Save Eris

Hi! I’m Eris, and as uncomfortable as this makes me, I’d like to ask for your help with a couple simple things, so that I can live a healthier, safer and more optimistic life.

For the past five years, I’ve been creating original content as Anarchogoth, where I use memes to microblog the topology of those thoughts most important and vexing to me – according to one negative review, my “obsession with trans women, punk rock, philosophy books, and psychiatric disorders is too hypnotising [a psyop] to be unprompted".

I’m proud to have built a community of around a hundred thousand followers across Facebook, instagram, and Bluesky. That people have responded to my particular sense of humour and memetic way of making sense of my world in such numbers is honestly and literally, not metaphorically, incredible to me.

But for the last 7 years I’ve faced significant obstacles to regular employment: Treatment-resistant depression, severe anxiety, and the increasing mental health toll of gender dysphoria, especially during an intensely transphobic time here in the UK.

I believe the following gender-affirming care interventions would make a significant improvement in my overall health and outlook:

-I have a mutation called pilli multigeminii that makes me particularly susceptible to ingrown hairs, leaving me in a state of perma-stubble that shaving only exacerbates. The atrocious dysphoria that results has pretty much stalled my transition. I have been told the required laser sessions for my beard and chest area would run me about £2000.

-I’ve also looked into botox injections for my jaw, to ease the pain of my bruxism and to reduce the squareness I perceive in my jawline. I understand this will cost around £250.

All told, £2250 isn’t a tremendous obstacle versus the hope and relief I could receive. But while I’m in poor mental health and only able to save about £100 per month, these feel like bigger and bigger roadblocks.

I’m a damn good academic in literature, specifically in Gothic Studies, and when I’m well I want to return to this work. Over the long term, my goal is to gain enough stability to work on my phD proposal examining the Gothics of Bataille, Mishima and their intellectual descendents. There are so many things I want to do when I’m healed – most of all, I don’t want to live the rest of my life feeling like this.

Anarchogoth and its community have been something of a lifeline and a journal of my last, transformative few years, and an important creative outlet for the jokes that come to me while I’m processing big things. Legitimately, I don’t know if I’d have been able to come to terms with my transness if I hadn’t had a big public scratch document to play with different identities through humour, while I figured myself out. Thank you for that.

So if you appreciate Anarchogoth, or simply have it in you to offer some help, no donation is too small to matter. If I’m fortunate enough to fundraise in excess of my goal, I’d like to set my sights toward moving out of this isolating poverty trap in the Midlands – there is no queer community here, and it is generally not a safe or healthy place for someone like me to publicly express myself.

….Seriously, literally everyone in this town except my hairdresser and one barmaid seems to be cishet, and it's the kind of town where all the men wear polo shirts and leather shoes at all times, and look like boiled thumbs. It's grim!

Grateful for anything you can spare in these times. If that’s not money, sharing my fundraiser or my work is also appreciated.

As I become more me, I look forward to being part of the world with you. Thanks for reading.