Really?
No, you want a cute, simple little blurb like this:
The Author finishes off a discount bellini with a fork at a White Spot, wearing the latest from Wal-Mart and a necklace they bought in high school
An ND NB Wearing NBs in BC!
After spending most of their life in the Southwestern United States, Wyvr now lives in Surrey, British Columbia. Wyvr chose their nickname way back in Web 1.0 days, from the word ‘wyvern,’ little anticipating that they would end up living in a place where their closest airport is abbreviated YVR. A funny coincidence! Wyvr identifies as an agender woman and will accept any pronouns in most contexts, although they/them is the simplest default. They are of mixed-race heritage, including Mexican, Czech and German. They credit their maternal grandparents for helping nurture a love of violin music, classic movies and baking. They have been married for over fifteen years to a very supportive partner.
Despite numerous mental and physical health issues, they have been writing and illustrating Tin Soldier for over five years. Among their other works are some dragon porn that you might find if you look for it (you probably shouldn’t look for it), and some funny fake product labels that were read on the air for the podcast Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap.
Their favorite food is sweetened cereal and milk. Their favorite color is red. They have one cat; he is a very good boy.
You don’t actually want to know about the author, right?
Still reading?
Look, you do not need this information and much of it is not fun. I’d give it a PSI-3.75, just below a 4 due to distance. A person who writes about trauma like I do is not an untraumatized person, you know this just from logic. Reader, don’t be a hero. Turn back now.
All right, smart ass, you asked for it, so siddown. It took me over 220 installments just to introduce you to my characters, you’re going to be here a while. Make yourself a snack or something.
Nothing about me is simple and I do not fit in boxes well. I’ve had a lot of injuries inflicted by people trying to put me into boxes and I resent the practice in general. In broad terms, my heritage is Czech-German on my mom’s side and Mexican on my dad’s side. On both sides, my grandfathers immigrated and my grandmothers were born in the USA. In any case I am an American-made amalgam, with some indelible cultural stamps as a result.
Genderwise, I’m not comfortable with ‘trans’ for myself, but I’ll accept ‘nonbinary,’ NB or enby as a label because it’s convenient. You may use they/them, similarly out of convenience. I’m one of the weird ones who’s also fine with she/her (AFAB, strangers are going to be calling me ‘mija’ and ‘young lady’ until they lower my pancake butt into the grave) and he/him (unless you’re trying to dismiss me as a clueless white male or BernieBro, I do not like boxes). He/him gives me the giggles if used IRL, because I don’t look it. But this one time, in my pandemic buzz cut, while doing physical therapy in the pool, some guy addressed me as ‘homie’ because I must assume only my egg-like head was visible. That was kinda fun. Enby life goals — to appear effortlessly androgynous like enbies in media! So I will also answer to ‘homie’. I do prefer X or Latinx, and I’m sick of the argument over the need for a gender-neutral suffix in Spanish. People are not things. And Raine Whispers, who is an enby like me, is male in the Spanish dub of The Owl House because that suffix is lacking. If you don’t want x, pick a freaking letter already and get out of the way of my adorable, shy, glasses-wearing representation.
You can have whatever pronouns you want, sweet baby. If they don’t give you a happy ending with Eda, Mama will burn Disney+ to the ground for you.
If I may divorce my identity from the language we’re using to define such things, my gender experience is like Gertrude Stein’s view of Oakland, there isn’t any there there. Which means I don’t feel any particular need to transition, so I shy away from ‘trans’ because people assume I require a new name or appearance or something. I don’t use my birth name online, or when I can help it otherwise, because I’ve had it screamed at me a lot growing up, not because it doesn’t match my identity. I’m not thrilled with my body because it doesn’t function well and it gives me a lot of pain — that’s why I’ve had a bunch of surgeries and I’m not eager to sign up for more. My dad was exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam and brought home PTSD, both of which cause genetic changes that can be passed down, so that may have something to do with it.
However, my tits have broken the Puberty Treaty of 1992, and if they do not stop hurting every single goddamn day, we are going to get into a duel to the death like Oscar Wilde versus the wallpaper. Or Barnaby versus the wallpaper, come to think of it. I just fear ending up with more pain after yet another desperate attempt to have less.
I am, as of this writing, what we optimistically call middle-aged. But I’ve had some of the same problems growing up that Ann and Milo did. Didn’t split my personality (I spent a couple years trying, couldn’t commit.) did spend a few decades socially isolated with trauma and various deficits. So don’t, like, read all this junk and tell me I’ll grow into a fine writer someday — I’m grown. I just don’t have an editor and I read words all weird.
Seriously, they noticed the weird reading when my mom tried to get me into the gifted program — I don’t sound out letters, I read the whole word. Even words I don’t know. My mom thought this was because I was ‘so advanced.’ Ah-ha-ha, memories. She drilled me on phonics until I could pass. But the thing about reading English as an ideographic language — I don’t notice the spelling and I may transpose, miss or add sounds when I pronounce it in my head. This means that I can learn a word and recognize it when I read it and not be able to spell (draw!) or say the damn thing. Took me forever to learn to parse and reproduce b and d, I really feel for poor Erik. I’m also super rigid in my language, I often can’t define a word by groping around for others close to it in my head. A rose is a rose and not anything like a daisy, even if they’re all flowers. Close is never good enough. I said tremendous and I meant tremendous, good sir. Does it matter one whit if I am three-years-old?
Ya know, I said to my mom when I was three (or younger?) and already ready for bed — teeth brushed, jammies and all — I said, “I have a tremendous craving for gingerbread cookies.” I am assuming I shocked her, because she took me into the kitchen and gave me cookies. This is how one fosters a lifelong love of language! “Hmm, express myself precisely, get cookies. Yes. I shall store that away.”
Conveniently, everything smart I did was because they were good parents and everything difficult was me being a bad child. Took me a long time to realize it was two sides of a coin, all me, and they never did.
But because of these weird credits and debits, I do much better when I can click for a thesaurus, type instead of scrawl, and use a dictionary that guesses what I’m trying to say. I did not have this in school, and only sort of had it in college. This is to say nothing of the troubles I had with math, because I never once tumbled to the fact that math drills were supposed to help me memorize the answers to simple problems and I did the work every single time. I hated the sight of numbers by the time I got to algebra, which I was not prepared for. And I kept up with the goddamn gifted program and honors classes anyway. With a tutor, I managed to catch up to math fast enough to pass a geometry honors exam in high school. I must be freaking brilliant.
I’m also an utterly traumatized social cripple because I burned out hard… and more than once! My parents managed to land me in a special education class in high school that put me back together and I burned out again in college! Basically, I can crank out honors-level work for you if you treat me like Milo at the watch factory — give me the tools, let me do something I like and do not startle me. Education does not work this way on any level. (Neither does employment!) I managed to cobble together two community college associate’s degrees from all my hard work and I’ll probably never get anything better. Despite being ‘so advanced.’
During my adventures in school, I picked up the labels ‘doesn’t know phonics,’ ‘poor fine motor skills,’ ‘smart but lazy’ and ‘severely emotionally disturbed.’ The school assured my parents that that last one was just for the paperwork. Ha-ha, no it wasn’t! Nobody floated autism or attention deficit disorder — I was too smart. And a girl. I self-tested for autism using the AAA a couple years ago, and I failed only because I refused to score myself with an imagination deficit. But for that, I scored higher than my S/O, and he rated as an Aspie. (It’s not a competition.) I could go to a real doctor and pay for the same test, but they’d want information from my parents and I still think they’d fail to peg me because the questions are geared tightly to the male stereotype. I’m like the wind, baby! Can’t be nailed down!
This does mean that when I copied my Complex PTSD onto poor Milo, he got my mislabeled disorders too. I meant Calliope to be autistic, but I never intended to do that to him, he had enough going on. Well, at least he got the imaginary friend that I never quite managed to create in my early teen years. It’s probably way harder to make a tulpa when you’ve got ADD, or a near equivalent. I’m still awful at meditating. I wander off and start telling myself stories, because that was how I checked out when my reality was intolerable.
My own personal Siege of San Rosille began in toddlerhood, to the best of my recollection. My first problems were bad reactions to noises and darkness and not sleeping when or where I was supposed to. I cried a lot. After various failures, my parents thought a good solution was to lock me in my bedroom with a hook and eye latch on the outside of the door. This was fine to do to a small child because I had a folding fire ladder they made certain I knew how to use, and there was no other reason a small child would need to exit its room at night. Logic! They insisted I would fall asleep if I would just lay down with my eyes closed and not move. Well, when you are locked in your room with no toys and lying with your eyes closed, ramrod straight, trying to be a good girl, your weird brain is gonna do something to entertain itself for hours.
Or you’ll figure out what you can do to get a book, a toy, a toilet, or just some goddamn attention. I did not pick up Milo’s self-harming habits, but I’d be lying if I said I never considered it. Or suicide, during my teen years, when the lock was on my side of the door but they had a key, for ‘safety.’ By that age my list of transgressions had grown to include refusing to go to school, severe anxiety, acid reflux so bad it made me throw up all the damn time (they kinda thought I was faking an eating disorder to get out of school), and not just being fixed already. Weirdly, my parents believed I had mental and physical health issues, but they thought I was being bad and punishment would improve my behavior at the same time. They never realized the contant terror might have a negative health impact on an anxiety-riddled child with a stomach problem.
I tried to stop communicating, also like Milo, in the feeble hope that they’d just leave me alone, but it resulted in a lot more screaming so I quit it fast and never tried it again.
I’ve blown myself and my experiences to pieces and you will find me all over Tin Soldier. A bit here, a bit there. David’s loud music for hours? My mom did that, every night. She had her own problems going on, but she liked to blame me. Seth being pushed to the breaking point to accomplish an ultimately pointless goal? Me, going through school. Hyacinth’s parents who screamed at her for being hurt and wanted to put her in an asylum? Mine wanted to put me in a residential school, but my grandmother intervened. I did go to a mental health day program for troubled teens for a while, did not help. Maggie’s turmoil with her mom brushing her hair and not believing it hurt? I still wince when someone tries to brush my hair, and I never got that apology. Dad always gone and mom a tyrant? Yep, but my dad was doing a job for the city government, not a trading company. Housing development, including low income housing — social justice and maladaptive coping skills are my parents’ legacy. Room 101’s hikikomori existence is what I had when my dad was gone and my mom and I were fighting, drinking water out of my bathroom sink and afraid to go downstairs for so much as a yogurt cup, because I’d get yelled at. Mordecai’s emotionally-abusive upbringing and subsequent insecurity about whether he’s ever being an honest person or just hitting all the buttons to get a bag of chips (i.e. love)? Need I even answer? And was I a fixer and a people-pleaser like Erik? By necessity! Sometimes my parents wouldn’t even speak to each other and I had to ferry messages back and forth for days!
I haven’t even addressed the semi-hoarded house, bugs in the food and cat feces glued to the floor with age. (I should say, the latter was my fault for not cleaning up after my cats. If I wasn’t going to clean up the poop, it would just sit there forever and that was logical consequences for my bad behavior. The single large plastic bin that all four cats were supposed to poop in and hated, the cheap litter that gave me an allergy attack when I tried to scoop huge, mixed piles of pee and shit out of this bin, and the inadequate supplies for cleaning wall-to-wall carpet — as a child! — never entered into it. Now, is it any wonder I get pissed at conservatives demanding individual responsibility for huge, systemic problems?) I suppose I had Hyacinth put magic on the pantry to keep the bugs and mice out and Maggie designed a spell to deal with cat poop right away. Even with all the shit I put my characters through, apparently that stuff is too painful.
I barely realized this was not okay and not my fault while it was happening, and not until after I moved out and lived in a college dorm for a couple months. I cannot stress enough that abusers do not behave abusively 24/7 and you do form an attachment and forgive them, even love them, especially if they are your caregivers. They threatened me with the idea that if I did not behave myself the authorities would take me away, and I did not want that. But I never popped up any of the Bs — that being blood, bruises and broken bones — so it’s not as if any institution would’ve removed me or, dare I say, helped me. Much later, when I found Wikipedia had an article on emotional abuse, for funsies, I opened Malachite (115) in another tab and had a look. Did I hit all the bullet points with what Mordecai and Nicky did to Seth without even trying? You betcha! I know my stuff!
I escaped this situation with my S/O’s help in my mid twenties, and I still kept going back to visit it regularly until my mom died in 2012. Possibly by suicide, I do not trust my family to give me an honest answer on that. She did have access to pills and it was only a month after my grandmother, her mom, died. My mom also had lifelong health issues that did not get addressed and boy, I sure do worry about that every day I have to cope with this fragile human body of mine.
Look, if you are inclined to read my work critically and you do not think I am a very good writer, cut me some slack for not being a serial killer. Please. If you suspected I knew what PTSD flashbacks and abuse felt like from the inside, you have hit the nail right on the head with that assumption, boy howdy.
As of this writing, I’m in pain every day and living through a pandemic but there is no amount of money you could pay me to rewind myself to 2012 or earlier. Okay, maybe a brief trip to 2006 to warn myself on my wedding day that the salon is going to leave a dot of long-wearing lipstick under my chin, my parents are going to drop the top of the cake in the parking lot and throw away the (rented) stand, we’re going to lock ourselves out of our apartment when the key breaks, that smile does not look warm and human, it looks like a terrified chimpanzee, and there is no need for a human being to put up with that many bobby pins in their hair no matter how much they want to feel like a pretty princess. Oh, and there will be a brief break in the rain for photos, all of which will have that lipstick dot and terrified smile. But, hot damn, the marriage itself seems to be made of titanium, so just get through it once and if we ever renew those darn vows, we’ll wear sweatpants.
Seth blew all his luck early, I seem to have gotten mine late. I am in no shape to do a real job and I’m very bad at relationships in general, but I got one right! I drew the right assigned gender to kinda get away with staying home, and we can afford me. Me and my little project here, which is cheaper than a lot of hobbies, I guess.
What kinda marriage do I have? We were doing our taxes on the floor of our one-bedroom apartment, I said, “If I’m going to go back to work, we really ought to get married,” and he said “Okay.” 10/10, would propose the exact same way again! Practical financial proposals are very underrated. He’s an accountant now. I don’t have to do my taxes anymore as long as he lives. Accountants can be fun!
Years later, I accidentally “came out,” if I may put it that way, as agender by showing him something I’d written for the purpose of arguing politics with some stranger on the internet. Can’t even remember the topic, but he acts as my own personal AITA subreddit. I was rereading what I’d said and I mentioned my lack of perceived gender. I said, “Oh, shit, I guess I just came out. Are you okay with that? “ “Yeah, you’re still you.” A day later or so, “So do you want a dick?” “No, I just wouldn’t mind one if I had one.” “Okay. Cool.” Days later, “I’ve been considering it and if I could velcro one on, I’d take the ability to pee standing up, but I have no use for testicles.” “Yeah, I get that.” Acceptance is a powerful thing, folks.
We were a long distance relationship and met on an internet message board about dragons. We spent a lot of time saying goodbye and being miserable. We found out we were near enough to meet in person when we both felt an earthquake at the same time. When visiting, we were afraid of the silences and used to play the Alphabet Game with weird themes, “I’m going on a picnic and I’m bringing Arthur Dent, Beeblebrox-comma-Zaphod, cricket, digital watches…” Or we’d lie in bed doing the most tortured Tom Swifties imaginable. “‘This scholarly article references nonbinary gender in the footnotes,’ Tom said X-citedly.” We still do Swifties sometimes, but we’re more comfortable with silence and we don’t have much use for goodbyes at train and bus stations anymore. We prefer to talk to each other while doing anything other than making eye-contact. I’ve cribbed Milo and Calliope’s relationship off ours, and Erik and Maggie will see shades of our weird interactions as well. It’s not perfect, and we’ve both got a lot to work on, but I’ll take it.
We chose Tucson, AZ for our love nest because it was far from our families and much cheaper than California. We’ve moved to Surrey, BC as of November 2021, because we’d like healthcare, a pension, a CPA (for him) and not to live in a fracturing democracy. Please. This move has been a long time coming, and we managed to squeak out of the US in between Delta and Omicron — after driving 2000 miles with a cat! I could always use a little more luck, but what we’ve had so far is pretty phenomenal. Still alive, with a (work from home!) job for him, and housing, and healthcare on the horizon. This is the first time we’ve lived in a place it snows, like, for real. Our first Canadian Christmas was designated by the weather service as “perfect,” which means at least 2 cm of snow on the ground and snow in the air at some point during the day. No tamales, but we can get the stuff to make them, and we’ll probably be settled enough next year to give it a try.
The chimichangas here are square. I don’t think I will ever get used to that, but I can live with it.
I’m in a better place, but my story and my challenges won’t end here. Getting my health issues addressed will never be easy, because of my appearance and the psychological damage I’m dragging with me. It’ll be hard for me to do a real job or get a real publishing deal too. But, hey, from your point of view, that means a lot more free story. If I don’t burn out again or die.
Much like Barnaby, I’m trapped in causality. If any of this stuff, even the bad parts, was a little bit different, you would not have Tin Soldier to read. Maybe something else, but not Tin Soldier. Safety, at least a little bit of safety, is necessary for me to create, but trauma does inspire. If I had to be screwed up this way to serve some purpose, I can’t do anything but accept it. And if the only purpose is what we make… Well, I guess I made something.