Blog #1: The Year Starts
You might be confused. Irene, what the hell are you doing talking about the start of the year in August? And to that I say: School. Tomorrow, August the 24th, I go into Junior Year, and let me tell you about why I am, justifiably, scared. You know the teacher you never really liked? Well, what if I have one? What if I have a teacher who's just a dick and uncompromising in every single way? What if ALMOST ALL OF THEM ARE LIKE THAT?!?!? Okay, I'm being a bit dramatic, but it's a fear of the unknown thing. All but one of my teachers are new, with the sole exception of Mr. O who I love because he's a chill guy.
But this also brings me to another school fear I have. Loud noises. See, I'm Autistic, and being Autistic at school is a humiliation ritual, especially when you're the kind of Autistic that doesn't like yelling, and teachers do a lot of that because nobody knows how to behave anymore. And that's not even to say that in the teacher's pet kind of way, people just suck man.
One of the things I am very excited about is that I will get to see my best friend, who I'll just call Ivy here. That's not his actual name by any means, but just using "I" would get really confusing when talking in first person, which Irene is doing right now. Anyway, Ivy is a great friend. When we sit at lunch, I would pull my laptop out and start just bullshitting on it with him or doing a war game using Google's digital dice with the Paint.NET software, which, by the way, was also used to make the graphics for this site. I haven't seen him at all this summer and we haven't talked much on Discord so I'm really excited to be able to get to see him again every day.
This is a smaller thing, but over the summer I came out to 2 school friends as transgender, so I will finally experience being called a she in real life by people I know. It's a small victory, but when you live in an incredibly transphobic household, it means everything. Anyway, this is going on four paragraphs now, so I should probably end it here. Thanks for reading!
August 23, 2026