Tickle the Heavens

A dream:
I was talking to a rabbi about something while playing Street Fighter 2. He seemed unimpressed by the level of intellect I was displaying, and seemed to scorn me. My pride wounded and desperate to appeal for his favor, I proposed a contest of sorts: we would fight each other in Street Fighter, and then quiz each other. At the end, I had tender sex with Bruce Willis.

Wall of Sound

It's eating away at me, the blank page. I've been depressed and not doing schoolwork. When I imagine the blank page before me, I freeze up. My mother says I see too many possibilities and I freeze, and she's absolutely right. I'm waiting for my estrogen to arrive from New Zealand (I think) and it's maddening. My supply of premarin is limited, so I've had to cut back to a quarter of my normal dose until I get that package in the mail. As a result, I'm kind of PMSing 24/7.

But that's not the reason I'm subsisting in misery. I've been missing my Marijuana Anonymous meetings. I haven't quite become a recidivist, but my disease, unchecked, finds a way to compensate, and I've been eating myself to death for that period. I don't know what's keeping me from taking two hours out of my Thursday to do what I know I must do. An older, wiser person has even given me the gracious offer to sponsor me in the intervening time, but I just couldn't do it. I'm afraid of fucking it up, and that leads me to fuck it up. I want to walk the bright path. I don't know why I feel I can't.

In the meantime, I played "I Wanna Be the Guy." Hardest platforming game I've every cursed at. It seems that the designer had a deep, personal hate for whoever would be fool enough to download his shit. It's enough to inspire me to my calling: making games of little to no marketable worth. If this paragraph makes no sense, sorry.

It's so weird having this public diary whose audience's existence is in superposition. I have no guidelines for what or how to write, whether something is expected of me or my expectations are simply in my own head. It frees me, but it makes things difficult, too; I firmly believe that constraints are sources of inspiration. Without them, I often feel lost, especially when writing fiction. I'll be trying more fiction soon, god willing, because I feel or want it to be a certain kind of salvation. Maybe I'll find my voice again.

Earlier this week, I made a date to meet a coworker for coffee. Since it's a female coworker and I still present as male at work, I tried to express that it was a purely platonic engagement. She canceled at the last minute and the subject has been taking possession of my mind fairly frequently since. I was going to give her the big reveal about being TG, and part of me was relieved when she didn't show up, freeing me from a possible Awkward Moment. But other feelings crept in, and later that night I felt torn up over it. It's a weird, muddled feeling: the sting of rejection (that's largely my own self-esteem issues and social anxiety talking) and the (temporarily?) lost opportunity to be honest and vulnerable with another human being. I had hoped to create a larger slice of the universe to explore as a transperson (as a woman? As someone apart from the gender binary? I don't know.)

I just feel rotten about it, which I can't really hide from her, which I feel hurts my chances of seeing her outside of work. The flavor of despair is something I think a woman is well-attuned to smell on a man. Despite my incongruity with the genders involved, my radar would be up if I were her and approached in a similar fashion, and it drives me nuts. I've never come out to someone over the phone, so I'm just not sure if I can break through whatever barriers separate us in addition to the brick wall that is gender. I suppose it's my calling to learn to scale that wall as a person who exists on the outskirts of the gender bell curve, but it's really hard and I'm feeling kind of delicate.

I like this woman because she is seemingly straightforward and may actually be in my intellectual league. The fucked-up part of my brain smells some damage on her, and I'm worried about how that factors into me fancying her. My common associates are fucked up enough, and I don't want to buy any more drama, especially with a work acquaintance. Despite it all, it took me no tiny amount of courage to get to the point where I could try to make a new friend relatively cold. I'm kind of short on the courage, to which my extended transition will attest. Although I've started to change my schema of courage and fear from the monolithic, boys-don't-cry stuff I learned from my father, I still can't help but view myself as a coward. Ironically, I construe that as a feminine quality and look down on myself for it.

I hate that as a transwoman, I have a really weird set of gender biases, but I'm kidding myself if I say that I'd be any better off were I cisgendered. Also, I hate that sometimes gender is all that I can talk about. I need to be around other trannies and transfolk, but I think I fear being read as unworthy if I'm to enter any circle of my people. Susan Moses on her Talking Tranny podcast did a great piece on hierarchical bias recently, basically stating how the trappings and status of subculture that we take on influence how those groups view us and the validity of our membership and opinions (I probably could have phrased that better, but just Google her shit because she's intensely intelligent.) I fear that moment of walking into a group of transfolk and being deemed unworthy due to my low passability and the mix of whatever else my subconscious can pit against me. It's not a rational fear, but few are, and realizing its irrationality won't do anything to dispel it.

I have a lot that I want to unload via writing right now, but it's never easy for me to order my thoughts. I'm feeling distraught, and a little big of that vertigo I feel when I consider how big the totality of existence is relative to how small my own experience is. Still, I just experienced a moment: the conviction that I must work on my opus, the unexpressed dream whose beauty drives me forward. My dream is a video game that summarizes everything I love about video games. I lack the literary and programming ability to bring it to fruition right now, but learning in submission to something greater than myself is breathtaking. It lets me understand the essence of art a little more: that which I see unrealized is truly brilliant, and it is me who will fail it if whatever I produce is garbage, not the other way around.

Fiction

I'm sick of writing this. I need to write fiction. Whatever talent I have in stringing words together feels like it means nothing when I'm sending it into the void like this. It's kind of freeing writing for an audience with an uncollapsed waveform, but this is masturbatory, and I'm currently trying to abstain from onanism. Not out of any puritanical prejudice, but because it feeds my disease and spins the wheel of my addiction. Maybe I'm afraid that I'll get addicted to confessing to no one. But I can't stop writing, and I'm not at a place where I can create fiction again.

I really don't want to say this, but I may have to become a writer. Making games is well and good, but I haven't programmed a line since I declared my intent, electing instead to write the pamphlet of woe and deconstruction presented here. Fiction is my chosen medium, I feel, and even though this ain't that, I can hear it calling me. Even though my stories seem personally unsatisfactory.

Whenever I'm in a rut in my prolonged transition, as I feel to be right now, I end up consuming a lot of writing, fiction or non, by other TG people (mostly women.) I love it because, through the cypher of a somewhat familiar character, I don't feel as alone and my experience not as weird. And yet I cringe when reading most all TG-penned fiction concerning our plight, because the freshness of the scars always leaves an imprint of our pain visible from the moon. Half of it is blatant wish-fulfillment, most prominently any story featuring magical/technological transformation from sex to sex. A third of it, the not-so blatant wish fulfillment, the straw men masquerading as nemeses, the constant self-pity, the cliché characters.

And so much centered on high school, the unforgotten battleground of myself and my people, the place where many of us nearly died (myself included.) That I can understand all too well, as even at a small remove from my adolescence, I find that I would move heaven and earth to reenter prepuberty with the knowledge I have now.

The remaining sixth is what I keep coming back for. I'm overly critical, even with the knowledge that anything I wrote now would by necessity deal with transition, and assuredly suffer from the same laundry list of problems that plague everything I have read (save for, I should note, a single work penned by a XX woman.) There's a problem of selection here, as my range is limited to include a couple books and a crapload of webcomics, most of which suffer the aforementioned flaws anyway.

I feel that I just need a strategy for writing a story, a single one, and it will ... do what? I don't know. I'm really quick to seek peace in methods that don't involve doing scary things and altering my life. I distrust my impulse to write, but I can't stop writing. Even if it's sloppy and sounds bad and makes little sense to anyone but me, the sense of achievement earned by creating something of permanence is irresistable.

Jumble

I can't stop writing. I feel like that should be good, but I'm not sure. Most inexplicable impulses I have are suspect to me; I wonder if they're part of my alcoholic process. Writing's one of the weird things in my life. At some of the times I had the most to write about, I couldn't write at all, and yet in drawn-out months like this one, the words itch at my fingertips to be digitized, collected, and thrown up on my little online diary. I'm not sure why I do the last part. No one reads it that I know of (I'm pretty sure it's not linked to or from anywhere.) I think it's so I can have a semi-permanent record of my feelings, my writing, my progression as a person.

If someone were to ask me why I write, which I'm pretty sure has never happened, I've already got the line and inflection memorized. "Well, it's cheaper than therapy." Despite the fact that my HMO covers all but co-pay on therapeutic visits, there is a certain truth to such a flip answer. I write because I want to reveal my feelings. If I had someone I felt I could unburden my entire self onto, I don't know that I would need to write, at least not in the manner in which I am now. It would probably be more satisfying and constructive. I have a couple people in my life who I think would listen to what I need to say without waiting for their turn to talk. But whenever I search for the words with someone else in the room, they just seem to disappear.

The fantastic thing about the written word is that, were I to stop writing right here and come back fifteen years later, you'd still perceive this as the same sentence. I'm horrible at dealing with time constraints, and yet whenever I write my thoughts like this they come pouring out nearly too quickly for me to put them down. But when spoken, the words need a beat, and I can't revise them or keep myself from tripping over my own tongue. And sometimes the fear of being misinterpreted or just weird keeps me from saying what I want/need to say.

I felt that high school feeling today. I read the myspace of your_an_ass. She's this powerfully beautiful t-girl who hangs around the imageboards. I wanted to wince, to look away when I saw it. I felt this huge thing just crushing me. I felt supremely ugly and fat and awful. There's this grief that I get, when I fear I'm just too late to pass without surgery. This time I didn't look away from it, I stared right at it. That feeling and her face. God, I've spent so much time reassuring myself that I can't change the past and there's no point to regretting it, but this I can't help but feel awful about.

I've done many subtle and not so subtle self destructive things in my life. Driving, drugs, eating. A lot of that came from my addiction, and some from the inextricable depression. But for the first time in my life, I wanted to cut myself, to bring the pain fresh and bloody to the surface. I never got the idea behind it before, but I do now. I want to swing my eating disorder from obesity to anorexia. Lose all the muscle and fat and health and sanity to get that much closer to beautiful. It's just so powerful, so big, and I'm so small before it.

In going through the whole Marijuana Anonymous model, I've had to try humbling myself before what I for lack of more concise words call God. My Higher Power. I'm an atheist by birth and experience, but the only method I can see to survive is to give up to something bigger than me, something infinite. It's enough to get me through the day without smoking, but I don't know if I feel that I can't or won't ask God to help me with this. I don't have the Judeo-Christian baggage about a trans- or homophobic god, although I have my own guilt. I have the notion that what I want and what I need are mutually exclusive. I think it's kind of a Calvinist parenting thing.

It's just, this anguish just won't go away. I realize that nearly every barrier to my transition is in my head if I'm of the proper mindset. But this is too much, too much for me. Maybe I can overcome it, but I can't. I fear going mad in the dark, like many of my sisters. I have no one to talk about this with, so I don't. Part of me wants to delete everything I am writing, have written, because it's the same self-pitying twaddle that tires me out when written by others. I made a point of staring straight at myself while I looked at her face, because I wanted to be in the moment and feel that weird, horrible exanimate feeling of having my soul separate from my body. Is it the hormones, or lack thereof? This feeling wasn't so strong when I had 2.5mg Premarin bid flowing through my veins. Is it the lack of exposure? The girl on the web, she talked about not judging herself by how she looked. But I'm so far from that. It's like I can't even do that until I have that one day where I just feel good and beautiful and free. Like that's the day that I let go of my pain, and not the other way around. Like there's some hole in me, beyond the gaping dopamine pit in my stomach where the drugs and food go. My experience of being TG is like walking around every day with that hole getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and eventually some day down the line I'm just the hole. That omnipresent feeling, the reason we supposedly believe we're going to die young: someday, left untreated, we just stop existing, and that part of ourselves devoted to being alive stops existing too.

I don't want to feel this way. What's changed, though, is that now I'm afraid of not feeling this way, because it resembles oblivion too closely. I can't bury it under something else, but I have no idea how to address the pain's source. The anorexia thing sounds really good, and that's frightening, but I'm just ready to sacrifice anything to approach my own facsimile of perfection.

Unprotected Sleep

My sister always wants me to write. I never really try explaining to her that I can't. I have experiences and people that I can barely keep in my head, but I can't take that first step. When I'm high, I can't write, because the words just don't flow like they do otherwise; they jumble, they scramble somewhere between the brain and the page. I want to say something that sounds introspective. "Could I not write because I smoked, or did I smoke so that I couldn't write?" Bullshit, but bullshit that looks good.

I've been let loose from a claustrophobic studio cell into a huge, beautiful one-bedroom, and I just feel alone. Being alone in a space like this feels so unfamiliar. Intensely empty. Frightening. I don't many have friends and they feel more like a support group right now than people who I share a mutual world with. I can't have friends until the real me exists, in all my vulnerability, and somehow no matter how I construct that possible reality it scares my shit right up into my stomach. I don't have the tools to make friends. My parents didn't pass them down to me and I didn't come out of my hole enough to make my own. My mortality is finally clear to me and it frightens me into action, but I don't feel there's anyone with whom I can discuss my matters of import or personal crises without just dropping my shit on his/her doorstep.

Being TG is a really weird experience. Success, at least under the definition I understand,
involves becoming invisible. The only people you can recognize who haven't made themselves truly plain to the world are those in transition. The internet is full of those who I term my people, but the internet is to me a source of reference only. Noone's real online; just archetype and invective and idealized self-image. That the layers of deception surrounding many transfolk (myself included) are only shed in a place predicated on the falsehood of identity is an irony I can't really participate in.

When I take my primary identity as being trans, I feel rotten. Not unlike a liar, but more akin to those whose personalities lie by virtue of whatever dominates their face to the world. Super macho man, the politically over-aware, the goth, et al. And I feel a different unease when I'm able to reveal all but my crossing gender; the difficult schoolyard feeling, the unthought taunt that's still heard. The elegant solution to both of these problems is obvious and fast approaching, but I hesitate on the first step. After which it can only get easier and easier.

I can't write fiction because I'm too caught up in writing my own personal story; it will come to dominate any tale I weave, and I'm afraid of putting too much of myself into my work. When I read something that channels the author's life to ill effect, I kind of hate the writer for it, for rubbing their existence in my face. And when the inseparability of artist and art is executed properly, I feel that beautiful heartbreak that wrings tears out of some crevasse in my center. I don't know if I fear fucking it up more than getting it right. Even as I write this now, I can't tell if it's grating tedium or something pure. I usually can't read my own work, and when I do, some part of my can't make sense of it. Leads to lots of spelling errors, but the stories themselves always feel unfinished because I have no clue what to do with them once the rough draft is done.

So many stories I've read have followed in the Joseph Campbell heroic tradition. The writer keeps giving the hero obstacle after obstacle until s/he finally goes into the underworld. That moment of greatest despair, after which comes apotheosis, the realization of the fragmented godhood that the hero has carried within him/herself since before birth. When an alcoholic does it, it's called a moment of clarity. It's the signal for the story to start turning around, for the return from death.

I started writing this because I had an epiphany. After my acid trip down , I woke up dead. Some part of me turned off to survive my grief, to cope with my intense fear of myself, and in deference to my mother for housing me in my convalescence. I vowed to snuff out that part of myself that transgressed gender, the part of me that contained my heart. I couldn't really feel the absence because what was missing was my ability to feel. And then one day I made a simple decision and it was just there again and it hadn't left at all.

And that's where my words fail me. It's so odd because I can only talk in vague terms, not as before to skirt the issue, but because it's how I feel: unformed, immature, but some small part of me is constructed of something of ageless beauty which I can't pronounce. Being disconnected from that flicker at the heart of myself just seems so awful, even if I can only truly appreciate the horror of it in retrospect. I've been grappling with other problems (namely, being an alcoholic and dealing with the results of childhood abuse) and yet this seems so simply massive. The problem is that being in the middle of a transition forces you to oppositionally define yourself by your gender to retain your identity, just like being in the closet forces you to define yourself by your sexual preference, moreso even than the out and proud.

Luckily, my world is changing. My disease, the mota blanket I've wrapped my self in, its time is mercifully coming to a close. With it some of my fear falls away, and the world is revealed for what it is. Maybe I'll start writing again. We'll see.