I love bread

I've been telling people I'm obsessed with bread lately, and I am

I will eat a plain slice of great value white bread and analyze the texture because truly, it is a *fascinating* product

but since I started working basically full time, not in the pursuit of disposable income, but entirely as a necessity for my own survival, eating bread in some form has become a necessary part of my daily ritual

I'll sit down and have some just barely toasted bread in the morning right before a cup of milk, and I will always always *always* enjoy a peanut butter and jelly sandwich during my lunch break. both made with only now-bougie yet ostensibly traditional loaves of bread. doesn't really matter how they're made to me. crucially, it's the character of the bread itself that I'm after.

because those moments when I've stopped my work. im not laboring, just resting and fueling my body for the day ahead. none of my 21st century worries about what my future holds or what I want to do with my life or what society will look like in the near or far future exist. when im enjoying my bread, I have genuinely no care in the world beyond the next time I'll get to enjoy a fruit so sweet. they're moments of pure bliss.

it would be incredibly easy for me to spiral and doom over how my life has played out thus far. ive basically resigned myself to living paycheck to paycheck for heaven only knows how much of my life, all so I can get away from my family and inject myself with some very legally bought hormones.

and the worst of it, the most dangerous thought of all, is the idea of what could have been. I always have to stop myself if the idea reaches my head because it's an incredibly difficult thought to grapple with. if things had only played out a little different with my family. if just a single person out of three people in my family I happen to live with could accept having a trans person under their roof, how different would my life be?

every one of my material needs could be met for life if I just stayed at home with them, but no. here I am actively choosing to spend every day that I can at work, just so when I move out I can have just enough money to just *barely* get by. but hey. I'll finally have titties, woohoo. me and my stupid chromosome or whatever.

this is where bread comes in.

as a weird little autistic nerd ive always been drawn to food that makes me think "wow, this is something people lived off of for hundreds, if not, thousands of years!"

and bread is like. the platonic ideal of this. it is arguably the thing that civilization formed to facilitate the making of. or at least, the breads that look and taste ostensibly traditional are.

when the humble peanut butter and jelly sandwich first started working its way back into my life as a staple of my diet, I'd always put on a townsends video about bread while eating one just to feel some sort of connection, no matter how weak, to what the average human existence was like across centuries of history. as if the world of today didn't feel real enough or satisfying enough, but that microdosing bits of a "realer" past could somehow be the antidote.

ive since realized that it wasn't the food, it was living as a trans woman trapped in a house full of raving transphobes without even a single hope for escape that made life feel arbitrary and fake.

I'm doing better now. I haven't left my family home yet, but through the gracious help of two friends to whom I genuinely owe the world (thank you devon and austin), I'll finally be able to move out in due time. at long last, a way out.

since being thrown this lifebuoy, there have been times where having to show up to work each day has felt like a grim reminder of just how much harder it'll be for me to survive as a result of my family and of my transness.

it feels like I skipped the part of my youth where I have a little bit of money and the freedom to have fun with it. if true survival, not suffering a long and drawn out spiritual death at the hands those who hate me yet claim they love me, is the goal, I have to lock in. I don't have the money to goof around like nothing matters. every day at work is a day working towards my own survival.

which takes us back to bread.

there will never be a day where I go to work without enjoying my bread.

for MILLENNIA people have had to get up in the morning, toil for their own survival, and despite the hardships of their time, would enjoy a moment of respite every morning as they rested and fueled their body for the day ahead.

when work was done and their taxes were paid, the most common desire across people's minds was when they'd next get to enjoy a fruit so sweet.

and it is for this reason, that when i am enjoying my bread in the morning or at lunch, I truly feel like I am reconnecting with what it means to be human.

knowing that, despite all the context, what I'm doing when I get up in the morning and enjoy my bread before working to ensure my own survival, is ultimately just one expression of the experience that has defined human existence throughout most of our history...

it doesn't change what led me here, but it makes the path ahead all the more bearable

...

I fucking love bread.