[3/25/2023, 4:29 AM]

this is a very strange statement to say, but i don't feel like my ideal flesh is human.
let me explain with a long and convoluted story and background. i grew up in a majority poor enviornment with not a lot of help around for kids like me. children with mental problems and disability were usually left in the dust in households like mine, and i wasn't much of an exception.

when did i learn i had brain issues? i was, alas... a part of the dreaded gifted child program.



i'm pretty sure gate was how they weeded out the 'mentally ill but smart anyways' kids from the majority populace in elementary school. everyone else was trapped in detention.

anyways, i was suffering from 'i have mental issues but nobody knows how to address them' at a very young age. i ended up finding myself self isolating from a lot of children because i didn't necessarily understand just how to be social and how to communicate to others for a huge portion of time. this led to a very disconnected experience between myself and people. the only people i could somewhat understand were my parents, and even then it was pretty difficult to connect to them and understand just what they meant for the most part.

in short, when i was a tiny beast i had like 0 positive interaction with other humans. i did not feel human either. it felt like everyone was performing life in a way i didn't understand, and i didn't really know how to pick up the slack and fix what i've been doing wrong. these feelings carried on with me into high school, and even into adulthood. i'm a grown man and i'm still sitting in the corner of 'if i pretend i understand socialization hard enough, people will think i'm good at socializing.' i don't know what i'm doing! i just got here!!!

anyways. with a lack of real human people to connect to, little gabe had to turn to media to try to connect to people and understand experiences beyond what my tiny mind could process. external media and computers were small gabe's everything back in the day, from playing toys and watching cartoons to pass the time to browsing the internet on my mom's windows vista computer, which i adored downloading virsus to because i was 8 and unsupervised on the internet.

and that's been my... well, everything since then. the internet's sort of become something of an extension of the self to me - a personal reflection of ego immortalized on little rocks we tricked into thinking. mostly because on here, i wasn't really bound to social interactions in the way that i couldn't understand them. words were easier to understand in text than in voice. in speech, it means tone is invovled, and all the little small mannerisms i could never properly understand. in text, words are words. i learned english through reading for the most part since spanish was my first language (before i immediately exploded all my knowledge of spanish from my brain that is), so it's only natural i was the most comfortable talking to others in that way.

the vast majority of gabe socializing since then was through the internet. i have not removed my presence from these little rocks that have tiny artificial neurons since.



considering the majority of socialization, friendship-making, and lasting bonds were made here, the world wide web was a huge facet of my personality and growth. my childhood was very much full of 'do you leik mudkipz' memes, as always. without it, i definitely would not understand english as much as i do now, and i would 100% be in a wayyyy worse place. this has... also come with a very unintended side effect that absolutely nobody could have seen coming, not from a mile away. that's right. gabe became dependent on the internet because that was the only way he could function socially for a majority of his young life

not to... particularly anyone's fault, really? it really be like that when you're mentally ill and also 8.

the in betweens don't really matter as much. i ended up jumping from media to media and place to place, dancing from neopets to small forums to deviantart to feralheart. i made friends, i cried, i had break ups. i socialized entirely as anyone else would, just mostly through text. and i found it just about as fulfilling as any other sort of social life, mostly because this one was one i could properly keep up with without exploding into one billion pieces.

when your entire way of socializing comes through the internet, it's going to have some lasting effects on you. it's also going to have some big lasting effects when, around the time you're learning how to be social in public and becoming friends with people as an adult, that a global pandemic strikes that leads you right back to square one, with all your connections on a digital screen.



this isn't even in a boomer way. i don't dislike the digital connection, it's just as authentic to me as any other connection. the problem is that i've become so deeply ingrained in that digital consciousness over the years that if i had the option to, i would jump at the opportunity of skipping the step of having to bring my flesh to the computer to interact with others. if everything here is as authentic to me as the real world, it wouldn't mind beind some sort of amorphous internet entity.

then there's the matter of. you know. the Transgender.

like most things, i learned about transgender people from the internet. now, i've always had a weird association with myself and my body as well as how i perceive others considering i've always had a weird disconnect between myself and others. me being a boy was very like, something that's kind of been obvious from the very beginning though. i've always been very uninterested in traditionally feminine things and would always put up a fight about it. i vividly remember receiving barbie dolls and then immediately dismembering them, but i LOVED dinosaur toys

anyways, it took awhile for people to sort of recognize that, but in my later teenager years i finally came out about it. there was some like supremely mild resistance, but thankfully things turned out fine. again, it wasn't too much of a surprise once my parents thought about it.

the funny thing about being transgender is the dysphoria involved in the physical aspect of things. i used to have strong dysphoria about my body, but it's lessened over the years. but you know what hasn't lessened? the thought that 'actually, this whole human meat situation isn't it. what if i was like wires and metal that would be swag.' i don't have many strong attachments to the human body, especially not my version of it. a lot of what i look like physically does not match what i want to be in my head, to the point where i genuinely see being something completely inhuman altogether, physically, would be a much more ideal form than having a human body at all.

i could not begin to explain just why the concept of being a statonary complex of wires and machinery is such a fascinating ideal to me. maybe the media involving entities like this? one of my favorite books growing up was 2001 a space odyssey (odyssey is such a hard word to write btw why were the greeks like this), and you KNOW who my favorite funny little dude was. it was H.A.L. 9000. obviously. i've always had a fascination with thinking supercomputers, and the idea that we could perhaps one day create something out of metal and electricity that thinks and feels just like we do. obviously even in the year of our lord 2023 we're supremely far off from making truly sentient ai (considering how modern 'ai' even works), and i'm not sure we can ever even make something like that. maybe something LIKE it or very close to it, but who can say...



it's genuinely to the point though where i've had dreams about giving up the flesh and becoming some sprawling stationary entity who's consciousness is held across multiple hard drives and pieces of digital data. i've dreamt about missing what sunlight was like and missing the sky and trees, but being content that this was my form, that i had so much access to the digital world and that i was in a way one with the one thing i've only really understood.

not to mention just how fascinating i find computers and machinery! i'm a sucker for comparisons of machinery to flesh and stuff. i love those analogies about wires being arteries and motherboards being synapses and electricity pulsing through them like it's own vascular system. it's fascinating! it makes the inhuman seem so much more human and so much more me, you know? it's practically already an inseperable part of what i am - why not embrace that fully?

anyways, it's not like i like, don't enjoy living life as a normal human person. it's just that the vast majority of my existence is intrinsically linked to computers so that i probably wouldn't mind much if i ended up being a computer or something. ALL i'm saying is that if i wake up one day and i am just in a digital space i would be happy about it. what's there not to love? being digitally attached to the internet and spending your time with your friends as often as you want, whenever you want, not having to sleep or eat and not having to deal with back pain.

it's definitely an impossible dream, but it's something i feel very strongly about even now. i'm never going to be a huge computer, and i acknowledge that that's the truth.

HOWEVER ......



can you really deny that the idea that you could physically be this isn't at least a little swag???



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