As a Canadian who has watched a loved one die very slowly and spent a fair amount of time in hospice I changed my mind about wanting to fight to the bitter end.

My mother in law was a lovely lady, but unable to really face her death. Seeing what others were going through she begged us to not let that be her but the rules are she and she alone needed to sign off on the paperwork while she was lucid. We couldn’t set that up for her, she needed to do it herself… And she couldn’t face it and she missed her window.

The last week of her life was hell. She was so weak from not eating due to her cancer that she fell and hurt her hip. Thing people don’t really tell you about wasting away is your brain essentially becomes too energy expensive to run. She lost the ability to understand what was going on around her and had to be restrained in the bed so she wouldn’t try to get up and she, unable to interpret what was happening, started making escape attempts throughout the day and night frequently crying in pain. She begged like a small child for us to help her and looked at us like monsters because we couldn’t. She had been one of the most staunchly independent people I had known and she spent her last week in agony and all of us were powerless watching knowing it was the last thing she wanted.

I was so thankful for the Hospice care. I realized it could have been so much worse if her care was expensive or wasn’t handled with such an incredible standard of compassion… But the experience left all of us close to my MIL more than a little traumatized.

It’s important to realize that these decisions are intensely personal. I would not wish what happened to my MIL on my worst enemy. Depictions of death in media do not adequately prepare you for the potential realities of every situation. That perceived duty to live as long as you can isn’t always a kindness.

I theorize this is because she’s had to adapt to code switch to speak a rhetoric specific for wider media coverage. Since the attention span of the general reader is fairly narrow and so many readers demonstrate confusion at perfectly correct terms (or the right wing coverage co-opts things in a very specific pattern) there’s a certain way of looking at language utilized in short, quotable format as a unique tool. In those instances it’s more useful to approach language from the aspect of what is the specific choices being made doing rather than saying. It’s not always correct to believe the person saying it believes what they are saying is strictly literally true. The reasons for an intentional error are many, it could be phrased that way for a personal political reason, to attempt (though not always successfully) to make the quote more legible to someone with only a passing understanding or to achieve some kind of specific desired result in the reception of the audience.

Those who know better usually find it frustrating to interface with but if you are speaking to a large group you are actually speaking to multiple audiences and usually your target is to capture those at the bottom of the engagement curve. As an informed audience member target wise you are far more likely to understand what is being implied and are thus not the ideal target for the potential language tools being employed. In many ways as an audience type you can be safely ignored in favor of outreach to people who are generally not so literate or aware.

Due in large part to cultural bans on showing explicit (not sexually explicit, just undeniable romantic coding) same sex relationships in cartoons during it’s production if you know what the creator’s intent was for you are looking at… Kora’s arc sort of plays out like a very common struggle queer women have with compulsory heterosexuallity.

Sounds a bit like attention economy burnout. It’s tuned to young adults level of brain plasticity and as a lot of us are aging the cycle is wearing us out. In some ways you might need to start finding time to actually be properly bored again. Not like a constant semi-entertained state or stimulated by work that is dull… just actually properly bored on your own time by choice.

Find some low attention calorie things to do. Read books, chill out in a park or a coffee shop with your phone off, set timers and take 30 minutes of a nap and hit the snooze button for as many times as you want. Win back your high points by expanding the low end resting rate. Unplug from things that don’t give you satisfying returns and see how that makes you feel.

And sometimes it’s okay to lose a bit of sparkle. We get older and it’s a little harder to find things that feel like an authentic fresh experience.

That is about the long and the short of it yeah.

As trans people we are very keyed in to noticing people of our perceived gender. Our brains recognize you as our people… but instead of nessisarily looking at what is considered the stereotype and being like “that’s a MAN” we sort of notice y’all more holistically. The flamboyant gay man, the quiet anxious man, the chubby kind quirky man, the man who likes pink… Our brains see you all are our people and being like you could very well be somebody’s transition goal and you might not even know it. When we talk to you we get that spark of recognition. You are men. The rest is all just window dressing. Man isn’t a static frame that you squeeze to fit - what you are just expands the definition of man.

All that is really required is that you own it.