ABOUT ME: taking up my first bytes of bandwidth
🐈⬛
I wrote this post while listening to:
(I’ve started, stopped, rewritten, deleted, and stared at this intro more times than I want to admit.
It’s a long one, so strap in. Maybe grab a tea.)
I’ve gotta come clean from the start and say:
I am deeply, genuinely sorry.
Every introduction I’ve ever written before this
was a lie in small ways.
Not because I wanted to lie, obviously,
but because I didn’t know who the fuck I was long enough
to even consider introducing her.
I didn’t have language for myself.
I didn’t have clarity.
I didn’t have permission.
And no matter how you frame it,
that silence was killing me.
For most of my life,
I’ve felt like a background character in my own story.
Someone written by underpaid writers with terrible humor,
improvised awkwardly, tolerated gently, forgotten easily.
The kind of person you don’t notice is in the room
until she breathes too loud
or moves for the first time in hours.
To put it bluntly:
I didn’t know who I was.
(big shocker, I know)
Not in the cute, poetic, coming of age way.
More in the
“I literally do not know what this body is supposed to be”
kind of way.
And now suddenly I do.
Oh fuck, do I know.
The knowing is loud.
Disruptive.
Messy, honest, painful, freeing.
It doesn’t make perfect sense
but it won’t leave,
and it’s not going away.
So hi. Let’s start again.
From the beginning.
I’m Claire. 🤗
22, she/her,
musician, little autistic critter,
existentialist in private.
And this?
This is the beginning of me finally letting myself exist
without apologizing for it.
This isn’t going to be a “clean brand” blog.
I’m not here to inspire, uplift, or be relatable.
I’m not trying to teach anyone anything.
This is just my little corner of the internet
where I can actually be me.
when it all made sense
Earlier last year
and I mean suddenly, violently, without warning
I realized I knew exactly what dysphoria was.
Which means I realized exactly what I was, too.
Not the version cis people force into bullet points.
Not the tidy textbook definition trans people memorize
so they’re allowed to be taken seriously.
Not the poetic Tumblr metaphors
or the Reddit essays.
The real thing.
The thing I thought I had somehow skipped.
The raw, unfiltered
“my pain makes sense now i want to throw up into my own mouth”
kind of realization.
Everything clicked.
Terrifying clarity.
Brain worms.
A whole new understanding of myself
that made the first twenty years
feel like some weird, off-brand fever dream.
Every weird feeling.
Every childhood moment that didn’t fit.
Every time I called myself "quirky" or "cringy" to cover discomfort.
Every dressing room panic.
Every time I avoided my reflection for weeks.
Every time I neglected caring for myself
because I hated the vessel.
Every “he” that felt like a mosquito bite
I pretended not to scratch.
All of it.
Suddenly in focus.
Suddenly undeniable.
It wasn’t pretty.
It wasn’t cinematic.
It wasn’t gentle.
It felt like waking up mid-surgery
bloody, messy, horrifying, unavoidable.
And once you see it?
There’s no going back to pretending.
“...you were supposed to be a...”
My mom once told me she was expecting a girl
when she was pregnant with me.
She said it so casually.
Just a little anecdote.
A “fun little fact.” :DDDDDD
But that sentence carved itself into my skull.
What am I supposed to do with that?
Frame it?
Archive it?
Staple it to my chest?
Because I can’t stop wondering:
Was she wrong?
Or did she know before I did?
Before the world taught me how to hide?
Before I learned to perform
the boyhood that never fit me?
Sometimes I wonder
if I was always supposed to be this
but the world had other ideas.
i had to defend myself
These stories usually have their ugly sides.
I wish I could say it was strangers who pushed back.
I’m usually good at ignoring strangers.
But it was my own sibling.
The fight we had still lives under my skin
in a way I can’t begin to scrape out
before calling my therapist.
They told me
(next to a bunch of awful shit I won’t repeat)
that I “wasn’t really trans.”
And that’s when something in me
started to rot and regrow at the same time.
Because who the fuck decides that?
Who wakes up and thinks,
“yeah, I know your identity better than you do”?
Who has the arrogance
to label someone else’s suffering as imaginary?
And for what?
Attention I’m not even getting?
It wasn’t just insulting.
It was grief.
Grief for the version of them
I thought would catch me
when I finally opened my mouth
to speak my truth
after they knew for so long.
Someone who knew my childhood,
my jokes, my fears,
my favorite food at age six.
Someone who should’ve known better.
It made me realize something.
Who gets to tell me what I am?
Who I am?
No one.
Not them.
Not my parents.
Not the people who misgendered me for decades
until I forgot to question it.
Just me.
And it turns out
I’ve been right about myself all along.
I just had to catch myself.
And I did.
so… who am i now?
i’m a musician
I make emotional, experimental indie electronic
under the name zaire.
I stack vocals until they sound like
every version of myself singing at once.
I build synths that sound like
anxiety melting into transcendence.
I create peace from chaos
and chaos from peace.
I’m making an album called --A- -O-?
It’s not just music;
it’s the first time my internal self
has had a physical outlet
without hiding behind love.
It’s transition, loneliness, identity,
dysphoria, self-love,
and grief all wrapped into one.
i’m a coder
Not in a GitHub-career way
more in a
“I build weird shit at 3AM because my brain gets itchy”
kind of way.
- Proxmox clusters
- TrueNAS
- endless Docker containers
- so much more
My machines know me better
than most people do.
i’m a storyteller
Longform YouTube videos I haven’t finished.
Weird internet rabbit holes.
Lost media.
Things like that.
i’m lonely. but not hopeless.
I moved to a new city.
I don’t know anybody, truly.
I barely leave the house;
not because I don’t want to,
but because I’m scared
of being seen the wrong way.
Some days I look in the mirror
and see the girl I’m becoming.
Some days I see the ghost
of the person I was forced to pretend to be.
Both are me.
Both are temporary.
I’m trying to live in the in-between
without breaking
until I finally get there.
so why write any of this? why a blog? why now?
Because I need a place
to put the versions of myself
that never got to speak.
Because writing feels like breathing
for the first time.
Because I’m tired
of letting silence rot inside me.
Because honesty is cheaper than therapy
and hits harder.
Because I want a record
of the person I was
when everything finally started to make sense.
I’m not writing for attention.
I’m not writing for validation.
I’m not writing for sympathy.
I’m writing because I finally can.
And because the girl I’m becoming
deserves to hear herself.
This blog is documentation of my rebuild.
My transition.
My loneliness.
My chaos.
My music.
My weird tech life.
My grief.
My joy.
My everything.
If you’re here at the start
thank you.
I don’t know where this goes.
But for the first time ever...
that uncertainty feels like freedom.
we’ll get there. talk to you soon. xoxo
much love - claire, 17/Nov/2025