Gender Therapy: Day 167 Negotating Relationships, Negotiating Emotions

See Gender Therapy: Day 000 to learn more about my hormone-induced journey of self discovery. 

I expect this post to be up and down, back and forth, conflicting and complex. Maybe it's because I'm human, and maybe you feel this way too, but it will be a roller coaster of a read. Fair warning.

This is a roller coaster. This is how I feel. This is how I think. This is how I feel about other people. This is how other people make me feel. This is how life makes me feel. This is how jobs make me feel. This is how classes make me feel. This is how the future makes me feel, and the past makes me feel, and how I feel right now. When I don't feel this, I feel like I'm waiting for the ride to start again. I'm always in the cart, and I'm always on this roller coaster.

Not many people know this, but this is how I always feel. This is who I am.

Many people don't think that I'm very empathetic, and that I don't know how they feel when they tell me about difficulties in their life. I tend to keep a lot of this introspective knowledge about myself to myself, because I don't want them to think I'm hypersensitive to emotions, or that I'm emotionally unstable.

Here's how investors feel. Maybe they have Bipolar II Disorder.

Honestly I've gone through every emotion in the book, and I have the potential to cycle through this every day, or every other day, but definitely every week, and every month, and absolutely every year.

I feel like I have anniversaries for everything in my life. Every time that I remember something that happened to me in the past, whether it was a major event or a minor event, just the fact that I remember that it happened brings back how I felt about it, and then I feel that way.

That would explain why I am forgetful about a lot of things. I don't want to remember everything that has ever happened to me. I would rather repress most of it and continue pushing forward, feeling and experiencing new things, instead of being held back by the chains of time, feeling everything I've already felt before, cycling through emotions I no longer want to feel.

I don't like to watch movies because I get sucked in to how the characters feel, and I am ashamed at how stupid a lot of them act. They make dumb decisions that put everybody at risk, because of their squishie morality and their negligence to logic or survivalism. I feel stupid about myself because I am a human and I might do something like that. When people bring me to movie theatres they quickly learn what a bad idea it was. I publicly announce when the characters make stupid decisions and what they should have done. This is why people don't think I'm very nice.

Take the movie 2012 for example. SPOILER ALERT: When the family forced open the ship while the whole world was flooding dramatically so that more people could get on, they essentially broke the door. Now the whole ship will flood and everyone on that ship will die. Dumbasses.

I prefer to watch cartoons and shows that don't have such predictable morals so that I can actually enjoy the plot and the message, or the art and and theme, instead of hyperfocusing on how the characters are going about making decisions. Maybe it also has something to do with ADHD.

Visual art is my favorite and I could be completely consumed by an art piece for minutes and hours. Art gallery hopping is one of my favorite activities and I will sit and stare at my favorite piece of the night for a very long time. If I can get away with it I will take a picture of the piece.

I often steal pictures I find online, anything that catches and holds my eye for more than a few minutes. I will make one my desktop picture for months. I have folders and websites full of thousands of these pictures. I revisit them and analyze them for meaning and draw them and recreate them to mean different things. What did the artist want to communicate? Who is the artist? What is their background? What medium did they use? How much did it cost to make? How did they blend these colors? How did they get that texture? What other media are they referencing? What stories influenced them? Which other artists did they interact with? Did they talk to non-artists? Were they inspired by day-to-day life, by a lecture, by a book?

My imagination is a very vivid place. I can be very happy for days about something I think will happen in the future, imagining what a wonderful place life would be when that happens. Sometimes I will be very sad for days thinking about something terrible that has happened, or that might happen.

My dreams are so realistic I toss and turn and sometimes wake up crying to someone who isn't there or jumping out of bed to fight a phantom monster. Sometimes I've called people to ask about why they killed their brother or why they sold their house. Sometimes I carry on in conversation with people and ask for clarification only to say, "Oh sorry, that was just a dream."

I've felt and imagined so many different things I feel like I know what it feels like to be a bear hunter in the arctic circle or a native farmer on New Guinea. I feel like I could easily go through the motions of the Wright Brothers or Marco Polo or Genghis Khan, because I know how they feel. I can imagine what their life is like. I can imagine how they feel. I can imagine how their life was, the joy and excitement and the struggles and the criticism they've received.

I could totally live in Papua New Guinea. I know how they feel.

When I listen to music I usually do so privately. I will be singing my guts out to Evanescence, "Call me when you're Sober", or to Louis Armstrong, "What a Wonderful World". If people knew they would think I'm some kind of depressed. I sing and feel every lyric so intensely and it makes me feel alive. I don't actually think this way, about anyone or anything in particular, I just feel this way. When the song is over the feeling is over.

On a regular basis I prefer to listen to nonsensical music like the Gorillaz or Beck just so that I don't get so caught up in how they feel, because their lyrics don't make any damn sense. For the same reasons I delight in music videos.

I can very easily get overwhelmed by people and don't like to spend too much time with any one person or else by the end of it I will feel exhausted and can't do anything else with myself by the end of the day. This is very aspie of me and it's a real problem. However I love spending time with people and learning about them, getting to know them.

I analyze what person think and how they feel and think about what they've gone through in life and how they've evolved to become the person they are. I like when my friends have very diverse backgrounds so that the evolution is different each time, and unique and new, like my international friends or those who grew up differently than myself. I can cripple myself if I think too hard about it, but I try not to judge them or make them into just an idea. They are still people, very interesting people, but people none-the-less.

I need to interact with people regularly, even if it is for a little while. I need to know that people value me and that they enjoy my company and are willing to set time aside to spend with me. I have to negotiate the amount of time that I spend with people so that I don't get too overwhelmed by them but also so that I have enough time to do other things with my life, like working and keeping my house clean and feeding myself.

I like it best when I can live with people who like me and interact with me. Less travel time and no need to schedule interactions. When I feel loved and cared for and like someone is watching over me on a regular basis, I feel stable and secure. When someone is looking forward to me pursuing important things in my life, like a degree, a job, waiting for me to buy a camera and start freelancing, I feel important. I like telling people about interesting developments in my life and having them support and validate my decisions. This is probably why I like responsibility so much, because I feel like I am a part of something, I feel like I am involved, and I like it when I can meet people's expectations.

I feel most unstable when I feel alone. Loneliness is a poison to me. When someone leaves my life, when they move away or stop visiting with me, when they drop communication or I see them less and less regularly, I feel alone, I feel isolated.

When someone close to me leaves, or even just the thought of them leaving will cause me to freak out. I feel abandoned. Sometimes I cry and scream and think they don't love me. Sometimes I feel like a bad person and deserve to be punished. Sometimes I think they are selfish for thinking they don't need me, sometimes I think I am selfish for thinking they need me. I feel vulnerable and child-like. I don't show this, but I feel this way, and I feel this way out loud when I am alone.

Maybe it's partially due to PTSD, but this is why relationships are difficult. Ideally I want to be close to people, as many people as I can. I want to gobble them up, put them in my life, interact with them regularly, see them often, talk to them, play with them, cry with them, listen to them and help them solve problems in their life. I want to explain myself and how I feel and problem-solve out the kinks in my life, and be an important person to them like they are to me. I want us all to live together in our own unique utopian community, where all my favorite people are and where we all get along. We each have unique skills and thoughts and we can use them to overcome anything, together.

In actuality I don't want anyone to know how screwed up my past was, and I don't want them to hold it against me, and I don't want them to hold me against the person I was in the past and to compare and contrast me with that person. I don't want other people to know my vulnerabilities and to be able to use them against me, I don't want to tell them about all the pending events in my life so that they expect me to complete each task I set out to do. I am reserved.

The reality is I keep a lot of things to myself, including how I feel and think about everything. I seem unconcerned and distracted and busy all the time. I am not home most of the time and I am off pursuing opportunities, keeping appointments, out on friend dates and responding to emails and setting up new dates. I am running errands and grocery shopping, I am price checking things I want to buy and things I don't want to buy and comparing what my life would be like with these things vs without them. I am independent.

I don't want people to expect me to always be there, that is selfish. I don't want people to always expect me to fix their problems, or to fix the drain, or to always be able to afford groceries or to always be happy and available. That is unrealistic. I don't always feel as strong as people think I am, and I don't always feel as competent as people expect me to be, and I don't want them to know this about me, and I don't want their undying confidence in my abilities to ever subside.

I am afraid to tell people about myself, afraid that they won't trust the things that I say, because I say and think and feel differently every time I speak, and every time they will ask me about something they will get a different answer. This scares me and I rarely take the things I think and feel seriously. I doubt that anyone takes me seriously and I don't doubt it if they actually don't think I'm a serious person. I try to hold back from talking about conflicting ideas and when I do so successfully, I am able to have strong and important professional relationships. When I don't, they fall apart and I have to move on.

In my close relationships there is more flexibility and it's okay if I don't have only one-sided answers to give. Many people appreciate that I have complex analytically abilities, that I can listen to their own complicated situations and lives and feelings and smooth it out to find the things that are most important to them. People like that I have crystal clarity when it comes to their lives. I look like some kind of psychologist, as if I have been doing this for years. Close friends trust and confide in me, strangers ask me to figure out if they are gay or if they should pursue a relationship (this stuff really happens).

The truth is that not everyone wants to hear my two cents however and if I bust out my overwhelming thoughts on the wrong person they will run away screaming from me (this has really happened too).

The truth is that I know this and I have to be careful with whom I articulate my ideas. I feel like every person I know I need to create completely different communication skills with, and I have to talk about specific things with them. Some of my friends I can't talk about trans* things with, other friends I can't talk about videography with, still other people don't want to hear about my travel plans or my blog or my fantasy girlfriend.

Negotiating relationships is hard. It is hard enough that it takes me a while to get comfortable to people. It takes weeks and months before I trust them enough to reveal anything about me. Usually my relationships start out very one-sided, me listening in on their story, them trusting me every step of the way. Usually they talk more than I do, and I really don't mind.

It takes me seconds to make friends but weeks to keep them and months to find time to interact with them regularly. I meet a lot of people and I want to keep them all, but I can't always. For this I am glad to have Facebook. I usually see my closest friends but only once a week, sometimes twice a week, and my most interesting friends maybe once a month, or every two months.

It takes me months to get the guts to date someone and months more until I feel confident enough to tell them how I feel about things. This is challenging because most people want to be friends instantly, and many people want to become best friends in a short amount of time, and a lot of the time people are impatient about romance and sex and want it to go flawlessly and think something's wrong if it takes too much time.

For the people I do succeed to connect with, I tend to put priority levels on them. The most important people are the ones who give me money, or people who love me. I tend to put work above everybody but I will skip work if somebody needs me. I do whatever I can for these people. 

It would be best if I could schedule everybody into my life, but a lot of people are not good at keeping appointments, and some people don't even like texting or calling. I have to approach everyone on their own terms and communicate with them how they like to communicate. 

In the mean time I keep up with people through Facebook; even if I can't hang out with them or get to know them in person I can still know about them. I may not be confident enough to hang out with them or have any time to travel and see them, but I'm still interested in knowing them.

Unfortunately this means a lot of my close relationships are one-sided, meaning people are confiding in me. For other people it feels one-sided in that I am only interested in them, such as when dates are canceled or calls aren't returned, and my only communication with them is through a Facebook wall. A lot of my relationships are also maintained over long periods of time, and we can't interact on a regularly basis as I would like. This makes me feel like my own problems are very complex and that my own needs are very demanding, and that no body cares to accommodate me. I feel like no one has the patience for me, and like I have no time for other people, and that people aren't interested in me.

Oftentimes I isolate myself because of this.

Usually when I feel so overwhelmed thinking about the fact that no body likes me I try to reach out to people, to go through and respond to old emails, to call people I know will talk to me, or to go through their Facebook to see what I've missed.

For other intense emotional fits I turn my attention inward to focus on what the problem might be. Am I hungry? Am I tired? Am I lonely? Am I bored?

If none of the above I ball myself in my room and go about solving these universal problems for the world. I go through the ups and down, the pros and cons, I feel intense and helpless and hopeful and powerful and pathetic and willful and watch inspirational videos and listen to whiny repetitive music and then nonsensical music and I'm eating chocolate and snacks and trying to stay hydrated. When I am done I bust out of my room and continue on with my life and tell the first person I meet about the grand ideas I have, the solutions to my problems and the amazing things I am going to do with my life. I am drenched in confidence and no one has the will to put me down.

This is how I go through life.

If you don't get this you should see Jane Mcgonigal and then play the game.

In case you haven't noticed I do feel very insecure right now, and this is why I wrote this post in a pretty short amount of time. Just the other month ago I made a pass at a pretty lady. Since then she has had reservations about my age and does not speak to me very regularly. We went on two dates in less than a week and she hasn't talked to me since. I don't know how she feels but it's driving me nuts whether or not she wants to continue with this relationship.

I feel very insecure about a lot of things right now and I am trying not to lash out at people or overwhelm them because of it. It makes me feel insecure too that I can't share my overwhelming thoughts with people and get crystal clear results, and it makes me feel insecure that I might hurt other people with my own thoughts. I am not a mean, hateful, malicious person, just someone with complex thought patterns. I am not too busy and disinterested and antisocial, I am just trying to prioritize my life so that I can accomplish difficult things and spend time with meaningful people as often as I can.

Feeling so emotionally unstable it makes me feel like I should get more emotionally stable friends. While I'm at it I should find more emotionally mature friends, so that they can be the ones to analyze my thoughts and find the most important things I feel. I also miss having a regular community of mentors and teachers and people who know more about things than I do, like I had when I was in school, and like I imagined this household to be. I want these kinds of people to interact with regularly so that I don't feel like such a child wandering in the dark, alone and scared.