CaptainCaption Health Update

Source: Caithiel, referencing Melonenbrot on tumblr

I swear I don't commission these or ask Cai to draw them; he's just based and does it on his own. I'm still not sure if I've become a mascot or not, but transposing one's creative identity onto an "authorial persona" seems to carry that risk and I've already resigned myself to some degree of being an unintentional chuuni.

So, I'm still not 100%. Mono aside (which seems to be starting to go over the over the hill after a rebound last month from hormonal bullshit), rough shit's been going on with my mental health. I blog way too fucking much on these posts (to say nothing of the Author's Notes), but broadly, being genderfluid still sucks, I'm having dissociative episodes, my OCD has been on a resurgence, and the, uh, "moon sickness" has gotten quite a bit more intense.

A fair bit of this can be explained by my endocrinologist giving me progesterone to try and get my slipping estrogen levels and runaway testosterone levels under control (53.5 pg/mL of e and 547 ng/dL is awful, especially when I'm about 22 months into the HRT I can't get off of because life is a fucking nightmare of my partial making).

I'm very much not interested in socially transitioning, and even more so now that the unclothed wannabee emperor is going back to Washington to turn the next four years into political theater that is exhausting yet necessary to keep up with because I'm legitimately convinced I'm gonna be fucking dead if a HRT ban happens and I'm not able to get an exception from a gender dysphoria diagnosis or my CBS need case and I don't have a stockpile to rely on; I'm not a "death before detransition" advocate, but I am sympathetic beyond what my words could ever convey for those of you in that camp and I'm hoping incompetency once again proves to be the enemy of maliciousness.

Despite the "risks" that come from getting on progesterone in America as the calendar year prepares to change to 2025 (I'm already feeling some growing pains again and I did not miss their absence), these dogshit hormone levels were something I needed to fix sooner rather than later as it was something negatively affecting my neurological health. That medication chance has been doing its job on that front as I have more hand coordination and less right arm pain than I've had in at least three years, but it's come with a fair bit of moodiness and the better antidepressants I've been on for about three months have had their work cut out for them compensating for this.

In the future, I'm going to try much harder to be quieter on my health issues as I do regret how much I've overshared my plethora of very private health and life details even if to some degree that paratextual context enriches the overall story I tell with its own stories of how and why it's made the way it is. But like, c'mon, I'm my own character study of a concept of person and the genderfluid writer of a gender bender visual novel getting on "the dumb horny bitch juice" hormone is a development I find fascinating for how it will affect the development of that weird story about gender.

But in all seriousness, I will be doing as much as I can to stay aware of this "second puberty" getting a turbocharger as it applies to my mental and physical health and will reevaluate my prescriptions as needed, because I'm not an authorial persona, or a mascot, or unintentional chuuni, or a character study, or a concept of a person, or a deconstructive gender psychoanalysis, or a quasi-journalist ghost writer who feels like they're chasing the scoop of a lifetime, or a tragic autobiographier, or a tortured artist, or a performative act, or a comedy routine, or a drama queen, or a gossip girl, or a diva writer with a rock star ego, or "the Hideo Kojima of gender bender visual novels (not because I am a widely-respected and innovative developer, but because I desperately need someone like a producer around to tell me "no" and reign me in when I go off the creative rails with an absurd attention to detail)," or a medical specimen, or a mad scientist, or a volunteer guinea pig, or really anyone but myself. No facetious "Sam-I-Am" lines, no hot redheaded anime women disguise to hide behind. Just me, and if I want even a snowball's chance in Hell to find out more about who that person is and be able to look myself in the mirror without flinching from mental whiplash, I've got to take myself seriously and get real. As I so often and worryingly forget, I'm a real person, one just as real as you, and one who needs to stop treating myself and my existence with indifference because every indication I have is that this life is the one and only chance of being alive I'll ever have yet I've started to take that life for granted.

But for now, I'm considering the tradeoff with this medication of stronger and diversified emotions for much greater overall functioning to be worth it.

And no, those changes with my mental health issues I've mentioned in this update predate this medication change. I've only been on the progesterone for about a week and a half and haven't noticed it affecting me in such a drastic way, and I'm attributing the mental health shit to being stuck in bed with so little to do as I run out of energy in a few hours. Introspection is healthy, but not at the levels that this OCD/ADHD/SAD/OSDD worrywart has been having. Rumination is an ouroboros that consumes itself, and I'm clearly in need of a snapping myself out of this stressful rut of going in circles and going nowhere.

...

I was gonna write some cringe pun here related to the "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" aphorism as it relates to gender and how I treat my work almost as play, but I need to learn to not do crap like that and force a bad idea through as if a clever-enough execution will excuse it. I'm desperate to appear witty, but I'm not that desperate.

Anyways, the point I am trying to make is that despite still being a mess of a person and still being at least somewhat sick with the mono and will need more time to truly shake it, I've been going fucking crazy from stepping away from making this visual noel for this long, so come Saturday (as I have some errands tomorrow), I'm getting my ass back to work.

I'm still only able to spend at most 12 hours out of bed at a time without collapsing into exhaustion unless I shove a full pot of dark roast black coffee into me, so a few of the first days back are going to be dedicated to artist design documents I'm late on and a few other smaller-scale tasks, but I'm itching to write so badly that I've even started to get artsy-fartsy with my private journaling to keep tabs on my mental state and find what makes those different sides of me and the all of me truly tick. It's partly that I am always my own audience that I am desperately trying to impress and partly the joyful regainment of enough of my mental faculties to enjoy playing with my returned but misdirected creativity and writing skills that I reveled in it.

To that end of getting back to writing the current pending update to Keisuke's route, I did my long-overdue yearly re:Read of re:Dreamer on my Android and came away pumped to keep what I saw going.

I reread the entire route, and it's clear how much better the newer writing is than a lot of the Day 3 stuff.

I think my dying primary monitor's color correction is fucked, but ignoring how that desaturated these screenshots, I really try to stay humble about my writing abilities as I see any creative developing an ego is a gateway to a boorish dismissal of feedback, arrogant overconfidence in what you're cooking up even when it doesn't have that kick to it, and just a general holier-than-thou attitude of getting high on your own fumes, but if I can break that modesty for a minute...

I am fucking GOOD at what I do for a job, I like doing this job, and I am goddamned proud of how much and how often this dumb gender bender visual novel I make with focused seriousness, obsessive perfectionism, flippant sardonicism, and oblivious self-awareness has affected its readers on a deeply personal level, even if I still don't understand how I got here and I constantly doubt myself despite my awkward attempts at boasting.

Honestly, I didn't know how to end this post, so I started adding a bunch of "I-am-a-clever-writer-wow-look-upon-my-skill-and-be-awed" to it before I realized over three hours later what I was doing. I might be a lot more cringe and even pretentious than I'm comfortable realizing, but if I'm able to slip into that impassioned writing fugue state/flow state hybrid again, it's a good sign that I'm well and ready to channel that energy back into re:Dreamer.