The Good and the Bad: How I’d Rate My Days

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Today’s Sunday Poser is rather relevant for me. In it, Sadje asks us how we’d rate our day. I’m not going to pick a specific day, but use this as an opportunity to write about the quality of my days and as such my quality of life.

When the Center for Consultation and Expertise consultant met with me last September, at one point she asked me how I’d rate my quality of life on a scale from 1 to 10. I find this difficult to say, as some days just about completely suck while others are okay or even somewhat joy-filled. I said that, on my absolutely awesomest days, I’d still rate them 7 out of 10 due to the fact that I experience pain and other forms of discomfort daily. Honestly though, I’m being optimistic when I do this. Even on my greatest days, after all, I hardly experience any noteworthy things. Like, I consider cooking or crafting to be enjoyable, but is my day really more than just about okay when I have done one of these?

This also signifies that my life could still very much be improved with just a few in my opinion relatively minor changes to my care. However, my staff see it differently, because they believe I can’t do a cooking or crafting activity when I’m in distress and, I believe, they also think I should be happy with just a walk and a dice game each day. Which, honestly, I’m not.

This makes me feel bad. In the words of my assigned staff at the intensive support home, when the staff follow my day schedule perfectly and I get all familiar staff, my day should be perfect. I replied, in my opinion truthfully, that no-one ever has a perfect day.

Now, to answer Sadje’s question about how I’d rate today: I’d probably rate it a 4 out of 10. I was rather distressed due to another incident yesterday. I also didn’t get to do anything other than go for two walks and play a game of Yatzy. I did, however, manage to do some reading and, as you can see, am writing this blog post. This signifies that, despite my distress, I’m still relatively able to function. My days could still be a lot worse. Besides, I had a cup of green tea in the evening. Oh wait, there I was being cynical, because green tea has become my symbol for how I actually feel about my life: when a cup of green tea is the highlight of my day or even week, that’s rather odd.

“One Chance!” Still Haunts Me…

Posted on by Astrid

Today, I’m feeling like writing but am uninspired, so I’ve been checking out a ton of writing prompts and the like. I’ve been fiddling with various notetaking apps too so that I can finally write snippets without them needing to be finished right away. I know I could do WordPress drafts, but I for whatever reason don’t like that. I’m now trying out Google Keep.

One of the writing prompt series was Halloween-themed and the question was about my most recent nightmare. I can’t remember and, thankfully, I rarely get vivid nightmares anymore. I do get snippets of conversations that replay in my dreams. “One chance!” yells the staff trying to force me to accept her new colleague. Those two words haunt me. I have had this experience before.

I recently learned that PTSD nightmares do not necessarily involve the details of your trauma. I don’t know whether the Redditor who said this, based this idea on the DSM, as I’m fairly certain that in the criteria for PTSD, nightmares do need to be trauma-specific except in young children. However, even just reading that someone else experienced vivid dreams that aren’t necessarily connected directly to their trauma, feels validating.

When I was living on my own, I experienced extremely vivid dreams almost nightly and, even when those dreams weren’t directly connected to my trauma, they were disturbing nonetheless.

In a somewhat similar fashion, the staff’s comment haunting me, in itself, might sound rather innoceous. I mean, I know that it doesn’t necessarily take physical or sexual abuse for someone to be traumatized (again, contrary to what the DSM says), but if this comment were a one-off experience rather than a symptom of the rather traumatizing power dynamics involved in institutional care settings, it wouldn’t have stuck with me. Or it might have, but it wouldn’t have had the negative connotation it has now.

There’s a reason secondary triggers are a thing. I often feel shame about the numbers of triggers I have. Usually though, when the context isn’t in itself distressing, I’m able to point out that something is a trigger for me and move on.

Not with this one, but then again it was actually a boundary that was crossed. If this had happened with three people who aren’t professionally related, it’d have been considered a form of harassment. I still struggle with this concept: that what is considered “normal” in a care setting, would be considered a violation anywhere else.

Quality of Care

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Today, I filled out a survey by the Dutch disabled people’s lobby group Ieder(in) on the quality of my care and its impact on my quality of life. I filled out the same questionnaire in 2023, a month or so before moving to my current home. Back then, I rated my quality of care 2 out of 10 and ticked almost every box on incidents I’d been involved in (as a target).

Today, I could think of only one incident box to tick: incidents due to lack of oversight, such as elopement. I mean, I myself have been aggressive towards staff, but that’s not what was meant. I also rated my quality of care 5 out of 10. That’s still not good enough, but it’s a lot better than it was back at the intensive support home. As my wife jokingly said, maybe in two years I’ll rate it 8 out of 10.

That’s not even entirely impossible, because as I explained in the field for additional comments, the bureaucratic framework for better care exists. By this I mean that I have a budget for one-on-one care that’s sufficient and that on most days, the home isn’t too short-staffed to provide me most of the care I need. What still makes me judge my quality of care as insufficient, is the fact that the way my care is organized in practice, doesn’t work for me.

There was a question about whether you have familiar staff or not. Back in 2023, I think I answered that I almost always had unfamiliar staff. Now I can’t remember which box I checked, but I did put into the comment boxes that the team including so-called regular temp workers is so large and new staff are oriented so chaotically that I essentially deal with a lot of near-strangers.

Speaking of which, my support coordinator thankfully agreed to another chance at orienting the new staff I mentioned on Saturday. Today, she attended my evening activity and we just chatted in order to get to know one another. I still feel some discomfort around letting her be oriented to my morning routine tomorrow, but agreed to it anyway. The fact that the staff even gave me a choice, shows improvement.

I must say I’m less willing to accept awful care now than I was two years ago. After all, let’s face it, almost no-one in the outside world accepts a random stranger into their house who refuses to leave and demands to do personal care tasks for them. I was forced to do exactly that until a year ago (and on Thursday, but thankfully my support coordinator changed that). In that sense, I wish there were a question on the survey asking me how my care compares to two years ago. I mean, in early 2023 I wrote a pretty cynical post about a day with optimal care. I reread it just now, thinking I’d claimed my care was actually optimal back then. I fully intended to contrast my revised idea of what constitutes “optimal care” now with my screwed view back then. Thankfully, my perception wasn’t as screwed in 2023 as I thought it was. In fact, I said pretty much the exact same thing I said on the questionnaire today: the framework is okay, but the practical reality isn’t. I do feel my reality is better though than it was then.

#WeekendCoffeeShare (November 1, 2025)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone on this first day of November. I’m not struggling as badly with memories of my admission to the psych ward (November 2, 2007) as I was in previous years. However, I’m struggling nonetheless.

Today, I’m joining #WeekendCoffeeShare. It’s been a while. I just had my last cup of coffee for the day and will probably take a break from writing this post for my 8PM soft drink and meds. Let’s have a drink and let’s catch up.

If we were having coffee, first I’d talk about the weather. It’s been a mixed bag but mostly rainy with daytime highs around 13°C. I didn’t do a lot of walking, but still managed to meet my movement goal each day this week. Unfortunately, it seems that my Apple Watch doesn’t care that I paused my activity rings while sick with probable COVID during the second half of September, as my streak is now down to 33 days.

If we were having coffee, then I’d moan about the fact that the care home is chronically short-staffed. There is, fortunately, a new staff here who started orienting a few weeks ago. She started her orientation on my side of the home on Tuesday. That day, I tried to make smalltalk with her, knowing that she’d be oriented to my activity the next day, but she hardly said a word. The next day, indeed, she was oriented to my activity. This went okay’ish, in the sense that I accepted her for the whole two-hour time slot and together with the staff doing the orienting, explained several activities. However, once again my attempt at getting acquainted with her didn’t get a response. The staff complimented me on how well I’d done. I told her she’d probably use that against me. I was right.

In the evening, the staff said she’d be orienting the new one to my morning routine the next day. Having hardly spoken with the new staff, I wasn’t comfortable with being naked around her yet, but the staff didn’t accept this. She claimed I hadn’t accepted the new staff in the afternoon either and just don’t want to meet new people and screamed that soon there’d be no-one left. I tried to explain my point of view, with the help of another staff, but to no avail.

On Thursday indeed the staff tried to force me to accept the new one for her orientation. She yelled that I had one chance and if I refused the new one now, she’d be considered as having had her orientation to me. This, I consider horribly unfair, as with the other clients, new staff get multiple orientations. But it’s in my rules, the same rules about no completely unfamiliar staff. I was originally told that the reason for the rules is simply money, ie. the fact that regular temp workers are not given an orientation period so I’m lucky to get one chance with them. I understand this, but I don’t think it should apply to staff who do get an orientation period. And for what it’s worth, I never said I needed temp workers to be oriented to me, but staff need to know these workers are still strangers to me and aren’t as familiar as the staff who’ve been working here for years. No rules can explain this, it’s about empathy. And I’m pretty sure the staff telling me off about refusing the new one, doesn’t have much of that for us clients.

If we were having coffee, I’d also moan about the fact that I now have no assigned staff at all. Like I said a while ago, the student one left for the intensive support home a month ago. The next one doesn’t want to work with me for now due to me having hurt her feelings. And yesterday I found out that the third one is off sick. I E-mailed the support coordinator asking her that, if I need to have another assigned staff, it won’t be the staff who I mentioned above. Don’t get me wrong, she’s fun-loving and great with activities, but she doesn’t know me behind the rules.

If we were having coffee, I’d try to end on a positive note. Yesterday, like six weeks ago, I joined the dance party at the institution townhouse. This time, I decided that I could deal with there not being a staff member for me and to just ask a volunteer if I needed help. One of the reasons was the fact that there were only two staff who are authorized to give meds at the home during the dance and I didn’t feel like I could ask one of them to accompany me, yet the other staff haven’t been oriented to me yet. I considered asking that one of the temp workers accompany me, but, for reasons that you’ll understand if you’ve read this far, felt this would be used against me. The dance was fun.

Finally, one more slightly positive note: we had general elections here in the Netherlands on Wednesday and, thankfully, Democrats 66 (D66) won. This isn’t the party I voted for, but it’s much better than the far-right Party for Freedom, which came out second. D66 is the most progressive, queer-supportive party out there. The reason I didn’t vote for them is the fact that healthcare and social security matter even more to me and the fact that D66 would likely need an economically right-wing party on the government too. However, unless Rob Jetten (D66’s leader) is a total hypocrite and cooperating with the far-right JA21 in favor of the left-wing GroenLinks-PvdA, things will be okay’ish in this respect. In any case, I’m looking forward to the first openly gay prime minister.

October 2025 In My Kitchen

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. This past month has been quite stressful. I have been struggling to get some meaningful activities in, of which cooking is one. I had hoped that cooking would be a more regularly-returning activity, but then again I’ve been hoping this for a year already… I doubt it’s ever going to happen…

I cooked two meals during October. The first, a chicken stew, I cooked for myself as well as my fellow clients. I followed the recipe, which instructed me to let the stew simmer for 10-15 minutes. That, my wife said, is not nearly long enough for a stew. She was in fact surprised that I’d included zucchini, as, if that’s simmered as long as a stew should simmer, would be pretty soggy. I do agree with her: the veg was too crunchy for a stew and too soggy for a stir-fry. My fellow residents liked it though.

The other meal, I cooked for just myself and my staff. I, after all, wanted to make a gnocchi dish. Gnocchi can be both cooked and fried, but my wife said it tastes better when fried yet then it’s pretty hard to do in large amounts without burning some gnocchi. Since the staff carelessly canceled meal delivery for five days starting yesterday because the freezer was full of meals, but I did not have enough meals in the freezer to get me through, I decided to prepare the gnocchi yesterday just for myself and my staff. The recipe was vegetarian and included lentils. I don’t care for those so decided to leave those out and use minced meat instead. The recipe included lots of vegetables, including bell pepper, zucchini, eggplant and onions. I’m not a huge fan of eggplant, but included it anyway and it turned out to be quite tasty.

When I ran this picture through Be My Eyes, it recognized the gnocchi as such. I hadn’t expected this.

In addition to cooking these two meals, I did bake a cake once. It was a pretty spontaneous decision to bake the cake. Unfortunately, we didn’t have eggs at the time, so we had to go to another home to get one. This and some other things led to me experiencing mild distress. Unfortunately, the staff who baked the cake with me interpreted this as the activity not having been a success. This made me feel rather off, as it gave me the impression that I’m only allowed to do activities in which I don’t experience distress. The cake was from a store-bought mixture and it wasn’t as good as the Biscoff blondies I’d baked last month, but it was still delicious.

Finally, I made a few smoothies and a bowl of overnight oats. No pictures of these, but to the oats, I added apple, cinnamon, cardamom and clove. That was really good!

Linking this post up with Sherry’s In My Kitchen.

No Reason for Alarm, Apparently #SoCS

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I’m pretty frustrated right now. This is in part related to the usual struggles with my day schedule, ie. the fact that the only thing that’s clear about it is when I have support and when I’m supposed to be by myself. I’ve explained a zillion times that I need my activities to be more structured but the staff keep saying I can’t do any meaningful activities when I’m in distress. This may be partly true, in that polymer clay, baking and cooking are harder for me to do when I’m in distress, but when there’s no clarity about which activities I’ll do, the sheer magnitude of the list I have to choose from, overwhelms me before I can even decide whether I’m in good enough a mental state to do such an activity.

Another thing that’s been bothering me, are my physical symptoms. I’ve had horrible tremors for a few years already, but over the past year or so they’ve steadily gotten worse. My institution’s physician tells me to distract myself when it happens because it’s probably in part stress-related. However, I can barely operate my phone or computer when my hands are trembling and all the activities that I can do on my own that would at least in theory distract me, involve my iPhone or computer.

Yessterday, the tremors were so distressing and also my leg was in a constant state of tension. The tremors mainly affect my right side, while the muscle tension was on my left side. I have mild cerebral palsy affecting mainly my left side, so it’s kind of understandable that I’d experience spasming in that leg. However, there’s no known explanation for the tremors. Yes, they could be psychosomatic, but they could also be due to medication (one of my various psychiatric medications), some kind of long-term effect of my cerebral palsy, or any combination of these.

Knowing that my doctor doesn’t see a reason for alarm, is somewhat comforting. At least there’s no reason for me to believe I have a neurodegenerative disease. That doesn’t mean the thought doesn’t creep up on me at times though. However, even when I am able to realize that I’m not suffering from Parkinson’s (not that my tremors are at all similar to those someone with that disease would suffer from), the tremors are still debilitating.

On Monday, the staff are going to ask my GP’s nurse practitioner about the symptoms yet again. My intellectual disability physician tells me to distract myself, apparently believing my symptoms are psychosomatic. I’m pretty sure the nurse practitioner is going to say the same. However, if only those telling me my symptoms are all in my head and due to stress, could help me lessen that stress!

This post was written for #SoCS, for which the prompt today is “alarm”.

Disabled Ace Day

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I once again haven’t been active on the blog much. I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately, mostly true crime. Today though, I decided to check out the podcast The Ace Couple. In their most recent episode, which came out today and which I’m currently listening to, the podcast hosts said that it’s disabled ace day today. Ace, for those not aware, is short for “asexual”.

Like I shared when writing my post for coming out day, I’m for the most part asexual. I’m still figuring out where exactly I fit on the asexual spectrum. For those who don’t know, since sexuality isn’t an all-or-nothing thing, asexuality is a spectrum describing anyone who experiences significantly less sexual attraction to other people compared to the general population. People who are not asexual, are commonly called allosexual (“allo” being Greek for “other”). This also clarifies that people on the asexual spectrum, even people who are altogether ace, may experience sexual desire and pleasure.

I do not claim to be an authority on asexuality. Had I been able to be open about my queerness all this time, I might’ve been able to gather more information without feeling guilty. Like I said, I’m still figuring things out.

This is also where disability comes in. Commonly, it’s thought that disabled people, particularly those with intellectual or developmental disabilities, don’t experience the same sexual feelings as non-disabled people do. This is simply not true, although disabled people are more often taught to suppress our sexual feelings. After all, particularly those with intellectual and developmental disabilities are too often seen as “children in adult bodies”. I myself have used these analogies when describing emotional development. Because it finally enabled me to get sort of okay care, this analogy appeals to me even though it’s inherently ableist.

When a disabled person identifies as asexual or somewhere on the ace spectrum, it is then too easily thought that this is because of the way the person was raised or educated. This is the counterstereotype I so often used to talk about in my early days on WordPress (oh my, I need to bring some of those old posts back): if we want to defeat the idea that disabled people can’t have sex, asexual disabled people could be seen as harming the cause, similarly to how I’m seen as harming the cause for community-based support by living in an institution. In reality though, prejudice and oppression are systemic, not individual. Besides, it’s not our job as marginalized people to fit ourselves into society’s neat boxes, whether these are stereotypes or counterstereotypes or other ways of telling us who we are and how we should live our lives.

This doesn’t mean I’m not influenced by prejudice. Regularly, I think I’m too disabled for a relationship and that’s why I’m ace. I’m pretty sure that’s not true, as I do have many years of being in a relationship with my wife before either of us clarified our authentic needs and wants to the other. I remember writing a post back in 2008, which I’m not going to bring back here (don’t worry, wife!), in which I described not knowing whether I was actually attracted to her and thinking I certainly wasn’t interested in sex. If that doesn’t tell me I’m ace, what does?

The more I write, the more memories confirming that I’m indeed asexual, come to mind. I was quite repulsed as a teen, purposefully skipping the biology chapter on reproduction and refusing to read the sex ed material that my parents brought me at around age nine. Then again, I’m pretty sure my refusing to read it was because I hated reading Braille at the time and my parents made quite a big deal of me reading this book.

However, what if my asexuality is in fact related to my being multiply-disabled, including autistic? Does that mean I’m doing the disabled or autistic communities a disservice? I don’t think so, because like I said before there’s no value in dictating who I am. Besides, as someone who lived for twenty years not knowing she’s autistic and yet who was autistic all along, chances are we’ll never know for sure.

I’m joining in with #WWWhimsy.

Care Needs

Posted on by Astrid

Last year, when I was first feeling like I was falling apart at my current care home, I wrote a list of my “needs” and E-mailed it to my assigned staff and support coordinator. I heavily watered down my wishes, thinking a need isn’t the same as a want and whatever comes out of a discussion of my needs, should be working for everybody involved, not just me. For example, I asked for more clarity on what activities I’d be doing each day and offered to use my whiteboard, but also said staff could just ask me what I thought I’d be doing and help me find a suitable activity; this last one was then put into my day schedule, ie. “Staff upon leaving asks Astrid what she’s going to do next”. Needless to say, this didn’t work for me, being autistic, at all, as it leaves the same amount of unstructured chaos as the old wording, which was simply that I had “alone time”, did.

Now, more than a year later and with the Center for Consultation and Expertise involved to help me and my staff improve my quality of life, I’ve written another list, but this time, it doesn’t offer solutions for my unmet needs; rather, it’s simply a list of problems I encounter at this home. In a way, I feel that being solution-focused should be more constructive, but then again this time I have the consultant to think up possible solutions to come closer to meeting my needs.

This post was written for the Six Sentence Story linky, for which the prompt this week is “need”.

Am I a Monster?

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I’ve been struggling really badly once again. Nearly three weeks ago, I had an outburst that caused the second staff so far at this home to request to the team manager that she not be required to support me for a while. This staff used to be one of my three assigned staff. Another was a student and has since left this home to continue her education at the intensive support home I used to live at. The third one is still my assigned staff, but she only works a day or two a week.

With the staff who previously requested to not support me for a while, I’ve since talked things over, though she still refuses to be honest about the thing that got me to be angry with her, ie. her using literally every opportunity to assign me a temp worker. Because of this, I’ve felt like I had to apologize for my anger (which I see is necessary) but she wouldn’t have to apologize for or explain her behavior that upset me. With the current staff, I don’t have this issue, but I do mistrust her for having pretended to have talked it over then decided she couldn’t handle it anymore a few days later.

I realize part of the problem is my attachment anxiety. As a result of this, I mistrust people who try to come close and be there for me, because I know that if they truly knew me, they’d reject me. Which is, of course, true in theory at least: no-one in life is there for anyone else unconditionally. And, given that I sometimes don’t know who I truly am, I worry that I’ll be worse than even I can imagine if I let my guard down.

Of course, it’s also a self-fulfilling prophecy, as you can see from the fact that two staff in the past year have already rejected me. The current one even claimed she wouldn’t.

Even if I’m in the midst of severe self-doubt, I am (almost) certain that I won’t become physically violent if I let my guard down. The problem is that words hurt too, and I can unfortunately say quite nasty things even without meaning them. I mean, there’s been one instance, back at the intensive support home, when I hurt someone’s feelings with a literal personal attack: I said that it was her fault that she got hurt during a fellow client’s outburst. This staff never requested to not support me anymore. With the two who so far did here, my comments weren’t intended as they came across and, while they could literally be seen as hurtful, I didn’t mean them personally and had no bad intentions whatsoever.

I struggle intensely with this knowledge, that I don’t intend to hurt people but that I do it nonetheless. I also struggle to figure out a way to stop this. After all, they are not insults that caused these staff to reject me (though I called them both bad names too). If they were the insults, it’d be doable to erase these from my vocabulary, as I’ve mostly successfully done with certain other words. However, like I said, they were their interpretations of my comments about how they don’t know me that hurt their feelings. This is harder for me to process, as it means being aware of every possible interpretation of something I literally say. This is quite hard for me as an autistic person with virtually no cognitive empathy.

Besides, as I now realize, I probably have low emotional empathy too, as I wasn’t able to predict that the staff was just going through the motions when I thought we’d talked things over. She in fact supported me through an intense movement therapy session and I didn’t pick on her struggling at all. This makes me feel even worse than the fact that I didn’t realize at the time that my words were hurtful.

This low emotional empathy realization makes me feel like I’m a monster. Aren’t autistics supposed to have high emotional empathy? Aren’t psychopaths and narcissists the ones with low emotional empahty? I mentioned possibly being a narcissist to my wife and she denied I am. Then again, aren’t narcissists masters at making their loved ones believe they are the victim? Is all this my attachment anxiety talking, or is there some truth to the idea that I don’t deserve to be supported?

Coming Out Day 2025

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. It’s once again been more than a week since I last touched the blog. I keep telling myself that I should write only to be distracted by other things once I feel able to write. I’m struggling badly, but I know my blog helps me feel connected to the world too. I originally intended to look at today’s prompt for #SoCS or to write a post for #WeekendCoffeeShare. Then my best friend pointed out that it’s coming out day today.

Though I was open about being queer when I first started writing online in 2002 and I was advocating for trans rights on my first blog on WP, I haven’t been very clear about my identity over the past fifteen years or so. Part of the reason is the fact that I’m still figuring things out even now that I’m 39. Is that even possible? Part of the reason though is also fear. I know some of my regular readers are Christians and I don’t want to elicit negativity from them. Then again, is having to deny part of myself in order to please others, actually a wise choice? I remember first starting this blog with the intention of writing from the heart and now I’m not doing that.

So, let’s get into it. With respect to sexuality, I’m mostly asexual but have experienced attraction to women. When I was a teen, I met a girl and felt the butterflies in my stomach, but I never met her again and honestly am to this day clueless as to whether my attraction to her was sexual. I’ve had other fleeting crushes but nothing that indicated I felt like I wanted to be intimate with anyone.

My partner and I are more best friends than lovers and neither of us ever felt any attraction to the other one. In fact, I remember letting her wait for four months when she disclosed she had a crush on me. A lot of our earlier “love” was based on societal expectations. Now that we’re clear about our queer identities, we’ve also decided we will no longer do anything we don’t feel comfortable with. That’s one reason we considered divorcing.

I knew I was asexual for many years, but felt like hiding it because of societal expectations too. Who cares about labels, I sometimes thought. Who’s going to check whether my partner and I have sex? Obviously, no-one is, but it often did feel like I was denying part of myself when I was pretending to be in a sexual relationship. In truth, I’m probably never going to be in a sexual relationship and that’s fine by me. Being emotionally very vulnerable, I sometimes even feel that I can’t maintain the expectations of a friendship. That’s probably why my wife is my only friend. I sometimes try to expand my circle of connections, but it’s really hard.

I do consider myself to be on the aromantic spectrum too, though that’s more complicated than the asexual part. I, after all, did and to an extent still do enjoy giving my wife heart-shaped polymer clay creations. It makes her feel uncomfortable, so I don’t do it anymore.

I still sometimes consider myself a lesbian based on the attraction I can experience. Because one of my fleeting crushes in high school was on a boy, I have considered that I might be bisexual or pansexual, but I’m heavily lesbian-leaning if that’s the case.

With respect to gender identity, I’m cis but somewhat gender non-conforming. I strongly identify with being a woman, which is clear from the fact that most of my online nicknames were/are gendered. I however don’t know how much of this is societal expectations once again and I do find my gender expression isn’t all that feminine. Honestly, in this case, I’ve stopped caring about labels, but then again I realize that’s a privilege too as I’ve learned to deal with the dysphoria I do experience. For example, I don’t have to worry whether my discomfort with my cycle is due to sensory issues, feeling too vulnerable or is actually related to my gender, as I take the birth control shot so no longer menstruate.

All this being said, being queer isn’t a strong part of my identity, but it is a part of it. I am glad I’m able to be open about it now, if for no other reason, then because it felt like I was constantly jumping through hoops trying to avoid being too open about the realities of my marriage.