How far does one go when rebuilding themself?
Naturally, one should seek out euphoria. A person should always seek out an identity that they are happy to live as
And at the same time, one should avoid that which causes them pain, displeasure, etc
But... pain and pleasure are intertwined
To do what feels good can often lead one feeling bad
That which feels bad can often feel good
To start becoming the woman I am forming into, I had to leave behind my old self. The old, uncomfortable, yet familiar mask. And it just felt... awful. The process was terrible, it was too much to bear for a very long time
It was also wonderful. It was the greatest thing I've ever done
I always knew I wanted this, to embody and be perceived under the lens of the feminine. My retreats away from it never had me denying their presence. If you told any version of me in the past that I was a woman, I'd have said "yeah probably". But then, I'd find some way to sidestep and/or lessen the importance of that.
I would tell myself I simply needed more time, I needed more confidence, I needed to unpack more about what living as the masculine self I was assigned would mean for me in the longer term.
Pleasure and pain are intertwined
The mind tries to separate them, but they always come to be in balance with one another
Pleasure and pain
Euphoria and dysphoria
Feminine and masculine
Life and death
I... don't have any real coherence to my thoughts at the moment. But that is precisely why I'm writing this. The self will progress as it always does, but liminality will not. I will always be caught between that which I was and that I am trying to become. That which I wish to experience and that which I wish to experience never again. What these are will change, who I am will change.
The mind is not a unified self, it is a scattered net of neuronal connections that happen to on average link together in a set of ways that create the illusion of a person.
The mind pretends to be a unified self, but this is an illusion. There is no central self, there is no solitary self, there is no singular identity. It is just different selves all pretending to be the same one. All passing along information and trying to agree with one another to hold things together in a coherent way.