I'm not going to go into tons of detail because I have burned any number of megabytes elsewhere in cyberspace on the topic, but I'll share just enough to clear up any general confusion :)

I, your erstwhile admin, am a transgender gal. I've known this properly for over two decades but steadfastly did not want to deal with it head-on because dealing with it SUCKS.

That said, a feature of this particular phenomenon is a little bit like being an introvert at a party for too long: you can cope for a while, engage in habits that let you deal but it will eventually exhaust and overcome you.

Where that becomes relevant here is that the longer you don't deal with it, the more brain resources it will occupy against your will, both in energy and ability to interrupt flows of thought.

On top of cosmological news slowing down, and hosting platform's fights over the ability to send emails automatically... that's in part why I was having difficulty keeping up this discussion board.

Well, I took several years and sorted out my shit in epic style, and after doing the last thing I feel like I need to, I've noticed my brain resources returning to me. I just made my first comment on a cosmology video in probably at least five years today.

What a freaking relief!

I don't know if I'll spin this back up fully - I still have kids and life and stuff - but we'll see.

I've had a name change as well. Quick funny story: it was a bit involuntary. In the course of sorting out my gender shit, people stopped believing my name to the point that I started being hesitant to give my name out. So after four months, I reluctantly went off to find something to change it to.

I ended up choosing Jade because not only was it a name that most people I know could see me as (it was weirdly unanimous), but it's also a name based on a literal translation back from the phonetic translation of my name for use in my Chinese minor back in the early 1990s. It literally translated to "fortunate jade" and I could have taken the "fortunate" part in Romance languages as Felicia or Felicity or something but Jade worked better :)

(I kept my old name as a middle name. It's my grandparents' last name, anyhow :) )

To any rare soul who pokes their nose back in, welcome back.

And to anyone who can't get in but knows me on other social media, please tell me and I will see what I can do, especially over the holidays here :)

-- Jade