OBWe've got very little to show for today.
No game progress in any game. Not Stardew Valley, not Dreamlight Valley, not any grinding in Epic Battle Fantasy 5 or Final Fantasy VII, not doing anything in Chrono Trigger, not building anything in minecraft, having no win in League of Legends, negative LP progress on TFT...nothing to show for today.
We've been going back and forth on whether to stream tonight or not, and it looks like the final answer is going to be "no", in part because we're not really sure what we would stream. We don't have a strong drive. We should work on our story. Or if nothing else, work on the art for our new profile picture. Or if even that's too much, minecraft. Maybe even just playing tft. Anything.
Well we're not gonna do that.
We did do a reorganization of our discord servers we're in to be more neat/organized, but we didn't do the title fairy thing we wanted to do, nor have we typed out the things we think would be healthy to type out in our journal. (Today we did learn a funny/interesting fact tho: apparently the real-life journals we used to write? The ones where we never wrote anything important until the second, third, or even fourth page? ...Apparently, that thing we thought was just an us thing, is not just an us thing, and a bunch of people did it.)
And for that matter, we haven't actually copied that journal into a google doc.
Nor have we worked on any other story idea.
We did write down some things for the art project, and hey, after this blog, maybe we'll manage to squeeze in some work on it (I wouldn't count on it--in fact I'd explicitly bet against it), but we didn't actually work on it today.
Speaking of today, work was interesting, and we felt fairly competent at working. There's just one problem: we didn't work out at all. We felt like we were shutting down. We felt forced into eating a full meal because we were developing really bad hand tremors, as well as losing vision from lightheadedness. It sucked to give up on that. We didn't run (not that we're really doing running anyway--2 minutes is only 1/5th of a mile), we didn't work out, we did nothing physically.
Nor did we do anything hygiene-wise. No shower, no brushing teeth, we're letting ourselves rot and decay at an alarmingly fast rate.
All in all, not a lot to show for today, but not nothing.
That said, I suppose we DO have more time to talk about why we are so determined to live for at least a year longer.
Now, obviously: we intend to live forever.
There's never going to be enough time in our lives. So we would love to have an infinite amount of it.
The world might have certain parts of it actively trying to revert dozens (or even hundreds) of years' worth of progress, but OVERALL, it's still objectively true that the world becomes overall a better place to live over time. Comparing now to 50 years ago, I would always choose to live now rather than 50 years ago. And that is 90+% likely to be true 50 years from now. 50 years from now is over 90% likely to be a better time than right now is. So I want to be there for that better time. I never want to be gone when the world keeps making so many advancements and progress.
OBVIOUSLY, that's not actually scientifically possible. We can't actually live forever. We intend to! But realistically speaking, science simply isn't advanced enough to allow for that to happen. The closest we could ever get is becoming a ghost after death. (Which, granted, is near-guaranteed to happen. Our family isn't going to bury us under our preferred name of Brianna "Bree" Danielle Lewis. And since the people we know online won't know we're gone, that's not one but TWO compelling reasons for not moving on. Can't move on if not at rest/peace and being buried under the wrong name guarantees that; can't move on with lingering attachments and not having been able to say goodbye to online communities and let them know would be another. BUT I DIGRESS.)
We still feel it's worth striving to live forever, but when we inevitably don't, we're hoping to have lasted at least 80 years if nothing else. To live a long, full life that experienced as much of the world's progress as was humanly possible, to have shared as much of our ideas as we could, to have brought as much of the next generations up as possible, guiding and mentoring them as a voice with lifetimes' worth of experience.
That's not too unreasonable to ask. Genetically it should be possible, since my family on at least one side tends to live to their 90s or higher.
However, as much as we want to live forever, or at the very least live for a very long healthy happy time of 80+ years:
Realistically speaking, with our lifestyle and genetics, there's a very high chance we die before then.
We have an hour-long drive one-way to work every single work day, and this commute is largely on highways, including a highway that is one of the most dangerous in the state. We also often don't get nearly enough sleep. Combine these two, and all it'd take is one drifting-off-too-long instance for disaster to strike. It almost happened to us once before (January 2014), it could happen again literally any time we get behind the wheel which is twice daily per work day adding up to over 10 times per week we risk death.
It doesn't matter if you dodge the bullet 999/1000 times. It only takes one bullet landing to be lethal.
Same concept for driving. Every day, there is that risk. It only takes one manifestation of that risk to end my life for good. There would be precious little I could do to prevent it. One momentary lapse, one momentary blacking out, one momentary zoned out, where I drift too far off into dreamland, where I get too sleepy to keep active track of my, well...tracks, and BAM! A likely lethal crash.
I apologize for the morbidness of this, but this is, sadly, the grim truth. Every time I drive it has a chance to be the last time I do anything, because of where I am driving and how exhausted I get especially behind the wheel, alarmingly enough. (Yes we're trying to get the necessary amount of sleep, but even if we succeed, that doesn't guarantee a lack of exhaustion. The whole, "we can be tired with 4 hours or 14 or anywhere in-between" issue.)
So, there's a fairly high chance we die behind the wheel, or in the aftermath of such an event at the very least. We don't want to. We would never deliberately do so. Obviously, we want to live. We don't want to die. We don't want to crash. We want to live forever, or at least 80 years, so a car crash is not the way we want to go out. But being realistic: we are not gods. We are not reality warpers. We don't have infinite luck. We are not invincible. It only takes one unlucky day for us to die, it only takes one bad day for us to get killed. Not because we wanted it, but because of sheer happenstance being against us in the most disastrous way possible.
Is it an inevitability? Well, no. Most people spend their entire lives driving without dieing from it. Statistically speaking, it doesn't happen often. It happens to the smallest fraction of drivers. But I am at a higher risk of being one of said casualties thanks to the length of the commute, roads on the commute, and my mental cognitive functions while driving being inconsistent in dangerous ways.
So most won't die from a car crash--yet, it's still a genuine hazard for me.
Even if a car crash doesn't get me, what probably will is cancer. My family has a long, long history of cancer on both sides of the family pretty sure, and I have dozens of brown spots on my body. Yes, dozens. Most of them quite large, but with plenty of small ones too. I did a count once and I am fairly certain the number is above 40, putting me at basically the highest risk of getting skin cancer.
Cancers of various kinds run in the family, but I am young enough that I don't really get screened for cancer. While I get medical visits, those visits come only once every few months and are for things entirely unrelated to general health, so it's quite likely that if I got cancer, it wouldn't be diagnosed until it was too late.
I'm willing to bet between car crashes and cancer that one of the two is going to be what claims my life. Obviously, I will fight tooth and nail to prevent either from happening. We're not gonna let it happen. We're not gonna let ourselves die. We are going to fight to the bitter end, biting and swinging. We have zero plans to let this early demise manifest and every intention to manifest the world where we live forever (or at least for a very long time).
We strive for life, we push for life, we want to live and will fight to do so. But heroic willpower only goes so far to fight off instant killers or slow deaths. The truth is that no matter what our mind says, if we actually were to be stricken by one of those two, we wouldn't be able to survive indefinitely the way we promise we would. It sounds grim, it sounds glum, it sounds pessimistic and cynical, but it's a sad truth:
We are not immortal, no matter how much we see ourselves as being so. If we have something lethal happen to us, we will die from it.
So we have to try our utmost to avoid letting that happen.
In part because we've got such strong reasons to live.
Part of it is the aforementioned "the world is awesome" aspect--the world is awesome and while it certainly may not seem that way from the 2018-onwards era, objectively OVERALL it does, in fact, become a better place to live in. No matter how much the lowlifes of society try to regress it, progress HAS marched on, slowly, gradually, bit by bit becoming more dominant.
The human race as a whole is sick and tired of the white Christian cisgendered heterosexual patriarchy born from Imperialism + Colonialism dominating the world and whitewashing/erasing/etc. things that should never have been forgotten. I know it seems like the patriarchy is winning now with how much they have managed to roll back and revert--but they are fighting a battle I firmly believe they WILL lose.
I get the value in naysayers and doomsayers warning about just how bad the rollbacks to rights are--and they're not wrong. Without constant vigilance to bigotry, that hatred will take root and have a platform to take over. But I am not so hopeless/cynical/jaded as to think they have already won. No, they are a minority in society trying to pass themselves off as being the majority. The actual majority can, and will, win out in the end, as long as we are able to keep pushing forward bit by bit to make the progress the world has made.
I'm not going to pretend the risk isn't there. It is, it's very much real. If we're not careful, then bigotry WILL win and the world will become overall well and truly worse and worse. Nor am I really qualified to talk more in-depth about this. But I firmly believe that, overall, the world IS trying to change for the better. It's two steps forward, one step back, but we can do it.
And I want to be there not only to help, but see the results.
This is one reason to want to live. Just to experience the growth of the world, and to see the future unfold in the present to build a better world. I want to live to see that happen.
But there's more.
I want to live to get my ideas out into the world. The longer I live, the more time I have to do so.
I want to live to help as many people as I can in my life. The longer I live, the more people I help.
I want to live to have the best most enriched most fulfilling life possible for a transwoman, maybe even living to see (and test) medical breakthroughs in the field.
But in the more immediate future.
I want to live because the world does not yet as a whole know that I am a girl.
Everyone online does.
I have come out to everyone in real life and am living daily as a girl.
But the world as a whole doesn't know--those who know me online don't know me offline, and those who know me offline are, largely, not truly accepting of me being a girl. They love me, they tolerate me, but they don't truly accept me, understand me, respect me, etc. Not as a girl, at least.
I'm like 90+% sure my extended family has no idea that I am a girl. My grandmother sends gendered gifts to our family each Christmas. In spite of being out for over half a year last Christmas, I received the 'male' gift rather than the female gift. Which tells me that me being a girl was not conveyed to my extended family.
Fortunately, my younger sister's wedding is next year, and my extended family is invited.
Yes, I have other reasons for wanting to live until then.
My younger sister is family and I love her.
My younger sister is the only family member who has truly accepted me and respects me as a girl, helping me, aiding me, supporting me, every step of the way. Correctly naming me, etc. She has put in the time and effort to be everything family should be for a girl like me who had to come out.
The rest of my family, to varying degrees...ahhh, hasn't. I don't want to be too harsh on them because I love my family, but the best descriptor I have for most of my family (barring my younger sister) is, "I love them, but I don't really like them, and I expect this is probably mutual".
There is genuine love for my family, and I know they genuinely love me; the proof is in their actions in spite of their beliefs. But they are deeply flawed in their treatment of me, and I am a pretty lousy person who is high in upkeep even without being a girl. They have genuine reasons to not really want to think fondly of me, and that's aside from them not truly accepting that I am a girl.
So I don't want to be overly harsh on them. I love them, after all, and part of that love is not wanting to badmouth them. Still, it's a fact that they don't call me by my name consistently (my mother does it to me when my father isn't around and if she remembers to; my younger sister always does. But the rest, they do not); they don't call me by my name when I'm not around even if my father/brother aren't around (I've heard my mother and older sister use my deadname when they were alone), so like: they don't really see me as Bree.
Not really.
I don't want to hold it against them. I don't want to be overly harsh and criticize them too much. I'll say for the sake of clarity that I have talked to them about this, so it's not me airing out thoughts in my blog that I never did to them. I told them what the damage of refusing to use a name for me at all is (deliberately using a neutral term when you KNOW the preferred term is still misgendering--if you know someone is a she/her, deliberately using they/them is considered malicious misgendering, as an example), so it's not that they don't know. They do.
It's just that my younger sister is the only one who has done what someone should do for family coming out and actually listened to the requests, wishes, etc. of the family member coming out in full, rather than just in part. But this description sounds too harsh on them. I don't want to paint them in worse light than is true.
They do make some efforts. It's just that I've told them what efforts they should be making beyond those, and it's still only 'some', except from my younger sister who makes all the efforts. I don't want to hold it against my family, because they clearly love me and they did put at least some work in. Yet, it's factually true that it's not the amount of work they should put in, and also factually true that I told them this.
They are not in the dark about what I want, what I would prefer, etc. I have let them known. I have made my thoughts clear. I have tried my best to educate them, to inform them, to give them the resources necessary for them to understand. But I can't make them listen to me, I can't make them listen to my requests. And I can't blame them for not doing so.
After all, I have plenty of demands unrelated to my gender. (Largely from neurodivergencies like my autism, but that's beside the point.) I understand them seeing all of the demands and feeling it's unreasonable to live up to everything I ask of them.
They love me so they do what they feel is appropriate for that love. I can't realistically expect more, so I don't want to be harsh on them.
But my younger sister, she has already done what she should, and did accept me from the onset.
I want to pay that back by supporting her at her wedding, to be there for her as her family.
And there's more.
My extended family will be at the wedding. Not all of them. But not none of them. And some of them is all it takes. Some of them, seeing me there, as a girl, is all it takes. Me being a girl has not been conveyed to my extended family, pretty sure. (I mean since the wedding's not until next year, we have this Christmas to test my theory again, but I'm not optimistic at anything changing from last year.)
All it will take for them to see, and be forced to acknowledge, me as a girl...is for them to be there, and me to be there.
Since the wedding is next year, that means I need to live until next year at absolute minimum.
It's my desire to manifest this into reality.
I want to live forever so bad that I don't want to ever have the plug pulled from me. If I'm braindead and my heart has failed, I don't want them to cut life support on me. I don't care if there's no brain function; I don't care if my heart has stopped; I don't care if the doctors say there's a 0% chance that I will survive, that the doctors say I have died.
SOMEHOW, I would find a way to live, if given the medical assistance to do so. This is, sadly, likely never going to be relevant because whenever I do inevitably lose consciousness for the last time, the doctors won't have access to my will that I am stating now, they won't know that I have zero intention of letting them let me die. That I intend to find a way, no matter how clinically/medically impossible, to pull through the impossible situation and actually live.
The doctors will give up on me far before I do, and if my family is there, they'll likely let the doctors pull the plug on me--against my will, mind you. My will to live is so strong that even with no brain function, even with no heart beating, if I was kept medically going in spite of having no signs of life, I would find a way to eventually fight back to life. Flatlined heart/brain won't stop me.
The doctors will certainly believe that it will--that I would be dead dead, a corpse, a goner, that I was gone, the moment that there is both a lack of heart/brain function. But I know that if given sufficient time, I would be able to recover. All it'd take is them not pulling the plug on me.
My will to live is that strong.
Because I want to live forever.
And even if I don't live forever--
I need to live for that event, if nothing else.
The wedding needs to be something I attend.
After that, I'll still have plenty of reasons to live, mind you.
But that is the most pressing.
I need people to know that I am a girl.
I need to live.
I just have to.
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