Brain on Download Blog

In Celebration of My Receding Hairline

July 18, 2020 by ABCs Of Kink

Today I’m celebrating the hairline no one wanted, the receding corners by my temple greys, the forehead that expands everlastingly… During this quarantine time I’ve been simmering like stew, noticing the cavalcade of feelings surrounding the wide and deep chasm between how I feel and how I’m perceived.

I’ve been fighting since age 7 when I was told to put a shirt on for no other reason than my box-checked [penis/clitoris/glans-head] size. This country wants my body covered in specific ways for the comfort of the patriarchy, for the survival of rape culture, and for the unfair and power-hungry led economy. Though I had no puffy areolas nor breast tissue at the time, my flat undeveloped chest was a ticking timebomb some commander sent troupes to disengage. I was instructed to start minding society. The directive was clear: listen to the songs pointing out differences between “boys” and “me”. Develop an us-and-them narrative, that I might start solidifying my rank within the camp for which I was assigned. Start playing different games, perceiving different things, enjoying/celebrating/existing as/finding pleasure in everything and anything: differently. These pills that I was expected to obediently and unquestioningly swallow from that day forward though, made me angry.

Furious.
Beside myself, grieving.

How dare this community mandate I remove the pleasure of the sun from my back, my chest, and my shoulder blades?!

Many of your values, United States, have never been remotely close to mine, though we also share so many of the same. Your limits upon the civil rights of some were not and still are not about me nor any other marginalized body. They had nothing to do with my little a-gendered physique or budding egalitarian heart and mind. This was true then and is still true today.

30 years later I began hormone replacement therapy (testosterone), and little by little I started to see in the mirror a wonderful vision form: the me I’ve had in my mind for many years, a person inside who most of you had probably never noticed, or even knew how to see. 30 years is a master’s journey in the making…

So many “drag” costumes became my daily clothing in those years. It was characters of mine who taught me how to dress ~ male, female, object, other… for decades my art intuitively shouted louder and more articulately than I knew how to consciously say, especially about how much I wished I could be acknowledged and understood for the me I am inside. My character-acting career had been a pressure release valve I’d installed at the age of 11, and which I hadn’t realized I’d been so deeply, regularly utilizing.

In these past three years on T developing secondary male sex traits (including a gloriously receding hairline), I’ve gotten to stare in awe at an emergent face I thought I’d never get to see without paint and stage lights demanding. They start the kids out so young, you see, swallowing pills, learning lines, playing with toys/games/jobs they’re told are “appropriate”, and giving up the ones they’re told “are not”. It’s common that at some point in life the only accessible image in the mind of who we think we are—who we’re even supposed to be—is one put there artificially.

This is violence to little bodies.
Burden upon tiny hearts.
Stress upon growing minds.
To assimilate.
To unlearn how we perceive even our very own secret and sacred selves inside.
To wave the white flag and succumb to injustice gracefully.

Adolescence comes and we quake in nightly horror at what happens to the body naturally. We learn to control these bodies over anything and everything. We often forget what we dreamed of becoming. We let go of our passions, or they’re stolen from us by a stealthy media-run machine which cares only that we participate in the system and the always-scheming economy—that we keep IT going. “This life is expendable”, we’re told. “It’s just the way things have always been.” “Boys will be boys.” “She asked for it.” “They stepped out of line.” “They wouldn’t participate and so they got what was coming.”…

I’m grateful I’m able to live my best life today, one where when I look in the mirror I see the echoes and lines lifting me up in this life. I can see each of my ancestries iterated behind THIS face and THIS body. I am not the women who came before, and I am not the men, nor am I the few unnamed fence-fuckers for whom I am legacy. I am made up of each of these bloodlines, each of these bodies, each of these ancient voices singing battles, triumphs, fears, struggles, loves, lessons, and meanings for their lives which lead irrevocably to mine.

My face is both and neither: a dish done at least three-ways. My character is viscerally, vulnerably, authentically showing, and for the first time no mask has been donned—they’re off and away.

I am not passing.
How incredibly, joyously, free.

Play On My Friends,
~ Creature

My writing takes time, research, and consideration: it is my art.
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Filed Under: Brain on Download Blog Tagged With: becoming oneself, growing up, hormone replacement therapy, loving yourself, receding hairlines, trans lives

Your Brilliance is Never Sexed

April 26, 2020 by ABCs Of Kink

Your Brilliance is Never Sexed
By Creature KPW

Maleness is meaningless without femaleness, and vice versa. They are both out of context without a deep understanding and recognition of the many shades of intersex which exist; dancing forms and variations binding two ends of all that is together. Whole. We are in lust, as a society, with extremes. But to be whole we must embrace and desire not only that which is sharply pointed and easily defined, but also all of the matter which fills our outlines. Colors and shapes, curves and knobs, bumps and erectile tissues forming uncomfortably, ridges and caverns aligning for an experience of pleasure (even when defined by social standards as shameful or pain). Experience your truth. All that we are, inside and out, is potential. This is everything. You, man with a hammer, are an emotional, sentient darling capable of all things named beautiful. You, daughter of the ocean with your tides and nurturing arms, are clear and strong, capable of overcoming nations with your acuity. You, child unnamed by parents and disowned by society are desperately needed—your innate knowledge of both and neither is a thirst upon the land. We are defined as individuals by who resides between our ears, defined by the movement of our limbs and the sounds uttered from the throat, defined by the variety of choices we make, defined again by research we take, tricks we learn, growth we handle, the silence we sit in that we may function another day in increased grace. Our hearts know these things when we allow ourselves to listen.

You are never a category—especially not one culled from a cursory glance between the thighs at birth.

What universes we are able to explore from that thigh-bordered region though, can deliver us whole, broken open and reassembled a million times (with others, or unto ourselves) to the galaxy, the stars, the everything we are made of and more. Insects and our other siblings stalking the planet will chew us back into dirt one day soon enough, taking what nourishment we provide as a last act: our offering to these tiny Gods. They grant us oneness with the dirt beneath the feet of all who walk—unity with the substance we so dearly love it is the name of our home: Earth. Created from clay, the promise is that in time we return to that state. The circus of our animation is but an echo in the universe. We are built from stories and your echo matters too…

Listen closely to your own life, and it will tell you where to go. Your dreams are what make you meaningful, large or as small as they may be. They inform you and are of your spirit. No form, no box, no ticked line can take your dreams away from you. Dreaming reminds us to truly connect to something, anything, that matters in these moments alive. You are significant. You will die. What matters is connection. Recognizing others as an integral part of your own wholeness.

Care for this house that we share so that as time marches on many more lives may also nest here, seeking a moment of safety in their bodies, dancing with the many articulated forms of life surrounding us in the vast jungle of love we call the Universe. Painful, terrifying, sobering, awful, blessed, grinding: life. You are something brilliant. This may mean little until you find your own capacity for love, a name reflected in the possibility of knowing the brilliance of offering: self.

Play On My Friends,
~ Creature

Filed Under: Brain on Download Blog Tagged With: autonomy, brilliance, Earth, from dust to dust, gender identity, intersex visibility, men are from mars, the importance of dreaming, trans visibility, women are from venus, you are enough

Potential: A Love Letter

February 14, 2020 by ABCs Of Kink

Creature KPW performing Sirius Black shifting into canine form… Photo by Mélissa Kooyomjian Kemp (Insta: @CapturedExposure).

Potential is a tricky subject. What a warm, beautifully arousing ideal: to have potency within, latent, waiting to pounce, a promise of ripening! Yet also what a sad and scary obligation: to fail, to fall, to misuse or waste, to lose, never to launch, forever to be stuck behind a glass of now, never rolling in the plushness of what could be…

Potential is a romance that sours a day after delivery as often as it blossoms beautifully for a week or more. It is sex for pleasure, potential being ripe and waiting for perfect conditions to pounce—conditions that’ll spin your head from news of the growing thing inside (even though you didn’t do anything differently this time)… and there are a million miscarried potentials bled out each month, not recognized nor given a first thought, much less a second. Unless it’s fed, one day potential withers on the vine, unviable, unwanted, out of mind.

What potentials course through your veins or whisper in your ear at night? Do they communicate secretly in the form of slumbered visions, asking for materialization and corporeal form in the sunlight? What potencies have you ignored for comfort or ease, for lack of support, misunderstanding, or because a dark void of deeper knowledge has a hold on your light? Have you let your potency evaporate away, dispersed? Do you disbelieve in your own worth? Does your You inside actively speak up about “what could be” if you’d just meditate on those hidden dreams buried in your chest, if you’d just reach out for that singular something, warm, oddly fitting inside?

Potential is a shapeshifter. Once it was small and uninitiated, a hungry little creature mewing at doors and searching for a friendly face. In time, one or two faces found, the belly grew with nourishment and possibility. Creature becomes something more, a growner thing, an animal with gravity.

One day Growner Thing goes about its day, and stumbles on the root of a new question. This question demands to be heard and considered tenaciously. The question sprouts, unfolding into a beautiful-terrible bit of flora, intoxicating in its splendor, demanding to be known! Known, though not as an other—but suckled, chewed on, eaten, masticated, and moleculed in the belly, whisked away to the bloodstream, ending up coloring the brain of Growner Creature. Question persists as it’s able. One day Growner Creature bites…

What unfolds is soft and terrible. The shifting of shape is a private delight, a secret ritual performed alone at night. The changing is a changeling merging with the what-once-was Grower Creature, and Growner Creature becomes Resplendant, a new thing. There are aches and pains from growth, as we all know. There are months of fog. There are minutes of euphoria. There are masses of other Resplendants, sliding down the walls and dropping from ceilings all around, swinging from chandeliers, and tripping you up in the halls of this hallowed changing space. Everything is too small and too incomprehensibly open wide, alive, to know what any moment asks (except the ones you inexplicably do understand). The shifting is a ritual of knowledge, of changing perspective, of holding onto where you’ve been while mixing in new experiences containing savory morsels of what else there is to take in.

Changing is a time to hold on, not do the math. It’s time to believe and question and understand the struggle of overwhelm; the fear that you truly know nothing at all in the end. Building blocks vs. the scales of cancelling-out look similar under a microscope, but from afar, a more wholistic picture reveals universes of articulation, unforetold branches on the path you’re on: new endings.

The shifting is a most incredible gift, and it’s the loneliest place you’ll ever live. Seemingly hyper-visible to the masses, yet frequently critiqued as “unknown”. Mobs are hungry for archetype and marketable images already well defined, and you’ll nail one type or another, as you quest to “pass”… or you won’t. At some point you might stop trying, reflecting back on the seed inside. That seed encouraged you to try on this magical self in the first place. You’ll have no idea what you’re supposed to end up looking like (unless you do), and every now and then (or frequently) you’ll feel dissatisfied.

Maybe you’ll try again, or you’ll head back from whence you came, leaving that particular impulse/potential behind: that old dream. Maybe you’ll return to shifting in the moonlight, celebrating your multi-faced facets quietly, secretly again. Maybe you’ll find a form that fits and never shift henceforth! Maybe you’ll realize the shifting is where you live and study this transformational dance inside and out, shifting in perpetuity before your life wears out… Regardless of your path, my worthy humanimal friends, there is potency deep inside—always waiting within.

Play On My Friends,
~ Creature

Filed Under: Brain on Download Blog Tagged With: be all you can be, creatures, embracing identity, evolution, evolving, living boldly, potency, potential, shapeshifting, shifting, trans, trans artist, transition, what do you want in life, who you really are

In Celebration of My Receding Hairline

Your Brilliance is Never Sexed

Potential: A Love Letter

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