My Trans Brothers and Sisters

Sometimes I get really jealous of people who’ve transitioned at a young age, as a teenager or even earlier.  I know it would have made my life so much easier in so many ways if I could have transitioned in high school or before puberty.  I think of all the years in between then and now that I wasted to depression.  The life I could have had that depression kept from me.  But I didn’t know I was transgender when I was a kid or a teen. 

 I watch YouTube videos of young people who have begun transitioning and I wonder, did they just always know they were meant to be the opposite gender earlier than me or did they just become aware that there was a such thing as being transgender earlier?  A combination of both?  I’m not that old, but the thing is, there was no YouTube when I was a teen.  There was no Facebook or social media.  I did not know the word “transgender” or know anybody who was.  Most schools did not have gay/straight alliances.  There was no awareness of the LGBT community.  No tolerance.  We used the words “gay” and “dyke” as slurs against people who were just different.  There weren’t a lot of gay characters on TV or in movies.  There were no out athletes that I knew of.  Most celebrities were in the closet.  People didn’t even talk about gender roles or things like that.  I know that many places may still be intolerant and unaccepting, but at least there’s more general awareness out there.  There was no national public debate about gay marriage at that time.  Unless you were in very specific areas of a city or had family members, you didn’t “see” gay people, let alone trans people.  I didn’t have my own computer.  “Devices” like smartphones and tablets and iPods were not invented yet.  Yeah we had the internet, but “googling” something did not exist.  Unless I had felt unequivocally, without a doubt, that there was something wrong and it impacted my life so much that I just couldn’t live another day as a girl, and my parents noticed and were worried and they took me to see somebody and that somebody just happened to know just the right questions to ask me and just happened to be accepting and tolerant, then there was really no way of me knowing that I could be trans that early.  I mean, people could walk on the moon and all sorts of amazing things, but the idea that people could change genders was not even fathomable to me.  It did not even enter my little brain at any point in my adolescence.  And even if I knew I was trans, would I have been able to transition?  I HIGHLY doubt my parents would have let me do anything besides maybe dressing like a tomboy at that age.  Certainly not take hormone blockers or testosterone or be called a male name or male pronouns.

 The unfortunate thing is, my parents did notice that I was unhappy in high school, my mom especially, but they did nothing about it.  My mom told me many years later that she had seriously thought about bringing me in to see somebody about my severe social anxiety.  It wasn’t until the summer before my senior year of college that my mom finally took me to see a therapist about my problem with “reverse culture shock” after I returned from my study abroad experience in Australia and was severely depressed.  What she didn’t realize is that I had already been severely depressed for quite a while, over a year in fact, and that it was only made significantly worse by the fact that I had to return to my boring, horrible life after having a fun adventure overseas.   I did still manage to enjoy the experience while being so depressed, but I can’t help wondering how much better Australia and New Zealand could have been had I not been depressed.  I didn’t make very many friends over there and I didn’t partake in many social activities.  I spent a lot of time alone and sad in my room writing poetry and listening to my iPod.  I did push myself out of my comfort zone on many occasions, but I think overall, the trip would have been a completely different, more fulfilling experience had I been able to enjoy it free of mental illness.  But I still wish my parents would have done something while I was a teen.  Maybe I seemed fine in junior high, but I was definitely not ok a year or so into high school.  And by senior year, I was downright miserable.  I had practically no friends and I often sat alone at lunch or in the “reject cafeteria” with other nerds and freaks that never talked to me, so I basically felt invisible.  I remember at the very end of senior year all I did at lunch was sit alone on the end of the reject table, eating my food and reading Harry Potter.  I inhaled Harry Potter.  I read every single one of those books in two days or less apiece (the four that were published at that time anyway).

 I feel like I was thrust out into the big bad world beyond high school without any idea of what I was really good at or who I really was.  I know most people feel this way, it’s normal, but I can’t help wondering if I was aware of just how much I really didn’t know.  It seems like kids grow up much faster these days.  Is it more exposure to the outside world at an earlier age via internet?  Is it that they have more adult responsibilities earlier on?  I have no idea why, but I just know that they grow up a little faster.  Most of them.  I was a kid who never wanted to grow up, no matter what age I was at.  I still played with dolls right up until high school (and probably secretly for a while into high school too).  I didn’t want to stop playing with them, but there was this major line I had just crossed between the childish world of junior high into the burgeoning adult world of high school and it just suddenly became not ok to want to play with dolls.  And yes, in case you’re wondering, I DID like my dolls and other girly toys very much thank you.  Does that mean I couldn’t really be trans or I’m not “trans enough”?  No.  Does it mean that maybe I just got to enjoy the best of both worlds as a kid?  Maybe.  Does it mean that even as a kid I was basically a gay boy in the making already?  I hope so!  But no matter what the reason, I enjoyed a lot of things from my girlhood that I would have probably never got the chance to experience had I been a transwoman, a boy who wanted to be a girl.  I was what people call, a “late bloomer."  That was everyone’s excuse for why I wasn’t as mature as the other kids in the social realm.  It wasn’t until college that I personally started to wonder why I wasn’t like everyone else.  It was then that I would start a journey to figure out all the answers to all the ways I was different. 

              It pretty much all started with sexuality.  Because honestly, I didn’t even consider gender to be, well, anything.  It wasn’t something I pondered for a second.  I was born a girl, with girl chromosomes and girl parts and that was science and that was it.  If there was a problem with me, and I could tell there was something wrong/different, that was not the first place I would think to start.  So I started by trying to figure out my sexuality mostly because I had never dated or even been interested in dating anyone or having a boyfriend.  But people were exploring that at an even higher rate in college and I was left in the kiddie pool or on the bunny hill so to speak.  I have written extensively on the subject of discovering my sexuality (for myself) and how this all came to be, but for the purpose of this post I’d like to keep it short and simple.  For the record, I never thought I was heterosexual at any point in my life.  In college, first I thought I must be bisexual because I couldn’t really figure out if I was attracted to men or women or anyone.  It turns out, I wasn’t sexually attracted to anyone at all, which is why I couldn’t figure out my sexuality.  I finally figured out that I was asexual.  And from figuring that out at 19 or 20 years old until about six months ago when I started testosterone (I’m 29 now), that was my sexuality.  Now yes, there was a large period from age 21ish to age 27ish that I fully believed I must be a lesbian because I identified so much with the queer community, and even though I came out as a lesbian and thought I must be one and subsequently identified with one and hung around a lot of lesbians, etc, etc, I wasn’t really one at all.  I was asexual with a proclivity for watching as many gay movies that I could get my hands on.  Gay as in gay men, not women (though I watched a lot of lesbian movies/TV shows too).  But anyway, the point is, until I started testosterone I did not have a sex drive or anything close to it and was not sexually attracted to other people. 

 So, my sexual identity went from bisexual to asexual to lesbian to I’m-sick-of-dealing-with-this to asexual again to gay (or something close to pansexual because I’m attracted to androgyny itself regardless of the gender identity of the person, maybe more on this in another post...).  So, when did I start thinking about gender?  Well, I’m not entirely sure, but I know that a lot of things changed for me during my last year of college.  I came back from my trip to Australia and when school started, I moved into my first apartment with my best friend Katie and our friend Pam (both whom I had been roommates with before).  One of the things I remember from living there was when I stopped carrying a purse.  I’m pretty sure it happened then, but it could have actually been earlier.  I NEVER liked having to use a purse and I DO remember when I first started using one in high school.  In junior high I managed to hide my feminine hygiene products in the back of my purple Five-Star Binder, then slipped one into my lunch bag before lunch and went to the bathroom before I got to the lunch room.  Putting it in my pocket was always too risky.  It was an unspoken girl code that nobody (not even other girls for that matter) was supposed to see your tampons or pads, but definitely not boys.  If it weren’t for the purpose of carrying tampons, I probably would have never carried a purse to begin with.  But by high school, it unfortunately became somewhat of a necessity.  My mom also made me start wearing makeup in high school even though I never asked to start wearing it or cared about it.  I was kind of neutral about the makeup thing.  I guess I assumed that it was just one of those things you had to do to fit in.  So that’s why I had a purse in high school, to carry all the girl things I was supposed to have on me at all times.  It was out of practicality and function, not for fashion or because I wanted to be girly.  In college, I pretty much got sick of my purse, so I’d just stick it in my backpack as I’d go out for class.  Then that morphed into me converting the front pockets of my backpack into holding the contents that would have made up my purse.  Eventually I had a small “aha” moment when I realized that my best friend and roommate Katie never carried a purse.  It’s like I suddenly noticed it one day out of the blue.  I basically figured out from her “how” she did it and soon I transitioned to no purse.  It wasn’t easy, but I made it work.  I thought, if guys don’t need to carry around a bag, why should we?  So de-pursing was kind of a big step for me into becoming less feminine.  It snowballed into me getting a short “lesbian” haircut, ordering a compression bra to bind my breasts (that didn’t work that well because it was sadly too small, so I gave it my roommate to use as a sports bra), buying clothes in the boys section at a department store, and just becoming more aware of gender and de-feminizing myself.  For some reason, it was always about becoming less feminine, not more masculine. 

 One of the first things I rented on my very first free trial of Netflix during that same senior year of college, was the documentary series called Transgeneration that followed four college students through various stages of their transitions (two FTM, two MTF).  For a creative writing class, I wrote a short story about an FTM transgender child (that was also published in my college’s literary magazine).  In 2007, after I had graduated and moved back in with my parents,  I ordered Kate Bornstein’s My Gender Workbook, read it and filled it out on Halloween while I waited between trick-or-treaters at the front door.  I wrote in there that I no longer identified as a lesbian and that I knew I was queer in some way and that if I were a gay male I would totally have a crush on Rufus Wainwright (one of my favorite singers).  I wrote that I identified as an “androgynous pangendered asexual who has been seen as female all my life and has thus been adopting many masculine traits/sensibilities to cancel out the longevity of this female self.”  I even referred to a story I had been writing at the time with a genderqueer character, where I had changed all the pronouns in the story to gender neutral “ze” and “hir” for all the characters.  In that workbook I also wrote about how my gender identity had taken a backseat to my mental health issues which had been of much significance in college, but were of the most importance after I graduated up until recently.  Gender was on my mind for many years!  But always on the periphery.  I’m 29, so that’s at least eight years ago that I noticed gender and thought about it in regards to myself.  I even lived with an FTM roommate in 2009-2010 and got to know many of his trans friends and then lived with another trans roommate who was MTF a few roommates later at a different apartment.  I remember there being two FTM trans people who were trumpet players in band, one in high school and one in college.  I saw their entire transitions unfold from pre-T to full on presenting as male and changing their names/pronouns.  It’s as though I merely observed the world and things happening around me all those years, but never really understood them or let them sink in.  It wasn’t until xmas 2012/New Years 2013 that I thought that I might actually be transgender.  I had never considered that I could possibly be transgender that whole damn time, not once in a period of about eight years.  It is CRAZY to me that it was under my nose the whole time.  It is CRAZY that in all those years and seeing a dozen therapists, discussing gender never came up.  I can’t even believe this, really, when I put it all together like that.  Why did it take so long!? 

 That is a question I may never know the answer to.  Which brings me back to how I started this post talking about my jealousy of young trans people today who are transitioning earlier.  I am so happy that they have the opportunity and self-awareness that I never had.  I know that generations before mine transitioned later than I have and that every year it keeps getting earlier and earlier, which is wonderful, actually.  But it leaves me, adult female-bodied and all, wondering if I’ll ever really look and feel as male as I’d like to.  Or at least as not female as I’d like to.  Will I ever love the way my body looks?  Will I ever feel comfortable in this body?  Will I ever feel confident enough with myself to be in a relationship and share my life with another person?  I don’t have these answers right now and I don’t know if I ever will.  But what I do know is that I now have the answers about my gender that I searched for many years ago and for many years.  I’m proud of my trans brothers and sisters who have the courage to be themselves and I’m so, so hopeful that they might be able to avoid the pain I went through, and that so many others before us went through.

True Authentic Self

With each day that passes, I continue to feel the cold shoulder and hand of judgment from my mom regarding anything that might have something to do with my transition (and many things that have nothing to do with my transition, but are blamed on it nonetheless).  I understand that this is not easy for her.  I get that she’s losing the daughter that she had or at the least the idea of that person.  She’s mourning the loss of her hopes and dreams for me.  But no matter how many times I try to put things into perspective by explaining that this isn’t easy for me either, she comes back with a response of how I chose this and how I’m doing this to myself.  So apparently being born into a body that feels utterly wrong and uncomfortable, and living 28 mostly miserable years of your life in said body, garners no sympathy from mom.  Fine, but what she doesn’t seem to comprehend is that I am losing that girl too.  I have to mourn my own loss of a daughter.  Of a girl I didn’t really ever know.

         Transitioning is all about righting a wrong.  It’s about fixing the parts of you that can be changed (body) to match the parts of you that cannot be changed (brain).  It’s about finally feeling comfortable in your own skin and being your true authentic self.  But I have a bit of a conundrum.  First of all, I’m not one of the media hyped “classic” transgender cases.  I did not know I was transgender as a child.  I did not refuse to play with dolls or wear dresses or go to tap dancing class.  I did not even know the term “transgender” until college, and I didn’t start transitioning until I was 28.  On the gender spectrum, my gender identity feels somewhat more in the middle than all the way towards male or female.  I’m a bit of both or neither.  I was socialized as a girl and thus experienced my girlhood as being wholly perceived and treated as a girl.  There is this part of me, deep, deep down, practically disconnected, hidden under layers and layers of feminist ideals and anti-heteronormativity, this part of me that wishes that I could have been that woman who enjoyed being female, who had aspirations of marriage and being pregnant and having a baby, who felt strength and empowerment from femininity, who wanted the kinds of things that most woman want.  There is a part of me that mourns the loss of this girl, this daughter.  I did not experience girlhood as an authentic girl.  Sure I had girl parts and could act like and walk like and dress like a girl.  But I was an inauthentic girl who would never grow up to be an authentic woman.  On the other side of the coin, I will never get to experience boyhood.  Sure I can take hormones and feel some of the effects that a teenage boy would have gone through, but I’m experiencing it through the body and mind of an adult.  And how can one who has never authentically experience boyhood hope to feel fully authentic in manhood?  Which takes me to this point:  How can I fully feel like an authentic person in any gender?

          People have social expectations of males in our society.  As children we try to create an identifying relationship between ourselves, those around us and the rest of the world.  We do this by identifying with common characteristics and subconsciously molding ourselves to be more like our families, friends, and the belief systems of our society.  We start learning our gender roles from around 15 months old.  But even before that, from the moment we are born, people place a high importance in needing to know if a baby is a boy or a girl.  The baby doesn’t care whether it’s wearing a pink or blue hat.  It’s only concerned about whether or not that hat is keeping it warm.  It’s everyone else that needs to know the assigned gender so they can fit that baby into the correct gender box with all its expectations and roles.  Males are expected to have less emotional range (though as babies, they actually have more than baby girls), to be tough, aggressive, strong, dominant, bold, extroverted and insensitive, to dress up in suits for special occasions, to open doors and pull out chairs, to be bread winners.  Let me make this clear, I am not socially and physically transitioning to male with the intention of living up to the stereotypical male gender roles in this society.  I am transitioning to male so that I can feel a little bit more authentic in my own skin or at least a little bit less inauthentic in my own skin.  To feel like a real me.  And let me also make it clear that I am not at all talking about “real men” or “real women”, which are terms that are hurtful and inaccurate.  One’s maleness or femaleness has nothing to do with what’s between one’s legs and has everything to do with what’s between one’s ears.

            I guess this all leaves me stuck somewhere in between my definitions and societies definitions of male and female.  It leaves me mourning the loss of a boyhood which I shall never get to experience.  It leaves me mourning the losses of a girlhood that was not lived authentically and the womanhood that would have never been lived authentically either.  It leaves me with a manhood on the horizon, that will ultimately be defined by how I choose to live my life, and what parts of me I choose to express.  It is all dependent on where I feel that I fit into this world (and where this world chooses to fit me in).  It probably won’t be neat and clean and simple.  It will probably confuse people or even alarm them, inciting hate and intolerance.  For me there is no real end point.  Mostly because there is no real defined starting point either.   I just need to stick to what feels right for me, even if I have to go against the grain and fail to meet societies expectations.

The Return of Mr. Grinch and Update 2013

       It’s been a year since I’ve updated my blog.  I just spent the last hour or so re-reading all of my previous posts that date back to 2009.  And boy oh boy have things changed. 

      Well, not everything.

      The xmas Grinch re-surfaced this year and I absolutely could not stop him no matter how much I wanted to.  He may have been displaying his worst Grinchiness yet, even though throughout the holiday season thus far I was feeling at peace with it.  I watched helplessly as my mood dipped further and further into gloomy-Gus-grumpiness and did not come back out, while everyone in my family noticed and at first tried to ignore it and then acknowledged it and finally ignored me.  It feels as if every xmas repeats itself and nothing has changed, even though clearly things have.  I listened to the same bad conversations and arguments, witnessed the tired old scenes play out from every xmas of the past.  I felt like the disappointed, pouty child of my adolescence who didn’t get the presents I wanted.  I can recall a particular xmas when I was about four or five (caught on video tape for posterity no less) where I opened up my present, a sled, and a confused, then angry/disappointed look came over my face when I realized it was “used” (made glaringly obvious by way of a giant dent in the middle of the metal sled).  There is a lot of holiday video footage of younger me opening gifts and having no qualms about showing my distaste and complete dissatisfaction with a particular gift.  And this xmas felt like my childhood all over again, with present after present not meeting my expectations.  It wasn’t so much the gifts themselves that upset me this year.  After all, most of them can be returned or donated or easily forgotten.  What was most disappointing was the fact that I realized more than ever how little my family really knows me.  How little they know about the person I’ve become or even my basic interests and likes.  I have an entire bag of gifts that make me so upset that I literally need to make them go away physically as fast as possible so I can get that uncomfortable, weighty, negative feeling off of me.  When my space is invaded, my routines are thrown off and my family is acting out their stale, prescribed holiday performances, my inner self takes over in a desperate attempt at self-protection in the form of the xmas Grinch.  He may not be pretty, but he is what happens when I am pushed too far. 

      I find myself returning to the behaviors of my not-so-distant Asperger-like past.  I am officially not diagnosed with Asperger’s anymore, but when my sensory limits are surpassed and I feel trapped in every bad xmas past, both physically and emotionally, my anti-social and selfish behaviors return.  I am reminded by my brother that I am not good at compromising and I put my needs above others.  I act as though I am ungrateful and inconsiderate.  I am made to feel ashamed of my feelings and behaviors because they are not socially acceptable.  Sometimes I can’t hide my disappointment.  Sometimes I feel grossly overwhelmed by everyone, especially when they are all being two-faced, pretending to be the big, happy family we are not.  Why must we always suppress our true feelings?  When I am repeatedly put into situations that push me out of my comfort zone I eventually crack.  I need more alone time than most.

      Needless to say, I am disappointed with how xmas went this year.  I am disappointed with my own disappointment and I wish I could have showed my brother and sister-in-law a more authentic picture of the person I am, and am still becoming.  So now, onto an update which is well overdue.

      It is a year since I last posted a blog, but not long enough ago that I have forgotten the contents of said blog.  I finally have the answers I was looking for and so desperately pondered late into that night a year ago.  At least most of them.  I will try to put it all into simple terms.  I am not bipolar.  I have been officially diagnosed as such by two mental health professionals, but they were wrong.  And it both disturbs and saddens me to know that just in my own experience mental health professionals get things wrong a lot.  I do not have Asperger’s or a mood disorder or an anxiety disorder or a personality disorder.  I am no longer depressed.  I am no longer suicidal or full of emptiness or completely disconnected from my self or my body.  I do not self harm, but I still struggle with keeping binge eating at bay on a daily basis.  I do not require psychotropic drugs or anti-depressants.  I see a psychiatrist every 4 months or so to keep up my prescription of Deplin (a high dose of folic acid), take St. John’s Wort daily (which may or may not do anything), see a specialized therapist in Chicago every 3-4 weeks and go to a specialized clinic in Chicago every 5 months for blood work to re-new my prescription.  I do not have a mental disorder of any kind no matter what the DSM purports.  I am transgender.  My body simply does not match my brain.  I am in the process of transitioning from female to male.  I have been on testosterone for nearly 6 months.  My biological sex is female, but my gender identity is closer to male.  Sex and gender are two vastly different things.  Your sex is the biological and physiological characteristics that are made up of chromosomes, genetics and hormones.  Your gender is the socially constructed roles, behaviors and attributes that define how you see yourself.  Sexuality and gender are also two vastly different things.  Simply put, sexuality is who you want to go to bed with and gender is who you want to go to bed as. 
     
      Until I started testosterone, I had no sexual attraction towards any gender and identified as asexual.  Currently, I see myself as a gay male and am attracted predominately to gay men (transmen or cis-men).  But I also find myself attracted to people who are gender non-conformists/variant: androgynous or masculine females, genderqueers, transwomen or anyone in the middle of the gender spectrum.  I have never been in a relationship and have never been in love.  I am not and will never be a super masculine man.  And that’s ok.  I just know that being female, being a woman is not an option for me.  My brain is both male and female.  There will always be both male and female parts that make up who I am.  I am not a clear cut case of a “man trapped in a woman's body”.  But because society needs to label everyone in the binary world we live in, if I must choose one, I need to choose (and present as) male.  I did not know I was different gender-wise as a child or a teenager.  I played with both boy and girl toys as a child and participated in activities that never limited me because I was a girl.  I had a pretty gender-neutral childhood and (to my knowledge) was never held back by my assigned gender from birth.  But my gender/body incongruence wreaked havoc on my social development growing up, even if I didn't have that understanding as a child or meaningful language to express it.  I never felt comfortable in my skin.  I did not know how to just "be myself."  Later into my young adulthood, I started feeling like I was not even real.  A pervasive feeling that disturbed my sense of self and practically drove me to insanity.  A severe disconnection of mind and body persisted for years and years which is probably the major cause of the severe anxiety and depression that I experienced (as well as the concern that I was suffering from depersonalization disorder for which I sought out treatment).         

      Since I have begun transitioning, my life has completely changed.  There is no combination of words that I can string together that could possibly begin to describe accurately how much better my life is now that I know I am transgender and have been able to transition.  All one has to do is go back and read my previous posts to see the extreme pain and hopelessness and disconnection that my life used to be.  This is not an easy path that a person could choose to take, but for me, it was the only option I had besides death.  I try to get the people I care about to understand that concept but it often falls on deaf ears and is lost to denial and fear and dashed dreams.  Isn’t a happy son better than a depressed daughter?  Isn’t an alive son better than a dead daughter?  I know it’s not that simple, but at the same time, it is.

      I will probably post a blog that goes into further detail about my transition (but I can’t really promise anything as I do have a tendency to go months without posting again).  But for now, just know that I have finally shed the false self I wore most of my life and have begun a new life with my authentic self coming out.  I have a stable job and have recently been promoted to a manager position (something I could have never achieved were I still severely depressed and anxiety-ridden) and I have some support in my transition (therapist, psychiatrist, co-workers, an old friend, my brother and sister-in-law and, for the most part, my parents).

      What I do not have yet, and desperately need, is a new name.    

Hypomanic Right Now??

I might have been diagnosed as having bipolar II, but I'm still getting used to the concept.  I'm still trying to spot the signs of hypomania.  The depression side of things is what I deal with 99% of the time, so that's easy to know because I basically live there, full time.  But I've only had a few potential known hypomanic episodes.  During the first one, which was several years ago, I decided I was going to be one of those people who vlogged on YouTube.  I went out with my xmas money and bought a web cam and video editing software.  I've always been terribly camera-phobic and hate hearing myself speak and seeing myself on video.  I'm not particularly interesting or funny or creative when it comes to that stuff either.  So I just got the idea in my head that I wanted to do it, so I did.  I obviously didn't become a YouTube sensation or anything.  Once that state of mind was gone, I tried to make videos, but realized that no one would ever want to watch them.  I didn't even want to watch them myself...I was boring and didn't speak loud enough and couldn't say anything the way I wanted to say it.  This year, I had an episode where I was quite euphoric.  I first decided that I was going to apply to colleges for my masters in cave science (even though prior to this I had no interest whatsoever in going back to school).  I contacted an old geology professor that was listed on a cave research site I came across and even went out and bought the 2013 GRE books (which I still haven't opened).  At the same time, I was convinced that I could write a novel.  I spent all my time thinking about this story I was working on when I was at work and then would dash home and just spend the rest of the night writing.  Sometimes I would even forget to eat.  When I would get into bed, I'd think of an idea or some dialogue and jump out of bed to write it down.  All I talked about and thought about was my novel.  I checked about 30 books out from the library that were in the same genre as my potential novel to use as research.  I'd agonize over finding just the right names for my characters.  I spent a whole night coming up with the perfect elevator pitch.  I filled nearly 50 pages of notes in an artists sketchpad over the course of a week and a half.  But my enthusiasm and confidence disappeared as suddenly as they had come.  I decided my whole story idea was crap and I could never really get to the point of writing an entire novel.

 

So, today, or should I say this morning, at 4:13 AM I'm unable to sleep, too wired with too many thoughts going through my head and obsessed with the idea that I might be transgender.  I've definitely had gender identity issues in the past.  I don't know how, but I'm convinced that my mental illness, sexual orientation and gender issues are all related.  I couldn't say which caused what or which are a symptom of what, but I think they are all connected.  That being said, no matter what it is, I never feel 100% anything.  I always feel like I'm in the grey area or on the borderline.  This has been the story of my life.  I feel like therapists have just given up on trying to figure me out so they finally stop saying I'm borderline this or have traits of that and decide to pick a random diagnosis from a hat, slap it on me and say we'll go from there.  Or more likely, I come in there convinced I'm X, Y or Z and then they are now biased and that's all they hear when I speak.  But that never really gets to the root of my issues.  I don't care what the labels are, I just want to understand.  I just want to know the truth of who I am.  It's probably so difficult because I have a lot of things wrong with me or the depression blankets everything else making it hard to see through.  And unless you treat the depression successfully, you can't see what's underneath.  But nobody ever asks about gender and sexuality.  And I suppose they feel there are so many more pressing matters to deal with, that we talk about those first and never get to the gender and sexuality stuff.  I have brought it up to therapists years ago, but they've all kind of dismissed it and said there's nothing wrong with me or something equally lame and unhelpful.  It's not about, tell me what's wrong so I can fix it and be normal.  It's about, help me figure out what's going on so I can feel happy and good in my own skin.  

 

I could spend hours talking about gender.  I've already spent hours talking about it with myself while in bed, not able to fall asleep.  It's like this thing that takes over me.  In college I drove myself crazy obsessing over sexuality.  Then during my senior year, the concept of gender took over.  Four years ago I filled out Kate Bornstein's My Gender Workbook and wrote in the margin of one of the pages that still thought I was a gay male trapped in a female's body, which meant I had been thinking about it even before that.  I wrote that I had already come out to my family and friends as a lesbian, but I no longer identified that way and wondered, what the fuck do I do now?  I've come out to an assortment of people as either asexual or a lesbian.  I even came out to a girl who I knew was a lesbian when I was taking a survey on HIV while in Washington DC.  It was for Americorps I think.  I knew this girl was looking over my shoulder as I stared at the box for sexuality.  I considered writing in a box for asexual, but instead checked the box for lesbian, secretly hoping that she really was looking over my shoulder (and she was!).  My pen also hovered over the box for sex as well.  It was one of the first times where I really didn't feel like male or female fit quite right.  When I was studying abroad in Australia (a year earlier), I considered myself an "undercover lesbian" in the Queer Club.  I did go through a phase where I thought I must be bisexual because I'm not attracted to men or women.  That was before I knew the word asexual as anything different than a term from science class.  I was very excited to go to my first pride parade believing myself to be somewhere on the queer spectrum.  I loved the term genderqueer and the concept of androgyny.  In college, I worked gay topics into as many class assignments as possible.  I did an English paper on Will and Grace even though at the time, I had never even seen an episode (I got an A though).  I did an essay on the play Bent for my Theater and the Holocaust class.  My first short story for my creative writing class (which was also published in the university's literary magazine) was about a transgender child, who was born female, but knew he was really a boy.  I had an idea for a story once where all the characters were referred to with gender neutral pronouns.  I even did an assignment on asexuality for my human sexuality class (I chickened out on doing a speech on the same topic).  And even though my intellectual knowledge of the LGBTQA world has expanded astronomically since college (as well as my movie collection of the same), I still don't think I have any clearer picture of who I am.  My friends (the few that I have), have all been very open and supportive.  Some of my family has been supportive too, while others choose to live in denial and completely avoid the topic. 

 

I've spent a lot of energy at times trying to be more masculine.  Or at the very least, less feminine.  It snowballed from not wearing anything pink to not wearing makeup to no longer carrying a purse to purchasing a binder (which was unfortunately way too uncomfortable for me), to getting a "lesbian" haircut to wearing more men's/boy's clothes to adopting male mannerisms to no longer wearing jewelry to no longer shaving.  Now I have some women's shoes and some men's.  Most of my clothes are currently from the women's section, but none of them are feminine.  Some are unisex.  Some are women's sizes, but are men's style (like athletic shorts).  I'm always jealous of the color schemes for men's clothes in catalogues.  Women get the bright ugly pinks and yellows and purples, whereas men get pleasant earth tones.  Honestly, the clothes thing is never a real issue unless we are talking highly gender-specific attire, like swimsuits or dress clothes.  I'll tell you right now, my brother's wedding is the last time I'll ever wear a dress.  It was the first time I had ever worn high heels.  I had to find the lowest possible (that were still considered "heels") for my part as a bridesmaid, because I could not walk at all in anything over two inches.  At this point, I do not own a bathing suit.  Besides my general dislike for swimming, I also have a terrible time dealing with wearing a swimsuit.  There is such a binary when it comes to men's and women's swim wear.  Women have to cover two parts and men only one.  If I ever go swimming again, I'll definitely be wearing some kind of tank top/t-shirt and shorts combination.  I do not dare delve back into high school or before.  Only just so.  I will only say that I have never liked and will never like having breasts.  I wore two sports bras, a cami with a built-in bra, plus one to two more shirts over that throughout my first year of high school.  I search for "lumps" in the off chance that I have cancer and could get a double mastectomy.  I wrote in my journal at age 13 on the day I got my first period that "my life is ruined forever!!!!!!!!!!" (I still agree with that statement).  And I have never liked having a curvy figure.  I have been jealous of every girl with no hips and small breasts.  I wonder if I would have done the tomboy thing full time if I'd have had a bit more convincing body to work with from the outset.  But there are parts of me that are decidedly female.  Most of them are social or cultural aspects, not physical ones. 

 

I've spent some time thinking about what it would be like if I were on testosterone.  Are there more pros or cons to the changes that would take place?  Let's start with the pros:  menstrual cycle would go away FOREVER, breasts may atrophy a small amount, increased muscle (or at least ability to grow muscle), fat would re-distribute to a more male pattern (less at hips).  I'm a bit neutral about voice deepening.  Body hair could go either way.  Skin would most likely get oilier, which would be fine for me because I have really dry skin.  Acne would definitely suck.  Clitoral enlargement, definitely not sure how I'd feel about that.  Sex drive may increase.  Since I have lived 28 years without one, that could either be a really good thing or a horrible thing.  But it would make being a gay male easier.  Ovaries would no longer work so no babies, fine with me.  Aside from a few cons (and potential ones), the biggest con would be a possible change in mood and personality.  It would be the not knowing if that would work out ok and not knowing how it would affect my mental health.  I already have trouble controlling my anger when I have mood swings, so it could make that worse.  Instead of throwing something at the wall I might punch a hole through it.  Another very obvious con would be the fact that I'd have to poke myself with a needle every week.  That could be problematic.  Oh and a major con: balding.  I certainly wouldn't do any of this without support from other transpeople.  I'm pretty sure doing it alone would be more depressing than staying in a body that wasn't quite right.

 

Ok, so this must be hypomania.  It's almost 6:00 in the morning now.  I don't know.  Is it crazy that I'm actually excited that this could be real, the more I write/think about it?  This is a terrible example, but I remember when I finally thought, you know, I've hated meat all my life, but ate what my parents told me to eat, but the thought that I could actually never eat meat again and that would be ok, that is the most incredible thing ever!  I immediately launched myself into vegetarianism.  I'll take nuts and legumes and beans and even fucking tofu over meat any day.

 

 

 

 

   

Isolated, Not Free...

“Isolated, she managed somehow to feel free—albeit with a freedom that made her want to smash a hole in the very center of the universe.”

—Flora Rheta Schreiber

Me Talk Pretty One Day?

             Sometimes I think my whole family is bipolar, as a unit.  Maybe they’re all just as messed up as me on the inside.  Maybe we’re all mentally and emotionally unstable, some hereditary genetic flaw or perhaps a family curse?  They can all be good actors when they need to be, playing the happy family gathered around a board game and over dinner with guests.  But who are they, really?  Well for one, they’re all fucking unhappy, but they won’t admit it.  They hate their lives, but they’ll never do anything about it.  They are full of too many regrets and bad decisions.  Listening to my parents’ ridiculous fights (always over finances), I hear them go back and forth, not really listening to the other person, yelling the same things over and over, getting louder until their voices crack, two children caught in an eternal maelstrom of “No I’m not”, “You are too!”, “No I’m not!, “You are too!”  In this debate, there is no clear winner.  And I feel like the loser, an adult forced back into scenes from my childhood, sick of my parents’ complete inability to communicate, wishing they could have just gotten a divorce like everybody else’s parents.

 It’s scary that yet another year has gone by and I feel trapped in a loop that keeps on repeating itself.  There are so many metaphors: a maze, a recurrent cycle, being caught in a roundabout with no exits (stuck behind a car going below the goddamn speed limit, no less).  But it’s all the same outcome.  Happiness remains ever elusive.  Where life has become nothing but a series of fictional distractions to keep you from feeling too much of your real life.  I’m honestly close to the point of creating an imaginary friend.  Not a fake person that I act as if he/she is real, but characters, one being myself and the other, a new friend.  A friend of my own making who treats the character version of me any way of my own choosing.  And the “me,” a version of me that can actually form sentences and say what I want to say.  A person who’s brain actually interprets a message and sends back out an appropriate response via speech.  I’m convinced that there is a yet-to-be-named disorder that is similar to Asperger’s, but affects the other side of communication problems and still comes with all the sensory issues.  Where a person can interpret social cues just fine (and may even be super good at it because of their ability to see detail and note subtle differences), can formulate a response, but who cannot produce said response.  Who cannot show the proper facial expressions or gestures.  Who cannot make their voice inflect in just the right spots and sounds like a monotone robot.  Who trips over words like mad.  Who comes off as rude or an idiot because of the way they said something and is unable to “correct” the mistake on the spot, therefore further coming off in a completely different manner than intended.  Such is my life.

 And no one can ever know the real me, whoever she is, because the world is so speech/oral communication focused.  I barely survived speech class in high school and got my mandatory speech credit in college by taking a summer school course at a community college where I'd have a much smaller class and less intimidating peers.  If only I could just write instead of speak, then I would have a much easier time communicating my intended words to other people.  I could use italics instead of voice inflection and lots of pretty words that I’m too afraid to use when I’m talking.  I don’t think I’m willing to wait around for “awkward” to become the new “cool”.  If only I had a name for this problem, so I could politely say, “Sorry, that didn’t come out quite right, I have [Insert label here].”  “Oh, I understand, no worries.”  Like a free pass for my awkwardness, a chance for a do-over mid-conversation.  Only people in movies get such a luxury, one that's not afforded to people in real life.  Interviews are a bitch. First impressions are a real bitch.  Confronting another person with a problem or issue you have, this is a major bitch.   Parties and social events are impossible.

 

But what happens when your brain is so messed up that even written words fail?  Yep, you guessed it, well actually, you probably didn't, but what happens is you pretty much avoid as many instances where this awkward breakdown of communication is likely occur as you can and turn inwards.  And if you're as creatively frustrated with speech and even words on paper as I am, you create people and worlds in your head where if a whole conversation between characters becomes a complete train wreck, you just go back and start over like it never happened.  Nobody is seen as rude or weird or inconsiderate (and nobody cares because there's nobody there to make judgements).  You drag the right words and the appropriate tone of voice out of your head and all is well, even if you have to do it ten times.  Misspoke a word?  No problem, it never really happened.  Sometimes I feel like my characters are all the stability I have in this crazy, fucked up world.  Even if think you that makes me a total nutcase.    

Morning Through the Shadows

It's been almost two years since I've posted something on this blog and I'm pretty sure no one cares, but if anyone was wondering where I went, they probably just assumed I'd finally killed myself or something.  Close...but no cigar.  I'm updating this for my own personal benefit so that several years from now when I re-discover this blog, I can look back on my life and hopefully have something more/better to show for it.

Yes, there was an actual suicide attempt back in June of this year, but I really don't like to think about that anymore.  It involved such things as immense amounts of vomiting, my therapist (this is a different one than I've written about previously) calling my mom and then later having the cops show up at my door.  Let's move on...I'm no longer living in Wisconsin and have moved back in with my parents due to having no job and no money.  The only thing on my calendar these days is chiropractor appointments for chronic neck/shoulder/back pain and headaches that I've had for over a year.  Well, the chronic headache problem, I've had that as long as I can remember.  I have no friends here and nothing to do, therefore I'm going out of my mind from boredom and lack of intellectual/mental stimulation. 

Actually, my mind has been rather stable for the last few months since I've gotten the diagnosis of Bipolar II.  And now that I FINALLY have that damn label, that I've been searching for and trying to figure out for forever, I don't want it.  I'm not taking any medication anymore though.  Mainly because all medication ever did for me was give me horrible side effects, but not help any of the symptoms I had in the first place.  My body reacted horribly to Lamictal which made one of my lymph nodes swollen and gave me the worst insomnia I've ever had in my life.  I was so desperate for sleep, I could have killed someone!  I'm now on a regimen of a high dose of St. John's Wort and many vitamins and supplements.  It's been working so far to keep my mood on an even keel, with zero side effects.  I like to do things the natural way and thankfully, my psychiatrist understands that.  I can't say I'm happy, but at least I'm not severely depressed.  But is it really due to the herbal supplements?  One can never know for sure.  My anxiety has also gone waaaay down.  This is probably a combination of things, but a large part having to due with my change of residence (though, living at age 28 with your parents who should have gotten divorced many years ago is full of all kinds of stress and mammoth arguments).

I'm trying to write more, but it's like pulling teeth to get each word out.  On my last hypomanic episode, I spent nearly all my time writing ideas for a book that my little brain hoped would be the next Great American Novel.  Yeah right...I'd come up with (what I thought was) brilliant ideas on my bike ride to work and have to dash into the building and scribble them down on the first thing I could find.  I couldn't go to sleep because I kept jumping out of bed to write things down.  I spent entire conversations with my mom on the phone trying to work out key sub plots.  But of course that didn't last, and now I'm feeling entirely mediocre and unable to even write decent poetry.  So mostly I'm reading and watching movies.  I've become re-obsessed with the Lord of the Rings all over again and have been reading through the books (I've gone back and now I'm reading The Hobbit).  I've seen the movies so many times it's ridiculous and now I'm going through and watching each commentary for each movie.  That's four for each which makes a total of 12 different commentaries to watch. 

I really wish someone would come up with The Sims version of LOTR, where you can choose those characters (as well as make up your own) and they can live in places like Hobbiton or Minas Tirith or Rivendell for the neighborhoods, and ride horses like the pets expansion pack and have lives like the base game.  I know there's The Sims Medieval, but it makes you follow a storyline instead of free play.  This might sound crazy (especially for a technology-hating individual like myself), but since my old computer died back in June (that was a nightmare), I've horribly missed all my Sims families (Sims 2) that I can never get back again.  I had five neighborhoods and about a hundred families.  Yes, that's a lot of wasted time I spent creating them and playing with them, but it was a very welcome escape I needed.  One that turned the thought of four hours with nothing to do into an opportunity for creativity which flew by because I was so intensely involved in my Sims world.  I sort of have my own version of a Sims world in my head that I use as my major coping mechanism for dealing with my own existence, but sometimes having something tangible and visual in front of you is more enjoyable.  And you can actually turn it off.  I still have not figured out how to turn off my head.

And here I shall leave you with this J.R.R. Tolkien quote from The Two Towers that I really love:

"For a while they stood there, like men on the edge of a sleep where nightmare lurks, holding it off, though they know that they can only come to morning through the shadows."

What a fucking metaphor for my life.  I love it.