The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

A blog? What?

Recently, I’ve been playing some little art games that are trying to capture the transgendered experience. I replayed dys4ia before sharing with my class recently, and I just now played a game called Mainichi which was a little RPG Maker experiment that worked pretty well. I think trying to capture this stuff is a fine idea. The vast majority of people just don’t “get it,” even if they are supportive, or think they are. I get wanting to make it clear what’s going on, to some extent.

I just wish they weren’t so negative.

I mean, there are plenty of negatives, don’t get me wrong. And as a, you know, education vector, those are things important to encapsulate and show to people. I’m not arguing that. But it’s a standard “more flies with honey” kind of thing, right? Wouldn’t it be more effective to help people kind of share in the joy of becoming yourself for the first time? Because there is a lot of joy in it. That would help them understand too, wouldn’t it? Nobody ever emphasizes that part. That first moment when you look in the mirror and see yourself and for the first time, you look like the person you’ve always been in your head. That moment when you buy something you never would have been allowed to wear before, and go out in it. That moment when a random person at a store correctly genders you for the first time in your life. That moment when a PARENT correctly genders you for the first time. There’s a lot of bright spots in the experience, and maybe, one could argue, they’re few and far between, but they make it all worth it, don’t they? I think so.

Maybe a lot of people have it worse than me. I wouldn’t be surprised. But I mean, I’m in the middle of goddamn Missouri and things are going well for me. It always helps to focus on the positive, even if maybe I’m often bad at it. And hey, maybe that’s why there’s so much negative in most of these games. Because it is hard to think positive when most of your life, you’ve been overwhelmingly depressed from this stuff. It is hard. And you think about the bad things. The asshole who ruined your day with a stupid, offhand comment. How hard it’s going to be to save the money for that surgery. But it’s just a thing. They’re all just things. And there are better things.

This all may have something to do with me getting somewhat drunk last night and telling everyone I could listen how awful and fucked up I am. But that’s just the bad part of my brain talking. I don’t believe it. I know things are wonderful. I’d like to share that, and not despair. That would be better, right?