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#this is ok to rb. u can tag w drugs if u need to.
againstme · 3 months
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idk man i’m just thinking about against me! and transness, especially cause we’re coming up on ten fucking years of transgender dysphoria blues, on the 21st.
lyrics have been swimming in my head lately.
“what god doesnt give to you, you’ve got to go and get for yourself.”
“if i could’ve chosen, i would’ve been born a woman. my mother once told me she would’ve named me laura. i’d grow up to be strong and beautiful like her.”
“you wouldn’t think something like gender identity would complicate something like asking for some company.”
“she spent the last few years of her life running from the boy she used to be.”
“standing naked in front of that hotel bathroom mirror, in her dysphoria’s reflection, she still saw her mother’s son.”
“agitated states of amazement, never quite the woman that she wanted to be.”
“you want them to see you like they see every other girl, they just see a faggot, they hold their breath not to catch the sick.”
“chipped nail polish and a barbed wire dress. is your mother proud of your eyelashes? silicone chest, and collagen lips. how would you even recognize me?”
“no more troubled sleep, there’s a brave new world that’s raging inside of me.”
“all my life, wishing i was one of them. there will always be a difference between me and you.”
“what’s the best end you can hope for? pity fucks and table scraps?”
“all the young graves filled, don’t the best all burn out so bright and so fast?”
“sometimes at night, i pray to wake a different person in a different place.”
“i don’t want to hang around the graveyard, waiting for something dead to come back. i know you think you’ve got one up on me, that you can see something i can’t.”
“i wanna be so real, you can see the difference.”
“dig up your bones, early graves are not homes.”
“come on, shape shift with me! what’ve you got to lose? fuck it!”
“confessing childhood secrets of dressing up in women’s clothes, compulsions you never knew the reasons to.”
“i’m sick of feeling like i’m losing my mind. sick of doing the same things most nights after night. sick of self loathing and self absorption, self destructive narcissism.”
some of these are directly referencing transness, some just alluding to it. some are just ones that i relate to as i’ve grown up struggling with my gender and sexuality and accepting my own transness and dealing with self harm and self destruction and relying too much on drugs.
finding myself buying baggies of coke and just stuffing them in my wallet while i walked downtown, feeling this immense guilt at the bottom of my stomach for essentially just wasting 25 dollars on a drug that wasn’t doing much for me besides making me feel like i was feeling something different than what my life was. getting scared shitless while in the line at the convenience store after picking up, seeing cops come into the store, and the small tied up bag filled with what was more baby powder than coke in my back pocket felt like the the heaviest and most obvious thing in the world.
and then i’d find myself on calls with my friends, with my camera turned off or pointing at the ceiling, suddenly muting my mic holding a cut up piece of a straw in my teeth as i crushed shit up with my library card from a city i wasn’t planning on living in again. just having them talk while i was racking baby lines, tilting my head back and rubbing it on my gums after. i was sniffling all the time. sometimes my nose would bleed when i would wake up. and i wasn’t even really feeling much; i didn’t know at the time that this would be because of having adhd and just basically spending money on overpriced shit that was just like taking an adderall, but it was a drug in front of me, that gave me the idea or the false hope of running away from my life during the short lived high.
“before you know it, here i am again, fucking 6 o’clock in the morning, rolled up dollar bill in my hand.”
“what the fuck are you cutting this with, anyway?”
“how low can you go before you can’t turn around?”
i don’t think that when i was 14 and getting into against me! that i would ever actually get to a point of fully relating to those lyrics. of running away from such a huge part of yourself or your problems, trying to fill the void with drugs that you’d plow through so quickly, faster than you thought you would every time.
the thing is, was that at this point, i had already started my transition. i was already “passing.” but i never got to the root of it. sure, i’m trans, but who am i? and i didn’t know how to answer that question. so i just pushed it away, pushed it under the rug.
“you can pray all night and day, but you’ll still wake up the same person in the same fucking place.”
against me! has been there for me for ten years. throughout so many transformations of myself, so much shape shifting, so much dysphoria, so many late nights wishing i was a different person in a different place.
i found solace in their lyrics. it gave me some small bit of hope, some realization that i didn’t know that i needed; that trans people always have been and always will be here, that being able to be trans and be alive is possible, and that i don’t have to be digging my own grave, spending late nights staring at the mirror and seeing the girl who i used to be.
against me! gave me the courage to be alive.
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