Hi, I Am Samantha

Preamble: I started out with the goal of this post being about finding my name, but I quickly realized how much my name journey was very intertwined with my early transition journey in general, so it expanded somewhat in scope. Relatedly, this post took me around a year to finish, in large parts as it stirred up so many emotions.

Content warning: Discussion of gender dysphoria and gender imposter syndrome.

I’m going to post this on my blog as an experiment. The experiment being that I’m trying to spend less time polishing it compared to my “normal” blog posts, as it started out as a social media (Mastodon) post. Expect some typos and grammatical errors. I tried to make it brief for posting on Mastodon, but it turned out to be a bit long anyway…

Since it comes up with some frequency on autistic social media, I wanted to share my experience with noise cancelling headphones as an noise sensitive autistic person with auditory processing issues. As always, this is just my experience.

Introduction

I like using Mastodon (/ the “ActivityPub universe”) for connecting with people, and I have found many great people I enjoy talking with. I look forward to hearing from people on good and bad days and having somewhere to share my world with.

One challenge is seeing the post I want while seeing a minimum of triggering posts. I think it’s important to be explicit that many things I find triggering and don’t want to see (at least most of the time) aren’t necessarily bad posts - they are, for various reasons, things I don’t want to see.

This blog will be used to describe various topics related to life as a a person who found out first they were autistic and trans later in life (40+ years old).

It will primarily be an extension of topics I post on my Mastodon account @samantha@autistics.life but for subjects where I would want a more permanent way to refer to it or just too long to fit Mastodon posts.

I use the #HiIAmSamantha tag on Mastodon for trans/gender-related posts. Despite the name of this blog, this will be more mixed - I just liked Hi, I Am Samantha as a name - especially as it was already there, and I hate coming up with names :-).