22 July 2023 -- Boise, ID

Sometimes when reflecting inward, I get anxious about gender performance.  In
a way, "playing the part" of femininity is really important to my own
identity, even I still have a long ways before I can get there.

Sometimes I see jokey posts about gender, and I love the concept of "fuckery
with gender", but ... those anxieties pop up again.  I read the silly posts
of "what is your gender", with their selectable poll answers containing the
likes of "void, creature, to be determined" and worry to myself, "by allowing
myself to find familiarity in this silly post, am I admitting that I'm ...
somehow not feminine enough, even though I know that's bullshit?  Shouldn't I
just force myself to a non-gendered role, performing not just abstracted from
gender but _denied_ from gender altogether?"

In __actuality__, I'm just overthinking it!  Thinking like that really _is_
bullshit!  [Hey future Me if you're reading this: this is past Self speaking
and I kind of love you and need you to like CHILL.  You're doing fine!]

There's a thought that's now dawning from somewhere within.  It's about the
day after the next; not the present or the dim nights already spent, but the
change through many seasons from now.  It's about how I can still look back
to see the heads held high and the fists held higher, and _also_ walk forward
at the same time.  I know you're reading this later, future Self -- it's not
that "reflections are mere stifling imitations", but that for us Self they
are Self-made trappings.

We might already be in a clearing!, but by looking behind and still seeing
the forest, sure we could do as we've done before and run back inside,
wrongly telling us Self that it's safer between the towering pillars from the
storms overhead.  But fuck that!  Get into the clearing, the storms will come
but the rain brings life just as well.

Because ultimately, Reflection is not a process of hanging our head over a
flooded riverbank's ledge, peering into a body of still and murky water.  It
is not a two-dimensional plane distorted by nebulous outside forces.
Reflection is about how the ripples _are_ distortions -- how, to exist, we
will _emanate_ because _that_ is the most human thing!

The ripples don't bounce on a Surface like a binary sliding gradient from
Here to There.  It's about how, to exist, we distort and shape and form --
stretching from edge to edge and back overlapping, under and above, through
and through.  Spacetime itself is not a fabric woven by Energy to keep us
warm -- "the capacity to do work" is the universal manifestation of this
distortion-meta!  To exist, we "do".  To cease, we "null".

Also!

Gender being "to be determined" -- not as in the thought of "that's a later
problem for me to figure out, because i am afraid..."  Instead, as in the
thought of "that's the thing I'm shaping for myself".  Like as if saying to
oneself "my gender is to be determined, no, _will_ be determined _by me_
because this is my being."  Is this anything?