I feel so grateful to the man who invented the “Traveller’s” typewriter.

Mina Harker, expressing her love for her laptop.

Applying modern labels and understandings of people to the past is iffy and and remains so when applied to fictional characters who were certainly never written with those as-yet non-existent concepts in mind but also it’s fun so I’m going to do it. Mina Harker (née Murray) is an autistic, bisexual, and cool as hell.

None of what I’m going to say is a particularly original idea and much of what I’m drawing from here is from the general milieu of the Dracula Daily fanbase. This was, of course, a large part of the appeal of Dracula Daily; not just a novel way to read a classic book but also a participatory exercise in going through that work and evolving a fandom understanding of it as it progresses, with all the tenuous headcanoning that such things involve.

Dracula is Gothic fiction wherein the ancient horror is defeated and soundly routed by modernity. Our heroes are doctors and solicitors (and a rich Texan who fancies himself a cowboy) and an important weapon in the arsenal used to defeat the count himself is meticulous note-taking. And it is Mina who transcribes, edits, organises and distributes these notes. Within the fiction it is she who creates the manuscript that is the text of the novel itself and makes carbon copies to provide to the other protagonists. She habitually organises and sorts information and while she often frames it as making herself useful to her husband¹ she displays a clear knack and enthusiasm for doing so.

“When does the next train start for Galatz?” said Van Helsing to us generally.

“At 6.30 tomorrow morning!” We all started, for the answer came from Mrs. Harker.

“How on earth do you know?” said Art.

“You forget or perhaps you do not know, though Jonathan does and so does Dr. Van Helsing that I am the train fiend.”

“I am the train fiend”?! This girl autistic as hell.

Mina is also the one who sits down and logically deduces Dracula’s escape plan from everyone’s scattered notes and observations, writing it out her evidence and conclusions point by point.

Ground of inquiry. Count Dracula’s problem is to get back to his own place.

(a) He must be brought back by someone, This is evident; for had he power to move himself as he wished he could go either as man, or wolf, or bat, or in some other way. He evidently fears discovery or interference, in the state of helplessness in which he must be confined as he is between dawn and sunset in his wooden box.

(b) How is he to be taken? Here a process of exclusions may help us. By road, by rail, by water?

[…]

Van Helsing says that Mina has a man’s brain and a woman’s heart¹. While this is meant simply as a compliment of her faculties¹ the fact that her analytical nature is framed as inherently masculine reminds me of the (nonsense) extreme male brain theory of autism which is rooted in notions of men being naturally more systemising and women being naturally more empathising. This is starting to bend towards me just documenting some free association so I will move on to Mina being gay.

Mina and Lucy in the book have a classic romantic friendship, gushing and fawning over each other to a degree that is difficult not read as somewhat sapphic to a modern reader. Mina takes care of Lucy while she is being secretly preyed upon by Dracula, and while she sleeps Mina notes how beautiful she is, thinking about how it could make someone fall in love with her, about sex outside of marriage, and about the idea of women being able to make marriage proposals¹.

Lucy is asleep and breathing softly. She has more colour in her cheeks than usual, and looks, oh, so sweet. If Mr. Holmwood fell in love with her seeing her only in the drawing room, I wonder what he would say if he saw her now. Some of the “New Women” writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the “New Woman” won’t condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it, too! There’s some consolation in that. I am so happy tonight, because dear Lucy seems better.

Later, not having seen Lucy in some time and unaware of her rapid deterioration, Mina sends a letter to Lucy that directly compares the love between her and her husband to the love between her and Lucy and that she could, would, has, does and will love her.

Jonathan asks me to send his “respectful duty,” but I do not think that is good enough from the junior partner of the important firm Hawkins & Harker; and so, as you love me, and he loves me, and I love you with all the moods and tenses of the verb, I send you simply his “love” instead. Goodbye, my dearest Lucy, and all blessings on you.

The novel—the manuscript compiled by Mina herself—emphasises the tragedy of this goodbye and this expression of love by noting that this letter was not opened by Lucy before her death.

Also her favourite spot to hang out in on her holiday in Witby is the graveyard so she’s pretty goth, too.

My flirting strategy for pulling autistic trans women

oh fcyj

im autims

:)

I have pretty bad impulse control around eating. If there is food in front of me I struggle not to keep picking at it even if I’m already uncomfortably full and even if I don’t like it that much. I generally don’t keep sweets or alcohol in my house because I tend to binge through it if it’s there. Moderation is not something I am good at.

One thing Ellie used to do sometimes is hide chocolate bars around my house and then, when I was in need of a treat, tell me where to find one or pull them out herself. She was incredibly sweet. I found a Galaxy caramel bar in the back of the kitchen press this morning. One last birthday present from her.

And now I guess I just want to share stories about her. We watched a lot of TV together. Just cuddling on the sofa or in bed and watching television had honestly become of my favourite things. I came over to her place once when she was watching Evil, enjoyed it and then she rewatched it with me from the start and we carried through all the way to the end together. She talked about watching a video essay (I do not recall who by) about Miraculous Ladybug and how it matures and grows more complex each season and I basically downloaded it and made her watch the first few episodes as a joke and then just sort of fell into continuing it because I cannot resist sticking to a bit well beyond what is warranted. It was a bit of mindless fun to put on and cuddle and chat. We were most of the way through the third series.

Just feeling the warmth of her body against mine is one of the things that I miss most of all. I got her a rose gold Zippo lighter for her last birthday. She liked fire and burning little things. She could be a real little very tall gremlin. She had left the lighter in my house a few days before she died. I had it with me to give back to her when we found her body. Sometimes I light it for a while and then just feel the warmth of it in my hand. Somehow that feels like the closest thing to having her here again.

We were also rewatching shows we liked as teenagers together. She was showing me Wolf’s Rain, I was showing her Outlaw Star and we were revisiting The Big O together. She loved R. Dorothy. We had also started rewatching Fullmetal Alchemist together and had gotten as far as The Alchemy Exam back in September and then it took eight months till she was finally in the mood where she was happy to sit through Night of the Chimera’s Cry again just a few days before she died. Seeing as this has turned into the anime paragraph I will also say that we had both enjoyed Dungeon Meshi but had watched it separately as I was watching the dub and she was watching with subs. She loved Falin, too. She related a lot to robot girls and monster girls.

She was a big, lovely, autistic, dork and I cannot describe how wonderful it was watching her unmask and being earnest and silly about things she was self-concious about. I understand deeply the shame of trying to be normal, of burying stuff you are enthusiastic about, and I loved seeing her dig it all up. One time while we were hanging out at home I turned a corner to see her standing stimming in the middle of the living room, shaking her hands back and forth and bouncing a little. When she saw me she withdrew a little bit. She was a bashful about it but it was adorable. I wanted to encourage her. I asked her to keep doing it and when she demurred I cupped her head in my hands and begged her “Ellie, I need you to be more autistic!” She cringed into herself shyly from that but smiled and giggled and said, mock-ominously “You know not what you ask!” and I just kept saying it until she said she would. From then on “I need you be more autistic” became something I would implore when she was being self-conscious about herself.

She really liked making characters and just fucking around in games. I’d watch her play WWE 2K24 and she would often play a random match and not even particularly try to win. Just have fun and being playful with the narrative of a wrestling match, showboating, playing a referee and being as obviously biased as possible to the worse wrestler. She talked to me about some of her RPG characters. She had restarted Baldur’s Gate 3 a few times but had never actually gotten to the end. Her current character was named Drizz and she had a whole backstory thought out for him that she spent an evening explaining to me (with a lot of interruptions to explain details about the world because I do not know much about Dungeons & Dragons).

Drizz was a drow trans man, raised to be an assassin in a cult dedicated to Lolth, who was shunned for not wanting to be a woman, betrayed by his mentor and ended up living rough for a long time. There was a lot more detail but I confess my memory is very poor and I don’t know that she ever wrote any of this down. She played Drizz as angry, brash and socially inept, deliberately making obviously risky or poor choices with him that would piss people in the game off. She saw a bunch of scenes she hadn’t before with previous characters as a result. Also it’s definitely Drizz and not Drizzt. He gets mad if you call him Drizzt. He did not name himself after Drizzt and is annoyed at people who assume he did.

I am not good at conclusions. She was wonderful. She’s gone, but she was wonderful.

I started taking ADHD medication one week ago. The path to get these has been humiliating. In the end I went to a private clinic but I have wasted so much time with a public health service that has completely eroded any trust or faith that I might have had with it.

I have known that I have had ADHD and autism for years. The more I talked to people over the year that have them the more it became obvious that their experiences matched my own, the more that I was drawn to people who had them, who were like me and shared my experiences and understood me¹. The people who I love most in the world are other AuDHD trans women.

But these are disorders and come with their problems, too. Doing even the simplest things is a struggle sometimes. Taking care of myself, doing the exercises that stop my back from being in pain, keeping things clean and, of course, my job. I have so often fallen behind in work and then in a burst of stress powered through what needed to get done at the last minute. I used to stay in late all the time to get things done that should have been finished hours before. I have lied to people over and over again about work, pretending I had more done than I did, hoping to make it up afterwards. My original masters project fell through when I got caught in a downward spiral of paralysing stress and lies about making progress while continuing to stare at a blank page. Eventually I broke down crying to my supervisor after admitting I really had basically nothing. He helped me start over and my family supported me massively through writing a new thesis. Over time I have learnt how to manage things a bit better, how to recognise my limits and work around them, but I continued to struggle daily.

Loughlinstown

But I did not seek treatment for a long time. A large part of this was due the the ableism and transphobia of the “National Gender Service”, the largest gender clinic in the Republic of Ireland, located in Loughlinstown, County Dublin. I was referred to the clinic in January of 2019. At the time I was informed that I was number 200 on the waiting list. That wait, sitting so far up a list, proved intolerable. Before I was seen in Loughlinstown I started taking minoxidil to try and prevent hair loss, began laser facial hair removal, started hormone replacement therapy with a private clinic, got a deed poll and a gender recognition certificate to legally change my name and gender, and the National Gender Service lost the records of over one hundred patient referrals. The news of that last thing broke in November of 2019 but it wasn’t until April 2020 that I was sent a letter assuring me that they still had my referral and that the clinic was no longer telling people what position they were on in the waiting list.

I had, as I said, already started medically transitioning, assisted by a private clinic, but that is expensive and I still wanted to go through the public system. It would save me money and it seemed like the way it “should” be done. I hate private healthcare as a concept. Everyone should be taken care of, not just those who can pay. I was finally seen in Loughlinstown in June of 2021, over two years after my initial referral. If you are referred today it will take you over thirteen years to be seen. It was a three hours drive to Dublin, a three hour interview with a psychiatrist, and a three hour drive home. It was utterly exhausting.

I was asked about my entire life and medical history. Like many others, I was ask about sex and masturbation so that my sexuality could be scrutinised by the man interviewing me. I have heard of much worse and more invasive questioning from people. When I was not comfortable answering certain questions I was not pressed on them. I passed enough of the other unspoken tests that meant I was an acceptable, respectable trans woman. I had stability, safety and independence. I was already out to friends, family and people that I worked with. People who are struggling, who have difficulty with employment or who are afraid to socially transition are often denied medication by doctors in Loughlinstown. If your life does not line up to their expectation of stability and normalcy they reserve the right to deny you treatment until you are ready, in their eyes, to transition. For those who do not have the means to seek private treatment they may not see any alternative except a public system that can deny them anyway for not meeting the standards of a comfortable, stable environment (that is, in our society, wealth) that is seen as a perquisite to be allowed to decide what to do with your body.

Patients have stated publicly or reported to TENI that they are being denied or delayed treatment for reasons such as suspected autism, ADHD, unsatisfactorily answering overtly sexual questions or for not bringing family members into assessments which community members continue to report to us, despite public statements by the HSE to the contrary. Assessments include questions about masturbation, porn habits, sexual history, thoughts during oral sex, detailed genital descriptions of themselves and sexual partners and even racial preferences.

Lilith Ferreyra-Carroll in GCN

Trans people of course share these stories with each other. About being rejected for being unemployed, for being fearful of coming out to bigoted family, for having untreated ADHD or autism. And when we do the doctors who run the Loughlinstown clinic accuse us of being “coached” to fast-tracked sex changes. Donal O’Shea, endocrinologist in Loughlinstown, is incredibly concerned about the rise in autistic people seeking to transition. He is worried that it is linked to “visibility around Kardashian personality Caitlyn Jenner” and compares people coming to a doctor and wanting to medically transition to a patient who asks their doctor to treat their pneumonia by amputating a lung.

Paul Moran, consultant psychiatrist in Loughlinstown, is also concerned about screening for neurodiverse people and wrote an opinion piece in The Journal welcoming the findings of the Cass Report, which he consulted on, which has been criticised in a joint statement by WPATH, ASIAPATH, EPATH, PATHA, and USPATH², which was headed by a supposedly independent pædiatrician who reportedly had previously expressed shock at medical transition practises and strongly recommended anti-transition literature to colleagues, which current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch suggested was commissioned due to “having gender-critical men and women in the UK government” and never would have existed otherwise.

Yale’s Integrity Project’s review of the report described the Cass Report as levying “unsupported assertions about gender identity, gender dysphoria, standard practices, and the safety of gender-affirming medical treatments”, as repeating “claims that have been disproved by sound evidence” and that it “misinterprets and misrepresents its own data.” But it is a wonderful document for those who wish to justify more roadblocks towards transition. Who will forever see the struggles of trans people not as a civil rights matter but as purely a medical question where doctors do not merely assist or facility their trans patients but hold power over them.

And the Loughlinstown gender clinic, originally a regional endocrinology unit that over time started to take more and more trans patients, have decided that they should hold their authority over all trans people in the Republic of Ireland. They declared themselves the “National” Gender Service without authorisation and write letters to people’s GPs to advise them not to do blood tests for trans people who are sourcing hormones from other providers.

I’m not sure where the title ‘National’ derives from [...] I do not consider at this stage that we can view this service appropriately as a ‘National’ service, as I have not received evidence to validate government or HSE recognition of this status.

Siobhán Ní Bhriain, national clinical lead for integrated care, Health Service Executive, in a 2022 letter

The ability of the men who run this clinic to gatekeep who gets hormone treatments is very important to them. They urged for years for the HSE to drop the WPATH model, which the HSE eventually did, walking back a promise from the 2020 programme for government. The WPATH 7 guidelines allowing for other models of care such as informed consent was far too liberal for Loughlinstown.

They frequently coach their language in concern for children, that they are transitioning too young and cannot make informed decisions, despite the fact that they do not treat children and there is currently no public pathway for the medical transition of minors in the Republic of Ireland at all. Paul Moran and Donal O’Shea are, in fact, currently taking legal action against the state to try and prevent children from being treated abroad either. Loughlinstown’s vision of a potential gender service for children is, according themselves, indistinguishable from conversion therapy. In a submission concerning a proposed law to ban the practice they wrote that it “will make it impossible to develop a children’s gender service in Ireland.” When they treat adults they use a system that their own model of care documents call overly complex and inefficient and co-author papers that get the mechanisms of the medication that they prescribe confused.

Loughlinstown is widely hated by the patients that attend the clinic. In research by the Transgender Equality Network Ireland 80% of respondents were dissatisfied with their care from the National Gender Service with a full 60% of them giving it the lowest possible rating. This sort of treatment erodes people’s trust in doctors and can lead to hesitancy around healthcare in general.

There are no correct guidelines, there’s no actual structure in how we’re dealt with. It means that it could be literally one person standing in your way, telling a lie or doing the wrong thing, or they might be bigoted or ignorant. So you’re completely at the mercy of maybe one person and there’s no other protections in the system. That person might be good and might help you. But then again, it’s luck. It’s complete luck and it should be standardised.

Séan, a trans man quoted in TENI’s report Trans and Non-Binary Experiences of Institutional Violence in Ireland.

Faced with this institutional gatekeeping I saw an ADHD diagnosis and treatment not as something beneficial, that could bring relief to struggles that I face every day, but as a weapon that could be used against me, to question my humanity and autonomy, to deny me even more vital treatment for my wellbeing, and that if I tried to seek an ADHD diagnosis through the public system that it would be something that would hang over my head to be abused by anyone else seeking to wield authority over me. This is another, indirect way that people are harmed by gatekeeping. I was afraid to seek treatment for one thing because I wanted another even more desperately. Eventually, though, I’d decided that I’d had enough, that I needed help with my other struggles as much as I did with transitioning, and if Loughlinstown did decide to deny me future care for this or other reasons there are alternatives. Foolishly, I decided to go through the public system again.

Mental Health Services

I went back to my GP in March of 2023 to ask to be referred for ADHD treatment. Unsurprisingly it took, after several delayed appointments, just over a year to be seen at my local mental health services. I had practised and thought about what I was going to say. I laid out my struggles, staring at blank pages telling myself to to start writing and nothing coming out, not being able to keep things clean, deadlines only getting met at the last minute through stress building up and bursting the dam of executive dysfunction. I explained all this calmly, and was met by a man telling me that I seem to be handling things well. That I met deadlines. That my job gives me flexibility.

I realised that doctors are like dogs: They don’t really understand English; they just follow tone of voice and maybe pick out a few key words. In calmly explaining my problems I was not performing the required level of patheticness to be seen as disabled. He went out to speak to a consultant and left me alone stewing in that room for a while. I realised that to be taken in any way seriously I needed to strip away the walls I normally put up around my feelings and dredge up the self-hatred and misery I feel. I needed to drag up every thought of being stupid and useless and let them out. To make myself into a sobbing mess. This is a deliberate performance, but not a dishonest one, and without it I was not being taken seriously at all. Medicine is the process of engaging in ritual self-humiliation until a doctor deigns from on high that you are pitiable enough to be granted the boon of his charity.

My tears got me a few tissues and the consultant called in, who was quick to make comments about “overdiagnosis” and how pharmacological solutions are not the best for people who don’t have severe enough trouble, before making a pointed comment about how I had brought a book³ to read in the waiting room. I guess someone who reads can’t really have ADHD, or at least not severe enough to need treatment.

Even so, I got a second appointment scheduled for a month later. For that one they wanted to be able to speak to someone who knew me as a child to corroborate on childhood signs and symptoms. This is a standard procedure for the DIVA, the Diagnostic Interview for ADHD in Adults. My experiences two decades ago apparently matter more than the actual problems I have right now. Still, I rang my mother. She was surprised that I was seeking an ADHD diagnosis⁴. Like many her image of ADHD was that of hyperactive boys unable to sit still and causing chaos, certainly not a description of my childhood. But after after a few conversations where I explained my struggles, and also showing her articles about how ADHD presents often differently in girls she came around a bit.

In any case, she agreed to be on the phone for the appointment. She needn’t have bothered, though, as when I returned to the clinic I was, bafflingly, told by the doctor who had seen me the first day that he had expected a psychologist to be free to see me that day to go through the DIVA but had not booked one and there was no one to do it. I was just given forms to fill out at home and drop back.

This was stressful, I had friends with me while I filled them out for moral support, but also deeply frustrating. The focus on childhood is bad enough but the questions are also sometimes confusing (what the hell does it mean to feel like you are “driven by a motor”?) and sometimes a single line would ask two different questions that have two different answers! “Did you do well in school? Were you a good student?” Yes I did well in school. I was intelligent and interested in many of my subjects. I genuinely enjoyed maths. No I was not a good student. I would ignore my teachers, talk in class if I was bored and thought I could get away with it, did homework at the last minute (often while sitting in the class that was about to start before the teacher walked in or while they were setting up). I struggled massively in university without the structure of school to make me do things and when faced with material that I did not pick up effortlessly. But when it comes to disability how well one performs academically or economically is often seen as the primary metric. Getting a person to produce the desired outputs of those systems is the goal and if someone does then they may not be seen as needing assistance no matter how much they are being ground down as an ill-fitting cog in the machine.

Several months later I am told by a doctor who I have never met before that the local mental health clinic I was going to had liaised with the adult ADHD service and they think that I have ADHD but it’s not severe enough to treat. Later I will be told by a friend who had also sought treatment that she was much more bluntly told that they are only treating people who are “crashing cars and getting arrested.” I ask the doctor in the clinic if I could see that correspondence with the adult ADHD service and she says she doesn’t know. She asks the receptionist and this is refused. I leave while trying not to show the rage and despondency I feel.

Freedom of Information

At this point I know I need to seek private care instead but I also want to see what the ADHD service actually said about me. I want everything in writing. It could also be useful to have documents to pass on to another doctor when seeking treatment privately. I decide to file a freedom of information request. Even requesting this turns out to be its own ordeal. The public clinic seems to deliberately have no contact email address. I phone them and am informed by the receptionist that all freedom of information requests must be sent, in writing, not by email, to a specific hospital that handles freedom of information requests for all Health Service Executive operations in the city. I am not given a specific person or office to address this to. After several more phone calls across a few days I finally get in contact with someone who is able to send me the FoI form⁵. I send it back with a simple request for documents relating to my seeking treatment for ADHD. I think that I will wait till I have these before seeking private treatment. It shouldn’t take too long; HSE is legally required by the Freedom of Information Act to respond within four weeks.

Two months later I emailed to ask (in much more polite terms) what the fuck they were doing. I will not bore you with the details of these exchanges but over the course of the following months I persisted, always patiently and politely, to ask as for updates. It would take multiple emails to get a single reply. Sometimes an email would get ignored and when I would send another one I would get a sudden phonecall in reply a few minutes later. They’re busy, they’re backed up, they were on holidays, actually this was passed along to the wrong person in the first place because they handle requests for clinics on the other side of the city.

What a waste of another few months on top of all the time I had pissed away already. At this point I think the public service is simply not going grant me my rights unless I threaten them with legal action and it’s not worth it. This has caused me enough stress as it is.

Treatment

I went to a private clinic. I paid a lot of money but I got seen quickly and was treated with some basic dignity. There was still the DIVA and the irritating focus on childhood but I was diagnosed with ADHD⁶—and this time I actually have that in writing—and I’ve started a trial of medications to see what works for me. So far it’s been really positive. I can direct myself and work much more easily. The house is getting cleaner. I can even relax more easily without thousands of ants biting at my brain telling me I should be doing something while not letting me actually focus on anything. I feel so much better in the last few days than I have in a while.

All it took is the destruction of my faith in doctors.

We need to normalise sex and kink in society so that it’s socially acceptable for my autistic arse to go on rambling about the ridiculous smut I’ve been reading in the pub after two pints the same way I do about The Ring or Sonic the Hedgehog.

This post quotes writing about sex and kinks.

In the last roundup post I linked to a piece by Devon Price. I was not aware of him before coming across a link to that piece myself but he seems to be quite a prolific writers. I’ve been going through some of his pieces and not only are they very interesting but they also speak to my own experiences in many ways as well, though quite different in others. I am being deliberately unspecific here about which parts are which, but I wanted to just link to a few more of his pieces and would just generally recommend reading his writing I think.

Common Phases of Accepting You're Autistic

The questioning phase is perhaps the most challenging one to move forward from — because to openly declare that you have a mental disability is to immediately call your own capacity to understand and interpret things into question. If other people can’t see how much you’re suffering, they will accuse you of being crazy and faking it. If they can see your struggles, they’ll accuse you of being too crazy to understand those struggles yourself.

The Asexual Fetishist

There’s nothing especially alluring to me about any type of body, or any type of face. The idea grabbing a dick or cupping a pert ass feels a bit formal, as if I were examining a purebred at a dog show. I can recognize the differences between one type of person and another, and even recognize the qualities that someone else might like, but to me all these gradients just dissolve into a bland field of fleshy sameness.

I’m equally bored by the mechanics of sex: the motions and stimulations bring me absolutely no pleasure. An attractive and attentive stranger could rub the correct spots on my body for hours, with the exactly right pressure and speed, and I’d only feel hollow if the experience weren’t also combined with some mind-controlling mantras or a swinging pocket watch.

Hypnosis is sex to me. Even in its most stagey and sterile forms, I find it inescapably erotic — and that leaves sex itself as just some boring party trick. You can touch me, or you can perform a series of backflips in front of me on the floor; either way I’ll tell you that you’ve done a very impressive job and all but it will not make me cum.

A Non-Disposable Place

That’s one thing that people don’t talk about, when they complain about landlords: how much disregard for your surroundings that renting breeds in you. It’s not only that the owner of your building never cleans the pipes. It’s also that you have no reason to feel invested in the pipes’ long-term functioning, and every reason to feel bitter about the thousands of dollars you’re already wasting on a broken building each year.

I lost and gained people I love in 2024. The year started off well. I won a Celeste race that myself and some friends do every New Year’s. I chosted a roundup of every film I had watched in 2023 to Cohost. I don’t think that I’m going to do that again this year. I don’t have the energy for it. I’ve been dealing with back pain issues for a while that are stopping me sleeping well.

In February I replaced my memory foam mattress with a spring one and it seemed to help for a while but then the pain came back. This repeated throughout the year with me finding things that seemed to give a temporary reprieve, only for me to start waking up in pain again. It’s not as bad as it was but I am still struggling with it. I am going to try going back to a physio again. I was not happy with the last one and when he moved his practise I did not feel very motivated to find a new one, but a friend recommended their physio to me over the holidays and I’ll give it another go.

Also in February my partner moved to Copenhagen. I knew it was coming, this had been planned for a long time, but when it actually happened it hit me very hard. She visited in the summer and I flew out to Copenhagen with some our friends in October too, but I want to make an effort to see her more, even if I do find travelling very draining.

Also also in February I dropped my phone in the toilet. It’s a Fairphone and designed to be able to be taken apart easily with just a screwdriver to swap parts, so it’s not very waterproof, and the screen stopped displaying anything. Thankfully disassembling it and drying it out thoroughly brought the screen back to life, but even if it hadn’t I would have been able to replace the screen.

In March I got a fancy folding, electric bike. I have not used it quite as much as I planned, especially over the winter when it has been cold and I have been struggling with lack of energy, but it has been very handy for certain journeys that public transport doesn’t adequately cover. I also experimented a bit with being horny on main with Cohost. It has really been the only place online where I felt safe and comfortable enough to do that. Part of that is just over getting more comfortable with myself and kink stuff, but Cohost was just a friendly place for me and I was inspired by other people I followed sharing their own kinks in very cute ways. Cohost shutting down has been upsetting for a lot of reasons but this is one of them and it’s hard to get comfortable about this stuff again in other contexts.

April was a huge month in retrospect. A friend asked me out and tentatively said yes, not really sure how it was going to go and I’ve never done polyamory before. I am so glad that she did. I love her so much. Both of my partners are autistic and ADD or ADHD and getting to know them and how wonderful, funny and utterly charming they are has helped me explore those parts of myself and see them as something to embrace. I’ve been learning to love myself through loving them. I am still undiagnosed but I am pretty sure.

And me being undiagnosed is not for lack of trying. Also in April was my first appointment at a local public mental health unit that I had been referred to over a year prior for an ADHD assessment. I calmly explained how much I struggle day to day and what I have to do to cope with it, which the doctor seemed to take as me managing pretty well. I realised from this conversation that doctors are basically just like dogs: They don’t really understand what you’re saying they just hear tone and maybe a few basic keywords. The health service is a paternalistic, condescending trap and you need to ritually humiliate yourself to them until they deign you worthy enough of the charity they so magnanimously bestow. I dropped the masks, let myself unravel and started sobbing in front of them.

This got me another appointment. They wanted to dig into my childhood, interview my mother. Quite frankly I don’t give a shit if I had ADHD as a child. Requiring that as part of diagnosis seems utterly pointless. I do not have a time machine with which to go back several decades to when that might matter. I am struggling now. That interview never happened, anyway. Appointments got delayed, doctors were busy. I got given a multiple choice form to fill out about my childhood again, some of which asked multiple questions as a single item which don’t necessarily have the same answer. Was I a good student and did I do well in tests? No, I was an awful student who ignored her teachers whenever I could get away with it and just read ahead in the book myself because I found that more interesting and I did will exams. I struggled massively in university when I finally hit a wall of subject matter that did not come easily to me as I had never learned how to study properly.

I of course got fucked around for another few months before being finally told I have ADHD and they are not going to treat it. I guess I’m functioning too well, though I don’t have any of the specific reasoning because the doctor who told me this was one I had never seen before and was just paraphrasing a letter that she refused to give me a copy of. I am still waiting on the results of a Freedom of Information Act request for my documents from these appointments that is almost two months overdue.

I started singling lessons in April but I failed to keep going with them. That’s far from the only thing I have failed to keep at since then. I’ve been struggling a lot as the year has worn on. I hope I can get back to the energy and spoons I seemed to have last spring again in the coming months. Going back over my diary for the year it’s a stark reminder of how much things were looking up then. April was also the last time I saw my friend Hellen. She had moved away and was around for a visit. I had a lovely time with her. I didn’t speak to her much after that and she died suddenly in August. I did not make it to the funeral, it was overseas, but some other friends did at least. Back here we had a memorial picnic for her.

Before that the summer was pretty damn good, though. Got closer to the new partner, got to see the old partner. I tried ritalin that was given to me—by a friend, not a doctor—and wow that does certainly help a lot. I wish it was possible to actually get treatment through the medical system. Oh well! I rationed them for bad days and they helped me get through a lot of shit. I also marched in a pride parade for the first time. I also met some kink people in person who were lovely.

Well. They were certainly lovely at the time. In August I learnt that one of the people I had met there had be accused of repeatedly spiking drinks at other events. Hellen died, as established, and then in September it was announced that Cohost was shutting down. I hope it doesn’t come across as callous when brought up in the same breath as my actual friend dying, but I also have grieved for that website. I was devastated. Cohost helped me a lot in this last year to embrace more parts of myself, be more open about certain things and it was also just a place that was actually fun and a bright spot in my life. I wouldn’t be posting on my own site if it wasn’t for it. It sparked creativity in a lot of people and reminded us that we can be thoughtful of how we use the internet and communicate with people. This site existing in its current form is because of Cohost.

I visited Copenhagen in October with some friends. I had a lovely time but I find travelling exhausting. I think I was a bit run down afterwards and got sick a few times. I might still be recovering from it all. My cat also got out and was missing for a few days, which didn’t help, and coming up to the Christmas holidays I had the most stressful time I’ve had in my current job. I’ve had two weeks’ holidays and I feel like it really wasn’t enough.

I did have a lovely Christmas with my newer partner, though. We had Christmas dinner with a group of other local trans people, played Mario Kart and watched Doctor Who. Ideal Christmas.

And now. I guess I still need to recover and heal. As I’m writing this my back pain is flaring up again. I need to get up and do some stretches before this year’s Celeste race this evening. We’ll see if I can keep my crown. I haven’t done much practising but I don’t think anyone else has either. It’s just a bit of fun.

older people love to complain about how “no one” was autistic back when they were growing up but never consider the obvious fact that Sonic the Hedgehog hadn’t been invented yet

getting every vaccination I can so I get quintuple autism like Sun Wukong