I'm Not Dead Yet!

Note – this post was written earlier in the day time.

Hi again blog.

My mood has stabilized significantly since yesterday. The tears are still close to the surface but for now at least I don’t have to make a concentrated effort to hold them back. Tonight I’ll let myself be as emotional as I need to be and I’m going to do it in a healthy, nondestructive way. (That’s my plan anyway.) 

The two people I feel closest to in San Diego, (the only two people I actually feel close to) are going away and I’m going to be here by myself.  I plan on getting my ass out and making new friends in the trans community, but what if I don’t forage any close relationships with anyone? If that’s the case all that will be keeping me here is my job.

Once the dust settles from my divorce I’ll be starting all over again and I have to say that the idea of moving to a new city and rebooting my life is rather appealing to me right now. After everything is squared away between me and my wife I’m going to get an apartment in Hillcrest with a six month lease. That will give me time to get settled, to meet new people and to save money. What I do after the six months is up in the air.

If I’m happy where I’m at I’ll just stay here. San Diego is a pretty nice place to live and I have a steady job. If I’m unhappy then I’m going to move away IF I can make sure that I’ll have a job lined up for me. Also, I’m already half way towards retirement with the organization I’m currently employed by and it would be foolish for me to throw that away. (So I’ll be able to retire when I’m 41 if I want to, although I’ll most likely keep working as I’d get a lot more retirement money if I do 30 years vs. 20.) 

If I feel like it’s time to move on there are a few different places that I’m thinking about going. I don’t like to plan really far in the future so this is just for fun. Still, I’m used to moving around all over the place thanks to the Navy and after all that I’ve been through here it might really be a good idea to get a fresh start. Anyway, here’s what I’m thinking.

Florida – I haven’t said this since I was a little kid, but right now I really want my mommy. =(  I want to be close to my family and I could really use their support right now. I know also that there’s a great gender therapist over in Sarasota, which looks like it’s a really nice place to live. I’d be able to dive out on the weekends to visit my family and vice versa. The cost of living out there is super cheep and I could afford a nice apartment with just my VA check. Both Sarasota and South Tampa look to have thriving LGBT communities as well.

The problem with moving to Florida is that uh, it’s Florida. It’s kind of the deep fucking south which is not the friendliest place for gender variant people such as I, and of course I need to be able to work so that I can support myself somehow. Also, fuck fire ants. Seriously.

Chicago – I was born and raised in Chicago, so I have roots there and I still feel a strong connection to it. I also have family and old friends there and I know my way around. Chicago has a bustling LGBT community and I’m sure that I’d be able to find plenty of support there. Oh, and the food! Best food in the world. I fucking love Chicago.

However I hate the weather. In the summer time people die from the heat and in the winter they freeze to death. Also, while there are people I know there, I’m worried that it might be a bit awkward for some of them that I’m going to be so, uh, different than I used to be. One of the points of moving away from San Diego would be to have a fresh start and going back to Chicago might be defeating the purpose. There used to be a strong Navy presence there but they’ve moved most of the various schools to Texas so it would be hard for me to find a job.

Oh, and all the Portillo’s will make me fat. I’m so hungry right now.

San Francisco – The Gay Capital of America. This one is a no brainer. In San Francisco I might actually not be queer enough to be noticed by anyone. =P It would be the safest place in the country for me and it’s a beautiful, diverse and wonderfully weird place to live. Hell, even if I was heteronormative I’d love to live there.

If I could afford to. The cost of living in San Francisco is crazy and I’d have to be very financially secure to move out there. That’s the only problem I can think of. If I could afford it I’d fucking go now.

Seattle – I’ve never been there but I’ve always wanted to go. Washington is a beautiful State with a diverse ecosystem which is important to me because I love nature and I don’t like living in the desert like I am now. Seattle appears to be a very liberal city with a lot of culture. The LGBT community is huge and I keep hearing that it’s an awesome place to live if you’re trans. I just feel drawn to Seattle like it’s somewhere I’m supposed to be. I can’t really explain it.

I need to learn take a little vacation up to Seattle to check it out. There are a lot of Naval facilities at Bremerton which is really close to Seattle. (Hour long ferry ride.) If I can get a job lined up I’d really like to move there. It feels right.

That’s enough typing for now. I’ll blabber on about more pointless nonsense later!

Paige

On controlling the bigender “flip” and what it's like when everyone you care about goes away.

Hay there blog. Yesterday was a fucking catastrophe and today sucks too. My best friend who is also bigender is moving away. So now basically my whole support network is gone and I'm going to be alone here in San Diego. It seemed like one minute things had leveled out and now everything is falling apart before my eyes and there's really nothing I can do about it.

I've been in guy mode since I woke up this morning and I've been forcing myself to stay in guy mode all day. Uh, I didn’t know I could do that before now. When I'm in guy mode vs. female mode I have a lot more control over my emotions. As a guy it's easier for me to control and shut them down when I have to. In female mode I have to cry until I'm done and that's that. I need to make it through another day of work tomorrow so yeah. I need to be in guy mode right now.

So for any bigender person who “flips” between genders like I do, here's what I'm doing. (This is from a MAAB perspective, switch the genders as you see fit.)

1. No female clothing, make up, or any of that shit. I can only speak for myself, but my presentation has a HUGE influence over my gender state. If I look in the mirror and I see a female face, (or a close proximity at least =P) looking back at me then it's a guarantee that I'll flip.

2. Maintain a masculine posture. Most people don't think about this shit consciously, but when you're trans you have to learn how to not only look like the gender you identify as, but you also have to learn all the nuances that go along with said genders presentation. As a simple example, when women sit they tend to take up as little space as possible while men tend to sprawl out and claim as much space as they can. You have to learn about posture, speech patterns, how men squint and look down to the ground and how women usually have there eyes wide open and fixed on the horizon line, stuff like that. Focusing on only using the standard gender ques of the gender I wish to be in grants me another level of control over the fabled “flip”.

3. Mindfulness. This is crucial. (For me anyway.) Don't let your thoughts run away with you. Don't allow your mind to day dream or drift over to thoughts/emotions that your other gender might feed off of. Focus on your breathing, or the different things you see. Notice every detail. Listen to music and hear and feel every tiny note. Basically, focus on the exterior world rather than what's going on inside your head. I've been training my mind to do this for a while to help combat my depression and anxiety so I'm starting to get good at it. It takes practice but it can be done.

So I've learned/I'm learning to wield some control over the flip, but I also know that all I'm really doing right now is suppressing my female side and I'll have to let her out soon. My plan for tomorrow is to make it through the day, take care of all my errands and then I'll go into girl mode and confront all the feelings I'm keeping bottled up inside me right now.

The reality of my situation is that I'm completely devastated right now. My wife doesn’t want me anywhere near her and my one and only friend who also happens to be bigender and whom I regard as a kindred spirit is going away. My friend is my anchor and he makes me feel brave to be myself. I was a complete shut in until I met him. I'm still super shy, but I feel like I'm just starting to come out of my shell and his support has played a huge part in that.

I sort of assumed that he'd always be around. That we'd be friends, transition together, support one another when we needed it, have crazy gender-queer adventures together and we'd do all the stuff that best friends do. (Uh, when they're queer.) My marriage ending is killing me, and then to learn that I'm losing the only other person who I really care about in San Diego. . . fuck.

I'm really fucking weird. No one understands me and I have a hard time making friends. He was my bigender idol when I first joined the bigender.net forums and he was the one who recommended me to my gender therapist, who has literally saved my life more than once now.

Meeting someone like my wife and falling in love with her, (and having my love reciprocated) was a one in a million shot. I don't know if that will ever happen again. (I'm afraid that it won't.) The fact that my friend and I are both bigender, we're both weird, we both work in healthcare, we're both reasonably intelligent, (although he's way smarter than I am) we both seem to be going through the same shit together even though we're not really involved in one another lives, and we both think alike. . . It's like we were supposed to be friends and now that he's going away I feel like I'm being cheated; like this wasn’t supposed to happen.

I feel like we were supposed to have adventures together. He was going to take me to get my first bra fitted. I thought that we could go to San Diego Pride together to represent the bigender community. I was going to take him to get his first suit. His presence in my life has had an extreamly positive influence on me and I'm a stronger person for having known him. He made me excited to be bigender.

So when the smoke settles from my divorce what do I have left? Nothing really. I'll still hopefully have a job, but I need more than that to keep me going. I'm going to have to make some new friends and build up a support network quick or else I'm not going to make it. I can't do this alone.

I just want to go home, but nowhere is home to me anymore.

Paige

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

So much to say, So much to say. . .

Wow. I have a lot of stuff that I'd like to write about. Let's start with fun stuff.

Topic One - Andrej Pejic is the sexiest man on the planet. (As of this date.)

http://style-caralho.blogspot.com/2011/06/andrej-pejic-he-blurred-boundaries.html

That link should do it. When I was growing up I never had a male idol who I wished that I emulated physically. I mean, I was kind of feminine and I was OK with it. I only wanted to not be quite so skinny, and I was devastated by my horrible acne. Otherwise, I never had any envy for a man before.

Until now.

Andrej Pejic is easily the sexyest man on the planet as far as I'm concerned. I've never wanted to look like a man so much as I've wanted to look like him, which for me is very amusing as his whole deal is that he looks like a woman. The thing is that he still, (as far as we know) identifies as a male.

I'm sure that he has an army of make up artists, but when looking at pictures of him (Especially of his chest) I'm convinced that he's on some sort of AA blocker to ward off the effects of testosterone on his body. There's no other way that a man can look that awesome. (Collagen lip injections and awesome lighting help too I'm sure.)

But here's to you, dude who's name my dumb ass from Chicago can't actually pronounce in real life. I've never been envious of another man until you, and it's obvious that I'm not alone. Holy hell, what a hottie. I mean shit, it might take me a while to get to sleep tonight. I mean, DAMN.

Topic Two – A little bit of insight

Yesterday evening I was in bad shape. Once again I was punishing myself for no reason and cycling through bad emotions and worst case scenarios until they culminated in what would basically be my suicide, and then starting back at the beginning. Look, I don’t want to kill myself, (Although I am fascinated with the suicidal state of mind, which I should write about at one point) but I have this awful habit of torturing myself with negative emotions for no reason.

I felt awful, so I took a rest in my high-tech sensory deprivation chamber (AKA my shower with the lights off and a candle burning) and had a brief moment of clarity that couldn’t have come at a better time. I'm a very sensitive person who has strong reactions to things that might not be a big deal to other people. The Voice in my head (the part of my brain that cuts through the bullshit and gets to the root of the problem) told me that it's OK to feel the way that I do; that it's OK to have those strong emotions and to ride them out.

However, it's foolish to keep cycling through said emotions over and over again to the point where it drives me to disparity. Feel the powerful emotions, make sense of them, and then move on with your life. For some reason for years I've been torturing myself mentally. For example, when I was a kid I kept myself awake many nights imagining that my Grandfather had died, and that I was at his funeral. I would stay up late and cry myself to sleep, and this was in elementary school.

Upon said realization, the artificial “crisis” that I had generated for myself dissipated and I was blessed with a warm wave of calm emptiness that permitted my entire being. I went to bed and had the best nights sleep in I don't know how long.

Topic Three – And In Today's News

I took the day off from work and it was just what I needed. Really, I had an awesome day. I scored tickets to see one of my idols, His Holiness The Dalai Lama, when he comes to town in a couple of months and I was able to manage to get tickets for my wife and a good buddy of mine, which made me happy. (They sold out in just a couple of minuets.)

I took care of the house which made me happy, as it needed some cleaning. (I'm kind of like maid service around here.) Then I went on a quiet, introspective walk through the nature preserve by my house, which was just perfect. Oh, then I ate a salad, and mushroom pizza. NOMS.

Later, I finally called the office of the plastic surgeon who I picked out to do the laser resurfacing on my face, and I have an appointment for 1630 tomorrow. As you may recall, (Ha, no one reads this blog) the acne scaring on my face is my #1 cause of dysphoria. This is step two in my journey to androgyny and I'm excited.

So then I got some more exercise and here I am now, typing up a storm. I'll hopefully have time to post on how the appointment goes tomorrow. If not I'll shoot for Friday. I have the funding and the sick leave saved up. It's time to take the next step in my transition.

“Damn the Torpedoes! Full Steam Ahead!” Rear Adm. David G. Farragut

Me in full on girl mode - 

Me in "I don't give a flying fuck" mode.  

This surgery will prove interesting.

Blah, Monday Part 2

Ok, so it's not quite Monday yet but whatever.  I'm feeling very depressed right now and I'm forcing myself to write this.

I'm so lonely.  My female half is anyway.  I have a classic introverted personality type, so I'm the type of person who does not need nor even want a lot of interaction with other people.  I also suffer from a major depressive disorder along with a generalized anxiety disorder with social phobia.  Uh, so I have issues.

What I'm trying to say is that I enjoy and need my "alone time".  However, that doesn't mean that I don't like people and that I don't want to have friends.  I'm just so weird that it's like I don't have anything in common with anyone I meet.  Not to mention that I'm so shy that I avoid meeting people to begin with.  I just never know what to say, and the more people the more overwhelmed I become.  Then I get exhausted and I need to be along again to recharge my batteries.

It's something that bothers me in guy mode but I'm OK with it.  In female mode however I feel like I'm desperate for someone to talk to.  I want to be part of a community, to hang out with people I can relate to and share my feelings with.  I don't normally crave social interaction in this way so this is hard for me to deal with.  I need friends.

The girl me is trapped in the house and she does not dare leave or even draw a curtain.  As a human being I cannot let anyone even know that I exist and it's killing me.  So every night it's the same.  In the evening after I exercise I get cleaned up and dressed up.  Even though my wife is here in the house with me, I'm alone.

I'm sorry to be so down.  I don't know what to do.  This sucks.