Here's a hill I'm willing to die on: 42 is not the meaning of life. It is the answer to the ultimate question to life, the universe and everything, and since we don't know what the question is it's almost certainly not something as obvious as "what is the meaning of life?"
@lambdagrrl like, on the very night that I declared to my closest friends in a Discord chat who I was and named myself for the first time (with @kel introducing me), I wrote this https://occult.camp/media/V_xjVSrP9MZKKG86PHs
"Terminal coma for 42 years"... yes, that about describes it. (51 in my case.) I've written a lot about feeling "displaced in time" -- I *remember* most of what happened, but it's like I wasn't really there.
I came across a license plate that said "SRS-5252", where 52 is in fact the age when...
@woozle @lambdagrrl yeah. one of the ways I was sure in my heart I was right about being Kara, about being a woman, was that it was suddenly simply _easier to remember things_, especially from the childhood that I used to barely remember. my brain hated childhood so much in this diffuse, aimless way that it just cast this fog over everything
Interesting! I've had the feeling of remembering-becoming-easier, but ...under other circumstances.
I think the reason it didn't manifest that way for me is that when I was a teen, I was encouraged by a cisfem friend to think about my past... and her presence was kind of like a respite from the dysphoria... and I sort of carried that around with me, a little, afterwards.
It has definitely (and suddenly), however, become much easier to face old grief and trauma.
Fog. Yep.
@woozle @kara @lambdagrrl @kel That's exactly it. I spent 33 years dead inside. 14 of those years knowing I was trans but feeling like there was no way to transition
@maritroniuity @kara @lambdagrrl @kel
Same! Discovered existence of "gender dysphoria" in 2000; finally had resources to begin transition in 2016.
The fog has been lifting in multiple stages over many decades.
I hope it's not done lifting.
@woozle @maritroniuity @kara @kel I like how my silly post about Douglas Adams has sparked this deep conversation :)
@lambdagrrl @maritroniuity @kara @kel
I could have given the flip answer (I mean question) -- "How many roads must a man walk down?" -- but decided to see if anyone else had said anything yet... >.>
@woozle @lambdagrrl @kara @kel "How many roads must an egg walk down before she hatches"
@maritroniuity @woozle @kara @kel pretty sure it's walls she has to fall off, going by Humpty Dumpty
"all the king's surgeons and endocrinologists..."
@lambdagrrl @maritroniuity @kara @kel
"How many deep depression cycles must an egg endure before she gets HRT"
(I was abruptly summoned to chauffeur a Pokemon raid some distance from our house. This is my life.)
@lambdagrrl apparently the answer for me was, "42 is the age when you crack your trans egg"