Clean Slates

So basically this is the end and the beginning in a lot of ways, I deactivated my personal Facebook account last night after getting my backups downloaded, and that decision was mostly just around the kinds of feelings and moods that Facebook tended to cause.

As a transgender person we tend to see a lot of comments on Facebook which specifically treat us as less than the general population, we are discussed in terms of legislation over our bodies, our private lives, our ability to choose for ourselves.  A lot of those comments treat us as a problem to be solved rather than as individuals with lives, loves, friends and family, passions and dreams.

Its the same kind of arguments against people of other races we've seen before, the same arguments we saw on gay marriage and almost every other horrible period of human history where a minority suffered violence at the hands of bigots.

So every day, at LEAST once or twice a day I would see some comment which basically said I should die, or that I shouldn't be allowed to exist as a transgender person, that I'm somehow mentally ill and need to be cured or killed.  It gets really draining, even with all the positive posts celebrating being trans that I also see... for every hundred positive posts it only takes one of those spiteful people to really make me spiral.

And if you've been keeping up on all my other posts, it was also a place where I was constantly reminded of how much I have been hurting about the girl I mentioned, its really hard to try and move on if you are seeing them even virtually everywhere you go.

So here we are, its digital detox time, I figure I will try and write a lot more on this blog which should result in better content here that's a little more detailed than I could ordinarily get away with on Facebook, there will be less editing, and of course without all the memes and foolishness hopefully it will be easier to take it all a bit more seriously.

I think because I tend to be quite light hearted and silly, people tend to see me as somehow incapable of seriousness or that my feelings are never really hurt.  Hopefully this post should clarify, that I actually hurt an awful lot of the time, and the seriousness definitely happens I just haven't always been the best at showing it.  It's much easier to laugh than cry.

The other thing I am looking forward to is having direct conversations with people more often, rather than people relying on my ridiculous levels of spam on Facebook to count as keeping up with me, I hope they'll take a few minutes to actually talk to me occasionally.

I love my people, its going to be a strange and difficult thing to deliberately distance myself like this, but I really hope it will actually make me a better friend with more emotional energy to play with.

Lots of love,
Abigail