Alien Girlybrain

8 years ago on 2 September i stood up for two seconds in a courtroom and when i sat down my legal name was something different to what it had been before i stood up.

the judge even congratulated me which was nice.

i feel so much conflict now about having transitioned but for a short while in my early 40s i was full of certainty that this was the right thing for me. wish i could get that back, or know for sure that going back would fix anything. ah well.

I just noticed I'm getting the dates wrong. While yes, technically, it IS the 13th right now, my inner pedant should feel free to fuck off, as it's still the 12th.

ANYWAY.

( This got longish, but it's been a good day, mostly! )

So let's see… The last time I posted was over a month ago. What's happened in that time?

Well… mostly not a lot.

I spent a couple great weeks in Wisconsin visiting my family. We went to Washington Island for a large chunk of the time there, staying in a house owned by my uncle's college roommate/best friend for life. It's right on the water, which makes for some lovely views, depending on the weather (which was mostly cooperative). There were more mosquitoes there than I've ever encountered anywhere else in my life. They were THICK. I'm amazed I didn't inhale any.

Time with my family continues to be equal parts frustrating and fun. Frustrating because nobody seems to be able to call me Carla or she with any reliability. Fun, because they're my kind of crazy (to a certain extent) and I just like spending time with them.

The visit was marred by a couple migraines, which sucks, but I had meds and was able to deal with them reasonably easily.

After I got back home, Travis and I went out to Pono Burger—an amazing little burger place that opened last year (?) here in Santa Monica—for his birthday. Then last weekend we celebrated our 16th anniversary by…um…ordering pizza one night and Thai food the next. We know how to live it up here, oh, yes we do. :)

And I've been battling severe depression the last several days. It comes in waves. I'm ready for it to be over, because June was mostly awesome, as was the first week of July. I was afraid the depression would come back, though, and it has—sadly—failed to disappoint. One hallmark of my worst depressive episodes is the feeling I should detransition. It's not that being a guy was/is better than being female as much as it is a feeling of discomfort with being female. I've been trying to unpack these feelings and there's definitely some kind of misogyny underneath it. It's a feeling of women and "female" bodies being… bad, dirty, disgusting. Misogyny, maybe? Whatever it is, it's interfering with my ability to accept myself and I'm ready for that to stop. I plan to get back into therapy (my last foray into therapy having been with a therapist last year in Chicopee who had less focus than I do and who seemed to want to put fires out as they started rather than dealing with deeper issues, and who seemed to be more concerned with Damian's mental health than mine tho he was not her patient) just as soon as I'm able to get insurance. I'd like to be a functional human being for once in my life. That's not too much to hope for, is it? I sure hope not.

So yeah, I dropped all my classes. Why? Why. Why… Well, the short answer is I was feeling a lot of stress from the classes I was taking. Everything was awesome up until the point where I starting getting homework and found that not only did I have no idea how to do what was being asked of me, I could only barely understand it. In other words, my homework (and thus the classes) was intimidating me and making me feel stupid. I know I'm not stupid, I'm reasonably intelligent, but this stuff…

Anyway, I was feeling a lot of stress, and it was interfering with my sleep and was making me depressed. As soon as I dropped the classes I could feel all that stress and depression evaporating. And I mean, LITERALLY as soon as I dropped them. Mind you, five minutes after that I was crying because dropping out of school means having to work at finding a job. That was the deal: as long as I stay in school, I don't have to work. If I drop out, I have to try to find a job. Eminently reasonable. So no school means no winter travel to see my family (probably) or my girlfriend and that equals a lot of hurt. But I was miserable and stressed. I might have been able to make a go of classes and even come out OK, but in the meantime I would have been very unhappy.

To be honest, I've been considering this option ever since I failed out of both my classes last semester. I needed the summer free, obviously, because of surgery, but now? This feels like the right move. School will always be an option for me, but today it's not the right thing. And it's not like I *NEED* a degree to be happy in life. I'm not caught up in the acquisition of STUFF anymore. There are things I want, and I am able to get some of them, and some others I can't, and that's OK. If I wound up working in a bakery somewhere I'd be just as fulfilled (probably moreso) than if I had a 9-5 job in an office somewhere pushing papers. The kinds of jobs you need a degree for aren't generally ones I'd want to have anyway.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a couple more online job applications to fill in before I go to bed.

OK, so I had my appointment with Dr Maddie this evening, and I'm just going to say that with every meeting she reaffirms my faith in her. She pays attention. She notices things. She remembers. She CARES. She made me promise to go to Cedars-Sinai if ever I felt suicidal again in the future. We then spoke about my moods and then commented, "Well you seem much more upbeat today than you were before". Which is absolutely true. She's got me on B vitamins which are supposed to help with mood (and in which I was deeply deficient) and I think they have made a huge difference, but I still feel depressed sometimes. So for safety's sake she prescribed me an anti-depressant, Wellbutrin, at my request.

Now I don't like the idea of anti-depressants. I've read first-hand accounts of how they changed the user's personality and demeanour. I am terrified of many things, but few more than not being MYSELF. Being out of control of myself disturbs me. It's why I've not touched a drop of alcohol since getting drunk in March. But I'd be a fool to spurn a medical solution when it's available and can help me get past these horrible depressions. After all, I'm willing to accept a medical solution to my gender identity issues, aren't I? I have to assume these drugs are as reliable as the ones I already take on a daily basis. And if they're not, well, I'll try something else.

Then we talked about the letter for the orchi. I explained what Dr Nguyen's office wanted and she asked to see Dr Fuhrmann's letter, but said she would write one for me. What she didn't say is WHEN. Since Dr Nguyen needs the letters, my paperwork and payment in full two weeks before surgery I hope it'll be soon.

So, progress. I'm not going to let myself get excited about the surgery until I've got Maddie's letter in hand and the date firmly marked on the calendar.

So how was your day?