Apologies for the lack of updates this year. My life has decided to be all sorts of strange.

First and foremost, I'm in the middle of a divorce. The lesson learned from all of this? If you're a gay man, don't marry a woman. It saves everyone a shit ton of trouble in the end.
I'm moving out of Idaho altogether in a little less than a week. We recently put my granddad in a retirement home, and my aunt and mum have offered me his house for as long as I need it, provided I'm working on my thesis (with plans to graduate in December) and visit him once a week.

A lot of shit is changing, and while I was terrified of all of it a few weeks ago, now I'm just excited to get out of here and start over. Not a lot of people get a chance like this, so I'm going to grab the proverbial bull by the horns and take a chance on myself. If I fail, it's all on me. I won't be able to blame it on anything or anyone else. It's my chance to get my feet back under me, dust myself off, and punch the world in the face.

Here's hoping the next year is better than the last five.

DFTBA, my lovely readers. Thanks for sticking with me.

Musings

It started as a joke, an attempt to make Ho laugh when he was supposed to be super-serious and totally mature. It started with this.

I jokingly called it my spirit animal, said that somewhere inside me, there was a horse with a traffic cone, hoping one day it would wake up and be a unicorn, and that's when it struck me.
I am the traffic horse. I spend most of every day wishing I'll wake up the next day and be someone else, be magically comfortable in my own skin, and it's just not going to happen that way.
I look at myself and see everything I hate, whether it's my masculine hands or my thighs or my own personality, the way I react to things I know pose no threat to me, my own insecurities and fears and dislikes, the fact that I'm pretty sure most of my friends only tolerate me because they don't know how to tell me to go away, and instead of handling any of it in a mature and responsible manner, I shove it aside, hoping everything will be better in the morning, hoping I'll wake up a unicorn and everything will be just fine. The things I like about myself get shoved aside, unimportant, buried under my desire to just be someone else for a change.

I'm never going to just become a unicorn. It's likely I'll never be entirely comfortable in my own skin, whether it's because of my weight or my gender identity and how drastically it differs from the skin I'm in. I'll always laugh at inappropriate times and make jokes people don't understand. My hands will always be large and awkward, and gloves are never going to fit properly. I'll probably never be famous for anything that matters, if I'm famous at all. It's unlikely anyone will ever read anything I write and take from it everything I was trying to say. My friends will probably keep forgetting that I exist from time to time, I'll end up going to a near endless stream of movies by myself, and I'm always going to be afraid of zombies and spiders and being in crowds.
There is nothing wrong with not being a unicorn. There's nothing wrong with not being totally confident every second of every day. It's perfectly alright to have moments when you can't stand the way you look and when you think you've wasted your life trying to be someone you're not, studying something you can't stand, saying something no one has ever stopped to hear.

I am just a horse with a traffic cone on my head. I'm not a unicorn. With any luck, I'll never be one. I'm kidding myself if I think I'll ever fit in with the other unicorns. I fit in just fine with the other traffic horses, though, and maybe, just maybe, I can learn to be amazing at that. I don't need a horn. I don't need popularity or fame. I just need to be me.

More random stuff

I am a smoker.
I mean that quite literally. I smoke on a fairly regular basis. I have off and on for the last seven years or so, and I always seem to pick it back up when I'm unmedicated, stressed, or stuck somewhere in my life that I just don't want to be.
Now, before you get on your soapbox and tell me how horrible cigarettes are for me, trust me, I've heard it all. I spent years on that soapbox. I know all the graphic details of what smoking can do. Remember, please, that the only person who has any say what goes into my body is me. You're allowed to have an opinion, you're allowed to try to convince me to stop, and you're allowed to speak your mind. You are not allowed to judge my worth based on this, just like you shouldn't judge me for my past.
Allow me to be hypocritical for a moment and tell any of you who don't smoke to never, ever start. Ever.

In the months since I picked smoking back up this time around, I haven't had a single panic attack. I've had vague bits of anxiety here and there, but that's normal (or so I'm told). I've been unmedicated in this bout of things since early September, and I'm fully aware I'm using smoking as a crutch. It's something I can directly control. I can't say if I'd still be panic-free right now if I didn't pick up a pack again. I don't know. I can't see diverging timelines.
What I can say is right now, I actually feel pretty ok, even though pretty much anything capable of calming me down long-term has been self-destructive and somehow despite the fact that I haven't had more than three hours of sleep in a single stretch in what's starting to feel like forever.

I've been fighting the urge to just leave everything, get in the car, and drive until I run out of things to see. For the first time in a long time, I just want to chase the unknown, not know where I'll be the next morning, and be utterly and completely free. I want to meet new people and not have them know anything about me unless I directly tell them. I want to see new places and do things I'd never do if I stay here. The wanderlust is just getting stronger the longer I let myself stagnate in this town. I love my friends (most of the time, at least). I have a fantastic husband who puts up with far too much bullshit from me. I'm near my family if anything happens, and I've never wanted much more than that until now.
I don't think anything fantastic will come from running away from my life. It's not like I can afford to live on the road right now, anyway. Maybe some day, if I manage to not totally fail at making my life worth something, I can justify taking a month to just travel and see everything. For now, though, I just wander around a town I know like the back of my hand. It's enough to get me by until I find some new inspiration.

I miss things.

I miss old friends, as well as places I used to haunt on the internet (where I met the majority of those friends). If any of you are reading this, know I miss you, the conversations we had, and knowing that I'd always have someone to talk to, even if it was 4 AM on a weeknight and we both had places to be in a few hours.
I sometimes miss my old life, before everything burst out of me and refused to be a secret any longer. I don't miss how it felt to keep everything inside, but I miss how easy it had become for me to just not talk about it. I miss how it was easy to be around people because I didn't feel the need to talk about everything, and I miss how easy it was to just make up a persona around strangers.
I miss the days when I didn't need to justify my bad habits with excuses like "at least I'm not drunk all the time" or "at least it's not meth".

I can't change what's already happened, but I can sure as hell take steps to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Maybe some day I'll actually believe that.