See Gender Therapy: Day 000 to learn more about my hormone-induced journey of self discovery.
"I prefer to use the word mental variance. It doesn't insinuate that something needs cured, unlike mental illness or mental disorder."
I haven't written in over a month. Lately I have been dealing with the realization that I may have one or several mental health issues and have been evaluating myself constantly to figure out how this will affect me, my future career, and my life, and reflecting upon my mental history through the perspective of these disorders to reframe my childhood. It explains a lot, but it leaves my future feeling vulnerable to my own self.
For several months now I have dug up the idea that I may be on the autism spectrum. I haven't looked into it in years since I last hung out with a collect self-identifying aspie group meetup, but I have started to read aspie blogs and am intrigued how similar our writing styles are. I told my roommate: "Either I'm autistic or I'm trans*" in explaining my boyish behavior and insensitivity to all things female and feminine.
I match the diagnostic for ADHD (attention deficit hyperactive disorder) verbatim and am reading a book on the subject for confirmation. I speak fast, think fast, get bored easily, and overstimulate myself with music to stay focused. For memory I use repetition for names, mnemonics for boring information, calendars for making and keeping long-term commitments and events, and messes for remembering to complete tasks around the house, for example leaving the laundry room light on to finish my load.
The other day I called a research study (there is a large medical research university in my city) to participate in a study about emotional and physiological health and their relationship to one another. They were open to participants who have a history of depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or trauma, the last of which I qualified for. Over the phone they were unsure of my status and when they brought me in they confirmed that I would meet the requirements of Bipolar II Disorder if I had longer episodes of depression (which I used to have in childhood).
As of two weeks ago I started gender therapy at a local LGBTQ clinic and am currently in counseling, a proactive approach on my account to figure it out, once and for all, and to find the proper methods for dealing with tough mental and emotional challenges. My assigned counselor is gay and bubbly and delightful and is interested in hooking me up with other medical professionals to get proper diagnoses so this is something in development, but it is of serious interest to me and takes a significant amount of energy to process.
As a side note having an LGBTQ-focused counselor helps narrow my interests in taking hormones and potential transition. My gender goal was named, "finding a suitable gender presentation that I and others feel comfortable with", such as on a professional level, and some of the things hormones would help with include facial hair and voice deepening. I have other goals as well such as exploring what it means to self identify as one gender versus what it means for others to identify you as one gender. I want to meet and talk to other individuals who identify as both, or neither, and those who are actively interested in not transitioning but instead living "naturally", while still establishing a binary identity. My counselor mentioned working on communication and relationship skills, as I have a hard time connecting with other females, especially feminine types.
In less than a month I will be off of hormonal birth control and will be paying close attention to how this affects my gender dysphoria and my general attitude towards those close to me. Lately I have not been feeling so concerned with gender. For a few weeks I was very upset about being female and insisted on dressing masculine as often as I could, attempting to pass and holding my tongue where I could so as to not be outed. For a few weeks following that I felt undeniably feminine and sexy, looking at more feminine pictures, artwork, nudity, and embracing what it meant to have female anatomy. I had shucked my packer and dressed in more tight clothes, although I had tossed most of them.
The weeks following that and leading up to now I have felt the need to neither dress masculine nor feminine. I have felt very stable in my ways, my lower-than-most female vocals proud and intelligent, my dress very androgynous and practical for bike riding and dressing professionally (sans muddy, snowy, salty boots). I have felt very loved and connected to the individuals in my lives, their acknowledgement and affirmation of my self being myself, their curiosity in my thoughts about gender, and their acceptance of my lack of interest in being a she or a he.
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And now for a poetic essay about myself:
I feel like a lie. I feel as though the things that I want my life to be are not really me. They are not the female that I am, they are different than that. The things I want are ambitious and complicated and self-destructive, and that I will kill myself in my pursuit of happiness.I want to travel, I want to marry a woman, I want to own a tavern, I want to speak many languages, I want to create media, to be respected, I want to be a man, I want to keep my female body, I want to challenge dominant culture and I want to do this all in a timely manner.
It sounds so simple written down but each of these goals takes large amounts of time and a tremendous amount of undying energy, social networks, money falling from the sky, luck, and creative problem solving. I feel like I am a lie because I have done none of these things. Okay so I've had a few girlfriends and I can speak two languages and I got a scholarship to go abroad. Maybe this blog even counts as challenging the norm, but I don't feel like I've had an active part in any of these activities, that I just happened upon the opportunity and pursued them passively.
I feel as though I am in the preparatory stages of accomplishing such things but I am not yet halfway there, I am still in the rising action part of the story, and have not yet reached a point where I can no longer turn back. I feel like there is too much opportunity to just stop here and live a normal life, a stable life, and because I am so much closer to that boring life than I am the life I want to live I feel as though I am living a lie.
I am the lie. I am fragile and female and I need stability, people I trust to interact with regularly, people to love and care for, food to eat everyday, exercise I must be disciplined about, ten hours of sleep and a stable job. These things are opposite what I want and almost separate from that which I'd prefer to do. I feel like I can't pursue my true interests because my own biological being holds me back, and I feel this way because it is becoming more obvious to me how my brain and body work.When I do not give it the attention it needs it causes me to mentally break down, to lose a day because I'd prefer to stay in bed and think negatively. I feel exhausted and need to be alone and will not leave the house, and if I tried it takes a great deal of encouragement to do so, which often ends in internal conflict which has a 50/50 chance fail rate and I collapse and crawl back into bed, now with a headache.
I never noticed these things about myself until recently, when I finished school and got a boring job and had a small group of friends and my life became quiet. The dust settled and I saw nothing but myself, and myself I have been staring at for months. Myself has developed many intricacies that leading a normal, boring life feels impossible.
I can't stand it. Myself forces me to miss work if I do the same things for three days in a row, just to change things up a little. Myself can't stand being locked into a social engagement for an undetermined amount of time; I must know when I can leave, and I will leave promptly, or else I will become agitated and shut down. Myself needs large amounts of food to keep going, and a variety of food, as myself refuses to eat the same thing more than twice and misses meals if there isn't anything quick and sweet to snack on regularly. Myself needs eight to ten hours of sleep a night and if I don't get that the next day is miserable and I just want to die. Myself wistfully drifts from interest to interest and will put an article about the bible on a higher priority level than the emails I need to respond to promptly regarding bills; my interests are expansive and will capture my attention despite how much time I don't have to spend. Lastly, and the most difficult attribute of the self, at least once a week I experience an extreme high state of being, a sort of manic-mode that lasts as long as several days as as little as one wake cycle. It is good in that I can be extremely productive in that time, and bad in that it hits without warning and I can't always take advantage of it, and I always lose sleep because of it. Similarly at least once every two weeks I experience an extreme low that causes me to feel and think about miserable things and to reevaluate my life with a consistently hopeless attitude which is contagious and thus causes me to isolate myself. This too happens without warning and can disrupt my life. I sleep too much and cancel appointments.
Life is rough, and I'm a complicated individual, and that is difficult to accept. I have lived most of my life being easy going and subject to my environment, letting the wind dictate my emotions and thoughts and letting myself experience things with an innocent eye, ready and willing to reach enlightenment at any given moment. Now my body, and my mind, demands structure and stability and will throw me into despair if I don't give it what it asks.
Yet, once I satisfy these requirements my true desires bubble up from the surface and overwhelm my very need to exist, asking and begging and pleading that I just let go of everything and make an irresponsible investment in a vehicle which will take me across the country, or to quit my job and hope freelance media creation pays the bills, or to just couch surf with my friend in England and go to Oxford for a master's in whatever-I-feel-like-studying. I don't want to take responsibility for myself, I just want to go with the flow. I don't want to mandate my body to stability, I just want it to adapt to new environments and to eat whatever is available.I feel like my own mind holds me back from doing anything fulfilling. I swing wildly from energized to exhausted, I have many interests and can't organize the time to focus and complete things, I take it one day a a time as I have the inspiration and free time, but it takes work to maintain myself in between and I rely on other people to push and guide me to do the things I want to do. Unfortunately not everybody thinks my interests are valid or responsible, so they passively encourage me as I publicly voice my progress in any area. Even I can't keep up with the amount of open-ended projects I am actively pursuing. I've attempted to make a wall of stickies and tape but the perfect organizational structure is impossible and I am discouraged when the stickies come loose and my rooms gets messy.
Maybe this is the conflict I have always had within myself, and something that all ambitious people have: want vs. need; time will always be against me. Maybe this life I have lived is coming to an end, a completion of who I am in my current identity and the prelude to the person I am transitioning into, the person I want to become. Maybe this is Eddie, the person no one but me can imagine, the person no one yet believes exists. Maybe these passive individuals in my life are secretly jealous of my ambitions and are more interested in keeping me the same, a passive way of holding me back, to prevent my better half from intimidating them. Maybe the naysayers want me to be isolated, hungry, depressed, weak and feminine, something they can control and predict and use for their own interests, be it sexual or romantic or friendly or supportive.
I am not a person but a ball of energy that people want to tap into. I run free and fly far but people want to harness my energy. They need me but I need myself more. I need to be myself, I need to be the person I want to be. I need to leave my weaknesses behind, and if that means leaving people, maybe I need to leave my old self behind.
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"Congratulations! You've figured it all out. You've managed to use your disorder to your advantage."
In the time since I haven't written a few other things have changed too. I took a job offer tutoring at a local high school, I've been involved with two different paid video production teams (companies?) one which I also edit websites for, and I'm in the process of quitting one job to start a new one: same pay, same field, but closer to my house.
I am happy about the production gigs as those are in my field, and the dumb job is mostly for financial stability, though I enjoy tutoring despite the small amount of hours because it allows me to be home early and do other things with my life. The students are also interesting.
The high school I tutor at has a predominantly black population in a predominantly poor neighborhood at the edge of town. I embraced the opportunity to learn about the subtle cultural differences of a demographic I am not usually surrounded by. Although I am not sheltered by definition, I did go to a predominantly white school. It's been a good experience so far, and between sessions I read the African-American history textbook.
At first it was overwhelming. The school felt like a jail. They locked the bathrooms and had their students escorted from class to class. There was a metal detector at the entrance and a security team waiting to be called upon from the room full of cameras. There was a sort of hard-ass attitude towards the kids, a strict way in which they were treated and expected to cooperate immediately. It felt like institutional racism but I'm not an expert on these subjects.
I got along with the kids pretty well; I find them smart and crafty. I engage in conversation with them about their goals for finishing their classes and about what they would rather be doing than sitting here at a computer screen. For the most part their being in an after school credit recovery program is because of having missed classes due to needing to work or help out with their families, or just being distracted with extra curriculars. I don't judge them since there are a million reasons to miss class. Perhaps they were bored of a shitty school curriculum. Perhaps they were thinking about what they want to do with their lives and pursuing their interests instead of concentrating on homework. Perhaps the institution did not accommodate their financial needs or their family makeup. Perhaps they had problems at home.
In the beginning there was a girl in class who was being rowdy and talkative. The teacher in charge of the class asked her to shush and to concentrate on her work. The other students, clicking away at their online class environment, paid no attention to the outburst from this young woman and didn't blink an eye when I was asked to call security to escort her from the room.
Another student in the class was sprawling on his desk space, being bored and listless. I visited him frequently to ask how far along in his online course he was and usually got a very half-assed answer. After doing the math to figure out how many lessons and modules he had to do a month to make his goal, he dismissed my suggestions claiming he would just do this online class next year. I told him that it didn't make sense to sit here and do nothing, that he could be doing other things with his time after school. He responded that he preferred to be here instead.
Whatever reason these kids were here for, they seemed like regular kids to me. They were snarky and silly and every so often looked at their phone between quizzes. Today was the fourth day on the job and today I learned that there is a large mentally ill student population. This came as a surprise to me as I had not associated the behaviors of the students in the program to be mentally ill. The girl who acted up was later described as too unstable to be in this kind of environment, and thus it was requested she be escorted and put into a different program. The boy who seemed to sit around doing nothing was later described as mentally handicapped, and that he perhaps had a physically abusive home life. I learned today that they have a full mental health team as well to check up on the kids, to make sure they make it to class, to make sure they are feeling okay.
I had not thought these students' behaviors were abnormal or related to mental disorders. I thought they were a little complicated, perhaps they had a hard home life. I knew some were anxious and others were misunderstood, if not bored. They were all very interesting and honest, if not a little cold at first. However when it was explained to me how these students thought and felt it made sense why I related to them so well. Dealing with difficult people is what I'm was used to growing up. Handling inflexible, challenging situations is the norm for me. Feeling intense, unpredictable, and unmotivated to follow directions was how my life was.
My brother used to act up all the time when he was in school. He would be himself, loud and rowdy, and when an authority figure told him to shut up and sit down things would get physical. I skipped school more often than I would like to admit, feeling reluctant to wake up each morning and feeling like my body was aching for hours every day. Home was chaos, and school was cold and oppressive, and my friends felt the same way. I could speak to these individuals because I was used to the complicated kids of my childhood.
My childhood friends were bipolar, depressed, they had personality disorders, severe anxiety, disassociation. They spent time in prison, they were sex addicts, they did drugs, they gave themselves tattoos. They loved me, traded video games with me, hacked websites with me, we climbed fences to play on playgrounds after hours, we walked the streets at night, we had skateboards and BMX bikes with pegs. These memories haunt me in a whimsical way, but recognizing the potential for my childhood friends to have undiagnosed disorders that go untreated makes me uneasy. Just the same, their emotional intensity, their spontaneous desires and unpredictable needs are familiar to me.
This city continues to answer my prayers and to listen to my desires and to creatively present opportunities for me to pursue and explore. Most of all it has helped me to solidify many ideas about myself that I once thought were silly or selfish or insane, and it has helped me to let go of those habits and behaviors and phrases which handicapped my emotional development as a child.
Recently I was almost diagnosed with Bipolar II Disorder at a local research clinic. The lady told me that if only I had longer episodes of depression I would have qualified. The thing is, I used to have longer periods of depression, when I was younger. She congratulated me on having "figured it all out", and having found a way to get by without it being an issue. As she said, "it's not really a disorder if you use it to your advantage". I wish a rough childhood on no one, but the experience was invaluable.
In the mean time I have a counselor who will help me work out the rest of my kinks and to help me better understand and accomplish the things I want to do with myself.
