to want, and be found wanting

18 Oct, 2025

A/N: this post started out as an exercise in working through some things in my head, and thus is long and winding and takes forever to get to any point (even by my standards). i don't think it's a good post, but i do think it serves the point for which i started blogging, which was to try to share my personal experience of the world.

towards the end is a part about my sexual history and relationship with sexuality that doesn't go into great or obscene detail, but does go into enough that i can imagine someone not wanting to know anything about it. this paragraph has its letters rotated by 13 characters (A->N, B->O, and so on), so it should be unreadable at a casual glance but easily decoded by anyone who cares to do so. i hold no particular expectations or judgements either way, obviously.

tonight i went out with my family to see a fun movie about lesbians, the evils of the music industry, and how polyamory is the solution to male loneliness.

like all good movies about getting a girl to love you, lesbian space princess is actually about the importance of being able to love yourself. the movie opens with the protagonist getting dumped by her girlfriend - she apologises for her failings, the girlfriend says "stop saying sorry for everything!", and she says sorry for apologising too much. my partner reaches over and squeezes my knee at this point. this is, unfortunately, a conversation i have had verbatim at least 5 times¹ with different people over the last 15 years or so².

over the past almost-a-year, i've had various levels of problem coping, honestly, with my meta-relationships^{3 4}. it took me more than six months to process that every issue i had dealing with those relationships was just a symptom of a problem with my direct relationships - it took me until a couple of weeks ago to process that all of those issues were actually just symptoms of problems i have with myself. the one that kept coming up, over and over again, was a continued failure of self-advocacy - simply, "it's hard to figure out what you want". so i've been thinking about that a bunch lately.

dear diary: i believe i'm a good person.

i don't believe that i am a desirable person, in any sense of the word. trusting others on that matter helps as a crutch, but it's a fragile one that splinters sharply if you let it, and it's one i've been leaning on a bit too much for a good while. so instead, i try to exist in a way that makes the people around me happy, making the secondary effects of my presence desirable instead. being wanted is difficult and vulnerable and ephemeral and subjective, but being one of the few bitches with a car? that's concrete.

besides, i'm a good person, right? good people care about the people around them. really good people make sacrifices for the people around them. kindness is the one positive quality i can actually believe in myself having, so some part of me demands that i scream it as loudly as i can and make sure everyone recognises it - i am a good person and i do things that make people around me happy, she cries! and if i can derive a kind of joy from seeing other people happy, i can just exist on that and i don't need to do anything for me, and that gives me more time to focus on other people instead. it's a neat little cycle, and i love neat little cycles.

oh how much kinder a just world would be, where i could dedicate my life to the betterment of those i love, could burn myself away into ash and oblivion, and everyone who heard the tale would say oh, that emma, she gave so much to make everyone around her happy, none could ever doubt that she was truly a Good Person.

modern day reality is, unfortunately, rather devoid of opportunities to heroically and grandly and gracefully sacrifice oneself for the good of one's family, so i make do with more conventional trying to make people happy in the meantime. but i'm used to parents who say things are fine until all of a sudden they were always wrong - friends who care more about not hurting anyone's feelings than saying what they mean - partners who say maybe when they mean yes, and say maybe when they mean no, and sometimes do both in the same conversation. sometimes it's easy, and sometimes figuring out the path that benefits everyone the most involves twisting and turning my own wants, threading the needle between the blades and walls of several different, often conflicting, desires. what comes out the other side isn't always recognisable any more.

last night⁵ someone i love asked me what i wanted, and after i managed to shift the weight of the choice that i thought would be best for other people, i found that i couldn't answer - as hard as i tried, i couldn't read a net preference in myself that was free of that weight. a few nights ago, a different friend asked me, just once, to be selfish - "i am giving you permission", she said, and it meant the world to me in that moment, but i couldn't take permission. even breaking down in tears on the phone, i couldn't let go of myself far enough to stop thinking about other people's feelings and just figure out my own.

i worry that this sounds awfully self-aggrandising. woe is me, i just can't help myself, how kind and generous i am. but the bit has gotten really old, i can see the struggles and distress that being this way is causing people i love, this is no longer a place of honour. i'm not sure it ever was.

so i've been trying to practice, recently, when i can - finding decisions that i know don't actually matter and sitting down to carefully dissect and shift the layers of "what someone else wants" to find whatever is hidden underneath. framing it as a skill i should have for other people's benefit makes it easier, but it still feels like trying to dismantle a bear trap by sticking my arms inside it with a screwdriver. and more often than not, when i finally get there, all i can find is passive indifference. an empty space where something was probably meant to grow.

this has been vaguely in keeping with other observations. a while back i asked a friend if i would like some movie they were talking about, and they said "i don't know, i don't... actually know what kind of things you like to watch?" which i thought was crazy, i like most things i watch, but then i thought for a moment and realised i don't remember the last thing i actually chose to watch without someone else suggesting it for me. i don't remember the last book i read without someone else telling me i should. i do remember the last game i played of my own volition, so i have that going for me at least, but i didn't really enjoy it much. my spotify downloads are a lot of things i got into because my friends were into them, and one single album by an artist that i encountered on discord in 2022.

on one of the days in germany that i never got around to writing about, we sat at a cafe in the shadow of a castle on a hill, and i listened to the two men in our party talk about toxic masculinity. man (older) postulated to man (younger) that the unhealthy nature of many young male social groups is fundamentally a product of fear - one particularly callous individual pushes a social boundary, and anyone who objects on such grounds as human decency risks their comfortable presence in the group to do so. in tertiary education you are not a child any more, there is no other group of kids you can just go and move to, the Real World is outside and the fear of having no one to hold at the end of your uni degree can be so much more crushing than it ever was before. so the slip goes unchallenged, the behaviour becomes an accepted part of the group, and the members of that group get a little bit further away from being able to find a new home in a new, more tolerable social group.

he then went on to suggest that the fear here is not just one of being lonely, but of existing without external context. ripped from the implicit social structure of childhood schooling, being alone and without the shared identity of your friend group forces you to actually look at yourself for the first time and figure out who you are as a person; or, if you're more of a natural background character, just how to be a person at all.

he wasn't talking about me at all - in fact, he's expressed a kind of admiration in the past for my ability to have figured myself out - but it stuck in my head. i went from high school to my high school friend group to a uni club, then the unfortunate case of my gender occurred and was followed closely by covid. late 2020 was a sharp reset on most of my progress in Becoming a Real Person, and i started it by getting into a relationship that⁶ exists to this day⁷. over the past five years i have watched that partner grow into a wonderful, fascinating, complex, beautiful person, and i have found myself scrambling along clawing at her coattails, trying to do the same.

of course, trying to become your own person by following someone else's lead is kind of axiomatically doomed to failure, though it works okay for casual pretending. curtains and lights strung up between your friends don't last long once those supports shift away, and even without that, it doesn't take much poking to brush them aside and see the poor, sickly wretch hiding behind them. and, well, having done that bit of poking and realised what is there, the thought of being dragged out into the cold and lonely open like that is terrifying, it fills me with dread, but at the same time some small part of me craves it. i don't know why.

of course, it is also true that this is all complete bullshit.

"oh i don't really have things i want" yes you do, it came free with your being a conscious human being. you just don't want to share them because they're embarrassing and inconvenient. you can't bring yourself to trust other people with the things you want, because the only interaction you can accept there is someone fishing through your life desires like a box of fried chilli, hunting for the morsels of chicken that are the parts where your wants happen to line up with theirs. take what you want to keep and discard the rest without a second thought - don't twist yourself around me, don't change your plans or feel pressured to do things differently, but you can't trust anyone else to be that way because you could never in a million years trust yourself to do it, and you've somehow gotten it in your head that this particular disease is part of being a "good person".

i don't... like being an inconvenience. who does? but somehow i can't read the desires i do have as anything but an inconvenience, or worse. i feel like i am surrounded by, well, transfem people⁸ who for various reasons have a tendency to make people uncomfortable by imposing their own desires where they are not wanted, and i am paralysed by the fear of making the people i love uncomfortable in that way.

or worse.

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which is a kind of detail i normally wouldn't dream of including in something like this, but thinking and writing through it has brought the conclusion more into light for me - for a long time i believed that i thought of myself neutrally, and that my reluctance to prioritise myself was just an effect of focusing on people i cared about (ie. not myself). but what i can see now is that there is nothing neutral about it - a major defining component of my self image is dominated by genuine hatred and disgust about a core part of my experience of life.

for a long while i wasn't really sure where to go from here - i sat on this ending part for a while, trying to figure out what to say or if i would even be able to bring myself to post this when i had. on one hand, i was mostly writing for myself - writing as though to an audience helps me externalise and process thoughts, sometimes. on the other hand, some of the things that came out are things that i wanted to - needed to - wished i could talk about to some of the people in my life, but i struggle a lot to do that directly and the indirectness of posting here makes it easier. but what if writing it this way makes those people uncomfortable? who am i to prioritise my need to share over their comfort? is this something that will make them uncomfortable? am i able to judge that?¹⁰

and then, well, time caught up with me, and the context i was writing in changed. i guess part of where to go from here became a bit simpler to decide.

the prospect of trying to be better is... daunting. terrifyingly so. it would be so nice and easy and cozy to go excise myself from the world as a lost cause. but! i am given to understand that my family would be upset if i did that, so i guess i should go and figure out how to be a real complete person instead. hopefully one that doesn't viscerally hate her own existence. maybe even one that can find a way to keep growing for her own good, rather than just because it would make her friends happy.

we'll see how it goes. might have to wait until i'm fully recovered from my current more physical illnesses, for starters. then, idk, watch this space.