Time: 9:51
Topic: Health, work, friends, media
Warnings: Discussion of sexual violence.
Last time I posted a diary entry here I'd just gotten a job after a pretty tough job search. Now that I'm properly into it, I'm happy with what I'm doing. I was hoping for different things out of college. I wanted to go straight into more academia and keep learning since that's where my passions lie. But instead I went straight into job searching. It was more important to get away from my family and get my own place than it was to immediately move forward.
In some ways I feel sad about that. I have a deep passion for my academic work and I'd like to keep pushing forward with it. But I don't feel unhappy with my life as it is right now in terms of career choices. I am working to live rather than living to work. I'd prefer to be doing the latter. But for now just living instead of feeling miserable is a great change in itself so I have to be satisfied with that.
I was able to finally start testosterone hrt and it's been amazing. I'm 6 weeks into it, though sadly I had an allergic reaction to the carrier oil. Would be 7 weeks if not for that. Since moving out to my own place and starting T I've had so much more energy. It's crazy but I think a large portion of my health issues- all that fatigue I struggled with for so long- ended up disappearing once I got on. I can dance again and I can live a normal social life where I go out multiple times in one day. I don't have to spend hours recovering from a simple trip to the grocery store.
There's a part of me that feels upset it took this long to get hormones because it means that the suffering I endured was pointless. I thought for so long my fatigue didn't have a cause. But it was my dysphoria. Now that I've moved out my family have commented on how much happier I am, how light things seem. They could have had this lightness all the time, had they just listened to me about my own needs. Had they put aside religion for a moment.
It's been very good overall. I'm happier than I've been in many years. But I have cut off my friend group recently which has been weighing on me a lot. I was friends with my group since 2021. I genuinely loved them and they helped me through some of my worst times. But I felt that we just weren't compatible as friends anymore. I couldn't be honest about who I am and what I like.
When I joined the friend group I knew they had certain boundaries around friends and media. They weren't comfortable with having friends into problematic media or media that handled sexual violence in certain ways. And at first I was of a similar opinion, but then I started drifting a bit now that I've been getting back into BL games. To put it very bluntly: if I'd been publicly into Nitro+Chiral when we met in 2021, they would have blocked me instead of adding me on Discord.
I didn't and don't want to dismiss my friends' feelings. It is normal to have boundaries around media and the kind of people you allow in your circle based on that. I think we just have differing opinions at this point. To me Nitro+Chiral has produced games that are trying to "have it both ways" when it comes to depictions of sexual violence. They both want to show it as traumatizing and create an erotic response from it. Most of Mink's major H scenes in DMMD are rape scenes portrayed with the same tone as BDSM or rough sex... but they also want to acknowledge seriously issues like dissociation, PTSD, and the severe harm long term sexual trauma can cause. Despite this issue, I think ultimately their games are valuable and have potential to provide catharsis or new perspective to readers. But other people are going to have different analysis, comfort levels, and generalized opinions on media. And ours became irreconcilable after a point. It's not just Nitro+Chiral that's subject to this, but it's felt like the breaking point.
I haven't spoken to them since May. I miss them a lot and I've felt a deep sense of loss, especially as I haven't found the right chance for a new friend group yet. And it feels weird to be like "yes, I broke things off with my friends of 3 years because of BL." But it's not that. It's more about how we see the world, media, and our experiences and opinions on how violence is depicted in media.
At first I was just kind of growing distant to determine if I wanted to end it fully. But I made the decision recently and that's been tough. I feel genuinely very depressed as it's always been hard for me to make friends. This is the first one I've chosen to end myself. And I feel it's the right decision, but it still is disappointing and lonely.