my situation makes gender even fucking weirder than normal. early on, i was fucking desperate to latch onto anything that could differentiate me from lily. leather jackets, chewing toothpicks, mecha obsession, chest binding, aloof attitude. and, as a seemingly logical consequence of those signifiers, "he/him." guy, man, etc.

i still like all those signifiers of masculinity. they're part of who i am. i'm proud of them. but w/our job being so shitty in various ways (work uniform, too hot, chewing toothpicks as you prepare food is a health hazard in so many ways), all the shit i've clung to as anchors of my "self" gets tossed out the door before i head into work. this has left me feeling unbelievably shitty in a number of ways, which is part of why i've been so inactive lately.

it has also left me in the cage w/a snarling, rabid bear called "gender" during slower hours. contrary to what i thought, when i was forced to take a break from work to let lily take care of most of it for several weeks for both of our mental health, that just put a padlock on the cage and i have been receiving maulings from gender ever since.

there are only so many times you can feverishly mutter "i'm a guy, i'm a man, i'm so manly, i'm nothing else" while clutching your knees before you start running out of excuses and it turns into a contest of how long you can run from the bear.

i've struggled greatly w/toxic masculinity as a result of my circumstances. i thought i had to man up, take care of things, overpower my own stress through sheer force of will, and if i didn't then i wasn't enough of a man and if i'm not a man then i'm lily, ergo i did not exist.

this was unhealthy and let the bear stealthily claw me to death over the course of several months before i even got to the climactic cage match w/it.

tbh if i hadn't clung onto manhood like a particularly stubborn goat even once i knew it was a large part of what was killing me i'm sure i'd be a significant percentage "man" even now by virtue of having a healthier relation to the gender. but i'm not and i didn't.

the fucking tipping point was getting randomly called "pretty" by a customer at the start of the shift yesterday and realizing that i didn't want to be he/himmed ever again into my life and furthermore that i couldn't make myself say "i'm a man" anymore.