my no-contact christo-fascist mom apparently spent some time putting together a set of little photo albums of ME as a kid and y'all—it was something else.
First off, my gran introduced it with, "your mom made these to remember you."
So I'm like, "I'm not dead??!" 😅
I could've just ignored them, but it's not like I'm scared of old pictures of me, so "sure why not." I dropped them on the dining room table next to my beer.
And it was, mostly, just a bunch of pictures of me, ages 0 to 18. But the special thing—the part she added—were little annotation stickers on every other photo.
The stickers were just a bunch of words like "Happy." "Friends." "Cute." "Love." "Mountains." "Travel."
It's so stupid and irritating that she's got it into her head that the reason I want nothing to do with her is because I think that she was a bad mother who gave me a miserable childhood—when it's entirely because she's a bigot right now. I mean, do I wish she'd never done drills where she pretended to shoot me for god? Yeah, but nobody's perfect.
The whole project was obviously meant to tell me, "LOOK! You were SO HAPPY being a GIRL like you ALWAYS WERE." (I'm dressed like a boy in half of them.)
I grabbed some post-its from my grandpa's desk and added my own notations.
On four whole photos of me flirting with a kid on the bus to Berlin, I wrote, "I still like flirting with guys." Mainly because it was the only way I could hang with the boys, but that's another essay.
On pics of me in hand-me-downs from the boys at church, I wrote, "I was always glad you let me wear boys clothes. I was very comfortable here."
On pics of me smiling awkwardly in ugly dresses, I wrote, "Hated that dress, I wore it because you liked it." On the pretty dresses I wrote, "loved that dress."
On the one of me smiling awkwardly at 15 with bad hair I wrote, "I was so uncomfortable then. I felt gross and unlikable."
On the one of me at college with the first purse I ever wore, "This was a time when I was putting a lot of effort into looking like a woman because I wanted to be accepted."
On the others— "I still like horses." "I still love travel." "I still like mountains." "I still have friends!"
"I have always been nonbinary. I just didn't have the words to express it back then."
prguitarman
dailybridgerton
gummygunk
yousharknotpass
snowghoul
blakekathryn
