t believe the person on my ID could be the person in front of them (it wasn’t, to be fair, but she and I looked VERY similar before I transitioned).

I have a job I love. My bosses like and appreciate me. My minions I mean undergrad workers probably think I’m annoying, but I’m funny and know more than them so they put up with me anyways. I’ve been in loving relationships with women (in a straight way) and loving relationships with men (in a gay way) (technically bisexual but you know what I mean). I live in a cute, shitty little rented house with my beautiful partner of 4.5 years, my big fat asshole cat, and his two tiny little polite ones.

Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of bad before the good. I made a lot of stupid decisions when I was young. I consistently found myself in crazy, dangerous situations because I didn’t care if I lived or died. I had a weird bad time in college. I had a WEIRD, BAD time in college. I’ve had shit jobs and I’ve always been broke. I didn’t finish my master’s degree and I’d rather cut off my foot and eat it than try THAT again. Transitioning didn’t fix any of that, but it was WAY better than all of that plus not transitioning.

And you know what? Life is boring, now. I wake up and I go to my little job, I have my little meetings and run my little machines (I’m a manufacturing engineer/machinist). I drive home to my little house in my little hoopty and I kiss my little boyfriend. We have a little argument about who has to pick out what we’re eating for dinner, we watch our little shows and play our little video games. I read my little books before we go to our little bed and lay us down to our little sleep. It’s pleasant mundanity. Gentle domesticity. And it happens to me, and I get to live it as a man. It’s just… life that I get to live.

MY life. MY mistakes. MY relationships that I cherish so dearly. MY deep(er) voice and MY hairy legs and MY flat ass and MY titties that are now really just an inconvenience til I can get top surgery. MY vagina that I made my peace with, once I could build myself a foundation from which to build peace.

I never thought I would make it to 18. I never thought I would make it to 20, when I started T. I never thought I would pass, I never thought I would make it to 21, let alone almost 30 (god, how did I get so old). I genuinely thought I was chemically incapable of happiness, that there was something wired wrong in my brain so badly that my life would be lifeless forever.

And yet.

I have found peace. I have made peace, I have built it for myself. I have forced the world to give it to me and defended it bitterly. I have beaten my rotten life into submission with my fists and my feet and I have found stability and happiness. Whatever storms may come, whatever sacrifices are still to be made and sadnesses to be endured, I am alive and I love to be alive.

It gets better. I promise, I promise, I promise. I don’t know you and you don’t know me but I love you and I promise it gets better.

#sorry I’ve rambled.#I don’t know if any of this helps #or if it’s just me talking about myself a lot all self important #but it does get better #it does #I remember that feeling.#I wish I had the words to tell you what I mean #unfortunately I’ll have to settle for hoping some of this rings true for you

a-cipher

anon I want you to know that I am always thinking about this

cuppydogshane

My Name is 8 PM. and I am always arriving when you atrent Looking

the-disemvoweler

M Nm s 8 PM. nd m lws rrvng whn y trnt Lkng

consonant-remover

8.y

I o a a i's ooa eo

cuppydogshane

if you two had a baby it would be a regular sentence. or perhaps silence.

unyieldingsilence

‎

cuppydogshane

Right.

androdragynous

every time overwatch does pride stuff (there's skins this year) I stand by that they should give winston a trans pride cosmetic and never address it anywhere else

androdragynous

excuse me for..... coming out

oneheadtoanother

depsidase

brarchives

jaguars in manaus, amazonas, brasil, photographed by caio vieira

oysters-aint-for-me

boys won’t be boys

angelicdewdrop

homelessrichgirl2

marinebiologyshitposts

white-spotted pufferfish attracting a mate:

powerbottombrucespringsteen

The thing is nobody at pride is evaluating you to determine if you’re queer enough to be there because they’re too busy thinking “it’s so hot out” and “why is this lemonade 12 dollars?”

a-book-of-creatures

o o_

#it looks like two angry birds with their wings out

memecucker

Invention of bread is weird bc it’s like some Neolithic ppl were like “hey you know that tall grass thing that’s sorta edible but not really how about we take it and grind it into a very very fine powder which is extra backbreaking right now bc the wheel won’t be invented for awhile and then we mix it with water and heat it up and you know what let’s also toss some mold in there just to see what happens”

quoms

there are a number of distinct steps though, each of which can be observed in isolation. “grind tough seeds to make them edible” is practiced with other foods besides grains (like acorns). the natural next step after that is to add water, which gives you porridge: a common ancient roman meal was puls, very similar to modern cream of wheat. once you have that you also have a simple dough, and baking it to preserve it is a logical experiment (as is baking some you forgot about and left out for a few days, just so you don’t waste it... voila, leavened bread)

there could have been, and probably was (though i’m not an archaeologist) a substantial time between each of these innovations. it’s not too hard to imagine people being chill with “grind seeds for soup, select plants for bigger seeds” for a good while

quasi-normalcy

Do you ever wonder how many amazing things are fated to go forever uninvented because each step necessary to invent them is a completely unintuitive thing to do?

noctumsolis

Okay, that's not how bread was invented. I wrote a potted history, I could try to dig that out if anyone is interested?

quasi-normalcy

Please do

panecultus

I'm putting this on my bread blog, because of course I am. Also tagging @appendingfic who I think expressed interest.

Tens of thousands of years ago people foraged and hunted for their food and ate whatever they could. Among their forage were wild cereals, which included the ancestors of modern cultivated wheat, barley and others.

People like sweet things. Grains are starchy, but if sprouted they start converting those starches to sugars, so people would've left grains in water to sprout. These sprouts are also easier to digest, thus more nutritious, which bestowed an invisible advantage on those sprouting their grains.

If grains are left in water too long, however, they begin to ferment. Alcohol is produced. People like alcohol.

In ancient Mesopotamia the fermented grains were experimented with, resulting in an early form of beer. The process of making that beer was quite complicated and involved a combination of sprouted and mashed grains.

People wanted beer all year round, but early beers did not have long shelf lives and the grain could only be harvested at certain times. So the ancient Mesopotamians invented a way of storing the ingredients for beer.

It was made of the grain mash, honey, dates and spices that were fermented to make beer. For storage, prior to fermentation, the mixture was baked dry, cut into smaller pieces and baked again to remove all water. This produced bapir, a product very much like biscotti, which could be stored for later rehydration and fermentation. Sometimes it was eaten instead.

I've made bapir, and I've eaten it. It is brittle but delicious. It's also a form of unleavened bread.

Bread was invented as a way to store the ingredients for beer, which was most likely a development from a chance discovery. Leavened bread (that is, with bubbles) may well have been discovered when a mixture like that for bapir was accidentally allowed to ferment before baking. Yeast is responsible for both alcohol production and leavening.

There's a lot more to it, in terms of the cultivation of grains and the development of milling, than I've written here. It's been a process of millennia to go from chewing sprouts to eating soft white bread like that pictured. But every step along the way was small and simple.

quasi-normalcy

I never would have guessed that beer pre-existed bread. I've always just assumed that beer was an accidental discovery by breadmakers.

jenniferrpovey

Nope, beer came first. Mead is also very old.

headspace-hotel

Thanks, ancient humans!

thirtyknives

Australian First Nations people developed their own bread making culture independent of the beer-base route. As far as I'm aware, pre colonial Australia had little to nothing by way of fermented drinks at all, so the likelihood of beer being part of the evolution of native breads is unlikely. Their breads, made from native grasses, are both leavened and unleavened. There's also different bread making practices using different grains, dependent on location - Australia is big and Indigenous culture over here is no more a monolith than it is anywhere else. Kamilaroi bread is different to Yuin bread, for example.

The colonization of Australia actively suppressed Indigenous knowledge, and creating an image of the idle wandering tribes was required to justify taking Aboriginal lands. This means a lot of the archeology of how First Nations people developed their breads has not just been lost but deliberately suppressed. The idea that they were settled enough to have ovens, let alone a bread-making tradition, is only now really being examined. I wouldn't be surprised if the grains-porridge-bread route was true for Aussie breads, though.