Eventually I started working again. First in a parasitology lab, and later as a wildlife technician. I finally, finally started hrt and it was like my brain changed. The dissociation finally started to clear. I was alive again, or maybe for the first time.
Conversation
I drifted away from the trans community I had found and it's morass of poor boundaries. I made friends with a more generally queer group and met the first person I'd ever loved. A girl named Lauren.
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We got drunk together and would cook together and watch bad movies and play video games and just talk or cuddle. I had a crush on her briefly that never went anywhere, but she was the first person I'd trusted in a long long time.
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For the first time since I was a very little kid, people touched me, and that alone changed my life. It was like all these pressures were building inside me, and then the virus started to hit, and it all turned inwards.
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I was happy for the first time in my life. I was binging creative projects and strange philosophies, occultisms and discovering introspection and meditation, and finally something broke.
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I... don't really know how to describe what it was. I had a weird ego death like experience meditating that gave me days of euphoria. It was like I had gained access to some deeper level of consciousness. Punctured into some hidden underground pool.
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I didn't just do anymore and deconstruct it later, I could understand things, and choose different approaches to being alive. And I could actually be alive and do in ways I couldn't before. Something like embodiment. This is a terrible description of the change.
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Social interactions, which had become fine tuned, lightning fast, and reflexive the way a master martial artist might move and fight reflexively and creative, finally took on a deeper understanding.
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I could perceive and understand others motivations and feelings beyond the information they gave me, at a scale I never could before. I was *connecting* with people in a very deep way. I had finally found some fundamental change, and I stopped being who I was before.
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I became me, Hazel. The one you know now. That is my story and my mystery. There are a thousand other details of vital importance, but this is how I became. That is why I am what I am, the way I am. I hope this helps you understand. This is how I love the world the way I do.
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