Month: January 2022

Tonight I put my years of pizza experience to work and cooked me a couple of homemade pizzas entirely from scratch. I mean it too. I mixed my own dough from ingredients, my own pizza sauce from tomato paste and seasonings and topped it with fresh veggies and meats I cooked myself. I did it all from scratch and it was a blast.

This was no small feat for me. For starters I had only begun baking from scratch a couple of months ago when my sister dropped me off a 5 pound bag of flour to get me started. On top of that I have had my share of baking mishaps over the last couple weeks. I baked dinner rolls that I renamed biscuits once they were said and don. Tonight  was also a trip down memory lane of sorts.

I took my first pizza job as a delivery driver for Pizza Hut when I was just 19 years old, mere months before I turned 20 in 2002. During the subsequent ten or so years of my life I primarily made a living bouncing around from one pizza joint to the next. I landed on pizza driver because it was easy for me.

As a high school drop out pre-GED my job prospects were quite limited indeed. I wasn’t even truly qualified to work as a cashier at a gas station. Even K-Mart turned me down until I came back armed with some cash handling experience and that coveted GED. At least with a valid driver license and a car in my name I could run pizzas from store to door for a fair wage for a few years while I figured out what I wanted to do with my life.

It wasn’t until 2009 after I flunked out of truck driving school I realized I needed to make a drastic change in my life. At that time I was living in a van in my sisters back yard. I had hit what you could call rock bottom. Essentially homeless, unemployed and nowhere to go but up I turned my life around. But it wasn’t easy.

After a while I got into college. I landed my first gig in the entertainment media business as a videographer/DJ doing weddings. I parlayed that into a job at a TV station before becoming a journalist the next seven years. The rest is history.

In 2010 the winter before I signed up for college courses I attempted to make a homemade pizza for the first time. At that time it was a weird pipe dream. I had worked in pizza so long I figured I would try to get into my own franchise. It didn’t take long before I learned that wasn’t a reality for me. So I baked an unappetizing pie made mostly from scratch with a few short cuts here and there. I called it a loss considering nothing I cooked was edible. I threw the entire contents of that night into the garbage.

Tonight was a victory for me. A long ways away from those minimum wage jobs scraping by wearing my car down for pennies on the dollar. I decided I would take the culmination of all that experience and knowledge I stock piled all those years ago to see if I could end up baking a homemade pizza that I could classify as edible. I succeeded and then some.

I made two pies. I tasted each and they both fit the bill. They were so satisfying I ate a couple slices from eat and ended up with no heartburn to show for it! That was the mark for me. A tasty pie that I could save leftovers for the next day. I also had a blast baking the pies while my beloved girlfriend watched via Discord.

The take away for me is never give up on your dreams. Twenty years ago I was working in a dead end job with no education, no prospects and no clue what I was doing. Today I was able to bake a pizza from scratch merely as a testament of will. I wasn’t cooking a pizza for a minimum wage job. I wasn’t doing because I had no other options. I wasn’t rushing to get a pie delivered to an ungrateful chump who was going to demand it be free because I wasn’t willing to run red lights to get it to them in that awful 30 minutes or less promise we had at the time. Tonight I was baking a pizza for me.

It was a reminder of where I came from. How I overcame the damn odds to rise above. I am so far beyond successful in life as is often pointed out to me I have every right to look back and be a little smug about how far I’ve come.

Tonight was my way of nodding to my past self saying you got this. It gets better. I considered it a win because I was doing it for me, to prove I could. I look back on my life grateful for how far I have come. I no longer have to settle for minimum wage jobs busting my butt for a boss several years younger than myself. I am finally at a point where I get to chose my own path and that is one hell of a tasty prospect. Like those pies I baked today entirely from scratch. That’s how I lived my life making it up as I went along, taking nothing but raw ingredients and turning it into a delicious success story. Bon Apatite.

I have had quite a few lows in my life. While I was relatively safe from life’s harshest cruelties, I am not without my own scars. I spent the first 39 years on this rock unsure of what love even was, now I am overflowing with it and I couldn’t be happier, or more afraid.

I won’t dig into the deepest recesses of my past, there’s some things I will take to my grave. What I can share is a lifetime of abuse, bullying, self loathing and no self esteem brought on by the people around me who were supposed to keep me safe from those things. I have been witness to sexual assaults of my sisters. I have been in fist fights where my very life was at stake knife in hand ready to die. I have been homeless more than once. I dropped out of high school, twice, kicked out of college, evicted and homeless days before Thanksgiving, on food stamps, unemployed much of my life and I have been involved in or with criminals for most of my youth.

When I was younger I practiced dark magic. A form of necromancy where I sought out evil spirits not for clairvoyance but to send demons to bring cruelty to those who tormented me. I let those demons consume me. I went into a dark place in my younger days. I was darker than the internet pirate who traded files illegally on the dark web. I was involved in a ring of criminal activity. I knew an individual caught up in an illegal child sex ring, a police officer who was father to a girl I dated once upon a time.

I have seen my share of dead bodies before entering the journalist field. Some were crimes I was witness to, others were on the side of the road or the one time I heard the gun shots of a man shot five times in the back of the head in the parking lot where I worked. Then I went into journalism and dead bodies became a regular sight I had to learn to work next to.

I have seen the worst humanity has to offer. I had a friend kill himself because he was sexually abused and couldn’t face it alone when his girlfriend dumped him. He was only 16. His abuser was my very uncle who tried to abuse me as well. I, don’t talk about that part of my life. It’s not something I share.

I was engaged to a woman who went insane, literally and was committed as a result. The first love of my life torn asunder and locked away, I was told to forget about her and move on. So I did. I have been beaten up for being gay, trans, too Christian, not Christian enough, and supposedly for being lazy more than once. I had to steal my dads car at 18 to get my driver license because we had been fighting and I refused to take lessons from him.

I have former friends rotting in prison as we speak. Others rotting in hell where they belong. Others who would gladly send me there if they were ever to find me. I made a lot of enemies in my youth. I had friends who dealt drugs, stolen merchandise, pirate dvds, child porn and every other vice you can think of. Some of those things I knew about, others I learnt when cops raided their homes. None of that absolves me of who I consorted with, whom I associated with and what I looked the other way to protect myself from. I was afraid for my life these were people who carried guns and not legally so.

The first time I fired a hand gun it was in training for a drug raid. We were preparing to go after a punk who owed us so little money it was not worth the armory we carried to scare him into paying. But I was present for the shake down, armed and ready to defend my “homies” to the death. Shit like that went down all to often. I avoided most of it by playing naïve but I knew what was going on. I was questioned by police more times than I’d ever care to remember.

I didn’t live as sheltered a life as my parents tried to provide. I stayed optimistic despite all the dark things I was around. I had friends who drank so much I thought they would die any day of alcohol poisoning, until the ones who did just that prompted the worst reaction from me, I became the very drunk I always hated I would become. My drinking days are far from over but it no longer rules my life.

Drugs. I never did but know many who bought, sold and carried guns to push theirs onto others. I knew one who killed three and is now out of prison having served his time. Don’t think for a second I was a saint. I was a monster. I lived a hellish life. I am tired, beat down and finally able to put some of my past where it belongs as I venture forth into my new life. I have lived the harsh life, seen cruelty, and come fact-to-face with death to the point we’re on a first name basis. Don’t ever doubt the shit I went through. I am not optimistic because I have faith in a fairy tale. I am optimistic because I survived all the shit this life has thrown at me, might as well keep fighting.

I blocked out a certain traumatic experience from my childhood that apparently does fit the narrative I have been told. yet for some reason I keep forgetting about it until someone tasks me with digging deeper into the recesses of my mind to dig up the remaining trauma that they believe would explain my quirks. This happened to me last night. I nearly broke down into tears at the revelation but instead I found myself in a strange fog of self reflection.

I am not going to recount it here. It’s been unpacked according to the appropriate channels now I shall contemplate the ramifications of  said recollection internally. I do this as part of how I survive. Only a select few are privy to the worst parts of my past. Those details that cause me to cringe before breaking down into tears. I share them with only those I trust. This isn’t one of those. It’s different. Potentially life changing in it’s own way or nothing at all depending on your perspective. Either way it was a repressed memory and that’s the part I want to focus on rather than the event itself.

The first time I recalled this memory was when I was 11 years old. I remember lying in bed playing with one of my Transformers action figures and there it was out of the blue. A painful reminder of something I had apparently determined wasn’t worth keeping in my memory banks in an accessible form. I asked my mother about the incident and her reaction was odd. She told me it was nothing and to forget about it then promptly changed the subject.

I was fixated on a thought my psychologist told me. She indicated my PTSD might be cPTSD and wanted me to dig into my mind to find the hidden traumas I was tuning out. I told her I didn’t have any that I had forgotten only those I told her about or the ones I write about here from time to time. She insisted. I asked her if my quirks were trauma based, I said smugly with a hint of sarcasm and self confidence, then why was I in special ed in school starting in Kindergarten? She said there must have been something I was missing. She told me to find it and report back to her.

I was angrily relaying this conversation to my girlfriend with the intention of feeling belittled. I stated I was sure I didn’t have any further trauma to unpack. I insisted my bullying began at Kindergarten therefore it made no sense why the special education started then. Then like a ton of bricks falling on the head of Roger Rabbit, it came back to me mid sentence. There it was plain as day the thing I had forgotten, repressed even! She was right after all!

This reminded me of the exact same conversation I had with my previous therapist in college. Same deal my insisting I didn’t have any trauma, then bam mid sentence it rearing it’s ugly head out of the blue. It wasn’t the type of ordeal you’d expect a child to repress, at least not on the surface. However once I unpacked it I found the core issue buried deep under several layers of lies I had told myself to keep it buried. I had to confront the lies before I could dig any deeper.

I don’t want to hype my experience up it’s not the sort of deal  you take to the grave. Although I have those too. It’s more the type of thing I want to sort out in my own mind before I tackle it publicly for fear of the repercussions it might have on my image. That being said it could explain so much more of what I face than my other theories. In fact it might very well be the key to unlocking everything wrong with my broken psyche.

Today I sit here in denial yet again. Not that the experience happened not even that my mother trivialized it such, she tends to do that. But realizing how alone I was when I didn’t have to be. Here I had a perfectly good explanation all along yet they had to fabricate lies to “protect my feelings” when the truth would have likely been easier to swallow had I been given the choice. I have yet to bring it up to my mother out of fear it will further widen the rift growing between us. At least not until suck time I have confirmation from my therapist what she thinks my diagnosis should be. At that time I will consider whether or not it is worth asking my mom about. Considering how dismissive she was in the past I doubt she will consider being helpful this time either.

I am not sure if this qualifies as the life altering event I have been searching for in my memories but here it is, something unpleasant enough my brain thought it best to hide me from the knowledge of it in the first place. That alone tells me it was probably worse than my fuzzy memories let on.

I started 2021 one with a slump. I was fired from my dream job day 7 of the year. Barely a week into what would become one of my busiest years on record I found myself unemployed and facing homelessness. That would be a running theme throughout the year. I ended the year unemployed too.

I made up a small timeline of events I shared on social media. That was only half the story. Last year I spent the first half of the year getting my name legally changed along with my gender marker on my identifications. I got a brand new driver license, cell phone, birth certificate, social security card, credit card and all my bills in my new name. This took the better part of the first 5 months to accomplish. That in and of itself was a battle. I had to fight the forces at play trying to prevent me from being recognized every step of the way.

I also started the year off filing for unemployment. This immediately put me in a weird position where I had to rely on the broken system to prop me up. Later in the year I was reminded how incredibly broken that system is when they asked for most of that unemployment money back as they claimed I over paid. Then there was my epic battle to get SNAP benefits as I went to war with Health and Human Services over my name change situation yet again.

I faced discrimination. I was shoved out of the way called sir by rude people. I was stepped on walking down the stairs with my cane as I limped my way to safety. I had more than one employer tell me they legally didn’t have to hire me on religious grounds. I didn’t even bother fighting those instances I just walked away with a pit of anger in my stomach. That anger fueled me as my relationship with my parents went south.

During the year I lost nearly all of my family. I managed to find support in my grandmother of all people. I won’t get into why but our previous relationship had been fairly rocky. Turns out she was the first person in my extended family to not only offer me support but to tell me she was happy for me. She is also the only one who refers to me as Stephanie. Others still fixate on my deadname. Oh well. I lost enough sleep over that time to move on.

Mere weeks into the new year and it didn’t matter my family had rejected me. I found a new sister. Her name is Robin Alura and she has been my best friend and strongest supporter since I moved to Texas. By the end of the year I had more found family including a trans daughter I adopted through Twitter. By the end of the year I had a whole new family to love me.

By the middle part of the year I had already gone through so many changes. I changed my name, my location, career, family, and was in the process of changing my podcast too. I cancelled my web domain and created a brand new website. This was scary because it meant leaving behind a lot of work I had done on a website I ran for several years. I had an emotional leave of absence from the podcast I helped start, helped watch it grow and become something powerful for the trans community.

Towards the end of the year the most important event in my life had taken place. I met the love of my life. The woman who has taken ownership of my heart and very soul itself. I have grown closer to her as time has gone. I have given her more of my heart, more of my time and more of my love day by day.

If all of that wasn’t enough change I also went through a religious transformation. I ended up leaving Christianity behind as I turned to paganism. I ended the year having celebrated several pagan holidays. My witchcraft has increased as well. I have grown closer to my deities, those spirits I commune with on a more regular basis. I settled on a path that follows chaos and nature. I haven’t done a ton of spell work but I have gotten to know my deities quite well.

The final big change I made for the year was launching a brand new news talk show dedicated to trans culture. This was the culmination of my entire professional career mixed with everything I learned as a trans woman transitioning while living in one of the most hostile states for trans people, Texas. I wanted to end the year on a high note by producing something that would offer hope to trans men, women, and others all over the world.

Now that 2021 is behind me I can say I tackled it like a boss. As I look towards 2022 I can assure you it will be even more grand, dare I say epic!