Weekly Thoughts 1/6/24

There are some hard truths in life. For example, I love having long hair, but there are times when I think I’m naturally inclined to be a short hair person. I have great hair, and I love running my fingers through it. It looks good on me. But no matter what, there’s the issue of it being in the way and wanting to put it to the side. A goal for future haircuts, as I’ve tried for in the past, is to have a style I don’t have to do anything with. I can just wake up and get going, it’s always the way it’s going to look, and it’s always out of the way. But with my square-enough jawline and giant chin you could land a plane on, everything looks masc on me. I want something that’ll help make people realize I’m not a man right away, and I can’t picture a short hairstyle that would accomplish that. Not that I’ve had much success with longer hairstyles, either; it seems most people just see me as either a trans woman, which I’m not, or as a “man in women’s clothing,” which is really not what I want them to think. For as much as I agree that I should ultimately choose what’s most comfortable for me, I can’t give up on the social reality I wish to change. I’ll always be nonbinary, yet that’ll never be true for the world until I’m commonly recognized as such.

On to a lighter topic: Me feeling abandoned and left out. I’ve talked about not knowing how to ask for help before, and that’s generally true of me. I have reached out in various ways in the past, though, and the experiences that have stood out to me are the ones that ended poorly. Specifically, they didn’t “end” so much as they eventually wisped away. It’s strange how many times that’s happened to me, and I’m not yet sure what to make of it.

The first big experience in this category that I can think of was in fourth grade, and it was more of a definite thing. I had been friends with some kids a year older than me, and we hung out during the after school program. We would play with these animal hand puppets, among other things. When I got to fourth grade, they went on to middle school. One of their classes visited my school one day for…I don’t know, whatever reason middle school classes have for touring elementary schools, which mine never did. I was excited to see my old friend and brought the puppets over to ask to play. He got mad and told me to go away, and I recall some element of saying the puppets were girly or gay. Looking back, he was probably embarrassed to have his new middle school friends see him playing with a littler kid toy, and also the homophobia that I don’t understand being applied to hand puppets, but at the time I was just really hurt and confused as to why my friend didn’t want to play a game like we always did. Was there something wrong with puppets, and what I do and like? When I moved up to middle school, I had one year with a friend from elementary school, and through him I was able to make a few others, but I had already lost confidence in my ability to reach out to others and wasn’t making any on my own. I had never given how others saw me a thought before, and suddenly I had to, because it lost me a friend. My friend in fifth grade moved away at the beginning of sixth grade, and so I was left adrift, with no connections and the oncoming of puberty complicating things further. I retreated into myself, and I haven’t fully ventured out yet. You can’t unsee yourself in the eyes of others.

In my sophomore year of high school, I tried out for the bowling team. I wasn’t very good because I didn’t play a lot, but I also didn’t think I was that bad and I figured that if I joined the team, I could get better. Bowling was fun enough that I thought I could go through with it, and that not many people would be trying out. More importantly, I’d be on a team, a whole new experience that would hopefully improve my social situation. That didn’t work out for me. This is honestly more of an administrative thing than anything else; it really bothered me that I was never told that I didn’t make the team. I never heard anything else about it after my try out, nor was I told when I should expect to hear about it. I eventually saw a posting on the bulletin board about who made the team, and I wasn’t on the list. It would have been a lot easier to let go if the bowling coach wasn’t my pre-cal teacher, who was kind of a jerk in other ways. I saw him every day, but he didn’t bother breaking the news to me. I guess it would make sense if he has no obligation to, so my expectation that I would get a “formal rejection letter” for a school sports team is overblown. It was just such a big thing for me, the thing I was riding on in hopes of a better social life and an environment where I could learn new skills, that not getting the courtesy of being told no gnawed at me for a long time.

I applied to the creative writing class the next year, which came with a writing application that the teacher would use to choose students. I know now how bad I was at writing in high school, but I don’t think I was worse than anyone else; if anything, I think I had strengths in writing that put me above the pack. I don’t recall doing well with the prompt, which I didn’t fully grasp. I didn’t get in, and I knew some of the people who did and thought they weren’t as good as me. Sorry to them, in retrospect; it makes more sense if they were at least better able to interpret the prompt and had more skill than I realized. That aside, it really hurt me to not get into that class. I was writing a novel, and writing was the thing I wanted to be doing with my life at that time. Even alone and lacking confidence in expressing myself in other ways, I could string words together on a page as much as I wanted. Getting rejected from it made me feel like even that avenue was being rejected by the world.

Not that I stopped writing after that. My experience with creative writing class is different than the others in this list, and I included it because it connects to another time. In my senior year, I asked my English teacher to give feedback on my writing. I was glad she accepted and asked her a few times about it. She was clearly reading it, and didn’t like it. I was fine with that; it was more experimental writing I was having fun with, and I was hoping that once she got done with the sample I sent her, she’d have constructive criticism. I never got that, and I don’t know if she ever finished it, either. She just stopped talking to me about it at all. The one time in my life I reached out to someone for advice about what I was doing, and I didn’t get anywhere with it. If the advice had been, “This isn’t good, scrap it and start over, focus on these ideas you seem attached to,” then fine. If she had come back and said, “I don’t think I can help you with this,” I would have been bummed but could have understood what happened. I don’t have a concrete idea why I never heard back about my writing, beyond that she didn’t like it. To me, though, that’s not enough. A student asked for help; the basic courtesy is to say if you can’t. I kept writing after that, but I had lost a lot of confidence. There was no longer any point of thinking it could be good, or to let others ever see it. If I was making something bad, it didn’t matter because I was the only person who would ever read it, so there wasn’t a reason to abandon a project I didn’t think was shaping up.

I didn’t do anything in college that would leave me vulnerable in that way. I did start my first job after high school, and there started a series of social experiences at work that I still deal with. I asked out two coworkers at that first job. Both of them told me they’d think about it. One never told me no, but eventually started dating someone else. The other I think told me no, but I didn’t really hear her well and I didn’t want to ask her to repeat a rejection. I mostly didn’t like being left in limbo for a few weeks each time. Looking back, I wasn’t taking their feelings into consideration as much as I could, but I also hadn’t ever dated anyone before; I didn’t have a plan beyond asking them out to the vague idea of a date, and I was hoping to figure out the rest if I got a yes. I also have had several experiences of not being included in social activities with coworkers my age. People have talked about parties and get togethers around me without asking if I wanted to join. I’ve had people ask me for advice on what to do at parties I wasn’t invited to. People who said they think I’m funny and wanted to spend time with me and wanted to see me in specific settings, they didn’t invite me out at any time. And like, I get the feedback. I know I should try being more proactive instead of waiting for others. That’s hard for me for a lot of reasons, and I am working on it. But at a certain point, I can’t psychologically withstand the idea that I’m the only one doing anything wrong; other people are being mean to me, or I might die. Why not invite me to, whatever they did, Buffalo Wild Wings? Why treat me like I’m socially cancerous? I can occupy my own time, but I don’t want to always have to; what am I doing that makes you think I don’t want friends?

I also had a strange experience at work professionally. I applied for a promotion at my old store. The manager I interviewed with scheduled my interview the day before her vacation, which didn’t set high expectations. After she came back, she just didn’t tell me if I got the job or not. Like, this is work? You have to tell people that stuff. This is basic entry-level retail work, and I’m good at it, and literally everyone asks me when I’m going to move up; you could at least tell me that you don’t want me for the job. That experience carries over to now, where I’ve talked to my current manager about moving up and not being told what’s holding me back. It’s so frustrating when you don’t know what others expect of you. That’s something I’ve always struggled with, and presumably has impacted my relationships in the past. Socially, I understand the general idea that you won’t be told why people don’t like you, but at work? I should get the courtesy of being told the ways they want to see me improve, so I can concentrate my efforts and evaluate if I really want to move forward. But I can’t even get that at work.

I think this all may connect with the codependency I talked about last week. It’s been so hard to find friends, and when I do and assume they’re on the same page, things go poorly. If I find one, then I have to pin all my hopes and dreams on them, because I won’t make another. When I’ve made friends and they’ve left my life, I’ve had a few experiences of not remembering why I was so attached to them in the first place. And I always expect that things will abruptly end, no warning or clear sign, so I’m always afraid of that. It’s part of why I have a hard time talking about myself, because I still have it in my head that there’s no point in trying and taking the risk. I have made some truly positive connections, though. I’m not as attached as I’d like to be to my current friend (because I’m codependent), but I also don’t feel like I’ll be abandoned or forgotten, and I know she’s a good person to have in my life. As I try to move forward, I’m using experiences like that as my guide, and hoping for more.