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2025-11-29T00:00:00Z

The Year Of 2024

2024-12-31T00:00:00Z

This year, 2024, has been incredible - it started with the darkest period of my life and has ended with the brightest. The contrast is really something.

The lead-up to 2024 was really really hard. Every single day during 2023, all 365 of them, was a struggle. I had to convince myself to get up each day, and then persuade myself to not do anything self destructive - every…single…day. That struggle - it had started years earlier - became more and more unbearable as I moved into 2024. One way or another it was going to end.

In December of 2023 the first part of my life ended. The second part didn't start until April of 2024. Those few months in the middle were…intense. There was so much thinking. I'd never done that much thinking…that much self-reflection.

As I entered 2024 I was in a state of mental breakdown. I was completely broken. Some of you noticed this. I saw many concerned looks and a few of you reached out asking if I was okay. I was not okay. But it was a 'not okay' that no one could help me with. My therapist did help guide me through it all. But it really was an internal thing. Painfully so. I don't think there are many external answers to existential questions.

On 15 April I accepted what had to happen. I accepted myself. Some transgender people speak of a day of acceptance. The day when they accepted that…yeah…they are trans. 15 April 2024 is that day for me. In December of 2023 my 'guy simulation' broke down - you knew him as 'Audin'. And, after four months of agonizing about what to do about that, in April of 2024 I accepted that I could no longer keep up the act. 47 years was too many. That part of me had died. I was no longer able to make him happen. I could no longer face the world as him. I had to start being me. The actual me. The me that I buried 35+ years ago. I could either be me or I could just stop existing. And after four months of thinking I decided against the 'stop' approach. (That was not an easy decision, given how fucked up our society is…)

And as a consequence on 25 April 2024 the most amazing thing happened to me. What happened was entirely silly. I put a little piece of plastic sticky tape on my thigh. That's all. But that piece of tape flooded my body with a new hormone. It wasn't a lot of Estrogen, in the whole scheme of things, but it was more than had ever been there before. And about 11 hours later I…felt better. I actively felt better. And after some adjustments - okay..quite a bit of adjustment…my e2 level today is about 5x what it was in April.. - I feel like a whole new person. Where before there was this constant fizz in my head, and an overwhelming existential dread that permeated everything every single minute, now I feel an almost otherworldly peace. I keep smiling. And I can't really understand why. I'm just…happy now. I'm not like laughing and hooting and hollering all the time. But my resting state is no longer one of depression and near-suicidality. And it's not the numb state of an SSRI either (which I'm also familiar with). Now it's one of (i think) a normal 'ho hum, but things will be okay sort of thing. I don't constantly have to work to distract myself from the horror of my existence. I can sit back and just exist in a reasonably happy state. It's…it's really really weird. And shockingly nice.

So that's where I sit today, at the end of December 2024. Of course a huge amount of stuff is still wrong. This body I inhibit is still completely fucking wrong. And I still suffer from dysphoria almost constantly. But that is changing…and for the first time I'm actively working to change it. But there are so many little things. I pretty much have to learn how to live life completely differently. But I'm learning. And my body is changing. Both under its own power and externally. 2024 was a year of acceptance followed by small mental and hormone driven changes. 2024 was the start of my transition. The start of my new life. 2025 is starting with a bit of a bang with my first surgical change. And I cannot wait! It's a small one. But it is another (very) concrete step in the new direction. The right direction.

So, I enter 2025 full of hope for this new direction in my life. I know there will be challenges and setbacks (the new administration will actively try to kill me, yay!) but I'm prepared to face them and move forward. There is no other choice. For the first time in my entire life I step into a new year for myself…my real, actual, self. Not the mask, not the simulation, not the act. For me. The real me. Audin stumbled into 2024. I, Kiera, deliberately step into 2025.

Happy New Year! I hope it is reasonably decent. For me it will at least be better than last year.

(Most of you reading this know at least roughly what's happened to me over 2024. A few of you are new. Um…surprise? Welcome into the circle. I'm sorry to spring this on you! But I'm also extremely happy to be able to share it at all. I'm at the beginning of building a new person and it is a magical feeling that I can't help but let it out. But sadly our society largely sucks. So this is all still a bit of a secret. So please use discretion should you need to share it with someone.)

Ramifications of a simple hand injury

2024-12-26T00:00:00Z

So. I hurt my hand. It hurt. It delayed my holiday project. Big deal, right?

Yeah. I turned out to be a very big deal. Something dramatic happened. I don't know if it was just the hand injury, or the gradual built up of pressure over the preceeding 10 years, or the fear that many of my hobbies were going to become very hard to do or possibly impossible. But I freaked out. Outwardly I think I was mostly visually okay for a couple months - turns out I am a surprisingly good actor. But inwardly…I was seriously fucked up. I stopped listening to music. I stopped listening to podcasts. I stopped watching youtube (I should calculate how much!). Up until this point my life had always been accompnied by a soundtrack of some for or other. But in December of 2023...my life went silent. Deafeningly silent.

I just couldn't stop thinking about how unhappy I was. I coulnd't stop thinking about how awful my life was...about how everything was just so incredibly wrong. Everything just sucked. I knew what was wrong. I'd known for years what the problem was. But I also knew that there was no solution. I knew I just had to tough it out and cope.

Every single morning I woke up and argued with myself about how I really did need to get up...how I really must keep going...how there were people who depended on me to keep going...people who would be immensely sad if I didn't keep going. Some mornings I simply kept going because I felt it would somehow be more effort to not do so. Every once in a while...maybe 5% of the time...I would get up because I Was genuinly interested in something. Go figure.

For years this had worked. My mom - she'd be terribly sad if I didn't keep going. My cat, Sigrun - who'd care for her if I didn't keep going? But. Living for other people...there's a flaw there. What happens when those people go away? Mom died. Then Sigrun died. Oh shit.

In Decemeber 2023 I was left without my physical hobbies as a destrction...as something to occupy myself. And suddenly I couldn't stop thinking about how awful my life was. Years prior I had figured out what my underlying issue was. But knowing that didn't help as the solution was just...impossible. So for years that knowledge simply ate away at my soul. I knew with certainty what the problem was. And I knew with just as much certainty that there was no solution to that problem.

And that state of being sucks. And a person can only survive so long like that. In December 2023 I could no longer do it. I cracked.

In December of 2023 my egg cracked. I admitted I was trans. I'd known I was trans for a long time. But I finally admitted it. I still could not see any solution. I could not see a way forward from that pit of dispair. But for the first time I accepted what my problem was.

And, the other huge thing I accepted was an undertanding of how many more years of coping I had left. I realised just how tenuous my grasp on life was - how it would be the loss of just one or two more anchors (people who depended on me) before I would truly be done. My sister? My dad? I'd survived my mom and my cat a few years prior. Noe life was much worse. Could I survive the loss of another? I could suddenly see the end of the road. And it was not at all far away.

Life was so unhappy, so uncomfortable, so unfulfilling.

In December of 2023 my life as Audin ended. Inwardly my whole life imploded. Its two years on now and I still cry about it whenever I ponder it too deeply. Outwardly it was a couple months more before the cracks really started to show. I'd been an actor for 35 years. It wasn't that hard to quickly construct a new act to sort of keep going for a month or two. But that new act was very short lived. She was not stabe.

December 16 2023 was the beginning of the end for Audin. He was done. He didn't give up right away, but he was done really fighting. 47 years was enough. Life was just going to get worse and worse. There was only one path that could possibly lead to anything better. But it was too scary to jump into.

The Incident

2024-12-16T00:00:00Z

This was the second major demolition day at the beginning of my Sauna project. The sauna resides in the same spot that used to house the hot tub. A few months prior I removed some of the deck that surrounded the tub, and then I hired a small company to come out and remove the tub itself. I had thought about doing that part myself, probably by cutting it up. But I decided to hire someone. They also ended up cutting the thing up and carting it away in a big open top truck.

Shortly after that I deconstructed the 'walkway' part of the deck behind the tub. Then I was ready to deconstruct the lower deck the tub used to sit on.

This turned out to be difficult. Few of the screws would come out of the lower deck boards. I think maybe 10% of them would move, and that only with a LOT of hammering with the impact driver. So I had to get more creative. The boards were pressure treated 2x6's, 9 feet (i think) long. So I did some 'horizontal' cuts to shorten them a bit, and then tried to pry them out with a crowbar. This sort of worked, but was very hard. The boards were still very solid. I did a few this way.

But prying up the whole 6" wide boards was very hard. So I decided to cut them down their length. I took a circular saw (the one that belongs to Jason) and ran it down the center of each board. There were 13 boards. As mentioned, they were roughly 9 feet long. It was cold and wet so I was trying not to crawl on my hands and knees. And that saw is not an 'inline' one, so I had to constantly push it back onto center. I came up with a technique where I hooked my thumb around the handle and pushed the saw forward while pulling back with my thumb. This worked well. But, this was a mistake.

I made all the cuts in rapid succession. And I think I noticed my hand hurting after that, but not dramatically? I pried up some more of the now-half-width boards, and that worked much better. But my hand started to hurt quite a lot, so I stopped for the day. I don't remember the timing, but the last photo from that day was at 3:20pm.

The next day my hand wasn't horrible. So I took some drugs and continued the project. I mostly finished the demo on the 17th. And on the 18th I went to collect materials. By the 20th the demo was fully complete.

And then I had to stop. My hand was just too painful. On December 22 I talked to a dr over telehealth about it. She indicated it was most likely a stretched tendon (this doesn't seem to have been the case) and said I should be nice to it for a few weeks. So I stopped the project.

In the days that followed I would learn that this small injury, to my hand of all things, would end up undermining the structure of my whole life. Not for any physical reason. Purely a mental one.

The Back Story

1976-06-06T00:00:00Z

Hi.

I'm Kiera. This is a blog about my life. I'm thinking of formatting it a littly strangely. The entries have dates. And sometimes those dates are in the past. So I'm thinking I will just back-date them. This may make finding new entries interesting. But...oh well.