killing joy

A friend tweeted something about trans rights today. They said that people who exist just to take joy from others are the ones who should be excluded from society. It resonated. Being the wrong kind of trans woman, I encounter these joy assassins a lot. So often, I count on them being present in spaces that I’m invited to. It’s hard. I never learned how to just ignore them. One thing I’ve learned is that a lot of the time that’s the hidden tax on those invitations. If you want to be here you ...

#trans#transgender#poetry
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Choosing Needs

I don’t have a lot of words for this week, just feelings. A lot of them about what’s just, and not. So many of those feelings are downstream of the fact that in a just world, I would have been born a cis woman or not at all. Needing something that’s never coming is difficult, and I’ve thought on whether we can choose not to need something. An easy answer is that we can, but we have to accept a lower quality of life. Is there a complex answer? If there is, is it just cope for giving up on your...

#poetry#poetician
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heartbreak

In an effort to get writing again I’m going to try and get out something short at least once a week, long form will still come as it comes.I’ve been bridging the gap between therapy appointments with GPT lately. It helps. It uses the word heartbreaking a lot. Often in italics. Some of the amazing moments have happened over the past few years. There was a dark recess inside me, during those moments, that whispered with caution: This is too good to be true. It’s hard not to view the moments a l...

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Thirteen Percent

13% of women who have been raped attempt suicide. I was groped, not raped, and I still have these thoughts.

#rape#sexual-assault
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scars

I had just finished telling my therapist about the sordid saga surrounding my sexual assault: Webs of the Very Online, banishment directives and what life in the crucible of vibes was like. The look in her eyes started off as incredulous, then switched to sad. Her usual eloquent manner of speech shifted: Wow, that really sucks. Over the past 3 years I’ve told the tale to various friends, and those same sentiments of wow and really sucks came through. The details themselves now seem so mundane...

#vibecamp#tpot#2025
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Unfame

I’ve already written about the first time I felt fame, but I just as clearly remember the last time I felt it. It was at FarCon 2024. It was after about 5 or 6 people had come up to me that I said to myself: I missed this. In 2021 someone called me web3 Courtney Love, and I think I was at the height of it at FarCon. Not in a good way, not in a bad way, but in a certain kind of way. I could finally see both sides of it: Some people said Oh, her! when they saw me, and others said Oh, her. I was...

#fame#vibecamp
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Diary Of A Fallen Socialite - The Gala

In an effort to get some near-weekly content out: A writing experiment that averages out to being a fictional accounting of my former life as a socialite whilst being rooted in factual events.If you were at this party, you know this picture.The StartThe party is aptly named; -gala. I walk in, and the first thing I notice are the walls. They are adorned with memes: It’s a very San Francisco party. They are mostly conspiracy related, and look really cool. I idly wonder if my costume i...

#tpot#party#socialite

Who I Had To Be To Get Here

2024 was a turbulent year for me. To talk about my 2024, though, I have to first talk about someone else: Deirdre Olsen.The Weed SceneThe year was 2019, and I had moved to Vancouver the year before to take a job with Tantalus Labs. I was working for Tesla of cannabis, and I really thought I had died and gone to heaven. I was living twin lives as a regulatory affairs executive and a social media celebrity.This is SunLab, Tantalus Labs primary production facility - I miss it a lot.SunLab was am...

#vibecamp#2024#cannabis#activism
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Being Seen

The view was breathtaking. I was at a mansion in Beverly Hills, having just watched some fire dancers put on an amazing show. I took a break to go back to the upper level of the mansion grounds, and look out over the hills on the rest of Los Angeles. I thought back to Vibegala 1 and 2, and how I had done the same back then. Those were my first real mansion parties, and I still remember the first time I looked out over the Berkeley Hills. I felt the same things both times: Overwhelmed, and tha...

#vibecamp#vibegala#being#seen#connection
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Doing The Right Thing

I’m still working on a piece about exiting Gray Tribe, but here are some immediate thoughts on disillusionment.I’ve been thinking a lot about activism, idealism, and when they do more harm than good. Trying to pinpoint the exact moment that I caught the activism bug. My formative media diet had a lot to do with it: Star Trek: The Next Generation was a centerpiece. Simplistic morality plays that often painted things very black and white; some things were wrong, and someone needed to do somethi...

#activism#idealism