Gender Transition

I don't know how it's possible for life to keep getting both harder and better, I just know that it is possible.

I don't mind, particularly. I'm a stubborn old bird, and as long as the quantity of the better keeps rising in proportion to the harder, I can maintain my equilibrium. 2024 was a bit over the top on this score, though.

For the prior few years I had been cocooning. It's a luxury I had available to me by virtue of the fact that I had already sleepwalked into a situation where I was living in near-total social isolation. So when I packed up and moved a thousand kilometres to a city where I knew nobody, with no particularly well-developed plan for what I was going to do with my life, I can't imagine anybody thought it odd. Well, no more odd than anything else about me.

[The reader is advised to to hear the following in an Alan Bennett-style northern lilt.]

I feel torn between congratulating myself on how much I achieved this year, and chiding myself over what I didn't do. It's just my way, I suppose.

I Went Out in Public as Me

It seems hard to believe now, but the most I'd ever done prior to 2023 was to occasionally sneak out onto the back stairs of Hellscape Court with a glass of wine, late at night when I was reasonably certain the psychopaths had all passed out.