This entry is part of 32-Bit's New Years '2025 event. Honest to God, I didn't know if I was actually going to participate, I personally thought I didn't have much to say. But lo and behold, my yapper had came in clutch once again. I just want to get this out of the way so I don't have to think about 2024 anymore.
General Thoughts about 2024
It was the year of all time. It’s honestly hard to say whether I love or hated it, because there is nothing to think about. A lot of things happened yet I don’t remember ANY of it, even something as big as the US elections was just another brick in the wall of numbness that was 2024. It’s fair to say that this is a transitional period for me, something that really wasn’t enough to garner much fanfare or hatred. 2023 was literally almost 2 years ago, and I remember more of that than the actual year I spent my life in. I think I’m just ready to move on, shrugging as I accept that it is what it is. 2024 is nothing more than the liminal space of years to come.
A Year of Socialization
Surprisingly I’ve become a lot more sociable this year, getting a lot more involved in different conversations with other people than I have spent recharging and isolating myself (usually with only one person I’m willing to talk to). I’ve been more active in different forums, both in 32-Bit cafe and Pixel Cats End. I never saw myself as someone who would willingly get into forums, but I have been trying to get used to how it’s formatted. I’m not used to slow communication, nor isolated conversations that are categorized in a post. When the 32-Bit Discourse forums were made, I didn’t exactly know what to think of it. I’ve made all this talk about how I’m probably gonna abandon ship after the forums were established, but that just didn’t happen. I think a part of me was still latching onto the instant messaging format that Discord servers just allowed to happen. It was chaotic, and hard to get into; since everyone was inevitably going to switch topics to whatever they wanted. Yet it was familiar. Despite how much it sometimes made me anxious about where to enter and when to exit, it gave me a sense of instant closure about other people’s opinions.
Sure the Discourse forums had an option for instant messaging, but it was clear that the culture of the forums were incredibly different from the Discord server. Ironically, Discourse has little discourse, its forum system allows for more slow and passive interaction that encourages the user to come in whenever they want; they could disappear for weeks, months at a time, and just come back like nothing ever happened. The jump to Instant Messaging to Forums wasn’t as easy as I thought. Gradually, I have been getting into the habit of checking out the 32-Bit Discourse forums and it has been relaxing to say the least. I don’t feel the pressure to reply to certain topics that I’m not interested in, just so someone can feel like a person is listening to what they’re saying. (Don’t get me wrong I enjoy when someone can just talk about a certain subject with a passion despite me not sharing the same passion, but it can get exhausting having to entertain everyone all the time).
I haven’t made a lot of progress on real life relationships, but I think I’ve just been less closed off than I have years prior. I have been trying to go with the flow, trying to be more understanding of my family members despite their flaws. I’ve also been trying to entertain them and go along with their activities. It still takes a lot out of me to socialize though, so I’m not really expecting much.
A Year of Website Burnout
Unfortunately, it’s also another year of very little “productivity” when it comes to my websites. I have indeed made some things, I’ve made plans, and some things got finished. Yet I just don’t feel as interested in anything that involves web weaving at the moment. Everytime I see someone posting their updates, I just feel guilty that I barely made anything. It wasn’t until a friend pointed out that I was most likely burnt out and I needed to step back. I know it was probably obvious from the outside looking in, but I didn’t realize most of the things I was making for my site were out of obligation. I liked the idea of finishing a goal, yet I didn’t feel like doing it. Even something as small as changing the CSS so the background doesn’t have a weird clipping effect anymore, felt like a chore.
I’m not a programmer, nor an engineer. I was not born to solve problems efficiently, nor was I able to troubleshoot easily. I have no aptitude for practicality, it’s a skill I had to painstakingly learn from square one. With all that context in mind, I was basically pushing myself to become a person I wasn’t used to being, just so I could achieve a result that was unrealistic within a short time frame. This is absolute madness, and it’s no wonder why I burned out so quickly. I was trying to achieve everything, without asking for help, all at once. I neglected to realize that making sites wasn’t just an artform, it was also a math problem and a whole new language. Just because it’s not hard compared to everything else, does not mean it’s not a complex subject with different ways to solve the problem.
There was still an overconfidence and ego I exhibited when I first delved into the Personal Web, that I have yet to scrub. Art and Tech can go hand in hand, but they are not the same field. I was projecting my own biases as an artist into a field that I barely knew shit about. Just because I could understand the fundamentals of art and was able to hone my creativity, does not automatically mean it’ll work for everything else. I was doing the same fucking thing that the “Tech Bros” I despised so much, were doing. The only thing I can do at this point is to humble myself, and accept that I still have flaws to work through and fix. Of course I can still learn new skills, but this one just doesn’t come naturally. It’s something I need to put more effort into learning.
A Year of Self-Discovery and Identity Crisis
Anyone who knows me, has already heard how much I’ve been questioning my own gender. I’ve settled on the label “Genderfluid” because I’m still on the fence about what it is. All I know is I lean towards the masculinity spectrum, but that's it. What started as a small spark around a year ago, snowballed into a full on existential crisis I was not ready to handle. Imagine growing up thinking that you were indeed cis, accepting that you were going to grow up a lady. The label didn’t make me uncomfortable per se, but it wasn’t really my choice at all. I didn’t really understand why all of a sudden I had to act graceful, elegant and feminine, just because I was a “lady”. For fuck’s sake, I was only 15 years old when I was told by my relatives that I was maturing into one. I resented the times where I was criticized by my mom about not acting like a lady. I didn’t sit with my legs crossed, I was rambunctious, I was more interested in what my boy cousins were doing rather than hanging out with the girls, and I wasn’t exactly “put together” as she had hoped. I acted more like a “tomboy”; not giving a shit about fashion or my appearance, engaging in boyish hobbies (like video games, woodworking, mechanics, pc building, blacksmithing, and digging holes in beaches??), being one of the boys as they say.
A lot of this might be attributed to having a “not like other girls” phase, but when the dust settled and I had fostered a healthy relationship with femininity, I still didn’t feel like I fit in female exclusive spaces at all. There was a deep sense that something was “off” and I really wasn’t living the life I wanted. I was already aware of the term, Transgender at that point, yet I didn’t feel like my experience was valid enough to be considered trans. I didn’t really feel the gender dysphoria hit early nor did I ever feel hatred towards hobbies that aligned with my birth gender. I was actually quite fine with being a girl. That was until I changed my avatar to a guy in a fashion game, did I realize that I wanted to look like him too. It was only a year ago, yet it shook my entire perspective on gender. You didn’t have to actively hate your life to be considered Transgender. Gender Euphoria is a valid part of it.
Although this epiphany gave me a lot of joy, I also couldn’t avoid Gender Dysphoria. Once the pandora’s box has been opened, I can’t go back to the way I was. I started questioning what it meant to be masculine, if I really am a man as much as I believed I was. It didn’t help that my mother has become a lot more rigid with gender roles than before. It’s pure hell whenever I’m trying to live my life and I suddenly have an identity crisis in the middle of nowhere. I get scared that if I come out, I could potentially compromise my own safety in doing so. What I’m most afraid of is permanence; I’m scared that I will regret my decision if I decide to medically transition. I want, most of all, to look and sound masculine, but that means having to give up a lot of my old life and features. It means having to commit to something I cannot take back. My desires seem very contradictory, I want to be both a man and a woman yet neither at the same time. I really don’t know where I’m at and it’s exhausting just talking about it, so I’m moving on.
A Year of ?????
I could be over here saying I could have done this or that this year, reflecting on all the things I missed, but I’m tired. I don’t really have the energy to regret anything or to list the things I didn’t do. I don’t feel like trying to dig any further than I already have to think about it. I don’t want to beat myself up when I still have all the chances in the world to change things. I want to move on and use this time to recover. I need a break. This isn’t the optimistic entry most people probably hoped for, but it’s my raw feelings about everything about this year. I don’t care enough to make any resolutions, knowing that I’ll just feel guilty about not meeting those expectations. I’ll just let myself float wherever the river takes me. If I have some detours along the way, then I’ll welcome it with open arms. Goodbye 2024.