Hi.
About a week from now is the one-year anniversary of this site. Happy birthday, site. I didn’t bake you a cake. Maybe I should. You’ve been through a lot this first year of your life.
In the past year, this site has been visited by ~18,000 people. 18,000 people reading about extremely personal aspects of my being. I can’t figure out how I feel about that, but whatever I feel, it’s weird.
In the last year, I wrote 46 articles for this site. (Technically, 70 articles, but I decided not to publish or took down 24 of them.) Just in my spare time.
I’ve described the purpose of this website with all kinds of high-minded ideals, from changing society to saving lives. But really, the thing driving me to put so much energy into philosophizing about gender has been a lot more personal.
I wanted to help the people I love understand who I really am, so that we could all leave the person they thought I was behind. That thing was making my life impossible, and hardly anybody knew it. It was up to me to do something to stop it from getting dragged into my life all the time. I didn’t want to have to cut everyone off so I could move on. I wanted to give them a chance to move on with me.
So I did something.
I did a whole lot of something. To be honest, I’m tired from all the something I’ve been doing. And there’s still a lot of something left to do. What that something is, I’ll just have to keep figuring out.
But what I have done has started to pay off.
Some of the people who used to believe I was someone else were able to set that aside, and they actually know me now, for the first time ever. And now that I’m more free to express myself, I’ve made some rad new friends who see me as me, without the baggage of the invented woman I never was.
That’s nice. Really nice. I’m still trying to register just how nice it is. I’m not used to it. My feelings are taking their time catching up to what I understand to be true about my situation. Apparently my processor is at capacity. All things considered, I can’t say I’m surprised.
I’ve put a lot of work into this site in the last year, not for any monetization purposes, not to build any sort of platform—just for the reasons I described earlier.
Now that I finally am starting to see the fruits of my labor, I’m realizing just how much I need a break.
I’m tired of talking about gender.
There’s a lot that well-meaning folks still don’t understand about how they treat me in degrading ways because of unconscious biases. But it’s so much better than it was, I have more real support than I’ve ever had, and I’m also a lot tougher than I used to be.
So I’m going to be stepping back from adding new content to this site for awhile, and focus more attention on other things. I have a lot of passion projects, and this one is no longer at the top of the list for the time being.
I may revise or retire some of the articles on here, but the ones that I think are helpful for a broader audience will stay.
I also will probably still share an awkward story about my weird life experiences as an agender person from time to time on social media. My life being what it is, strange things are going to keep happening to me, and I’ll probably talk about them.
On the blogging side, I have no idea how long of a break I’ll be taking. But in the meantime, enjoy the content that’s on here, and feel free to leave me a comment. I’ll still be monitoring those on my break. I might upgrade the design here and there, too, because I definitely threw this site together with some haphazard existential urgency. It’s legible and navigable, but I am not impressed with it. 😉
Thanks for reading, and for being willing to learn from me. I learn from you, too.
—Adrien
All the best to you on your journey Adrien. 😘 Thanks for trying to enlighten people. It’s obviously not easy. Enjoy your well deserved break.
❤️
Thank you again for all your efforts. You really have changed my life with your bravery. May things continue to improve for you!
Adrien, your Deconforming posts have been amazingly helpful for me. I am so glad I found them. You are an incredible person, and I wish I knew you in real life. I miss you on Facebook, and I hope you’re okay. With warmth and best wishes, Ansley.
Hi! I wrote a poem called On Dysphoria to sum up what it feels like for me and I wanted to know what you thought. I tried to comment this on a more related post but was unable to find a place to comment.
The crisis happens in silence.
It hits me in the stomach first,
a deep punch that knocks my center and fills me
with anxious dread. Then my heart catches up,
sinking down and cracking, letting the bad feelings
in. With my heart filled with despair, my voice is lost,
burying itself somewhere I can’t retrieve.
Did I ever really have a voice of my own?
Now I cannot speak, and I have no one to blame
but myself.
I try to draw in a breath, a cool, soothing gasp,
but instead of dissipating my dread, it enshrines it.
I want to take my body to a happy place, to a future where I’m not so vulnerable
to the reminder of who I am, but I cannot find it.
They’re not a perfect shell that I can walk into when I’m ready,
a prince charming with their happy ending already scripted.
No, they must be created from my own flesh
and blood, sacrificing
everything I have in the process.
Beautiful. I love this.
I felt that on a frickin spiritual level jeez. Thank you, I don’t think you could’ve described it better 🙂
Thank you for all of your posts. I just found your site today and I’ve read several of your posts already. I’m glad you’ve gotten to this stage in your life. As someone who just now being more open about being fluid with my friends, I know its difficult. Go You.
I don’t know exactly how to start this “little” wall of text here, but Adrien, you have given me something to think about.
Given our present political climate, I decided it was high time I could follow along with the various terms and acronyms associated with gender, sex, orientation, etc being used on today’s interwebs. Your blog happened to pop up when I looked into AFAB and AMAB.
As a straight cisgendered dude, I honestly expected nothing more than explanations of things and concepts I didn’t have much in common with.
But then I started reading about agender and how you grew up dealing with it, and somewhat uncomfortably realized something I didn’t expect: I could relate. I could see something of myself in your stories.
From the mention of gender seeming to be an act (Do guys seriously find penises really that hideous? It’s actually an over the top performance so no one thinks they’re gay, right? Right?), to having a problem dressing like a cisgender girl as child (I had a “phase” where I thought it would be cool if I dressed as a girl and pretended to be one. My mother was… not a fan.), etc, etc, I could find some watered down equivalent in my own life. At the point when you mentioned feeling more like yourself alone in the woods, I muttered “Stop describing me…”
As I was writing this, it suddenly occurred to me that I have always resisted describing myself as a man, preferring terms like guy, dude, or fella. That seems rather interesting now…
To conclude my rambling here, I fully realize that nothing I felt or had happen to me compares with what you experienced, and in comparison, I lived a charmed life. I still feel more or less comfortable with the idea of being a cisgendered guy, but as I said, you have given me something to think about.