CW: weight issues.

The emotion has inertia, it stays, it continues, it grows and surges within me like snow piling up in the darkness.

There are people who meet loved ones every day, who experience touch on a daily basis, confirmations in the physical space. This feels like some impossible dream, a mirage. How long ago since I was anywhere near it? Thirteen years, I think.

I believed I couldn’t have it, didn’t want it. I felt certain that only very very few rare people would ever be able to love someone as queer as me (that is, someone who wasn’t comfortable with their assigned gender), and that I could only feel comfortable with very very few people. I assumed long-distance would only ever be the option because the chance of meeting someone like that who additionally happened to be near me, that was exceedingly unlikely. I mourned and made peace with this, and assumed it wasn’t something I could hope for.

More to the point, I believed I was so introvert that being near someone on a daily basis could never work. Since I needed so much time alone, unpredictably, to manage dysphoria, I assumed that even fewer people would feel comfortable in any relationship with me, and that those would be the ones who similarly were like cats, generally reclusive and not predictably present. So in some sense I mourned the above less because I thought I wouldn’t be able to handle it anyway.

In the relationship I started about as I began transition, I sensed when we were together that somehow, I could feel safe with some particular people around without needing to escape as much to time alone. The part of my introversion which was recovering from baseline misgendering miasma of being closeted faded, and I realized it a possibility, yet still hindered by lack of other people. As I transition further and meet more people, I don’t feel as alien any longer to such a large fraction of those I meet – still the majority, but in Babylon a sizable majority can actually see and interact me as I am.

So the excuses are fading and the need is there and I feel envy and hunger and sorrow and self-sympathy and longing and cold, cold, wanting warmth.

Where do I take this? Tinder and therapy, presumably. And yet another need to lose that weight, because while I am pretty to many, I could be pretty to more, and the more people would give me a chance through some initial spark of interest, the more a chance to find people who want to be near me and cuddle and nurture me regularly. I’m cold. But I’m used to things not being easy, so I’ll manage. I’ll do my best, every moment of every day.