Entry 30

it's time for another entry of this blog that no one reads!

so i'm back! kinda. i have not made a single update to any part of this site unfortunately, because life has indeed been life-ing lately.

sooo many things have been happening to me and because of me in my life so far ever since my last entry. 2025 has been... well, it definitely has been interesting so far, i can say that for sure.

my birthday this year was the worst i've ever had because of a little Incident that happened to me that also led my therapist to finally diagnose me with: PTSD! i won't go into the details but my reaction was... not quite the best. not one of my best moments, that's for sure ^^;

that being said, despite my triggered reaction, i handled it the best i could with the information i had at the time and i didn't impulsively jump into action like i wanted to. my therapist said that the last thing i needed to do was fuck shit up for myself right when i was working so hard towards transitioning and entering a new phase of my life that spelled success and happiness for me. so yah

and then RIGHT after that happened, i got my testosterone rx! on may 30th, i did my 1st T shot and i've just recently completed 1 month on T :) yippee!

it kinda felt like a reward at the end of a long, dark tunnel that had me trapped p much my entire life, but most def held me back most recently in my life for damn sure. and it was a lil reward for me handling my recent triggering event like a damn champ, all things considered ( ◡̀_◡́)ᕤ

i've survived! i survived that event. i've survived years of living in a body that did not serve me and that i was trapped and caged in for most of my life until recently... and i survived this year so far. fuck yes, let's pour it up 🥂

... and back to that PTSD diagnosis... yep. i have suffered for so long from PTSD borne of a shitty childhood that i can't believe i didn't put it together sooner. the out-of-body experiences, the terrible jumbled memories, bad depression, anger issues... yep. yeah. i should have seen the signs, but i was always convinced that i had inherited the depression that all of the women in my family had. now i'm seeing that perhaps they didn't have depression either... well. not JUST depression if ya know what i mean.

it explains so much that i have suffered from in my past. i would cut people off as a coping mechanism and my brain would help me with it by effortlessly erasing so many of their memories from my "files". i'd burn bridges and get rid of places, people, memories, things, anything that i had-- simply as a result of an unstable childhood. i could never keep friends to save my life... least of all anything i wanted to keep. so i never did. i lost everything by letting it slip from my grasp, and as the years went by and i became further alienated from myself, the warning signs would start to show.

now i'm in my late 20's and thanks to a year of therapy, i've been mostly restored. my therapist would give me little assignments, grounding techniques to pull my soul and consciousness back into my flesh and blood body anchored into the real world. she'd help me get out of "survival mode" many times before, and it worked. i'm so so grateful that after having so many terrible therapists in the past, i stuck with this one and she saved me over and over again!

now my last session with her is next week. her contract is up with the therapy agency that i signed up at, and i'm grateful more than i am disappointed. we did great work in the time that we were paired together! i was able to excavate my gender identity enough to go forward with transitioning, i've learned to meet myself where i'm at and unpack so many awful traumatic memories from my childhood. i developed healthy coping mechanisms and habits that help me come back down to earth as often as i can. i'm no longer a ghost floating thru life and watching things play out like a movie before my very eyes. i feel like i'm actually living life now, not having life live thru me.

it was HAAARD. god it was hard. i would be a giant liar if i didn't say that i wanted to give up some days, esp on the days where i was so frustrated bc i thought that what my therapist was propositioning (learning to do meditations, grounding techniques, love myself, etc) was impossible for someone like me to reach. i tried a million things to try and unpack my own trauma and learn to accept myself in the past-- but alone. and a certain substack essay that went viral a couple years back puts it better than i ever can: we can't heal alone!

so with her help, i did it. i've accomplished the herculean feat of coming back into my body. it took a lot of months of audio diary entries to really claw thru the layers of bullshit that i had heaped onto myself thru the years, getting past all of the avoidant coping mechanisms i had installed into my consciousness, and finally sitting with myself as i truly was-- no moralizing or judgment. just me. my past, my present, and now my future.

i'm mars! i survived 100% of the days that i have been alive on this earth and i can probably survive a few more. i don't have to let my past define my future. and the most important lesson i've learned in therapy is: that i can play the cards that i'm dealt. everyone gets dealt a hand of cards in life, and some might bemoan their shitty hand, while others are born with the best deck of cards this world can offer. it isn't what you're dealt, though. it's how you play it.

so i'm taking all of this knowledge i've gained so far and i'm seeing how i can apply it to my daily life from now on. idk if i'll ever truly get over my trauma... and i'm still left with the knowledge that i have and still struggle with PTSD til this very day. but now that i'm armed with that knowledge, i feel like a huge weight has been lifted off of my shoulders. it's bittersweet in a way... i've received the diagnosis i knew i've been after my whole life, but... yeah. now i know what's wrong with me and i have to deal with it in future scenarios, i suppose.

either way, massive mission accomplished. i wanted to unpack my trauma with someone before i hit my 30's, because i knew it would be dangerously detrimental to myself and anyone who wanted to be in my life if i didn't. so many people still walk this earth alienating themselves from their friends, their communities, and their family members... and well-- i've worked in a nursing home for a year. i know how that ends up. shiver.

in these current uncertain political times, it's important to stay connected and anchored to real life. stay in touch with the community. stay active and most importantly, PROactive.

i've been leaning away from scrolling on social media a lot, since i really want to wean myself off of so many ppl's unhelpful opinions, but bc i know that doomscrolling for hours a day is completely antithetical to all my grounding exercizes i've been doing lol.

i read a LOT more now these days, after finishing my movie craze earlier this year. i'm still consuming horror, but i'm allowing myself to sit with what i watch and consume now instead of immediately looking up theories and behind-the-scenes trivia on the whole production. i'm currently juggling Thomas Harris' Silence Of The Lambs after finishing Red Dragon while also reading Mendel Johnson's Let's Go Play At The Adams'.

reading is very very verrrry good for slowing down, stopping, pondering authors' thoughts and writing techniques and just the state of the world in general. i find that it personally helps me connect more to past events in history and so therefore, it helps ground me in the present moment as certain things get put further into context.

for example, i knew that the isreali-palestine "conflict" (it's a fucking genocide, and palestine will be free in our lifetimes, i promise you that) has been happening since the late 40's. the Nakba happened in 1948, after all. but Thomas Harris mentioned it being a pertinent topic of political discussion amongst other topic-du-jours of the late 80's in america. in many ways, SOTL is a very 80's book, grounded in its time. and other times... it's frighteningly modern.

old folks were not kidding when they say picking up a book is so much more intellectually nutritious for us than mindlesssly reading whatever the almighty algorithm feeds us. in a lot of ways, those guys knew what they were talking about. go figure!

i've also been taking walks all over my neighborhhod, up and down the streets whenever the weather and my energy permits. just today, i drove about 25 mins away just to go traipsing in some nature trail that i never visited before. i was eaten to death by mosquitos for sure but i enjoyed the fresh air, good weather, beautiful nature views, and most of all-- at least an hour of no phone time.

god, it feels so GOOD to be anchored in the present. we live in such a hyper-capitalist nightmare that we never really know HOW to stop and smell the flowers at all. i remember during my 1st therapist appt, i was instructed to do a guided mediation thing in order to slow down and breathe and i couldn't even do that. i was deadass hyperventialiting while doing it, my mind racing while thinking abt a million other things, guilty that i wasn't paying attention to my therapist as she told me how to breathe in and out.

now, i sit on benches and stare at trees and talk to myself my phone just to hear my thoughts played back to me at a later time. i really use my overthinking and overly analytical brain FOR me, not against me. it's such a blessing.

so yeah! hopefully i can use my overanalytical brain for good so that i can finally update my horror shrine and offer the world more opinions on horror movies. instead of using my overanalytical brain to destroy my life and push everyone who ever cares abt me away ^^;

i'm not perfect by any means, but self acceptance truly is a fantastic start towards the long journey of true healing. i feel like i'm on that path, finally. after years of struggling, isolating, using self-help books and blog posts, watching countless therapy and mental health vids on youtube... i'm finally heading in the right direction.

well... at least, that's what my therapist says! :)