09/03- It's been something like nine months since I've written and I'm starting to feel like I'm being corraled [sp?] into Normal Real Life, wherein I move in with my girlfriend, get a nice job where I look normal, and am forced to grow up. And what do grownups do? Stay one sex.

My god.

We've been together for about 1.75 years, something like that. And once again I've got a girlfriend for whom I'm keeping quiet about my gender. For whom I'm abstaining from being an internet tranny, and for whom I'm trying to masturbate my transsexuality into submission, every night that she's not here.

What does it mean that I've found another girl who's all distant? Physically, again. She wasn't, and this move wasn't forseeable, but still: we live hours away from each other. Within months we'll be moving in together and moving on with our lives and she loves me and I love her. This creeps in every once in a while, this gender ashiness, and it's the second time it's happened in a relationship. I'm sharp enough to notice a pattern.

Did you read She's Not There? Dress Codes? I gobbled them up secretly, like some fifties housewife lesbian and dimestore dyke fiction. (I heard an author of such fiction on NPR, she sounded cool.) So let's see: two or three years down the line, Alyssa's transitioned; Lyta's transitioned; Tera seems to have transitioned; Pirategirl was never going to transition, Becca transitioned before I met her, and here I am in boxer shorts. And they don't even look cute on me.

I'm realizing that whether or not I'll be attractive, I've got to do this. Whether or not my voice is believable; whether my rib cage is too big; whether I'll be happy or not, I've got to do this, because I am not happy without doing this.

Once again I've got to hurt somebody to be happy and I can't do it. This is not the only reason I can't act.

All this self-awareness and understanding piles up and yet, I can't do anything. I guess I need some kind of validation from a shrink? I need therapy, right? So tell me how I'm going to do that on eight dollars an hour. Please.

I am potential energy.

Hey have you read Kelly Link? I love her.

We are not going to get into the national political and literal climate.

So once again I'm feeling collapsed and corralled, like I said. Unable to get out of this rough skin, away from this great girl, out of this very literal overwriting tendency.

I'm not overwriting.

I am.

Whatever.

This doesn't go away, does it? I just keep piercing my body, trying to bleed it out the holes; I try to grow it out with my hair, to keep it on the outside by wearing it as little bracelets.

I need someone I know to tell me it's okay. And they don't know to, because I need somebody to tell me that it's okay, to make it okay for me to tell them.

I need to write more, go to the gym more, be more. All these albums lately? Pretty Girls Make Graves: "This is Our Emergency." The Bouncing Souls: "Don't forget that you are born free/better to die on your feet than to live on your knees," "What are songs for without the strength to live your life that way;" "with a heart so big that you can't hide/ you chose the path of a slow suicide"

The entire catelogue of Andrew W.K. telling and showing and making me feel like it's okay to be me, no matter how lame that is.

I have a friend who is an alcoholic. He's gotten over his hump in life, and he's the most positive, amazing guy ever. It's amazing because he was quite a junkie. For years. Like, an honest to god, I-can't-believe-you're-alive junkie. We hang out now and I feel like I can be completely open because he's found that enlightenment-like space where he is in the world and that's it. Not at odds with things, just okay. I feel like I could reach that place with myself, like it wouldn't be so hard, if I could just get over myself. I can't.

We have a mutual friend who is a raging alcoholic. He is also particularly intelligent. My ex-addict friend was saying that you can survive as an intelligent alcoholic for years and years, if you're self-aware, because you can pull it off, squeeze under the line, just make (or juuuust miss) deadlines, and make things work. And then you wake up fifty and have spent your life drunk and missed it.

That's what I'm doing. So self-aware, so immobilized. And I'm so good at projecting this persona I've been cultivating since I was little. It's evolved! Just like a real person. I'm more comfortable with everything else in my life, but I still can't do anything about this. Step one has got to be getting a shrink, I guess.

I decided on a name, too. For myself. Which I would (will? I can't quite bring myself to type "will," instead of "could") use for myself in real life- no, I shan't be going by Melissa. My name is very pretentious. My god! The more I talk about this, the more it seems like reality, like a possibility. Some small degree of happiness? I can't even feel it in my imagination.

Oh yeah and also: there is fear.