nicole @nicole@myna.social

Who decides the answer to this question is probably more important than the answer itself. I’m pretty sure it’s me. 😇

But the first hand is the dominant one: when I see myself in the mirror, the new prominence of my collar bone, the gradual, gradual, too-gradual thinning of my neck, it makes me happy. I am happy to be reduced in this way under these circumstances.

But should I be? 🤓

I’m 17 months into my #transition, which (for me) means just as many months of hormone replacement therapy (#HRT). Every so often, I head into SF and lie down on a giant scanner bed, and have my body composition analyzed.

The most-profound change has been the loss of lean muscle mass. For the first sox months, muscle held steady; over the next six, ten pounds evaporated.

Right now, I’m losing more than a pound of muscle a month. 🎢

I have such mixed feelings!

On one hand: goodbye and good riddance. I’ve always been tall, broad-chested, and muscular, and I’ve always hated it. I well remember my friends encouraging me towards sports in high school—“you’re a beast!!”—and how much it fucking hurt when they did.

On the other hand: this rhymes with aging—an accelerated enfeeblement. For the first time in my adult life, I can be physically overpowered by nearly half of the species. This is humbling. It sponsors nightmares and late night pepper spray purchases on Amazon.

🥺 Okay, _fine_.
🥹 Cue the waterworks.

“This was how life went. A single moment seemed to extend forever, then suddenly you were snapped out of it. The forward motion of time stretched whatever rubbery glue-like substance had fixed you there until it failed catastrophically. You weren’t the person you were before you got trapped; you weren’t the person you were while you were trapped: the merciless thing about it, Liv discovered, was that you weren’t someone entirely different either.”

😭 #NovaSwingMadeMeCry

@TheSpaceshipper bravo 😂

@sparrowpost Oh gods, I just read up on his biography. So much I didn’t know. 🥺

@rooster Now there’s some feels. 🥹

@sparrowpost It is! I ordered the Penguin paperback, and I’m very much looking forward to its arrival.

I was starting to wonder where she’d wandered off to. 🤭

@andrewedstrom Love this.

@sparrowpost, the film’s structure is just so interesting. It has so many of the “and one more thing” fastening-ons that I associate with oral folktale traditions, where you know every character has lead a hundred lives in a thousand variant narratives, such that they can’t be all brought together cleanly, if at all. And yet here we are, doing just that.

Looking forward to reading the story collection that inspired the film.