being trans is kind of like writing and planning and designing and obsessing over the perfect OC, except, that OC is actually you.
i've actually been drafting azurelore one way or another as far back as i remember. just, didn't have the awareness to realize this girl i was making up, thinking through, planning in incoherent shifting evolving bits and pieces, was actually me.
even when my head went to "if only" territoryβlike, if things had gone right, or if somehow i had been a girl i would have been something like this, it still was speculative. there was this essential conscious detachment.
the person occupying my vessel didn't have the tools to question the story they were handed about who they were, even as their mind silently rebelled against it, rejected all the most overt trappings of gendered roles and interests and expectations put upon them.
some versions of this imaginary girl, i considered more thoroughly than others. the most defined and complex and longest-lasting is that ambiguous anthro rodent girl you see in some of my social media headers, whom i still sometimes reference here and there.
even in her case, there's a sorta freudian twist where although she's "main," the other close supporting characters in her world are clearly also aspects of me, that i split off to study and contemplate separately.
i couldn't fully understand how to integrate all of these aspects into one person, so much of the story and dialogue and drama i wrote was a reflection of the friction between those different parts of the girl i wanted to be.
conflicts between characters were conflicts about how i felt about different desires and needs and interests and Ways of Being, that my repression and learned shame and fear gave me problems making up my mind about or fully embracing.
i didn't even notice until several years into my recovery just how much my concept of "azurelore," of this ideal version of myself, was sort of a reconciled amalgam of those characters from 30 years ago.
