Everyone will soon be going to AC and be putting in their best and putting on a show and having the time of their lives and that's great. It really is. Please make memories to last a lifetime.

AC is too large for me. I made memories to last a lifetime at Furthemore 2014, it was plenty fine for me. I'll talk about that in a different entry.

What I was thinking about just a bit ago was galavanting about. How much fun it is to do when you feel like you can do so freely. Look at the videos of every fursuit parade. Look how the people in them seem like they are free-spirited and happy.

Free...

The cons sometimes remind me of the high school prom, you know. So much fuss. So much decoration and preparation. Everyone trying to look their best and be the best and be with the best boy and oh, you must have a date. You do, don't you?

No, I didn't. Josh had just broken up with me, telling me he was gay, but wearing Nicole on his arm instead. She was leaner and meaner than me and had a job at Taco Bell. Huh. Funny about that. Actually, pretty much anyone would have been leaner than me at that point. The last year of high school was pretty much the biggest I had ever been in my whole life. I weighed well over 320 pounds, but not sure exactly how much, because I'd stopped weighing myself. I didn't even want to see the number any more. I bought stretch pants and men's multiple-xl tees because I didn't want to know what size I was, really.

But, you know, that's actually not what this journal is about, either. I ended up getting a date: the little brother of a kind, well-meaning classmate. I'll remember both of them forever. She was Julia and he was Michael. I wanted to be the prettiest I could even though I was so large. I asked him what his favorite color was. He said blue. So I wore a blue dress to prom.

What this journal is about is that preparation. Preparing so that I could be free like all the rest of the beautiful people. Putting on a façade so I could blend in a bit better.

I wanted to be as pretty as possible. I owed the poor dude that much.

You know what that means, right?

...

Facial hair removal lotion. This was my virgin journey with it.

I read the instructions on the tiny tube. "For coarse or hard-to-remove hair, leave on up to 5 extra minutes. DO NOT EXCEED 15 MINUTES!" Hmmm... It can't be that bad... I thought. So I turned on the radio. Alanis Morisette was playing: "One Hand in My Pocket".

It kind of smelled like a mixture of sulfurous eggs and baby oil that turned my stomach, but I held on for 15 minutes. I thought so, anyway. Was it 15? Maybe it had only been 10. Better to wait longer. Don't want ANY left behind. Four more songs played. I doodled in my notebook. Dragons and unicorns and hearts with a pink pen.

Oh gods... It... It burns.

And suddenly my chin and neck and upper lip were all on fire, and I knew I had made a terrible, terrible mistake.

I jumped in the shower and tried to rinse it off, pursing my lips so it didn't go in my mouth. The burning intensified. The thick, smeared-on lotion wasn't coming off!

In a panic, I grabbed the nearest washrag and, against the package directions, I started to scrub it off. This hurt. A lot.

By that point, I'm blubbering and crying. The water and tears touching my skin only burned it more. Now desperate to wash off the stinging, I grabbed the bar of soap in the corner of the shower. I lathered it up on a new washrag.

It worked.

It still burned, but not like it was. What a relief. I washed my hair and got out of the shower and toweled off.

"Mary Hope!! What the fuck are you doing in there? I gotta go!" said Tony. (Of course!) He was not used to my taking quite this long for a shower.

"I'm almost dooooo-ooone!" I sang back, and then stopped cold as I saw myself in the mirror.

Red. It was bright red where the facial hair used to be.

Oh. No.

My heart. It stopped and broke. It scattered into tiny pieces inside me. I sank onto the toilet, tentatively touching my sore face. Embarrassed, I screamed silently for a few seconds, through my nose, like I used to so I wouldn't get into trouble with my other stepdad.

What could I do? I couldn't go like this. It would be more noticeable than if I had just gone sparsely bearded in the first place. The prom was tomorrow night. There was no way...

And then Tony... Right outside the door. He would take any opportunity to tease. I thought quickly. I told him I'd forgotten my top and there's not a big towel so don't look. I ran to my room with my robe and toweled head and a hand towel on my face. I collapsed on my bed with a fan on my face and just cried and cried. The dogs scratched at the door. I told them to go away and locked it.

I must have slept through dinner. I woke up when it was dark, my hair tangled in the towel still. I touched my face. It still hurt a little, but it was smooth there. I couldn't believe there was no hair there. After all those years just looking at other girls that didn't have to worry about people looking at their faces like they looked at mine... I thought that I might go through that once a week, if I could have my face smooth like this. I got up and looked in the mirror and, to my relief, the redness was fading already. It was all going to be okay!

A few weeks later, it actually grew in even worse, and I started to obsess over it, shaving it up to three times in a day if I thought someone could see it, in spite of knowing it must be a common "problem" if there is a product (or dozen or hundred) on the market for it!

Raise your hand if you're terrified to be in a any accident or hospitalized overnight without your razor for the same reason! I honestly think about it!

Now I am braver. I am okay with admitting it. There are other things that I'm not ready to admit that I also think make me less-than-palpable for what is publicly acceptable for being female, but, for now, admitting this embarrassing one is a pretty big one. I... obsess about this facial hair. There is only one person that I feel comfortable touching my face and neck because of it.

Any of you that know me very closely know that I've struggled with off-the-charts levels of hormones since puberty. That's when the teasing started. I got everything. I got crazy cramps and a bouncy bosom, but I also got a slightly lowered voice, a bit of a sex drive... and facial hair... just like my mother. ... and I got teased about it until I wanted to delete myself.

I was born female. I have two X chromosomes and a vagina and ovaries and a uterus and everything. (Trust me, they remind me every month!) I don't think my body is male. I don't particularly want to be a male. I don't really care if someone calls me one, though. I'm not between genders. I'm not confused (often). I'm not genderqueer or transgender. My mother wished I were a boy, and that's where I get my ideas that it's possibly better to be one, but that's it. I hate the word 'cisgendered' because the way it's been used toward me and people I care about, but it applies to me, I suppose.

But this struggle I had before prom... it will always remind me of some of the problems that some of my friends that DO have gender identity issues face. (No pun intended.)

Every girl, every PERSON, goes through these or other puberty issues. Some of us have to go through puberty over and over and over again. Painfully.

My point is I wish I could have taught myself how to live a healthier life. I wish I could have taught myself a better self-image, sooner. I am grateful for my better self-image, now, but we need to teach these young people where greatness comes from. They're not getting it. They don't understand: the bullies nor the bullied.

I got so much more beautiful when I decided I wanted to be HEALTHY first. I wish I could have gotten THAT from peer pressure...