Breaking My Silence

I’m still here!  It might have been a couple of days short of two months since I last posted anything but I haven’t gone away.  I’m still alive and well and most importantly, happy.  It’s just that I’ve been suffering from a terrible case of startitis.  In my first and to date only post on this new blog, I wrote that I was going to write about a wider range of things than just my trans journey.  Heck I did enough of that on the old blog.  By widening out my potential topics I thought that I would be spoiled for choice of what I could write about.  And indeed I was.  Spoiled, anyway.

At least two or three times a week I think of something that I could write a post about.  But I haven’t done it.  I think the problem is that it isn’t really time-sensitive any more.  On the old blog writing about my trans journey, I always felt like I wanted to document what I had done and the milestones that I had reached, because I knew that there would be another milestone along soon and if I didn’t write about the current milestone right now the moment would be past and it would be old news.  That no longer applies.

The one and only time that I branched away from matters transgender on my old blog was a series of three posts counting down my top 20 music albums – incidentally, “The Holy Bible” by Manic Street Preachers was an utterly glaring omission from that list, what was I thinking?  I really enjoyed writing those posts and they got me thinking about music and listening to music in a way that I hadn’t done for quite some time.  So I considered maybe doing a post about my favourite songs as opposed to albums.  Or maybe a revision of the albums posts.  Still on the subject of music, I have thought about writing an appreciation of Teenage Fanclub, the romantic Glaswegian indie heroes whom I have loved for over 25 years.  And I still might do all of that.

With the Oscars having been held last night as I write this, I thought maybe it was an opportune time to write about my favourite films.  I have also been reading particularly voraciously recently (at least on the weeks when the kids are with my ex) so I thought maybe a few book reviews in a bit more detail than I used to do, where the book review was incidental to the fact that I was going to a book group and being accepted for who I am.  Maybe an overall “Kirsty’s favourite novels” post is waiting to come out too.

Readers of the old blog may also recall a few mentions of the fact that I am something of a pro cycling obsessive, and with the spring classics and early season European stage races upon us now, I might like to write about what I’m looking forward to most about the upcoming season, and how Paris-Roubaix is the best sporting event in the world (look it up).  But who would read it?  Maybe I’d be better off trying to distil what I love about the sport into a post, to explain why it grabs my imagination like no other (and no, it’s nothing to do with the TV camera view of row after row of slim male bums pumping away like they’re chewing a toffee between their cheeks either!  As the execrable Shania Twain said, that don’t impress me much)  For all that, if any man could turn me it would be reigning Giro d’Italia champion Tom Dumoulin, a man so talented that he won last year’s Giro despite losing two minutes to his rivals while got off his bike for a poo.  Really!

Politics.  Oh god why?  I could write about politics.  But that would be horrendous.  I don’t like to think about it.  It’s just too bad.  Brexit.  Trump. Arlene Foster.  Terrible.  I can’t dwell on that.  There’s so little that’s positive to write about on that score that I’d rather write about something that’s going to make me feel better.

Video Games!  Yes, I am a bit of a gamer.  Even if something of a geriatric gamer, I still love grabbing a controller and spending a bit of time in virtual worlds.  What could I write about though?  Game reviews?  Who would be interested?  Maybe I could write a bit about my history with video games.  I’ve been through quite a few from simple bat-and-ball style things in the late 70s through till the current generation of consoles.  That’s a thought.  One for the future.

At this point I will also add that my love of books and video games have never been more brilliantly married than in the novel “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline, which is shortly to be a film directed by Steven Spielberg.  If you have any geeky bones in your body, and particularly if like me you were a teenager in the 1980s, it might feel like the book you’ve been waiting your whole life for.  Loved it to bits, can’t wait for the film.

Of course there’s one other thing I could write about.  I am still a trans woman in transition and there are still milestones that I reach and incidents that happen.  But what I am not going to do is write about work, and what I am not going to do is write about other people.  I don’t want people to feel that anything they say may be taken down and used as blog material.  I’ll just be writing about me and my personal experiences as I continue in my transition.  I’ll have been living as a woman full time for eight months this Thursday, which is of course International Women’s Day.

I’m not going to make this a long post, I just wanted to put something out there to say that I hadn’t completely abandoned this blog and more frequent posts will resume again soon.  There are enough possibilities there to keep me going for months.  If anyone’s still listening, feedback is welcome too.

Kirsty.