VulpineCitrus - Personal Blog

"I just need a system"

2026-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

You’re fifteen, bored off your mind. Summer vacations are starting, and you want to do something new, something stimulating, something that will take you out of the monotony of spinning all day-around like a goldfish in a tiny bowl. You always have a million things you want to learn anyways, so many new activities to pick up. For example: you wish you were more of a creative person. You’re also very intelligent, or so you’ve been told. Knowing things about everything is your entry point into pretty much every topic, so, perhaps, you can just expose yourself to something a lot and it will come to you, naturally, like everything else.

You read about this “spaced repetition” thing, with flash cards. You think of the flimsy, quaint little pieces of cardboard, or plastic, with words written on them. You think about the low-pitch wobble they make while you flip them. You give it a try, and ingest hundreds of words in a week.

Ah, you’re doing pretty good! Time to keep the momentum going. You pick up a pencil, and a little notebook, and you sketch and draw. It’s not great, but you like it, and you want to do more.

The habits of doing both of those does not last, it never settles. Soon, you realize that this is a common pattern you exhibit: the habits can never truly settle. You are, somehow, immune to habit-forming. This is fine, as long as you never need to practice to be good at something. If you need to do something, it will stick, but if you just want to do it? Better be good at it from the start.

You are sixteen, you’ve been itching to draw consistently for months now, and you just cannot figure out what’s got you stuck. You keep drawing. You discover that there are exercises you can do. Maybe you’re repeatedly doing the same thing wrong. You could be missing a technique, a detail so ludicrously obvious that only you could miss it. That’s it! Maybe you lack a lot of mechanical foundations for how to trace lines. And there’s a recipe to get better at it! Draw these ten thousand boxes. It’s daunting, yes, but maybe after you’re done you will have magically acquired enough… brain doodads to be good at drawing. You never did things “correctly”, after all. You’re a self-directed learner, one who is isolated and only ever overhears other talk about their interests, but never asks.
An you apply yourself meticulously to about 1000 boxes, thinking you better reserve your time for drawing to after you’re done. All the while, a pile of flashcards mocks you from inside your desk drawer. You forget to eat, you forget to shower for a couple days as well. On day 3, you stop because you’re almost pissing yourself from not taking time off. You’ve never been good at scheduling things.
At this point, you draw not because you enjoy the process, but because you expect your outcome to meet a certain standard of quality you expect of yourself. It frustrates you to no end: nothing you make is pleasant to look at once it’s done.
At a thousand boxes, you chuckle, mildly worried. Everything in your life so far you’ve managed to figure out, it seems. At least, what you could not make work was inconsequential, nothing you really actually truly cared for. This is different, you want to make it. You want to figure out a way. There’s gotta be a way.
Your sketchbook will not survive unscathed from the consequences of that frustration. Thankfully, you’re too scatterbrained to recall where the rest of your supplies were, despite you holding them about fifteen minutes ago. Stuff like that happens to you, all the time, since forever. It’s something you’ve also noticed, more and more. Perhaps, this will be worrisome to you in the future.

You are seventeen. High school is ending soon. You’ve started to fully realize that you are only capable of slacking in your studies so much because something about you compensates for the fact that you basically don’t put any work in, beyond actually writing things you’re supposed to write at home and hand in the next day.
It will take you ages to realize that it is not something inside of you.
You’re also really anxious about it. University is happening to you soon, and you’re afraid you will have to figure out a system, or you will become overwhelmed. You stash that thought for the coming summer.
If only something could also compensate for that forgetfulness problem.. Or just, not being able to get started with the million things you want (or need) to do all the time…

When summer is here, you feel like your life has lost all semblance of organization. The days go by without you realizing. You’re once again starving by accident, because the framework of your time has disappeared, and nothing reminds you that you need to live anymore. You start sleeping in, you stay awake for 20+ hours. You also want to draw, but you can’t bring yourself to. You want to code, learn new things - this is going to be your career! - but nothing comes. It’s like there is a thick, transparent wall in your mind between you and the things you want to accomplish - no, not even, the things you want to begin doing. It feels like your mind is a muscle, and getting up to do anything strains it so much it is sore beyond use. You feel like you almost do not want to do the things you desperate wish to get up and do. If only you could snap your fingers and give yourself an electric shock to jump-start yourself. Nothing can get you motivated to get up and do them anymore.
“Perhaps”, you think, “this is what depression truly feels like.”
Instead of doing the things you want, you lie down. You read. You browse the internet, you meet new people. You do a hundred million different things, sometimes from the moment the sun comes up to the moment it comes down, while time blurs and your days become noise around you and suddenly you blink, and you’re entering university.

You’re eighteen, it is your first month in university. You’re winging your homework. You haven’t had a single exam yet, so you think you’re doing fine. You’re half-assing the maths assignments that you will be graded on. It feels like doing what you’ve been doing so far, but, for the first time ever, ideas are not sticking to your mind. Up until now, you barely had to expose yourself to the material for it to be pristine, crystal-clear in your head when it came time to recite it back. This time, you actually have to think about what you’re doing, and how to assemble the knowledge given to you to reason about problems… but you’re not. You become sloppy, you’re losing precision. You feel yourself lose grip with something fundamental within you, an ability to self-direct that you thought was a defining characteristic of your being.
Perhaps all you need is slightly more discipline. Perhaps, you need a system.
You remember the flashcards. You remember how you trained yourself for that week three years ago, to remember words. Perhaps, you can be your own Pavlovian dog.
That’s it: you just need a system. A universal framework by which to direct yourself, and you’ll be fixed.

You’re nineteen. You’ve been coasting through two-thirds of your freshman year of university by spending entire weekends in the library, meticulously pouring over notes with a pre-arranged set of highlighters, all with different meanings. Green means the notion has been compiled into a flashcard. Blue means it can be trivially derived from other knowledge. Red means you need to inspect that notion further to link it to other ideas. You make flashcards to link all of the ideas you’ve carefully pulled out of every lecture note, like a surgeon meticulously pulls nerves apart, careful to not break or snap any of them while moving them, and gently lifting them with its scalpel, aware that a single motion of the blade could do permanent damage.
When midterm results drop, you sigh in relief. You’ve made it, by spending hours, each day, pouring through hundreds of little questions, answering them, training yourself to become the absolute monster of an exam machine that is now the third best student of the class. It never alleviates your anxiety.
You haven’t showered in three months. You cannot prepare anything to eat that isn’t canned and cannot be instantly re-heated. Your room is a mess. You don’t party. You don’t see anyone. You don’t socialize. You’re depressed. You haven’t brushed your teeth in a year. You can hardly remember what month it is at times. Some days, you skip meals because you just cannot bring yourself to make food, just like you cannot bring yourself to shower, just like you cannot bring yourself to get out of your dorm room, or out of bed at all. You learn that the anxiety of grades is all that keeps you animated.
You look at the sketchbook under your bed, stashed next to that pile of fiction books you’ve been meaning to read. The system has not fixed you. At least not yet.

You’re twenty. You’ve become slightly more functional, thanks to your own observations. You’ve extended the system not only to the objects you studied, but also your own subjectivity. You’ve started studying yourself like you study a caged animal. You’ve started implanting responses to specific events to remember to keep yourself alive and fed and washed. It’s far from perfect, but it works. You’ve winded down the intense flashcards cramming. You use it for non-school knowledge, but, at this point in your degree, you do not need to rely on it anymore. You’ve picked up a bullet journal, because apparently it works for organization. You’re keenly aware that you have no organizational skills, at all, even about daily life. You started tracking your own habits on an app. You’ve set various reminders.
You’ve discovered that if you set systems around you, then you can survive.
It started one day, when you forgot a cup of tea in the kitchen. When, three hours later, you came to pick it up, you realized it was cold - and also absolutely over-infused. Something lit up in your mind: you started preparing tea for yourself, in the kitchen, before making food. Then, when you were done with food, you’d have (only slightly over-infused) lukewarm tea, ready to be consumed.
As long as everything around you is a system, you can keep yourself fed, you can keep yourself clean, you can keep yourself alive. You can even start thinking about doing things you actually want to do.

It lasts about a month and a half. Something happens in your life and all your habits are thrown off. You have to pull off incredible amounts of focus and energy together to survive it without collapsing in on yourself, and, suddenly, you don’t meditate. You stop remembering to track your habits. Your bullet journal is one week late, then a month, then abandoned. You stop journaling altogether. You only brush your teeth sporadically. Various sketchbooks lie strewn about your bed, untouched. You can’t think about doing the things you want. You hate them. You hate everything. You hate yourself so fucking much.
And two weeks later, you’re once again fine, as if nothing happened, but, in the process, every system was blown to pieces. You have to build it all from scratch once more.

You’re twenty one. You have no systems. You’re miserable, but, slowly, you try and coast along, hoping that something can get solved, hoping that, somewhere, someone has the answer as to what the absolute fuck is wrong with you. You can barely induce this period of intense focus that used to be your way to survive through school every day.
Every now and then, you hear about a new system. You read advice on the internet. Someone else asking about why they can’t keep to a system, why they keep buying new planners and then barely using them. Someone replies that they should be developing routines, and not systems, before describing a system they put in place around their routines.
You’re tired.
You had been drinking tea for years. You’ve heard that, if you had that one specific issue, then maybe it could help. It hasn’t. You keep drinking tea, because coffee is too bitter. It just makes you sleepy.

You’re twenty-two, you’ve slowly adapted routines into your life that make you somewhat functional. You have a day job that needs you to show up at somewhat regular hours. You have rent to pay. You just can’t not be functional. Perhaps, the anxiety is what keeps you functioning. You can still have periods where you’re outputting a lot of work, but those are chaotic and unpredictable. The more time passes, and the less novel everything you do feels, the less you can induce this high-intensity output anymore. Even when you’re high-energy, you are extremely forgetful. You were always prone to losing things, since childhood, since forever, but you never really needed any of those things you kept misplacing. Now, you have meltdowns because you’re gonna be five minutes late and you just cannot find your work ID. It’s happened twice. You ransacked your own apartment, irate, shameful, knowing you should be able to do better, but you can’t. You’ve always been like this, and, unless something happens to you, you will always be.
You’ve learned that, on occasion, when needed for a specific purpose, systems can work, but that you cannot make them work long term. Something about you is just broken. Your therapist encouraged you to take things slow, but your discussions with them just made you angry. It felt like they were also trying to help you find systems to achieve the things you wanted to do. They’d get stuck on the first thing you said you felt unable to do, and then stop and try and find a way to make you do that one specific thing. “You can try to do X and Y to be good at drawing”. You nodded, but you did not believe in what they said. They failed to see the bigger picture, that you were fundamentally broken. Eventually, you stopped showing up. You know it can’t be that simple, you know it’s not about drawing in particular. Or music. Or bullet journals, or remembering to eat, or remembering to brush your teeth, or remembering to take out the trash, or remembering Slovenian vocabulary. Everything about how you function is broken.
You’ve started drinking coffee. One day, at the office, someone said they had started themselves on it by mixing it with a downright abusive amount of sugar, then lowering the dose. You gave it a try, and genuinely enjoyed the absolute rush it gave you. It was horrifyingly effective, at first. Then, after weeks, you became accustomed. You slowly acquired the taste for that horrible, bitter instant-coffee they sell at your local supermarket, and mixed it stronger every time, until it could barely dilute anymore. A moorish brown sludge at the bottom of a cup that had not been rinsed in a week.
You are currently only drinking at most a cup a day. It will not last.

You’re twenty-three, you see some of your friends online go through something similar to what you have with respect to being unable to organize your life, and feeling like they’re a passenger unable to drive the car. You try and warn them not to believe that a system can fix them. You know, for a fact, that many have tried before, and that it worked at first, and that there is no one thing or set of things that can make you or them functional. They don’t like that idea, or, perhaps, you’re projecting on them. They tell you it’s just a difference in how your brain and theirs work versus the rest of the world. They tell you it’s something about the dopamine or something. You don’t believe them. If it was something in the brain, someone would have found it in yours. You would have found it: it would be obvious. You stand your ground, tell them that nothing can fix them. These friends stop talking to you. You notice that you’re running on minimum three cups of coffee a day. You cut down on the sugar to lower the risk of diabetes.
You still haven’t consistently picked up drawing like you wanted to, 8 years ago. Instead, you have an unfulfilling job, 8 virtual calendars, 4 to-do lists, and no hope.

You’re twenty-four. You haven’t had a raise at your job. In fact, they’re probably going to fire you because you don’t meet their expectations. You’re not cut for company culture, or so you think. In the back of your mind, you realize that you were the perfect little guinea pig to run around in the wheel of the school system, but that you cannot accommodate to the real world. You were a lab rat. The near-constant activation of your fear response was the only thing compensating for your inability to self-direct and organize. Now, you’re out of the school system, armed with a dysfunctional reward feedback loop, a fried nervous system, and a caffeine addiction, and neither of those help someone keep a desk job.
You unearth some archives from the previous decade. You find three bullet journals. You find five planners. You find 2000 flash cards from your freshman year of uni. You find the abandoned to-do lists, and a kanban with an entire reading plan you made three years ago and forgot about. You find four failed attempts to track habits. You find two diaries. You find four sketchbooks barely a third of the way in. You find a tomato timer. You find fancy paper sheets with your last uni classes penciled in, but without the fancy marker applied.
You cry.
You forget about it over the coming days. But there is a recurring thought, at the back of your mind, that, perhaps, you could be doing the things you want in your life, if you just had a system. It always rings in your head, that sentence, every time someone comes up with a new little tool, a cute little method, an idea.
“Maybe I just need a system.”
It feels like fucking drugs to your brain, this idea, of everything neatly and perfectly organized.

There is no telling, reader, whether this fictional person reaches twenty-five. Their experience is a dramatized collage of various observations from my own life and that of so many of the people i have encountered over the years. All of us have had these experiences in common, about how we were unable to function, but somehow, unpredictably, chaotically, we could be hyper-functional, but only when fear or novelty or a challenge presented themselves in front of us.
If you recognize yourself in these lines, reader, i implore you to be gentle on yourself next time a system fails on you. In time, perhaps, you will come to find that, much like me, there is no system that can fix you.

They are Watching

2025-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

i am at a train station. i have a friend over, and she’s into trains (so typical of trans women and transfems like us). We go to the platforms that do not have gates closed. That’s a thing in France for high-speed trains. This fucking country is so paranoid. All of us have our cameras. We love spending time at the station taking cool train photos. We see a very cool looking freight train pass by the platform. We take pictures. For about twenty seconds.
On the way out of the platform, three security guards corner us. They demand to know why we were on the platform. We answer that we like looking at trains. They look at our cameras, tell us that taking photographs in train stations is illegal (no it’s not) and we must delete all of them immediately (no we don’t). My friend doesn’t speak french, so the three imposing men speak to me and i translate. i don’t translate how they gender my friend and i (male). i act dumb, knowing they’re full of shit, but trying my best not to get actual cops called on a foreigner. Looking like tourists probably saved us.
Then they see our respirators, that we wore on the subway on our way here. And ask why we have that. They look ready to grab us and escort us. i explain that we’re in poorly ventilated places in the metro, and there’s COVID in the air. They don’t look convinced. They don’t grab us, but they force us out of the station.
i have never been to the station to take photos ever again.

An old lady comes to me. i am attending the wedding of one of her friends, as a plus one for a relative of a friend. i spend most of my time outside, chilling, away from the overwhelming sound system and tight crowd. Every now and then, i go back inside briefly to grab a drink and take pictures. At one point, while going back outside, this kind lady stops me and asks, in a half-worried half-surprised tone: “why do you put a mask on? are you sick or something?”.
i am used to that question, at this point. i say “no, i am not sick, i just pay attention to-”
“oh but i’m asking because, you know, i’m an at-risk person, i would really need to know if you were sick”, she says.
i politely signal my understanding of her situation before we part ways. She plunges back into the poorly-ventilated, cramped room, where she just spent the last 5 hours dancing and eating and chatting with dozens upon dozens of guests, none of whom are masked. Neither is she. i feel something indescribable.

i am buying groceries with my flatmates. The store is packed. People are looking at us. i’m wearing my mask. People are staring. i mind my voice. It gets louder when i’m anxious. i don’t hold it as well when i feel seen. In the corner of my eyes, i recognize the head of security at the store. i’ve seen him before. He loves harassing non-white customers at checkout. He looks like the worst undercover cop ever. At first i don’t notice, but he’s tailing us. i make a note of it. At checkout, he’s still roaming around, but he has probably moved on.
A couple weeks later, i’m in the produce aisle. We have friends over who do not speak french, and we’re buying stuff together. A rather affluent-looking old white guy sees us and jokes to his wife that we’re afraid to catch dust. He genders all of us male (a zero out of three). i consider removing my mask to pretend-cough at him. i remember the head of security. i am boiling with rage. i feel my body’s entire presence in space all of a sudden. i feel like a man in drag. We get our cucumbers and onion bags and go. i want to leave as soon as i can.
i decide to start taking notes whenever this kind of thing happens. Keep a record. Perhaps it can help some people realize how badly it’s affecting me, and, surely, others.
At the cash register, another couple weeks later, somebody two rows over looks at me and my roommates and start laughing. Visibly. Like we can’t see her. She probably doesn’t care. She’s beckoning a colleague to come look at us. To watch us. We get on with checkout, hoping we don’t run into more trouble. i make a mental note: is this happening more frequently? Why is it always when i’m looking more fem? Is it directed specifically at me? Am i only noticing it only every so often because i don’t go out that much anymore? Why is it so much worse on Saturdays? On the weekends? Do they think only people who look middle-class, cis, and don’t give a shit about their immune system should be allowed here?
i pay 108.26€. i remember the amount. It’s all i can fixate on right now. i want to puke.

i go to the mall. i need to refresh my hair dye supply, and i want to get new weights to lift. Going there in person is the most convenient way to do it. i’m sweating and agitated, because the bicycle ride there was constantly interrupted by poorly signed construction work. i get the dye. i note that the lady at the checkout genders me and my partner as female. Today we both have good passing, i guess. We walk to the sports hardware store, and i spot a security guy. He’s slow. i’m considering telling my partner to slow down, so we never have to walk in front of him to get to the store.
Once inside, we roam around for a bit. It’s confusing. We finally find the weights section, it’s in a cul-de-sac aisle at the back of the store. There are other customers in it. A mom and her kids. She’s watching us. She beckons her kids to get out quickly when they decide they can’t find whatever apparel that the kids’ after-school sport will require or something. We find the dumbbells. While looking for the right weight (5kg), i make a note in the corner of my eyes that about three employees of the store have gathered in a half circle of light-blue jackets and puzzled looks. A minute later, we’ve not made more progress on finding the 5kg neoprene dumbbells, but a tall male figure with a grey beard and a high viz vest calls us.
He genders us female. i don’t know why that’s the thing that my brain sticks to. i think i needed something to hold onto that wasn’t his questioning. i’m not in my body anymore. i vaguely recall pointing at the paper masks hanging from my backpack, and the paper folded inside the filters of my mask, telling him something about COVID, and faking a cough. He’s happy enough to let us shop, but not happy enough to let us be. He joins the circle of employees overlooking us at the open end of the aisle of overpriced sports hardware, which has grown to over five of them. i pretend i can’t see them. But i can feel their eyes pierce me. Eventually, we give up, and go ask one of them if they have the 5kg neoprene weights. They don’t have them anymore, she says. We look at other options. She stands there like she has no idea what to do. Like she’s just watching us. Like she’s been tasked to keep an eye on us. Eventually, she points out a cheaper option than what we would have picked: a kit. We decide to take it. It’s heavy as balls. It distracts me from the onlooking employees, families, and the high viz mall cop who’s still trying his best to hide about two aisles away from us while he’s fixated on us. We walk to the cash registers. He follows behind us. Lamentable tailing skills.
We leave the sports shop. i have to hand the kit to my roommate, because it’s becoming too much. My arms are starting to give. While she hands me my phone back, i notice the mall cop still behind us. We walk all the way to our bikes outside. It’s pouring. i remove my mask right as the outside door opens. i spend about five minutes removing my bike locks and securely tying the kit to my back rack. It started pouring outside. All along, a woman who found shelter in the bicycle shed watches us. The mall cop is right outside the door we just took, watching us. A small gathering of bystanders gather around the door. Watching us.
They’re all watching. They’re all watching. Until we are literally out of sight.
i come back home and do my best to carry the kit up eight flights of stairs. Eventually, i beg my roommate to take it and climb the second half. My legs are going to give out. They’re shaking because the stress of everything just hit, and i can hardly carry my own weight anymore.
i arrive home, and write this. i debate sitting on it for a day or two. Maybe a couple hours. Editing is probably worth the wait. But i need to scream into the void. Right now. i still feel their eyes. i still feel their eyes on me.
why do i still feel their eyes on me

How to make a Kouign-Amann

2025-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

The region i live in, Brittany, is famous for its very fatty and sugary deserts. Kouign-Amann</a> is the very famous example of that. It is a dough pastry, traditionally made with bread dough and laminated. Originally from the town of Douarnenez, in Finistère, it is now eaten in a lot of parts of the country, with various recipes derived from the original.
My own take on the recipe originates from this version</a> (in french). i modified some aspects of it, namely the way that the dough is laid down into the mold.
This post might be updated in the future with more photos, whenever i do this recipe again.

#</a> Kouign-Amann Recipe</h1>
##</a> Utensils & Appliances</h2>

Kitchen Scale</li>
Measuring Cup</li>
Rolling Pin</li>
Mixing Bowl</li>
Kitchen knife</li>
Small bowl</li>
Baking mold</li>
Oven</li> </ul>
##</a> Ingredients</h2>

300g wheat flour (250g + 50g for balancing the dough mix and powdering your working surface)</li>
250g of salted butter (alternatively salt-free butter and add salt later)</li>
250g of caster sugar</li>
10g baker’s yeast</li>
couple pinches of salt</li> </ul>
##</a> Steps</h2>

Take the butter out of the fridge and into the small bowl to let it soften</li>
In the measuring cup, measure about three soup spoons of lukewarm water</li>
Add 10g of baker’s yeast in that measuring cup and mix gently</li>
In the mixing bowl, put 250g of flour</li>
Create a little hole in the center of the flour</li>
Add a pinch of salt in the flour, but not in the center hole (because you don’t want salt to kill the yeast)</li>
Pour the yeast mix in the hole at the center of the mixing bowl</li>
Start mixing the dough, adding flour if it is too wet and water if the dough comes apart too much; never add too much at once however, as the dough will start coming together through being kneaded</li>
When the dough has coalesced enough to be taken out of the bowl, use some of the remaining flour to powder your counter and knead the dough until it is fairly elastic</li>
Put the dough in a bowl and cover it with plastic wrapping or a towel for 3 hours</li>
Take the dough out of the bowl onto a surface covered with some flour</li>
Using the rolling pin, flatten the dough into a rectangle shape until the dough is thin but not so much that it would split</li>
If your butter is not sufficiently melted to be poured and spread, microwave it repeatedly for 15 seconds until it is liquid enough</li>
Using a cooking brush, apply the butter on the dough; make sure to leave a 3cm margin near every edge</li>
If your butter is not salted, add two pinches of salt here</li>
Add a third of the sugar on top of the butter, leaving the same margin with the edges of the dough</li>
Fold the dough in thirds: take one third and fold it into the middle third, then take the last third and fold it on top of the other two</li>
Turn the dough around by 90°</li>
Using the rolling pin, flatten it into a rectangle again until you start risking to let butter and sugar break out</li>
Add the second third of sugar</li>
Fold the dough in thirds once more</li>
Turn the dough 90° and repeat the last few steps to flatten it, add the last of the sugar, and fold it again</li>
Flatten the dough one last time, this time making a rather thin rectangle</li>
Roll the dough along the short length</li>
Let it rest for 30 minutes</li>
Preheat the over for 210°C (thermostat 7)</li>
Using a kitchen knife, cut rolls of dough of the desired length and place them next to each other in a mold</li>
Bake the cake for at least 20 minutes, until it looks golden on top (you may have to go up to 30 minutes depending on your oven)</li>
Take the cake out of the oven and wait 15 minutes to serve it</li> </ul>

</a>
By rail fox (flufftech.net)</a>, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons </div>

Tired of Being Human

2024-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

Here is a TL;DR if you're a prospective employer</summary>
Hi!
The way i express my identity outside of the bounds of the professional sphere has little to no impact on the way i behave and adapt to professional settings.
If you think society hasn’t spent enough time teaching me that careful compartmentalization of behaviours is crucial to one’s survival, you have a lot more privilege than i do!
On the contrary, if you find what i express here to be fine and just the expression of a personal preference that does not affect the way you think about me or my output, then i guess you’ve got me because i never expected you to exist. Huh. </details>

I believe that identity is a sort of malleable gel of thoughts, something bound and influenced by the world around you. Everything about your identity is tied to the way you exist within the world around you, as a person, as a human. What makes you “you” is what separates you from an “other” you just often do not think about (if you are lucky enough). Identity informs the way you interact with the rest of the world, but also how the rest of the world around you. And we, as people, as humans, have built a ton of small interactions and parades around signaling who we are, what role we are playing.
This is not a coming out. It’s mostly not about me. While this is my own corner of the internet, i find it egocentric to write about me (ironic, i know). This is about what i learned, and what you may be able to take from it. That being said…
##</a> Let’s Talk about Lux</h2>
My identity shifted a lot as i aged. Moving away from the cookie cutter cis-het-allo-white-everything template of my environment growing up required a lot of undoing things i was thought, a process that is imperfect, ongoing, and will have to remain that for the rest of my life.
Tangentially to that, one part of my identity has been, for an amount of years worryingly close to 10, being a furry.
Lux</a> [they/them] is three things:

One of the many names i go online and IRL by</li>
My fursona</a> (i assume if you’re here that is probably a word you know about)</li>
Unknowingly at the time, an expression of a profound desire to change as a physical and social person, to build my own identity and express it honestly</li> </ul>
For the longest of time the exact relationship between Lux and i had been weird. They were at the same time a character, but also a goal to aspire to, but also me. As i moved along through my transition however, and changed them as a result, they became definitely separate from me. Yet, there remained something about them i wanted desperately.
Lux transitioned alongside me. They were, and remain to this day, a tool of creative expression. A part of me, but also not a part of me, and perhaps a future part of me.
Being in this position of constant evolution for the past decade or so, i learned that a lot of things are really just made up. Gender, sexuality, social norms of politeness, money status, etc. They are real things that have had and still have real, deadly consequences, but they’re made up. It clicked in my mind that the terms we use to described what people, what humans we prefer to bonk are made up the day i tried to reason around what being gay while non-binary would mean.
It’s all made up.
All of you. Maybe you did not even decide to make it up yourself.
##</a> Undoing Humanity</h2>
Being queer, autistic, disabled, marginalized for an identity we didn’t choose, treated like an other by people, humans, takes a toll on you. Admittedly, mine is less than others, or than what it could have been. Some of my friends have it orders of magnitude worse. To an extent, the trauma is, however, collective. An attack on one of us is an attack on us all.
When the world around you constantly signals that a minimum level of acceptance and respect is derived from being human while constantly denying it to you and those like you and around you, you start thinking about what it means to be human. On a biological level, we sort of understand it (even though taxonomy is also made up). Have you ever thought about what it means, socially, to be human? It feels like asking what it feels like, physiologically, to breathe air.
i recall seeing seeing artwork from @TheHearthFox</a> [E/Em/Eir] years and years ago which described how e felt coming into eir psychologist’s office, shown visually in the comic by a stark change of the character who transformed from an otherwise rather non-distinct androgynous human to Hearth, the fox. Another piece of eirs caught my attention a little bit afterwards showing how e felt an invisible presence at times, fox ears on top of eir head which followed alongside eir environment and emotions. At the time, i remember being fascinated by the idea of feeling these things, almost jealous. Finally seeing someone who you can show your real, raw self, without shame or the need to hide.
i sat on the thoughts for years, watched as me and my friends and i increasingly fucked around with our own identities, transed our genders in new and creative ways that had no other drive but to feel good and give a fat middle finger to the system that had attempted to shape us into things we were not.
i kept going at it, i keep fucking up my gender again and again, blurring my presentation, i keep identifying with my embracing of weirdness and my rejection of what i feel society expects of me.
In the end, what remains? The choice of being human, or not, and the potential to reject humanity and its social implications.
##</a> Theriantropy</h2>
Theriantropy is the identification, in part or whole, with an animal as a part of yourself. It is one of several non-human identity labels in common use today. It is often symbolized with the two greek letters ΔΘ , denoting difference/change (Δ or δ in physics) and a bestial nature (Θ being the first letter of θηρίον, meaning “beast”). θ also symbolize the term we use to describe ourselves: therians.
Like many things, what we believe to be human is honestly more malleable than people are willing to think about.
There is this joke</a> among us who use it/its as pronouns:

“it/its pronouns is dehumanizing” it is, i am <insert species/kin> </blockquote>
At this point in my life, i feel like it resonates with me as well. i am unsure to which extent i provoked it or found it happening to me. Not too long ago, while being overstimulated in an otherwise neurotypical-friendly environment, i thought to myself:

« Hey, relax. The sounds around you are confusing. Here, you have ears there now. Think about where your focus is, and they will go.
In the big confusing world of people, you feel lost. If you can choose, be a fox. » </blockquote>
It started as intrusive thoughts visualizing and feeling ears atop my head, then a tail in my back. Spacial grounding has always been the best for me it seems.
It then started happening intermittently, at random times. Then the ghost feelings started. One day, i recoiled from the feeling of a hand sliding down my back. It’d had felt as though it had slid right through a tail that was not there. i never fought against it, it just felt natural, like something i had wanted to do for so long but felt forced to repress.
i had been aware of the concept of theriantropy for a while now. i had first heard of it as a teenager while getting to know the furry community. For a long time, therians have sort of always been like that weird sibling who lives in the attic who you don’t really talk about to strangers because you’re kind of ashamed of them.
Yet i am weird. The core concept of my identity seems to be the rejection of norms. i make squeaking noises as a form of affection, i jump around randomly to express happiness, i whimper to show sadness. i sit in weird positions, i refuse to conform to the social norms imposed upon humans, people, because they irk me, they go against my very nature. i ate pasta out of a dog bowl with my name on it for lunch today, for crying out loud! Why? Because it feels good and fun.
In the flesh i am a person, however, my close friends have increasingly began calling me a fox.
While i inhabit the body of a human, my mind is the entity i consider to be the true me, regardless of the vessel that carries it. i have gotten used to, and even learned to appreciate, show off, and enjoy my own flesh. i find it limited, however. There is something it doesn’t quite capture or express. There are limbs that i find missing at times, emotions that do not transcribe well. There is something that could be hacked, like i thoroughly hacked my own sex hormones. Knowing something is made up is halfway to the forbidden knowledge that it can be dismantled and perhaps rebuilt the way you want.
If you do not think this is real, fine. You probably do not get it. The spectrum of human expression is unfathomably wide. i had to learn that myself.
If you think i am a delusional and just trans and weird, and i should stick to these identities or i will make the *phobes think we’re all degenerates who think they’re animals or whatever: cool. Sit over there with the other pick-mes and don’t bother me further or talk to me.
There is a reason this is not talked about. Same reason this article has been a draft for five months now. There is a similar reason for which my pronouns are currently “she/her” in professional settings, and not “they/them”. Same reason i have a capitalized name on my ID that i rarely get called by outside of a professional setting these days. This isn’t the kind of thing you casually share with your coworkers at work around coffee. Yet, at the same time, this is part of me in a way. It is a part of the shattered fractal that forms my identity as a whole, one that you can never look at entirely at once, but where each and every part influences the next.
##</a> So, what’s the point?</h2>
Be weird. Bathe in the glory of rejecting what feels normal. Think about what normal means. Be kind upon others and lift each other up.
i am lux. i use they/them, it/its and she/her pronouns. Out of professional contexts, i will uncapitalize the first person pronoun to refer to myself. In the right headspace, this fox may even start referring to itself in the third person, as further detachment from humanity and personhood.
This is an identity i find comforting, and, in spite of all of what i have said until now, i am not particularly interesting, nor is my weirdness very different. i pulled on a thread while trying to unravel the mystery of my constantly shifting identity, and here we are.
Hopefully, you, reader, have thought a little bit about what normal is. In closing, let me ask you something.


Aren’t you tired of being human? Don’t you want to be weird?

No More Hunting for Eggs

2024-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

You may, as I have in the past, have boasted about the number of “eggs” you’ve “cracked”. You look at guys who are sort of fem and call them eggs. Hell, you yourself may have been an egg and refer to your past self as that.
The day this releases (hopefully) is March 31st 2024, which happens to be both Easter Sunday, Transgender Day of Visibility (and the night we switch from CET to CEST here in Europe). So you’re going to hear a lot about eggs. A lot of very unfunny jokes about hunting guys and turning them into girls. It’s going to feel fairly unpleasant.
There is a non-insignificant portion of the transgender community which despises the term egg. For those not in the know, an egg in modern trans lingo is a term for a person (although typically a guy) who either does not know or denies the fact that they are transgender or non-binary. That term comes from the old joke that what comes out of an egg is a chick. The ambiguity in the definition will be important later.
The main argument I have heard over time is that the usage of the word “egg” feels prescriptivist, like pushing an identity on someone. At first, I disagreed. Then, time went on, and I changed too.
##</a> Eggs as Self-Denying Transgender People</h2>
My first exposure to a transgender subculture was r/egg_irl</code>, circa end of 2017 and beginning of 2018. I did not actually join the subreddit until some time in 2019, but I was exposed to the memes, and feeling the terrible sinking feeling that something was relatable. EggIrl was mostly, at the time, a community of people who were all deeply in denial (or at the tail-end of said denial), about being transgender. So was I! People in deep denial who only needed the comfort of community to come to accept the realization that they’re transgender flocked from a lot of places into that subreddit (and the discord servers, let’s not forget the discord servers).
So at the time for me and the people around me, “egg” was simply us. It was the comfort zone between cis and transgender. A little nook between normality and transgression. In retrospect, it’s the coward’s position. It’s where you want to stay when it does not feel good to be transgressive. My opinion, as me from 2024, is that you should be transgressive. I believe this is how I escaped the egg phase, by learning that it was, in fact, okay to not be normal and assert yourself as such.
So now I was a transgender young adult, mostly around transfeminine people who had also stopped denying themselves. Still, we talked about eggs. All the time.
##</a> The Egg Prime Directive</h2> Despite no longer caring about the uncomfortable in-between where you readjust your sense of self, I found myself thinking about eggs a lot. Other people too. Occasionally, one of my friends would act a little suspicious, and me and other trans friends would think “oh my, what an egg, give him two years, lol”. It’s a little creepy, isn’t it? I have no idea what’s going on in the mind of other people, let alone what their reflection on their own gender identity is, nor should it really be the place for me to argue about it. But it’s funny. We think, maybe we’re not as uncommon as we think? I mean, we know there are many more transgender people out there than we think we know. Maybe, often, we’re right. Maybe that twink you saw at the grocery store starts dressing fem and growing tits. Maybe that butch at your lesbian bar starts growing a beard and his voice cracks. We do a little gender fuckery, as a treat. Yet, sometimes it’s blurry. Maybe you know that “egg”, and you keep telling them. They know about trans people (I mean, they know you), but maybe you try and push them a bit, nudge them a bit. Perhaps, you think, if you push them just a little bit, you can take them away from the metastable</a> state of eggness. You’ve been there, it’s miserable. You don’t want anyone to suffer through that more than they have already. Perhaps they’re uncomfortable about it, and you push through that. So, don’t do that. You will attract the ire of someone at some point who will tell you to remember the egg prime directive. That term describes the unstated-but-has-to-be-stated-frequently-enough rule that you should not tell an egg that they are an egg, because forcing someone to come out might lead them to identify as something they are not, or doing so too early, and they will just recoil and refuse even harder. Or they might be cis, you know. I generally agree that the egg prime directive is a good principle. However, I wonder to what extent the egg prime directive exists to be an actual rule followed by people, and to what extent we use it to make ourselves feed good about how we talk about questioning people behind their back. ##</a> Eggs as Not-Knowing Transgender People</h2> Nowadays, “egg” has a bit of a different connotation. Oddly enough, it feels like it is reflected in the content you can find on EggIrl (well, could, since Reddit’s enshittification sort of broke the community apart). Nowadays, the memes are mostly by people who have sort of already admitted that they are trans, or are questioning but not particularly inclined towards denying that they are trans. Eggs are mostly what you say of someone who does not know that they are transgender yet. There is a problem however, because calling someone an “egg” already assumes something about their identity. It was already a problem before, but it’s even starker now. By calling someone an egg, you’re making a definite statement about knowing someone’s gender identity better than them, or at least better than they are willing to show you. The egg prime directive cannot protect you from that fact, especially if you are talking about someone to other transgender people. ##</a> No More Hunting for Eggs</h2> Recently, the “final boss of eggs” came out. I’m talking about twitch streamer F1nn5ter, who’d been cross-dressing as a joke and for community donations since at least 2017. Once the trans community found Finn, we absolutely lost it (especially the girls). There were many attempts to try and convince him that he was really trans, that he should think about it more, maybe try HRT and such. All failed. In reality, as Finn stated, the pressure from people in his audience to identify one way or another contributed to a lot of confusion around his realization that he was genderfluid (hence why I’m still using he/him for him; at the time of writing, he still states he’s fine with any pronouns). I do not think we should have eggs. I think the whole concept should be left aside. We do not need a term that assumes that an identity is a fixed point that should be investigated and uncovered, or that it is anyone’s job to go do that for someone else. I come from a perspective of thinking that there is no such thing as a fixed, perfectly binary gender identity for anyone that’s fully solid in time and space. Ascribing that quality to someone’s gender identity, and turning it into a riddle that they yet haven’t solved (but you have!), sort of prevents the full breadth of expression you can have once you figure out that gender is constructed and expressed within a given social and cultural context at a given time. Maybe, instead of figuring out who’s an egg or not, we should create spaces that are welcoming of people who are questioning. You should help them fulfill their needs without assuming anything about them, about who they are, and about the fluidity of their identity. Such spaces would naturally attract people who are more likely to be transgender, of course, but that should not be a stated fact, so as to minimize the pressure people find themselves under. I myself would rather rethink the time I spent in denial as just that: I was in denial. I had so little material and emotional support that constantly denying myself the right to admit my identity and transition felt easier, more safe. Once you have that in mind, it’s easier to analyze why people deny themselves, why people do not know, why people refrain themselves from doing what’s good for them. Not because it’s a phase we all go through, but because the world around us makes us act so. Maybe we should all stop hunting for eggs.
The Door to my Childhood Bedroom Stays Closed 2023-12-04T00:00:00+00:00 He came of age in a place of his own. Perhaps never secret, never entirely private. He had his own intimacy, a world of his own, inside his own mind. It was closed. Always had been. Light from the outside shone too bright from the window. Shadows crept from underneath the door. It remained shut for so long, smelled of varnish and dust. Mold invaded. The wooden floor rotted. Insects festering. Rotten flesh. He remained. Father takes pride in making us look acceptable. He finds peace in the absence of judgemental eyes. The gaze of strangers is unnerving. You caused this. I think. He is just too different. They were not ready. Someone has to do something about the rot in his mind. It created me. I came to be in a childhood room, not mine, but his, with intact wallpaper and lino floor. I came out of the rot in his mind, the maggots crawling behind the walls where things we do not want to talk about are crammed into a disgusting papier mâché. I came out to the world inside my childhood bedroom, through the window, into the wild and unknown. Our parents were none the wiser. Then my lies grew the size of an entire city. An entire world. His corpse had been left to rot underneath the bed in my childhood bedroom. They would have to find out one way or another. Mother scoffs at the idea that she has no son. Ridiculous. She does not talk about it. Father knows he cannot change her mind, cannot find any better. He is running out of time, and contends with what he has. They do not talk about it. They do not talk about me. I do not exist. They keep to themselves, in their house of silence, lies, sorrow, grief. They pretend things are as they always were. They never talk about their son. Or, rather, they always do. As if he still lived. As if he still breathed. As if I had not crawled out of his open skull. Yet, the door to my childhood bedroom stays closed. </div> Blurbs On Passing When Non-binary & Transfem 2023-08-25T00:00:00+00:00 My friends tell me I have good passing. It’s not particularly a compliment. I take it as that, because I know they mean it as that, or, rather, that I look feminine. That is a compliment, especially for someone like me who had little hope of hormones or clothes to do anything. Passing has never been an ideal. It has been a constant in my thoughts on gender that my goal was never to appear 100% like a cisgender woman to society. That though is, while not as unpleasant as appearing as a man, still fairly unpleasant. I am non-binary, I am not a guy nor am I a woman: I simply refuse the static categorization of one gender in a dull and overdone binary. At the same time, I recognize that people may want that. We want to look the way we want, which we take from social codes of social roles, and aesthetics we are raised and evolve with. As far as I have thought about it, it does not seem to pose a problem. I view gender presentation like I view taste in ice cream: it’s just ice cream. It’s clothes. It’s jewelry. It’s clearer skin, more muscle, or less. Sometimes it’s little to no change at all. Sometimes it’s changes all the time. It’s also about social roles, pronouns, names. It’s about creating and shaping a self you are comfortable with, and iterating, whichever way fits. So when my friends say I have good passing, I take it to mean I am feminine, and yet… Yet, I also understand what they mean. In their eyes, if they apply a gender test based on what they think cisgender people think, I would end up categorized as a woman. Arguably, perhaps, there is not just this black box function shared by all cisgender folks where they input all social, vocal, behavioral, and aesthetic cues, and output one of two binary genders. Perhaps they don’t even really think about what genitals you have (at least not if they gender you without doubt). It is certainly more complex, and varies based on individuals. For the sake of simplicity, I will assume that cis people all unconsciously apply some sort of gender test to strangers, in order to fit them in their social model. As an aside, something we often forget within queer circles is that our gender test has been thoroughly wrecked by the widening of our understanding of gender versus appearance. All of my friends are baffled when a binary trans girl, unrecognizable from herself years before, with an androgynous voice, and conventionally feminine clothes, gets confidently misgendered by a cashier. We scoff, we laugh at each other, trying to shoo away the second hand embarrassment, the crushing cringe, the thought that if it happened to her, it will happen to you too, the fear you’ve been clocked. We say, “the cis are weird, I don’t get them”. Yet, we continue to try and judge ourselves by their standards, even if we learned to reject them. I wish we did not have to, but I recognize that we have to, sometimes. The core observation that motivated me to write this is as follows. Despite not wanting to convincingly look like a woman to the untrained cisgender eyes, I relate with the idea that it is necessary. I get that it is necessary, when I cross paths with the very loud cashier, with the presumably cis woman in the bathroom at work, with the odd trio of somewhat drunk dudes outside on the walkway. In the latter case, even, passing is somewhat vital. When in this situation, I am not faced with a choice, but a trial by their eyes. I will either look mildly dubiously like a woman, or like a feminine guy in a skirt. I could also land on the edge of the coin, and appear confusing. In that case, it depends on the person and situation whether or not they will be adventurous enough to try and make it my problem. All of the situations I mentioned earlier also share something: they suddenly happen to me, without me being able to do much about them. I do not have to pass as a woman for the untrained cis eye because I am trans, rather, I choose to have an androgynously feminine appearance, and that’s fine, like any choice of appearance. Yet, because society around me violently imposes two tightly defined categories of gender, I have to learn to adapt to maximize my own safety in situations where being read as transgressing gender norms would mean I am in danger. I am not writing about anything revolutionary or new, it is a thought often expressed that us trans people learn to pass as a defense mechanism against the cisgender gaze. I also know that people do not like that idea, they want to pass. They want to fit the binary gender, often even integrate silently into society. This is fine, as long as you do not, in turn, become the cis person who I have to hurriedly pass in front of. It’s just not for me. - Amelia

VulpineCitrus - Personal Blog

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How to make a Kouign-Amann

#</a> Kouign-Amann Recipe</h1> ##</a> Utensils & Appliances</h2> Kitchen Scale</li> Measuring Cup</li> Rolling Pin</li> Mixing Bowl</li> Kitchen knife</li> Small bowl</li> Baking mold</li>

##</a> Utensils & Appliances</h2> Kitchen Scale</li> Measuring Cup</li> Rolling Pin</li> Mixing Bowl</li> Kitchen knife</li> Small bowl</li> Baking mold</li>

##</a> Ingredients</h2> 300g wheat flour (250g + 50g for balancing the dough mix and powdering your working surface)</li> 250g of salted butter (alternatively salt-free butter and add salt later)</li> 250g of caster sugar</li> 10g baker’s yeast</li>

Tired of Being Human

No More Hunting for Eggs

The Door to my Childhood Bedroom Stays Closed

Blurbs On Passing When Non-binary & Transfem