Events ring out into my mind so much. I feel like a failure, not because I unwillingly walked into my mistakes, but willingly did. i still feel like the kid when he fell off his scooter, and got a wound so deep, it went down to his bone. i remember it hurting so much. i remember being afraid of the shower, because the water and soap hurt so much. and all my responses were “boys will be boys, get over it” and i cried over my own mistakes, with no one to support me, and with excuses to fill the air, it became a bad habit. a habit i’ve enabled, to my patriarchal family, my quiet, silenced politeness, my attitude towards their authority, has made me both a black sheep and their dearests child. my family, my family’s friends, a lot of the social groups i had a hard time growing up with as the first kid born in America and neglected then helicoptered (abusively) through the tough decade of the aughts and the early teens. I grew up so kind of hidden away, and always wanting to, that i slept for most of my teenage years. and I remember getting grounded for the what was big to my parents, but was minor to anyone else: being queer, i would be dressing ‘femininely’, or wearing make up, or whatever the fuck. I just remember a day in this decade or so of isolation and familial insulation, where my father had locked me, my mom, and himself in my room and sat and interrogated me about images they found on my phone, a bunch of them being me in a dress and in make up, and he and my mother verbally berated me, multiple times, calling me an idiot, trying to imply I was ‘undermining’ them, even outright smashing the technology they bought me and grounding me until they believed my queerness would just disappear from me.. it had made me hardened, mad, and upset about my inability to express myself, in situations that i feel holds much more standpoint in my psychology than i’d like to remember (i don’t. i’ve been disassociating, depersonalizing, and derealizing over the course of my teens to now. for so long, i’ve been blind, confused, was cynical in such a way that no one agreed with. ive just come back to my senses). i remember sleeping for days. not knowing love. i feel so ungrateful for the small, isolated bits of intimacy that weren’t even love. i am touch starved, but afraid of the consequences of committment, while desparately desiring it and at the core of it, there was more of a fear to comitting to my queerness around my family. especially to this day. i was kicked out for wanting to transition, being 18 and still having interactions with that community, my father started more harassment. he took pictures of conversations with friends, yes, even the sexual ones… and tried to blackmail me. I didn’t cave. I looked for a chance to delete his photos and run. And when i went to live on my own (which really means live with my ex and his sibling), i began three years of transitioning. but i gave it all up to come back home. im in the closet again, under the foot and eye of my family. it’s that cold, isolated, disassociated feeling. I wish work helped, but it doesn’t. It exhausts me, and makes me fall back into those cold, dreary sleeps. Those sleeps where I fall back into my amnesia-induced childhood memories; drowning, once when I was back in Kuwait with my aunt’s family, and I decided to just walk forward, towards the sea, and keep swimming. The sea pulled me in, and my khala jumped into the deep end of the sea to save me, we immediately left the beach after that. and no one held me. I never was comforted for that night, for another mistake of my own, only excuses filled the air, and i felt like a puppet, floating at sea. The other time, slipping into the pool as I ran childlishly around the edge, having my mother's friend jump in full clothing and save me... I wanted to learn how to swim, but I didn't want to swim. I was afraid to swim. I became insulated after those two incidents, whether intentionally or not, and it became more and more entrenched as my childhood-into-teenagehood became a series of more and more mistakes, I kept getting myself innocently in trouble, over minor things, over unintenitional and blindsighted ways of thinking. At the moment, I only felt like an flesh automaton, and hated every minute of it, who’s only means of liberating oneself came from engaging with radical theory, but even in those moments, I became a slave to a mentality and ideology. I didn’t wanna define myself by it.

And my family hasn’t insulated me, since I've lived here. they've given me my distance. But only because they would’ve rather disowned me than to work to build a relationship with their daughter - to make a son out of me... It feels awkward, being back here, it was silent. My first birthday was just me, my mom, and dad sitting and eating a cake quietly, no happy birthday, no talking, just 10 o'clock at night, no talking, just staring at each other. I felt disillusioned in that moment because I knew what my family meant by that. I was already talking to my brother’s ex-wife, and she was supposedly (see how little i still believe people :/) the only advocate for me while they were trying to disown me. She told me their version of the day i left: she said they found a gun in my room, when it was simply just transsexuality? By that point, I already knew enough. They’re doing everything in their ability to make me seem like I was crazy... nice and fun.

Well, certainly, it feels like I'm crazy. every minute I'm being gaslit by my family. my experiences, my desires, my interests are back to being belittled. And my financial record? they wanna use that to buy their new house, buy a car, start a business...

Well, to this day, I still have no one to hold to feel warm. I wake up cold and I feel cold day in and day out..