The shit hits the fan (Update part 1)

Holy fuck balls I don't know where to begin.

I'm going to try to sum things up as best I can. If I got into detail this post would go on forever.

As you may recall my wife went up to her parents after I pissed her off. While she was up there I fell into an even deeper depression that I was already in. Upon her return we had a talk and we decided that I needed to go off on my own (but not too far!) to find myself. We are like two pees in a pod, best friends forever; but my transitioning is driving us both nanners. So this made sense to me and I began looking for a way to make things work.

At first I thought that if I found a room mate I could live out in town. I know a friend who is also looking to move out of his apartment and I figured if we pooled our resources this might work. I went so far as to do some preliminary apartment hunting. (I found this cute place in Hillcrest right in the middle of everything that I would kill to move into.) However, upon further review of my finances it became painfully apparent to me that unless I was willing to make some MAJOR sacrifices this just wasn’t going to work financially.

This made me a sad.

It wasn’t that good a plan anyway because then I still wouldn’t be able to save money for transition, and and as I've just hit the “transition or die” phase of my life that's not acceptable. After wracking my brain the only other thing I could think of would be for my wife to move out until February when she completes school and gets a job. Then I would rent out a room which I would use to help finance my transition. Then after my wife was financially stable I would sign over the mortgage to her and move out on my own with a room mate so that I can save money for transition.

This plan sucked balls but at the time neither of us could think of a better idea. I don't really know anyone plus I'm trans/whatever so that makes things even harder.  She agreed to this, but as you can imagine, while all this was going on we had reached critical drama levels. We seemed to have things worked out and I started to feel a little hopeful. Transition is all I think about now. It's something that I'm willing to give everything up for. That must sound batshit insane to non-trans people, but what they don't understand is that it really can be a matter of life or death.

Once I thought I had finally made things work my wife started changing stuff around and she threw a monkey wrench into the gears of my plan. (Not that she was trying to do so, this is an extremity complicated situation.) This was three nights ago, so on the 17^th. We argued and I began to, for lack of a better term, freak the fuck out. I'm trapped in limbo, unable to transition when I can no longer wait. Seriously, I even considered defaulting on my loan for the mortgage and destroying my credit just so I could get an apartment to save money. (Turns out my wife's name is on the mortgage too so that wasn’t going to happen.)

As the night went on my depression became more and more profound. I couldn’t think of a way out and I was completely overwhelmed with hopelessness. I drew up and hot bath, got an old box cutter and I began cutting.

I used to do this in high school and at various points in my life when I've felt that all hope was lost. It's a very unhealthy and self destructive behavior, and I'm embarrassed that it's all I had to fall back on. At the time I was not in my right mind. I cut myself all over my body and when my wounds stopped leaking blood into the water I would scrub them so they would reopen. I kept trying to cut deeper, but I couldn’t bring myself to open a vein to end it all. At one point I finally came to my senses and I crawled out of the tub and tried to ask my wife for help. She was sleeping and when I tried to wake her up, blood trickling down my body from multiple incisions, she mumbled at me and told me to go to sleep. (She didn’t look at me and it would not be until the next day that I would learn that she had taken two ambian before going to bed, so no wonder I couldn’t get her attention.  At the time however I was very hurt.)

I then drove myself to the VA hospital ER and attempted to voluntary commit myself to the psychiatric ward as I was damn near suicidal. However, all the beds were full so they kept me there in the ER and observed me over night. I cried for hours and at some point I drifted to sleep for a short time. When they woke my up as they needed to move be to another room there was a huge wet spot around my head.

In the other room I could not sleep and finally my wife showed up. (By then it was like 0900.) We talked and worked some stuff out. They still didn’t have a bed open for me and I decided to go home rather than staying at the hospital. I was hospitalized for my depression once before for a three week period and I was miserable the entire time.

We finally got out of there at noon and I went home, got stuff cleaned up and called my gender therapist, who was able to see me on short notice. As always she helped me to put things into perspective and I'm going to be attending some sort of program that should help me deal with these kinds of situations in a healthy way. (DBT)

So, it's been rough. My body, especially my arms, are covered in scabs and I'm going to have to wear long sleeves for a while. Up until now I don't think my wife realized just how desperate I am to transition. I think she does now. This has also shown me that I need lots of outside support to get through this. For a shy, introvert like me that's going to be hard, but I have to do it.

More has happened since then, but I'll put it in a separate post to keep things organized and to keep my individual posts from getting too long.

A final note – if you are feeling hopeless and it seems like there's no other possible way out, please reach out to someone and get help. A few days ago I was desperately trying to work up the resolve to open up my veins so that I would bleed out into the tub, but now here I am typing up this post in a much better state of mind. I'm getting the help I need and there's always hope, no matter how bad it might seem at the moment. 

Paige

Lot's of stuff

I haven’t posted in a while. It's not because I didn’t want to, it's because I had a lot of important stuff to work through and I wanted to make sure my head was clear before I did. This past week has been one of great emotional and mental turmoil, culminating with my visit with the gender therapist on Monday. Things have gotten better since then so I'm back.

It's now been 14 days since I started estrogen and just two since I started spiro. Since I first realized that I was bigender I have been very dysphoric about my body. Because it's not a woman’s body. So I set out to make my body as female as possible to reflect how I feel inside. Because I'm a woman. Who is sometimes a man also.

What's funny is that I knew it the whole time but I just wasn’t able to admit it to myself. There was nothing more that I wanted than to appear as a female; why couldn't I see this coming? I think it was the fear of dealing with the whole, “coming out” thing. It wont be much longer now before I have to, and the prospect scares the shit out of me.

I always thought to myself, “If I just make myself look like a woman then I'll finally feel right.” Of course, that means no longer looking male. Why did this not compute? It's now obvious that I am essentially a (very nerdy and tomboyish) woman trapped in the body of an typical male nerd.

My wife’s family may reject me. My old friends may reject me. The vast majority of my family will probably reject me. When I walk down the street people will probably cuss at me out of their car windows. They might jump out and beat me to death too. I'm going to have to start taking mace with me on my nightly walks soon. My coworkers will probably shun me.

If it turns out that my boss is prejudiced she might look for reasons to fire me just because of my gender presentation. Eventually my wife might not be able to accept me as her husband anymore and reject me. In the mean time she will be interrogated by her friends and family about me, and when we are together people will think we are lesbians and she will be discriminated against because of me.

And people think this is a lifestyle! Who the fuck would want to make themselves miserable like this???

So I've come to accept that this is the way I am and I have to do what I have to do, so that's good at least. One thing that is unchanged is that I still identify as bigender. I switched at least four times today. However, I should have been a female when I was born. Now I'm going to have to try and correct that.

Shit. I'm so excited and scared. Please wish me luck.

Page Abendroth

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