Alicja (and Artemida and Mara, see bio)

(thread, 1/2)

Story time!

My wife and I went to a hot pot at her friend's place.

We arrived first, to our surprise. We said hi, the host apologised for not everything being ready yet.

My wife asked if she could help, so she washed her hands, was given a knife and was stationed at a cutting board to chop vegetables.

My wife had literally just returned to our home city on a train. And barely slept last night. It's not important to the story but it's relevant.

I was feeling lazy so I didn't help out for now. I sheepishly apologised and asked if it was ok if I don't help out and can rest a tiny bit. The host said sure. So far, so normal.

Soon, the other three guests arrived. A married straight couple and another man.

The woman jumped straight to helping. The men grabbed a beer each and started chatting.

It was so fucking uncomfortable for reasons that are difficult to articulate, so I helped out a little too. I washed and peeled some oranges that were going to be a palate cleanser for the meal.

It's not that not everyone did stuff. There wasn't that much TO do. Definitely not enough work for six people.

It's the dynamic of what happened. The... pacing. The vibe.

It's not that the men didn't help or offer to help. It's that every tiny little thing about their body language indicated it didn't occur to them as an option.

It was screamingly obvious, even to me, a trans woman who had decades to settle into the "male" role and I'm honestly not used to that aspect of being a woman. I mean, I did start out not helping because I was tired, when my wife did and was obviously five times more tired. I'm not perfect in this situation.

But even I quickly joined the other girls because it was all so... icky. So viscerally uncomfortable to not help. It felt wrong.

It still feels wrong. Not that women did the work. No, I mean the fact that the work was invisible to men. Very clearly. It you asked me how I know, I'd struggle to tell you. But I know.

Cis women reading this are, I would guess, either nodding along or mildly surprised that this is news to me. Trans women who've transitioned a while ago as well, probably.

And I can't guarantee it, but I imagine some other trans women have awoken to this shit as well when their perceived position changed.

I was thinking maybe I was making a thing gendered when it isn't, so I did message my wife and pointed out that who worked and who didn't fell across gender lines and does it always happen like that. She said yes.

(duh)

And like... the issue is not that the two guys didn't do anything. I didn't chastise them for doing nothing because them doing anything was not needed. I couldn't articulate to them why the situation felt so... slimy.

And a lot of men reading this post right here are still not gonna get it. They're going to say I see the patriarchy everywhere.

Which is my issue.

I was raised the same way. I too got comfortable with this learnt helplessness. I too am still somewhat bad at doing stuff I should be doing.

If you're a man, your mom did stuff for you and then, chances are, your girlfriend or wife became your new mommy. And not the sexy kind.

If you're a man and you're somewhat progressive, you might want to help your partner around the house. And you miss that you just read that previous sentence and didn't see an issue with me using the word "help".

It's not something that can just be undone, because trying to make men aware of this dynamic, and a million other dynamics, will get a woman labelled a "nag".

Here's my early #GEM #GEMonday . I am going to a thing. I went through some outfit ideas but nothing really worked.

So finally I settled on the simple, tried and true formula.

Black opaque tights (leggings, but whatever), light blue denim shorts, Nightwish T-shirt that shows a bit of neck and almost bare the shoulders, black canvas bag with a cat, eye makeup like I headbutted a coal miner, white Doc Martens because of course, silver necklace, and a bright purple plaid shirt around my waist for a splash of colour.

Hey, classic looks are classic for a reason ;3 and also, the world needs to be made aware that basic bitches come in more than just pink xD

And clearly it was a good choice. At the convenience store, a guy who looked... like, halfway between a construction worker and a hobo told the cashier to ring my stuff first.

And he referred to me as a woman.

I had NOT seen that coming. That's not the kind of guy that gets it right. Ever.

The conclusion is simple. I have to always dress like it's 1999 and I'm about to yell at my parents and slam the door to my room ^_^ /hj

I know I repeat myself, but pleasuring myself is so different on HRT. It's transcendent. Not easily and not always, but the ceiling of where I can go is so much higher than ever before.

And as I've said many times before, just going at it without any pressure to orgasm is so much better than finishing pre-transition.

I do need to invest in a vibrator. If my fingers can do this much, I wonder what a toy could do.

To be conservative essentially means believing you're the exception. The rule doesn't encompass you. You're special.

Which rule? Well, the specifics of that shape what kind of conservative you are. From a libertarian to a religious nut, from a Respectable Gay to a gun nut. From a racist to a transphobe.

But you have to believe your own lie that you're better than others. More aware. More of a person.

If you don't know what I mean, read "The only moral abortion is my abortion" for an example. It's easily available online.

It fascinates me that people who very much eat meat are often various levels of uncomfortable or weirded out by animal products not made of meat, like tripe or what goes into a sausage or whatever.

My friend, you already eat chunks of a carcass. You already gave up on the notion of avoiding the ickiness. How is a leg inherently less upsetting to eat than a stomach. If you eat dairy, you eat basically spoilt milk. And milk itself comes from modified sweat glands.

If you want to go vegetarian or vegan, good! Eating meat is unethical and has its own health issues, and also it's bad for the environment. If you don't, fine. Get off your high horse and enjoy the horse meat.

I consciously try to reduce meat in my diet and am considering going vegetarian. But because of ethical and environmental concerns, not because of arbitrary, cultural notions of what is gross.

Today at #rollerderby I didn't exactly do contact stuff, but almost-kinda-sorta (I was the jammer for an exercise. Sort of). I can smell the time when I'm allowed to train during contact practice and I can't wait!

We also did 27-in-5*. This was the third time I've done this. First time I managed 19 laps. Second time, 20 laps. Today I was like two-three seconds short of making it to 22. So I am improving with every attempt so far!

I didn't pace myself well. This was the first time when I actually skate well enough that I can give it some speed and stamina becomes an issue. On my previous attempts the big thing was not falling down or wasting too much time on turns.

Given how close I came to 22, I strongly suspect I'll improve on my result once more when we do 27-in-5 again!

*for those who don't know, it's when you have five minutes, you ride around the track for that time and you complete as many laps as you can. You guessed it, 27 is the threshold to prove you have sufficient skill in that area.

There are some methods etc. in #godot that my brain just bounces right off of. I have to look them up over and over again and never seem to remember.

I just had a thought xD

What if I wrote a script that just has a bunch of methods that I can actually *remember* and all they do is do the thing I struggle to remember how to do?

As in, all a function would do is invoke another function.

That would be like two lines of code or whatever. Would that slow things down too much?

So as y'all know, I am bad bad bad BAD at staying consistent at doing stuff. I already wrote how I'm building up the habit of working on stuff (so far I am two for two days!), but I also need to hack my brain for hobbies, notably game dev.

So I am trying this thing where I play Torchlight 2 and for every level up I actually do (which according to game stats is about every ten minutes or so), I do 10 minutes of game dev, either working on Godot itself or thinking and making notes.

And the smart thing, I think, is that I don't do that every 10 minutes or whatever, or whenever I level up in the game. Because that'd be disruptive and it'd actually make me resent the switch and my brain would actually keep sliding off of the game dev tasks.

Instead I switch only after actually spending the character and skill points. Which means if I want to keep playing I just don't do that every level, and also it happens whenever there's no actual action in the game, AND I switch to Godot every time I get that dopamine boost from Number Go Up. In practice, I leveled up usually every two levels or so, then worked for 20+ minutes.

I tried this approach today. It worked well, at least this first time!

I got a good 50+ minutes of honest work out of this. Not just staring at the screen and doing nothing, either. Properly moving forward.

I didn't *make* much, but I definitely moved forward.

I didn't exactly chomp at the bit to work rather than play, but my brain was sufficiently poked and prodded that I never got bored. And by the time the 10 or 20 minutes of working were up, I often felt this "I am almost there, maybe a few minutes" impulse which primed my brain to return to the work several minutes later.

It worked surprisingly well, is what I'm saying.

I don't think it'll work indefinitely because the ADHD brain adapts to things and once it stops seeing novelty in this switching up, it will probably start avoiding it too.

But for now I think it's a brilliant approach for me specifically.

Plus, it helps me avoid that behaviour loop where I level up and I immediately want to play just a little bit with the higher stats or the newly available weapon or whatever, and of course then I want to play until a level up or two, and I end up sinking hours into the game.

(and as a person who once scrolled TikTok for 14 hours straight... yeah.)

No, whenever I feel this Skinner Box pull to continue is when I stop and do something else, and that short-circuits the bad behaviour to an extent.

Ever noticed how when sapphic girls obsess, even in cringy or obnoxious ways, about something they find sexy or sexual they usually frame it in terms of imagining a *person* or a *situation*, and straight and even to an extent gay guys tend to focus on the specific *thing* they find arousing?

No, this is by no means universal. But it's a pronounced general difference.

It's almost like the most important thing in a woman's sexuality is another person.

I have reached the point in my HRT where masturbation is so much more pleasurable than pre-transition that even when I finished the "male" way it barely registered to me and I did not even slow down because the sensation was almost irrelevant compared to the sensation I was having throughout.

Female sexuality is so much better than male sexuality, at least for me, I can't even tell y'all.

No real (as in, female) orgasm this time around, but it almost doesn't matter!

Y'all know how bad I am with habits. I've had some success building up physical activity (see my earlier post today), and I'm working on other stuff.

But I am now confident enough in what I am already working on (despite failing often) that I'm adding one more thing.

I am gonna do 30 minutes every day of what I consider work. It does not include hobbies or art or sports or anything like that. It's gonna be cleaning, tidying up, shopping and all sorts of chores, as well as job hunting and just everything that is supposed to be part of being an adult.

And each day after today, I will add 3 minutes to those 30 and I will keep going until I reach 6 hours, which is a reasonable day's work.

That will make me productive like a normal person, more or less, within less than 5 months. Without eating into my time massively OR making stuff too difficult from the get-go.

And yes, I intend to pick and choose what I want to do on any given day so that I can beat ADHD. But I will have time to just Do Stuff, and once I find a rhythm, it'll probably be at fixed hours because I really need to build a daily rhythm.

(I will adjust if I get a job in the meantime, of course)

This plan is subject to readjustment, but that's what I'm going with initially.

EDIT: More is permissible of course, but 30 minutes plus 3 minutes per day is the absolute minimum.

OK, so I have my official statistics for exercise in March.

The worst thing about it is that I walked/ran 7256 steps per day on average, way lower than my plan of about 10600/day.

But I am giving myself a pass on that.

One, it's still the best result since October of 2025.

Two, March is the first time since 2024 I have recorded running in a month (only 422 steps per day on average, but still!). It's also the most running in a single month since, brace yourself, November of '22.

Three, it's the first time since 2024 that I have recorded bicycle riding in a month. It was over 130 km, which amounts to over 4 kilometres per day on average (precisely 4377 metres, because I'm a meticulous numbers nerd). It's the most bicycling since August 2023.

Four, I was at #rollerderby practice 7 times, not counting two events when I was helping with stuff.

Five, I lifted weights 5 times total.

So in summary, this is EASILY the most consistently physically active month I've had in years. Probably well over 10 years.

I intend to keep it going, too!

There are no real people on Fedi, it's just my multiaccounts. To prove this, i will now post this on every alt of mine

(last EDIT: y'all more than came through, I'm incredibly grateful. Thank each and all of you if you Boosted and especially if you donated. Y'all are so generous and this will help so darn much!)

It's Transgender Day of Visibility and I'm trans, hi.

I'm jobless and broke and have overspent in the past month or two.

I don't suppose I could get a little money to make April a bit lighter on me?

Say, if I could collect 150 Euro (which is like 170 USD), it'd make things manageable for me.

Pretty please? My mental health is in the toilet and I could use one source of stress less.

https://ko-fi.com/oddtail
or
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/oddtail

Thanks for even a tiny bit. And Boost if you can't help yourself <3

#mutualaid #begpost #tdov #transgenderdayofvisibility #trans

There's this stock puzzle in video games where you have to do some things in order. Like light up torches or flip switches.

And if you flip the wrong one, they all reset and you have to start from scratch. But you know the sequence of however many you got right.

So eventually you'll get the whole sequence. Makes sense, right?

Now imagine having to solve these puzzles every day, except each puzzle is different, with each you only get one or two attempts (rarely three or four) before you're locked out of the puzzle, and also sometimes you get it wrong and the puzzle does not reset so you merrily keep switching switches only to be told LATER (or worse, figure it out retrospectively) that you fucked up. And you'll be told which switch was wrong, if you're lucky.

Worse, you can't say you're bad at any particular puzzle or ask for a hint directly, because you're supposed to pretend there's no puzzle. Like, there's nothing that puts most people off further interaction more than saying explicitly that you don't know which switch to flip next.

So saying "I don't understand this switch puzzle" makes people angry or weirded out.

This post is not about video games. It's about interacting with people socially. Especially when #actuallyautistic . Or having rejection issues. Or just being socially awkward. Or having few opportunities to socialise.

EDIT: oh, and sometimes you have to solve ten puzzles at once, while keeping track of all the moves you've made, and failing one puzzle can randomly lock you out of one or more of the others, sometimes with no notification.

This optional puzzle challenge is usually known as "going to a party", but there's variants like "working at an office".

Cis girls, you should already know this, but the way transphobic men treat us is pretty much the way they will treat you if they do not immediately want to fuck you.

It is impossible to be transphobic towards trans women without regarding women in general as little more than sex objects. It just isn't.

I don't see this talked about like, ever.

So I'll talk about it.

If you realised you're trans but find yourself sometimes not really hating your assigned gender and being like "meh" to it?

1) That doesn't mean you've been cis all along;
2) It doesn't mean you just imagined your dysphoria;
3) You're not "pretending" anything or lying to anyone, least of all yourself.

It just means you're more tired than dysphoric. Your brain can't keep negative feelings at full steam all the time, which is good. It's not supposed to.

Do not measure your transness by how much you CURRENTLY need to transition. Dysphoria comes and goes. So does euphoria, for that matter.

I went through several cycles of "I am trans. Wait... I don't feel strongly about this anymore. Was that real? No, wait, ARGH, I'm trans. Wait..." and so on, before I started transitioning. Fooled me every single time.

I still experience this. I'm experiencing this today. I am currently wondering why this whole transition thing is such a big deal to me.

But guess what. I know I'm trans, I've been through this before. Doubts that something is true are not the same as knowing it is not.

You will have doubts whether you're trans years after you transition to your general satisfaction. You will. It just happens. You will still be almost certainly happy that you transitioned. That's what being trans means.

If you don't MIND your assigned gender at the moment, but still your actual gender sounds neat, you're still trans.

You're allowed to pause things and recalibrate, or focus on something else. Your transition should go at your pace.

But you haven't suddenly become cis. I promise you that you haven't. You still prefer to function as your real gender, don't you?

I've done this enough times that I need to say it. It's OK. It ebbs and flows. As long as you're not actually *satisfied* with your assigned gender, as long as you have ANY overall need to transition, you're not cis. You may be genderfluid or genderflux or bigender or agender or genderqueer or non-binary. Knock yourself out exploring those (I sure did). There's no penalty for concluding with "nah".

You may also be very Very, Very Tired.

But none of those things mean "cis". I'm begging you, believe me.

EDIT: one good way to figure this out is - OK, so you don't jump for joy at the thought of transitioning. Now imagine yourself in your actual gender. Imagine it's all done and dealt with. Is your imagined self repulsive, do you want to *avoid* this? Does the idea of HAVING transitioned fill you with discomfort?

If not, then you're not cis. Cis people are *uncomfortable* with the idea of transitioning because they inhabit their AGAB. That's their entire deal.

EDIT 2: also, this is the MOST unintuitive thing ever - I firmly believe feeling "meh" about transition can paradoxically be a symptom of dysphoria.

I don't think it's an accident that I currently feel this way after some rough days, and while having to deal with several days' worth of facial hair. One way dysphoria manifests is that your emotions shut down for maintenance. It's good. But it doesn't mean they were never there in the first place.