Survival

I don’t think most people talk about how difficult the period of time right after the Great Shift was. The world was in chaos, and everyone was in the wrong bodies. Planes fell out of the sky, stores were shuttered and often closed forever, and things were rough. I went from being in a man’s body to becoming a woman, but honestly gender was the last thing on my mind in the months following the Shift.

I didn’t have any way to prove my identity, so I stuck with whatever resources the woman had in her rundown apartment. I’m not sure it would’ve even mattered at that point; we were all in rough shape.

Things like food and clean clothes ran out pretty quickly, but supermarkets and laundromats still weren’t open. I remember being quite desperate. I washed clothes in my sink with brown water coming out of the tap, realizing that the systems in place to make sure it was clean may not be around or in the right bodies anymore. Collecting bugs off her apartment’s dirty floor to heat up on the stove was an absolutely gross activity, and actually eating them was even worse. But I was hungry, and the options were few and far between! I needed to survive!

I still know people who look back on those with a weird fondness. Those people are nuts.