line becomes a circle

Laser day, woke, went out without makeup, no time for estrogen before. My face and form and voice are flawed and this felt like weighted sadness. Receiving support made me safe to feel this sadness, love and music came my way and I listened and opened, and thereby could feel it more clearly.

The interesting part: I know I could step into “this has to get done, I feel nothing” dissociation and ride outside the body core in the enactment of tasks. I wouldn’t express sadness then or appear to feel it, might not even notice it.

I’m trying to stay now if I can. Because I’m thinking that perhaps I need to stay in sadness, even court sadness, if I am to be able to also stay to feel happy emotions at a greater amplitude than I can now. I think at this point I must learn not to dissociate and I think this is what I also am attempting.

raw-war

Not quite sure how it happens, but today I have sensed myself being especially vulnerable, it has been easy to worry but more to the point, some sort of sense of dread in the background. This fascinates me, I am happy to observe, and curious that I cannot find the anchor. Though I believe it has to be, except I don’t feel it, that I was worried about my talk before the faculty.

Said talk went well. The same thing happened again that when I got to the penultimate slide outlining how I want to look at trans cohorts to understand sex-differential disease better, my body but not my mind reacted, I felt at peace internally but my voice got thick and I would have shook had I not prevented it. It slowly dissipated but slowly, and made me less eloquent. Obviously I fear talking about that in front of an audience because it’s a coming out and I feel exposed, it brings all the fears of not seeming serious, of seeming ridiculous, of being too much, probably multiple impostor syndromes simultaneously. It does nexus many of my fears so that does make sense.

But still odd I don’t emotionally sense it, whereas my body reacts whether I want to or not. Is this a sign of emotional repression? I’ve gotten so controlled over the years I can ignore affect and just move past fear without even sensing it, but the body still is deathly afraid and it shows in my body language?

Now a little worried that everyone could sense my voice tone shifting, worrying they look down or me or pity me, that they won’t work with me or give me tenure. But that’s also probably just the irrational fear, the same fears underlying it. I’ll act to ignore them, not feel them, just proceed with my work. But perhaps the ease with which I do that is precisely why it only can come out through my body tensing up?

econ

Got the hope today of maybe making some money through pharma consulting after all. That appealed because of one thought: being able to afford the SRS I want (?) faster. The thought of waiting feels unhappy. The thought of having it done feels appealing. I jump on options for having it done like I want (?) to.

fruit

Weird. Contemplating “huh, maybe I really should become vegan now?“ with a similar emotional tone as “huh, maybe I really should aim for SRS in two years time?“. With the main difference is I keep returning more often to the latter, and feel like I sort of care more about the question.

I guess in some ways the former is the more important question, because if one sees it ethically and environmentally, it impacts lots and lots of lives of sentient, feeling creatures. But I am numb to that suffering, feeling it only on a detached, intellectual level. I guess my point here is, the same detachment is there for major painful surgery of my genitals and basic body configuration. Is it really like this for other people?

particip

Wondering over how and why it is that I know I feel strong longings for some things without feeling much in the moment. It does seem dissociative, and certainly I am not all cured – social and medical transition has begun to help, but must proceed, and probably I should help it along with a therapist.

I just realized one way in which it may work here, though. Thinking a lot about bottom surgery these days. I wonder if to a reader or listener, there is a point where I suddenly started talking about it a lot, and now won’t shut up about it? It’s on my mind a lot, mostly in terms of how to work around the problems, what the challenges are, how to deal with those. Planning, almost.

What I don’t do is look at the hoped-for outcome, the result. I don’t let myself think of what I could experience if it really worked out, don’t let myself feel that. The few times I do I’ve felt weepy. I’m recognizing this as how it’s been when I’ve worked hard toward other things, like my PhD. I’m too scared of not reaching the outcome (that is, I am whelmed with the scope and challenge of the path), so to protect myself from disappointment I don’t let myself look forward to it. I veer my mental eye away from it. I know it’s there but don’t want to look at it until I know it can’t be taken away from me any longer.

This may be why I obsess with laying groundwork to allow SRS for myself, but do not feel much as I do so. I sense the longing as a sun behind clouds, and I stay away mentally because if I expected, not just hoped, I could get hurt. Thus I can’t feel how much I want it, most of the time, it’s just evident in my actions.

In a way this is challenging because one part of the preparations is that I feel I must make sure I want it, which I cannot really do unless I have an idea what my body then would feel like. I need to visualize what it could be like having a post-op body, from the context of me as a 37-40 year old woman looking and sounding and moving like I do, and this is hard when I don’t let myself dream of a successful outcome because I fear a failed one too much.

So I guess I should be rational. That means ignoring fear as a motivation, not protecting myself from disappointment by hiding longings, and go right ahead in imagining. We’ll see how hard that gets. Also should look into demo options like tucking.