The Bussy Beat: These boots weren’t made for accountability
Now that further aging myself is off the table, I’ll share a tip: Don’t begin your day with introspection. I find that the best in preventing a mass of crippling anxiety by noon, is to just completely ignore any active problem in your life, until it (often literally) hits you in the eye, much like scrolling the internet pre-2012 and getting hit with a Best Gore image or some other viral dismemberment pic that sits with you for ten years until you bring it up in therapy. I like to be unprepared, and live chaotic. Thinking? Self reflection? That’s for emotionally healthy people who have never contemplated sticking their hand down the garbage disposal.
I’m at a place right now that, in part, is my own doing, and the other is maybe coincidental. But to write is to reflect in a manner I would never verbalize, because it is far too embarrassing. In an attempt to recapture the spirit of youth, and lean into the beginning of the end of not being quarantined, my cousin decided to have some kind of house party; I greatly enjoy the first half of house parties, because I can float around from group to group, monopolizing attention in small amounts from people without them being exasperated, using the same jokes on different people and pretending I have the kind of personality that isn’t just unstimulated from not being talked about.
That’s the first half, folks. Like any event I find myself at, the night always dwindles, and despite my attempts to not give into my inner femcel yearnings, I always feel… slightly alienated. Everyone seems to pair up, and as my ability to keep myself entertained by the masses departing or finding something to do with their partners, I become painfully aware of my inability to communicate with people in a genuine way that doesn’t leave me feeling vulnerable and sick: in any scenario where I feel uncomfortable, I retreat into my phone, and my safety net of horny caucasian men who are at least two inches taller than I.
I had learned the uncomfortable feeling of being a MILF at 28 (really, that’s the standard? A MILF should at least be 35) so… now it was time to recapture a feeling of youth. A huge part of my experiences as a young trans person attempting to navigate a world where validation came at the cost of being sexualized and then discarded by men unable to confront their own sexual desires was spending a lot of time in the bedrooms of older men. Some of them immediately wanting to pretend they had done nothing after covering me in enough DNA to frame them for a murder, and some after attempting to groom me for a few weeks before getting annoyed with my trauma induced personality defects. I had strayed away from such things, including but not limited to married men, after one man’s wife sought me out to message me about the collection of my nudes he had saved to his computer: a more than awkward enough situation to scare me off from that… mostly.
So, throwing caution and past experiences to the wind, I felt that I, a 28-year-old, could not be groomed by a 38-year-old. A weird gap, sure, but maybe the dick would be okay? Experience had to count for something, right?
My faulty justification caused me to find myself face down, dissociating into the mattress of a recent divorcee, feeling like I was playing some role in his midlife crisis. Fairly cliche — He had a record collection, so like any other girl who had tumblr, I forced him to play Nancy Sinatra (and only Nancy Sinatra). Since the sex was not doing it for me, I instead started psychoanalyzing him. What he was doing at 38, where his ex wife was, if they had children. Being as intrusive as possible, before I realized something probably important: would this be me?
Considering my newly rejected cougardom, would I be some aged out hipster, showing Gen Z’ers I’ve invited into my home my collection of screenshotted celebrity twitter posts? Avoiding questions about why I was unmarried, wriggling about in an attempt to appear as youthful as possible? What was wrong with me, and what was keeping me there?
I had a genuine inability to connect. Was it because of my lack of introspection, my own inability to look inside myself? For a very long time, I simply blamed all of my issues on being trans, and the difficulties of navigating constant fetishization. I was so used to being fetishized and discarded after the fantasy concluded that I was almost using it like a crutch. It was easy to just write off anything and everything that way, but admitting, perhaps, some of the things that were wrong with me were in fact… my own fault?
That realization was jarring… Watching a man shove (and break) a glass jar up his ass jarring.
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