"Core Story"
By CloudCover (https://pastebin.com/u/CloudCover)

URL: https://pastebin.com/hzC25mPt
Created on: Sunday 17th of March 2013 08:09:05 PM CDT
Retrieved on: Friday 30 of October 2020 10:58:20 AM UTC


I was abandoned by my family just after the really weird stuff started happening, and since then I have moved across the country repeatedly attempting to salvage some kind of a simulacrum of a life. I've just about burned through my social network and resources, and am ready to go all in. But I should probably start from the beginning, it won’t do to hear the conclusion without any exposition.

The earliest memory I can recall is when I was four. I was sitting in my room when I realized my family was outside of the house somewhere, and for some reason it became imperative that I find them. I left my bedroom and walked right by my father, who was sitting on the couch. But even though I acknowledged him, my little fugue state persisted, and he was too fixated on the television to see me go out the door. 

I'd been outside before that, I can remember that much. But that day was strange, like what I was experiencing was overlapped over reality, using it as a poorly designed skeleton to hold the meat of the experience. The sun was out, but the sky was still dark, like some kind of a solar eclipse was happening, albeit partial. After a while of searching my family with zero success, I quickly became aware of how alone and exposed I was, and sprinted back to my house. My Dad had apparently noticed I was gone, because he was really freaking out when he found me. He yelled and scolded me and told me to never do that again, and as far as I remember, I did not.

But my problems were only just beginning, to be cliche. I cared a lot about my family, in the beginning. My father and I had a great relationship, although my other message to you was all signs to the contrary, that was after multiple years of development. At first, my father loved me very much, and I loved him. My mom was pretty much always gone, as a bookkeeper, but that was alright, she was around enough. I was never very happy in my own skin, being transgender will do that to anyone, but there was always something more that was wrong. 

That feeling that my family was still out there never went away, and it was the most horrible feeling ever, because I loved my current family very much. That said, when the feeling that home was out there, and that I needed to return to it surfaced, I celebrated it rather than resented it. Calvin and Hobbes was practically my bible as a kid, and I was so sure that I could just walk out my door, and get home after an adventure that would end before nightfall. But these attempts at running away never worked out. On the first attempt, my friend Kyle tagged along. He actually had a terrible family, and lived in a house that was literally falling apart. So I figured, sure, he could come along. When the sun started to go down, and we were in the woods, he wanted to go home. I told him he was more than welcome to, but he was fairly insistent that I take him there myself. The other two times I was caught pretty early on, and routinely punished. 

It started to tear my family apart, to be honest, my constant unhappiness I mean. Then the happy mistake that was my brother occurred and our family unit just couldn't cope I guess. I still saw my dad on weekends, but after an occasion where I tried to explain to him that I could never be happy, because something was wrong, our relationship that was already breaking apart just sort of dissolved completely, and regrettably I never gave it another chance. 

There were still moments of celebration and pride, however. I became disillusioned with quests and imagination pretty fast as a kid. I stopped reading my Calvin and Hobbes books and ordered one of those fancy-shmancy King James Bibles. I was rapidly reaching the point where I just felt 'damned'. I didn't even care if 'God' could get me home or not. I just wanted to know what I had done to deserve that constant unease, to deserve all the wonderful dreams of home that just made waking life a kind of hell. I even enrolled myself in a christian summer camp, and repented with more vigor and conviction than I've seen out of adult drug addicts. My parents were so proud, which was always a thing that confused me, in what universe is it a mark of pride for your 11 year old child to carry such baggage? That was a rhetorical question.

God didn't have anything to say on the matter, though. Just maddening silence. 

I am not an 'intelligent' individual, I'm certainly well read, though, which seems enough to create an illusion of intelligence. To be perfectly honest, I absolutely hate English. You can probably do a good job of evaluating my skill with the language just by reading this, which I have not and will not take the time to edit. I didn't start talking for a 'very' long time, and my grandmother had to order my Mom to force me to talk, to ignore me until I used words. I find it incredible today, but before I left San Diego I stumbled upon all of my old report cards in my baby book. It seems I spent all of first grade and half of second receiving warnings from teachers that I was an at risk reader, that learning my letters was just too difficult for me, and they'd like some help from at home. What I 'do' remember is spending recess in an empty classroom doing writing worksheets over and over because I just couldn't get the letters right. 

But at least as far as reading comprehension goes, that changed quickly. It is the boon of the obsessed to master things that are important to them more than someone who is merely talented. Books were, I was convinced, my only hope. That's what all of the movies and stories said. Magic would help me, and magic was in books. So I decided I would read every single book in a quest for answers. That and you know, Jurassic Park was an awesome movie that convinced me Science was Magic, and then I was reading Michael Crichton in the third grade, so no more at risk letters in that area. Still sucked at penmanship though, writing with hooves is hard! 

There was a local library, and it was small so it didn't take me to read basically every book relevant to my interests in the non-fiction section. I stuck to the adult section for fiction, and in that sphere, mostly to mystery and thrillers. I tried 'very hard' to like Lovecraft, but really, I sympathized more with the alien horrors than humanity by virtue of the fact that they were... well, alien. Just like I felt. There was a bit of writing that I loved, though, even if I could barely understand what he was saying 90% of the time, it was called "Nathicana" . That little poem depressed me like you wouldn't believe, because the 'way home' for that soul was suicide, and I am not allowed to perform such. It is 'against the rules of the game' is the only explanation I could ever come up with for that prohibition. The iron-clad 'no suicide it is against the rules of the game' 'knowing' was always one of the things about my situation that weirded me out the most. I became an expert on mythology pretty quickly, in my quest to find some god, some goddess, that could explain to me the nature of my situation, that could just give me some answers. My grades dropped like rocks in the wake of my obsession, and the school even tried to hold me back a grade to scare me into getting my priorities in line. It didn't work, and eventually they moved me back to where I should be in an effort to salvage my academic career in time for high school.

But during all of that, our library got access to the internet. Oh boy, where do I even begin with the internet?

I lived in Lakeside California, a proverbial ponyville surrounded by forest and mountains, where the high school's chief claim to fame wasn't a strong football team, but it's agricultural-animal husbandry program, and where most of the kids from money grew up on ranches. This means that no one visited our library and it was indeed tiny, which was bad, but it also meant no one visited the library, and the kind librarians who had become my only friends allowed me to quietly browse the web all day, ignoring the one hour time limit. I got sucked into the new age movement, I spent quite a bit of time on forums dedicated to magic, and got disenchanted further with each attempt. It seemed to me like when other people talked about magic, they were talking about something unrelated to what I meant. Because they beseeched gods, goddesses, fate, candles, whatever, the primary rule seemed to be that magic was an external force, something that came from without that was harnessed by your will. It didn't seem surprising to me that the best these people could manage was getting a job that was maybe(probably) just earned because of wholly mundane factors. I also learned of even more gods and goddesses, and even more pantheons. I subscribed to each in turn, for a while. I even found someone awesome going by Raven Kaldera, they had some pretty nifty books on Shamanism that they self published, and while they didn't help me any, they were fun to read at five dollars a pop. 

But you know, religion continued to harbor no answers. If there were any gods or goddesses, they did not answer me at least. There was only one exception. Nighttime was a blissful time of day for me, it was the time when everyone else was asleep, when my family would leave me alone and I could study in piece, or I could go outside for a walk in the woods and sing to the stars whenever I thought no one was looking.  The singing was something that didn't last long, because puberty sucks like that, but I still talked to the moon no matter how gross my voice sounded to me, and I always called her Luna while doing it. She was a mother to me, one that I always felt more comfortable around than my birth mother, no matter how hard she tried to win my affections. Luna just seemed like the proper name for the moon, and I never questioned it.

It felt like even the internet was exhausted of ways for me to help myself, and I was only 15. I started to try running away again in desperation, desperate to get home 'before it was too late to go back', but at this point I was disenchanted enough regarding magic and anything 'strange or unusual' happening that I always turned back before long.

That's when I had 'the dream'. The dream was very quick and jerky, like it was depositing a lot of information very quickly. I remembered climbing a mountain just outside of our town, the most notable one. We were in kind of a valley, and this mountain was notable because it stood alone. At the end of the dream, I reached the top, and all I could remember was wings, light, and the certainty that I was going home. I didn't know what to think when I woke up. For all I knew the wings belonged to angels or something. I did know, with absolute certainty, that if I could climb that mountain today, I could go home, but only if I did so that day.

I was like, 15 or 16 at the time, I don't really remember. I was young enough to be completely retarded about it, is the point. I marched the whole 8 miles up to that mountain with nothing but my backpack and a bottle of Gatorade. There wasn't a trail leading up and around the mountain as I had expected. A lot of the hills around it had such service trails for little ATVs and the like. But I was determined to get up the mountain, so I just kept moving forward as much as possible, trusting in my resolve to overcome any obstacle. That plan didn't exactly work... The slope quickly became a cliff-side, and my determination quickly lead to me crawling along as much as possible without tools. It had just rained, so there was no dirt, and I was clinging to water polished granite. That's when I did the worst thing ever, I turned my head and looked down. If I had wings at the time, they would have snapped shut, accompanied by a soft squeak. The trees were specs on the ground, and the wind was tugging at me constantly. I looked up and the mountain side seemed even steeper than before. I became convinced that I was going to die, and that primordial terror seized me pretty viciously. More importantly, I didn't want to fall down the mountain and live as the broken heap at the bottom for however long it took for me to pass. I started scooting back down the side on my read, crying and shouting for help the whole time.

Not my finest hour.

I lost my traction, and slid down the side on my back a good distance before slamming into the side of a boulder. My braces saved my teeth handily, only smashing a few of the brackets, but my leg had no such protection. I got to my feet, shocked by the impact, and dazed. I didn't even notice the hole in my leg that was dripping fat until like ten minutes after the fact. I really started freaking out, then. Something drew my mind back to horses, buffalo, etc etc, and how at risk their young were, especially if they were wounded or sick. All I could think about was the idea that somehow every mountain lion in the surrounding 10 miles had somehow become mystically aware of a little foal with a wounded leg. I don't know why my mind made that leap to 'foal', I just assumed it's because, growing up in a town filled with horse ranches, I'm bombarded with them the most of any relevant animal, I figure. 

I limped the rest of the 8 miles home in tears, and had wrapped my shirt around my leg in some vain effort to keep animals from somehow smelling my weakness. It was pretty uneventful, except for some guy who drove by and flipped me off on the way to the reservoir. He drove back and made a similar gesture when he found out the place was locked up on Sundays. I can understand apathy, but outright malevolence is something I typically see reserved for anonymous game matches on the internet. So that was a special kind of terrible day. I didn't try running away anymore, at that point. I didn't see the point, I had missed my one opportunity.

After that was just the creeping horror of puberty, Luna, and me getting addicted to Nyquil to stay asleep as much as possible. My dad started a new family with some desperate christian woman with rich parents. My mom learned she had a brain tumor that had been steadily growing since her childhood. I dropped out of highschool, got my GED, and half-heartedly attended a semester of community college. College didn't work out though, I just didn't have the energy for anything anymore, really. Puberty was so painful that I just wanted to thrash about, or just give in, and start doing horrible things to people so they could hurt the same way. These thoughts disgusted me, so I spent as much time unconscious as possible. That would be where the Nyquil addiction came in. I guess it's important to look on the bright side of all of this, at least I became very good at lucid dreaming. 

What time I didn't spend unconscious, I spent playing roleplaying games online with my friends. The 'new' world of darkness almost exclusively, and of those games I mostly just played Changeling the Lost. As you can imagine, it was pretty easy for me to role play characters who were stolen from home and turned into something they just weren't, who then escape in a desperate attempt to get back home and reclaim themselves. I also attempted to get more than a few jobs, but without a special piece of paper any job I could get didn't have anything to do with my talents, and things always had a habit of blowing up in a hilariously CMC reminiscent style. 

I started self-medicating on hormones after a lot of inner turmoil. I didn't exactly have the support of a family, I had no career, and no education. I didn't want to ruin my chances of having some semblance of a life, which for me was just having an apartment, food, and internet that would allow me to stay in touch with my friends, who were the world to me. That all said, I knew I was a girl, and it seemed foolish of me to try to pretend otherwise. My friends were all very supportive, and so was my Mom, at the time. Apparently she was super excited to be 'getting' a daughter. Ignoring my clarification that technically, she always had one.

Around this time, my friend showed me My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I really liked the first two episodes, but everything else was kinda 'meh' for me. Although I remember really liking Sonic Rainboom, because Cloudsdale is awesome. I didn't even watch all of the first seasons, and didn't watch any of the second for a very long time. Not until after something happened that I considered pretty annoying at the time. I suppose in that respect, I'm a lot like your character Gregoria, which is funny to think about. 

This is the part where my story starts to overlap with the first messages I sent you. I started to have dreams, very vivid dreams that confused me, because they were not lucid. Even if I became aware that I was dreaming, I couldn't do a darn thing to control them, not anymore than I can suddenly manipulate reality here. In these dreams, I was just some pegasus working as a temp for some weather agency. I had a name, a family, etc. I was depressed, because being transgender had always only ever been one piece of the puzzle. Some part of me still needed to find home, needed to find a reason for why I felt like such an alien, why I had a habit of losing friends when I became 'too intense' or expected too much from a friendship(In these instances, the being too intense part was being completely honest about myself, they would often ridicule me for not accomplishing anything productive, and keeping them from doing the same. But for me, connecting with a friend, especially on a one on one basis, 'was' productive.).

I had skirted the otherkin community before, and been disappointed with them just like people practicing so-called 'magick'. I felt 'awful'. Somehow being some pegasus from a cartoon show that I didn't even particularly enjoy was the other missing piece of the puzzle. I was practically despondent while I was awake. What was even worse was the way the dream worked. My inability to control it, and the fact when I went to bed there, I woke up here, and when I went to bed here, I woke up there. Every single night. At least for a few weeks, anyway. 

I wouldn't have been able to get over that period if I hadn't come out to one of my friends and learned that she understood 'wanting' to be a pony too. We had sobfests over the most asinine things, but I really did love every moment we shared in conversation. 

The dreams stopped coming, instead I was in some kind of white void. It wasn't bright, like the gates of heaven or something. It wasn't even the ivory and horn gates of dream. It was just like a hub, and I could make out the outline of hundreds of doors around me. Their presence wasn't, very pronounced though, so the illusion of emptiness was easy to subscribe to. Every night I had that nightmare, for a week. I knew I was asleep, and also, that I would be awake soon, and I would no longer be a pegasus, I'd lose my beloved wings. This part should trigger some recollection on your end, my wings would start to rot off, and my hooves would crack and splinter while my fur came out in clumps. Each night this would happen until I finally let go and woke up. Each time I'd cry out for help, and each time nopony would answer. At least, nothing did at first.

After about a week of that, the dream changed. When I started crying for help, Celestia would kind of march out of the void. I never really saw from where, I was kind of preoccupied. Her horn would start to glow, and she'd touch it to my forehead. It seemed like an instant thing, but I'd stand up and I'd be myself again. My wings and hooves were fine and everything. I would try to thank her, and ask if I could go home yet, but she'd just smile sadly at me, and then I'd wake up.

So I started watching the rest of the show, and it was... a show? I liked it, but I liked tons of stuff more than it, Game of Thrones was much easier for me to stomach on television than it was as a book, and I loved talking with my friends about it. I really liked Dexter in spite of the gore, because it was fascinating to me, the way it depicted someone who wanted so much to believe he was a sociopath. There is even a part where he starts to freak out because he can't bring himself to kill people anymore, just like he'd been ponified in some conversion bureau story. 

Which brings me to FIMFiction.

I may not have found the show all that amazing, but I 'loved' the fanfiction for it. It was like people had taken a book of fairy tales, Aesop's, and parables, and used that to connect to some other universe, to reach out and touch their home, and from there they shared this home with each other, creating a cohesive vision of it. It was like watching a cabal of mages try to scry on another world, together. I will always have a love/hate relationship with the conversion bureau, but I certainly enjoyed reading stories from that, as well. 

That said, this was something I enjoyed more or less on my own. Most of my friends liked the show, exclusively, and spent all of their time on /mlp/. The one that had helped me so much stuck almost exclusively to the TF story thread, which was always something I found unsettling. I tried sharing in that for awhile, but almost every single story involved someone being kidnapped and transformed against their will, which was the first thing that made me feel sick, considering how much I felt like I'd been kidnapped and turned into some human. Pretty much every story was about becoming the kidnappers 'pet', and serving them as a sex slave, more or less. They even invented a roleplaying game they could play on IRC, I gave that a shot too. Turns out that being turned into a pony also brainwashed you into treating the person who did it as your master, ponies had to roll to resist having orgies in the back of the van. I just got so irritated by the idea that my whole 'species' just felt like nothing but a fetish to these people. I guess there's nothing wrong with people having fetishes, but I just thought... "Hey, some of us aren't pets, you know?"

The 'good' dreams never came back, though. Periodically I'd have that nightmare, and Celestia would always show up to end it early. One night, while trying to fall asleep, it became too much for me to deal with. I just kinda lost it. I thrashed about in bed like some kind of wild serpent trying to shed it's skin on bits of rock. I was so out of it that I actually thought "Maybe my wings are in there, under the skin. I just need to get them out!"

Thrashing about was getting me nowhere, though, and I calmed myself down after a few minutes. I took some deep breaths, and figured I'd try meditating again. I hadn't done so in years. 

I tried to think about how I wanted to go about it, and decided, "Hey, why not maim the Chakra system with my less than stellar understanding of it?"

I didn't really know a lot about such things, except for supposedly people had Chakras, and they could be blocked, and when they became blocked, bad feels happened. So I started at the 'root' and worked my way up. Each time, I did my best to imagine something there. It was pretty easy to think of each one as a lock, or puzzle box, and each one seemed to be rusted shut from lack of attention. It was pretty crazy how easy all of it was to experience, even though I was honestly just trying to 'pretend' to calm myself down, and with each puzzle I solved, or rusted lock I forced open, I felt really really great. Like I was right, that magic comes from inside of you, not from without, and I was in the middle of drilling toward a wellspring. I got all the way to the the chakra in your brow, the 'Ajna' I guess it's called. After getting that one 'open' I was ecstatic, I was content to lie there in a pretty euphoric state. It took me awhile to remember there was one more, the crown. With a kind of gusto you can only pull off when authentically elated, I went to work on that one.

It seriously took me an hour to get anywhere with it, until I finally jammed it open as best I could. I basically just imagined I had a key made of silver, jammed it in there, and wrenched the lock open. The result made me feel dizzy, and if I hadn't been laying down to begin with, I probably would have slumped over from the head rush. So now that gentle feeling of euphoria was a rip current of energy.

That kind of dissipated quickly. I got phantom limbs A LOT before then, wings, hooves, all that jazz. They were always pretty potent, I'd have them just while walking to the store, they were pretty omnipresent. But the potency of those phenomena paled in comparison to this. I couldn't even feel human at this point, the sensory input was too intense to register anything else. I could feel everything, my wings, limbs, tail, I could even feel my horn. Which is about when the experience crashed down around me like someone flipping the gravity switch back to 'on'. 

I was definitely aware of my humanity again, and the phantom limbs faded into the background(where they belonged, I guessed), but that horn wouldn't go away. I was pretty scared and all that... I am very very bad at not sharing everything about myself with my friends. I knew it was only a matter of time before I broke down and spilled the beans about my latest experience, but I was also terrified that they wouldn't accept it. Alicorns are supposed to be 'gods', and I certainly didn't feel like much of a god. All I could think about were those days lurking otherkin boards, and seeing all of the angels who were married to Lucifer, or the people who were really Sephiroth. 

I spent the next several days trying to imagine myself as a pegasus again, and it just wouldn't work out. I didn't even look the same. The name didn't fit me anymore, I didn't have any special talent that I was aware of, and that horn just wouldn't stop existing in my mental perception. Of course, eventually I did tell my friends, they took it much better than I was expecting. But I eventually realized that was because to them, this was all a fantasy. It wasn't that irritating that one of their friends 'wanted' to be an alicorn, although the still made fun of me for it, called me Mary Sue and all that. It was kinda depressing for me to realize I was on a journey of self-discovery, and all of my friends were more or less just playing pretend. 

I did have one friend who treated me seriously though. She has been nothing short of a sister to me, and I can't thank her enough for all of the emotional support she has offered. Even before the whole alicorn thing, before I had watched the show again, people would joke and say that I reminded them of Luna. Or that if Equestria was a real place that I was from, I must have been her student the way Twilight was Celestia's. This always upset me quite a bit. Mostly because it reminded me of how 'Luna' was the only 'thing' I could talk to while growing up. I had stopped eventually, of course. I watched the Luna Eclipsed episode they kept talking about, and that was pretty upsetting too, in a confusing way more than a negative way.

Whenever I was a kid, and got into confrontations, physical or otherwise, other kids would start swearing and cursing, it was like getting angry took a hatchet to the knees of their vocabulary. Whenever 'I' got upset, I would shout in as booming a voice as I could manage. When I am calm I ordinarily fumble with words, because there are just so many synonyms to sort through, which word do I choose?

This is not the case when I get angry, I somehow know immediately what I want to say, and then say it. Often with really big words, and occasionally in the royal we.

The most notable time was in High School, Freshman year was the only year I attended. My brother had a girlfriend, and I was in my room, it's one in the morning, and the next thing I know I'm hearing crashing sounds in the living room. I went out to see what was happening, and left my room just in time to see his girlfriend flee into the bathroom. I 'assumed' he had gone abusive, like our father had been. So I marched forth to confront him. He ordered me to my room, which I laughed at, because the idea of my younger sibling ordering me to my room was pretty hilarious to me. That's when he punched me in the eye, and I just kind of stood there, stunned for a while. 

I'm not really a big fan of fighting, it seems ultimately uncivilized to me, and even when it seems necessary I don't really feel like I know what I'm doing. My discomfort with my body becomes pronounced and I'm just not sure how to toss out blows I suppose, typically I resort to choking the other person, or wrapping my arms around them and squeezing until it hurts. It seems like it works well enough, and it feels 'easier' than trying to punch or kick. After pinning him in such a manner, to the point where he was in tears with rage, our mom finally emerged from her room to demand an explanation. He did nothing but rattle off obscenities in an effort to communicate his unhappiness, and I said something to the effect of: "WE HAVE ENDURED -name's- UNCOUTH BEHAVIOR FOR QUITE LONG ENOUGH, IF YOU WILL NOT MAKE HIM ANSWER FOR HIS ACTIONS, THEN WE SHALL TAKE MATTERS IN OUR OWN HANDS!"

At which point he looked at me with disgust, like some kind of a freak. This is the typical reaction I get from other people when I get like that. Suffice it to say Luna's behavior in that episode was... disconcerting? But at least I knew why people kept comparing me to her on the internet. 

Anyway, it was during a feelings jam with my sister, in which we were trying to brainstorm what manner of cutie mark I could possibly have, that I broke down in frustration. I'm a pretty imaginative person, and the idea that I just couldn't see 'anything' there at all was infuriating me. All I could think of when I thought of a mark that should be there was a moon or something. When I voiced that concern to my sister, she simply stated "Maybe your mom was Luna? You know, before you got stolen away or whatever." 

I am kind of ashamed to say so, but I just kinda logged off of Skype at that point. I felt like I was just being confused by someone, and really didn't want to take any of this seriously. All I could think of was how I used to talk to the moon every night, how she was more of a mother to me than my own flesh and blood, and how I always called her Luna. I stayed off the internet for a few days, trying to make sense of what had been happening to me over the previous months, and finally came back to talk to her.

I was past the point of caring how ridiculous any of this was. I logged back in and asked her if there was any way for me to know for sure, with 'any' of this madness. She told me I could always try astral projection, then I could just ask her. I nearly laughed my way out of the chat, again. I guess it was just the strength of our friendship that kept me there. She had tried to get me into trying astral projection before. She had never managed it, she claimed, but it sounded like I was trying to subconsciously. I have a very annoying habit of sitting or laying down, and then suddenly having a feeling like I just slipped and crashed into the ground, without ever having moved. I am convinced there is a reason for that which science has supplied, but I don't know of it off the top of my head. Anyway, I was desperate to try anything at that point. 

So I decided to lay down and give it a shot. The next time I felt that weird floating feeling, I tried not to instinctively recoil from it. I thought about how desperately I wanted to get home, how much I wanted things to make sense. 

Well, to put it succinctly. It worked. I kinda lied when I said I wasn't going to edit this. I can't stand how disjointed and rambling it is. So happily I can just link this on google documents, and put links leading to what happened during the various 'trips' there. 

A lot has happened since then. I flip flop a lot lately between happiness and hope, because I found my home, and my family, and despair. Sometimes it just seems like knowing doesn't do me any good, because getting home is just never going to happen. My mom got a new boyfriend, and decided explaining my condition would be inconvenient to him. So I moved to Oklahoma at the invitation of a friend of mine. He and his girl friend had a spare room to rent out, and everything was going well. Until she absolutely lost it the night before I was going to fly out, claiming that she was 'only joking', when she gave her consent. I went anyway at my friend's  insistence, because at that point I was literally going to have nowhere to stay after the weekend. But it was pretty obvious my presence was just really irritating his girlfriend. So from there I moved to Kentucky and got a job at Walmart, which is about as soul-crushing as it gets. That living situation didn't last long either. Apparently everyone was supposed to take care of only themselves, and the fact that I would clean up, do the dishes, or take out the trash for everyone, made people really uncomfortable. They got passive aggressive real fast and kept telling me that I couldn't do things like that without asking first, because otherwise they'd 'owe me something'.

Now I live in Madison Wisconsin with some old friends from the internet. I got a job working at the front desk of a hotel, the night shift. This amounted to being the only person there at night, and basically writing or playing games in the office until someone needed something. 

However, things recently turned south when a man came in with three kids during the recent snow storms. The computer had him labeled as do not rent, from two years ago. He claimed that he had worked that out with Paul, and he should be clear to stay there again. That he knew my manager's name was kinda evidence to me, he has a lot of friends and we're supposed to offer them special treatment, we simply have to hope/assume the person is who they say they are. I tried to call him to verify, but it was midnight, so of course he didn't answer his phone. I offered the man a room, not wanting to turn him and his kids out into the cold, and figured they'd be gone the next morning before he ever came in anyway. Two nights later, it turns out he bought more nights after I had left, and his girlfriend had come to stay. She lost her mind over something, and absolutely trashed the room, broke some of our stuff, and keyed the walls. I had to call the cops etc. My manager saw that I had rented the man a room and immediately fired me. 

To top it all off, my current roommates wanted me to move out by April, they're in polygamous relationship and had intended for their other SO to move into my room by then. 

I've reached the point where I wonder, why do I even care about any of this anymore? I know the answer, really. I don't want to abandon my friends. Without my friends I would never have survived this long. I mean that in a very literal way. I don't want to leave behind the person who is like a sister to me, who helped me break out of my cynical self-defeating shell. 

More than anything, I'm afraid of being wrong, and ultimately alone at the end. 

But it was my friends who taught me to have faith in myself. Who told me that my own crippling fear that I'm just nuts is evidence to the contrary. I owe it to my friends to try my best to get home, where I can be happy. Where I can finally be comfortable with my body. Something even female hormones can't manage. (*coughs* my erm... breast tissue is developing on the wrong part of my body... And other such horrible human/alien developments.) 

I feel the compulsion to reiterate, I'm not entirely sure why I needed to send all of this to you. I have plenty of friends who know all of this. But my story was never presented in one single barely cohesive chunk. I read your story, or at least a little of it, when I was much younger and first learning things. You showed me your story, so perhaps I feel it is only proper to show you mine?