Tag: emotion

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.

calms and their counterparts

I’ve been describing to people a lot how HRT changed my stress response from fight-or-flight to acceptance, but thinking now perhaps that, while partly true, is not the most accurate description. What I’ve come to feel is largely calm and anchored, but there is a change felt also in non-stressed circumstances (so maybe not just something reactive), and now that stress levels are really high during these weeks when I move and switch jobs, I recognize some of how that stress feels from before, there is still a physical urgency in the body after some point.

So perhaps what is there is instead: there is a change in the form of stress response I have, but there is also a base reduction of some form of ambient stress that used to be there (dysphoria?) along some mechanism and path. And then there may be that I thus am generally less stressed, and reacting somewhat differently to it, but I also cannot ignore specific and situational (non-ambient) stress on an emotional level as I once could. That is, I can still choose not to act on stress but I cannot really choose not to feel fear or worry. This is something I need to explore further.