I'm at my desk for once. It's mid point of september. setpember 15. I'm catching up on lots of notetaking I haven't fully been able to catch up upon since week 3 of July. Basically all of the summer. It's fair to say summer is over now.

I wanted to write about the 19th of July 2025. In the morning I went to do my running, then I went to step class. It was Annie's last step class ever. An explanation about Annie.

Annie was this young woman I got to know. Back around 2020 or 2021 she was a med or premed student and in 2025 she graduated from med school and since July 2025 or so she's become a full junior doctor on her first proper doctor jobs and shes' doing 3 doctor placements as 3 different kinds of doctor positions, one of which is psychiatry. Annie was really talkative and I'm not talkative. Annie would always get to know people and she was so nice and she was nice to me. An incident last year when I had to go to A&E because of my testicles meant I managed to leave hospital to get to the gym. I had a cannula in my arm.  

I probably told this story before. Annie came into the mens toilets realising I was going to pull the cannula out. I didn't know I'd lose loads of blood and it would all spill out. apparently its venal blood or whatever. Also when that happened, Annie was in the men's toilets with me almost on her own, she was rubbing my arm and saying stuff like 'it will be okay' and she made me feel like a little boy or something. Annie was close enough to me to touch me and also she probably noticed my shorts. I wear shorts that are padded and tuck because of my dysphoria. Annie probably never brought that up with anyone and she never brrought it up with me, but she saw it I'm sure.

That Saturday on 19th July was her last class. I miss her still. There was a leaving do a week before for her in a pub. all the gym peopel came along. It was her last day, we did group photos, it was so nice. It was also the case that on 19th July was trans pride brighton. I went to Brighton after the class. I met J there and..I got upset because of some speeches. I was very very upset. I saw a certain activist I know and I saw Kate Nash perform live. I'm probably saying too much about the real world.

Annie got my number and she messages me every other day. Annie sends me the sunrises and I sometimes send her sunrises and sunsets. One day she sent me a pic of her bare legs reclining on the balcony of her flat, she had these cute socks. I had to like...not be weird about that. 

Life feels really weird. I have a new friend and she's a young woman. She also has a nice boyfriend who does ironman. It really is a just friends situation. It feels weird that I know new people. I feel like I've lost so many friends lately that I'm just not emotionally able to meet new people. I'm still getting over the losses. 

 its 21 July 2025.

I realise that I have different schematisations of hoarding. all my hoarding items are organised in different principles, then i abandon it for a more sophistated one but they are piled digitally and physically on top of each other in something that's clearly a pattern but also clearly chaotically put together.

My revelation is that a lot of the things I'm hoarding are tied to significant dissociative episodes, distress, grief, loss and things I don't feel able to cope with directly. I hoard things as a way of holding on for a time when I'm ready to face it. The earliest unarchived google keep item is from 24 April 2025. That was my correspondence with the conversion therapist. I exactly realise why I have struggled to cope with my hoarding since then. I'm not over what happened. The conversion therapist said some things that if I ever even uttered or took seriously could be the very end of me. The suggestion that I am fundamentally defined by my birth, by my organs, by my disabilities and those set who I am and nothing else, nothing else can be different by the way I was born.

It's also why I run. I have changed my body. I remain with a partially reconstructed arm and significant sight loss. I still have difficulty with speaking and balance. But my appearance my suggest otherwise. I'm the fittest I've ever been in my life. At 39 I am probably the envy of all my future and past selves. Lots of people including myself idealise the early 20s self but I think early 20s me would be massively envious. I am on track to clearing 400 hoarding items. I realised on the way to April 2024 there were other moments. moments of loss, grief, distress, struggles to make decisions which I'm still coping with. I think I have under 4000 items of processing, perhaps even 2000, given that I cleared about 400. Well, that's under the schematisation from April 2024. it's evident there's clusters that have compression documents keeping even more things dating to 2021 but I believe those will be quicker to process with the way I archived it at the time.

 It's taking me a while to get around to it but I'm putting my 'on this day' anniversaries for May- present day, which is up to 6 July (I'm writing on 7th July).

Quite a few things happening in May and June. Pride month I have told many different storeis about how Pride month is for 2025. I saw a couple of gigs. I might have even socialised a bit. I think a lot happened in short spaces of time that I wasn't prepared fully to deal with physically or recover from. Every day running on next is just barely catching my breath from the last day. Catching my breath. That's a nice metaphor, visual or something metaphor to describe exhaustion, so exhausted that I am struggling to deal with the current breath while recovering from the next. It's more than a metaphor, I run 2.5 hours a day. I have moved my baseline a bit. I stick to 2500 a week, which I do on the first day. KCal that is. I aim for 300 points a day. Which I mostly do. Some days like office days I don't achieve this. Other days I exceed it. One thing that helps as a heuristic is if I say 300, I mean hitting 300 heart points in the treadmills, so there's other activity like cycling home and home prep and chores which rally up additional heart poitns, that's a bonus. 

I couldn't make the baptism today. My best friend's son. He's named after Richard by his middle name. Our friend Richard visits Tony more. It's right that he's named after him. Not least because M didn't make it to visit. I have been having a fever since Thursday. I'm run down...again these bloody running metaphors. I was so overwhelmed on Friday that I decided I couldn't do gym on Saturday. I say 'decided'. I was too tired. I really couldn't get out of bed.

Her name was Star and Discord

 On 23 May I went to a speed dating event online and I didn't really have any expectation. I didn't feel comfortable going. As a nonbinary person that's 'AMAB' I didn't feel I belonged. 

I matched with her. Her name was Star, Star and Discord. We had 6 minutes to talk with each person speed dating and the sun was setting outside my window. I told her that Homer described the Rose fingered dawn. Rhododactylos Eos. It is a moment of beauty so intense that the transfeminine in me lives in that moment and just as it briefly exists it just as briefly fades away and I feel sad as the feminine leaves me to ocme I hope for another day. We connected. Star seemed to understand

24 May was comicon day 1, or was it 25 May when I got the first message? on the taxi to the venue I got a message. I had matched with Star. Star messaged me. Star asked me lots about the sunset Goddess inside me. I opened up. Star was into spiritual practice and psychic practice and I opened up a lot.It was so beautiful and intense and I felt an affinity and kinship with her.

28 May: she messages to say it's gone in a direction where she feels more like I'm a client of hers and we are less romantic than friends and less friends and more like it's a client/patient and therapist relationship. She says she knows I have had problems recently with trust and long term issues with abandonment. she knows what this will mean for me but its best that we cease contact. My last message to her was: I'm sorry. 

My first thoughts were: try not to feel abandoned. Try not to feel betrayed. Star doesn't owe me anything. I want what's best for her and her sense of what is best is we cease contact and what we had shared and how we had gotten to know each other she felt it felt uneven, she felt she had too much power and knowledge over me in a way she didn't feel able to open up. 

Abandonment. I felt abandonment. I felt a sense of hope and I felt life could be different. I opened up emotionally and just as quickly, so too did I feel abandoned. So too did my sense of hurt get to me. It's about a month since then. I'm still not over it. It's the abandonment, it's the trust. I am struggling to find a therapist lately for DBT and EMDR and my trauma is very difficult. It's making me angry. It's making me struggle with executive function. 

I have taken a month to write this. 

 I just thought I'd have the time to do a post in between things (liminally as those cool aging millennials say). 

I just tallied my assets. It's gone down 2%. President Trump's' tarfiff business has screwed my savings, I'm trying to get a mortage in principle statement right now. It's not the worst thing in the world. I'm still 80k but...yeah, annoying.

Emotionally I'm really tied to J but she's basically ghosted me. I've growing feelings for L but I want it to happen in the right way for the right reasons, plus she's in a different place in life where the things I want' aren't necessarily the things she wants. I feel very isolated. I found a new therapist. I'm going to spend the rest of today's desk based tasks on doing a pre-write for therapy and then I'll go to the gym.

This was written in February

The day after our last session. I was looking at my desk. I was looking all around me and I was distracted by all the things around me. There are so many things around me. I mentioned as an example that I had lots of postcards on my desk. I had about 50-60. It’s under a marble block. The marble I think comes from Italy. It’s a sample block that was sent to me during work. It was such a weird thing to be sent, a block of marble as a rectangle square thing, that it was unique enough to keep. I use it as a ppaperweight because it really keeps things held down. Its 2:30 in the afternoon on Thursday 9th. I decided to get rid of all the postcards. Except a few. I have some postcards that I got from comicon. There’s the practice of gift trading with our flag means death fans so the postcards are fan art and personal and there’s a story behind them. Lots of the other postcards, they are related to artists who send their portfolio to us as part of my job, they are good artists, they usually send postcards with a blank behind and I like using them, there’s a story behind it like the one I’m just telling you now. Some really posh ones too, some even came with envelopes to send to people, so the pile of postcards were not just postcards. They are envelopes. I got rid of it. It will count as my two for a day a nd I’ve marked that in the diary. It felt difficult. I kept the our flag means death postcards as there’s only 3 of them and they still feel special. Our flag means death is about people who are looking for a place in the world and that is important to me to keep.

 Dear  Diary,

Portfolio has gone up. It's 81k. That's about 5k more than the last time I checked, which in fairness was close to 5 months ago it seems. 

I've been doing a lot of running as a way of dealing with my distress. It has meant I haven't allowed myself much desk time.