Easy Mode

Still one of my favourite images of
myself. I miss those days. A bit.

I used to know who came up with the idea that white, western, middle-class males played the game of life on easy mode, but like with most information that is actually semi-useful in my line of work, I have forgotten it. I went to University and was funded throughout by my rich father and I got a decent degree without ever really appling myself like I should have done. Then, afterwards, got myself a Masters in Military History almost without breaking a sweat and using the loans I took out at very good value (1% interest in a world where 5% interest was standard on savings) to pay the tuition fees. Here I was courted and dated my first girlfriend, Terry, who has never really featured much on here.

Thereafter to a teaching degree, very cheap indeed with a government grant that covered rent and tuition, so I just had to foot the bill for food and entertainment. Living like a social eunuch, a skill I now know that I owe to ASD, this was no great shakes. I was lonely and conflicted, irrationally emotional a bit delicate over the wrong things (a housemate I really fancied and respected once chided me that I dealt with standard issues by crying and playing loud music alone, she was not wrong) but I completed the training and fell into a job by dint of being able to take risks that others would not (it was the Nazi lesson) which, again, I now know to be connected to my ASD and my lack of understanding of what the potential consequences might be socially if not legally. In short, I blasted through by being oblivious where others would be cautious and careful. Still didn't get a decent degree though.

Remember this? I'm on the beer again.

In that new job I applied myself, living only to work and read fictionmania. I branched out to sticky site, back when it was a thing with the Andare brothers, and then, inexplicably, found myself being sought out by Toby. Toby was exciting, edgy, cool and different. Bisexual, into the goth scene and involved with transsexuals, cross-dressers, drug-users and the LARP crowd. Exciting, intoxicating, experienced and three or four years younger than I. She knew stuff I had only dreamed about, literally, and led me through many formative experiences but I played the moral high ground card when it suited me because that's what I do best. It all ended, the only way it could, with her leaving me and me feeling hard done to despite making it all but certain that nothing could ever develop.

With Terry I hadf been the corrupting influence, with Toby I was unable to corrupt but she was also unable to corrupt me, finding that I was already there in many cases. Not in a good way, not in an edifying way. I did not know that I had ASD. I suspected that I was depressed, clinically, but did not pursue that.

Dating website. Holiday in the States. I met Tilly. I was still able to project being interesting and clever. Tilly was looking for security and I provided it. I did not notice that she wanted me to be normal. Because I thought I was normal.

Once my favourite photo of me.
Still the most honest one.

The year I met Tilly. Just six months
prior.

For someone playing the game on easy mode I am a shit gamer. And that holds. I don't play rule systems nor power game nor really play well. I do not learn. I do not improve. In every pursuit I have followed the same line: rapid initial learning, a plateau and then... just plateau. I get no better, I learn no more. The level I almost enter on is the level at which I remain. In Medieval Total War, in Lemmings, in Worms, it was always the same - I would start at a skill level, find that within the game, be matched and then... stick. Get stuck. Stay there until something else came up or I moved on. So it was with relationships. But Terry and Toby were not with me long enough to see that I also degraded. I get worse given time.

Easy mode. But I end up alone, lonely and sad. I end up no longer a Head of Department with minions, but a minion. Same pay, sure, but none of the power and the freedom to be creative. Because I don't actually follow rules, I pat them carefully looking for loopholes, weaknesses, holes and areas that can be exploited or subverted. It's not as useful a skill as it looks. Even my nuance to the white, western, mid- let's call it Default Man status. So, my wrinkle, my cross-dressing, my sprinkling of trans, my gender-queerness (if that is the right term), is subtle and camouflagued enough that no one would ever know. Sometimes even I don't know. I suffer no adversity, my life after University has been pretty easy and welcoming, I experience no sexism, no racism, no classism.

I almost wish I did. I might actually feel a sense of achievement now and again. Instead of failure.

What I left behind.

Going Out pt 2

 On the 24 October 2011 I went out for a walk in skirt and heels. The heels weren't really heels, they were wedges from ASDA that I had bought after a bit of an argument with Tilly early on in our relationshiop. It was after we had rowed about my cross-dressing that summer, after Tilly had decided that I was a pervert and evil and wrong and that I had misled her. After the end of the relationship, had I but known it at the time.

Not quite the wedges I bought, but close enough

I had to leave the house to get changed in the dark down the back of the streets where I lived, and I recall that I was surprised by someone walking in the dark on a windy evening indeed. I wore the wedges and then put on a skirt, it was one abandoned by Tilly. She insisted on keeping it until 2013 when she finally threw it out and ensured I couldn't claim it. But I had worn it already, so I was definitely in the wrong there - you should never steal anyone else's clothes. And it wasn't a long walk. It felt like a long time, I walked around the side of a street and then took the skirt off, and walked the rest of the way in jeans, all the way back down the road we lived on and into the woods. Where I stopped, removed the shoes and then walked the short distance home in trainers. I stopped in the car and wrote a record on my phone. And then, a few months later, I wrote it up as the third post in this blog. 5 December 2011.

Do you remember this as an aim and
as a hope for someone I'd meet in the same
image? I do.

Now I live alone. My musings on what I wanted from back then have been revealing. I kinda knew. I knew back then this is how it would end. But timing. Later on I would buy some boots, also from ASDA, also after an argument, also for repeating that lovely experience of walking late at night and preferably in a skirt. Over time I dropped the idea of adding a skirt because, well, I didn't really have anything like the long skirt that I had lifted from Tilly that would look like trousers from a distance. But, that was 2011. And then 2012. then we moved in 2013. And then it was suddenly 2019, and then it was 2020 and we split and then it was the New Year. And now...

Now it's 2021. And I have some time because I have finally got ahead of myself with planning for teaching in this Lockdown. And I went out in my boots. Not for long, not far (too scare) but it was nice. Just nice. It wasn't as electrifying as the first time in 2011, because since then things have rather moved on. I have spent a lot of time dressed and I have been in chastity, for over 180 days, and I have been to work under-dressed. So, I guess this time I was... I dunno. I enjoyed it, but it was short and unplanned and spur of the moment and I left with the boots on but only wearing full briefs beneath my clothes. I've done it now, though, so next time I shall wear tights and a bra and cami and maybe even take my new pencil skirt (I bought a pencil skirt).

And that's the story.

Oh, and on Friday I officially applied for a divorce. Tilly had scanned our marriage certificate and so I actually could.

Frankly I miss this image - it used to
practically be my signature.