Had a fling for a couple weeks and it got weird. Broke it off last Wednesday. Got way too drunk and killed it on the dance floor on Friday, and a woman with red hair told me I'm gorgeous and gave me her number. I woke up with her in my contacts as "Cuuuuuuuute (cutie)" with her number entered as the last name. Texted her and we're getting brunch tomorrow. A Wednesday I guess? Not sure if she even knows I'm trans--hard to have those conversations when you've spoken a sentence to each other and met while drinking in a fairly dark room. I'm feeling cautiously optimistic though! It's nice to make a connection the old fashioned way--dating apps are burning me out.

Now I'm back on the job hunt looking at full-time engineering positions, while scared to death to work full-time. I spent this summer part-time at my job, part-time on online courses trying to bridge the gap between what I know and what I need to know to get the work I want, and part-time on my mental health. I'm scared I won't have any energy left over after work to relax, take care of myself, and date. And I need to keep getting out and meeting people even if it gets weird. The pain of being alone becomes acute once you've spent even a moment with someone else.

I don't think people recognize how much work goes into being trans. I recently went through the process of changing my name and gender marker through the county court, the DMV, social security, and my voter registration, and changed my name with all my utilities, my credit cards, my nearly depleted retirement account, my car insurance (which then raised my premium), and my Xfinity account which was somehow the worst of all of them. That somehow took three half-hour phone calls. I spend an hour in therapy a week, I spend an hour or two decompressing from that hour, I spend a few hours a week just processing where I fit in the world, and I write a few thousand words in a text document that I bring to therapy so that I can try to squeeze a week of experiences into that hour of therapy to get help making sense of them. A backlog continually builds while I get help putting out fires in my day-to-day life but overall I guess I'm doing better. Some day I'll take the plunge and sign up for psilocybin-assisted therapy and get into the real shit but I can't imagine that happening for a while.