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Jan. 31st, 2025 06:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newandexcitingshapesthis week, i thought about shaving my head.
also: i realized last night that monday was seven years since the boyfriend of my early 20s dumped me. these things aren't related, except for the ways in which they are. let me back up.
it's a cute story when i tell it, at least it can be. i met him on our first day of college classes, the first class either of us had on the schedule. it was a 9:00 a.m. course; i arrived at 8:20 and he arrived around 8:59. this is meaningful in its way.
we didn't start dating until a month before graduation. i don't feel like telling the rest of the story right now, cute or otherwise, but he was - not exactly my first love, but not-not that, either. my first boyfriend, my first real feeling of "maybe this is it, maybe this is the forever one." (it wasn't. he dumped me sitting on the floor of my apartment with the opening line, "i don't want to be dating you anymore." it had reportedly taken him months to actually say this out loud to me.)
thinking about it, in all, he was in my life for roughly six and a half years, which is roughly seven years if you're really rounding up. and now it is almost seven years since i last spoke to him. in a sense, this also feels meaningful.
look, i'd like to be clear: i do not think he is the great lost love of my life, or anything. there were several reasons it would not have worked out for joy in the end, many of which became apparent shortly after the breakup itself. hindsight, and all that.
but i grew up posting bad poetry to tumblr, and because of this, i have found myself thinking - seven years. wow. all my cells are new, now; he has never touched me, this version of myself.
(it turns out, of course, that your cells do not all actually turn over every seven years.)
but that doesn't really matter, does it?
i'm a newer version of myself every day. i would say from 2020-onward, i've changed more rapidly than i had since maybe 19 to 22, or at least my teens. i am a different person than i was when i was his girlfriend. (for one, i'll never be a girlfriend again.)
i've been thinking a lot about myself lately. i know too much navel-gazing and introspection isn't great or, frankly, attractive, but i can't help it. i am the person i spend the most time with. i'm stuck with me, for better and for worse - and even if lately it feels tilted toward "worse," i gotta keep this guy going anyway.
i spend a lot of time worrying about who i am. i guess that's pretty normal, especially given the sort-of classic "second queer adolescence" i've been experiencing the last couple of years. i feel very young and figuring-it-out.
i worry a lot about whether i am at all. to quote dawn summers: "am i real? am i anything?" i would add: am i a whole person? am i just borrowing personality bits from people i think are cooler and more interesting than i am by my own self? am i a magpie of everyone i've ever loved and admired? (who isn't, i think, when you get down to it.) how much is nature, how much is nurture, and how much is theft?
and beyond that, i wonder: am i myself, or am i fitting myself to a mold, to meet expectations of people who want things that are so much different than what i want for myself? or, to put it simply: am i still trying to make my parents proud of me? is that all i want from my life, my self? is that the most important thing to me, above doing what i want and what makes me feel happy and alive?
i'm trying, very hard and earnestly, to become myself for myself. to get out from under the shadows cast by what other people might think, and to say: what do i want? and, fuck it! why not? the latter has kind of become the motto for my year, actually.
part of that is, like - taking control over my own body. and that may sound dire, but hear me out: did you know you can just, like, go get a tattoo? you can just bleach your own hair in the bathroom? you can pay a professional to put another hole in your ear, is what i'm getting at.
you can do whatever you want forever, is what my friends keep telling me. and i keep repeating it: i can do whatever i want forever. it's like a magic spell.
last year, i got three tattoos. and i had put very little thought into any of them - my studio just posted flash for some discount events, and i drove into dallas, and i sat while they inked little critters onto my thigh, and i venmo'd them, and i have those creatures on me forever. like a permanent sticker sheet. i didn't have to justify it to anyone, or explain the meaning, or do anything other than fill out the form, sit still, and pay the artist.
the first time i did it, it was the first day of pride month, and a trans dude named bugs put a flower on me, and i felt like: this is my body. i can do whatever i want to it. i can do whatever i want to my own body, and nobody can say shit to me about it.
and i did it again, and again.
and i chopped all my hair off for the first time since college.
and this month i bleached it and dyed it, and when the pale pink i tried first didn't feel right, i dyed it again. an obnoxious raspberry hot pink. (gooddyeyoung's ex-girl with a tiny bit of rock lobster. it should look like danganronpa blood when you've mixed it.)
and the world didn't end. it's my body. it's my hair.
work doesn't care. my mom likes my hair better long, but i don't care. i sent my parents photos of the two pink dye jobs, and they were kind of like, eh on them, and it did make me feel a little bad, but then i realized: it doesn't fucking matter what they think.
it doesn't! it shouldn't. it is taking me a long time to engrain this in the grooves and wrinkles of my brain, but i'm working on it.
so i'm thinking about getting another piercing or two. and i'm thinking of shaving my head. and i want to get more tattoos.
i know my mother will freak out at me shaving my head, but i kind of want to do it anyway? i will probably also freak out, but here's the thing i keep telling myself: hair grows back. it is literally fine. and i'm young. fuck it, why not, you know?
sometimes when i feel myself getting closer to who i really am, i worry that i am getting further away from the version(s) of myself that my parents love, that my old friends love, that anyone in my life for longer than 5 years even recognizes.
and that's really scary? but it also feels, honestly, fucking cool.
when i am out in public, whether it's my college town or my hometown, wherever there are people i used to know who aren't invited into my life anymore, i worry that i'll run into them, that we'll have some kind of weird encounter and i'll spiral about it. but recently, i think: fuck it. let it happen. maybe i'll be brave, wave at them. maybe they won't recognize me at all. maybe i'll look like another interesting stranger, and we'll pass by one another, and no one undeserving of me will ever know me again.
so no, my body is not entirely new cells since the last time i spoke to my ex-boyfriend. someday they will be, or someday we'll cross paths again, and i will be brave enough not to be anxious about it. i'm a different man now. i don't need to try and please anyone but myself.
also: i realized last night that monday was seven years since the boyfriend of my early 20s dumped me. these things aren't related, except for the ways in which they are. let me back up.
it's a cute story when i tell it, at least it can be. i met him on our first day of college classes, the first class either of us had on the schedule. it was a 9:00 a.m. course; i arrived at 8:20 and he arrived around 8:59. this is meaningful in its way.
we didn't start dating until a month before graduation. i don't feel like telling the rest of the story right now, cute or otherwise, but he was - not exactly my first love, but not-not that, either. my first boyfriend, my first real feeling of "maybe this is it, maybe this is the forever one." (it wasn't. he dumped me sitting on the floor of my apartment with the opening line, "i don't want to be dating you anymore." it had reportedly taken him months to actually say this out loud to me.)
thinking about it, in all, he was in my life for roughly six and a half years, which is roughly seven years if you're really rounding up. and now it is almost seven years since i last spoke to him. in a sense, this also feels meaningful.
look, i'd like to be clear: i do not think he is the great lost love of my life, or anything. there were several reasons it would not have worked out for joy in the end, many of which became apparent shortly after the breakup itself. hindsight, and all that.
but i grew up posting bad poetry to tumblr, and because of this, i have found myself thinking - seven years. wow. all my cells are new, now; he has never touched me, this version of myself.
(it turns out, of course, that your cells do not all actually turn over every seven years.)
but that doesn't really matter, does it?
i'm a newer version of myself every day. i would say from 2020-onward, i've changed more rapidly than i had since maybe 19 to 22, or at least my teens. i am a different person than i was when i was his girlfriend. (for one, i'll never be a girlfriend again.)
i've been thinking a lot about myself lately. i know too much navel-gazing and introspection isn't great or, frankly, attractive, but i can't help it. i am the person i spend the most time with. i'm stuck with me, for better and for worse - and even if lately it feels tilted toward "worse," i gotta keep this guy going anyway.
i spend a lot of time worrying about who i am. i guess that's pretty normal, especially given the sort-of classic "second queer adolescence" i've been experiencing the last couple of years. i feel very young and figuring-it-out.
i worry a lot about whether i am at all. to quote dawn summers: "am i real? am i anything?" i would add: am i a whole person? am i just borrowing personality bits from people i think are cooler and more interesting than i am by my own self? am i a magpie of everyone i've ever loved and admired? (who isn't, i think, when you get down to it.) how much is nature, how much is nurture, and how much is theft?
and beyond that, i wonder: am i myself, or am i fitting myself to a mold, to meet expectations of people who want things that are so much different than what i want for myself? or, to put it simply: am i still trying to make my parents proud of me? is that all i want from my life, my self? is that the most important thing to me, above doing what i want and what makes me feel happy and alive?
i'm trying, very hard and earnestly, to become myself for myself. to get out from under the shadows cast by what other people might think, and to say: what do i want? and, fuck it! why not? the latter has kind of become the motto for my year, actually.
part of that is, like - taking control over my own body. and that may sound dire, but hear me out: did you know you can just, like, go get a tattoo? you can just bleach your own hair in the bathroom? you can pay a professional to put another hole in your ear, is what i'm getting at.
you can do whatever you want forever, is what my friends keep telling me. and i keep repeating it: i can do whatever i want forever. it's like a magic spell.
last year, i got three tattoos. and i had put very little thought into any of them - my studio just posted flash for some discount events, and i drove into dallas, and i sat while they inked little critters onto my thigh, and i venmo'd them, and i have those creatures on me forever. like a permanent sticker sheet. i didn't have to justify it to anyone, or explain the meaning, or do anything other than fill out the form, sit still, and pay the artist.
the first time i did it, it was the first day of pride month, and a trans dude named bugs put a flower on me, and i felt like: this is my body. i can do whatever i want to it. i can do whatever i want to my own body, and nobody can say shit to me about it.
and i did it again, and again.
and i chopped all my hair off for the first time since college.
and this month i bleached it and dyed it, and when the pale pink i tried first didn't feel right, i dyed it again. an obnoxious raspberry hot pink. (gooddyeyoung's ex-girl with a tiny bit of rock lobster. it should look like danganronpa blood when you've mixed it.)
and the world didn't end. it's my body. it's my hair.
work doesn't care. my mom likes my hair better long, but i don't care. i sent my parents photos of the two pink dye jobs, and they were kind of like, eh on them, and it did make me feel a little bad, but then i realized: it doesn't fucking matter what they think.
it doesn't! it shouldn't. it is taking me a long time to engrain this in the grooves and wrinkles of my brain, but i'm working on it.
so i'm thinking about getting another piercing or two. and i'm thinking of shaving my head. and i want to get more tattoos.
i know my mother will freak out at me shaving my head, but i kind of want to do it anyway? i will probably also freak out, but here's the thing i keep telling myself: hair grows back. it is literally fine. and i'm young. fuck it, why not, you know?
sometimes when i feel myself getting closer to who i really am, i worry that i am getting further away from the version(s) of myself that my parents love, that my old friends love, that anyone in my life for longer than 5 years even recognizes.
and that's really scary? but it also feels, honestly, fucking cool.
when i am out in public, whether it's my college town or my hometown, wherever there are people i used to know who aren't invited into my life anymore, i worry that i'll run into them, that we'll have some kind of weird encounter and i'll spiral about it. but recently, i think: fuck it. let it happen. maybe i'll be brave, wave at them. maybe they won't recognize me at all. maybe i'll look like another interesting stranger, and we'll pass by one another, and no one undeserving of me will ever know me again.
so no, my body is not entirely new cells since the last time i spoke to my ex-boyfriend. someday they will be, or someday we'll cross paths again, and i will be brave enough not to be anxious about it. i'm a different man now. i don't need to try and please anyone but myself.
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Date: 2025-02-01 03:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-02-03 11:09 pm (UTC)