In continued news of so-subtle-I-probably-imagine-it, I sometimes feel like it takes more effort – and possible more effort to succeed – to recollect some old memory details. Not generally, not in a scary sense. But like things which were habitually kept in mind happened longer ago than they did. On a possibly related note, I look at things I wrote in the past and I see spelling mistakes, noticing them. Yesternight had some moments when well-known sights and experiences felt new, like I saw details I had not noticed before. Taken together, I suspect that if this is not just confirmation bias, it is the indication of neural and mental turnover, that my system in some ways is doing a fresh start. If so, that calls for me to take good care of myself and raise/guide myself well through this developmental stage, to lay groundwork properly. Taking omega-3, zink, B12 and iron supplements, among others. Attempting to sleep better – I suppose I do, I sleep deep enough and wake earlier than often in the past.

Things like being cold and shivering, but not sick, are more related to my dieting, which also likely increases turnover, as well as hopefully garbage collection via autophagy. Glad to have shifted to a 99% vegetarian diet, I feel better about incorporating less animal tissue derived building blocks into my new body growth.

Another thing, less worksafe. The virtual loss of erections. Even thinking of sexy things, or when feeling warm and safe (this too could produce a non-sexual but physical transient tumescent response in me, before), I hardly grow stiff. I can by making an effort, combining touch and fantasy, generally needing to first touch my breasts. Doing that feels different too, a cloudy and eye-opening kind of sensation in-between emotion and sensation. Light touch, too, not presently feeling I want rough touch there, though I probably will come to. But all those things aside, I am happier than I expected over the non-erections, or weakened erections, in both sexual and non-sexual contexts. It’s like the possibility of tumescence was always there fluctuating weakly but significantly on the lower range of some scale, pulling at attention, making me feel that area of my body somehow not being under my control, and restricting movement and sensation, being both vulnerable and obtrusive. Sensitivity there to cold or touch has changed, growing fuzzier, I can often think easier of just having hips and legs and belly area and crotch, and feeling more anchored and at peace, again, somehow, both in sexual and non-sexual mindsets. Have not yet been with a lover after starting HRT, and am curious on what it will be like.

I keep talking about sex stuff. That’s not to indicate that is so important, or that what I am doing is about it. It is however one of the earliest clearly real changes, so it warrants my documentation. More to the point, I am continuing to conclude that the everyday experience of human beings – being emotional and social creatures in context and identity – IS something where subliminal (in the general sense of the word, below some cutoff) sexual functionalities and responses actually do affect our feelings and actions and anchorings. Freudianism is a pot of garbage in most ways, but our complex selves are woven out of the stuff of our bodies like knitted dolls out of yarn, and I don’t think those things are irrelevant on a broader scale to how the rest of us functions. Even soft and airy and cerebral and complexly interlinked and intersectional realities still depend on some simpler body processes, and in affecting some of those, I open up the possibility of gross or subtle tone and texture changes also in my more complex selves…

Dreamt strongly last moments of this night, remembering unusually clearly. I was living somewhere vaguely similar to where I did before. I was myself, as a transitioning person, and it was sort of at this point in my life. I met some gang of youths much like those I saw yesternight before sleep in my police procedural & whiskey wind-down, as I was going out, and they indicated after some anger towards me for some slight that they had/would vandalize where I lived. I accepted and held that worry. Then I was on a bus, and getting off it, and there was also my estranged friend of a long time, A, wearing a nice brown/purple trench coat thing. On the bus ride I read a long set of multi-page linked articles/thinkpiece thing in one of my native country’s tabloids, which A had written – in the dream he may have been a journalist, and the writing, appropriately, was poetic but vague of content or conclusions – it was about either the Alt-Right or trolls or some intersection thereof. Meeting him on the bus stop was a chance to finally meet again, we hugged and I still could not tell whether he shuns me or not. But he was supposed to come with me and stay there, I guess before traveling onwards the next day? The youths were waiting inside the house but outside my door, and I was concerned but not scared; they had painted graffiti over some house decorations that were ugly anyway. A again did not really betray any emotion over any of those things. Then I woke and gradually concluded I had slept enough.

Woke to take meds and vitamins and fluid. Checking emails and writing updates and launching scripts from my bed. Then for replacing shower bandages (mole removal surgeries), washing hair, donning makeup and going to work.