Estrogen and Emotions (Anger/Sadness)

Today I thought I'd write a little about some of the ways that HRT has effected my emotions thus far. I've only on estrogen for four months, so maybe things will change down the road and of course your experience on HRT might be totally different than mine.

The biggest change has been how I process anger and sadness. Before estrogen when I'd get upset about something I'd get pissed off. Now instead of getting pissed off I cry. I mean, I fucking cry rivers. Uh, at least every other day in fact. I mean, this is a very difficult time in my life and I have some good things to cry about I think, but wow.

My gender therapist told me that I was going to be crying a lot and holy shit was she right. The weird thing is that going from T to E, crying instead of getting angry now just seems like the natural thing for me to do, depending on what gender I am at the moment. Here's a good example that happened today -

I got out of work and I had to head strait to my therapists office to attend a DBT group. Instead of getting on the freeway I needed to, I went into auto pilot and started driving to my house! When I realized what the hell I was doing I was already at a point where the only thing I could do was to head towards home and then take the route that I normally take to her office if I'm leaving from my house.

I HATE being late. (The Navy beat that into me pretty well.) So I arrived just a few minuets late, yet my stress levels were climbing. So far I have hated my DBT classes and today was no exception. I sit on my ass for eight hours at work and then I have go to the meetings where I have to sit on my ass for another two and a half hours. About 30 minuets into these things my butt starts to hurt and I want to fucking get up and do something constructive.

It takes forever to go over a simple concept and we move at a snails pace through the lesson plan. I just want to get the fuck up and leave. I have shit to do and I feel like I'm wasting my time there. Every thing we go over I already know for the most part and the skills we are learning are ones I already know.

Anyway, the fact that this is not working for me makes me really sad as I had high hopes for DBT. So I sit there for two and a half hours, feeling miserable. There was a bunch of talk about the term, “Man up” for some reason, (act like a man) which bothered me because it enforces the gender binary. Oh, and I spoke up for myself and asked for the facilitator to call me Paige for now on, which was good, but she replied, “yes ma’am” which fucked me up because I was in male mode at the time. Yes, bigender is complicated.

All these things were making me feel worse and worse about myself and my situation. I toughed it out until the end and then I went and sat in my car for an hour and a half. Why? Because during our session on Monday my therapist told me that she wouldn't be in next week and that she wanted to see me one more time before then, so we scheduled an appointment at 1830. I sat in my car and ate my crappy fast food sandwich until it was time to be seen.

I went back inside, waited half and hour past my appointment time and then I texted her asking what the hell was up. She called and told me that we were scheduled for NEXT Thursday, not today. I swear that she told me it was going to be for today, but quite frankly, ever since I started E I've been even more scatterbrained than I normally am, so she's most likely correct.

She tried to say some nice stuff to me but I had to hang up on her because I had started to cry again. I bolted out of the building and hid in my car for bit while I pulled myself together.

Wow, that was a long tirade but here's the thing – When I was on testosterone all of these little things would have compounded until I'd have gotten extremity pissed off and I would have brooded about them for a while. Then when I was tired of being pissed I would just stop and forget about it. However, every now and then that memory might have resurfaced and I would have gotten angry again and felt the same level of anger I had previously experienced when it actually happened to me.

On estrogen, I get sad instead. It's confusing to me when I'm in guy mode but in female mode it feels perfectly natural. By the time I was leaving my therapists office I had flipped back into female mode and I was chocking back tears. I started driving away, and all of the sudden, (I had no control over this) I shouted, “this is fucking bullshit!” at the top of my lungs and I punched the steering wheel. Urges to cry – gone. I was pissed and I had flipped back to male mode.

So regarding my experience with estrogen as a bigender MAAB person, hormones have had a huge impact on my emotions, but what gender I am seems to have a significant effect as well. Ha, I was originally going to go over some other emotional stuff but this entry is long enough and quite frankly I'm sleepy.

So goodnight! May you dream the dreams that you dare not share.

Paige

On realizing that I’ve always been Bigender

Before I get going, I just wanted to mention how happy I am that President Obama came out of the closet (heh) in support of same sex marriage yesterday. He’s the first US President to do so, and it’s worth noting that every President who has championed a civil rights cause has had civil rights legislation passed during his term in office. Here’s hoping for another four years.

OK, I just wanted to get that out of the way. 

On Monday I saw my wonderful gender therapist and we were talking about my long battle with depression and social anxiety. She got around to asking me if identifying as bigender has changed how I look at it.  At first I thought that she was just asking about how it’s affected my mood since I first began to identify as bigender about a year ago, and I asked her to clarify what she meant. 

We got to talking and she helped me to realize that I’ve always been bigender, and that throughout my life it’s had an enormous impact on my depression and my social anxiety. It might sound silly, but I was so clueless that I never really thought about how it had affected me as I grew up. I'm almost embarrassed by the fact that this hadn’t occurred to me earlier.

Suddenly things clicked into place. Repressed childhood memories of liking both boy and girl toys and cartoons, wishing I could be a girl sometimes but not always, getting in trouble for messing with my Mom's makeup, (sorry I ruined your lipstick Mom) the feeling that I was different from all the other boys in my neighborhood which isolated me, my biological father’s attempts to masculinise me and stomping around in my Mom's high heels wearing a sheet as a dress came rushing back to me.  The clues from my teenage years have always been pretty easy for me to identify, but I’d never thought about how being bigender affected me as a child and what sort of impact it’s had on my long term mental health.

I didn’t have a happy childhood for other reasons to begin with, but it’s now clear to me that my gender nonconformity exacerbated those issues considerably. Everyone knows that being gay or being trans is not a choice; you’re born that way. (Well, there are some ignorant twats who refuse to believe it.) Makes sense that some people like me are born bigender. 

I’m confused about my own gender identity as it is, and I have the support of a tiny bigender community and the power of the interwebz at my disposal. Imagine what it’s like to be a little kid who has no idea why they are the way they are. That’s enough to screw you up reeeeally good. 

On a side note, it also makes me wonder if there aren’t a whole lot more bigender people out there who don’t realize it. Maybe with this media attention we’re getting at the moment, plus the fact that transgender people are becoming more accepted in society, more people will realize they they’ve been gender variant their whole lives and the pieces will “click” into place for them as well.

This is one of those night where I have a million things I want to say, but I'll save it for tomorrow. 

Cheers.

Paige

The Paige and The Pendulum

Hello bloggy, my old nemesis. At least we meet again, although this time - we fight to the death! Have at you!

Sorry, just trying to spice things up.

So for the past few months I’ve been pretty dead set on transition and I’d lost most of my male identity. Then over the course of the past couple weeks I’ve been in guy mode more and more. A lot more. My therapist told me last night that my gender “pendulum” is swinging back the other way again, but I already knew that.

In a way I’m disappointed. As I’ve mentioned in the past, when I’m in female mode I can’t imagine that I’d ever want to be a man and I get rather obsessed with the idea of transition. I really thought my gender identity had stabilized enough that I could make a flexible plan in regards to my future, but it seems that’s not going to be the case. I had already decided that I needed to put the brakes on everything and to slow down until I was in a better place mentally before I came to this realization, so it doesn’t effect anything too profoundly which is good. Still I’m a little bummed out.

A little bummed out vs. profoundly depressed, which is what’s happened to me when going into this state of mind in the past. Now that I’ve been through this a few times I think I’m getting a little better at dealing with it. Like riding a wave instead of letting it crash over my head, pulling me underwater. I can’t control my gender changes and I may never be able to. That’s something that I’m going to just have to accept. Maybe down the road something will change, but for the time being I have to learn to accept the fact that my gender may never be static.

Acceptance is the big word here. I need to accept that being bigendered is an intrinsic part of who I am, and I have to accept myself for whom and what I am, regardless of what gender I happen to be. I think I’m taking my first steps towards that, but I have a long way to go. Still, I can tell that this is getting easier over time and that’s a reassuring feeling.

Elsewhere in the news I start DBT this Thursday afternoon. Group therapy quite frankly scares the shit out of me so I’m both looking forward to it and being terrified at the same time. Perhaps if I could combine those two emotions I’d just feel indifferent about the whole thing?  Paige Abendroth - emotional alchemist.  Eh, maybe not.

Someone relatively new to the forums over at Bigender.net had made a post yesterday about how she felt like being bigender and what she's currently going through, and that same post could have been written by me maybe nine months ago.  It's amazing how we as Bigender people share this unique experience, one that the average person could never really understand.  Heck, I don't even completely understand it myself.  It made me a little happy to think about how far I've come and it made me a little sad, to see that someone else is just starting to go through it. 

Yesterday evening I was on the phone with someone and she asked me to describe how I know when I'm a woman vs. when I'm male.  I said something like, "if you took away all of your physical characteristics how would you know you're still female?  It's something that you just KNOW."  Your average cisgendered person never thinks about this stuff because they don't have too.  But if you fall somewhere under the trans-umbrella you become hyper-aware of your gender(s).  (Or of course you can have no gender at all for that matter.)  

I afraid that when I tell people I'm bigendered they're not going to understand and they'll assume I'm a cross-dresser.  (Not that there's anything wrong with being a cross dresser mind you.)  I don't "pretend" I'm a woman for fun, there's nothing sexual about it and I don't dress in frilly pink dresses and prance around the house.  (But again, not like there's anything wrong with doing that if it's your cup of tea.)  I wear the same types of cloths in both modes - a black shirt with a band logo on it and blue jeans.  Whoo-hoo.  They are of course male and female tee-shits and blue-jeans though, and that's just to make myself feel comfortable.  

I guess that part of accepting myself will be accepting that other people don't accept me.  That's something to think about.  I think that's a good spot to end this entry, have fun and take care.

Paige

Today I moved from my house back into my house.

OMG it feels so good to finally be able to sit down and rest. My wife and I spent the entire day moving furniture. Tomorrow I'm going to pay for it. In the mean time, here's a little update.

I woke up this morning in strong girl mode, but when we started moving crap around I flipped over to strong guy mode. This seems to happen when I have to get shit done in a timely manner. I'm typing this now in guy mode, which doesn’t happen very often.

We cleared everything out of the bedroom and then moved my desk into there. I was afraid that it was going to fall apart and it almost did, but then my wife slapped a couple of l-brackets on it and we rocked that shit. Good thing my wife is non-gender stereotype conforming in her own way because I don't know anything about that stuff. (She owns all the power tools.)

We have a twin mattress that we moved into the bedroom for me to sleep on and the queen mattress and frame are in the living room right now until Tuesday when my wife's Dad is bringing down the twin mattress from her parents house. Then they'll take the old bed to the dump.

I got the dresser into the walk in closet and it's very easy to access. My wife is going to move her stuff out of there once I can squeeze my book case in here. Then I can finally throw away the old plastic crap drawers that I've haws since we first moved in together in Japan.

After we moved around just about every piece of furniture to another part of the house we went to Ikea and picked up my loft bed. My wife is paying the utilities now, (electric and internet) which came out to 120 bucks. The loft bed was 119. Sometimes things work. The boxes the thing came in were a lot bigger than I had expected, but I have a Honda Fit and the seats fold down to the floor. I've worked miracles with this car before, and once again I was able to bend reality to my will in defiance of the Gods. So uh, we made it fit. (Is that why the car is called a “Fit”?)

Right now the bed is unboxed in pieces. My project for tomorrow is to put the darn thing together. My wife will be in class so hopefully I'll be able to do it by myself. I put this damn desk together by myself so I think I'll be able to pull it off.

I'm a little worried that the big screen TV wont fit in here. We took some measurements and we were able to move the desk away from wall, but now there's like a three by three foot space that serves no purpose, and I'm trying really hard to use every inch that I can get. If it fits then we will get some seating in here and in the daytime and the early evening it will be the TV room. (More like a – theater; the things huge.)

If it wont then I'll put it up on Craig's List and we'll use the old analog TV in the mean time until we can afford a better one. Personally I don’t give a damn one way or the other. The big TV is fucking cool but it's just more “stuff” that's not essential to my life. (My wife want's to keep it.)

If we go with the little TV everything should fit perfect. Then between the TV and seating I'll have a nice little area for meditation and exercise. I think I will get a little round table for people to put their drinks or food on.

As I type this right now I can feel myself sliding into girl mode. In real time. Just thought I would document that.

So I have my little world set up here now. I have my most favorite show in the know universe, Mystery Science Theater 3000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_Science_Theater_3000 playing on the little TV in the background. It's very comforting to me. When I was going to get married to my wife, (the big family wedding and not the quicky wedding in Japan) I had a little portable TV/DVD player and I remember I was watching MST3K. It was once of the Hercules movies, but honestly I can't remember which.

OK, now I'm rambling. I worked my ass of today and I'm completely spent. I'm tired and tomorrow I'm going to be in a lot of pain and I still have so much to do. Eh, oh well. Time for go to bed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KN2JhPc0wM

New Creatures

I feel a lot better today than I did yesterday.  Anyway, I just dropped in to post a little poem I just wrote.

New creatures

Blister and slither

Beholden unto nothing

New Creatures are Born

The infallibility of infancy

The quiet decay of another day

Erupting forth from graveyard wombs

New Creatures come out at night

Bent and beautifully twisted

Wrapping around long spindles

They collapse and relapse

Well rehearsed decimation

Unnatural alien masses

Beautiful wild and lustful

Shrilly screaming triumphantly

As they murder the dawn

The New Creatures are coming

The gibbering mob crescendos

Spilling out unstoppable

Looting dirty looks and spit

Ravaging small bruised towns

Fucking on park benches

Glorious monsters rise

They sleep together now

huddled little horrors

In abandoned cars and mouldering cathedrals

Incubating abomination babies

Waiting to claim this world as their own

The New Creatures are here

Paige

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