On loving to be alone

I thought I would write while I cool off from my walk before I hop in the shower.

I like to walk for exercise. I walk as fast as I possibly can without breaking out into a jog for about an hour each night. It's the only form of exercise I've ever actually enjoyed enough to be able to stick with it, so I figure – go with what works.

It rained today and everything thing was fresh, wet and clean. I loved the way the lights from the houses, passing cars and streetlights reflected in the puddles everywhere. The dirt and smog in the air was washed away and I could actually smell the grass and leaves.  I like to think that they smell like the color green.  The world was so soaked that everything I heard SOUNDED wet, if that makes sense.

I don't know how to explain how I felt. I kind of went off into a little trance and things seemed clear to me. My mind is such a muddled mess sometimes, but the place I went to was quiet and there was nothing there. It was just empty and I was able to get some good thinking done. It made me happy.

I was reading today about being alone, and how it's good to be alone. People are afraid of being alone but why? I guess there's different reasons. One one hand we are egotistical. We want to be acknowledged by other people. We want them to see the things we do and approve of them. We want to see other people do things that we disapprove of so that we can judge them, further feeding our ego. I think that we feed off each others misery, and we are so blind to how unhappy we are that we don't realize it.

On the other hand we want to be with other people because we want to be loved. Everyone needs love. What is love though? I love my wife, but if I saw her laughing and flirting with another man I would become angry and jealous. But why? If I love her so much, why would I get angry that she was having a pleasurable experience? Don't I want her to be happy?

And that's a part of the problem with love, at least the sort of love that I've been taught about. I hold my wife in my arms and we say to each other, “You are mine, I am yours.” But is love possessive? Is it right to make someone your emotional property? If you think someone belongs to you then it's no wonder that you get upset if it behaves in a way that you don't like.

Love is not a toaster! One day the toaster starts burning your bread. WTF toaster! All this time you've been making my toast just the way I like it and now you burn it every time. You can take the toaster in for repairs, but when a person changes you can't take them into the shop. Otherwise I think my wife would have taken me in from a complete overhaul a long time ago.

I guess what I'm trying to get at in my typical cryptic fashion is that to truly love other people, maybe you need to also be able to love being alone. Then, if you love being alone, you can love others with out any fear, anger, jealousy, envy, or any of those other hangups that doom so many “relationships” to failure. Love is freedom and freedom is love.

Sorry, no bigender content, but maybe next time I'll write about my secret longing to be a housewife.

Quick Change Artist

This morning I was flipping through genders so fast it was almost overwhelming. Bam! Male. Bam! Female. Bam! Gay male. Bam! Mousy female. Bam! Rocker chick. It was exhilarating and my whole body was tingling with energy. Eventually it slowed down and I got really tired. My gender has been extra fluid lately, but I hadn’t experienced anything quite like this morning since I first identified as bigender.

For some reason my doctor didn’t put me on spiro, which pisses me off because he said he was going to. Now I have to wait till next Tuesday to see another doctor who may or may not prescribe it for me. I'm so damn sick of waiting. If they don't give it to me the first thing I'm doing when I get home is I'm ordering it from the internet. I'm trying so hard to do this the right way, but it's one issue after the other.

I'm still paying out of pocket for my therapist as the VA has completely failed me. I was actually supposed to call them today to fire my shrink and complain, but I forgot. I'll have to put that on my to do list for Monday. (There, just put it in Google calendar. “Fire Shrink, 0900.”

Is it normal that my fingers are tingly?

Things are doing ok otherwise, but the fact that this thread has been left dangling regarding my medication is bothering the fuck out of me and it's hard to think about anything else. I think I'm taking an extra long walk tonight to hopefully clear my head.

On the social front, or lack thereof, I was looking up http://www.meetup.com/cities/us/ca/san_diego/ to maybe see if there's a group or club or something I could join to try and meet new people and not a single one of them appealed to me. Am I so weird that I can't find anyone with my same interests? Fuck, if it wasn’t for the internet I'd have no fucking contact with the outside world what-so-ever. I'll keep trying. What's funny is that before Page I didn’t have this burning need to socialize and connect with other people. Now I just want to go out and fucking do something.

This is officially my most profanity-laden blog post ever. Hurray!

I'm obviously wearing my angry pants tonight. Time to go decompress.

Page

A very special, sleepy update (Plus HRT!)

I am very sleepy, so this should make for an interesting status update, and by interesting I mean rambling and incoherent.  Yay!

The big news is that after all this time I finally started on hormones today! I got the injection-type as I wanted them to be as safe and quick acting as possible. My doc said he was going to prescribe me sprio but for some reason it wasn’t on the script, so I need to call the clinic tomorrow.

So far no breasts yet! I'll check and see if they've grown in by tomorrow. =P

But seriously, I think that my body will take to hrt well. That being said I am keeping my expatiation’s low. I am 32 after all, so the changes should be relatively minor. It will bring me closer to me goal of appearing androgynous in “neutral” mode, and by all accounts from the fine lady’s at bigender.net it should help with my dysphoria, which is going to be a huge deal for me. I am now official beginning phase two of my diabolical, master plan. My next step is to get the laser resurfacing treatment done to my face. More on that as the situation develops.

Speaking of my dysphoria, I've been handling it pretty well lately. Life in general has been pretty good, mood-wise. Every day I try to stay mindful as much as I can remember too, and it's making a huge difference in how much my social phobia effects me. (As in, I'm doing wonderful.) Like a manta I tell myself over and over again, “I will not judge myself and I will not judge anyone else.” I keep slipping up, like someone will annoy me for some silly reason, but then I am able to catch myself and I instead try to love that person as much as I can manage. I've also learned to finally except and love myself for who I am. Now that I can love myself it's so much easier to love other people. Just a month ago I never could have imagine that I would say something like that.

When I am awake I like to think that I am outside of myself, like my conscious is floating above my head like a little silver cloud. While the “small I” is walking around doing whatever, the part of me that is free observes the world and tries to see the true, empty nature of the world. That probably sounds weird. Maybe I shouldn’t try to write about the heavy stuff when I'm so tired.

Books! I finished Pilgrims to Openness: Direct Realization Tantra in Everyday Life which was good, although I didn’t like how the author kept introducing new terms without explaining them. What made it worse was that she would use a regular word of phrase and then assign some alternate meaning to it, and she left it up to the reader to figure out what she was getting at.

While I wait for my physical books to arrive in the mail I've begun reading Love, Freedom, and Aloneness: A New Vision of Relating by my man Osho on my kindle. That wonderful, bearded guru is amazing and so far I've loved everything I've read by him. (And I've learned so much.) The book is all about love, and thus far, he talks about how wrong we've got it. I'm to sleepy to give this topic justice so I'll save it for another time. It's really cool, life altering stuff though. (Huh, lot's of life altering stuff/revelations lately. Neat!)

Which (somehow) brings me to sleep, or lack thereof. (I knew this was going to be a rambling entry.) Why the fuck can't I sleep! I don't want to sleep but my mind and body is exhausted. Then when I am finally able to fall asleep I wake up at least an hour before I have to get up for work. I'm averaging four hours of “good” sleep per night and that shit's taking it's toll. My meditation book should be here in the next day or so and I'm reading that next. Maybe that will help.

That's enough for now. I'd say on a scale of 1-10, one being “I want to die” and 10 being a state of pure, uninterrupted bliss I'm at like a 4 ½, which is a far cry from where I was at when I started this little blog.

Cheers, and I hope you sleep sweet. (Godess knows I wish that I could.)

Pete and Page

Just checking in

 

Note - I actually wrote this yesterday afternoon.

So for the past few months I’ve been sleeping an average of four hours per night. I have no idea how I am still able to function but I am. Page hadn’t come out for almost a week and she didn’t want to go to bed yesterday evening. Finally I had to force “us” to. Then as usual I woke up at like 0400 and couldn’t fall back to sleep for more than 10 minutes at a time. 

This used to happen before due to my anxiety and Trezadone did the trick. (I still take it before I go to bed.) Maybe I need to increase the dosage or something. While in general these past few days I’ve felt better than I have in months about myself and the future there is still something obviously disturbing my mind, preventing me from sleeping soundly.

On a plus note despite my lack of sleep I feel pretty darn good, if not groggy. My mood continues to be better than it has been in a very long time as well. I have a couple social situations coming up, and I’m actually looking forward to them as opposed to worrying about them. So far, the self doubts that occasionally flair up are quickly brushed aside as I realize such thoughts to be the ridicules things that they are.

This weekend my wife and I are going to hang out with the in-laws and with a friend from online.  I’ll have a good opportunity to practice not judging myself or being afraid of other people judging me. I’m giving myself permission to feel uncomfortable at times and if things don’t work out and I become overwhelmed I will forgive myself and keep trying without feeling as though I’ve failed in any way.  Fuck you social phobia!


I've been feeling a bit dysphoric lately but not very bad.   Only five days until I begin HRT!  If there's something wrong with my lab results I think I'm going to start crying right there in the doctors office.  I guess it's time to make an appointment with my regular family practice doctor to let her know what's been going on with me.  Holy shit, am I going to need an obgyn? 


What an interesting life.

A quicky

I just got back from exercising and I'm smelly and icky.  I'm also too hot to hop into the shower yet and I want to write, so this is me maximizing my time. 

After like five days in guy mode (and a mixture of the two) I'm back in girl mode.  Right in time as my new tee shirts just arrived!  One's a Misfits shirt and the others a "Dracula" shirt, as in the old Dracula from 1931.  It's delightfully nerdy and death-rock.  Squeeeee!

Oh, yeah, and my complex spiritual evolution is going swimmingly.  Anyway, I just finished reading Introduction to Tantra: The Transformation of Desire.  Now I've just begun on Pilgrims to Openness: Direct Realization Tantra in Everyday Life.  On deck I have Modern Buddhism - The Path of Compassion and Wisdom Vol 1-3, Tantra: The Supreme Understanding and The Book of Secrets: 112 Meditations to Discover the Mystery Within.  

I've been reading The Book of Secrets in bits and pieces in it's online form.  Osho describes Tantra as a feminine practice as the counter to yoga, and he says that it's best practiced by those with a feminine and introverted temperament.  Lord Shiva is often depicted as being half man and woman.  Devi asks Shiva "What is your reality?" but really Devi is the female aspect of Shiva.  


Being bigendered it's easy to see why tantra appeals to me.  


There's so much I want to say, so many things that I've realized, but I still smell and my brain needs a break.  Oh, and I have new clothes to try on.  yay!  Another happy post.

Some small smidgen of enlightenment.

This morning when I woke up everything made sense. That might seem silly but that's how I feel. For weeks I've been searching for meaning and happiness and now I finally feel like I'm on the right path.
I believe that the potential for happiness is within all of us. When I say happiness I'm talking pure, cosmic, orgasmic joy. Most people will only experience such a feeling for fleeting moments at a time. I believe that through training and practice that one could experience this sensation all the time.

I've been trained and conditioned my entire to life to judge myself negatively. In turn I've learned to judge others the same. But why? When you judge someone you exert some sort of perceived control over them. I'm right and you are wrong. This is foolish. As long as someone is not hurting themselves or anyone else how can they be wrong in anything they do?

If I'm ever going to be happy I need to stop judging myself and giving other people permission to judge me. Instead of letting my mental conditioning dictate my feelings I'm going to do my best to remain mindful of what's going on around me so that I can identify the things that upset me and then dismiss them as the nonsensical thoughts that they are. I realize that this is going to take years of training, but it's something I know I can do and I've given myself permission to not be perfect.

My new philosophy is one of love. Instead of hating myself as I have for so long I'm going to love myself. In turn I'm going to love everyone else as best I can. I think that at the core of our being everyone is capable of pure love; it's just that some people have problems with their mind that prevent them from experiencing this. Be it through environmental conditioning or perhaps through a medical defect, some people are cruel and hurtful. I will do my best to love the part of those people that is capable of love and to forgive them for their hostility.

Throughout my life, nothing has ever made me happier than helping other people to be happy. That's exactly what I'm going to focus on doing utilizing the science of Tantra. I feel like the storm that's been raging in my heart, my desperate search for purpose, has come to an end. (At least this particular storm, as I'm sure there will be others.) So now I finally have a direction and a general idea of where I want to go. What a relief, and what a joyous feeling.
Mabey I'll even sleep tonight! =P

Pete/Page

And a poem

I started writing poetry again.  Uh, so far it's been really obvious how out of practice I am.  I finally wrote one that I'm happy with.  (So see?  A happy post!)


Poem # m3 = I am the Raven upon the back of the wolf -

I am The Raven upon the back of The Wolf.

When She is blind I can see
And I know that all is The Hunt
Four paws beat upon the ground
Frantic, rhythmic, incessant
as it should be

We seek
Satisfaction
Flesh and Knowledge

My Black Wings Spread
And I ascend

The lay of the land
and the wickedness of Man
His boarders mean nothing
We hunger
But at least that is something

Her Maw craves meat and lusts for blood
I await for absolution upon the back of the Wolf

I circle above the prey
I scream
I scream
I can't stop
Screaming

Help me
For I hunger as well

And then Her jaws collapse and silence his voice
Warm wet salt darkness
And she is complete

Again, I descend
To roost upon the dead.

I am the Raven upon the back of the Wolf

She hungers and I question

And never are we satisfied

Together and disconnected

Obscene love of The Flesh

Forever Hungry . . .

I am The Raven who Rides Upon the Back of The Wolf

My Eyes are Black as Night

And while she stalks you

I can't stop screaming

screaming

Your Name ~

Happy New Year

With all the commotion of the holidays I haven't had much time to post lately.  Suffice to say, it's been an "interesting" year.  If my blood work comes back normal I will begin HRT on the 17th of this month.  Obviously this will be the begining of a major change in my life, and I like the fact that I'm going to begin this journey at the start of the new year.

In regards to me gender orientation I still consider myself bigender.  Sometimes I lean hard towards going MTF, but I always come back to guy mode.  Lately I've been worried that once I start hormones I might slide all the way into that camp, but worrying is a lot of work and I'm going to do my best to just take it one day at a time from now on.

My dysphoria has been very bad lately and this is the year when things will finally start to happen to change my physical appear to better reflect how I feel inside.  As I mentioned hormones start on the 17th for one.  Secondly, I have a follow-up appointment with the dermatologist and I'm going to see if the VA will do the laser resurfacing that I'm going to get done for my face.  They proboboly won't, but if they can it will save me a ton on money so it dosen't hurt to try.  If they say that they won't, I already have a Dr. out in town who I would like to do it and I will call for a consultation that same day.

So that's where I stand today.  I'm sure it's going to be another "interesting" year.  Hopefully it will be one that brings me closer to finding inner peace, which is what I wish for everyone.

Love,

Page