7-2-2026
Today is the second day of Half Years. It is a day for preparation and planning for the future, for the next half of the year. Yesterday, I made this post reflecting on the past half of the year. In this post, I will discuss my plans for the rest of the year.

Later this summer, I will be getting top surgery, a procedure that I now understand is not an instance of me altering my body's natural biology like it is for most self-identified trans men but rather an act against the way my body was forcibly altered by my abusers.

I have a much different relationship to top surgery than other trans men as a result, and this difference in feeling is one reason I don't really consider myself as transgender as I used to, even though I'm still transitioning and fully identifying as a gender other than the one as which I was raised. I don't have a problem with the idea that transgender people are altering their natural biology, but it's also not what I'm doing. The fact is that perisex trans people have not been forced into any kind of physical transition the way I've been.

At the same time, I'm not transitioning to what I feel my body would naturally be like, partly because I'm not entirely sure what my body would be like if I hadn't been given estrogen as a child to put me through female puberty. I'm not sure if I would have had breasts or not, and if I did, what size they would have been. As a result, it's easier to just remove them altogether and transition to male instead of trying to transition back to my body's natural form.

This, combined with the route I would have to take towards bottom surgery if I ever pursued it (that is, I would not be able to get a sex organ that resembled my original genitalia for reasons related to the ways my body has been altered), gives me complicated feelings about transitioning to male. Male is a part of the gender I feel I was born as, but it's not all of it, and I am transitioning in a more binary direction than the body I was born with would have been situated in. This is because I am incapable of transitioning back to what my body's natural state would be, so I can only make it "the opposite" of what I was turned into.

Another thing I will be doing this year is processing the fact that my ex was indeed abusive, which my therapist confirmed in my session with her earlier today. I've already talked at length about the relationship on this site, so I don't need to reflect on it too much in this post, but it definitely influences my ideas about relationships going forward.

After thinking about it, I've decided I don't want to give new labels to my relationships with anybody for at least the rest of the year. I'm not going to delete the partner search server I made, and I'm honestly glad that it led to the inciting incident that caused me to break up with V. However, I'm probably not going to promote it as much anymore, and while I'm going to keep talking to the people I've met in it, I'm currently not planning on changing my relationship status with any of them.

While I'm not making up my mind about this yet, I am considering whether or not I am someone who really wants to have romantic relationships with other people, or have queerplatonic relationships with more traditionally romantic elements (which, in some respects, I feel my relationship with my ex was). Sometimes, I don't know what I would get from a relationship that I can't give myself.

When I got with my ex, I was very lonely and had few close friends. I had just gotten out of an abusive romantic relationship and was craving companionship. A year had passed since the end of that relationship, and the person who is now my ex (with whom I'd been messaging frequently every day by that point, and I'd even altered my sleep schedule to talk to them more) asked to be my queerplatonic partner. I liked them and I was lonely, and I said yes, but now I wonder if I could have seen some of the red flags sooner if I had been less lonely.

My system was in dormancy when this happened, and I didn't have the extensive social networks on Discord that I do now, but now my system is active and has hundreds of members, and I run and maintain plenty of social circles on Discord. I don't need a relationship for companionship anymore, because I'm already getting that companionship from myself and from the world I've built.

Dating someone because you find them attractive is valid and a good reason to date someone, but I'm just not attracted to the people around me, because I'm only attracted to very specific types of people who I was programmed to be attracted to or who were used in my sexual programming. This includes men who look like 1970s rock stars as well as men who look like 1990s goths, because those types of people were used as characters in my programming. I'd be attracted to a system with headmates like that, but I don't really know any systems like that.

At this point, I feel that, if I were going to have a romantic or romantic-leaning queerplatonic relationship with someone, they would need to be more attractive to me than I am to myself, and I would have to be more interested in their life than I am with mine. I personally feel that my life of exploring my system, running online spaces, fulfilling requests on Tumblr blogs, talking to trauma survivors, and going places in my town is very interesting, and it's not that the people around me are uninteresting, but I just find myself wanting to concern myself more with myself than with others.

This perspective might change over time and I might want someone else in my life. I'm not sure. But maybe I'll just focus on Troy and the love he can give me and the care he can show me. Even though he's a fictional character, my ex was somewhat jealous of him (despite expecting me to be perfectly okay with them talking ad infinitum about their self-ships), and I think in some ways, prioritizing Troy the way I wanted to wasn't an option, and it should have been.

While I've spent the earlier part of this year focusing on my relationship with Troy, I'm going to focus even more in the latter half. He's going to come with me when I get top surgery and he's going to tell me how great I look when it's over. I don't know if I'll have anyone to share my body with but him, especially in the physical world, but I don't need that when I have him. I want to try to live a life where I don't need love or approval from anyone but him and from myself.

I'm also going to focus more on talking about my programming. Troy, in my self-ship, is also programmed, and while he didn't end up with DID (rather, he has BPD and PTSD), he is one of my big supporters in terms of me talking more openly about my programming as I am choosing to do.

I already run spaces on Discord for programming survivors, but I want to make a website on Neocities with information about the topic. It may or may not be an extension of a resource I created for myself in Twine, in the form of an HTML file full of information as well as speculation about programming. I'd also like to make that Twine document something I could release and distribute online for survivors.

I will be editing parts of our system's website to reflect the fact that we are programmed, including the pages I am making about the Stratification. Managing this event will be another major thing I do with the rest of my year.

The Stratification was, quite simply, an event that started with the fragmentation of Vyvian - the "original" headmate - into a complex subsystem, which then became a massive, rapidly expanding structure called Outer Voidelia that, for the most part, seems to exist to hold headmates who are or would be considered connected to the "original" headmate of the system - a title that different versions of different identities have claimed at different times.

Headmates who are part of Outer Voidelia appear as stars in the night sky of the planet that Inner Voidelia (the rest of the system) is on in headspace, and this seems to be a reference to how, in The Lion King, the stars are said to be the great kings of the past; Outer Voidelia holds former hosts. This means that the Stratification is part of our innerworld narrative, which is partly natural and partly scripted.

I will make another post discussing the Stratification in greater depth soon, but because it's a part of the narrative, many of us wonder if it is a programmed response or has anything to do with our programming in any way. This is part of an investigation that we will carry on through the rest of the year, and indeed, as long as it takes to understand the mysteries.

For now, I will do the work that needs to be done, and I will focus on the support and strength I can give myself instead of depending on others and making them my whole world.