Trans Music (Collections) and The Desire to (Not) Exist

27 Nov, 2025

Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it. I'm personally not a big gatherings person, so I'll pass my time applying for jobs and writing a blog post.

I'm transgender. I've never affiliated with my default sex and developed an obsessive-compulsive hatred towards it, actually. Since transitioning is out of my cards due to lack of motive, I continue stewing in this form. This has caused me to age into a generally vapid, passionless person with a passive tolerance of my own form. Generally, I'm not one to enjoy being myself at all, and I don't see myself doing much at all.

One thing I actively do is collect music. I'll admit that I'm not a pure soul when it comes to my methods, and I commit the great sin of collecting in .mp3 as I'm currently at 1.5k files that I need to maintain across three storage systems. Two years ago, I set a personal goal to collect all music that I've enjoyed throughout my waking life, and I finished my goal some weeks ago. All I've got left is to fix the metadata on music that I inaccurately tagged at the start of my journey, and that would be all for me. However, I've taken a small break from my tagging binges to actually enjoy my collection, as I'd like to actually listen to the music that I spent days downloading and tagging.

I personally use Winamp Community Update Project (WACUP) to listen to my music on PC. It's imperfect, but it's what I encountered first and what got me into collecting to begin with. I initially started with a collection of music taken from my parents' music drives, but gradually collected more of my own for the love of the game. I'm no professional, but I love how I always have my music available even if the internet goes out or I'm out of the house.

WACUP feels distinctly homey, and I've found myself using the default theme despite the aesthetic potential being what drew me in. It's quite the nice software, as it allows you to remove unwanted tabs and scale it to your heart's content. I've never been one to stream music, really only using Soundcloud and Youtube without subscriptions, and their constantly changing accesses aggravated me to the point of developing a collection. I'll likely type up a guide on how to get your music downloaded; I'm someone who likes sharing the fun.

When it comes to being outside of the house, I used to rely on my phone and the mercy of my local cell service, but that got frustrating as well. Thus, I shifted to using a Snowsky Echo Mini and an ONN USB that I got at Walmart for eight dollars. The USB works well for my car, and I take the Echo Mini out (in the rare occasions) where I'm traveling or (more commonly) at the gym. Being frank, tagging metadata the way I do (in bulk, usually in groups of 500 songs) then transferring them to my USB and Echo Mini is a huge bitch of a task. It usually takes me a day or two to clear those batches nowadays (thank you MP3Tag!) and some two hours to load them all in, accounting for changing album art sizes to let them load on the Echo Mini's limited firmware.¹

Still, this music collection has given me something to work towards in a life without passion. I've always been one that's wanted to fade away and be nothing forever, but I always find some comfort in the collection that I've built. Like, wow, look at this, I set it up myself and learned some little tools to do it! It's rejecting convenience in the short term, but ultimately a lot more convenient in the long run. My collection serves as a recollection of who I've been throughout the years and what I like and have liked, and that's a bit of identification I need in a time where I am nobody at all.

I suggest that you also get into downloading your music and listening to it locally. Here's a guide I wrote down on how to do it. The least you'll need is a PC that you likely already have if you're on Bear to begin with. The inconvenience will pay off in the long run, and you might even learn a little more about yourself now that you're actually choosing your music.

Kind regards,

ദ്ദി◝ ⩊ ◜.ᐟ