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4:02 AM.

Recently I feel stuck again. Like snow piling up on the mountains, I feel myself sliding down. Not quite an avalanche, not yet, just some gentle sliding whenever some more is put on top.

I’ve been a little sick. I took some meds for two days, but ran out, and didn’t bother to get new ones. These were left-overs from a couple of months ago, and I’ve forgotten the brand name. That was partially a lie — I could’ve checked it on the plastic package for the capsules. I just did.

The weather has been shifting quite drastically for the past two weeks, and my cats have been getting sick, so I guess now it’s my turn. I have been pretty good at taking care of them, but nowadays I’m getting a little tired. A little depressed, perhaps, even though that’s a strong word.

I can’t complain much though, because I’m still in a much better state than when I was in Shenzhen. It’s likely that my mood fluctuates with the change of seasons. I can get pretty gloomy in autumn and in winter. Then again, sometimes I feel like I can get pretty gloomy anytime — not like, in a bad way. Just emotions, sensations, thoughts, feelings. Those kinds of things.

4:21 AM.

There are maybe five other things that I ought to do now, but instead, I decided to web-journal. I kept a physical journal for a while, and I wrote in it every day. But these few days I have not kept up. I don’t know why — it seems that I have trouble with habits. For a while, perhaps a few weeks, or even a couple of months, I can be great at doing something on a regular basis; then I stop. I get carried away.

I’m also never good at writing everything in one place. Something about it makes me uneasy, I guess. I’ve tried to do it, I’ve tried to be organized, but it doesn’t work. It feels forced. Writing in many different places somehow provides a sense of safety. It’s like how Voldemort split his soul up and store them in seven different Horcruxes. No one will know all of me if they only get their hands on one copy of stuff. On the other hand, it makes me feel a little lonely because that also means no one will really know all of me unless they read all of the copies, which is highly unlikely to happen.

Then again, I don’t always remember all of my writings. Or all the things I said. Or all the things I did, all the people I met. All the things that contained some kind of meaning to me sometime somewhere. Maybe they are somewhere in my head still, or they’ve gracefully shed away with the neurons that died all the time I skipped sleep. I have trouble accessing them sometimes, and if they are still there sometimes they seem to shy to say hi to me. This makes me kind of sad, although it’s not something I indulge myself in.

4:35 AM.

What am I doing with my life now? It’s kinda funny that S used to tell me he’s jealous because I seemed so sure that I knew what I am passionate about. He was almost mad at me; maybe he was, a little. That I had something I loved — robots, music, Artificial Intelligence, and I was chasing those things. And he didn’t know what the wanted.

I was somewhat defensive about it because I knew it wasn’t true. I knew he was making it out to be like I was surer of what I wanted than I actually was. But I didn’t know how to show it, and I wasn’t sure if he was actually right. In a way, I knew I didn’t have the right to complain. I guess I did know more about myself than most people our age.

4:51 AM.

But maybe that didn’t really mean anything. Somethings things change — people change, yourself included. And not all knowledge transfers in useful ways.

The last night I was in the Bahamas in 2017, I went alone to a party at the pizza bar by the harbor. At the dock, I met an older woman. My friends had ditched me, I was properly buzzed and looking for someone to borrow cigs from, and she was generous with her Canadian cigarettes. We had a pretty deep conversation about being yourself and balancing between things. She was a lacrosse mom, a new empty-nester, re-learning to be herself. I’d just gotten an invitation to audition for some singing show, so I talked about how I felt torn between my artistic side and my scientific side. After I left the bar, I biked around unfamiliar neighborhoods until I got almost lost amidst a bunch of rich folk houses. At the end of those houses, there was a dock, a different one. I lay down and looked into the sky, checked out some constellations, all while talking to myself about myself, my future, and how I’d like to live my life. I recorded it all on my phone. After I returned from that trip, I looked up procedures to take a year off, and I did take a year off.

And a couple of years later, when I listened to it, I kind of wanted to slap myself in the face. I mean, I feel compassionate towards myself back then. But the truth is, I was also a total phony. When I had that conversation with myself under the beautiful stars about the future, it wasn’t really about what I wanted to do, but rather what I thought I could do. When I talked to the lady, I knew even then I wasn’t being completely honest. I was more reciprocating the self-disclosure than speaking my personal truth. My real struggle was not finding a balance between science and music, but rather that I wanted to throw out the scale and weights, run far far away, jump into the ocean, and never come back up.

There was something screaming inside of me, even back then, for a long time. And I chose to ignore it because I figured I knew what the consequences were if I let it out, and I figured I knew I didn’t want those consequences.

I forgot to check the consequences of not letting it out, so those ended up the ones I had to bare.

5:11 AM.

I thought of the phrase “breaking boundaries.” I looked it up in Chinese and a book popped up. It was a sociology case study about a village in Zhejiang. In the introduction, the author discussed quite eloquently some conceptual constructions like “communities” and “society”, the unique route Chinese Sociology took, and why the entire village may become a target when only 5% of the people do bad things. I heated up some porridge to eat and kept reading the book for a while.

5:28 AM.

I first read the phrase a few days ago in an episode review of S4E4 of Rick and Morty, written by probably some dude who enjoys poking fun at the “white liberals” and is “neither supportive nor against the homosexual community.” Needless to say, I didn’t agree with whatever analysis he pulled from his ass about the episode. But one thing he said rang true to me somehow: “the pleasure of sex is about breaking boundaries.”

Is it just sex, though? Maybe it’s about freedom, in general?

Recently I did something that relates to this idea. It was nothing I would want the public to know, but it was nothing short of a milestone in life, and it hurts me to keep it a secret.

To put it in less crude ways, I met someone who was willing to see me as who I am, and gave me what I wanted but was too embarrassed to ask. It all happened very fast, and now it has all ended, leaving me to question whether it was real, or whether it’s likely that something like this would still happen again. More likely than before it happened, for sure. And even though I’m not known for being optimistic, I feel more hopeful than ever.

It wasn’t without friction, and I don’t think he really understood me. Which is okay, since I don’t think I could say I understood him either, and I think we were on the same page about that. Instead of brushing it off, he asked me questions admitting he didn’t understand. One of them went something like, “But you are still figuring like 40% of the things out with your identity, right?” And it was addressing why I was so adamant that I’m not a girl.

It was a very interesting question, and I wasn’t really able to unpack everything on the spot. But it made me want to address this and document where I’m at now.

It doesn’t feel like I was only at 60% progress with figuring out my identity, but maybe more like 85%, if not more. On the other hand, when it comes to how to express or to live as myself, I’m maybe only at 30%. I haven’t really figured out effective ways to communicate my knowledge of myself to other people, and I often end up either over-explaining and confusing them or sliding right back into the old costumes. But that doesn’t mean I don’t really know who I am.

When I’m by myself, sometimes I do possess the kind of clarity that brings me some kind of inner peace. After so many reflections over the past year and change, I think I’m at a place where I accept myself where I am. I feel closer and more in tune with myself. More safe, maybe. Even if there is no one else who can give me any kind of affirmation and validation, I can still provide myself with a little bit of energy to get things going. It’s a belief that has so much supporting evidence, and it fits nicely into my existing scientific framework of understanding myself and the world.

6:17 AM.

I can’t say that I’ve never “felt like a girl” or considered myself one. But the thing is I have almost always felt “different from the other girls.”

The first documented case of me claiming that I was a boy happened when I was 13. I used to write on a blog quite frequently (called Qzone, and it came with Tecent’s QQ which everyone uses), just some usual stuff that teenagers write about — fragmented thoughts, cringy raw emotions, made up stories.

7:43 AM.

I spend some time actually going through those blog entries to make sure I’m not making anything up. It was very cringy but quite nostalgic. And, I might add, much queerer than I remembered.

As early as 2008 I had already started mentioning the confusion and frustration that came with categorizing myself. I was reluctant to refer to myself as a girl or a female in general because it didn’t feel right. So I almost always used more masculine or genderneutral terms. In separate entries, I lamented on things like “maybe I’m really just a guy” “it’d be much easier if I were a guy” “I wish to be a guy in my next life” “I don’t think I’m one of the girls” and so on. When I was asked what gender I was, the answer was never “a girl” either, but “I don’t know, I guess biologically I’m female”, “whatever you think I am”, “Otokonoko”, or “take a guess?”

Then, in January 2009, I mentioned in a post saying something like:

“I’ve been frustrated about the issue of my gender. Now I’d like to declare: I’m a boy…although it’s a boy whose orientation is different than the normal people…Got it? …Actually, I don’t either. So let’s leave it at that for now, hahaha…”

To be honest, I don’t remember why I wrote this, but I kind of understand what I was trying to say. I knew that I was supposed to be a girl, and I do relate to femininity (although not as much as I relate to the “masculine” mantras), but at the same time I felt fundamentally different than “a girl.” And I was attracted to boys, which made things even more complicated.

The blog post was not a dramatic declaration and was far from the only declaration. It was definitely not intended or received as something like a “coming-out” speech — no one really knew what “coming-out” was, anyway.

In the years to come, the assertion that I was “really a boy” was never made in a dead-serious kind of way, it was always thrown out there half-jokingly, easy breezy. Shockingly my friends and classmates all went along with it. When people made gender-based comments, some of them would even come out and clarify, “but he’s a guy, not a girl!”. Perhaps they treated it as a joke; I always assumed so. Sometimes I felt embarrassed, sometimes I pretended to be embarrassed but were actually kind of glad.

As far as I remember, that’s how it really started — How I started thinking of myself as a guy, and how I, for the first time, challenged the idea that I should think of myself as a girl.

8:23 AM.

I don’t really think I’m “one of the guys” either. Part of this is because I have low self-esteem and think I will never truly be accepted as one by the other guys. Part of this is because I don’t want to pretend even to myself that I’m a cis-guy. Part of this is because I think even if I were a cis-guy, I would be one of those “freaks” who don’t really fit in anyway.

But the difference between me and the guys do not seem so fundamentally different. It doesn’t feel like we are different species. When I look at a guy who’s got a very different style than me, I still feel more similar to him than I do when I see a girl who’s got a very similar style to my own, say when I was more femme presenting. What is this all about? I don’t know yet. Maybe it’s just the way my brain works at the moment.

Maybe it’s because I have not met anyone who ever asserted that I’m a man and then expected things from me accordingly. Never in ways that made me feel forced and trapped. Meanwhile, for most of my life people have told me that I am/should be so and so because I’m a girl/a woman/a young woman/a lady. Perhaps at the moment, being a guy seems like the grass on the other side of the lawn, and since I haven’t stayed there for a long time, it doesn’t seem like a bad place to be. Maybe if I end up trapped there instead (e.g., if I get on HRT) I’d feel differently — maybe I’d start to hate that cage too, or maybe I’d start to accept the former one.

For a while after my “discovery” that I was “a boy” who likes boys, the struggles were not about “being a boy”, but more about “liking other boys.” In all the mainstream literature, movies and tv shows I was exposed to, boys liked girls and girls liked boys, and anything else was wrong. There was not a lack of queer literature, but it was considered cult-like, deviant or even illegal, so I didn’t give it much credit and felt ashamed in consuming them. My struggle, then, was that the boys I liked either liked (girlie) girls or “real boys.” I also repressed my attraction to girls. Even though it felt natural that I’d get with girls, because I wasn’t a “real boy,” I was always in fear that I would “turn someone gay” and they would ask me to be responsible for it. As an aspiring romantic, I felt quite defeated.

Then came the first time I realized that even the jokes didn’t fly was when I went to Texas. I was 16 turning 17; my host family was conservative and didn’t register the humor in my “joke” that I was really a boy. I didn’t want to seem weird, so I tuned it down a notch. I decided that this gender issue was perhaps really just a joke, and maybe I should abandon it and learn to grow up and “be an adult.” That would including playing the game right — the gender game. I pretty much looked into the mirror and told myself that I sucked at being female and I was ugly, and this all needed to change.

I started doing female-coded things: shopping for women’s clothes for special events. My hair grew out. For the next few years — high school to college, I decided to try my best at “growing up.” A main motivation behind this was to get guys. And I did have some success, I guess.

9:09 AM.

But I felt lonely, a scary kind of lonely.

In the past few years, I have dated and hooked up with a number of people, and I’m grateful for the warmth and pleasure I have absorbed from them. But it makes me incredibly lonely and sad when I look into their eyes, and I know that they are seeing someone else. We might be passionately in love, but still, there would be some mismatch in our knowledge of who I am, some consensus lacking.

My “career” as a girl really peaked in college and I’d even say I was considered quite attractive. For a girl. My level of sexual confidence was through the roof, I had a lot of fun exploring my options. But when I was out, it always felt like some kind of role-playing job. This was sometimes fun, sometimes tiring.

Something like this was going on in my work life too. I became a good “female leader,” a good “femme in STEM.” I was proud of it at first, but I found it somewhat hard to relate to the experiences of the other girls who actually think of them as girls. It felt forced.

I still tried to prove that I could be a good female. I acted in a play as the lead female character, and that was as feminine as I ever got in my entire life. I dated straight guys. I’ll unpack these some other time.

9:23 AM.

Let’s skip to about a year ago.

I returned to school after my year in Shenzhen. During that year off, I did a lot of soulsearching, and one of the things that came up was “am I really ok with living the rest of my life as female?” At that point, it was a question that I had pushed aside for years. Thinking back, it was probably because I was terrified of the answer.

In Alice in Wonderland, there is a scene where Alice finds her way and is very happy — “Maybe I’d even get home in time for tea!” She said. But then a dog-like creature with brooms for both the nose and the tail comes out and wipes the path away. So Alice loses her way again, sits and sings a very sad song that makes all the adjacent creatures cry.

That’s kind of how I felt — like my path was wiped out. I was doing so well as a woman, I knew that I had a great career prospect and earning capability, I knew that I would do great at grad school, I knew that people loved my singing voice and that dudes were into me — at least when I make an effort. But the truth was, I was not happy. I was unhappy, stressed, overloaded, and lost my sense of purpose.

But what’s the alternative? What was I? Transgender? Do I come out, and how? Isn’t this going to be social/career suicide? Who do I talk to? What would I even do? I didn’t think I needed medical transitions, but without it, I highly doubted people would be willing to see me as not-a-girl. Would I ever be sexually relevant again? Would people think I’m lying for attention, as they often accuse non-binary/genderqueer people? Would people think I’m a freak? For a few months, my mind was constantly crammed up by these questions. I turned them off when I had to work, and at night, I binge trans-related material. I browsed all the content I could find, and most of them consisted of terrible life stories. Towards the end of the semester, I was very depressed. The “female” identity felt like some kind of sticky, smelly Halloween costume that I couldn’t easily take off; but it was so cold outside that if I took it off right away I’d be frozen to death.

That’s a long-winded way to say that yeah, I guess I’m still iffy about people calling me “she/her” because when I hear that, I smell the Halloween costume and I want to puke.

9:47 AM.

That’s it for today.