Biorhythm

I feel beat. Time continues on, and I become older and unwiser. I've got a job interview Monday, in my field of choice, but I can't tell whether I'm elated, full of dread, or simply nervous. Well, I know that I am nervous. Even though I don't rationally believe in karma, it feels as though my very good luck is like a cosmic loan, one which will be withdrawn if I fail to act within my own self-defined limits of goodness.

And, yesterday, I failed at that task. I hurt someone that I very deeply love because I was unable to physically and mentally restrain myself from exceeding the boundaries of our relationship. We were only two months broken up (I had ended the relationship because I felt physically unsatisfied,) and I let myself get too close to her, enjoy her warmth and presence a bit too much, and rekindled her yearning for reconciliation. I desire which I did, do in some ways reciprocate. But I can't be with her. She's but a twig and I'm a whole lotta woman. I need someone who makes me feel safe; not only does she not manage to do that, but I find myself having to assure her physical and emotional safety on a regular basis. Our friendship piques in me a bit of both maternal and paternal instinct, neither of which I desire to carry over into a physical relationship.

As I wrote this, I used an internet Book of I Ching (a ridiculous thing, though no more ridiculous than the print edition) to divine wisdom. One thing popped out at me:

At the foot of the mountain, the lake:
The image of Decrease.
Thus the superior man controls his anger
And restrains his instincts.

I can't say what it means or how/if it applies to my situation, but it sounds like sage advice, which is, I suppose, as good as anything. I've grown fat and complacent, either of which could theoretically be consequences of 5.0g conjugated estrogens in bidaily doses. I just feel so ... lazy? I'm not sure that's what it is, buy I need to get some excercise and decide on a Halloween costume. Or I could just dress up as sluttily as possible and go to a party. Halloween is our day, the holiday of we the transgendered. The one day when we can walk around with a slightly lower probability of staring or jeering or getting our asses kicked. The day when the freaks around us make us seem normal. I can't think of a denouement.

Postscript:

I've been thinking about prefacing these posts with chapter headings. It's a practice I carry over from my personal writings (daily agendas, notes, and such,) though I can't help but feel that in some way it detracts from my focus by filtering my thoughts through the mood of the title. Moreover, I'll often spend more effort on trying to create a cool title rather than the content. If it works, I will continue it. If not, it will die, but I won't erase this small blip of experimentation, despite all temptation.

I sit in my basement, downloading music, passing time. Trying to keep within the frail bubble of eternity that exists between midnight and five am. It's quiet, and in the quiet I find peace. I was moved to write via interpretation of the I Ching. But that's a lie, as I needed to write; whatever internal mechanism I have that prods me to spill thought to medium has been tripped, and I have words that ache to ravage the page. I feel to calm to write ardently right now, so this entry shall be as blissfully lazy as possible.

Even though I take them for granted, the changes that have been taking place in both my body and mind are pleasurably painful. My skin feels especially soft and sensitive, which leaves me more prone to injury. I always said to my therapist, "Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return." An old animé phrase. The first rule of alchemy. But is it worth it? I don't know. I'm tempted to just say 'yes,' as that would validate all of the efforts I've put into getting this point. I'm very satisfied with the way I feel, but with that comes the fear that I won't be able to defend myself when I need to. The feeling of power beyond the restriction of authority is intoxicating. And corrupting.

It all comes back to the mental conflict that I felt embroiled in as an adolescent: shall I be good or evil? It's a culturally weighted question. All the movies, books, and TV shows I've consumed in my life instruct that evil is nice, but good is just better. Evil is attractive, though. The dark side of the force, of human emotion, promises that you get to wear black all the time and swear even to teachers and priests.

... I've failed to write with blissful laziness. The words become forced as the quiet peace goes to its grave. The sound of clanking machinery and stirring life somehow set me at odds with myself. If only I could get a job where I didn't have to be near people. Ah, it's all a waste to want for such improbabilities; best to make do with the best I can get. I'll write again soon.

I've had a trying week. I've begun to realize I push myself away friendships that I feel are ephemeral. I fear that I'll invest a lot in the interaction and lose everything, so I tend to quit and walk away. I think it's why I don't manage to make new friends easily. In social situations, I'm always overanalyzing the ways in which the situation may go wrong, and calculating my possible losses as higher than my probable gains.

Right now, I'm avoiding writing a paper due in thirteen hours. I'm also writing to try and pull inspiration from the ether. While I feel that I can craft legitimately powerful essays, my ability to do so isn't a constant. I don't tolerate mediocrity when it comes to my written works, so I'll often postpone handing in a paper rather than finishing it. While I would appreciate the ability to toggle my muse from dormant to active as the weather requires, I feel that it would lessen my ability to produce quality work. Whenever in my mind I grant myself some talent, I react with displeasure at my own perceived egotism. It's a response that I feel comes from a young age, when my precociousness was rewarded by adults and peers with both praise and scorn.

... even dubbing myself precocious sets my teeth on edge.

Tuesday, an appointment with a doctor about that very special time in a girl's life. Perseverance furthers success. I've taken to using a randomized online Book of the I Ching. It's great because I consult it for advice, twist it to mean whatever I think it should mean, do what I was already going to do, and am that much happier for it. Armchair psychology and precognition are a self-defeating combination.

At my current vantage point, I view the past, the present, and the future equally. While true parity is impossible to verify, I feel balanced. When I tried to live in the past, I reaped only bitter black sorrow, a pain that I drowned in clouds of fragrant white smoke. My future kept me from seeing my present, and living in the now just depressed the hell out of me. I understand now that whatever path I take does not begin today nor end tomorrow. Coming to understand this has put me at a new peace, interrupted every so often by the thorny cloud of self-doubt. It'll always hover over my shoulder, no matter if my decision to transition is right or wrong.

But now I'm at a point of decision: I've been at my current therapy venue for about 3-4 months. At every point along the way, I've reserved a tiny spot at the back of my mind for the dim hope that they would recognize my plight (and partially that I would come to believe in my own suspicions) and allow me access to hormones.

As a child, I played role playing games and read fantasy novels endlessly. Something about the concept of a journey to unlock one's own mystic power excited me. To claim the holy sword, the artifact of God's presence on Earth seemed the greatest calling any one human could hope for. Even if it meant giving up my life in the process; if I could die as an act of love to my companions, to the human race, what more could I ask for?

At seventeen, I read Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In the archetype of the monomyth, I saw the very thing which fascinated me. It is to me the essence of beauty, that which can be named but never shackled by mere words. The ultimate boon he spoke of, that is what I view hormones as. It's not the end purpose of the process, but the process itself wouldn't exist, I believe, without them. The conception of gender transition only appears in medical literature after the synthesis of testosterone and estrogen had become possible in the 1930's. Maybe it's due to a historical demarcation of differing medical philosophies, but I believe that transsexuality would not exist without the possiblity of hormone therapy.

At first, I was wary; what if my background of fascination with myth made me want to seek estrogen as a tool to change myself and my world? At the same time, what if my transsexual dilemma was the root of my fascination with the monomyth? I implicitly understood that the two possibilities contradicted each other. Now, I'm not so sure that either need be correct. Dwelling around the edges of my internal debate and seeing it within others, I think I might realize that neither option need be true, and that both could be true to varying extents.

The heroine discovers his true identity, something at his and her core that cannot be destroyed. Campbell said that the enlightened being produced by the ultimate epiphany is equal parts man and woman, and yet above both. I understood this, and I think I worshipped it, wished to embody it. I can't say that I don't still. It's not wrong, even if it feels perverse sometimes. At first, I viewed gender transition as moving from one's birth gender to a bi-gendered state and then to the target gender. Now I understand that my target gender is that beautiful state of truth (for me, 75% female, 25% male - the energies are not divisible by such simple math, but, eh).

Our memories of childhood are fickle things; even when submerged, they speak in voices unable to be silence. As I child, I wished fervently to be a girl, but I got over it. Or did I? Energies repressed always come return to the light of day. It's a fact which touches me viscerally.

I don't feel right that the decision of when I will be able to go on hormones is in the hands of the establishment that I pursue psychotherapy through. This unease can be traced to two primary causes: impatience, part and parcel of any immature personality, and something a bit more intellectual: wariness of gatekeepers. I have the unspoken suspicion that there's some test I must pass, some rubric I must match up to before I can proceed within this structure. I'm sure that someone is deciding my fate from behind the scenes, and I don't like it.

I don't like the feeling of jumping through hoops, because the mere fact that there are hoops invalidates their effectiveness as a measure of anything worth measuring. I don't like it because, now that I feel confident in my identity, I have no way to earnestly communicate this without coming across as somewhat disingenous. I want to get it this whole thing done of my own accord, but that takes money that I don't have. Once I have the hormones in my hands, I'm sure that they'll be willing to help me, but this whole situation seems bass-ackwards.

I wouldn't mind if it felt like just another obstacle, because the hero/ine must clear all obstacles and journey to the bottom of night before obtaining the god-power. But I've fought off everything I could so far, and no heroine may defeat the greatest evil without the power to change reality, the sword of evil's bane, the power within herself. I feel this power pulsing within me; I've nurtured it as best I can. Whereas before, if completely denied the option of hormone therapy, I wouldn't have transitioned, now I know that I would have to anyway. The person within me is real, and I can acknowledge this now. The fact that I cannot grow into her physically as I do so mentally troubles me.

My distrust of my caregivers is paranoid, but with reason; I've read enough horror stories of transpeople dwelling within a system indefinitely, and advisories to pursue other resources if one feels one's needs aren't being met. I haven't done so because of a fear of wasting the energies I've already expended here and a lack of money. I feel that I've done everything that I can within my current situation, and it's not enough for them.

What I haven't done is changed the parameters of my life to extend my boundaries, at least in the sense of getting a job and moving out. I have complications that arise around doing so, but more than that I have a fear that is paralyzing me from stepping over that threshold. Now that I'm starting to put this fear to the light of day, I can see that it's without substance, and that I needn't heed it. Once I have a job as a woman, it's all over.

Not! But, relatively, this phase of inability to completely transition will end, and I will finally be at terms with fighting the Final Boss: living the rest of my life. Surviving is truly the ultimate goal of transition, which is alright with me. If, through maintaining my survival, I can find within myself something beautiful, some power and grace above what I currently possess, even better for me. The hormones may be an effective shield, but my mind is my sword, and my will my armor.

...fuck. Is that what they're goading me into? I hate mindgames.

Extinction. The most potent method of preventing behavior. A new landscape beckoned me that day, one which interpolated natural beauty with terrible danger. My thoughts aren't mine, yet, but I will return when they are.

I need some form of blow-off, some method of dealing with the feelings I have right now. Writing here helps, but ultimately writing on a blank wall lacks the real impact that something more meaningful would impart. I'm now employed after many months in a state of uncertainty, both of my financial/professional status and of my own identity.

Now I have an recurring feeling of intense unease at work. I attribute it, superficially, to a profound sense off not belonging around my boss and the other employees. I feel sort of above it and yet sort of unqualified to do the job. I know that one can never be above doing the task put before them, but my visceral experience says that I am sort of too much and sort of not enough. I just took an examination that may allow me to qualify for a much better career, but it's hard for me to live in the 'now.' Which may be one of the reasons it's been so hard for me to start transitioning from male person to female person.

Digging deeper, I find myself afraid I'll go insane if I stay at the job. For the first time I'm seeing of my adult life as a male in microcosm, and it scares and repulses me. I feel myself being pressured constantly through the expectations of others into following this path that seems most logical for the self around which I have formed my persona, and in many ways my own expectations. Though I know some parts of my transgendered nature incontrivertibly and consistently, I can't help but feel inauthentic in my own stated self-perception of a boy who wishes to be a woman, yet is perceived as a man. It's due in large parts to being made to feel like a man very often, I believe. While I somewhat resist taking my own choices so far out of my hands, I feel like everyone around me is subtly pressuring me away from taking the individual steps towards my goal of living and (here's the important part) feeling like a woman.

And yet, now I feel truly free in subtly changing my own mental landscape towards something I could be more satisfied with. It's a confusing duality. Perhaps the resistance from other people is partially my own token resistance to the change I feel ocurring within me, which scares and excites me.

Still, happier I feel with my progress, the more I have to fragment my personality to effectively deal with the numerous situations I face daily where I'm called on to act as masculine as possible (within certain limits) or face the consequences. It keeps me in perpetual void, holding out for those moments when I feel able to exist.

Bah. Six hours until I must go to work. Think I'll go to sleep.

For the past week, I've been working on my car. I crashed it one rainy night, deforming the driver's side. That was two months ago. For a month it's been sitting in my garage in varying states of undress. It vexes me, knowing that it's out there, waiting to be driven, but handicapped because of my stupidity. By now I've replaced the door and taken new window glass from the junkyard, but one major problem stands in my way: the door won't lock. I've spent hour after hour hammering away, but it feels like I'm no closer to being finished now than I was a week ago. I feel so powerless; I know that there must be something I can do to fix it, but I can hardly tell if I'm making any progress.

I've been going to therapy for two months now. It's an interesting experience, really; at times it feels like this cooperative collaboration aimed towards self-growth, and at others it feels like being vivisected. I don't really feel too enthusiastic on the concept anymore. While it's necessary to go through the whole therapeutic process to get gender reassignment surgery, I can recognize the subtle feedback I get from the counselors I'm paired with. It's not quite doubt, not quite confusion, but ... a certain ambivalence. Which is, ironically, what they tell me that they sense in me.

In further analysis, the whole thing seems ludicrous. Earlier in the game, I felt that the 'transsexual' model was the only valid model of variant gender expression. Therefore, I changed my perceptions to fit what I believed to be the one true schema; if only transsexuals got to change their bodies, then I was to be a transsexual. Not the best way to operate, but my overriding principle of dealing with the world seems to be, "Sometimes you have to change yourself to fit your situation."

When I look at it, though, the clinical vocabulary I used/use to describe being a boy who wants to be a girl ... it's all a way of distancing myself from having to ask any questions, critically analyze myself. Or take a hard look at what I can't help but view as the medical structure that keeps all of these classifications in place. When I was simply a student of psychology, I viewed it as having a bad rap; very few people want to be psychoanalyzed, which I interpreted as a fear of learning the ugly truth about oneself. But now that I've had psychiatry applied to me (consensually, if not fully willingly) I see another element to it.

Perception creates reality. How we are perceived many times governs how we act, even how we feel, and most especially how we view ourselves. If you're told that you have a sickness, you certainly begin to feel ill. I once read somewhere that it's most advantageous to have a self-image slightly move positive than realistic. I can believe it, really; my best moments of introspection don't really coincide with high motivation or self-esteem. For me, the process of therapy creates a feedback loop. I feel pressured somewhat to conform to whatever sort of behavior the counselor unwittingly lets on to be acceptable to them, and suddenly I'm torn: I can follow their expectations and get closer to one of my specific goals (hormones) or I could be and do as I feel internally motivated to, continuing to wrestle with presenting myself in an acceptable light to those who have been put in a position of judgement.

It gets on my nerves! I mean, I didn't have to go through x months of therapy to be male in the first place; that was a non-choice. I'm entirely willing to accept the negative consequences of any decision I make, because, dammit, it's my decision to make. No one else has to live my life; while some people may ultimately be affected by my choices, I'm the only person who has to live with them 24/7. While I respect the stated goal of the gatekeepers to prevent me from making a decision that I'll ultimately regret, I can't help but recognize that they're also trying to cover their asses from any liability that could be incurred. When you're coming to a shrink willingly, you've already been marked in some way. The paradigm of the reluctant, long-suffering transsexual is deeply rooted into the psychiatric consciousness, I think, which also means that it's deeply rooted in the consciousness of the psychiatric patient. Am I paranoid for believing that I'm suspect for earnestly wanting to transition?

Then again, the entirety of what I just wrote smacks of some misplaced energy. I've had very little held back from me by the psychiatric profession and most of my observations are second to third hand at best. There's a kernel of truth to my ranting, but I think I'm really more angry at myself for trying to adhere to a black/white male/female dynamic and failing. And I'm scared that if I give it up and recognize my own fluidity of gender, that I'll also give up my ability to transition from male to female, which is my paramount desire. What I've realized most potently is that only my own intercession will provide me with any security, any truth in my life. I can't look for outside validation of some sort of medical diagnosis to legitimize my need to become female-bodied, because then I'm setting myself up to rely on some external source of motivation/control.

But does this mean that I should work my shit out independently of any establishment? I wouldn't be averse to it, really; while it lacks the smack of official sanction, I truly do detest formality and implied authority. I'd still be able to obtain hormones (probably more easily than if I were to muddle my way through a full course of diagnoses) and, more imporantly, I think I might be able to more easily own my femaless if I didn't feel that it required someone else's validation.

Ack. My prejudices show clearly when I allow myself to write freely. It's a good thing, I guess. My only talent when self-analyzing is my ability to be mostly honest with myself, something that a lot of people seem to lack. Is life a narrative, or is it a non-linear, non-fictional jumble of events? I don't really know what's going on here, but I've got more than an inkling now. My victory lies not in seaching searching searching for some type of answer, but in letting it find me as I live my life.

Look, here's my unnecessary, somewhat cowardly (I mean, no one even reads this, but I guess it's all about principle) declaration to the world: I'm your she-male, you boy who wants to be a girl. I'm not afraid.

Most of the time.