WARNING:
This journal is LOOOONG, and there is no TL;DR at the bottom. Sorry.
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For decades, I’ve tried to be a somebody, and failed miserably at it. It’s not for not having tried, I tried my damnedest to be a somebody, but failed.
Why?
I failed because, despite my desperate attempts to become a somebody, I didn’t really want to become a somebody.
What I wanted was to be respected.
Specifically, I wanted my family to respect me.
I was born with several problems. I was born a month late, I have a lazy eye, I am slow to learn though I retain what I learned better than most. I am socially awkward, not “getting” some things that other people just naturally understand. Perhaps most notably, I was male at birth with certain features and conditions that are consistent with girls of my family, i.e. curly, bright red hair, a feminine face, a higher-pitched voice than most other boys, and interests in things that traditionally are only allowed for girls.
I was (and still am) also very sensitive to heat and bright light. While I am not diagnosed with it I strongly suspect that I may have a variation of albinism, due in part to this sensitivity.
My family was very conservative, and very focused on propriety. They cared more about how they appeared to other people than they did about the well-being of children living under their roof.
Mother had a long-standing habit of telling everyone she knew about my problems, many of which I myself was unaware of. As a result of this behavior, other people regularly treated me worse than they treated other kids.
My step-father, meanwhile, saw me as some kind of a threat to him, even though I went out of my way to prove that I was nothing of the sort. Yet the more I proved him wrong, the angrier and more abusive towards me he became.
I wanted so badly to be accepted by my family that I tried to be an actor, an author, a publisher, a musician, and of course an artist. While I am fairly decent as an artist, the fact is that my art is nowhere near as good as many of my peers in the furry community.
When I went by Inanna, I felt it was wrong from the very start, and yet I also felt obligated to be her, mainly because of my obsession with pleasing my family and getting them to love me.
When I was 9 years old, I became a Christian not because I wanted to serve Jesus, but because I wanted my seemingly devout Christian family to love me.
But the more I proved my worth, the worse their abuses towards me became.
They blamed me for things I hadn’t done, used me as a scapegoat for all their shortcomings, and one day in 2011, having had it up to my eyeballs with this blame-game, put my foot down and held my step-father accountable for his own behavior. The situation got so heated that we almost came to blows.
Shortly thereafter, my step-father gifted me a travel trailer to live in, and promptly “fixed” it up by installing electrical equipment that far exceeded the trailer’s capacity to handle, making sure that leaks in the roof weren’t fixed, and covering up black mould with plywood before saying he fixed it.
Rain started coming down late in September of that year, and he and mother started off on a long-planned road trip to Yellowstone Park and Sacramento, California. Three days later, I woke up unable to breathe, extremely warm, humidity through the roof, and the air in that trailer like soup. I put on a robe and stepped outside and it was crisp and cool. Realizing what had happened I quickly went in, ran my fingers across the cupboard doors, and found that they were covered in slime. I sold the trailer to a neighbor as-is, begged him to sell it for parts not wanting others to move into that death trap, and then spent a week homeless until my SSDI payment came through on October 3rd. I slept under a bridge for the first time in my life during that week... the Burnside Bridge, in Portland, Oregon.
I had an acquaintance online who had agreed to put me up, but I had to take a Greyhound to the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex in Texas. That’s why I waited as long as I did. Got my ticket, boarded the bus, and haven’t been back to Portland since.
Three months later I ended up in a hospital in Arlington, TX, with one of the worst cases of Bronchitis I had ever suffered in my entire life. I almost died as a result of it. Given the trailer I had lived in was filled with black mould, and that I spent a week wandering the streets of Portland, Oregon, during the last week of September, 2011, it’s pretty obvious where that Bronchitis infection came from. I was in the hospital for three days, hooked up to an IV bag filled with Saline Solution to rehydrate me.
All because I held my step-father responsible for his own bad behavior.
I kept on trying to make a name for myself, but knew I’d never gain the respect of my family. I went by Inanna during those years, thinking I was an incarnation of the Sumerian Goddess of the same name. Not wanting to gloat about it, I originally just wanted to name myself “Inanna” and nothing else, but of course that name had already been taken. So, rather than going by a different name while also wanting to acknowledge what I believed without outright calling myself “Goddess,” I chose “Eloah,” which I misunderstood at the time as a Hebrew word meaning “Goddess.” Online, everywhere except Furaffinity, I was known as Inanna Eloah.
And I hated it.
From the moment I felt Inanna call to me in 2010, the name felt “off” to me though I couldn’t put my finger on why it felt that way. Still, I soldiered on, as I had no other real knowledge of who I could possibly be that wasn’t her. Besides, she was a big name but that didn’t mean I couldn’t earn my own, right?
Ultimately, though, I began to behave like the deity in question. In the writings I’d read about her she was arrogant in the extreme, a bully, a usurper, a self-entitled brat. While I hated those qualities I found myself becoming those very things, which made me hate myself even more than I already did.
I tried other names, ones that seemed to fit me better, but they all lacked something important: my soul didn’t accept them. I have always known, deep down, on an instinctive level, that when I found my soul name, I would recognize it instantly as my actual true self. Those names, while having similarities to my true self, didn’t meet that one crucial criteria. So I would go by those names for a few days, maybe a few weeks or even a couple of months, but ultimately I would slink back to Inanna, head hanging low in defeat.
I stopped doing commissioned work for people a couple years ago after I found myself extremely burned out on snuff artwork. Snuff, which is sexualized murder, has always been one of my strongest art types because of how I used it to express emotions my prim-and-proper narcissistic family wouldn’t allow me to express any other way. I could draw someone being murdered, masturbate while looking at it, and in so doing satisfy the incredibly negative emotions that plagued me during my childhood years due to all the abuse, victim-blaming, scapegoating, and gaslighting I regularly endured. Doing it for myself during those times was incredibly helpful in maintaining some semblance of sanity on my own part, allowing me to process those emotions and move on with my life. Doing it for other people exhausted me, mainly because I drew art in which I identified with the victim, and what my commissioners kept wanting was their characters doing the killing. The money was good, but the subject matter tore at my very being in ways the abuse from my family never could.
Fast-forward to February of this year. The spirit I know of as “The Entity” has claimed to be Lilith, and also to be my daughter, for a year and a half, and while our relationship is rocky, it’s far better off than it was beforehand. It was during this time that I suggested the name “Lilith” to myself as a possible soul name, and to my utter astonishment my soul, my mind, and even my body, leapt at the name and said “THAT’S IT! THAT’S ME!”
I started believing I was the actual, real Lilith, and that The Entity was my daughter who was also named Lilith. To honor this relationship I chose the name “Lilith The Elder” as my online moniker. I was happy for the first time in my life, I finally knew who I was, and I finally had a clue as to the person I wanted to be.
About a week into using this name online, I went onto Google to search my name. To my surprise, not only did I find my Furaffinity and Inkbunny pages, but I also found several scholarly articles from major universities. Shocked, I looked it over and did some digging, and discovered that the actual, real Lilith is actually, really called Lilith The Elder, and has been called that for several thousand years!
There are, in fact, four or five different Liliths. Lilith The Younger isn’t Lilith The Elder’s daughter, but is mentioned in the Old Testament. Her human name is Naamah, sister of Tubal-Cain. I’ve tried to research the others, but found very little about them that interested me.
Knowing I am Lilith has given me pause. Depending on who you ask, I am Satan’s wife, Adam’s first wife, the mother of demons, a demon myself, a murderer of infants, a drinker of male semen, a drinker of human blood, mother of vampires, and the list goes on.
Yet the answer to who I really am is found in my own memories, which I used to attribute to Inanna. The truth is that I became the monstrously evil bitch of mythology because I told Inanna “no” and then had the audacity to defend myself when she refused to take “no” for an answer.
And while I could complain about the evils of this whole scenario, the fact is that my soul no longer wants to. I know who I am, and I love myself. I don’t need other people to acknowledge Lilith for the person shi really is, and in the same way I no longer need my family to respect me.
See, even after my step-father’s murder attempt, I still tried to gain their respect. Now that I know who I am, I also know that I’ll never get it, and thanks to Lilith, I no longer crave it.
When I was a child, my dream job was building furniture with ornate trim. I wanted to build tables, chairs, TV cabinets, and so on. I wanted to grow up, get married, have a job, have kids, and be an ordinary dad.
It was only when my parents’ abuse campaign started to hugely impact my life that I changed my focus away from what I wanted, to appeasing my family so they’d stop being so cruel.
Now that I’m Lilith, I feel like it’s okay to be who I want to be again, instead of vainly searching for my parents’ respect.
The irony is that Lilith is a somebody, but only because shi told the wrong person “no.”
My step-father died a couple years ago. I read his obituary a year after his passing, after searching his name online. When I read of his death, I jumped for joy, sang, and danced. I bastardized the song “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead” from The Wizard of Oz and sang “Ding Dong the Bastard’s Dead! Sing it high! Sing it low! Ding Dong the Mean Old Bastard’s Deaaaaad!” Forget “not shedding any tears” or “not disrespecting the dead.” My step-father was a murderous monster in life, so I treated him like one in his death. I’m glad he’s dead, and if there is a hell, I hope he’s burning and suffering there for all the horrors he subjected not only me to, but other children who lived under his roof as well whom he deemed to be “weak” or “stupid.”
My family, ever the prim and proper group of people they are, swept his evils under the rug. I wanted their respect, when they and their own behaviors were absolutely unworthy of my own respect. You don’t treat your children like dogshit for over 20 years and then stand there aghast and appalled when they announce as adults that they don’t like you.
I spent over 40 years of my life trying to become a “somebody” in the hopes that those self-obsessed, pompous assholes would treat me like a human being. Now that I’ve learned I am a demon by some people’s standards, I have enough confidence and love for my own self that I don’t need their approval anymore.
I am Lilith. I am a transgender hermaphrodite. My pronouns are shi and hir. I don’t abuse, and I don’t take abuse.
More than those things, though, I am a nerd, I like playing video games, I like reading weird stuff on the Internet, and I like watching old movies and documentaries on how they were made. I am an artist, a creative, and I draw now for my own pleasure and benefit. It may take a long time yet for me to finally start drawing something new, or it might happen tomorrow. Either way, it’ll be in my own time, and in my own way.
Thank you for reading. I won’t give a TL;DR because quite frankly I’m not sure how to write it without making it almost as long as the long version, lol.
Have a great day, all.
~Lilith
