I found a handful of captures of my circa 2006 LiveJournal in Wayback, and man, it is really weird looking at myself 18 years ago. It feels like it hits just around the point where I started to get my shit together, but at the expense of putting myself in a series of situations where I had to shut down all my feminine impulses.
In 2006, I am broke and living with my mother, and yeah, it sucked. I was basically a suburban hikikomori pulling in a bit of income doing bullshit menial work. But a few years later, I was living in Brooklyn and working in tech and starting to make decent money at the expense of sporting the world's saddest eyes and an even sadder denial beard. The thing that really sucks is that I'm pretty sure I didn't have any better options at the time.