Tematic Elements (Tema's Journal)

[Tema]

Warning: a very not happy post

Oh my god I can't. I can't. I can't handle this. I started feeling sick earlier today and though I know Dr. Google isn't the answer, but my doctor didn't listen to my symptoms when they first happened and now they're getting worse and I'm scared my kidneys are failing. I can't I can't I can't deal with this! If I'm right it's the nail in the fucking coffin of my hopes of ever taking hormone treatments. I never had big hopes anyway, and I had SOME reservations anyway, but if I'm honest with myself I still wanted it really bad. I don't even feel like getting treatment right now, because why bother living if I can't be myself. I try not to fall prey to bioessentialism or whichever term I'm trying to think of but let's be real, people are always going to associate certain features with certain genders or at least for who knows how long it will take to normalize trans issues more. Hell, even my THERAPIST MISGENDERED ME ONE DAY!!! THEY'RE NONBINARY AND THEY MISGENDERED ME! I wasn't mad because I knew it was knew it was an honest mistake and they corrected themselves immediately, but it still hurt so bad, so bad... I felt so bad for weeks because of one little word... I can't, I can't live like this, please....

 

[peaches2217]

Hey, Tema. Things are shitty right now. I can’t tell you how devastated I am for you, or how sorry I am that you have to endure this. But please listen to me: this is not a nail in your coffin. I don’t have much in the way of tangible advice, having never been in your exact situation: find a doctor and a therapist who will take you seriously, if you can. And if you can’t, scream and fight and snap and make yourself heard, because they have no right to brush you off or misgender you, and dammit they need to know that. I can’t say with certainty what will happen in your future, but you know what? All things awful will pass. They may pass like a kidney stone, leaving you in screaming agony for a while, but they’ll pass, and you can look back and say “Suck it, life! I’m still here!” (Spite, no matter what anyone says, is a wonderful motivator.)

I don’t know what your future holds, nor do you. But as someone near and dear to me once said, the only way to know for certain whether the future will be better is to be there and see for yourself. In the meantime, you have support. At the very least, you have us, and we’ll fight alongside you.

Is there anything we or I can do to help right this minute? Anything we can do in the coming days? Focus on the here and now for the time being and take it minute by minute. You are stronger than your situation, and you will prevail.

 

[Cerāgi <º•]

I’m terribly sorry about what’s happening, really.

I’ve personally never been in your situation , so I think I can barely understand the pain you’re actually feeling and fighting against right now...
All I can say to you right now is to please keep fighting and being strong, you have to keep affirming yourself, and showing the world your beautiful inner self, along with the help of every little thing that can be of help. Please, don’t let the way people are thinking about your gender overcome you, you know who you are the best, and anyone has absolutely no word on that, besides accepting who you feel you truly are!
I hope they’ll understand how you’re feeling about it and absolutely stop misgendering.

Again, I’ve never dealt with gender dysphoria, so what I said could be completely unhelpful, just please, don’t give up. You are strong and even if everything rights now is being terrible and fixed, I believe that in the end you’ll be able to reveal a turning point by going on and keeping firm about it, and that you’ll be successful in crafting your future the exact way you want to.

If talking should make you feel in anyway better, we’ll be absolutely here supporting you!

 

[Tema]

Thanks you two Sorry it took me a while to reply

@ Peaches- To be fair to my therapist, I’ve flubbed up people’s pronouns too (I was just lucky it was an internal monologue not a conversation), so I know they didn’t mean anything bad by it, humans make mistakes. My current therapist is amazingly supportive, unlike my first therapist who claimed to be trans-friendly but only called me Tema if she combined it with my dead name (I like to call it my zombie name since I still have to use it IRL ), never asked about my pronouns and just used female ones, and asked me “Are you non-binary or are you trans?” (when it's not an either-or) Anyway, my point mentioning the misgendering was mainly how it would have been easier to remember if I did hormone therapy to be more stereotypically masculine. Though if you ask me I don’t really see what’s that feminine about most of my body but there must be enough because I got “ma’am”ed before I opened my mouth the last time I went somewhere Just hearing me out has been help enough really, I appreciate it <3

@ Ceragi - I'll try my best! I'm not exactly confident people are ever gonna stop misgendering altogether, at least in my lifetime, but after Kyounosuke came out and I spent these past few days thinking and crying about it I feel just a wee bit stronger.

 

[Tema]

I finally plucked up the courage to reach out to one of my trans friends (I was worried I'd be burdening them too much so I avoided it) and after talking about it with them I realized like at least 80% of my problem lately is I'm being too impatient with myself. It feels obvious but I feel a lot better now and I'm looking forward to working with Iroha more now. I saw on the Discord where someone tuned VFlower in Vocalshifter with Kiritan. It was so goooood and now I kind of want to try it with Iroha. Oh man, if I can get that to work, I MIGHT JUST BE UNSTOPPABLE

It's funny because I say I have a song idea for Iroha but it's really more like a webcomic at this point because I can picture an MV for it but I haven't actually had any ideas for an actual song yet sdjfklsdjflsk But since I'm restarting that music production class maybe it'll help with that

 

[Tema]

And now, the brand new line up of Things Tema Says They Want to Do

1) Finish the Amore cover I've been saying I'll do since freaking July
2) Cover Unicorn with Iroha maybe. My thought process: I was going to cover Villain myself, but funnily enough singing some of the lyrics gives me a twinge of dysphoria (I have realized lately I'm a lot closer to binary trans than I thought I was ) so I set my sights on Unicorn. The problem there was, I'm pretty sure this is out of my range and I don't know if tranposing it would work or not. Plus I have yet to find any information on HOW to transpose an off vocal, although I guess maybe there's not much more to it than going into a pitch shifter and then using mixing magic to deal with any weird sound distortions that might happen idk.
3) Cover It's a Wonderful Cat Life with Lily and Iroha. Largely inspired by the set of Hello Kitty figures featuring Iroha and Lily. (I WANT THEM)
4) Cover Yuuki wa Doko ni? Kimi no Mune ni! with Iroha and... someone else maybe idk what I'm gonna go for maybe I'll actually dig into my huge pile of banks and do a group thing
5) I do have a couple of ideas for originals floating around, we'll see how my music production class goes this time.
6) I kinda want to get a voice teacher and learn to sing. I feel like I may have mentioned it before but a couple days after Kyounosuke's coming out video it kind of dawned on me that I'd always loved singing since at least the second grade. I sang at the talent show that year and they invited me back to sing at this encore presentation but I didn't get to go because my dad had bowling night so I sat in the hallway and cried my eyes out. X'D The biggest problem is voice dysphoria is an ass because as you may know, you perceive your own voice differently than it actually sounds and I actually sound masculine enough to myself but then I play back a recording and I'M HECKING KAGAMI KAWAIINE I CAN'T -- (it's kind of funny as much as it is frustrating sjfkldls)

ETA I totally forgot about Rinbu Revolution oops (three guesses who)

Not gonna lie I'm still feeling kind of under the weather but I'm not as pessimistic about it? Might try to swallow my fears and find a new doctor this week.

(I would have saved myself so much money if I'd just bought Iroha first instead of Mayu dang rofl)

 

[Tema]

I am here once again to ask you for your help VocaVerse! I really want to do this cover but I was playing around with Voice Color and I can't decide on which settings I like, so I figured I'd ask here. I'm partially drawn to B myself, but I don't really know

 

[luwo]

I'm personally drawn to sample A! The vowels are a lot clearer and the consonants are less fuzzy.

I'll be interested to hear the final result regardless of what you pick, though, bc I've never heard Iroha used like this!

 

[Tema]

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah that's the biggest reason I was torn, I liked the feel of B but I knew it was honestly kind of a drop in quality X'D Maybe I'll try to find another way to accomplish what I was going for that might not affect it so much (there's a plugin I have in mind that I might try to use when I get to the mixing stage that miiight work... hopefully I can get the trial to work).

 

[peaches2217]

I honestly like B best! The quality drop is miniscule in my opinion, and it has a little more umph.

 

[Tema]

Thanks Peaches!

Hmmm I’m still a little torn... I played it for my dad and he liked B which surprised me a little, I was expecting him to not like either sidjdjdsj I guess I might go with B but maybe turn down the exciter a shade, since that’s the biggest difference if I remember correctly. That and maybe tweak the character setting.

 

[luwo]

Exciter is definitely the source of the fuzziness, considering i use that parameter way too much. Im still excited to hear though! I’m completely guessing, but if the plugin is anything like Avox Throat, you would probably be able to fix the closed/slightly muffled sound in the vowels - though it’ll probably sound fine in the mix anyway!

also, your dad liking the tracks made me think of when my granddad took my ipod while i was out of the room and said the person sounded cool — and whaddya know, it’s that Iroha cover of Meltdown LOL. i think its safe to say that everyone is an iroha stan

 

[Tema]

Avox Throat is the exact plugin I was thinking of! Mitchie M uses it if I remember the blog post I read correctly (Link) so I’ve been wanting to try it for a while.

Iroha is love, Iroha is life