transretrogurl

Yeah, I promised Frock Tales and I will deliver, but I felt in the mood for a little introspection, especially this time of year and ESPECIALLY given the ‘way past its expiry date’ year this has been.

What you’ve got to realise is that I write this blog from a single person’s perspective, and being honest, not an overly stable person’s perspective. Nothing sinister about that statement, my moods go up and down like a teenager at their first ‘no adults’ party. Sometimes I’m jovial, sometimes I’m accompanied by my faithful black dog, whose howls reduce me to bones and misery. Don’t worry, no black dog today, but I’ve been thinking about what I actually am nowadays.

See, Sarah isn’t real (I’ll wait for the shouts of surprise to die down). Sarah is a construct of mine. Sarah is a person I’d love to spend time with, if it wasn’t me. Sarah represents the femininity I find attractive; and that’s an important point.

I’m seeing a lot of people self-destruct during this pandemic. In fact, being honest, we’re suffering two pandemics; a physical one which has a terrible toll on a small percentage of the population while reducing the rest to low grade terror all the time, and a mental one which is the side effect of having too much time and not enough outlets to do what we want.

I have a friend who is, for the sake of this argument, ‘normal’. He’s mad on football (soccer for all you colonials); plays it, watches it, the works. His entire life outside of work is football, football, football. When the lockdown kicked off, if you’ll pardon that slightly cruel pun, it all went away. I talk to him every other week as he works for the same company I do, and every conversation has just got darker and darker; he talks about home feeling like a prison. He gets angry towards the government for not letting him be who he is.

And that’s someone who likes football.

I’ve found the lockdowns tough, much tougher than I thought I would. And interestingly enough, because we’ve had effectively two lockdowns over here, I found the second one much, much harder than the first. The first involved me getting upset at not being able to spend time as Sarah. I went a number of months without any outlet for my pink obsession. But the second one was tougher because it felt normal.

I was lucky enough to get a couple of pink hits in between the two lockdowns, and as soon as the second lockdown finished (and acceptable because both myself and Boys Will Be Girls are, currently, in Tier 2) I got another fix in, but the problem was the second lockdown was normal. And nothing.

Interestingly enough I was at my second session when the government announced the four weeks fire-break lockdown; I spent 45 mins stuck in my car, blinking away the sensitivity from my makeup-cleansed eyes, as drunken unhappy people fought up and down Tower Bridge while I frustratedly wanted to hit the road. But when I got home the lockdown had effectively, for all intents and purposes, started. So I settled into the drab lockdown life, working 8:30-17:30 at my desk, moving to the bed and PS4 for the evenings. And after three or so days the lockdown was lifted.

No it wasn’t. It was four weeks. But it literally felt like three days because all the days were identical and worse than drab; before the pandemic I could at least play with the drab construct, go sit in a pub, read a book, work in London, all those little moments that made the days different.

It felt like three days between sessions. And poof, that was a month of my life gone.

And that’s the worry thing for me, and people like me. As I said at the start, I write these blogs from my perspective and I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be mid or even pre-transition at the moment, having to put your life on hold with no real feel for when normality, whatever that turns out to be, comes back. Or a closeted CD who has no time to themselves any more because they are locked in with the people they hide their sweet side from.

This is the second pandemic and it’s a lot sadder, and a lot more infectious than the other one. We’ve all been put on hold, but the problem is life doesn’t wait.

I really hope the vaccines work. Because the vaccine gives governments a waver of their moral liability for the disease; at the moment we are all living a tenth of our lives potential because the governments are terrified of being held responsible for the outcome of a pandemic; it’s not about saving lives or even making sure the health services can cope. It is about responsibility. With the vaccines that all changes; the vaccine should hopefully make it harder to get the disease, and hence lower, massively, the death rates. And the moral liability shifts; the government can safely say ‘go back to a semblance of normality’ with no worries of being taken to task later.

It could be worse, granted. I’m lucky in that I’m 100% sure I had Covid in February and, contrary to my body’s piss poor record of chest related fun it didn’t kill me. I had eight weeks of a cough that wouldn’t quit and I felt bloody awful for a while, but I came nowhere near to being hospitalised. And we could be living in a society where there are no vaccines.

I just feel desperately sad for those of us in the community who are almost a year older.

And back to what I was trying to say before the blog got sideswiped, oddly enough like 2020, by Covid. I am Sarah about 0.3% of my time. I love that bit of me. And before Covid I was drab me 99.7% of the time. But since the lockdowns and the overly long amount of time I’ve had to think about things I’m starting to feel a lot like there are way more pink Lego bricks in my constructed facade than I thought before.

I feel like a hybrid. The frustrated anger at life in general felt by drab me has dissolved somewhat during the Covid crisis; I’m not angry for no apparent reason. I feel, and apologies for the Sarah terminology, a lot more delicate and gentle in my daily life. And that’s a good thing, and I’m very, very interested in where this goes when life gets back to something approaching normal.

I for one promise to be a little more pink Lego……

Stay beautiful and as sane as you can, the sun is on the rise.