Today makes 6 years since I started testosterone. I am so deeply unmedicated that I have forgotten to take it on and off over the course of the years. Especially as my gender got weirder. The seasons changing is finally setting in.

It's maybe a bit cliche to use the change of seasons into autumn as a a time of reminiscing but that's how it happened. Just the other day I was going through all the sketchbooks that I still have. There's quite a few of them, but it ultimately left with with an aching kind of nostalgia. All of them were from my high school years, and almost all of them from after I moved to the city.

I've been drawing a lot longer than that. I remember being a young kid and digging through a box of my father's CDs to find the one that had Photoshop Elements 5 on it. Back when Photoshop could be purchased separately, on its own disk, and you owned the license to it forever. Better times. I didn't have a tablet to draw with and I remember eventually giving up on trying to find that disk again between one of the computer swaps. But I loved to draw and so I did.

This was before I cared as much as I do for data storage. or data hoarding, depends on the value you find in what I have I guess. So files of my art were subject to be lost. But there were also the sketchbooks I took to school with me. I know I had proper sketchbooks as early as middle school. Any memory of my life gets fuzzy earlier than then anyway. I have a single record of drawings on lined paper though.

dozens, if not hundreds of drawings I made as a kid are lost in a way I can't do to my high school drawings, because it's probably my biggest regret that I did throw away any art. I didn't value myself or what I made in a way that's deeply tragic for someone as young as I was when I did it. I remember being a very young teen sitting in my bedroom, staring at my belongings and boiling with emotions. Indiscriminately throwing away what was ultimately parts of myself, parts of what had made me happy, parts of how I expressed myself.

I was suicidally depressed and convinced that when I finally killed myself that I should leave nothing behind but garbage and smoking ruins of what once made up a person, hollow of one as i felt. I think lamenting my lost art is probably just the way that I've been mourning my years of lost childhood to abuse and mental illness. I never thought I would make it past 18. I never thought I would graduate high school if I even got close and then I would kill myself. A fuck you to my dad. You did so such things to me that I crumbled. Unable to perform I am gone.

My suicide note would've been simple. A peice of paper, folded in half. The outside would have his full name. The inside would say "I'm dead now. It's your fault."

But now I'm in my mid twenties. My dad's been dead for 9 years. He died before I even graduated. I did graduate in the end. Barely, but I came out alive. I have to live with the the fact that I did burn that much of myself away. I live with the bittersweet nostalgia of being alive and continuing.

I've transistioned.