same! just moved to a safe state and started a new job and was about to try to buy a house. just got my gender marker updated on everything. was (still am, inshallah and the creek don’t rise) scheduled for bottom surgery next year. everything seemed to be going in the right direction and I had so much hope, especially in the last couple of days before the election when the energy and enthusiasm seemed to be peaking and I was thinking that Harris might actually win.

Now, fuck, I don’t know if I’ll have a job next year.

I got bored and installed Arch on my desktop. I’m back on Arch after using Ubuntu for years.

They still sold user data without being upfront about it until caught, and are still running a shady-ass business. They’re at the intersection of crypto, bigotry, and dishonesty.

Not using or advocating for Brave is pretty simple.

It’s going okay so far, but my area is forecast to have highs in the 100s later this week and I’m not sure how that’s gonna affect me, since I only really know how to dress in layers for work (I’m a trans woman working an office IT job where I do occasionally step outside or carry computers from one bldg to another)

Like, I’m gonna be wearing a thin cardigan over a tank top and I know I’m gonna sweat. Oh, and my hair instantly goes frizzy when I sweat. I’m dreading it.

Yes, kind of. However, I was raised Pentecostal and strictly conservative, and have lingering religious trauma that I’m working through. For a while (from my teens through my mid-twenties) I described myself as atheist. However, I got into witchcraft and the occult a few years ago as kind of a time-waster hobby, not really sincerely believing in it at first but just having fun with it, and that grew into learning about other religions and becoming genuinely curious about spirituality and religion. Now I’d describe myself as a Unitarian Universalist. I’ve still never been to a Unitarian Universalist church in-person because there’s not one near me, but I attend online stuff occasionally and whole-heartedly love the way they do religion. And I feel welcomed there despite all of the things that would have gotten me dirty looks at any of the churches I grew up in. In terms of belief, I’d say I’m agnostic and I like to “put on” and “take off” beliefs (or “suspend disbelief”), which I got from doing chaos magic. I think magic and ritual helps me organize and make sense of my mind more than anything else… if anything, just having a meditation and journaling habit has helped my mental health, especially since i re-started those habits after starting my gender transition. And yeah, it also maybe helps with everything else gestures to the world at large…

And yeah, I just realized this is the most I’ve talked about my spirituality to anyone since going down this road. One of my big things is that my spirituality is a very personal thing and I keep it mostly to myself. Nothing against people who proselytize (I’ve come to understand and forgive people who sincerely believe they’re saving my life by “ministering” to me, like some of my older relatives who genuinely care about me and who are probably happy to hear me say “yeah, I’m kind of getting into a church now”) but I don’t feel compelled to tell people about my shit because I definitely have no answers. That’s my whole thing, I have no answers. I’m just kind of reading everything and trying everything, for no purpose other than to just understand people and myself a little better. And maybe it works for me, but I also know folks who definitely don’t want or need religion and that is 1000% okay, and I hope I don’t disturb them. So I only really speak of my stuff when people ask.