My funeral speech

What I tried to read in https://cyberspace.online/notbornval/valerias-funeral

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Whenever I think about death, I remember my friend the Turriptosis dohrnii, or moon jellyfish, which can live indefinitely. When it outlives its sexual maturity, it can revert to a sexually immature age through a cellular development process called… yes, transdifferentiation.

So, the moon jellyfish certainly doesn't plan its funeral. According to Wikipedia, a funeral is the set of ceremonies or solemn services dedicated to a deceased person in the days leading up to their burial. Immune to the aging process, this jellyfish isn't concerned with such things. Besides, it measures only a few millimeters, but we're not going to make fun of short people on such a hot day.

I'm not the first person to hold their funeral in advance. In the USA, it has legal status, and in Japan, it even has a name: Seizenso. However, it's a modern concept, but in Japan, the color of mourning is white, which is why I'm wearing this dress along with my dotanuki. I would have worn my white wig, but lately, I've fallen in love with this one.

In fact, my mother held a sort of funeral while she was still alive when she learned her illness was going to take her. She gathered her whole family for one last group meal and spent time with them. It was incredibly difficult, but as she used to tell me even in those tough times… "the dead to the grave and the living to eat cabbage". It's very sad to lose something you loved, but at least you came to love it.

According to Wikipedia, this has to have ceremonies or solemn services, and while that makes sense, it doesn't mean we can't have some humor, dancing, sex, fighting, or any other form of fun to suit everyone's taste, following the legal provisions of the structured society, or at least staying close enough to the limit to be able to hold it in our hands and go back if the police show up.

I had planned to talk here about my work and miracles, how much everyone loved me, how much I'll be missed, and that sort of thing, and get all solemnly philosophical, adding sophisticated and elaborate reflections not only on the overall protagonist of this event (me), but also on illness, decline, suicide, and other important matters. Too much solemnity for me; I prefer fun people to sad ones. It's well known that smiling prevents depression and prolongs your life. But do you know what else prolongs your life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of the women

So, without further introduction, we've come to say goodbye to... someone. I've been thinking a lot about who we're saying goodbye to without quite coming up with a coherent answer. I'll try to elaborate on this, but I'm completely open to any input at any time. I've rented the park until quite late; we can go on and on.

Perhaps those of you who have known me longer might have thought this falls under the peculiarities of my undiagnosed dissociative identity disorder, and while that makes some sense even to me, the dynamics related to these flows aren't so clear. I also started thinking in these terms, but I think if you think about it more closely, you'll see that it doesn't quite make sense. As if some of it does.

For me, this is much more related to leaving behind a life I lived until not too long ago in order to start a different one, and in a way, you can't start a life without having finished the previous one, so in a conceptual sense, that life is already over, and this funeral isn't really one of those Seizenso rituals, because that part of me is no longer here. For me, this ritual, therefore, has vital value because perhaps it allows me to rid myself of the clinging remnants of that life.

The affair of gender identity also has something to say in all of this. Ultimately, I've had to live forty years of my life suffering the gender construct assigned to me when born, which I reluctantly accepted. Now I've moved to a place where my new neighbors can only call me "Valeria" because it's the only name they know. This move has been an abrupt step, perhaps one of the most significant in this life-changing shift, which, while leading me to something new, is perhaps what I should have been long ago.

So today I'd like us to leave behind a certain vision of my "self." It's not something entirely concrete, easily defined, or encapsulated in cohesive physical particles. It consists of a series of interconnected and even incomplete concepts, which I can only approximate with the limitations of human language.

I suppose it's easy to point to that fragile masculinity I never fully embraced, the one I learned by imitating what it meant to "be a man." That version of me did things like work as a bouncer or get into trouble to test myself and prove I was strong. Okay, I still get into trouble, but not to prove anything, just because it's fun in a transcyberpink way.

I'd also like to let go of that tendency I had to shoulder responsibilities that aren't mine, carrying unbearable burdens and guilt, which can even lead to blaming others or harboring excessive resentment toward people or societies that, while they may be responsible, are beyond the control of any single individual.

And letting go of responsibilities that aren't mine also includes letting go of people who drain me without contributing anything. Okay, this sounds like Instagram advice, but I'm not referring to that as something specific, but rather to the aspect of my personality that made me vulnerable to their presence. Now I'm en evil cyberpink warrior who knows how to say "no" and then have a yogurt.

And finally, it means leaving pain and fear behind. Not in absolute terms, because I'll always have new fears, like running out of black lipstick, and if I get pricked, I bleed. My current fencing background allows me to give a literal meaning to this usually metaphorical statement. What I mean is leaving behind the capacity to feel fears that have no solution, like epistemological loneliness, or the pain of losing a family.

As I've come to perceive it, today we say goodbye to these things within me. Of course, we can see it from other perspectives, like that ever-present risk of suicide, or of a car accident on my way home. Perhaps someone wants to continue framing this as a Seizenso and take the opportunity to say goodbye to me in a more complete and classic sense, but I prefer to see all this as an opportunity and simply think that the best is yet to come. With wigs, lipstick, 4x4, and of course, little swords.

So, with the time we still have, I invite you to share something about yourselves. I mean, you could talk about me, and that would be perfectly normal in a Seizenso, and I appreciate it if you do, but I also invite you to talk about yourselves, about that burden you're all surely carrying and how you're managing it, perhaps to let it go, or simply to make its weight bearable. And if this is a moment in which you can change something positive in your lives, it will be much better than if it has only fed the needs of this cyberpink trans warrior.