An Ocean in my Soul

Hi,

I'm feeling rather moody today. Down in the dumps and all that. I was just reading the Rolling Stone article about the lead singer of Against Me coming out as transgender. https://imgur.com/a/hydSB I'm super happy for her and I also find it very encouraging to see such a high profile person coming out in public like this. At the same time, I'm envious because I want to transition too and I can't.

Maybe I should mention that I'm writing this in girl mode.

When I'm in girl mode I'm basically a transsexual. I experience the same soul-crushing gender dysphoria and all that, but if I was to fully transition I'd just end up being miserable because eventually I always go back into guy mode. I know I've said this before, but sometimes I wish guy mode would just go away. Thing is that when I go back to guy mode I won't feel this way at all. See the paradox there? It sucks.

I think that I'm going to have to put a lot of work into my appearance if I'm ever going to get over my dysphoria in girl mode. AND I'm going to have to come out of the closet. I need to be out to my family and out to everyone else I know. The fact that I'm keeping such an important part of my life hidden away like some sort of shameful secret is making things worse. I'm NOT ashamed to be who I am and I don't want to live this way any more.

Explaining what it is to be bigender is rather complicated. For example, if I had to pick between one gender or the other I'd pick female in a heart beat. That's because I'm in female mode. Whenever I flip back to guy mode I'll prefer to be male. It's such a dramatic change in how I think, yet still I'm the same person and I like the same things for the most part.

I've decided to keep a detailed spread sheet in order to track when I flip back and forth, how it effects my mood, what makes me feel better and so on. This way I can at least be proactive and find a way to deal with this the best as I can. I have a pretty good idea already, but there may be little factors that are playing into it that I haven’t noticed.

I'm going to listed to “The Ocean” for about the 50^th time today and then I'll get right on that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvWeP18RpmM

“There is an ocean in my soul where the waters do not curve.”

Paige

Nobody knows

Where it comes and where it does, errr and all that jazz. This should be a pretty quick update. Yesterday I thought I had everything figured out and now I'm not so sure. In a nut shell, life is. . . complicated at the moment.

There's nothing I can do about that at the present moment, (my wife comes back from her parents in two days time ) but alas this weighs heavily upon my mind. Uh, yeah. Mostly what I think about all the time is -

A. - My body is all wrong and I hate it.

B. - I've married to the perfect woman for me but then I changed in a way that I couldn’t control and now I've gone and ruined everything, and I'm really scared regarding the ultimate outcome.

So - NOT FUCKING HEALTHY.

Today I've been thinking about purification. Not just of my body but of my mind and if it exists my spirit. Turning everything off, eating only simple, unseasoned food and foregoing my beloved energy drinks for water. I'm very sick in my mind right now and I've been that way for a while. Due to my mental sickness my body suffers as well. Today I woke up feeling great, but then at midday I suddenly became violently ill. I don’t have the flu, food poisoning and I was not hung over. I know what's wrong however. You become ill like that when your body is trying to desperately expel poisons from your system in order to keep you alive. I have inundated my body with toxins both mental and physical and I'm overwhelmed.

These past couple weeks as I've been home recovering from my not very effective laser resurfacing I've been poisoning myself with unhealthy self destructive thoughts, lack of exercise/fresh air, sleep deprivation, disgusting processed food as well as chemical stimulants. I don't have a good reason why, other than in the past this is how I've dealt with pain and mental anguish.

It's killing me and it has to stop right now. I've become so sick that I can't properly take care of myself. If you can't tale care of yourself you can't take care of anyone else. My wife needs me to take care of her, but I am a fucking wreck. This is a dilemma.

Being trans I must transition. I have no choice lest I go insane. It's now obvious to me that I'm never going to be happy unless I change. I now know what I have to do, but that's the easy part. Changing the intrinsic nature of a person, even yourself; that's something else. Everything must change, and we all know how humans love change.

Good! No, Crap! Uh, Good Again!

This was an interesting day.  Sick of the VA dicking me around I went ahead and scheduled an appointment with the gender therapist myself.  This will be tonight at 2030.  After I got her email this morning and confirmed the appointment I was ecstatic.  Yay!  Things are finally moving forward!

Then I left a nasty-gram at the patient advocate office as they have not been at all helpful and they still hadn't faxed me my letter authorizing funding nor have the been returning my calls.  I just figured that I'd pay out of pocket for tonight's appointment and that the letter should arrive in the mail before my next.

I guess my message lit a fire under the patient advocate's ass, because some hours latter one of the head honchos who works in admin came downstairs to my office with my fax!

"Uh, hay.  I found this sitting in the fax in-box with no cover-slip on it.  I know that it's confidential medical information so I brought it down to you right away."

"Hay thanks Greg!"  (Names changed of course.)

"No problem Jargo.  Take care ok?"  And off he went.  He had put a cover sheet on the fax, so I took it off to look at the funding request.  NAME - JARGO ABENDROTH (not my real name but I like it!) DIAGNOSIS - GENDER IDENTITY DISORDER.  There was all kinds of highly sensitive personal information on there and SUPER VISIBLE OMG LOOK AT THIS WEIRDO.  So whoever got the fax now knows all about me, "Greg" knows, and anyone else who happened to wander in to see if they got a fax knows.  And you know how rumors can spread in a small office environment.

I fell off cloud nine back onto earth completely horrified.  I didn't know what to do.  I was shaking and afraid to leave the office.  It was lunch time so I got some chow and gave myself time to work things out in my mind.  So my grand plan is -

If one person says anything about this to me I'm coming out at work.  Fuck it.

I'm sick of being ashamed of who I am.  I feel like my life has been out of control and I'm fed up.  It was supposed to be my decision when I came out, and in fact there's only one person who I work with that I ever planned on telling, and it was not going to be until I was ready.  That's been taken away from me and I'm pissed off.

I'm always afraid of what other people will think of me, of being judged.  That's going to stop right now.  I might just come out anyway.  The Department of Defense is an equal opportunity employer after all.  If I'm discriminated against or harasser I just need to go to HR to get their ass fired, and if that doesn't work I'll sue like crazy.

So what I think I'll do is take is slow, asses the situation over the next week and then make my decision after I've had time to mull this over.  (Unless someone say's anything, then it's "come out as queer time.")  I refuse to be a victim and this situation will only make me stronger.  Now I need to exercise and get cleaned up before my appointment.  RAR.

Nightmare

I've just awoken from a horrible nightmare.

In it I was younger and still living with my parents, sisters and step-brother back home in Chicago.  Apparently I was out to them and I dressed up at home.  (I believe that I was starting on HRT, but the details are pretty fuzzy.)  It was my birthday and we were going out to a  restaurant that I liked for dinner.

I guess that I was presenting as a female more and more when I went out, and that plan was that I would be female at the restaurant.  With my girl cloths in my back pack  I rode to the restaurant on my mountain bike so I could get there early to get dressed up in the bathroom.  I felt happy and confident in my presentation, and I remember chatting with the waitresses and cracking jokes with them while I waited for my family.

Then my immediate family showed up.  As well as some of my other relatives.  I was not out to them and my feeling of happiness and contentment abruptly turned to shame and anger.  My Grandparents, whom I love(d) dearly and who had a huge roll in my upbringing walked in, saw me, and then turned around and walked out without saying a word.

I asked my Mom, "What were you thinking?  How could you do this to me?" but she didn't seem to care how I felt.  My parents insisted that I didn't leave as it was my "party" and other gusts would be arriving (which was news to me) so I couldn't leave.  I quickly changed back into my guy cloths and sat in a corner while everyone ignored me and had a lot of fun.

Quick background on my Grandparents; they were the most wonderful people I ever knew, but especially my Grandfather.  My Dad was MIA for most of my childhood and for many years my Mom, little sisters and I lived with my grandparents.  My Grandpa was the sweetest, kindest man I've ever known and as one of my cousins said to me during his funeral, "he was the only positive male role-model I've ever had".

They, like most of my family on my Mom's side, were devout Roman Catholics.  I feel confidant that their response in my dream to seeing me dressed up like a girl would have been the same if it were real life.  No matter how much they loved me up to that point and I loved them, it would have changed the way they felt about me forever.  I don't think they would have hated me, but I'm sure they would have been disappointed in what they would have assumed was a "choice" and our relationship would have been poisoned. 

I was taking a nap and my wife woke me up while I was at a point in the dream where I was heading back home alone, sobbing to myself.  While the nightmare is over, it's opened my eyes to a new kind of terror that I'm going to have to face in my real life.

I've always been a big supporter of GLBT rights since I was in high school.  I hate it when ANYONE is being treated unfairly.  I've always been enraged when reading about the discrimination that GLBT people face and the violence that is inflicted upon so many of them just because they are being who they are.  (Same goes for skin color, religion, ect.)

I've been out to myself for a few months or so now, but about half and hour ago a nightmare made me realize that I have a lot more to be afraid of then the prospect of my wife leaving me, which has been my greatest concern up to this point.  I have to be afraid of other people who will hate me just for being myself, people who could be moved to actual physical violence against me for nothing I've done to them.

Now I realize that each time I come out to someone who I've known in the past or present they might suddenly hate me, just because I'm different.  I've always hated discrimination, but I was a white hetro male who grew up in a nice part of town so it was as an outsider looking in.  Now I find myself on the other side, and I'm suddenly feeling scared and alone.