This morning caught me off-guard.
I was creating a new separate website for me to share older digital photos in a blog format (like I do film at lottiephoto.ca) and, as I was editing some photos, a familiar and unwanted feeling began to wash over me. The same feeling I always get when I have to engage a little too much with the residues of the pre-transition me.
I don't know if others get the same feeling, but it seems very much related to dysphoria, but also distinct. Like, when I was dealing with name and sex designation change paper work, I had to think about and use my dead name a whole lot during the process. In communicating with the province during this process, it had to be in my dead name - including the psychologist's letter.
I mean, I understand. Until this year, to the province, I was my dead name, even if to very few others I was.
Still, I ended up feeling down.
A little sad.
A little undermined.
A little like being detransitioned.
I got that feeling today too.
When I recovered this cache of digital photos a few years ago, I quickly went through and deleted selfies, more personal photos, and anything else that was outside of what I wanted to preserve, so it's not as if I was faced with them.
The ghosts remain though.
...and I'm equally cursed and blessed with a good memory.
The inaugural post contains photos I made ten years ago on New Year's Day while on a late morning walk through Lowertown. It was a snowy day and I was hoping for some pretty photos. I also remember some selfies I took while out for that walk. They're long-deleted, but they're burnt into my memory. They're both real and false.
They're real because I know what I looked like when I made the photos and I know that I used one of them as a social media photo. I was trying hard. I had only recently purged (for the infinitieth time) a small cache of clothing and makeup and I was (for the infinitieth time) trying to rebuild the crumbling facade of who I was supposed to be.
I'd love to look back and just chuckle.
...and most days I just do.
But sometimes.
Sometimes...
One of the things I have been working on through my transition is to locate the little hiding Charlotte in my memories and pull open the closet door for her. It's what she wanted and it's what she needed and it's exactly what she didn't have. It makes sense, nobody can do that for us, but she waited for it to happen.
I see part of healing from decades of repression (and suppression when I'd get a little too close) as drawing a line back from the woman I get to be today, to the little girl stuffed into the wrong identity.
In doing this, I'm learning, there is a certain vulnerability that when I look back into the past and have to engage directly with the dishonest and false version of myself, it's almost as if I'm revisiting a certain harm.
But, of course, I can never go back.
So I have two places to visit in my own past: engage with the memories of being a scared and hiding little girl (which I want to do) or to engage with the the memories and residues of the dead-eyed shell of a person pretending to something they were not.
Still, it's just pictures.
I plan to keep putting posts up on this new little site, but I think until such a time that I know it won't risk coming at some emotional cost, it will be somewhat irregular.
A Vegetarian, A Vegan, and a Sad Cow Named Charlotte
For some time now, if you were to ask me about how I ate, I'd tell you I'm a vegetarian. And that's quite true. While we keep it to a minimum, my diet includes eggs and cheese.
About three weeks ago, after eating mostly vegan for a while, but finding cheese replacements (in particular) to be, how shall I put it, disappointing, we agreed that we could purchase cheese and eggs, so long as they came from a nice producer with good practices.
And then, we proceeded to celebrate this decision by not buying cheese and eggs from nice producers with good practice, and instead continuing to buy disappointing vegan cheese replacements.
This morning, while coming with a plan for our adventure, we discussed perhaps looking for a some nice cheese from a nice producer with good practices.
But a feeling came over me: I still didn't want to. The ethical challenge still loomed large, but I also felt bad. Bad that I might be inadvertently making a decision for our household and also bad that I was just seeking a way to go around my ethical problem.
And so much of it is illustrated in my head by a cow named Charlotte.
Last Spring, we visited the Agricultural Museum and its dairy barns. While we were walking through, I came across a cow that staff had named Charlotte!
Unfortunately, unlike many of the others in the barn, she was sort of laying on the floor and seemed depressed. Listless. Vacant (even by cow standards) and almost disassociated. I won't pretend to be a cow whisperer and my only time spent with cows is a few times through my live visiting them, so I don't know exactly how she was feeling (depressed? sad? bloated? itchy bum?), but in my mind, she was most certainly not enjoying her lot.
And then all of the things vegan friends had told me over the years, all of the vegan things I read on my own, the quick recent research on animal standards in agriculture, all of it reiterated what I knew, but long didn't want to.
It's not right by my ethical standards and I can't reconcile it.
I also can't step around it anymore.
After discussing it again, for the millionth time, Kathleen and I are on the same page. It's not just me, it's both of us. So we continue!
One of the last sources I have for dairy/egg is on office days, when I purchase a breakfast sandwich at a certain popular coffee chain. I mostly have been doing due to inertia, it's on my way to work, and that it's one of only two shops open when I'm heading to work, but that's still compromising my ethics for convenience.
So now, I've got some time in the kitchen to come up with my own properly vegan breakfast sandwich.
I think we're going to be just fine!
January 3, 2026