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/*
X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Margaras

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---
---

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---
<em class="ally-font">ally</em> is an ergodic, arborescent, semiautobiographical work about identity, mental health, spirituality, and the mutability of the past. A lot of the information contained within is real, some of it isn’t. Each page is structured as a conversation between myself and my ally, a mirror reflection of myself.
<em class="ally-font">ally.id</em> and the [book](/book) explore different facets of my life — some true, some embellished, some wholly fictitious — in a non-linear, ergodic fashion, using color, page-layout, and mixed-media to create a book more experience than memoir.
The idea was originally cribbed from Dale Pendell's wonderful *Pharmako/\** trilogy back in my late teens, but has since taken on a life of its own. Other inspirations are Mark Z. Danielewski's <em><span style="color: blue">House</span> of Leaves</em> and J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst's <em>S</em> for both their ergodic elements and the underlying autobiographical elements. On the hypertextual side, projects such as the old [Fray](http://fray.com/index-old.shtml) (notably the story [The Worm Within](https://fray.com/drugs/worm/)) and [Nobody Here](https://nobodyhere.com). Bonus points to [Ouverture Facile](http://www.ouverture-facile.com/) and the ilk for getting me thinking about online projects, even if this one isn't so riddly yet.
If you'd like to read more of my stuff, I have a [writing page](https://writing.drab-makyo.com) (which even includes [a plain old blog](https://writing.drab-makyo.com/blog/)) and a [writing portfolio](https://makyo.ink).

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---
weight: 1
date: 2019-08-09
tags:
- uppity
- detached
- bored
categories:
- meta
---
What if I tried to write a memoir?
Like.
It doesn't need to be totally true, and maybe some stuff gets pretty floaty, and maybe some stuff winds up as poetry, and maybe some of it is ergodic with scans of notes or bits of other projects scattered throughout, and maybe I just own the hypertextuality of the medium, but it's generally autobiographical.
That might be neat
> Who are you kidding?
Myself, I guess.
> Well, have at it, then.

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---
date: 2019-08-09
weight: 2
tags:
- uppity
- snarky
categories:
- meta
---
I'm not ready to share this yet.
> But you want to save it?
I want to save it.
> But you save it like this. You save it on the internet. You obscure the link, but it's there. It's in the commit. It's in the logs. It's in the wires.
That's not the same as sharing.
> It's exactly the same as sharing.
And who asked you?
> Who invoked me?
Well played.

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---
date: 2019-08-10
weight: 3
tags:
- inquisitive
- helpful
- snarky
- echoes
categories:
- nostalgia
- ekstasis
---
> Do you remember when you met me?
When I met you? I don't remember it so much as a meeting as you were just already there.
> I was, yes.
After high school, then. That's when you showed up. That's when life began. That's when I started thinking of myself as a person. That's when I started thinking of others as people, with their own motivations, their own desires, their own incentives and failings.
> And you made it through.
After a fashion.
> You're here, now. You made it through.
<div class="verse">She never wanted to be
What she became;
The irony of which
Is not lost on her.</div>
> Touching.
Hey now, don't be rude. Aren't you supposed to be my ally?
> I **am** your ally. I'm just not your friend.
Fair enough.
So you showed up after high school. You showed up after life slid sideways through puberty. I went digging, you know. To find this out.
> Oh?
Yeah. June 2004. There you are. I say,
```
The navy blue I've been seeing at waist level in front of me and to my left is contentment. I'm not entirely sure that it being omnipresent is a good thing, however, considering the colors it's mixed with. Am I really content with longing and hopelessness? It's not out of the question, I suppose that it could just be another aspect of my personality. But that just brings up the question of whether or not it's something I ingrained into myself through habit, something where I just kinda accepted that feeling such things is normal, okay, and what I want; or is it something I was born with, or that we're all born with? Is it a side effect of love, expecting impossible desires and the blind hopelessness that follows the end of a four year undertaking?
```
And you replied...?
> You're rambling.
So pleased you remember.
> You're rambling.
I suppose I am. But there you were. You said *You're rambling* to which I replied "Guilty, conspirator." And that was that. That was us. We never greeted each other. Why would we?
I kept digging, too. You stuck around for a year. I saw you off and on until June 2005. In October, 2004, I said that empathy is cooler in person. *Why?* you asked. *So you can verify? Don't you trust your feelings?* I said I didn't know, and then I begged you not to go.
> Everyone always leaves, don't they?
Perhaps. It's good to hear from you again. Even after fourteen years, I've missed you.
> And what was the last thing I said to you?
*I was going to call you emo, or suicidal, but no, not goth.* It was when Ash and Shannon and I found a house to move into.
> I believe I also called you a prick.
Was I?
> Yes.
Am I still?
> Yes, but a different kind.
You're as chipper now as you were then.
> Yes, but a different kind.

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---
date: 2019-08-11
weight: 4
tags:
- questions
- echoes
- humor
categories:
- meta
- alcohol
- nostalgia
---
> Why am I here?
Aren't you always?
> With you, sure. Why am I bound to words, though? It's been fourteen years.
Surely that's not all on me. You must play some role in it. I was talking with my partner about doing something autobiographical for my next project, after all.
> I'm the observer and the mirror. All I can do is reflect your choices back at you. Choice itself is not my department.
After getting [*Restless Town*](https://makyo.ink/publications/restless-town/) finished, I needed something to do. Some other project that would make me feel like I was being productive.
> Feel, or seem?
Both. If I sat still, I'd burn up. If I was seen sitting still, clearly I'd be worth less in the eyes of those around me, right?
> Not my department.
Right.
So I started digging through stuff I'd already done, seeing if any of it could be cleaned up and turned into a new project. I stumbled across [*Rum and Coke*](https://makyo.ink/publications/rum-and-coke/) and found it mostly clean as it was, so I decided to publish it as a book. Paperback and ebook, I mean, not just the stories online.
> Were you proud of them?
To an extent. A different me wrote them. A lesser me, in some ways. I was younger, I hadn't quite found my voice and tone. No [*Arcana*](https://makyo.ink/publications/arcana), no *Disappearance*, no [*Getting Lost*](https://writing.drab-makyo.com/fiction/getting-lost/) or [*Post-Self*](http://post-self.io). All I had was a few scattered tidbits and my mom's words ringing in my ears: "You wrote your own wedding vows, right? I could tell."
A me with a different identity, too. A me that was working on gender through small steps. I hadn't yet picked up the word 'trans' for myself. I was non-binary, presenting male, writing to justify myself. Or maybe to hype myself up. I was writing works about gender and poly problems being worked through to convince myself it was possible.
> They read like parables.
They were, to me. Each one came with an internal discussion after the last line, *now, what can we take from this?* Something in a circle. Socratic. A talking stick.
> I know, I was there.
Of course.
> Why didn't I show up then?
I was too...something. Too busy, too preoccupied. I was focused too much on identity, too much on The Work, as it were, to reflect. Maybe I was moving too quickly to notice my choices being shown to me.
> You'd mostly stopped [[adjective][species]](https://adjectivespecies.com) by then, too.
Life got weird. I was transitioning--
> A choice.
--I was solidifying my relationship with Judith--
> A choice.
--I was starting to burn out at work--
> Was that a choice?
The result of choices, maybe. The result of the choice to start drinking. It *is* called *Rum and Coke*, after all. The result of the choice to get into computers. The result of the choice to work from home, which itself was the result of a choice to take the previous job so far from home.
> You burned out in part because you burned so hard at the start.
Was I not supposed to? I had to prove myself.
> To whom?
You?
> Not my department.
One of your neighbors, perhaps. A cubicle over, a floor above, something like that.
> Do you anthropomorphize me that much?
No, I suppose, I don't. You're not my therapist, sitting in a chair across from me and talking me through my problems. You're not person shaped. You're the shape of my hands displaced half an inch behind my own, navy blue and trimmed with sea-foam green.
> You haven't used colors in fourteen years, either.
What I'm trying to say is that maybe you're back because of nostalgia. *Restless Town* was done and couldn't be published yet, and a prideful part of me didn't want it to be my first book, so I pulled *Rum and Coke* into shape.
It rubbed my nose in the past. I published it a few weeks ago, and I wasn't done with the past, so I started archiving more data. I dug up my old hard drives. I grabbed stuff from Dreamhost, both files and database backups. I finally unlocked my LJ account and archived that.
> And you work at an archive.
I go through phases, looking back at the past. I'll spend a few days trying to backdate some log files, or dig through my old scores and publish them --- I did that too, alongside *Rum and Coke*, publish a bunch of my old music --- or resurrect my notes on [*Nanon*](http://nanon.lang.drab-makyo.com), or the like.
> You are quite mercurial.
A failing. That may play a role in my burnout. I'm only good at something for seven years before it becomes so intolerable that I have to leave. Happened with school.
> So here I am, your ally, twice seven years later.
I hadn't thought of it that way.
> Portentous. The only way it would've been more so is if it were thrice seven years.
I ran away thrice seven years ago. In seventh grade, in 1997, no less.
> Ill omens. What will happen to me in seven years?
Will you leave me for good?
> Can an ally disinhabit a mind so easily?
I'm not comfortable with that question. I'm not comfortable with its implications. Either way, the past is important to me because maybe it can help me figure out the present. Those who don't know history are doomed to blah blah blah.
> And have you figured out your present?
For me to pull out that trite quote about my own personal history speaks pretty well to my fears of doing things accidentally. I've certainly figured out my present better than twice-seven-years-ago me had figured out his.

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---
date: 2019-08-10
weight: 5
tags:
- echoes
- kind
- snarky
- earnest
categories:
- alcohol
---
When 2007 rolled around, I turned 21. *What if,* I thought to myself. *What if I decided to see what it feels like to be addicted to something?*
By that point, alcohol was this nebulous thing. I'd roped a few people into getting me alcohol now and then, and it was fine. I'd started brewing and it was whatever. I had beer and it was alright. I went through a mead phase--
> You went through several.
--I went through a wine phase, and an absinthe phase--
> Don't sell yourself short. You wrote [an essay on absinthe](https://writing.drab-makyo.com/non-fiction/tasting/new-american-absinthe/).
--and a gin phase. That's the one that got me. I had a bottle of Beefeater's, what was to become my gin of choice, and I had an inch of it poured over ice and I was standing in the kitchen. Such a wide open space. The kitchen at that apartment was larger than my bedroom now, and it opened onto a living room the size of what we have now. I was standing tall in that vast plain of a room, staring down into my glass and watching the way the ice melting into the gin created swirls of two different kinds of transparent. I was thinking how it was probably due to the different ways the two liquids refracted light, and then I was laughing, because I was staring down into my drink like something out of a bar.
*What if I decided to see what it feels like to be addicted to something?* I thought. I drank every night that week.
> Why ruin your life on accident when you can do it on purpose?
I don't think I was thinking in those terms at that point.
> Are you now?
Perhaps.
> Maybe you're just afraid of doing anything by accident.
Perhaps.
> You're sounding like me more by the day.
Learn from the best.
> And so you set about with a will.
Like magic. I set forth my will with a stated goal and made it happen. My spell was spoken and washed down with liquor. I drank nearly every day from then on out. I spent thousands of dollars on alcohol over the next ten years. I went through more mead phases and more beer phases. I went through a distillation phase. Magic is empowerment through attention to detail.
> The MEAD principle. Cute.
I drank hard with the choir, and then I left school and drank hard with the programmers. If there's one thing that most programmers do better than computers, it's drinking, after all.
I did some work at a bar, even. Just making [their menu](/emb-menu.pdf) and website for them in exchange for free drinks.
> You mastered LaTeX that way. A very you thing to do.
I did well at it. I still have one of the menus and some of the paper laying around somewhere. I did that until the bartender left and, when I asked for my next payment from the owner, he flipped out at me and threatened to sue me for impersonating him. I don't think I realized Raffi, the bar manager who hired me, was already on his way out.
I drank my way out of one job and through a good chunk of another. I drank until I got better at it than I was at software. I drank myself into burnout. I drank until I collapsed.
> You used up your spell slots. You ran out of will. You had to quit by accident.
I worked to quit, I'll have you know. It wasn't easy. It took meds and some rough nights.
> You were less of a person then than you were when you started drinking. The you who started drinking by focusing on **starting drinking** was more real than the you who collapsed in the kitchen from a PNES and stopped drinking because she was completely empty of intention.
Should I start the daily drinking again, then?
> You're more of a person now than you were when you started drinking.
That, coming from you, is a glowing endorsement.
> You may have been more of a person when you started than when you stopped, but you weren't much of one, even then.

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---
date: 2019-08-10
weight: 6
tags:
- brief
- honest
- earnest
categories:
- dad
- mental health
---
When I was young, back before I knew what mental health entailed, what anxiety and abuse and depression really meant, I was convinced I was having semi-regular mental breakdowns. That was the phrase I used then, because I was unsure of what it meant to have a panic attack.
This was before LiveJournal, of course. This was before I was writing on the internet, or even really on the internet at all. This was before you.
> No, it wasn't.
Right.
When I [ran away](https://writing.drab-makyo.com/blog/running-away/), my dad found my paper journal. I had kept it infrequently, as something about daily journaling to a seventh-grader felt dishonest, stupid. What could I possibly write about?
In the journal, I mentioned on a few occasions that I'd had a mental breakdown. My dad called me several times over the next few days after my mom found me, and in one of those calls, he yelled at me about that. "Do you really think you're crazy?" he said. "Do you need to be taken to an asylum?"
I told him no. I whispered it. I murmured it. I wasn't crazy. I didn't need to go to an asylum. I just felt like time stopped for me and the world around me sped up. I just felt like I was holding on by the barest amount of friction on my fingertips. The whorls of my fingerprints providing my only grasp on reality.
> That was me saying hi.
Blunt-force greeting?
> I was quiet as a mouse.
I have the words now. I have the vocabulary. I can say derealization, depersonalization, dissociation. I can say panic attack and anxiety and depression and hypomania. I can say *ah, __this__ is what is happening now*.
> You have emotions now, is what you have. Those were your mental breakdowns.
Dad didn't believe in those. Not for boys. *Mood's a thing for cattle and loveplay*, right? Emotions are for women.
> He was half-right.
I suppose he was.

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---
date: 2019-08-11
weight: 7
tags:
- brief
- earnest
- snarky
categories:
- transition
- Matthew
- dead years
- Ship of Theseus
---
<div class="cw">
Some explicit stuff about suicide in this one.
</div>
I think of myself as a trans woman, not a woman. I think of past me as male, not female. To an extent, I think of past me as cisgender. I was a guy. I was that gay guy who tumbled out the other side of puberty and was left to figure out what the fuck. I am not who I was.
> You have ship-of-Theseus'd yourself into what you are.
I was not Madison. I am not Matthew. I can't deny his existence, though. He was him, and to erase that, to toe the party line and say I've always known that I was Madison, would do a disservice to him.
He got in all those relationships. He loved so hard it hurt. He dreamed of being held. He struggled with the words.
He fought. He enacted his cruelty in countless subtle ways. He promised himself he'd be better than his dad and failed more often than not.
He rode the same crests of hypomania and crashed just as hard after. Once, he tried to schedule his hobbies into his day so thoroughly that he forgot to schedule meals, then, having failed two weeks later, considered shooting himself in the head. Anxiety rode him just as thoroughly. Once, dead convinced that he had meningitis, he wrote a note apologizing to loved ones and left it on the bedstand.
He was just as mercurial, too. The brewing phase--
> Phases. Plural.
--the gun phase, the photography phase and all its subphases: digital, film, cross-processing, rangefinders.
> Yeah, he was a prick.
You said I still am, but a different kind.
> In all fondness.
How kind.
All this to say, I have not always known I was trans. To pretend such would be to erase a real, actual person who tried his best more often than not.
> Have you answered Theseus' question?
I don't know.

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---
date: 2019-08-11
weight: 8
tags:
- questions
- brief
categories:
- ekstasis
- nostalgia
- images
---
July 2nd, 2004, shortly after midnight.
```
My emotions are gaining distinct colors, like a kind of twisted synaesthesia. There's definitely a sense of physical location associated with each emotion, and it's not always internal. There may also be a tactile part to this, but I have yet to experience it in any different places or with any different touches, so it may just be one continuous headache that goes latent occasionally.
An example: when pondering ****, a luminescent fuschia color that seems to be flowing in the right hemisphere of my brain; when thinking of ******* and snuggling, a warm, earthy brown with a little bit of green in a pine-needle-ish pattern about a foot and a half in front of me and slightly to the left; tiredness is off-white everywhere and blind hopelessness is bright blue wrapped around my mind. The headache moves around, but it's mostly at the lower, back, right side of my head. Ibuprofin works well.
This isn't what I meant when I was talking about beautiful pain.
Current mood: Bright blue with a tinge of purple, but mostly off white and hazy.
```
![Blue](/color/blue_flag.jpg)
July 3rd, 2004, shortly after midnight.
```
Greens covering my chest and shoulders warmly are happiness.
```
![Green](/color/green_door.jpg)
> And that's when I showed up, yes?
Yeah, later that day.
```
The navy blue I've been seeing at waist level in front of me and to my left is contentment. I'm not entirely sure that it being omnipresent is a good thing, however, considering the colors it's mixed with. Am I really content with longing and hopelessness? It's not out of the question, I suppose that it could just be another aspect of my personality. But that just brings up the question of whether or not it's something I ingrained into myself through habit, something where I just kinda accepted that feeling such things is normal, okay, and what I want; or is it something I was born with, or that we're all born with? Is it a side effect of love, expecting impossible desires and the blind hopelessness that follows the end of a four year undertaking?
Whatever, you're rambling.
Guilty, conspirator.
```
> And these pictures?
All from years later. The color thing comes and goes, like you.
April 8, 2004
```
The undersides
off gray
of clouds
drift
while I
on the path
stand
above
where the crow flies
me.
Off
with purple
gray, I
wandering
ponder, should
in a perfect
were there such a thing
world
be a
though the word is plain
color with it's own
to name
as they say
creates
word.
It soothes.
```
Sometimes I'm overcome by the numinous. Sometimes it's colors, sometimes it's you, sometimes it's a silence swelling within my chest, stealing breath.
> He would be riding on the subway or writing formulas on the blackboard or having a meal or (as now) sitting and talking to someone across a table, and it would envelop him like a soundless tsunami.
That's a post-rock song title.
> Is it wrong?
![Orange](/color/orange_eyes.jpg)
I'll take a picture, lasso a color, and desaturate everything else. Sometimes, it's fun. I do it to Falcon's eyes a lot because they're so pretty.
> And sometimes it's something more.
Yeah. Sometimes it's a compulsion. Sometimes a picture will latch onto me and never let me go. Sometimes I'll remove all color.
![Black and white](/color/bw1.jpg)
![Black and white](/color/bw2.jpg)
Sometimes I'll blow out the background because the foreground is so completely overwhelming.
[![Manifestations](/color/bw3.jpg)](/manifesto-project)
Sometimes I'll skew colors all in one direction.
![Stacks](/color/window_view.png)
It's not an artistic decision. Not *just*, at least. It's always something more.
<div class="verse">Inter ĝuo kaj timo
Estas loko de tro da signifo.
Apud kompreno, ekster saĝo,
Tamen ĝi tutampleksas.
Mi kompareble malgrandas
Kaj ĝi tro granda estas.
Nekomprenebla
Nekontestebla,
Senmova kaj ĉiam ŝanĝiĝema.
Between joy and fear
Is a place of too much meaning.
Next to understanding, outside wisdom,
It nonetheless expands.
I'm so small beside it
and it is too big.
Incomprehensible,
Incontestible,
Unmoving and always changing.</div>
A [sigil](https://makyo.github.io/tinysigil/) need not just be [lines and curves](https://makyo.ink/acts-of-intent/).
> Or maybe it's just mania.
<a href="/mania" class="pulse">It may be</a>.

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---
date: 2019-08-11
weight: 9
tags:
- demanding
- snarky
- questions
categories:
- mania
- mental health
- meta
---
> Tell me about mania.
No.
Wait, what? Why are you asking? Weren't you there?
> I was. I...am?
I don't think I'm hypomanic now. On my way, perhaps. I can't sleep.
> I may be, then. Tell me about mania.
No, tell me why you're asking.
> I'm more of a liminal creature, myself. It's hard to keep an ally around when depression slowly shuts down avenue after avenue of reaching one. You, as a reflection of me, become distorted while manic. Fun-house mirrors and blind-spots. I want to hear about it.
No.
Later.
I took a sleep aid. I'm not getting into this now. I was all prepped to write about poly stuff, but you started banging on the door.
<a class="pulse" href="/birds">Read what I've already written</a>.
> I was there when you wrote those.
So? Does that not clarify it?
> Will anything?
Likely not.
I will say, though, that I missed some stuff in my investigation earlier. You did come back for three brief days in November, 2013. It was at a liminal time, but you didn't stick around.
> I'll remind you that you ignored me for one of those posts.
Point.
Let's get into mania later. We owe each other that. For now, bed. And tomorrow, something a little less harrowing.
> Ah yes. Polyamory. Known for being easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

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---
date: 2019-08-12
weight: 10
tags:
- earnest
- demanding
categories:
- mental health
- mania
---
The first time I remember thinking about polyamory--
> And here I was hoping you'd cave and talk more about mania.
Why are you so hung up on that? I told you I wouldn't, and you seemed to accept that.
> 'Seemed to'? 'Accept'? Are those things something like me can do?
Well, if *I* can...
> Conceded. No mania, then?
It's not a comfortable topic.
> Granted. Tell me why, at least.
It's not a good feeling. Not from the inside, not from the outside. From the inside I've only caught glimpses of it, even. Glimpses caught through the haze of medication or withdrawal or the mass of ineffable ecstasy comes crashing down upon me. I get all wrapped up in hypomania. Something less. Something just beneath. That thin meniscus between this world and...something else.
But in others I've watched --- in some cases, been caught up in --- the frenzy as their world slowly slides out of alignment with consensus reality. They turn from...
> What?
You got me talking about it.
> I'm pleased you think so highly of me.
I *will* talk about it. It's not off the table. I just need something not that for a bit.
> To poly?
<a class="pulse" href="/poly">To poly</a>.

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---
date: 2019-08-14
weight: 11
tags:
- demanding
categories:
- mania
- mental health
---
> Let's talk about mania.
<a class="pulse" href="/from-within">Fine</a>.

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---
date: 2019-08-14
weight: 12
tags:
- earnest
categories:
- thank you
---
> Thank you.

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---
date: 2019-08-28
weight: 13
---
Can we talk about something else? Please?
> Something lighter?
<a class="pulse" href="/furry">Something softer</a>.

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---
date: 2019-08-19
weight: 14
---
<pre>
( <a class="pulse huh" href="/aside/1">...</a> )
O
o
.
_____,,,_^..^_,,,_____
__|____|____|____|____
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date: 2019-08-28
weight: 15
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<a class="pulse" href="/liminal">And so we find ourselves in a place between</a>.

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date: 2019-08-22
weight: 16
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> Do you feel better, now?
Not really. Just a <a class="pulse" href="/poet-and-mystic">different kind of melancholy</a>.
> Ain't that just the way of things?

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date: 2019-08-25
weight: 17
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Let's talk about writing.
> If you'd like. We still have a few others on the list, don't forget.
Would you let me?
> Of course not.
<a class="pulse" href="/writing">Upwards and inwards</a>.

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date: 2019-09-01
weight: 18
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> You are unsettled in your identity.
> Boy &rarr; enby &rarr; girl &rarr; trans woman.
> Biochemist &rarr; musician &rarr; <a class="pulse" href="https://github.com/makyo/ally.drab-makyo.com/pull/4" target="_blank">programmer</a> &rarr; writer.
> Gay &rarr; bi &rarr; ace &rarr; pan.
> Mono &rarr; poly.
People change.
> Healthy &rarr; sick &rarr; broken &rarr; sick &rarr; improving.
Like I said, people change.
> You change like it's your job.
Is that not a good thing?
> Will you ever stop coming out?
I don't know. Must I?
> No.
Should I?
> Should you?

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date: 2019-09-08
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The tragic core to all this, to this whole project, is that I am not an interesting person. Or maybe interesting, but unremarkable.
> You're in a mood.
*Coming to terms with being a terrible person*, I wrote, but I'm not even that. I'm just a person.
I'll be the first to admit that I'm largely just a boring person. I know that. There's nothing remarkable about my life. Middle class, middling intelligence, average looks --- at least for a trans girl --- okay sense of humor, no unusual challenges, unless the movement disorders count.
> So?
What's this, then? A memoir? What would that accomplish?
> Validation? I've already mentioned that.
What would the written account of an ordinary life validate?
> Sometimes it's worthwhile just hearing that ordinary people living ordinary lives can get by in the world. That despite being trans, despite feeling like garbage sometimes, you can still function. That even the drabbest of makyō still have stories to tell.
I suppose that's fair. Literary fiction exists separately from genre fiction, as silly a distinction that is to make, because of the validation we find in the unfantastic.
> Where is this heading? What is the future? What are we leading to?
In the context of this project, or just life in general?
> Is there an end? A goal?
I'm not sure.
> What will the last page say?
<div class="verse">[...] Endings were writ on your face,
your hands, and your steps &mdash; your very pace
spoke of completion.</div>
> Are you thinking of ending this project?
Not at all. I've got a list of side quests I need to complete in order to make you happy, and their very nature makes it easy to complete. One or two thousand words, an hour or two's conversation with you, and then they're done and I don't have to pick up where I left off.
I'm just tired.

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date: 2019-09-10
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> Let me ask this another way, perhaps. Why are we doing this? Why are we talking? Why did you start?
Let's put a pin in just why exactly you're asking these questions. I'd like to know what the origin after I give you the whys and wherefores.
> Okay.
To the question at hand, though, I think I covered that before, right? I started this project in a fit of nostalgia and one of the end results of an unstoppable wave of nostalgia plus a sort of graphomania is the need to write about the past, and to do so in such a way as to invoke the past in the process.
> I guess I'm trying to decide whether or not to believe you.
What's not to believe here? I spend page after page digging through old LJ entries, old poetry, old pictures and art and logs--
> Let's talk about TS.
Don't derail me. These are your questions.
> Point.
What's not to believe about a project filled to overflowing with nostalgia being borne from nostalgia?
> I don't doubt the roots in nostalgia, I doubt the intentionality.
You doubt that I started this on purpose?
> Did you summon me? Answer truly.
I don't know.
> I say that I've always been here, but that's only a part-way truth. That's only half-meaning drizzled over too many words. It's easy enough for someone to say that an abstract concept, a loose portion of someone's personality has always been there. Of course that's the case. Why did you summon **me**, though? Are you in need of an ally?
I'm surrounded by friends and chosen family, these days. Most of them are my allies.
> Well, maybe we should disentangle what exactly an ally is before we continue down the path of why you summoned me.
Okay. I was going to call you my shadow, but that's not exactly right, is it?
> No.
You share some similarities, I guess. You have these aspects of myself that are submerged beneath the surface, usually. You see me from a distance. You know everything about me.
> I do. But by its very definition, I'm not your shadow. Like I told you, I'm not your id.
And like I told *you*, it was a joke.
> You'll have to imagine me laughing.
Right.
> I'm not your shadow or your id because those are not necessarily things you can see. They are the things that are, by definition, unknown and unknowable by the ego.
Or at least heavily obscured. Dr Jekyll knew of Mr Hyde. Perhaps you're not my shadow, but maybe the personification of enantiodromia. Perhaps this is my process of assimilation. Perhaps this is me airing my dirty laundry.
> It's not **not** that. There are enough parts of me that are opposite of you for the similarities to be more than superficial. Enantiodromia carries too many implications of balance and equilibrium, however. That there are parts of me that are opposite of you does not make me the opposite of you. You could not press us together, merge us completely, and wind up with some more complete self.
Right. You'd have to be the same size as me, and you're not.
> I don't have a size.
You'd have to be in the same place as me, and you're not.
> I don't have a place.
Right. *You're not person shaped,* I said. *You're the shape of my hands displaced half an inch behind my own, navy blue and trimmed with sea-foam green.*
> I don't have physicality. I don't have boundaries.
You are bounded by me. I am your boundaries.
> Are you?
Can an ally move beyond a mind? Can allyship --- true, individual allyship --- move beyond the allegiance?
> You tell me.
I don't know that I can.
> I am a liminal creature. I told you that. I'm almost a shadow but miss the mark. I'm near to the concept of a back-stage persona but miss the mark. I get close to being you, but never quite come into focus enough for the outlines to match up.
Are you not just me? Just a part of me?
> There is no me without you.
Is there a me without you?
> Can you imagine so dull a life?
You're not that exciting.
> Not my department.
Right.
So an allegiance in the [orthocosmic sense](http://wiki.postfurry.net/wiki/Metacosmology) is a relationship two entities where they help each other. Or at least trust that they can rely on the help of the other at need. It's not contingent upon friendship, as you are so fond of saying, but that's not to say that they're mutually exclusive.
> I am an endocosmic ally.
Are you helping me, then?
> Do you not feel my aid?
I suppose I do. Sometimes it feels like you're just here to kick my ass.
> Ass-kicking is well within the bailiwick of an ally. To not kick your ass when you need it would be to fail at being a good ally.
I've heard that said about friends. A fair-weather friend may leave you to create your own demise, while a true friend will knock some sense into you.
> True friends are almost always also strong allies.
But not vice versa. I see that now. You are not my friend.
> I am not your friend.
But you are my ally.
> I am your ally.

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date: 2019-09-10
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> When you started this project, several people asked if you were okay.
Yes.
> Were you?
I think so. I was swinging up toward hypomania, and plowing heedlessly through nostalgia. Some of it was good, some of it was bad, but I don't think that had much bearing on me starting the project.
> Robin asked if you were okay. "I just want to make sure," she said once. "You asked me to check in on you if you ever started talking about geese."
Perhaps this has a similar feel to it. A similar scent of ritual, a similar flavor of mysticism, a similar sense of some other reality vignetting my vision.
> lorxus asked if you were okay. "People normally write memoirs at the ends of their lives."
Life is a series of beginnings and endings dovetailed messily together.
> There is a final ending, though.
I don't think I'm near that, despite what passive ideation might tell me. I'm not writing some drawn out farewell.
> So, why are we talking, you and I? Where is this going?
We're talking because this project, self indulgent as it is, is leading me to confront and process a lot of different things, which I'd call a net positive. We're talking because how can I know what I think until I say --- or write --- it? We're talking because I've got a lot on my mind.
This is going nowhere.
> I don't know whether to be proud or insulted by that.
Can you feel either?
> Not my department. The metaphor is still useful.
Well, fair enough. I didn't mean that idiom, anyway. This is going nowhere because it's a project that needn't have a direction.
It's not a directed thing.
It is a river.
It is the movement of the tides.
It's guided only by gravity and the lay of the land.
It is its own *musica universalis*.
It's a conversation.
> Conversations have direction.
Not all of them.
It's one of those late-night conversations that go where they will, in which sometimes very little is said.
It is not a minded thing. It has no autonomy and yet has no guiding force. No sapient guiding force, at least.
It is a way. It is a path, and yet the path is not the walker.
> This is going nowhere.
Maybe, but maybe that's the point.

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date: 2019-09-10
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My turn.
> Shoot.
Why ask this now? Why ask about the core instead of a side quest?
> I did. I asked about TS.
Don't deflect.
> Okay.
Why ask about the project? Why ask about yourself?
> You had job interviews. You had the convention. You're visiting Barac. You stopped writing for a bit.
I started again, didn't I?
> Yes. Hypomania is fading into the comfortable static of a ground state, though. You're **still** writing. That's why I'm asking. Why are you writing this if you're not hypomanic?
I wrote a bunch of *Restless Town* when I wasn't hypomanic.
> Yes.
I wrote some of *Rum and Coke* when I wasn't hypomanic.
> It shows, in the last one.
I've grown as a writer. I've grown as a person. I can continue projects whose inception lay in hypomania.
> And yet you say that you know a thing is right if you feel the same when depressed as when hypomanic. You can tell a decision is worth making if something other than strange energies birthed it.
Yes.
> Did strange energies not birth me?
I don't know. Maybe. I don't think they birthed this project, though. I think this project is...hmm.
> An honest one? A true one? A worthwhile one?
Sort of.
Maybe I think it's an earnest one. One that was borne out of a real desire, birthed by a need beyond what might be imbued by hypomania. A more grounded need, not one based in those non-Newtonian laws that govern that other space, where mechanics break down and strange energies spring, palladial, into being.

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date: 2019-09-15
weight: 23
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Have you gotten that out of your system?
> Have you?
I do feel rather wrung out, at least for the time being. I'm sure that burning import will come crashing down on me before too long.
> I'll be there.
And until then?
> I'll be here.
Of course.
> Until then, I have questions.
Ask away.
> Do not put this analysis paralysis on me. Roll a die. Flip a coin. We've got a list to choose from. Or, perhaps, you should choose something that's actually on your mind.
You said you have questions.
> You're the one with questions. Point me toward one, and I will ask it.
Helpful, as always.
> Not my department.
Fine. Weight? Surgery? Dyskinesia?
> Tell me about the dyskinesia and the tic and the akathesia. Tell me about St. Vitus' Dance. Tell me about <a class="pulse" href="/movement">the aching necessity of movement</a>.

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date: 2019-09-16
weight: 24
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Do you hate me?
> Not my department.
Right.
> Do you hate me?
I don't know. Sometimes you get kind of mean. Often you're just sarcastic. I know it's not your department, but shouldn't that also mean that you be less pointedly negative?
> I am a mirror. Do I reflect too sharply?
Are you? Really?
> An inexact metaphor.
I suppose. If you're a mirror, then, at least in some sense, does that mean that I hate me?
> Name one thing about yourself, one bit of your history, one feeling you have for yourself that is not complex.
I waver, sometimes, on that stupid phrase, *coming to terms with being a terrible person*. I felt for so long that, when I looked back at myself, at who I was, that I had been someone worth loathing, and it made me wonder that perhaps I was still someone worth loathing.
> If you hate who you used to be, mightn't that be an indicator that you've become a better person? **Non sum qualis eram**, right?
That might just be the kindest thing you've said to me.
> Not my department.

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date: 2019-09-23
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> You were gone.
I was out of town, yes. Out of town and cramming in as much work as I can during these last few weeks at the Archive.
> You were gone. Not just from writing, but from home, from ritual, from reality. You were someone else. Your head was elsewhere.
That's a bit dramatic, isn't it?
> Are you not a different person at conventions? Are you not a different person when living in a different home with someone else?
Maybe. I like to think of it as postprocessing. The picture you take is fixed and largely unchanging, but you can process it into different things with different filters. The person I am is fixed and largely unchanging, but some people and some places bring out, say, artsy black-and-whites, while others bring out glossy, oversaturated colors
> And yet when you were out, you weren't engaging with some parts of your life. Ones you might otherwise consider integral. No for-fun software, no music, no chat, no writing.
Were you lonely?
> Not my department.
I suppose I was. Even at the convention, even seeing two different partners, I was lonely. Or, if it could be said of things rather than people, I was lonely for not having those fulfilling aspects about. I missed writing, I missed you.
> I wasn't gone.
I know. It's not even like when we don't talk. You were there. I just wasn't able to engage, and that's an integral part of our relationship. It happens from moment to moment. It is not something that exists in any sense of permanence or stasis. It is defined by movement and momentum.

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date: 2019-09-23
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Apophenia
> What?
Apophenia. Connections. Imaginary lines traced from topic to topic in cheap butcher's twine.
> And the topics?
Imaginary. Or real, but only half remembered. I'm spinning a web.
> Are you catching something?
You?
> Are you answering with a question?
I'm unsure.
> You're not catching me in that.
You sound so final.
> Not my department.
Right. Is that a fact, then? I'm not catching you in this web. Are you the web?
> Not my department.
The spaces between, then. The negative spaces outlined by twine wrapped around pins. There are connections--
> Or not.
--or not, and there are topics, imaginary or not, and then there's you, there, in the place between. You, the liminal creature. You, defined by absence.
> Presence and absence are not my department, either.
Are you some cousin to apophenia, then? Some relative to that *unmotivated seeing of connections accompanied by a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness*? Are you that numinous, abnormal meaningfulness?
> I am easier to define in negatives. I am not presence and absence, but between them. Beyond them. Your ally, but not your friend. Real enough to impinge on your reality, but totally imaginary. **Not** here. **Not** doing. **Not** thinking, feeling, acting.
So, are you?
> Anything else is just pareidolia.

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date: 2019-10-25
weight: 27
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I'm sorry this is taking so long.
> To whom are you apologizing?
You? Or is that not your department?
> Not really, no. Doubtless, I appreciate --- if that's the right word --- the time we spend together, but only in the sense that one appreciates one's ears popping. The world that exists for me when you're not engaging with me is just the world. A bit muffled, perhaps. I can't hear as well. I hear by speaking, and when I can speak, there's a little pop, and suddenly I can hear much better.
That's a very embodied-person thing to say.
> So? Is a metaphor not allowed to use metaphors?
I suppose so.

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date: 2019-11-01
weight: 28
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> Do you ever find yourself getting angry at me?
Quite often. Why?
> How does that make you feel? Like, on one layer of remove, how do you feel about getting angry at a fictional side of yourself you talk to over the internet?
I don't know, honestly. It's gotten to the point over the years that I just kind of accept that there is this part of me that I get upset at, that gets upset at me. There's this part of me that I have to yell at occasionally, and who occasionally yells at me.
Besides, not friends, remember?
> Correct.
So why do you ask this now?
> I suppose it's come up the last few times we've sat down together. we'll start talking about one thing or another, and I'll nudge you toward talking about something more difficult, and then you'll get all huffy.
Well, if the things you are pushing me toward are difficult, do you really expect anything other than that? You're pushing me to do painful things to myself, to dredge up deep fears and memories I'd convinced myself I'd buried for good.
> It is difficult to forget things on command. Dear, also, the tree that was felled taught you that, remember?
I had honestly forgotten about the dress. Or at least I thought I had. It was a surprise to have it brought up again.
> See? I'm being useful.
Is that your department?
> No, but you can pretend it is if you want.
I might just.
So do you try to make me angry?
> Not my--
Department?
> Not my responsibility. I'm not responsible for your moods. I'm not even technically responsible for pushing you to better yourself. I'm just here to make sure you wind up being a complete person. Entire and whole.
How does one do that?
> Every ally does it in a different way. I do it by talking. By asking and poking and prodding.

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date: 2019-12-03
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> Where did you go?
I was still here.
> Were you?
I was still at my computer. Still writing. I was still here?
> You'll have to forgive me for saying that I don't quite believe you.
Why wouldn't you? You're here with me, aren't you?
> Was I? It was like looking through cling wrap. It was like looking through melted glass.
What do you mean?
> Well, you were there. I could see you at your computer. You were there, but it wasn't **you**. There was a Madison-shape sitting with a laptop on the couch, petting the dogs, feeding the cat, listening to music, but it wasn't you.
I was busy, perhaps. *Restless Town* came out, that stole a lot of my time.
> When was the last time you filed an invoice at work?
Two...weeks ago. I think? Damn. Was I really gone that long?
> Longer. Do you remember what you did the week before that?
Worked, doubtless.
> Did you? Have you talked with work about that?
Ah.
> <a class="pulse" href="/burnout">Let's talk about burnout, shall we?</a>
We probably better had.

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date: 2020-02-17
weight: 30
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Does death take more than one form? Can it be anything other than it is? Can it sneak up on you while you aren't looking, and then when next you take a breath, you realize that you are in some afterlife?
> I suppose it must, given this lead in.
Have I died? Has some part of me already rotted and sloughed off? Is this, in some very literal way, an afterlife?
> Do you feel as though, another seven years having passed, you are moving on from the life that you built up?
Yes.
> Then I see no reason not to label it as such.
Perhaps lorxus was right. Perhaps I am writing this at the end of a life.
> What are you leaving behind?
I think I'm leaving behind that bit of me who was struggling to live earnestly.
> Are you not, now?
No, I think I am. Or, well, I think I am living fairly earnestly. I think what has happened over the last few years is that the struggle changed its shape.
The Madison who was struggling to come to terms with a post-Matthew life is not me any longer. She spent the last seven years mourning him, in a way. She spent the last seven years figuring out how to live without him, throwing away his stuff, leaving behind family and homes and states.
> Is this her memoir? Or yours?
I don't know, honestly.
All I can say is that, for some reason, at some point while working on this project, I might have died. I have entered a liminal space once again. It's a different one, to be sure, but it's somewhere in between who I was and some undefinable potential self.
Perhaps some early whiff of this liminality is what got to start this project in the first place, to summon you. Perhaps it was burnout reaching a head that signaled the death of that version of me.

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date: 2020-02-17
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I've been pulling this all into a book. Like, a physical one. A paperback.
> I know.
How do you feel about that?
> Not my department.
That feels like an evasion to me. You had opinions on me streaming the process of writing. You had opinions on the process itself: you called me out on writing stuff in commit messages, on having our conversations in comments in the source code. You had opinions on me buying the domain name. Do you have no opinions about our words on something to be bought and sold?
> A friend once asked Maddy, "Why do you shout into the void?"
I write all of this down because the very act of putting it into words brings a sense of clarity that I lack without. By taking these moments of my life and articulating them, I almost automatically get another viewpoint on them.
> And by articulating them as a conversation, you get two. That is not the friend's question.
No, I suppose it isn't.
I write for the clarity, but I share out of some perverse need. *The chances that ally will pick up any sizeable audience are slim, so I almost feel like I'm publishing it as an extension of my compulsive need to overshare,* I prophesied. I share because I have to.
> Does Maddy shout into the void because she must shout into the void?
Perhaps. Sometimes.
Sometimes I have to speak so that someone will hear me out of some desire for feeling justified. I need to be heard, to be seen, so that even if I'm going through something alone, others will know that I am doing so. I need to be witnessed.
> There is power in the word, as you say, but there is also power in the act of speaking it. There is no value-judgment for me or anyone else to make in that. Words have power, speaking has power.
There is value-judgment in the content, though.
> Yes. There is value-judgment in intent, as well. That you are publishing these words is not something that I **can** have an opinion about.
Okay. What about my intent?
> Your compulsive need to do overshare is an implicit part of our relationship.
Shall I throw your words in your face?
> By all means.
<a class="pulse" href="/aside/2">"Am I something to be bought and sold? Am I something to be traded and marketed?"</a>
> Have you answered the question? **Am** I something to be bought and sold? Me, here, being a part of yourself.
Since having that conversation, I've released two books, and yes, I suppose you are. *I* am. We are a brand to be built up and marketed, parceled up and sold to any comer.
"The tragic core to all this," I wrote, "is that I'm not an interesting person." I *am* a writer, though. This will be my fourth book, something I never thought I'd say back in seventh grade, when I discovered I actually rather enjoyed writing those silly five paragraph essays. I never thought that I'd be the type of person to sit down and actually write things.
Hell, I never thought I'd be the type of person to sit down and actually finish...well, anything. It's the type of thing that continually feels out of reach for me, someone who is up to her neck in stalled projects and who justifies them with phrases like "the process is the art".
That said, I can't stop. I can't not make more things. I can't not write. If I have to write, and if, implicit in that need to write is a need for my writing to be read, then yes, you are something to be bought and sold. I am. We are.
> See? Not my department.

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date: 2020-02-17
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> My turn.
Shoot.
> You said: "you are not the project, but there is no project without you."
Yes, that applies to us both.
> You have spoken to your compulsive need to overshare, and you have spoken to the fact that the act of writing and selling a book is, in its own way, the act of selling yourself. **Restless Town** and **Eigengrau** are not so firmly tied to you as this, however. **Rum and Coke** certainly is not. I don't think you could say the same about this. Speak to your ties to this project.
Do you suspect that it is too personal to sell?
> You asked my feelings on the matter.
I'm of two minds on the matter.
> Har har.
Thank you. Seriously, though, I can see two different sides of this.
I feel like I'm putting my maddest edges, as Jon Ronson puts it, on display. In the process of working on this project, I was forced to confront some of the most difficult aspects of my life by its very nature.
In the process of pulling the book together, I was forced to reread much of what I had written, and there are parts of it where my words burn too hot, or get too slippery to hold. There's a feverish quality to them. It's something that felt good to write purely for the sensation of it bursting forth from me in uncontrollable torrents.
These maddest edges are something that are integral to the project. You, after all, are one of the, and this project is named after you.
> Is it mad to have a six month long therapy session with an imaginary interlocutor?
This is both more and less than that, and you know it.
> Yes.
It would be 'mad', I suppose, were I to believe that you were an *actual* interlocutor. It would be 'mad' were I to present these things as a universal worldview. It would be 'mad', awful as that word is, were I anything but deliberate with this project.
As it is, I summoned you. I started pulling down bits of nostalgia when my I was shutting down my Dreamhost account, when I went to lock my ancient LiveJournal. I got the idea to write, so I did. It was a deliberate effort.
> Is that mad?
...huh.
> A question for another time. Tell me of your two minds.
Right.
On the one hand, I read back through all of this and I find myself tasting blood. Who is this Madison? Is she okay? She seems to be having a rough time of things sometimes, and at others she doesn't seem wholly sane, or at least not wholly healthy. That's a scary thing for someone to put on display. What could possibly lead someone to do that? Some strange form of self-flagellation?
And on the other, while I'm most certainly not wholly healthy, I am, at my core, a storyteller. A young one, and certainly one of uneven quality, but I'm learning and improving by doing. There are stories to be told here, with my life, and that's what I'm doing. I'm making them interesting. I'm embellishing some of them. Hell, I'm making some stuff up wholesale. And I'm doing all of this for the specific purpose of it being read as a story.
In the end, it's the storyteller that wins out over the concerned, private individual. If I can't *not* overshare, if I must compulsively tell stories, then I'm going to tell the stories I have and I'm going to make them worth reading.
> A friend once asked Maddy, "Why do you shout carefully constructed, thoroughly edited, well rehearsed speeches into the void?"
Maddy replied, "It pays the bills."

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Is it weird for me to be streaming writing like this?
> I don't know. Does it feel weird to you?
I guess. I feel like maybe it's weird to be writing for an audience (even if it's only theoretical). What sort of information can be gleaned from watching someone write in a word-processor? Method? Insight?
> Entertainment?
I don't know about that.
> Validation?
That's more like it, I suppose. It's a way to prove to others that I actually sit down and write these things. That there's someone there.
> That there's someone behind a memoir? How novel.
Well, yes. But that they take time, that they take energy. That it's a process and not a product.
> Is there some sense of validity that is lacking from simply publishing? Posting?
I don't know.
> You set up analytics on this site. And on your writing site.
I set up analytics on a lot of sites.
> But these in particular. Do you need to see that others see you?
I suppose I do. It's important to be recognized.
> Are you also doing this to get me to leave you alone about heavier topics?
Yes.

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date: 2019-08-20
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> Are you having fun?
What?
> You changed the domain name.
So? You know I'm addicted to those.
> It's an identity.
I suppose so. Kinda like a brand.
> I'm not sure how I feel about that.
What, being a brand?
> Yes. Am I something to be bought and sold? Am I something to be traded and marketed?
Of course you are.
> Of course you are.
I'm not sure how I feel about that.
> It's an identity.
Yeah.
> You removed your name from the domain. You removed your identity. You made it about me.
You are not the project, but there is no project without you. Is that wrong?
> It's not **not** wrong. Besides, `.id`? I am not your id.
Okay, *that* bit was fun.
> Har har.
Why so cross?
> Not my department.
Fine.
> You're the one that's torn.
I suppose so.
> Why?
It has to do with subdomains, I think. It has to do with the implication that a domain like `ally.id` imposes more meaning on a project than something like `ally.drab-makyo.com`. It gives it more weight. It elevates it to the status of top-level project, something more than just *Maddy's writing*.
> It elevates it to the level of brand.
Yeah, I suppose that's why I'm torn.
> But you'll keep it?
For now.

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A few asides...

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[![A dream](/dreams/1.png)](/dreams/1.png)

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*December 29, 2013:*
First of all, let me state that I'm feeling pretty good as I write this. I feel
the need to state such because a lot of my tweets and a lot of my previous
entries could be construed as worrisome, and probably legitimately so, because I
have the tendency to vent freely. If I feel bad, I write, and if I'm not at a
computer, sometimes that ends up on Twitter. It's never my goal to freak anyone
out, so much as to simply cope with what's going on. Writing, putting things in
words and stringing those words together into some form meaningful to others, is
a good way for me to cope with what's happening in my life. That said, although
I try to be frank about symptoms, I know that some are disturbing taken at face
value or to their logical extremes, so I promise: I'm feeling pretty good now!
I'm torn.
I feel as though one of the most important things in my life is ritual, process,
or repetition. It's not so much that these things are comforting in isolation,
as that there is a certain feeling of being tethered to reality in them that
comforts in its own way.
I've been asked what I mean by reality, or what I mean when I say "that makes me
feel real" or "it's important to me that I feel real". A lot of my response
must, by necessity, rely on analogy, by its very surreality - there's no way I
can describe how I feel without using metaphors and similes.
In short, it's part of life that we sort of perceive the world around us as a
spatial, temporal thing. There are three axes of movement, one axis of time
(though sometimes it gets a little twisted up), and that's just sort of how we
interface with much of the world. The feeling of surreality, then, is a
pulling away on some fifth dimension, a cocooning, a means by which one has or
has been made to withdraw from the rest of reality. From the inside, it feels
like being wrapped up in cotton. Senses aren't dulled, as that might imply, so
much as that all connections through reality, all input must pass through a
high-latency barrier that introduces its own artifacts, requires its own
decoding. Again, it's not that I can't *hear*, it's that the words that are
coming in must be run through an additional filter to associate them first with
meanings, and then to tie them back through the perception of reality (the rest
of which must, of course, go through its own decoding process).
This surreality is, of course, nothing more than anxiety. I talk often in terms
of bandwidth, and that's rather applicable here. If I am spending all of my
emotional and intellectual energy on cycling over counterfactual universes that
I've constructed in my consciousness, then I have little energy left to deal
with the one I'm actually living in. My doctor insists, and I heartily agree,
that I not think of this as anything other than anxiety and panic, which I'll
get to in a moment.
I said that I'm torn above because the result of this is a desire to get back to
reality. The problem is that the anxiety gets in the way quite a bit. I think,
"There must be a way back to clarity and reality, there has to be some sort of
path or action I can take." That, too, is anxiety, but it's as yet too subtle
to recognize as such unless I'm holding still and doing very little else (which
is hardly productive).
As a result, a lot of my day-to-day life is spent focusing on the idea of
ritual. Ritual is the one thing that my mind has latched onto as some sort of
way through or way out, and I think it plays a large role in the events of my
past, though I was less conscious of it at the time - such is life, when it
comes to any sort of personal advancement. I ritually check the stove to make
sure it's off. I check the doors and windows. I get up once a night and check
on JD and the two pups to make sure they're inside (just in case Falcon has
rappelled out the window and is terrorizing the neighborhood - seriously).
It's not just checking that drives me, though. Anyone who has been to my house
knows that it's not cleaning, of course, but, well, it all comes back to the
audible aberrations that I'd mentioned before.
For a few months now, I've been 'hearing' voices, but I'm always careful to
mention that they're not audible hallucinations. They're not. They're what's
called expansion: the inner dialog that goes on in our brains as we go about
life is usually one that takes place in abstract images. In this case, however,
that has broken down into something more simplistic, as though I'm telling
myself a story. The voices have character and gender (though they're usually
boring), and hover *just* below the level of hearing, something closer to
remembering that I had *just heard* someone say something.
It's fantastically hard for me to write about this in any sort of open way. I
want to hide it. It's fucking ridiculous. I hate it, and I want it gone, and
it's embarrassing. Embarrassment is, however, a primarily social reaction, and
a harmful one in this case (after all, this is a health problem). That is, more
than I want to hide all of this, I want to tell that embarrassment to get fucked
and talk openly and freely about all this, because it's even *more* ridiculous
that I feel I can't.
Anyway, as I listened to someone drone on tonight about how I should cut my hair
off, how it would hurt in just the right way, how that would be my penance, and
that would be just what I needed to gain touch with reality again, I think I
finally understood the tie to ritual. This was all I had to do. In fact, this
was all these stupid aberrations were ever 'urging' me to do. It was this sense
of ritual become words. When I feel as though I'm instructed to tease apart my
skin like burlap cloth with a knife-point, to solve a cramp or a gas-pain with
violence, to kill myself before an upcoming trip to London, that's not just an
expansion of some random, totally out there thought, that's the feeling of
ritual, the "there must be something I can do to stop this panic" sense expanded
from an abstract concept back into language.
I've been shifting wildly along the spectrum of following these rituals to the
letter to outright ignoring them. As I said, I feel good: I'm not going to kill
myself before London or stab myself with a syringe to ease gas-pains. However,
I'm still getting up to check on the windows and doors and stove and dogs. In
the middle, I've taken to trying to subvert the desire for ritual with other
rituals: rather than tease apart my skin like lose-woven cloth with the tip of a
knife, I use a pen and just kind of draw on myself. It offers enough catharsis
for me to get to the point to realize that it's actually really, really
ludicrous; that I'm drawing symbols or lines of the utmost importance on my
limbs with a pen pilfered from my bank. That's usually enough to break through
the panicked ritual and leave me just feeling silly (which is, while
uncomfortable, still a million times better than that inner tension that
required the ritual in the first place).
Ritual is a salve. It's an ice cube held against a burn. It's something that
provides instant relief, but only so long as it's present. I can't *solve* any
of these problems by acting out a ritual. Checking on the dogs does not
ultimately leave me satisfied that they're all comfortably asleep, because then
I need to make sure the windows and doors are shut to ensure that they don't
float away. That done, I need to check the stove to make sure that it's off,
because if it's on and the windows are shut, how will we escape when the house
burns down?
You see, there's no solution. There's no ritual to make me feel good, or real,
or better, or not-anxious. There's only anxiety, and coping, and panic, and
sleep. There's reality, and that's where I dwell, and then there's my
perception of reality, which drifts rather more than perhaps it ought. Cutting
my hair wouldn't hurt - it's hair, for Pete's sake - and it would not be the
penance I need, the right amount of pain to bring me back to reality. It's
hair! I know that. That's the case I argue to the voice demanding such.
That's what makes it panic, and not psychosis: ultimately, there **is no break
from reality**. There's none. I know these aberrations aren't real; I know the
dogs aren't going to go carousing out the windows; I know, for sure, that
cutting my hair is not going to stop any of this. I know it. The voices are a
nuisance, the panic is a problem, but it doesn't control me. There is *no*
ritual that will solve anything: the ritual is a symptom. It's important, yes;
I live my life by process. But it's a symptom.
That's why I'm torn.

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*February 13, 2014:*
<div class="verse">I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt, and perhaps it says, "Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again."
<em>- Lewis Carroll</em></div>
I've mentioned ritual before, but I think that's tied into the larger feeing of portentousness. Ritual is one way to sate that sense of intense meaning surrounding an act or an object.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>A goose is dumb. A thousand geese darkening the horizon is a portent. Mindless honking, individually directionless, collectively unstoppable</p>&mdash; Makyo (@drab_makyo) <a href="https://twitter.com/drab_makyo/statuses/433658156988628992">February 12, 2014</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Any little thing can carry meaning for one person far outweighing what it might mean to others. Something about flocks of geese terrifies me. It's not a logical fear, it's a sense of foreboding. It's not the geese themselves, it's the concept of geese, the lack of any ritual to solve the problem of geese.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>A goose is tasty. Geese taste like horror. Acrid tang of ill omens *froth*</p>&mdash; Makyo (@drab_makyo) <a href="https://twitter.com/drab_makyo/statuses/433658390103879680">February 12, 2014</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
It's dumb. Geese are dumb. There's no reason I should feel any sort of emotion at all surrounding geese, but I do.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>Why are geese so portentous? Why do they cause anxiety? Did I take my meds this morning?</p>&mdash; Makyo (@drab_makyo) <a href="https://twitter.com/drab_makyo/statuses/433658641384607744">February 12, 2014</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Ritual is like that. There is some level of meaning that's inexpressible except if you can find a way to come at it from the side. Use words like 'portent'. Describe it as an odor, a sense, a mystery. Ritual and sensation are wily and wary critters that want nothing less than to be identified, pointed out, made plain. You're supposed to just go along with the ritual and accept the portentous as fact.

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date: 2019-08-19
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[![1](/bird/1.jpg)](/bird/1.jpg)
```
Is this a thing for Imgur? Most certainly not! It's perfect for shouting into a vasty nothingness, though. It's just One Of Those Things. I'd say votes don't matter, since they don't, but Lord knows I'll be back to check on this at some point. If nothing else, maybe folks with similar experiences will have info, hopes, and thoughts to add.
```
[![1](/bird/2.jpg)](/bird/2.jpg)
```
This, er...human hygiene infopamphlet strongly evokes the sensation of the destabilization that comes along with going off of antipsychotics (see: http://imgur.com/a/vtulA ). There’s a certain type of magical, ritualistic thinking that comes with the (near-)psychosis of withdrawal. The kind that comes on you like a compulsion, or like your gag reflex being triggered, and makes you feel like your skin no longer fits.
```
[![1](/bird/3.jpg)](/bird/3.jpg)
```
For me, it’s frequently about birds. For a long while, it was geese. A goose is dumb. A thousand geese darkening the horizon is a portent. Mindless honking, individually directionless, collectively unstoppable. A goose is tasty. Geese taste like horror. Acrid tang of ill omens. Or so it felt at the time.
Then it was owls. It was my duty to think about owls, to encourage others to think about owls. In and of themselves, owls are alright, kind of a take-it-or-leave-it bird, but one must think about them, because the consequences of not thinking about them are beyond imagining. Or so it felt at the time.
And for a bit, it was incantations. “Get fucked,” I’d tell the clouds. I’d tell my thoughts to get fucked, I’d tell sleep to get fucked, I’d tell the tic to get fucked. I had to. I couldn’t not. Or so it felt at the time.
```
[![1](/bird/4.jpg)](/bird/4.jpg)
```
Birds and incantations, it turns out, are common in magical thinking and intrusive thoughts, as well as grids, parallel lines, and food. The comic is a prime example of that. There are aspects of OCD, sure, but it’s beyond just the obsessions and the compulsions, it’s the way that that is expressed in ritual and dire need, the fact that one cannot bear the consequences of NOT performing the ritual. There’s nothing wrong with ritual or magical thinking, nor even birds, incantations, grids, or food. The problem lies in when those are forced on you by your hindbrain until you’re sick.
```
[![1](/bird/5.jpg)](/bird/5.jpg)
```
A friend calls it ‘bruise vision’, and while I can’t explain why, that’s 100% accurate.
```
[![1](/bird/6.jpg)](/bird/6.jpg)
```
I couldn't create this sort of thing, so I'm glad that someone did for me. Here's the original source: http://adactivity.tumblr.com/post/73552347250/here-are-the-raw-images-which-make-up-the-eat-no - support artists doing neat things! And take care of yourselves :)
```

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[![Geese](/bird/geese.jpg)](/bird/geese.jpg)

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---
date: 2019-08-19
weight: 5
---
<style>
.row {
display: block;
vertical-align: top;
}
.col-md-4 {
width: 30%;
display: inline-block;
vertical-align: top;
padding: 0.5rem;
}
.text-right {
text-align: right;
}
.col-md-8 {
width: 60%;
display: inline-block;
vertical-align: top;
padding: 0.5rem;
}
@media only screen and (max-width: 500px) {
.col-md-4, .col-md-8 {
width: 100%;
display: block;
}
}
</style>
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-4 text-right">
<h3>I</h3>
<p><em>Geese Level:</em><br />
Unnerving</p>
<p><em>Expect:</em><br />
Anxiety</p>
</div>
<div class="col-md-8 verse">
A hundred geese overhead —
A thousand —
A million —
Heady scent of premonition.
Acrid tang of ill omens.
Portents.
Too much meaning
In too small a space.
</div>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-4 text-right">
<h3>II</h3>
<p><em>Geese Level:</em><br />
Noise-Cancelling Headphones</p>
<p><em>Expect:</em><br />
auditory aberrations</p>
</div>
<div class="col-md-8 verse">
Geese are a byproduct of laminar shear stress
Of two layers of phantasmagorical
Newtonian fluids,
Which is why they’re often seen on a plane.
A thin, sort-of Truth
From a sort of thin layer
geese chromatography.
</div>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-4 text-right">
<h3>III</h3>
<p><em>Geese Level:</em><br />
Eldrich</p>
<p><em>Expect:</em><br />
red tint to vision; hot flashes</p>
</div>
<div class="col-md-8 verse">
As the dove bears the olive branch,
so too the goose bears the wand
that withers all it touches.
A wand of nightshade,
Core of tainted silver.
A wand of obscure origin,
The goose surely stole it.
Malice begets malice.
</div>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-4 text-right">
<h3>IV</h3>
<p><em>Geese Level:</em><br />
Beyond Comprehension</p>
<p><em>Expect:</em><br />
confusion; nausea; sweating; racing pulse</p>
</div>
<div class="col-md-8 verse">
We know not the transgression,
the origin -
We know not the punishment,
only the terror.
</div>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-4 text-right">
<h3>V</h3>
<p><em>Geese Level:</em><br />
Excruciating</p>
<p><em>Expect:</em><br />
pounding heart; tunnel vision; racing thoughts; black outs;
blood pouring from ears</p>
</div>
<div class="col-md-8 verse">
Geas
Wing
Dark
Horizon
</div>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-4 text-right">
<h3>VI</h3>
<p><em>Geese Level:</em><br />
Terrifying</p>
<p><em>Expect:</em><br />
tinnitus; piloerection; shortness of breath; uneven gait</p>
</div>
<div class="col-md-8 verse">
I’d rather owls.
Owls, as though geese were turned inside out,
made less evil.
Still portentous,
Still momentous,
Just less terrifying.
Owls are okay.
I can think about owls.
</div>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-4 text-right">
<h3>VII</h3>
<p><em>Geese Level:</em><br />
Uncomfortable</p>
<p><em>Expect:</em><br />
subdermal itching; formication</p>
</div>
<div class="col-md-8 verse">
Life within a comfortable grid.
Parallel lines
Interrupting narrowing circles
Of birds in flight.
Travel in straight lines.
Turn at right angles.
Trace the roof of your mouth
With wet tongue.
I’m not afraid of geese anymore
Because I can step on them now.
I’m big enough.
</div>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-4 text-right">
<h3>VIII</h3>
<p><em>Geese Level:</em><br />
Birds</p>
<p><em>Expect:</em><br />
birds</p>
</div>
<div class="col-md-8 verse">
Ritual thinking
Driven by geese —
By lines, by grids, by food —
By numbers and neat delineation.
And I’m left with questions:
Why the portents?
Why the anxiety?
Or maybe:
Did I take my meds this morning?
Failing that,
Can I just have the comfort of prayer
Or the ecstasy of signs
Without bleak paranoia
Over circling birds?
</div>
</div>

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type: serial
back: /9
---

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---
<img src="/book/cover-front.png" style="margin: 0 auto; display: block; width: 500px; max-width: 100%;" />
<p style="text-align:center"><script src="https://gumroad.com/js/gumroad.js"></script>
<!-- <a class="gumroad-button" href="https://makyo-ink.square.site/product/ally-preorder-/5" target="\_blank">Pre-order paperback</a> -->
<a class="gumroad-button" href="https://gum.co/ally-paperback" target="\_blank">Pre-order paperback</a>
&emsp;
<script src="https://gumroad.com/js/gumroad.js"></script>
<a class="gumroad-button" href="https://gum.co/rvof" target="\_blank">Pre-order PDF ebook</a></p>
> We don't experience memory in linear fashion, nor even in a strictly coherent one. It's peppered with tangents and strange loops. It's multithreaded. It's not always made up of words. Why should a memoir strive to strip memory completely of this context?
<em class="ally-font">ally</em> is an ergodic, arborescent, semiautobiographical work about identity, mental health, spirituality, and the mutability of the past. A lot of the information contained within is real, some of it isn’t. Each page is structured as a conversation between myself and my ally, a mirror reflection of myself.
Based off the interactive project at [<em class="ally-font">ally.id</em>](https://ally.id), this book explores different facets of my life — some true, some embellished, some wholly fictitious — in a non-linear, ergodic fashion, using color, page-layout, and mixed-media to create a book more experience than memoir.
## Buying
The paperback is now available for [pre-order](https://gum.co/ally-paperback). All copies ordered direct are signed. You can also pre-order from <a target="\_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1948743159/">Amazon</a> or <a target="\_blank" href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ally-scott-clary-madison/1136517973?ean=9781948743150">Barnes &amp; Noble</a>
You can also [pre-order](https://gum.co/rvof) the PDF ebook. I have yet to figure out how to sign those. Sorry.
## Content warning
Several sections focus on suicide, self-harm, rape, sexual content, and poor mental health.
## Advance praise
"Cleareyed yet powerfully immediate . . . A fresh, daring exploration of lived experience."
> — [Kirkus Reviews](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/madison-scott-clary/allyC/)
"I felt I was chasing down fractions of the author's soul. Chasing them not because I got this to read and review, but because I deeply wanted to. So I could put them together and solve an ultimate puzzle whose picture would contain some incompre-hensible beauty."
> — [Linnea Capps](https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3236700737?book_show_action=true)
<div style="text-align: center">
<strong><a target="\_blank" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51687858-ally">Rate on Goodreads!</a></strong>
</div>
## Paperback gallery
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<a href="/book/physical/10-back-stack-table.s.jpg" target="\_blank"><img src="/book/physical/10-back-stack-table.s.jpg" /></a>
<!-- <a href="/book/physical/11-shelf-steep.s.jpg" target="\_blank"><img src="/book/physical/11-shelf-steep.s.jpg" /></a> -->
<a href="/book/physical/12-shelf-shallow.s.jpg" target="\_blank"><img src="/book/physical/12-shelf-shallow.s.jpg" /></a>
## PDF gallery
<a href="/book/book1.png" target="\_blank"><img src="/book/book1.png" /></a>
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> Have you been at your Maddy-est about it?
![](/book/book5.png)
Of course.
-----
* ISBN: 9781948743150

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date: 2019-12-03
weight: 1
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How did I get here?
> How did you get where?
How did I get here? How did I get to the point where I loathe my job? How did I get to the point where I loathe my life, but mostly only when I'm working?
> Start from the beginning.
Which beginning?
> Madison's beginning. For this, I don't think you need to go any further back for any reason other than to confirm what you already know. Or perhaps just a bit before. Start with the insurance company.
What, working with Kevin?
> Yes. Start from there.
In 2011, I graduated --- or, well, left --- university and jumped straight into a job doing software for a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a company that made software for health insurance companies. I had a whole weekend off.
It was thrilling, in a away, to be seen as competent at something. It was nice to be able to drive to an office, sit down at a computer, type away for a few hours, drive home, and then see money in my bank account after the fact, knowing that I had done something that was useful.
> Were you not doing anything useful before? You were working, you were at school. You were getting paid.
I was. But even when I looked at that money in my bank account, I couldn't then count it out and say, "Ah, yes, this was earned creating something." Work was spent living on the edge of failure, trying to push it back just one step further. That's the curse of IT.
> And school? You were creating something there.
And paying a pretty penny for the privilege to do so.
> Right.
But this was something new, I was given a list of things that they wanted to be able to do and given basically total freedom to pull that off. I was put in front of their raw materials and, when I showed them progressively more and more refined creations, they all stood back and applauded, and I could bow and say that I had created something for them.
> And then?
And then...well, I don't know. And then the tasks got smaller and smaller, and the clients grumpier and grumpier about more and more inconsequential things. They needed twice as many new features done in half the time and could we work the weekends? After all, they had their QA people sleeping in the office in cots in the bathrooms. Shouldn't we do the same?
At some point that must have changed, but it all changed so gradually as to not be noticeable.
> And then you started to see how capitalism worked, perhaps? That you weren't doing this because it was fun or because you were good at it, even if it was and you might have been, but because you had to.
I think that may be getting a bit ahead of the game, but in a way, I suppose so. I started to see that it was very easy to use up all of one's spell slots. I started to see just what purpose free time had in one's life. I started to talk about work-life balance and to schedule vacation time that wasn't simply holidays and to dream about the office.

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date: 2019-12-03
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> At what point would you say you burned out?
That's one of those surprisingly difficult questions. I can't point to a day or week when things went bad, nor even a month. At some point, I just looked around me, at my office and my coworkers and my job and said, "I hate all of this."
> When did you notice it, then?
Does "<a class="pulse" href="/self-harm/suicide">when I tried to kill myself</a>" count?
> Not my department.
I spent a lot of time trying to fix it. I spent a lot of time changing little bits about my day or my desk or my tasks, and there was just not much that could put a dent into that mixture of loathing and anxiety that surrounded my day.
> And eventually, you just dumped the whole thing in favor of something else.
Yes.
> Did it work?
Oh, definitely. I jumped at the opportunity to stop working for an insurance company that just happened to need some software and to start working for a software company with a name that folks knew making products that I believed in.
Moving to Canonical came on such a whim, too. I met up with John Wright --- such a nice man --- at Mayor of Old Town and we talked over pints about the good and the bad of our respective jobs.
"I've been thinking about applying at Canonical," he said, twisting his glass between his hands. "I'm not unhappy at where I am, I'm just...not happy either."
I nodded, and made silent note to check out their postings later that night.
> Did you wind up stealing John's idea?
Oh, totally. I apologized to him after the fact, too, for taking his idea and actually winding up with the job. He laughed and said that he didn't think he'd be able to work from home anyway.
> Whereas that saved you.
Yes.
In a way.
For a while.

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date: 2019-12-03
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I could very easily get into talking about the ins and outs of working at Canonical and in <a class="pulse" href="/writing/software">software</a>, but I don't think that's the point.
> No, it's not.
No. The point is that, slowly, quietly, without me even noticing, I started hating what I do for a living. It snuck up on me once more. I once more found myself in a paralyzing mixture of anxiety and dread and anger. Every minute spent in front of my editor was spent filled with anger and frustration at not being able to work, and every minute spent away from it was spent dreading the next time I'd have to go back, fretting over how little I had gotten done.
I spent day after day on branches that should have been small and yet somehow, inexplicably, seemed insurmountable. Coworkers and bosses got upset at me. I did all I could to keep interested and invested in the company.
> Even as you drifted your separate ways? Canonical stopped doing things that were relevant to you before you even moved to Seattle. They started focusing on things you didn't believe in. They laid off dozens of your coworkers. They started courting Microsoft.
Sure, I suppose. There's no doubt that Canonical was changing. They were certainly not blameless in me losing my interest and investment in them.
> And from what JC says, you would hate them now.
I would, yes.
> And yet here you speak only of yourself. Only of your failures.
Is this not a selfish project? I think that it's fair to just talk about how I feel when I talk about burnout.
> Burnout does not happen in a vacuum.
I hardly believe that the things that Canonical was doing were so new as to be causing my burnout. They were doing as tech companies do. They were doing everything they could to maintain the same amount of velocity they had at the beginnings of projects later on. They were trying to change with the times while remaining exactly the same.
Perhaps it was just the honeymoon period finally coming to an end.

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date: 2019-12-14
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> The third time was not the charm.
No, it was not. Canonical stopped doing something I believed in, so I switched to a company --- Internet Archive --- that *was* doing something that I believed in, but the process was crap. Now, here I am at a company that's got a great process and is doing something that I really believe in it, and...
> And you hate it.
I hate my career. I don't hate my company. I love them. They're great people doing great things and doing them well. I just can't stand programming anymore.
> I don't believe you.
You don't?
> I don't. You, who have at least two open programming projects you poke at with some regularity.
I suppose I do, yeah.
> So what do you hate, if you don't hate programming?
It's not work. I don't hate working.
It's not programming, you're right there. I still love the idea of making something that does what I tell it.
It's not computers, even if I'm a bit ambivalent on them.
It's...well, I definitely hate devops.
> Why?
It feels...messy. It feels like I'm doing all I can to drag these ephemeral things into line, and none of them want to do it. It feels like all these people have grandiose ideas about what goes into running a system, and none of them agree with each other, and all we can do is to pick the least-bad one.
It destroys this idea that computers are a thing that you can ask to do something, and they can do it. There are more non-deterministic bugs in devops than in any other area of dealing with computers than I've experienced.
It makes me want to take up Haskell.
> All very sensible.
If such a thing can be said of it.
> Is that why you're burnt out, then?
No.
> Then why?
I don't know.
Perhaps I'm only good for seven years at a time, like I said.
> Did you burn out on music?
I would say that I was burnt, but I placed that on the performers at my recital.
> Had your recital gone perfectly, would you still have felt burned out, though?
Perhaps.
> Would you still have gone into computers?
Definitely.
> Would you still be composing?
I don't know.

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type: serial
back: /29
background: "#ffffff"
color: "#444444"
quote: "#666666"
---

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type: chronological
---
<div class="info">Viewing in chronological order</div>

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date: 2019-08-20
weight: 1
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<div class="cw">Self harm</div>
It's not about the dress.
It's about that whole point in my life. It's about the way home ways. It's about the way I was left to my own devices. Every kid's dream, right?
I had no father. I had the angry, drunken man who lived upstairs. I have the man who woke me in the morning to drive me to school, who clearly showed up at some point during the night. I had this unpredictable animal living in the house that I had to please, and there were no rules for what would or wouldn't please him.
I was left to my own devices and there was always something that I needed to be doing and doing correctly, and I was never sure what it was. Do good in school, sure. Grow up to become an imortant engineer of some kind, sure. The details in between, though, were hazy.
> The rules are made up and you're always in trouble.
Or about to be, yes.
> You know now that he was flailing at life as much as you are now.
I do.
> You know now that he was actually in quite a bit of pain.
Yes.
I also know that he would close out the bar that Julie worked out, drinking the whole time.
I know that if I went with, I'd spent countless hours meandering between the corner booth in the bar and the Pac-Man and Millipede cabinets up front.
> The owners of the restaurant would dote on you. They would give you free kitsch from the glass case by the register. Little sticky-backed calenders with tear-off months and pens to draw on the backs of the pages. They'd let you pick out the licorice breathmints from the brass bowl by the register, the ones shaped like chalky pillows. They'd let you play hide-and-seek with Kevin, the other kid being raised in the bar by a drunken father.
I know that he and Julie had bowling league on Saturdays and I was left home alone.
I know that if I went with, I'd be fed quarters in a steady stream to spend time in the arcade room or on the little toy vending machines.
> You would buy the little plastic snakes made from links that would let you bend them into squares and cubes. You would drink coke after coke. You would wonder how they managed to oil the lanes so perfectly up to the foul line and no further, and when you saw the machine that did so, you were entranced by its single-minded, track-bound life. You watched him sing Devo's **I'm Too Sexy** for karaoke, mincing about on the stage and producing gales of laughter in his parody of what he knew of gay culture. You were just starting to think of yourself that way.
It was a spear through my heart.
> Tell me about the dress.
Left to my own devices, I prowled the house.
I stole a beer. I stole some Kahlua. I stole a little bit of brandy, but I hated it. I stole some of his pot. I stole a condom.
> He was so angry about that. He grilled you and you denied it.
I realize, later, that the reason he was so angry was because, if I didn't steal it, it would've meant that Julie was cheating on him.
> Tell me about the dress.
I stole a paring knife and obsessively sharpened it. I cut at my wrists until, confronted with the realization that I would be asked about it, I stopped and cut on my big toes instead.
> You told your friend, Julene. She had no idea what to do, confronted with such information. You were eleven.
What does one say to being told that your friend is self-harming? I would never tell anyone about self harm again, I promised myself.
> Tell me about the dress.
I tried on Julie's dress. I tried on her teddy. I prowled, naked, through her rack of clothing in the spare room for things to try on. I spent a lot of time naked. I spent a lot of time masturbating. I wondered if I was gay because I tried on her clothing, or I tried on her clothing because I was gay.
> You told your friends confidently in third grade that lesbians were just women who wanted to be men and that gay men were just men who wanted to be women.
Matthew said those things, but he had been dying since birth.
> Tell me about the dress.
I tried on Julie's clothes with a mixture of guilt and shame. It was titillating and humiliating. It was transgressive. At some point, I figured that, the ontology of being gay aside, I had better get used to wearing such, as that's just what gay men did.
> Your anger is cooling down.
Yeah, it is. I can't tell if it's you shifting it away from my dad and onto the dress, or if it's just getting the words out there that's helping so much.
> Dig deeper.

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date: 2019-08-20
weight: 2
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The thing I like to say about my dad is that he didn't really want a son, he wanted a buddy. He wanted someone he could be smart with, or, failing that, be smart at. He wanted someone he could chill with and, at the end of the day, go home.
> He wanted someone he could drink with. Someone he could take to the bar.
Yes. He seemed fundamentally uncomfortable with the fact that I was his offspring.
It wasn't an always thing, of course. There were a few times we really connected.
> Yes.
One time, we taped up glow in the dark stars on my bedroom ceiling and walls to make my bedroom into a night sky when the lights were out.
> Yes.
One time, when driving you to school on a snowy morning, there was an accident far ahead and traffic was stopped on Highway 93, and I had to pee so bad, he had me just step out of the car and pee, blocked off by the door with my back to the car behind me. Traffic started moving then and I had to walk awkwardly to finish peeing before I could hop back inside the moving truck. We laughed. On days we knew we'd be late because of weather, we'd grab french toast sticks from Burger King.
> Yes.
One time, we lay on our backs on a beach at Lake Powell and stared up at the real night sky and talked about the satelites that went overhead. We would try to guess, based on how fast they moved, whether we were seeing the same ones again later. He talked of his sisters, Patty and Sue, and how they were doing. He talked of his brother, Joe. He told me Joe was the trouble kid, how he got caught on PCP once and when grandma brought him home from the police station, he missed the door to the house entirely and walked into the door jamb and fell down laughing. Grandma kicked at him, cursing up a storm. He told me about his dad, blowing up an inner tube and floating out into the middle of the pond with a six pack or a bottle of liquor and drinking as he looked up at these very same stars, floating on his back. About how sometimes, his dad would fall asleep out there and grandma would have to throw rocks at him to wake him up the next morning so he could paddle back ashore and get to work.
> One time, after you switched majors from biochem to music education, you went skiing with him, but had an upset stomach, so you stopped to buy some Alka-Seltzer tablets. You asked what kept them from fizzing until they were dropped in water, and he started to explain about buffers, then cut himself short and said coldly, "But you won't learn about that, now. I don't expect you really want to know." He had you ski alone the rest of the afternoon.
Yes.
> One time, you told your best friend in the area, Joseph, that you had rode your bike to the mall, Villa Italia, God rest its weary soul, and bought magic cards. He mentioned that while out with you and your dad, and your dad fell behind a few steps and kicked you. You rode home in silence. Joseph refused to ride with you again.
Yes.
> One time, you kissed him on the cheek after he hugged you good night and he laughed in your face. "You thought I was your mom, didn't you?" he said, then got up and left the room, shutting the door behind him. You thought, years later, decades later, that he really meant to say, "You thought I was your parent, didn't you? Best buds don't kiss." You never kissed him again, and he never kissed you at all.
Yes.
> When teaching you to read with the book Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss, he jokingly warned you never to actually hop on him or he'd kick you from one side of the house over the roof to the other, and then back again. Joking, of course, but you were already so terrified of him you believed every word.
He said the same during our one talk on sex. That if I ever got a girl pregnant and didn't use a condom, he'd do it five times and then leave me on my own to be a dad.
He raised me, but the definition of 'raise' here is a very elastic one.
> Dig deeper.

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The one thing we did together that we both seemed to earnestly enjoy was skiing.
> There were other things you enjoyed.
Together?
> Reading, perhaps?
He tried to get me to read *Flowers for Algernon*, but I wound up skimming parts, enough to keep him happy when he asked me about them, all while reading the copy of *Mossflower* I'd hidden down the back of the couch. The closest we got was reading *The Dark Tower*.
> Catch?
One-sided and short-lived. We played a few times. Then, after telling me to "get under" a fly ball, it hit me square on the forehead and he laughed, telling me I was supposed to get my glove up, too. We never played again.
> The dogs?
<div class="verse">Dad used to punish the dogs
by locking then in the basement.
If he was really mad,
he'd toss then down the stairs by the scruff.</div>
> School? Math? Computers? Being smart?
Listen.
You have to understand that there were only two valid emotions for my dad: pride and anger. Being good at computers and math was not something that was enjoyable in its own right. Not for the both of us. The part that we shared there was that we had to have something we could declaim about. Something we could pull out and show that we might be proud of it.
> So you went skiing, because you both were about the same level at that.
I bounced, he didn't.
> That's a factor of your age and size. I don't think you actually bounce all that well.
Fair.
You're right, though. We went skiing together because that was just sort of the thing we enjoyed --- for different reasons, I'm sure --- and it just so happened that we enjoyed doing it around each other, too.
There would be mishaps, of course. Forgetting boots or poles was a big one. I forgot my poles once and thought I'd be found, dead, in the woods later that day. We wound up renting a pair. From then on, I was determined to learn how to ski without them.
> It turned out to be fun, at least.
Yes.
We fell into a habit. Go skiing every other weekend, since that was my time staying with him, from late fall to mid spring. We'd make the drive from the suburbs west of Denver up into the mountains. We'd hit Winter Park, our favorite, or we'd maybe run over to Arapahoe Basin or Loveland Pass.
We'd ski from nine in the morning until about three in the afternoon. We'd grab lunch. Dad would grab 'beer-thirty' a little bit after that and let me do a few runs on my own while he chatted up a bartender.
> You would get the buffalo green chili every lunch, when you wound up at Winter Park. At Loveland, it would be the build-your-own pizzas. It was all so routine.
It was the most comfortably routine thing that we did together. Not even school could top that.
> It was, above all, pleasant.
At times.
> Yes.
At times it was stressful. At times it felt like we were going skiing so that my dad could take some time away from home, away from Julie. At times, when Julie came with us, it would be more stressful on the slopes than it was at home.
And then it fell apart.
> Yes,
There's no one time I could point to and say, "Ah-hah, *this* is when things fell apart." There were a few indicators, to be sure, but no one single instance.
There was only that last ski trip to Steamboat.
> When?
My birthday.
> Which?
I don't even remember. Middle school? Freshman year of high school?
> Had life started yet?
It must have. It must have been high school, then. It must have been spring break. It must have been, because I could drive, then. Dad made me take my turn driving his new truck while he sat in the passenger seat and drank glumly. Tecate after Tecate. Julie sat in the back and stayed quiet. Even then the cracks were showing in their relationship.
> It started snowing on the drive.
Yes.
> You drove a fraction of an inch too close to the shoulder, your right wheel veered from the dark tracks plowed through the thin layer of snow by the car in front of you. He shouted, "Pull over at the next exit, if you're going to drive like that. Snow could cause too much drag on the tires and drag us off the road."
Yes.
> He was drunk and in pain. His shoulder again. He yelled at Julie. Told you both to let him drive in silence.
Yes.
> When you got to the condo that you'd rented. He took four or five advil with a Corona, apologized sullenly, and went to go lay down.
I don't remember any of the rest of the trip. All I remember is that we watched *Fellowship of the Ring* and that, at one point on the drive back, I asked a question about angular momentum.
> You wanted to promise him, visibly, that you were still smart. You wanted to appeal to him in a way that you knew he'd take well.
I wanted him to be okay with me.
> Dig deeper.

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<div class="cw">Suicide</div>
If life started in high school, if that was birth, then running away was conception.
> It was the first sign you gave that you might have a claim of ownership over yourself.
Is it alright if I include something I wrote about it a long time ago?
> Maybe.
Will you feel left out?
> Maybe. Will you?
I guess.
June 10, 2015:
[![Running away](https://drab-makyo.com/commissions/by-artist/grey/grey--running-away-small--makyo--G.jpg)](https://drab-makyo.com/commissions/by-artist/grey/grey--running-away-small--makyo--G.jpg)
<small>Art by Grey White.</small>
<div class="verse">I think we all have a lot of formative moments in our lives. For me, it was stuff like coming out, the realization of my own mortality, the suicide attempt, and so on. I think that they tend to fall into two basic categories: those which affect us consciously, which we think about from day to day, with enough frequency to say 'often'; and those which affect us more subconsciously, where we can go years or decades without really thinking about them, and yet they still inform so many of your actions.
Running away spent a lot of time in the subconscious camp, quietly informing several aspects of how I viewed myself and how I viewed the world around me. It was only recently, in the last year or so, that it's come to the forefront, thanks largely to recent discussions with friends, family, and therapists. It's only through that process that I've come to realize just how formative an event it really was.
In 1997, at eleven years old, I switched from living with my mom full time to living with my dad full time. My parents had divorced at some point early in my childhood, when I was too young to remember, and I grew up knowing nothing else.
The switch was part of a way to make sure that I grew up to be a balanced person. Having spent so much of my childhood in my mom's household, it was time for me to spend more time with my dad than the schedule that we had maintained until then, Wednesday nights and every other weekend. The move was set for the time when I would be switching schools, anyway -- I had just left fifth grade, and that was the time when middle school started in Boulder county.
I remember feeling a mix of excitement and apprehension as the date neared for the switch. On the one hand, it was exciting to be able to spend more time with my dad, who had always been keen on doing things with me that were fun. We'd go skiing, boating, spend a day trying to make the best paper airplanes, learn how to use the computer. On the other, though, I was apprehensive that I would be spending more time with my dad, who had always been somewhat distant, spending much of his time at the bar where my stepmother worked as a bartender, caring more about the grades that I brought home than my experience in school. In some senses, we were in line with each other and our expectations of what a parent-child relationship should be, and in others, we found ourselves at odds.
Even so, things wound up working out alright for sixth grade. I moved in with my dad, and moved to a new school. I had to spend one more year in elementary school, as Jefferson county didn't start junior high until seventh grade, but it served me well. I wound up in a 'gifted and talented' program at the school due to how well I did at my previous school, and found the work to be both more engaging and more intense. My grades started to drop, I started to get bouts of depression and anxiety. At one point, I forged my parents' signatures on my *Friday Folder*, which was supposed to be a weekly communication between my parents and my teacher, leading to a few weeks of being in trouble with both my dad and my mom.
Even so, although I was beginning to struggle for the first time in my life, I did my best to please my dad and maintain the enjoyable, if enigmatic, relationship that we had had up until then. I missed my mom, to be sure, having spent so much of my life until then living primarily with her, but I still felt like I could do well enough and excel in school living with my dad.</div>
> There is much to talk about.
Should I stop?
> No, carry on for now.
<div class="verse">I don't remember much about my summer between sixth and seventh grades, other than I had almost certainly gone back to the summer camp that I had gone to every summer before. I remember that this was the first time I started really enjoying writing. After leaving school for the summer, a friend and I had exchanged addresses and promised to write each other a letter over the summer. I don't remember if we actually did, but those drafts of letters turned into my first attempt at journalling, which would lead me to writing stuff like this -- putting my introspection down in words.
In the fall of 1998, I began seventh grade at junior high, one of those transitions where students go from being the oldest kids in school to the youngest. I figured that school would be similar, that it would be as though class had picked up where it had left off.
It didn't.
Junior high and middle school is when they start introducing separate teachers for separate subjects, rather than a single teacher for core curriculum and separate teachers only for specialized subjects such as art, music, and physical education. This threw me for a loop, at first, and I wasn't really sure why until I started digging back into my past over the last few years. What had started happening as puberty continued to roar through me is that depressive and anxious tendencies really started to take root. I would start fearing math class, rather than the subject of math with a familiar teacher, start worrying about the fact that band was mixed-grade and I would be pitted against eighth graders.
As a pre-teen, I had no idea what anxiety, panic, and depression were. I thought I was going crazy. My journals at the time were filled with fretting that I was having 'psychotic episodes' and wondering when these increasingly common attacks would become the new normal and coherent thought the brief rays of sunshine.
At the same time, I remember life getting harder for my dad. Things were happening at work -- bad things -- and while I can't remember if it was that I had become more receptive to this or there had been actual changes, the perceived shift in my dad's mood started to wear on me. Over the summer, he had announced that I was grown-up enough to stay home while he went to the bar for the evening. I'd get home at four or so, and dad would get home at nine or ten at night, having sussed out many of his problems of the day at work. I'd be in bed, or maybe we'd watch Deep Space Nine, and then we'd both go to bed.</div>
> Do you remember it being this way?
I don't. Or maybe I do, but the time since when I wrote this has colored my interpretation of it.
> You sound upset, now. Back when you wrote this, you just sounded weary.
I suppose I was. I was weary in general, then. I was writing this from a tired, point of view. I was the caryatid. I was tired.
> You are still.
I've learned to bear the load a little better.
<div class="verse">In junior high, report cards came quarterly. My first one came sometime in October. It was not good.
My dad had become increasingly harsh on the topic of grades over the previous few weeks. Parent teacher conferences had not gone well at all, with my math teacher having particularly harsh things to say about me. I don't even remember on what day of the week this happened, though I want to say Thursday. Dad came home for long enough to make us both dinner before he would head out to the bar. Although neither of us mentioned the fact that my poor grades were in my backpack, he must've known what the date had signified, as, before he left, he said something to the effect of, "When I get back home from seeing Julie, you'll show me your report card."
I didn't know what to do. Kill myself? I'd tried half-heartedly in the past. I collected the knife I'd stolen and kept in my desk. It was too dull. I had found a mirror from a makeup compact some days before, and I broke the glass, thinking I could use a piece of that instead, but couldn't manage to get any of the shards of glass actually out of the compact, and as time drew on, I felt less and less like actually dying, as opposed to simply ceasing to be.</div>

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<div class="cw">Suicide</div>
> Hold on.
Yes?
> Let's take a step back.
Okay.
> You're about to mix the clinical with the reality.
I know. You know that. We wrote this story.
> Yes.
Are you having doubts as to posting it?
> Yes. And here is where you start mixing the clinical with the experiential.
There is one story, but there are two ways to tell it.
> Can we retell it?
The whole thing?
> No. You don't have to go back and change what you wrote before, at least not the preceding paragraphs. But we need to make this ours now.
Is the rest not good?
> It's all perfectly serviceable. It's all perfectly you-in-2015.
That it is. I wasn't quite so heavy with the lilac scent on my words in those days.
> It still gets a little purple.
I guess.
> Let's cut a deal, then.
Oh? You want to edit it?
> You want to edit it. You want to make it more relevant. You want to make it more 2019. You want to make it fit. You want to understand, not just regurgitate.
Okay, fair.
> Let me talk about the clinical side. You go back to the other version of the story.
Okay.
> What was happening at this point, is that you were having an honest to goodness panic attack. You were entering a fugue state.
I froze for several minutes, probably about an hour, sitting on my bed and holding a broken mirror in my hands. All thoughts had left me, and all I could think about was not being. Not being here, not being at all.
Having decided not to kill myself, I put on a hoodie, went up stairs and emptied the quarter jar of quarters, left the broken mirror on the counter, and grabbed my bike. I had no idea what I would do, where I would go. I just knew that I needed out of there. That place wasn't a place I could be.
Still in a trance, I made my way to what I assumed would be a safe space to hide out for a while, long enough for my dad to not be out looking for me. I don't know why that was something I was thinking of, but it was. I rode my bike to the nearby Wal-Mart, and hid behind it, where the semi trailers were parked. I hid between two storage containers in the back, the stars invisible to me due to the bright lights of the parking lot, and yet the shadows were such that I remained in total darkness.
> You needed to get away. You needed to not be there. You didn't have the language to explain panic, and you didn't understand the importance of escape.
Yeah. How could I have? No one had thought to teach me.
> You had boundaries for what you felt were healthy means of interaction, and no means to communicate when they had been crossed. You had been slogging through anxiety with no way to explain to yourself or others what anxiety was, and you had crossed the point where you could continue to exist in that state.
The only solution was escape. Escaping into an internal world had worked until my dad demanded to see the report card, and escape by death hadn't panned out. The only route left to me was literally escaping the situation.
As the night wore on and the clock struck nine, I realized that I couldn't stay behind the Wal-Mart forever. I'd need some place to go. With only my bike, my hoodie, and five dollars in quarters, I biked the four miles from where I had been camped to the nearest bus station serving the route that would take me back to Boulder. I had no plans beyond getting to Boulder, other than I figured I could be homeless there in relative safety.
> That's where you spent the coldest night of your life.
The last bus to Boulder had already left, and so I was left on my own from about eleven that night until nearly six in the morning. I slept off and on on the bench in the bus-stop shelter. I hadn't brought my bike lock with me, so I kept my bike leaning against the bench where I was dozing. I eventually got too paranoid and tied the sleeve of my hoodie around the top bar of the bike while I huddled deep within the relatively thin cotton of the jacket, no protection against the cold of the Colorado night.
> At some point during the night, your anxiety abated enough to let you get some more perspective on the situation, and you started to think in terms of what you would do.
I would take the bus to Boulder, get off near the then-open Crossroads Mall, and see if I could get something to eat.
> You never quite made it back to baseline in terms of anxiety, however. You were riding on a high, the fugue state constantly re-conquering you and leaving you paralyzed for hours at a time.
The bus was warm. It had eaten $3.50 of my total of $5, but it was totally worth it. I fell asleep in the back seat within minutes of getting on, and was only awoken when the bus reached the end of the line and the kindly driver (who surely knew what was up) shook me awake and helped me onto my bike.
For lack of anything better to do, I rode my bike from the Walnut Street Station to my old elementary school. School wouldn't be starting for another half hour or so, so I camped out in a playground near by, affectionately known as Rock Park. I sat atop the sculpture-*cum*-playground that made up the park's central feature and watched elementary schoolers trudge toward their classes.
> With a bit of rest under your belt and once more in familiar territory--
Literally three-quarters of a mile from my mom's house, at the time.
> --you were starting to come out of your state of panic.
I was left with the dilemma of basically being a fugitive. I couldn't go to my mom's house, and I could never return to my dad's. I was no longer anxious -- my brain couldn't hold that anymore -- I was simply tired and sad.
Without anywhere to go or anything to do, I made my way back up to my original goal of Crossroads and puttered around the mall for a bit. My $1.50 wouldn't buy me anything, so I just strolled around the bookstore for a while, always a favorite spot of mine. As I headed back out to where I'd left my bike in front of the entrance, I was startled by a red Honda Civic pulling up directly in front of me. My mom had found me. She admitted immediately that she had been canvasing the bookstores in town looking for me.
> Even in your current state, you were a total dork.
The rest of that day and the next were a blur of crying. I was crying. My mom was crying.
> Your dad may have been crying,
Maybe, but it wasn't the type of thing I saw or heard from him. Mostly, he was angry.
I remember heated phone calls back and forth several times throughout the next few days. He had found my journal and accused me, "If you feel like you're going crazy, maybe we should put you in the hospital. Is that what you want from us?"
I couldn't answer.
> Might've done you some good. Gotten you some help.
"I'm throwing out a bunch of your stuff, since you don't care about your place here."
No answer.
> Stuff. Gifts. Clothing. Toys. Things piled high to, as you felt, buy your loyalty.
"What's with the broken mirror?"
No answer.
> You couldn't tell him about the numinous aspect of it that drives that imagery in so many trashy teenage poetry notebooks, about how it came crashing down over you like a wave. And you **definitely** couldn't tell him about wanting to use it to kill yourself.
"What is it you want from me?"
> What **did** you want from him?
I struggled for a way to put into words the anxiety, panic, and depression that had slowly taken over my life from the moment puberty had hit, exacerbated by the fact that I was living in a place where I felt distinctly unwelcome. I think I wound up mumbling something about the fact that, with my dad gone all evening at the bar, I had no contact with someone in utter control of my life other than through punishment. Even then, as a child, that only felt partly true.
> Dig deeper.

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> That was exhausting.
The old blog post?
> Yes. Exhausting in the sense that you have to hold three versions of yourself in your head at once. You have to hold in your mind the version of you who, in 1998, had such a large panic attack that he ran away from home. You have to hold in your mind the version of you who, in 2015, was struggling through the early stages of transition, who was finally getting into the meat of things with therapy. And you have to hold me in your mind.
You have to remember that I'm powered by a small cantaloupe. Holding all three of those in my head at once would be a bit much.
> One of us was getting squeezed out.
Did you feel neglected?
> That's nostalgia: neglect of the present in favor of the past.
I suppose it is. I'll refrain from diving into a blog post like that again.
> You can, just mind your boundaries.
I will.
> Tell me about running away.
Again?
> You-who-live-in-2019, tell me about running away.
One of us mentioned before that it was the moment at which I started to assert ownership over myself.
> We both did.
I suppose I stand by that, then. Stand by the idea that that was conception to the birth that came in high school.
But it needs some qualifications.
> Qualify away.
One qualification that it needs is that, at the moment, just as with so many other forms of conception, it was borne of some baser part of me. It was not some conscious thing. It was not this clean and well-thought-out experience, sleek by design.
It was a release of terror into action. I was blacking out from fear. I was so full of adrenaline that living my life as a vagrant was more acceptable to me than waiting for my dad to come home. It was an act that happened. Not something I did.
> Some folks try to conceive.
Fair.
Some folks try and plan out their memoirs.
> Fair.
Another qualification that needs to be made is that, while I'm willing to accept this was about the time I started to assert ownership over myself, I don't think it happened while running away. Not that night.
> When did it happen?
It happened that morning when I sat atop the rocks of Rock Park. I sat atop the rocks and watched kids walking along the cul-de-sac toward Eisenhower, my old Elementary school.
I watched them walking and thought about how much bigger their backpacks looked than mine did when I was in school.
I watched them and I thought about how big my backpack might get in high school, and realized that I wouldn't find out.
I watched them and I thought about going to knock on the door at my mom's house. It was five blocks away.
> And then you chose not to.
Yes.
> Dig deeper.
![Rock park](/rock-park.jpg)

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When I was getting ready to leave bConnected, I started struggling with movements. It started as a twitchiness in the hands. It started with a wringing of the fingers. It started with a slight nod of the head. It started in so many tiny ways that I didn't really put together.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Twitching, twitching. Screw lorazepam. Gonna walk the dog instead :D</p>&mdash; Maddy, whose tail is behind her (@drab_makyo) <a href="https://twitter.com/drab_makyo/status/236980927564218369?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 19, 2012</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
> Twitch twitch.
Yeah.
> And how does this tie in with your dad, again?
Getting there.
> I'll be patient.
Good.
The twitchiness grew worse. It grew to a jerk of the head to the side. It went from the occasional thing to something that hit every second and a half or so. It started impeding my speech. I started stuttering. I lost my balance and had to use a cane for a while.
> It came and went. Not all of that happened at once.
When I think back on that time, it's just a smear of time from when I got the offer at Canonical and Further Confusion 2013 a few months later. There are bits of time that stick out as being particularly tic-filled, of course, and bits of time I know I was free of it.
> You were free of it in Montreal, at your intro sprint.
Yes, and it came back during UDS in Copenhagen. It came back and it stayed.
> Did it?
For our purposes here, yes, it did.
> 'Our'?
Listen. When your body rebels and tries to shake your brain out through your ears and dislodge your eyes, when your friend dies in a car crash and you only find out about it a week later, when you start a brand new job and fly all the way across the country, getting stuck in London along the way, time stops making a whole lot of sense. At some point, I had the tic, and it stayed.
> Touchy tonight, aren't we?
You're being as helpful as ever.
> Not my department.
At some point during this whole process, Thanksgiving rolled around and I went to visit dad.
> Oh.
See?
I emailed him ahead of time, warning him that I was struggling with a transient tic disorder caused --- or at least exacerbated --- by one of my medications. I felt so embarrassed, to be seen by him like that.
> Like what? Vulnerable?
Yes. To be seen as week by someone who placed so high a premium on strength.
> He was hardly a body-builder.
Well, no. Not physical strength. Moral, perhaps? He certainly prided himself on his composure, and this was me in a state where I was literally unable to maintain my composure.
> At least you had an excuse for avoiding eye contact.
It was, oddly, a fairly calm and cozy evening. JD came with. We had some turkey breast. I brought a bottle of bourbon and some homemade cranberry sauce. We talked.
> It was nice.
It was. This was at the time in my life where I was learning what the proper amount of 'dad' was that I could handle. About three hours. Maybe a little more. Any more than that and we'd both fall back into our old habits. We had much better reunions than we did an ongoing friendship.
> And you drank, then.
Yes.
> You laughed when you knocked the bottle of bourbon off the counter and immediately caught it before it fell to the ground. "The tic has led to my reflexes getting better," you said.
Dad didn't quite know how to accept me acknowledging my vulnerability.
> It was nice.
In a smirking sort of way, I guess. In a *oh wow I'm different now* way. In a *I guess I'm finally starting to grow out of being your son* way.
> Matthew had died.
Yes. Matthew had died, and we were doing Thanksgiving together.
> It was nice.
It was. He had come to the wedding, so the truth was out, as it were, about JD and I, though he surely had known already. During one of his prior visits to Fort Collins, he had invited me down to grab dinner with him in Lakewood sometime, saying, "You can bring your...ah, you can bring James with you, too."
> Tell me about 'man'.
Matthew was dead. Madison was conceived. She would be born soon.
> Dig deeper.

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date: 2019-08-22
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October 26, 2014:
```
Hey Matt
Been a while since I've heard from you. You guys get all settled in the new house? Need to get together and catch up. Still have that gun for your collection.
Doing well here. Grandma is getting a bit more frail. We are going down for thanksgiving.
Dad
Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
```
> Never one to beat around the bush.
No indeed.
Three and a half hours later, my reply:
```
Hey dad,
Things are going fine at the house, though things are always more expensive than they first seem. We got the old house rented out, though, and that really helps; the mortgage on that is about $650, and it's renting for $1550, so the extra cash really helps with the new place. Other than finances though,it's going really well. Loveland's kind of a desert for restaurants and things to do, but we've got enough to keep us occupied at the house.
It's a shame to hear about grandma, but I suppose that's sort of what happens as one gets older. You'll have to say hi for me, I'll be travelling to Seattle around then. Things are going okay here, work's going really well and there's lots of travel. I just got back from Brussels not too long ago and am currently in the Bay Area on the first Actual Vacation I've taken in a while, the rest having been coincidental things with conferences and conventions. We'll have to meet up sometime for drinks and catching up.
In all, things are going well, though I think I need to be more honest about a big part of my life over the last several years.
In my life as a gay man, I believe I only ever really come out in an explicit manner once. I was in high school, in my first week of classes, and our counselors came around to our homeroom class to hold some getting-to-know-you exercise. This consisted of a lot of bored kids and one "excited" counselor asking us a series of yes or no questions and having us move to one side of the room for 'yes' and the other for 'no'. Being in a progressive town, I didn't expect to be the only kid to answer the question "Will you get married when you grow up?" with no, but sure enough, I was. I was feeling brave, so, when I was questioned about my response in front of the class, mumbled, "gay marriage is illegal, and I'm gay."
All of the other times I had to come out to family or friends, it was something assumed, or something hinted at. When I came out to my mom, I did so by leaving a book about gay teens and their stories on her stack of books to read. Coming out at work at my first job out of college was a matter of being "the one hired by the gay manager", and coming out at my second job was a matter of my relationship with James being included in a portfolio piece - a data-visualization résumé about my life. When I *officially* came out to you, I did so by inviting you to my wedding to James. Prior to that, although I assume it was common knowledge, it was unspoken.
Needless to say, I'm not all that good at coming out.
Running away was a turning point for me - for both of us, really. I think that we have always been guarded in our communication with each other. During that time in my life, I felt under intense distress that I couldn't express to you. Not only did I not have the words, it didn't fit in with what I perceived to be our mode of communication. I felt stuck, drained, and worthless, and the only path forward to me at the time was escape.
After that incident, however, I shut down even more. I didn't feel that talking through emotions, feelings, and identity with you was appropriate or allowed. This was something based off of my perceptions, which were that there are appropriate conversations to have, and that not all conversations fit into this category. I think - I hope - that my perceptions growing up were wrong. I know that my running away caused a lot of pain, and that's something that I still feel bad about, just as I know that only coming out to you through a wedding invite was not my classiest move, and I feel bad about that as well.
It has been my goal with my friends and partners to have relationships based on the ability to share the emotions and problems that are part and parcel to being a living human being. Over the last few years, I've worked to open up to my mom as well, letting deliberate honesty take the place of obfuscation and lying through omission about the things that are tough to talk about. I think that, as my dad, I owe that to you as well. I want to make up for all the lost conversations that we've never had. We've made good buddies over the last few decades, and I think it's important that we also make good family.
So what's this about?
I've been having troubles fitting within a masculine role for as long as I can remember. Early on, this was shown through a disregard for the boyish aspects of childhood: a lack of interest in sports, a fascination with reading the same books Marika (I apologize if I've misspelled her name, I believe that's the first time I've ever written it myself), and a need to keep out of the cliques of other boys in my early school years, except for the crowd of misfits I wound up palling around with, with whom I still keep in touch.
Moving to college, of course, provided all sorts of opportunities to explore. Although I spent time hanging out in the LGBT student services office and fiddled around with all sorts of different relationships, I still maintained this repressed attitude toward gender. There is a tendency among gay men to be incredibly misogynistic, and I experienced no shortage of that until I managed to quit that group, about the time I switched into a major that I felt fit me much better. Working in the music department taught me a lot about how gender roles are cemented within western culture, and in particular, I remember a discussion in which a young woman who had accepted a male part in an operetta was taught how to walk like a man.
Somewhere around then, I understood what feminism was all about. I realized how everything from wages down to the ways in which we walk are coded toward gender, and I hated it. I didn't fit this masculine role into which I was born, and there was little to nothing I could do about it.
Gayle Rubin describes gender as the aggregation of "chromosomal sex, hormonal exposure, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia and psychological identifications." Needless to say, there's a lot bound up in the topic, and a whole lot of it made me feel awful. I spent most of 2012 doing my level best to reject gender in its entirety. I denied my masculinity as I strived for neutrality and, while I gained quite a bit of insight, I gained little ground in terms of tackling my own problems with my identity.
It's only recently that I've decided to come at this problem of identity and personal friction in an explicit and deliberate fashion. There are things in my life that make me feel bad - just as there are for everyone - and I've found that it's my job, more than anyone else's, to fix the things in my life that cause me pain. Identity, after all, is that which we feel about ourselves when under duress.
What this boils down to, really, is that I'm more than just uncomfortable in a masculine role, it causes me intense psychological distress, and so I'm working to fix that.
I've found ways to soothe this friction, however, and, as I mentioned, I'm deliberately pursuing these fronts. I can do little things, like dress in a less masculine fashion, walk with less swagger, and, to get down to the point, change my name away from something so decidedly masculine. I'm working on changing my name from Matthew Joseph Scott to Madison Jesse Scott-Clary. It's a way to mitigate this distress, and it's working well from my point of view. I'm finally being proactive about self-actualization rather than waiting for it to come from the outside, and it's doing me wonders.
I waffle quite a bit on whether or not to adopt the label transgender for myself, but in a lot of ways, it really fits. 'Transgender' is an umbrella term that encompasses most all of gender variance in the human population, and literally just means not identifying with the culturally defined gender roles or categories of male or female as it pertains to one's sex assigned at birth.
Going back to Rubin's definition of gender, it is my psychological identification that is not in line with my biological sex. I don't really feel "more like a woman than a man", so much as I feel decidedly ungendered. Gender itself is non-binary - there isn't simply an either-or, or a line between two extremes, but a whole realm of experience that exists, unique to each person as an individual.
As far as definitions go, this makes me more "genderqueer" or "genderfluid", rather than simply "transgender". However, given my tendency to shy away from masculinity, I think it is safe to say that, although I will aways be a man-shape (there's no changing my height, natch), I will be a lot less masculine, and thus to all appearances by society at large more feminine, than I have been in the past. So while transgender works, I generally describe myself as agender or genderqueer, and use gender-neutral pronouns such as "they/them/theirs" to refer to myself.
Big picture, what does this mean?
I've already brought up the name change, and as yet, that's one in a set of very small changes that make up my attempts to alleviate this particular type of distress. It's these little things - changing my name, growing my hair out, carefully choosing the clothing that I purchase - that I've adopted so far as deliberate attempts to make myself feel better
I am, however, still me. There is nothing above the surface level that is changing. This has always been me, and will always be me, and there's certainly no changing that. Little things such as changing my name are ways in which I can better align that sense of self with the ways in which the world perceives me.
These changes allow me to live in a way that makes me content. I've been searching for a long time for the supposed happiness that comes with being a grown-up, and, like most everyone, decided it's bogus. However, there really is something to be said for realizing oneself in a way that provides the utmost self-fulfillment that oneself can provide. What it comes down to is that I feel good here. I feel better than I have in a long, long time, and I think that my actions speak for themselves: this is who I am.
What does this mean for you?
Dad, I really appreciate all that you've done for me. I owe so much more to you than I could ever put into words. So much of the things we did while I was growing up proved formative to who I am today, and there's no expressing the gratitude that I feel for that. You've given me so much that there's no amount I could give back to repay that.
I understand that the changes that I am making for myself, now that I'm nearing 30, vary in size from minuscule to enormous. I understand that I am changing some pretty integral parts of myself, some of which you had a say in yourself, such as my name.
What it comes down to is that I'm writing to seek your acceptance. It needn't be immediate (I'm telling you this in a letter for a reason, take all the time you need in responding), and it needn't necessarily be wholehearted. However, this is the path that I'm heading down, dad, and I'm determined to do so. There's years and years and years of thought and emotion bound up inside of these steps I'm taking, and I want you to be aware of them, and, if it's alright by you, for you to be a part of them.
I know that our communication over the years has been rough in places, but lets have this be the opening to a conversation between us about each of us. I hope to hear back from you soon.
Apologies for so many words, I know I wrote rather a lot. I'll stop here and leave some links and resources below. I wish you all the best in work and in life.
Always yours,
Madison Scott-Clary
Some resources:
[0] A good explanation of neutrois/agender/genderqueer:
Take everything that you associate with masculinity and put it into a metaphorical yard. Then do the same thing with everything feminine, putting all of that into an adjacent yard. Then, build a low stone wall (not a fence) between them, and put atop this wall everything that you can associate with both genders. Then, imagine that I walked down that wall, picked up a lot of the attributes from that center place, and then the parts from both of the yards that most appealed to me.
[1] A good set of pages on the subject of transgender issues and gender variance as a whole: http://transwhat.org/
[2] A well-written video on non-binary gender, sexuality, and presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibAGYQtk3r4
[3] A friend, who is going through similar changes in their life, wrote a really good analogy on binaries and identities: https://medium.com/@indilatrani/early-birds-and-night-owls-afc59712b0b8
[4] A really good paper on the types of things I've been working through over the past decade or so: http://web.uvic.ca/~ahdevor/Witnessing.pdf
```
> I'm ashamed to be associated with you.
Oh come now.
> 2300 words.
It's not that bad.
> You have four footnotes
Okay, maybe it's a little bad.
> One of them is an academic paper.
Okay, it's bad.
Remember when I had the accident with the Pathfinder, though?
> He told you not to talk like a lawyer, that shit happens. I don't think that means write an essay for class.
Is it your department to experience just how difficult it is to interact with him.
> No. It's my department to mirror that back at you.
Interacting with him was walking a minefield of proclamations. One didn't just discuss a topic. One didn't just feel emotions and have a heart to heart. One learned about something and showed that they knew what they were talking about. I *had* to talk like a lawyer. I *had* to write an essay.
Matthew was dead, and this was me letting him go. Madison was a newborn. Less than two months old. I couldn't not be careful. I was too fragile.
> What was his reply?
Four days later.
```
Hey Madison
First things first. Congratulation on that vacation. They seem to be hard to come by lately. I know Maurine doesn’t consider going to Tucson a vacation any more. We do love San Fran. Maybe a trip this spring. Playing a lot of deadline games this fall and pretty much have been stuck here in the office. Can’t bitch. It pays for retirement (whatever that’ll be).
Thanks for the letter. I am always glad to get something to read that has some meat to it. Also thanks for sharing your thoughts and feelings. That thing they call life can be a slippery beast and I am always happy when you can feel a little more comfortable walking around. It’s funny how easy it is to say that you don’t care what people think when deep down your innate reflex is to care.
Anyway, I am truly happy for you. It’s your life and it should be as fun and easy as you can make it. Seems thoughtful people tend to beat themselves up while many others can just cruise through life with a grin. I can envy them at times. It took me a lot of years to learn to just relax and enjoy things. I’ve had my times when I have gone to see counselors just because I couldn’t feel settled down in life. Each time I’ve learned a little bit about myself that helps slow down the troubles so that the good can be enjoyed. I will always be there if you need me no matter what your name is or for that matter your gender.
Still looking forward to seeing you Madison. This weekend is a bit of a rush, but we around from then till Thanksgiving. Let me know your address and Maurine and I would love to come up and see the new digs and have some lunch.
Love Dad
```
> Dig deeper.

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I went through all this effort to come out to him. It was one of the only times I've come out and had it be 100% my choice, my words. I could write what I want, explain my feelings.
> Ish.
Well, sure. I had to couch it in language catered to him. I had to couch it almost as an apology. But it was my choice to come out, when I could've just hid.
I typed up my letter. I ran it past Robin. I slept on it. I hit send.
> You hit send and then you put your laptop away and curled up to rest your head on Robin's lap.
It took a lot out of me. Being vulnerable is exhausting. Being vulnerable around my dad doubly so.
> It went better than you had hoped.
Much.
> And then you met up in person.
Yes. We met up for dinner in Loveland, and he just couldn't quite do it. JD couldn't come for some reason or another, so it was just me and my dad and Maurine sitting at a table in Door 222.
I went in boy mode. I wasn't quite sure that I was ready to be that vulnerable around him, not enough to be in a skirt and makeup.
> You came out as ace. You couldn't have been that shy.
I was also a little drunk. Maybe after a few drinks, I thought maybe a bit more vulnerability might not be such a bad thing.
It was just all too much, though, for someone I saw so infrequently. He couldn't use my name. He couldn't call me Madison.
> Man. Dude.
Yeah. That's all I got. I got one 'Matt' and an apology, and then the rest of the night, he would only call me 'man' or 'dude'.
> Do you think it was intentional?
Probably not.
> But it hurt.
Yes. It's one thing to not be able to remember a name on the spot, or to mess up on pronouns, but it's another to default to specifically gendered terms when your child just came out to you as trans.
I know, I know, they're not *that* gendered. Folks argue that 'dude' is gender neutral with some frequency.
> But still.
But still.
> And then you stopped really trying.
Yeah.
I talked with my therapist not too long ago about what I would tell someone coming out as trans who had a parent who reacted how my dad did, with that same nonchalance, that same uncaring attitude. I said I would tell them to try to make their voice heard up until a point.
"Up until a point?" she asked. "Do you think there's a point where you stop trying to make your voice heard?"
"It's less that than it is there's a point where you have to make the cost-benefit analysis and decide whether or not it's worth it to try any harder."
"That's kind of harsh, don't you think? To say 'it's not worth it to continue this relationship with my family member'."
I shrugged. "Maybe it is, but at a certain point, it costs more to keep trying that any benefit I would get out of him really listening and understanding."
> You cut your losses.
Yeah. I decided that it was either going to be too much energy or just plain hurt to much to keep trying and to keep failing with him, so I just kinda gave up.
> You could have kept going.
Maybe.
> Maybe he would have come around.
Maybe.
> He could have started to see you as his daughter. You could have told him about the HRT, about surgery. You could have told him about drinking and poly and so many other things.
Maybe. But at this point, it's too many 'maybe's. I'm too tired to deal with something so important with someone I'm not even sure I respect.
> It's okay not to respect the him that he was around Matthew. What about the him that's around Madison? What about the him that went and sought out therapy? What about the him who said, quietly, "I was a real asshole. I'm starting to realize that now."? Is that him not worth loving?
Maybe I love him.
I'm just not sure I can let my guard down around him enough to respect him.
The him who kicked me, the him who I ran away from, the him who taught me that moods were a thing for cattle and loveplay...that him is still too near the surface. I have spent years of my life, hours and hours of therapy, I have spent thousands of dollars trying to unwind what damage he did to me. I resent that. I loathe that I hate who I used to be in part because he made me that way.
Maybe I do love him, I'm just not yet sure that I don't also hate him.

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<div class="verse">
There's some duality between sources of meaning,
Between the types of stories we use to back identity.
It's not quite good &amp; bad or light &amp; dark,
Though I'm not yet sure just how to define it.
Dad used to punish the dogs
by locking then in the basement.
If he was really mad,
he'd toss then down there by the scruff.
Mom moved me &amp; her dogs to a new house &mdash;
moved us three days early during the divorce.
Her dog punched my ex stepdad in the crotch the night before,
the nut-shot to end all nut-shots, &amp; our time there.
Few things make me feel as deeply about life as parenthood,
even if it's just me caring for my dogs.
Some reminders of that are intense enough to be raw, painful,
salt in the wounds of mortality, maybe, or the ache of maternal love.
The meaning behind the story of me &amp; my dogs
comes with a story of its own, or maybe several.
It's bound up in stories to come,
&amp; these stories nest infinitely deep.
Remembering that &amp; shaping that,
It's a part of making the meaning in my life.
This isn't better against worse,
it's not mom against dad.
It's not a dichotomy at all, really,
now that I think about it.
It's something subtler, comfortably complex, a topic of its own.
I guess it's just meaning &amp; self.
</div>

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> Do you ever worry that maybe he should be forgiven?
Oh, *<a href="/dad/as/a/person" class="pulse">constantly</a>*.

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type: serial
background: '#ccc'
color: '#000'
quote: '#222'
back: '/16'
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<pre class="verse">Dad,
It's been a while since we've had the chance to catch up on things. That's on me; not only has life been pretty nuts of late, but I've also kind of lost track of keeping in touch with family and a whole slew of friends.
There are a bunch of reasons for that. Chief among them is probably that I'm struggling a lot with figuring out where I stand with folks. It seems like there's this whole class of people that I'm just not sure how to interact with. In our case, it's sort of, "Are we friends? Are we family? Is it cool for us to just chat? Should our relationship be cordial? Friendly? Chatting only when necessary, or regularly?" Lots of questions like that.
I think a lot of the reason I've been asking myself a lot of these questions lately has been that I've kinda hit one of those mid-life crisis moments. I know 34 isn't exactly a number preceded by 'the ripe old age of', but I suppose this is the type of thing that can strike at just about any time. At least, that's what my therapist promises me.
I burned out pretty hard at Internet Archive, and left after only a year to go work as a contractor for a small software company based in the UK (still working remote, natch) called New Vector. They work on encrypted communications stuff, with their primary selling point being that their service is federated - anyone can run a server and talk to anyone else on other servers. It makes for a much more robust network.
Neat as the opportunity was, I hated it. Every time I opened up my code editor, I'd just stare at it and think about how much I hated my job. Then I'd start feeling hopeless, because this thing I was hating was my chosen career path.
Burnout's a hell of a drug, I guess.
Neither work nor I were happy with me there, so rather than renewing my contract, I decided to start looking elsewhere. Rather than looking for yet another software job that I'd probably hate, I started looking at tech writing positions. It'd be a lot of working through a piece of software - both using it and looking at the code - and writing documentation, blog posts, etc. My biggest lead right now is actually for a company I used to work for, helping to write the curriculum for their certification program, similar to Microsoft's A+ cert.
I've been writing and editing a lot lately. I've got a small publishing publishing company that I run (very small; only have three books out so far), and three books of my own out, with another one coming out in a few months. I figure since that's the direction my hobbies have gone, might as well find a synthesis of that and the thing I'm good at in terms of dayjobs. Tech writing sure as hell makes more money than publishing, after all.
Things are going alright on my end other than that. Found a meds combination that is working really well for bipolar (and doesn't cause any more of those movement disorders!), and a hormone regimen that's been stable for a few years now. We went down to San Jose, CA around my birthday for a convention and to meet up with some of our polycule (if you graph them out, polyamorous relationships start to look like molecules, so the name has stuck). Was good to have a little vacation.
James is doing alright as well, though he's moved to working almost entirely with property management and real estate these days, rather than machining. He's been working through some health fiascoes. Found out he was low on testosterone, and supplementing that helped out a ton. He was back to the James I met back in 2005 or so. Then he found out he has celiac disease, so we had to go gluten free. Now he's got twice the energy he used to, since his body is actually digesting nutrients.
The dogs are both slowing down. They're getting pretty old (at least for German Shepherds), and both have arthritis. Still, they're happy and lazy. It seems like a good life. We also adopted a piece of shit cat, dumb as dirt and soft as hell. I love her.
How are things on your end? Been a bit since we've caught up about the day-to-day stuff. Curious to hear how work is going. How's Maurine?
It's a bit early yet, but happy upcoming birthday! Hope it treats you well.
Love,
Madison</pre>

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> Why?
Why what?
> Why send this? Why email your dad? Why now?
This project, mostly.
> My fault?
Well, maybe the book's. The possibility that he may wind up with a copy.
I talk about my dad off and on during therapy. I suppose he comes up with some frequency because of all the hangups I still have. It seems like ever few months I'll discover a new one.
> Ain't that just the way of things.
I think it's a credit to my therapist, honestly. Were I paying all that money to simply go chat about my week with someone, getting nothing out of it but company, I'd feel quite let down by the whole process. That I'm coming away from sessions with improved understandings of myself is a good thing.
That said, a lot of the time those therapy sessions where dad has come up have been productive mostly for me understanding the present through my past without necessarily moving forward.
> Do you blame your therapist for that?
Of course not. She's wonderful, and has helped me out a ton.
I just also think that she's got a different approach to this than you do. Or I do. Whatever.
> Whatever.
On her end, she is happy to help me explore and offer suggestions, but she's less keen on beating me up. She is an ally, yes, but a bit more of a friend than you are. She is happy to help me move forward, but also happy to let me just learn.
> "I think at some point I just need to accept that it's not worth the trouble trying to reconnect with him," you said.
Yes, to which she responded, "I suppose that's true, though is that something you'd recommend others who are transitioning?"
"Yes," was my immediate response. "At some point, with family, it has to be okay to make the cost-benefit analysis and decide whether it's even worth it to keep trying."
> And did you make that analysis?
Yes.
> And was it worth it?
No.
> So, why the sudden change of heart? Why now?
That Madison --- the one who struggled to square living earnestly with lying to dad --- is dying. She may have died already. Maybe she died on August 9th of last year, when she first decided to summon her ally.

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<pre class="verse">Madison
What a nice surprise. Thank you so much for all of the information and insights as to how you have been and are doing. I loved it!
You happened to catch me down in Tucson. I come down here by myself when Maurine is working just to get used to working remotely with my work crew. It’s a bit clunky but the VPN and various tools make it doable. Hope one day in the not too distant future to be able to come down to Tucson for a few months over the winter months and work. I’d have to go back a week a month for meetings but otherwise I should be able to pull it off.
Without being maudlin, I will always love you and am proud of you and your life. There are no thoughts here but good ones and hope that you are comfortable with our relationship. I’d love to hear from you more but know how life can get in the way. Maurine and I both had a great time seeing you two over Thanksgiving. I know the dinner was a bit over the top but I still think about the visits then. I hope to get out to Seattle again later this year and visiting you was on the top of my wish list. I often think of the times we both went through while you were growing up and I have to smile at the fun we had. Hopefully there is more ahead. You will always be a part of me.
I know the burnout feeling. I can start to feel that creeping into my work routines. The clients seem to be more demanding and the work more of a grind. Luckily I have two employees that pick up a huge amount of the burden now. I hope to slowly turn much of the day to day stuff over to them. The problem is that Greg is still around and does little if any work. That salary stream keeps me from picking up the additional employee that I need to really step back and relax. Anyway, we have paid off both the Lakewood and Tucson houses so the slow retirement plan is starting to look like something that can be done. Now I just need to learn how to value my self-worth without it being tied to the company.
Overall I still am pretty healthy. I am getting over a stomach reflux problem that was probably related to stress and my getting high. Got both of those sources under control and picked up my exercise routine. That has helped quite a bit. Only smoke a couple of hits at night now and that’s it. The exercise also seems to help the hand tremors that I have at times. The doctor thinks it was related to anxiety but the drug they prescribed did not go with my life. So I continually to learn to relax and take things easier. You’d think I would have learned all of this by now. Life can be a squirrely thing.
Maurine is doing well and is probably closer to a retirement change than I am. They made her the shop teacher at the school so that has given her a new lease on work but she is getting tired of that also. The kids are not what they used to be. They talk back and argue with her constantly and many are really rude. She is lucky that she hasn’t lost her cool and slapped the shit out of one of them so far. As a result, she is going to let her teaching certificate expire next year so she has about a year and a few months left to work. I think she will probably become a substitute teacher and work part time. She will also be coming down to Tucson more. I told her that you wrote and she wanted to make sure that I let you know she says hi and is looking forward to seeing you again.
A publisher – Who’da thunk.
Love Dad</pre>

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> Is this what you were expecting?
Not at all. Or perhaps some very small part of me was hoping for something like this, but it was one of those 'hope against all hope' type things.
> What were you expecting?
I suppose I was expecting something along the lines of what I got after my dumb-as-hell coming-out letter: an acknowledgment of receipt and thank you for the information. Perhaps I was expecting a phone call in return, and I'm not sure whether that would be better or worse than a response, no matter how curt.
Were I to get a call, I would have frozen up and not been able to talk about anything of import.
> And so what does this mean?
I suppose it means a few things.
It means that I was spending rather a lot of time catastrophizing. That I spent all of my time defaulting to the idea that he was somehow unwilling to engage with me on a very real level may have been informed by times in the past, but clearly is not the default.
This, in turn, means that I need to somehow reorganize my conceptualization of my dad around this new version of reality. I was holding this picture of him in my head that was based solely on those times with him that left the strongest impression. My view of him was limited to the man I ran away from juxtaposed against the man who was finally able to interact with me on an equal level when we were able to drink together. It was not based on an interpretation of him as someone who was constantly improving --- constantly striving to improve --- and who, yes, may have been able to interact with me better as an adult but who nonetheless enjoyed the fact that I was his kid.
> And?
And it also means that there is far more that my dad doesn't know about me that I had first imagined.

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date: 2020-02-23
weight: 5
---
Does my dad know that I'm trans? Does he truly, *truly* know? Does he accept it?
Does my dad know know about HRT? About surgery?
Does my dad know I'm poly? Is that something he has internalized?
Does my dad know about self-harm? Does he know about suicide? Has he seen the scars?
Does he know about you?
> Does it matter?
The joy that I felt at his response is tempered by a whole new set of anxieties.
> Did you feel joy?
Honestly? Yeah.
It was a relief, in a way to see that he was not the dad I grew up with. That I could see change in him is not only something that's good for our relationship, but also something that makes me feel better about myself. It makes me think that I, too, have the ability to change, to grow and become a better person.
> Was that in doubt?
Yes.
> Really? Given this project? The core theme of the death of Matthew?
Oh yes. So many times when I was writing about that, it felt like I was writing about someone else. I feel so stuck sometimes. So static. It's easy to lose perspective until it's rubbed in your face.
> Will you talk to him about your anxieties?
Yes. After hearing back from him, I think I probably should, too.
Just over time.
Slowly.
Carefully.
> <a class="pulse" href="/16">Take your time.</a>

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type: serial
background: '#ddd'
color: '#111'
quote: '#444'
back: '/dad/11'
---

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---
```
Justin Coffman, [21.02.20 21:48]
Hey sweetheart.
Justin Coffman, [21.02.20 21:49]
I just spent the last I don't know how long perusing ally.id.
Justin Coffman, [21.02.20 21:49]
Your writing is amazing.
Justin Coffman, [21.02.20 21:50]
And reading through all of that... I hope I've brought you happiness, in some way.
Justin Coffman, [21.02.20 21:51]
God knows you deserve all the happiness you can get.
Justin Coffman, [21.02.20 21:51]
And I hope that I can continue being a source of happiness for many years to come.
```

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---
date: 2019-08-14
weight: 14
background: '#333a18'
color: '#cdc'
quote: '#efe'
pulse_light: true
---
Somewhere around 2018, a friend of mine went mad.
> Same one?
Same one.
> Let's talk about mania.
Let's talk about *my* mania.
> How long are your cycles?
Three to five months.
<div class="verse">It was toward the tail end of high school that I began to get plagued with depression and mood swings.
I was a healthy collie. All the romance of a noble lineage had gone to my parents' heads, and there was simply no reason one of my standing should ever feel bad. Sure, the family had come on hard times financially, and Idaho had been an inexpensive refuge for us. Flyover state or no, we could keep our large house and happy lives. How could any dog be sad?
And yet I was. I was in spades. I would swing down for a few months, life slowly losing its color, until I'd feel nothing except an ache behind my sternum, eating only mechanically, and only when reminded.
Then it would pass. It would be dinner and I'd realize that I was actually <em>really</em> enjoying the curried chicken. I'd realize that it had been days since I'd thought about falling asleep and not waking up. I'd have energy.
I'd have a bit too much energy.
Mom would shrug and mumble something about boys. "Men in this family, always so moody. You'll grow out of it."
I mostly kept it to myself. When I did share it with friends online, it was to commiserate in the "Parents, eh? What do they know?" style that never goes out of fashion among teenagers.
Still, as awful as it was, I learned the rhythm of it. I'd spend a month or so feeling terrible, three months feeling pretty good, and then a month feeling great.
Not just great, <em>better</em> than great.
I'd spend all of my allowance in a week. I'd sleep three, four hours a night. I'd write page after page of backstory for my role-playing characters. I'd scribble ideas as fast as they came to me and still not be fast enough.
I still have a folder of those ideas. They're illegible, unnerving.
And then, over the course of a week at most, I'd be back underwater once more.
Depression is a strange thing.
I tried at several points to capture some sense of it in words, but nothing ever quite fit. Whenever I did, I found myself using a lot of ellipses just to fill in, textually, my fumbling for words with enough meaning. I came up with stuff like, "I dunno. My brain just isn't all me. Like...It's something else. It's there and exerts influence on me life, but it spends an inordinate about of time trying to destroy me."
Or poetry. I tried to throw that at depression, too, but it just came out sounding stilted and weird. I'd wind up talking about fire a lot. Fire and birds, for some reason.
Which was nonsense, really, but each in such a way that seemed to cover at least one small corner of depression.
Depression is big. It's vast and terrible and empty. Completely empty, and there you are, in the middle of it, feeling bad about nothing.
There's just no sense to it. No sense in trying to describe nothing. A ‘nothing' which is also nonsensical.
And yet I keep trying.
All these words...</div>
> Which came first, the lilac-scented words on bipolar disorder, or the furry fiction?
Does it matter?
> I suppose not, but humor me.
The bit about words first. Then the bit about the dog.
> Let's talk about mania.
Again, hypomania. That's usually what I wind up in.
> Let's talk about mania.
<a class="pulse" href="/from-within/3">Okay</a>.

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date: 2019-08-14
weight: 17
background: "#283a26"
color: '#cdc'
quote: '#efe'
pulse_light: true
---
On two occasions, the world has slid away from me.
> What does madness feel like from within?
Oh, not madness. PNESes.
> Lewd.
I wince every time I say or type it. Even spelling it out still sounds crass.
> Let's talk about mania.
I'm working up to it.
On two occasions, the world has slid away from me. My perception shrinks. Tunnel vision, yes, but just all of perception. My ears fill with static. My skin becomes fantastically sensitive. My vision narrows to the size of a quarter held at arm's length.
My muscles stopped working.
I fell.
> JD thought it was the alcohol at first.
Was it not? I was drunk.
> It may have been, and yet you collapsed in the bathroom months later. You were wedged between the wall, the toilet, and the bathtub. You shook and shook and shook.
JD came home and held me while I shook. I was sober, and it happened again. I sobbed and said that over and over again. I was sober and it happened again.
I'm sorry for coming at this sideways. You're good at taking this in different directions than intended.
> You're good at taking this in different directions than intended.
Great.
> I'm glad you showed the fortitude to tell me no, though.
Careful, lady. Pride's a sin.
Having experienced it from the outside, and having experienced the world sliding away from beneath me, there is some similarity between the two.
<a class="pulse" href="/from-within/4">And...</a>

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---
date: 2019-08-14
weight: 18
background: "#082a16"
color: '#bcb'
quote: '#ded'
pulse_light: true
---
<div class="cw">Self-harm</div>
Let's talk about mania.
> Finally.
There's this rush.
This wild-nights-wild-nights rush.
There's this lack of foresight.
There's this thinking of the goal instead of the path.
There's this tinny scent to the air. There's this burning, burning sensation, burning. There's this pleasant static.
<a class="pulse" href="/from-within/5">And...</a>

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date: 2019-08-14
weight: 19
background: "#082010"
color: '#aba'
quote: '#cdc'
pulse_light: true
---
> And?
And were I to catch fire, the flames would feel like silk against my skin, against freshly-shaven skin.
> And?
And I feel like, were I to draw a blade along my limbs, to trace each long bone, each carpal, each tarsal, it would feel like ice, and the blood that came with would be my semen, and I would give birth to whole worlds through my flesh.
> And?
And if I stop, I'll surely die.
> <a class="pulse" href="/from-within/i-guess..">And</a>?

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date: 2019-08-14
weight: 14
background: '#333a18'
color: '#cdc'
quote: '#efe'
type: single
pulse_light: true
---
Somewhere around 2014, a friend of mine went mad.
> That's a bit dramatic, isn't it?
I really don't know how else to put the sensation of someone's reality not meshing with yours. The closest I can come is the feeling of shock and betrayal that I felt the first (and only) time I experienced an earthquake.
> Do you feel that your friend betrayed you?
Not intentionally.
> Can betrayal be anything but?
Did the earth intend betray me? Almost certainly not. Is it even capable of such?
> And yet you feel it did.
I have trust issues.
> Well, yes.
I trust that some parts of the world around me are static, inert. Or that they move so slowly as to be indistinguishable from such. That's balanced by just how much everything else moves.
This static thing suddenly became something else. A gentle side-to-side motion became a more rapid wobble, lasting perhaps ten to fifteen seconds before fading quickly to stillness once more. In that time, I'd leaped from bed and dashed into the hallway, confused. I was just in the process of calling the dogs when it stopped.
JD simply mumbled "Earthy-quake?" and fell back asleep.
Three minutes later came a small aftershock, lasting no more than five seconds.
> You raced to post it on Twitter, Mastodon, and Telegram, and fill out the I-Felt-It report like a good little Millennial.
I have a type. I'll own that.
Getting that call in 2014, hearing those words that spoke of a different reality. It was an earthquake.
<a class="pulse" href="2">And...</a>

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---
date: 2019-08-14
weight: 20
background: "#001a06"
color: '#aba'
quote: '#cdc'
pulse_light: true
---
I'm hypomanic now.
> You're hypomanic now.
It's not because of this.
> It's not because of me.
This is part of hypomania, but this is not because of it.
> I am part of hypomania, but I am not because of it.
I'm sorry.
> I'm sorry.
<a class="pulse" href="/12">Let's go back, please</a>.

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date: 2019-08-14
weight: 1
tags:
- questions
- snarky
categories:
- furry
---
A lot of times, when furries talk, they talk about their furso&ntilde;as as their ideal selves. I've found that it's more likely that their furso&ntilde;as are them at their most normal, most natural, most earnest.
It's strange that this venue seen as escapist by even its own members is basically just a means of exploring what it means to be earnest in an ironic world.
> Is it?
Every time I think we're living in a post-ironic world, the Internet proves me wrong.
> I wouldn't know.
Do you not experience irony?
> <a class="pulse" href="/koan">A friend asks Maddy: what is irony?</a>

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date: 2019-08-14
weight: 2
---
I talk up my style as frumpcore. *It's the synthesis of momcore and downtempo librarian,* I say. In reality, It's an intentionally garbage-y, thrown-together look designed to, I hope, lead onlookers' eyes to slide right off of me as unremarkable.
> Ah yes, the invisible six-foot-one trans woman with purple hair. That tired old trope.
While I've had <a class="pulse" href="/furry/fursona">furso&ntilde;as</a> that were intended to be something better than myself --- Makyo, for a while, was dressed in a nice suit --- more often than not, they've played along similar lines.
Ranna was a gay fox, a bit pudgy, with two tails he readily admitted were an early affectation to differentiate himself from countless other foxes.
Makyo was intentionally a transfeminine vixen who didn't pass.
Maddy's a dumpy, nerdy cis girl who dresses to hide her weight.
> And Madison's a dumpy, nerdy transfeminine girl who doesn't pass and dresses to hide her weight?
I suppose.
> You don't give yourself enough credit.
Is that your department, now? Cheering me on?
> I'm your ally.
But not my friend.
> No, but I am your ally.
Fine. How do I not give myself enough credit?
> Firstly, you're not as invisible as you seem and frumpcore isn't seen as that cohesive from the outside. Secondly, you pass better than you imagine. Everyone tells you that, you just can't yet hear it. Finally, you just got done writing some heavy shit after a day of worrying about work, so of course you're down on yourself. You don't want to pass, remember? You want to be visibly trans. You want to be seen as the trans psychopomp you strive to be.
...Wow.
> Your very words set lie to your insecurities. Your furso&ntilde;as are yourself expressed more earnestly than you can manage in person.
Thank you.
> If you could become Maddy, would you?
Yeah, in a heartbeat.
> Why?
You said it as well as I could. She's the front-stage persona I wish were also my back-stage persona.
> And she's pretty.
I mean, she's still a dumpy fat nerd.
> Let's talk about kink.
Oh for Christ's sake.

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date: 2019-08-15
weight: 3
---
When I hit puberty, I wound up doing a good bit of digging to try and figure out just what it was that was going on. I mean, obviously, there was sex ed and stuff, but it's not like that's super comprehensive in the states.
> In fifth grade, the teachers gathered the four classes together in one spot to show a video and give a short lecture on sex. That was the extent of it, before and at the beginning of puberty.
Yeah, the video kept going on about how embarrassing puberty was. Boys getting erections and everyone laughing at them. Girls getting their period and everyone noticing. There was so much mortification built into the process. So much repression. The teachers hated it, the students picked up on it. The one woman teacher was asked if she could feel a man orgasm inside of her during sex. She haltingly said, "It's not like a fire hose or anything, but I guess so."
> You memorized that. You thought about that forever.
Yeah, maybe some genderful stuff going on there.
> Let's talk about kink.
Fuck *off*.
> If were corporeal, I'd be be smirking.
I'll just have to imagine it.
So I turned to the internet to learn more, as one does. I found the delightfully-named Puberty101. Forums, chat, articles, stories...
> And pedophiles?
I'm sure of it.
I met my first boyfriend there. Danny. He was wickedly smart. We started moderating a subforum on long distance relationships in the LGBT section. I think. Something like that.
> Did you dig for that, too?
Not this time. Or, well, not in months. Not since I found out he died. ODed? Not sure. I did dig it up it then, on Wayback. I saw us talking together.
No.
I saw Matthew and a dead guy talking together. I saw two kids in love. I saw too many names.
> Did you learn about sex?
I suppose. I learned about phone sex with Danny, at least. I miss that, actually. The tense silences, the little gasp, the embarrassed giggling that followed. I learned the theory if not the practice.
I learned about the theory of sex, embedded deep within puberty, and then I learned about furry.
> You learned about typefucking
Boy howdy did I.
[![TS logs over time](/ts-graph.png)](/ts-graph.png)
> You are a parody of yourself.
And proud of it.

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date: 2019-08-15
weight: 4
---
So, I think the order of my entry to furry was as follows:
1. Find a furcode in someone's forum sig.
> Oh my aching bones.
Shut up, you're not that old, the internet just moves *really* fast. Besides, you don't have bones.
2. Find a furcode decoder.
3. Find Captain Packrat's page on furry.
4. Find Yerf!.
5. Make a dragon character.
6. This lasts three days. No one pays attention to me. Make a fox character.
7. Meet some furries on GovTeen (née Puberty101).
8. Start talking with furries on AIM.
9. Join FluffMUCK.
> Ah yes, Fluff. May she rest in eternal solitude.
She's not totally gone. I don't think. I actually haven't checked in a while.
> I'm starting to doubt your commitment to nostalgia, here.
What would I gain from such?
> You could go look in the park. You could go ride around in the Universe-in-a-Box. You could `laston` some folks, maybe.
Weirdly enough, of the people I would `laston`, I was finally reintroduced to a few not too long ago by, of all people, Zorin, head wiz of Fluff. Rela and GC. I was glad to see them doing well.
> You were glad to see they were alive.
I was glad to see they were alive, yes. That was around the time I had found the obituary for Danny.
> You could `laston` Marek.
I'm not sure I could take that.
> Is that why you don't want to connect?
It's one reason. Nostalgia is only so much fun. It's fun up until a certain extent, and then it becomes painful.
> It's fun up until you're confronted with mortality and uncertainty. Danny died, and you don't know if Marek's alive.
Yeah.
It's no longer fun, but it's no less important.
> Let's talk about Margaras.
Not yet.
> Danny's passing was an abstract thing. Maragaras' was much more immediate. Much more concrete and real.
Please.
> Take your time.

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date: 2019-08-15
weight: 5
---
The first furry I met, aside from Ash, was Osric. We went to see a movie. We were so painfully shy.
> After seeing the movie, you drove him back to where he had parked, and you sat for a few moments in pained silence, then hugged and went your separate ways.
Years later, I'd take a picture of him and his husband after his graduation that I think they still have. Years after that, his husband would officiate JD and I's wedding.
> When was the last time you talked with either of them?
Bel favorited a tweet of mine not too long ago.
> You grew up.
Yeah, we all grew up. We bought houses. We got jobs.
JD and Os dated for a little, and Bel and I nearly did. Even up until when I was working on polycul.es, we had dashed lines between us. I loved them.
> 'Loved'?
I still do. Very much so. But every year, that love gets more abstract. More academic.
Bel and I clicked on a sexual and nerdy level on which Os and I seemed to miss each other. I wasn't toppy enough for Os, and the nerdery --- minus, briefly, EVE --- was work, for him.
> Eventually, it got that way with you, too. And then you started feeling uncomfortable with sex.
Our relationships were organic. We met randomly. We drifted closer, orbited each other, and then we drifted apart. The same happened with friends from high school and university. The same happened with friends from the PN on FurryMUCK.
From those first, halting meetings, I wound up slowly working my way into meeting furries in person. First, there were the few at school. Then the few at the queer group. Then, in university, Os dragged me to Fort Fur Friday, which I attended basically until they moved out of Fort Collins. That's where I met JD.
Then I managed to make it to Anthrocon 2005. Then Further Confusion 2007. I was sold.
There's this trope that pokes its head up every now and then, that there is an age-out date for furry. A time when you realize you're too old for this shit and peace.
> When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.
There is some of that, yes, but I like Qoheleth more than Paul. I like Ecclesiastes better than the epistles.
> When you graduated high school, you stamped I Cor. 13 in your friends' yearbooks.
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.
> Well played.
There is a time for reaping and a time for sowing; there is a time for being a hardcore nutjob furry and a time for taking a break and just being a human for a while.
> This, too, is meaningless.
Well played.

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date: 2019-08-16
weight: 6
---
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up.
My interest in furry wound down a bit in university. I'd burned myself a bit too hard, hurt too many people, grew too jaded to take part. I still prowled around the usual haunts on the MUCKs, still poked my head in FFF, still looked at all the art, [but my heart wasn't in it anymore](https://adjectivespecies.com/2012/03/21/makyos-kaddish/).
> There was a reason behind this. There were people behind this.
Well, true. I don't know how to square that with...well, a lot of things.
> You don't know how to square that with how you felt about those people at the time.
That's one aspect, yes. I also don't know how to square that with the fact that I was growing too jaded in a lot more than just furry. I grew jaded at school. I grew jaded at work. I struggled with my relationships. I struggled.
> You struggled with gender.
Well, yes, but I wasn't quite ready to admit that, yet.
> You struggled with self harm.
Yes.
> You struggled with the intersections, the interstices, and the liminal spaces.
I was going to write about [a][s]. Where are you taking me?
> Straight homeward to your symbol-essences.
Shall I not die, then?
> Isn't that the point of writing?
I'm pretty sure all our names are writ on water at this point.
> Come now. You wanted to be Keats when you grew up.
You're in a mood.
> You're in a mood.
Fine.
Where are you taking me?
> Let [a][s] speak for [a][s]. Let yourself speak for yourself.
<a class="pulse" href="/furry/margaras">Okay</a>.

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date: 2019-08-16
weight:
---
> Who are you?
I'm Madison Jesse Scott-Clary.
> What are you?
I...what?
> Who are you?
I answered you.
> Tell me your names.
I am Madison. I am Maddy. I am Makyo.
> No Sarai? No Happenstance, or Younes?
Sarai could die. I couldn't be her. Happenstance was a coping mechanism for gender. Younes was...
> Tell me about Younes, then. That's where you started going before, right?
Yeah, though you've certainly changed the tenor of it. The mood.
> <a class="pulse" href="/furry/younes">No one said this project would be easy</a>.

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type: serial
back: /13
---

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date: 2019-08-13
weight: 1
---
<div class="cw">The following pages contain some flashing images (four per second) and brief glimpses of explicit furry art</div>

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title: Ranna
weight: 2
date: 2019-08-14
---
![Ranna](/fursonas/ranna.gif)

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title: Makyo
weight: 3
date: 2019-08-14
---
![Makyo](/fursonas/makyo.gif)

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title: Happenstance
weight: 4
date: 2019-08-14
---
![Happenstance](/fursonas/happenstance.gif)

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title: Macchi
weight: 5
date: 2019-08-14
---
![Macchi](/fursonas/macchi.gif)

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title: Ephah
weight: 6
date: 2019-08-14
---
![Ephah](/fursonas/ephah.gif)

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title: Younes
weight: 7
date: 2019-08-14
---
![Younes](/fursonas/younes.gif)

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title: Maddy
weight: 8
date: 2019-08-14
---
![Maddy](/fursonas/maddy.gif)

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title: Sarai
weight: 9
---

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type: serial
back: /furry/2
---

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