Month: December 2018

eh moh

These days just now, I seem to run out of spoons very quickly. Vacation mode thing most likely. On some level I know I get to, so I feel the long-term tiredness. Now feeling extremely tired and worn, will do minor things and then rest.

Also saw some claim that triggered my dysphoria a little, or rather just an opinion. Ordinarily would not faze me but right now no space in head, so putting thoughts into text. Person felt only dislike of body anatomy was a good reason to transition, compared to wanting to be seen as a man/woman or so as to relieve other issues. Here I’d counter that it really is true my other mental health issues, being to a significant part based in dysphoria, got better with transition and that this was a major otherwise unachievable benefit; that certainly is a good reason. And as for how I am seen… I am dysphoric when seen wrong, simple enough, and that has indirect consequences. Changing how I am seen reduces my dysphoria, which I need to do in order to function. That too I consider a good reason. So in a sense point all moot.

Brain tired, no logic, all weariness, will seek rest.

alex

Once more I feel something and it’s big and it persists and I don’t know what it is. I feel it in my body and my tears. I feel small and lost and alone and vulnerable and worn. What is this and why am I feeling it?

Some sort of pain and loneliness and disconnect. Still curious if it somehow was the deadnaming. It’s similar to that time in summer when misgendering got to me and stuck with me throughout the day. I can’t be sure but that at least is there. I want to cry. I’ll be OK.

empty

My parents were gracious enough but kept using my deadname by mistake, especially my father. I feel tired and empty and felt distant and as though I was enduring some boring social game which me as a mask was pretending to participate in. I still feel empty. But I don’t know if these are connected. They probably are but I might also feel empty and cold and sad and distant and as though I sit in on some uninteresting class in a topic I don’t care about for some unrelated reason.

Or maybe this is how repeat deadnaming feels now.

gal ananda

Gaius Baltar is sexy and I want to be the Cylon teasing him, I think. Then he keeps talking about “facts” with the same dark beauty as my crush, and I remember how I was way too forward and inattentive in trying to confess my love, she must have felt it awkward. Or not. I don’t know at all. Did I do wrong?

I think actually progesterone, while great, makes me more impulsive as I worry less about doing or being wrong. Worth remembering. Worth it too but good to manage.

Meeting in Unpronouncable was good. I was a good scientist and this will further my transition.

multipains

TW: Body image.

So, day not going great. Cold and fever and coughing are hard – but always worth it from staying out for crazy unrequited love, so whatever. Babylon’s combined rail and postal service screwed up and the tickets that could not be sent online and had to be sent by post didn’t show up, the customer service gave me wrong info, and they could not print new ones, I had to buy new ones, missing the train that would get me to Unpronouncable, Poland in comfortable time. It feels like the whole of the system works mostly, but the individual cogs are made of fragile, poorly-designed components.

It’s cold, I sit in the railway station waiting for the new train – where my feverish self will have to run between connections, too – but at least I have coffee and a place to sit and warm scarves. I still have not done the work I have to do. I will but first dump more about crushing and emotions.

I felt this many times before, though perhaps it is the first this year like this. I don’t necessarily feel what A calls higher fidelity of emotions (I am probably somewhat alexithymic) but I do feel gravitas and inertia of emotions and the reeling now does not stop, nor does it harm or hinder, it is just there. I feel it.

First, of course if is only sad and nothing else if truly I am rejected because I cannot bear a child, but I don’t even feel that sad over that, not dysphoric-sad, because it is not my trans alignment that makes me choose to be childfree. And the needs and wishes of others are valid and legit.

I feel a crawling, odd fear that I really was too much, that the outcome had been better if I had waited longer before letting my intentions become known. Circumstances were such that it made sense to come out, it did not make sense not to. But perhaps that was still not tactical? Should I have played it cool, downplayed interest to make me an uncertain price somehow?

FUCK THAT. I am not here to play games. I am not here to waste time. If I need to lure someone in through some silly exercise, then whatever. Still afraid I did wrong. Oh well. I will remain crushing and friendly. I did many times already in the past and got great friendships out of it. And the thought of not being spontaneous, authentic, that tells me that is not an option any more. Whatever.

Leaving still the feel of lack of self-worth. I believe myself to be ugly, boring, flat, fake, easy to see through and predict, banal, average. Uninteresting. I know by external metrics this is not quite the truth but with experiences proceeding – on some level, I have not received the validation I need to heal yet, have not earned it – I must have more happinesses coming my way before I can avoid feeling like that.

So what is there to do? Embrace all my loves and friendships, old and new, nurture and listen and be happy and seek you, listen, care, create. Exactly what I want. Build and nurture myself. And at this point? School myself more.

I know it is not what would be healthiest from some standpoint of what I recommend to most. But there is a path for me to deal with my body hatred, and social self-hatred, by actually powering through and eliciting response from the world. I know this because I have done it already. I can become more beautiful. If I keep up efforts, intensify them even, I can change my shape further, and ultimately perhaps I will look such that people will consider be attractive even without my personality playing a part? I want that. (It also will let me be read more clearly as my sex.)

For some reason my will to voice practice ties in here too and is another thing I will do. Becoming more eloquent without feeling distanced? Yes. These things will happen.

And I will keep on questing for external validation. I will make all those plans I have reality, I will push until it works, until everyone who looks at my achievements marvel because they expected less.

I will seek overkill. I’ll stack on force multipliers. I will warp and change into the best me that I can be, until there is no way I can be discarded, until there is no way for anyone to be disillusioned with me.

Tearing up again. Keeping it in check, don’t want the hosts in Unpronouncable to think I am weird except in all the ways I want them to. Should start preparing my slides now.

splt

Brief spelldump. Came across person commenting on my forum posts elsewhere (detransitioner referencing attack helicopters, so may not be wholly in good faith); I am stressed and have no spoons, so just blocked and ignored, even if he may have been trying to be helpful by trying to convince the person I in turn was commenting on not to act rashly. Some of his thought stuck in my sleep-deprived head though, and I need now that head for analysis, it is time to pay the piper, so to speed up the process I codify the dysphoric fears into text and place hear. This is the process that, in related form but liquid, in my mind, used to eat so much of my life and make me so unhappy.

Mr Helicopter says that it is not useful to see if the world comes across as easier to cope with if one sees oneself fully and truly as the non-assigned sex, as the fact that one does not see oneself so is unchangeable. I differ, the thought experiment was highly useful to me. Everything about transition is to be able to fully and truly see ourselves as our true sex/gender, all else works towards that goal. So while getting there is neither guaranteed nor trivial, it is possible, and a partial projection of that state was helpful for me in order to see that it most likely was dysphoria fuelling my angsts, later made clearer still by demonstration. Experimentation and projection of self-image I do claim is possible and useful.

Mr Helicopter says that transition lets AMABs live as trans women, but not as women, that these lived experiences are not the same, that there is a discrepancy no matter how far you get, that passing as cis is crucial and no-one gets there. I differ. This is up to demonstration, obviously I am not where I want to be, and work will be required to get there, work I will do. I will never be cis. But to say that the lived experiences always are qualitatively the same is both wrong and highly dysphoria-inducing, no wonder I reacted to this. Rather it is a thing of context and partiality and mixture. I move asymptotically towards living a life like that of any other woman who is unique in the non-trans ways I am unique.

Mr Helicopter says that the gender questioning eating life and time does not stop, it is merely replaced with transition as a quest/effort/novelty/challenge/project, which then takes up as much of your life. This I was vulnerable to because I always feared early on it was somehow just the new cool thing, or the thing to spice up my life. And of course so much of my life now is trans-related. But my solution at the time was to note how, if this was only a distraction or getting reborn like into a religion, it should eventually fade and I would be unhappy again. Thus it was another thing I needed time to evaluate, which I took. And now? It is only rare moments like these of dysphoria triggers when I feel like I did. The other transition related parts of my life generally do not feel draining, and I don’t think they take up more time than I once lost, though truly I do need more time in the morning. More to the point, the part of my mind working on my femininity as part of everyday interactions, I don’t think this is a trans obsession, I think it is a conscious version of what cis girls and women do growing up and living; we perform femininity. The fact that I introspect this performance makes it no more artificial, and I don’t think it loses me time or life.

Thus all in all, while perhaps the experiences of the detransitioning attack helicopter are true for him, I remain on the track which gave me back my life. Having codified this as a spell, I will let it go and do what I must.

*

Also if I am sad over being rejected? That will go into fiction some day, because there it is beautiful.

refuse

I should be sleeping off my fever and gain rest for tomorrow when I need to write a talk en route to destination, but this feels too much, I cannot sleep until I write it.

This year was amazing in so many ways. Then there was new love, by and large two new persons that I feel deeply for. Both trans women, each time after we slept together and my emotions began to spin. With each I came to realize that in actuality I wanted us to be girlfriends. With the year making me brave and trying to be honest in all things, eventually I told each.

The first, the beautiful and magical crazy one, from whose eyes I can see things I otherwise could not even understand, who moves in spaces I will never master in the same way, she said she wants not to have any formal relationship. But in truth she is saving herself, because what she craves is that relationship with a straight cis man who will make her feel like a “real” woman. He may not want her if she is taken, there might not be as many options.

The second, the stunning and brilliant and darkly logical one, within whom moves grand machines, the lateral thinker who follows ideas to conclusions so much I feel free, she said we cannot be in a relationship as we cannot have children, she waits to find a cis queeer woman who can bear her child. Presumably again even non-monogamy with me would be too much of a risk, may keep that other woman away.

For each I sense how far they have come, how much pain each have dealt with. For each, I recognize as valid what each need, and how that may not reconcile with what I want. So sad, all the same, and I do that thing where thinking of each and somehow feeling I can never experience that again, that somehow each experience – the touch and taste and smell of her skin, the soft sound of her voice when we whisper, the thoughts of us being recognized as together – will be something I never will feel again.

Of course I will. There will be others, and with each of these two I will love her regardless, be her friend and ally regardless, reach out to her and do our things regardless. For all I know we might sleep together again. Either or both may change their mind and pursue relationships with me. Right now I still feel that sadness – sadness indeed.

(There is even a third, to complete the set, the trans woman I crush on who is brilliant and kind and beautiful and together, but who I have assumed is in a mono marriage, aside from being far away. So formally, each time a matter of demographics. I am not a cis man so I cannot make the first a woman, I do not want to be a parent (in addition, cannot have genetic children, and cannot have genetic children with an AMAB person), I will never want to be monogamous so the third could not happen. Each a valid need mismatched. Each brings sadness but no will to change.)

The hurting part of me becomes convinced that of course these are just excuses. In actual fact, I am not interesting enough. I am an aging, sad trans woman who just pretend to be smart or have anything to say, who quickly becomes predictable and boring to those spending time with me, ugly, masculine-looking, fat, inconsiderate and inattentive in relationships, not sexually interesting to anyone. Past market date, not interesting, cold, callous, unfeeling.

When I think those dark thoughts I remember those who clearly do love me, and especially my partners. Fitting there are also three.

There is the one who knew me from the start, back all those years, the sober one, the one who makes doing right and being good seem cool, the one I know will always, always understand and care, who brings me full and intensive trust and safety regardless of far away or long between. She loves me so I can’t be all useless.

There is the one who understands the world from all the same odd angles I do, my alternate self, the brilliant one who stays kind despite the world asking them to do the opposite, the one who make me not feel alone in being me. They love me so I can’t be all useless.

There is the one who stands between all worlds, the one who carries chaos and with whom I can surprise myself by who they inspire me to be, the one who keeps on evolving like face of the moon and buried fossil, they who expand my span of world. They love me so I can’t be all useless.

I cherish these loves and draw strength from them. And I will nurture and also draw strength from my friendships with the three former. There is noting I really miss, I just feel fear of being at some point lonely, and I actually also long for lovers, active and interested participants willing to be with me in the ways I have not done – being worshipped, being touched, being exposed and given pain. Meh. That will happen or it will not.

But here and now I feel sadness. This year at least I confessed 2/3 crushes at least, this is a step forward.

Eyes falling shut. Sleep now.

sargat

I’m on the second day of the high-progesterone cycle. And sure, I cannot tell if this is biology or placebo. But I feel like I did in that previous 14 day cycle and it contrasts a lot to the 14 day cycle with estrogen only. I should work and shower and go to my meeting, I will do that, but need to describe this.

It’s both scary and interesting and useful. I am not detached but I am relaxed, laid back. There is less urgency, more acceptance in the face of anything. I feel a little tired, a little slow, not apathetic, but slow. I am not sure if I am, and I suspect it simply is me feeling how tired I really am and have been for a long time. It’s like it shuts off my fear/anxiety driven overdrive mechanism.

That’s scary because I have use for that overdrive as an overachiever. Possibly I can stay equally productive if I ensure enough rest, self-care, work-life balance. But I do feel that since I am less afraid, I am also less energetic. I’ll work that out.

I don’t feel detached, per se, emotions are not less, I am not dissociated. But there is also an… otherness to my emotions. It’s like when I woke up after long sleep and wondered who I was. I feel like myself but I don’t know if it is the same myself as off progesterone? Of course I am the same, I love you all the same and want the same. But on some odd level I don’t have words to describe I also know I am somehow emotionally different than otherwise. It may be I am closer to my body somehow. Like I have greater emotional inertia?

I mostly like this. I’ll learn to modulate it and to understand it better.