A post in which I just kind of go with it.

All dressed up and no where to go as usual. I'm feeling very happy with my presentation today. Happy but realistic. I'll never pass at this point, but I've made a lot of progress and that makes me smile. I just feel this scene that all is right with my body, biochemically speaking, now that I have estrogen coursing through my veins and spiro blocking off any latent testosterone in my system. I feel calm, fuzzy, snuggley and tingly.

Now that I have some money in my transition war-chest it's time for action. Tomorrow I'm calling the plastic surgery place I picked out some months ago for a consult to get the laser resurfacing done to my face. My face is. . . .I really, really hate it and once I heal from the procedure I plan on starting to go out in public. The night before the procedure I'm getting my ears pierced too, or maybe right after I heal, who knows. Maybe I'll get some other stuff pierced too! That'll be fun.

I'm in a much better place today than I was yesterday, that's for sure. Last night I met with with two people from bigender.net, one who I know and one who I hadn’t met yet. They are both super nice and awesome people. While I'm doing much better on the shyness, (I was wearing women's jeans and a female cut shirt, which is something I never would have been able to do before) I'm still very socially awkward. It sucks and frustrates the hell out of me.

As I mention frequently on this journal I'm an introvert and I love being alone, but I still like people and I want to make friends. I'm a pretty weird person, even without the whole bigender thing, but just simple stuff like small talk and casual conservation is a struggle. (I DREAD small talk.) I don't know if it's just that I have nothing in common with anyone, I'm so out of practice socializing that I forgot how to or maybe it's just that because I'm so weird that I need to figure out my own way to interact with people?

That last idea gives me pause and warrants further investigation. See, I knew there was a reason for writing this shit down. Maybe I'm trying to hard to act normal? I should just act like the weirdo that I am?

Leslie was saying that she want's to take a few days vacation from the house to rent a hotel room and just to be alone while she does her school work without distraction. I'm totally cool with that. Is that wrong? We have an interesting relationship.

OH! Another reason I've been depressed is that I ran out of my anti depression meds. Cause and effect, no? On Wednesday evening I have an appointment with my shrink to get some more. During the day time I also have an appointment with my general practice doctor who I haven’t seen in a while. Boy is she going to be surprised. =P I think what I'll say is, “Doc, have you ever had a transgender patient?” and let it go from there.

I think it's time to end this stream of conscious entry. Damn the torpedoes.

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

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.