With a flower in her hair

I have a history with camellias. They grew in glorious abundance around our family home, and I always loved their blossoming, for itself and as a sign of spring in general. But they also play a part in a memory I’ve never confided to anyone until now. It was spring of my senior year of [...]

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Oh, I recognize this barrel

I’ve been posting with my new identity to a few places I’ve been active at before, and find myself enmeshed in all the usual arguments about unrecognized privilege, discrimination’s existence without consciously bigoted intent, all the Awareness 101 stuff. At the same time, I’m reading and thinking about the discussions at trans places about moving [...]

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Self-reconciling kitty is self-reconciling

This week so far, four of my long-time friends have told me some flavor of, “Wow, you seem a lot less stressed this week.” So far I’ve replied with something along the lines of, “Yes, I made some big progress on old personal stuff. I’ll tell you more when I get a bit more sorted [...]

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Learning to listen, learning to follow

One of the really big turning points in my life came about a decade ago when a female friend whom I often chat with online demonstrated to me, kindly but firmly, with lots and lots of quotes, just how much I was hitting her with classic male dominance behaviors: cutting her off, not answering questions [...]

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Broken wings under an invisible sun

All through recent months as I’ve tried to sort out my gender identity, I’ve listened to a lot of music from my teen years. Not exclusively, because I don’t ever do complete era/genre/whatever exclusivity, but songs from about 1976 to 1985 have dominated my playlists. There’s no surprise in it, either: music has always been [...]

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Let’s start at the very beginning

A very good place to start, at least according to Rodgers and Hammerstein. When I was young, our family bookshelves included a beautiful edition of Ozma of Oz. I don’t recall that we had any other Oz books, though we saw the movie often enough on television. Maybe we did and they just didn’t make [...]

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