4-17-2026

I got blood work done today. I had it done earlier this month, but I had to redo it because I forgot that applying testosterone gel before getting blood work done will throw off your testosterone levels.

Yesterday, I joined a bunch of self-ship servers where I can hopefully talk about my fictional relationships and meet people who know what it's like to genuinely consider yourself the partner of a fictional character.

In my therapy session yesterday, it came up that I have difficulty finding real-life people who relate to my experiences, and I often have to turn to fictional characters to find that understanding. This very often means having to be the one who made up those characters in the first place, due to the specificity of the experiences.

On one hand, I don't need another person's experiences to be totally relatable to me in order for me to treat them as a person or consider them a friend, so that's not the issue. On the other hand, I'm struggling with a lot of trauma and processing adverse experiences lately, and I've found that I can find very few people who can really relate to me about those experiences at all.

I find myself very frequently being offered sympathy, which is nice, but sympathy without understanding is othering. "What you went through was so terrible. I can't imagine how terrible your life must be. Your mundane reality is unimaginable horrors to me."

It reinforces my sense of myself as this thing existing on the outer margins of society and, to an extent, humanity. I don't like feeling that way, and I know I'm not uniquely damaged or idiosyncratic. At the same time, though, it's hard to feel humanized and understood when no one can understand you or treats your experience as part of their understanding of the human experience.

This is largely with regards to my intersex trauma, which my therapist mentioned she really needs to do more research on because of how much it's affecting what I talk about in sessions and how little she knows about it currently.

It's also with regards to some abuse that I might explain at some point but that, for now, I'll just explain that it was something my adoptive father did (that my adoptive mother probably had to do with but somewhat less) and it's part of why my system is so disordered and amnesiac.

Either way, I've joined some Discord servers, including self-ship ones, and Kepler from my sidesystem has already infodumped about how we relate to Thomas Jerome Newton's portrayal in the movie from the perspective of relating to him as an intersex man.

I could talk about the whole "Newton is intersex coded to me" thing but that honestly deserves its own page that isn't predominantly me whining about finding non-fictional people unrelatable.