“This God is Dead” by Seven Spires hit me really hard after I started HRT.

Adrienne starts “Oh mother, I wonder if you knew. Oh father, if only I could speak with you. Did you love my smoke and mirrors?” and then in the next few verses Roy Khan replies “Your mother, she watches over you. My daughter, just know we are proud of you.” And she can’t hear him, of course, becausehe’s dead, and that’s the boat I’m in. I lost them both, I’ll never really know.

“I wear this skin like someone else’s clothes” and “Everything I’ve been feels like it’s a lie.” Yup. A whole wasted life before I came out, living my life like a disembodied ghost and trying to pretend like I’m not a skinwalker living out a fake life in someone else’s skin.

“See the earth through young eyes. Feel the universe through an ancient soul.” Yup. The whole world is new again, but I didn’t start transitioning until I was 29! It’s a strange feeling, to be going through puberty while also being a grown-ass adult. Ancient.

“This has been my final death, finally accept all that I am, and all that I’m meant to be” Yup. People change a lot throughout their lives, but my pre-transition self is dead. That’s it for him. We call them deadnames for a reason. This is who I’m supposed to be.

And then of course, the title of the song and the final spoken verses. I’m an atheist, became one a long time before I realized I was trans, but my transness can’t be ignored as an undercurrent for it. The “Guide of the lost” is dead. The “Guardian of the broken” is dead. The “Bringer of peace in final hours.” is dead. “Happiness is a choice” because I had to choose to be happy. This is contrasted “And purpose, a charted course” and what was charted for me, by birth, was never a course that would let me find happiness. I had to choose it.

“I am but a soul-keeper, and this god is dead.” I don’t believe there’s an afterlife. I don’t believe there’s salvation, or damnation, or anything. I believe my parents live on through me, that all of the dead live on through us. I am their soul-keeper.

There’s more parallels. Before my transition I just liked it because, yeah, god is dead and powermetal is very good. After I started HRT, though, the back-and-fourth she has with her dead father hits hard. I sobbed while listening to this song (and also doing this write-up!). It’s very cleansing. This is what this song will always mean for me.

Visiting the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders in 2003 was sobering. My mother was visiting me in China at the time and she insisted she wanted to go see it, to show me some family history.

That wasn’t the bubble bursting. It was sombre. There was some eye-opening. But nothing really that I didn’t already know, and I’d already experienced Bergen-Belsen, so the sheer inhumanity of human beings was nothing new to me. Further, the people attending it looked by turns somber and shocked, but that was about it. The Chinese people in attendance were basically reacting like I did.

Or so I thought.

The bubble bursting moment was this song¹. This is where I found out that there is no forgiveness for this. That there is still a very strong undercurrent of raw fury at Japan and others that’s just lurking quietly beneath a facade of joviality. The bill for the massacre has not yet been paid, and it became clear to me in about 2020 how big that bill was likely to be.

Oh, and where I found out that the rage is infectious.

¹ It’s a common joke to say “don’t click on this link!” to the point that this warning will likely fall on deaf ears. But do not click this link if you are in any kind of a fragile state. The song is brutal and unrelenting (as is the whole album it is from). There are no happy feelings. There is incalculable pain, misery, rage, and resignation. It is not something to experience lightly.