spaceforathing - Tumblr blog

[spaceforathing]

i finally had help cutting my hair. i don’t love it. it wasn’t professional obviously and it just looks sub-par. it’s DEFINITELY a major upgrade, and better than before. but holy shit. it’s the 90s teenage boy curtains, meets judith butler, hannibal, but actually even longer than that. on me, it looks like……prissy and borderline “pixie cut”. i keep imagining that i look like “the karen look” (i’ve been told i don’t but dysphoria bites ass), and it just doesn’t feel distinctly butch enough tbh. which i guess is ok for now, since i need that plausible deniability as we get back on our feet. but yeah………………

this was in the drafts, too, lmao. from a few weeks ago. i’ll be getting a new ID soon, and this shit will be on it, in my photo. as soon as i get a new job and first paycheck, i’ll be getting a better haircut, professionally, then going back and making them retake it. i got fucking frauded so i’ll need to change my ID anyway because of that…two birds, one stone.

[spaceforathing]

sometimes i’ve been asking myself, what the fuck are you doing, going forward with this trans thing? is it even worth it anymore, after all this shit you’ve been through? what it might bring on you? i’m so tired.

and then i have to remember, these are temporarily depressed thoughts from a traumatized mind. i’ve been through some shit in life. a lot of people have. i’m not even enjoying anything i used to. this isn’t “the normal (optimal) me”, speaking from a real place in my mind that reflects my own happiness. i’m just……… tired, and there’s that side that wants to accept its own exhaustion and not do anything, just hibernate post-trauma, to take care of its own brain, that feels that changes seem too daunting.

but like… the side of yourself that wants to change, that’s the side that will save your life. that side that keeps its mind open like a child, that imagines what would be most beautiful for yourself, and wants to reach out and get it. you HAVE to ignore the other side, and feed this side instead. you HAVE to wake up and do what’s right for you, for your future, not just for your temporary survival.

things that contribute to your comfort zone will kill you. the very phrase “comfort zone” is misleading — you can be incredibly uncomfortable, and just resign yourself to it, just stay that way where nothing changes, purely because it is what you are used to doing, the way you had to live for so long. but that side will fucking kill you. you HAVE to kill it first, before it steals more days, years of your life — because IT is killing YOU now, whether you do something about it or not.

you HAVE to make a long-term plan and do, and work for it.

you HAVE to take risks that feel scary, strange. you HAVE to expand your capabilities past what you think you can do.

you HAVE to challenge yourself. you HAVE to get EXCITED for that challenge! like a child excited for the first day of school. or nothing will change. you have to. it is not optional. you have no other choice but to get up and fucking do it.

i just…………… i feel things about this.

you HAVE to remember that the side that wants you to stay in stasis, with things all the same, is your enemy. it’s killing you and you need to be stronger. faster. even on days, especially on days when you don’t possibly feel like you can, at all. but you have to.

you HAVE to feed the side that’s a little evel knievel, that takes risks, that wants to go boldly dyke-ily forward and race through life in your fucking motorcycle jacket… you literally have to or you’ll die.

“did you always know you were right?” what a validating, respectful question, to someone who had been so judged in such a rigid time period and environment, someone who didn’t let any of that grind her the fuck down…for a mainstream television talking head to ask such a compassionate question, take such a stance, and in a little subtle way. just throwing it at her, in a way, to say that “yes, i’m on your side.” unexpectedly.

i think about this interview literally all the time. parts of it like that are what get me through life. “did you always know you were right?” yes, but i was made to doubt it and pushed around by people who didn’t recognize, or did but wouldn’t accept it. i predicted every trauma years before it happened but no one listened. you HAVE to respect that side of yourself, you HAVE to be gutsy, you HAVE to validate that part in yourself that no one else is validating. you HAVE to love her/him/her-him. you fucking HAVE to. i’ve had enough of telling myself the same lies this world tried to tell me. (chronic invalidation as abuse tactic. female socialization on steroids — more like pushover socialization. i was always too willful to fully accept it in my mind, but i still let it/these ppl take the reins and change my life, for the fucking worse.) they were not right and i know what’s right for me and i’m going to chase it.

[spaceforathing]

my body has to have something medical about it that is forcing it to exist on the nocturnal sleeping schedule.

i am thinking that untreated thyroid is the main factor — it runs in my family, i have all the symptoms, and an initial test came back with the levels looking strange, though more extensive testing hasn’t been done yet.

based on other symptoms, i theorize a possible autoimmune or hypermobility spectrum problem ehlers-danlos syndrome, too. (seems to be verrrry common in transmasculine people…and my mother seems to likely have (milder than mine? or just ignored?) symptoms too…and i really wonder about ethnic causes/predisposal to it, as i’ve seen sooooo many people from certain heritage similar to ours talk about having this issue, and i don’t think it’s an accident.)

untreated adhd absolutely has to be a part, too. there is too much info going around to suggest that a tendency to sleep in the morning, wake late afternoon to evening, and be awake through the night, is tied on a physical/neurobiological level to adhd neurology.

(i wish that people took this shit more seriously, as the brain is a bodily organ and a real thing… brain-body is one functioning whole, and of course things happening to certain parts of the system control the total of it. there was this post i have saved that suggests there was a link between impulse control disorders and LEAD — which, everyone knows that lead was a major fucking factor throughout our grandparents’ and even parents’ lifetimes. how many things even now painted in lead might we be exposed to? furniture and walls in schools etc…how thorough was the removal, actually? shit i just do not have the energy to research right now…. i would believe it was partly an existing tendency throughout history, and then that something like this might have aggravated certain problems in people, maybe not originated them… but who knows.)

this is why, as soon as i get a job here soon, i’ll be taking evening or night shift.

i have just forced my body to endure painful attempt after painful attempt to force it/myself through being awake during the day. it never works. i have been treated as lazy and/or “depressed so get medication for it!” (despite having no depression symptoms, just PTSD/trauma which is situation-based and will leave with therapy + efforts to change my situation….. i was not born with “organic depression” like some seem to be.)

i have been told all this bullshit, over years, about pulling myself up by my bootstraps. and it’s nonsense. and i’m done with it, completely done with it. it’s time to just work with my situation and try to fix it, in my own way. and to accept my current limits and be kind to myself, rather than judging myself.

my body is what it is, my limits are what they are. i will work with these limits rather than self-hate for them, rather than accepting pushback from unhealthy people who are from older generations that are used to “just deny it’s there and it’ll go away, work your way through it,” etc. well-meaning or not, just because they are used to that. i worked TWO FUCKING SHIT JOBS AT ONCE and worked my body into the ground, until i had to quit one, then go part-time on the other, then left that one, too, just fucking spent from not just the health problems but the toxic psychological environment. i just won’t do it anymore. i am not accepting other people’s unhealthy imposition on my fucking life, idc what form it comes in.

first on the plan is getting a night job part-time, second is getting/waiting for dr’s appointments to fix the body shit, and the adhd neuro shit. after treatment, i’ll see what comes of it, what they figure out. ugh.

[spaceforathing]

i could have spent all these years that my life was being wasted against my will, just doing things like learning new languages, at least………but with the unhappiness there has been next to no motivation. even for shit like duolingo. like all of my motivation is external and would come from things like the social environment involved when going to school, the deadlines and timeframes and social interaction fueling me……. i can’t do it without that. i just feel dead inside.

wrote this a night or two ago, and put it in the drafts, when it got really dark for me. i’m trying to maintain my spirit, my feeling for the future, but it’s fucking hard.

[spaceforathing]

feelings

[spaceforathing]

this year has involved nothing but timewasting. i need help that has not been happening in order to make my life. i’m so frustrated. and then with the health issues, scared of their increasing symptoms, and the scares like last night that happened; however minor that might seem to anyone else, it was so much worse with stomach issues than it had to be. wanting a life, resolution, a social life, an education, treatment. needing it all, not wanting. ugh.

made some strides this year in terms of relationship issues and emotional stuff, trauma…. had a breakthrough or two. just in the past couple of days alone, did some positive work on the OCD and getting more relaxed about some of the things that OCD would previously make me more nitpicky about. reconnected with some folks including family who don’t suck. saw a message from a very old friend who i disappointed…planning to message and reconnect in the new year.

time to get a lot of practical work done on solving irl problems, and chip away at it all the time, every day. this year can’t have any time wasting. i feel good about it. it’s difficult but i will get somewhere.

[spaceforathing]

i am thinking of the little special things. i want to have beautiful journals, i want to press flowers in them, and stick them to the pages with some kind of lacquer or something. little beautiful goals to brighten the everyday life. it’s not being able to buy the shallow, flashy status symbols that motivate me to work again when i can. it’s the little things like this. maybe i’ll put my cat’s paws in ink and press it to make pawprints on some pages, when i do this. :)

[spaceforathing]

the upside of this kind of thing happening is that you feel a real gratitude for life. a fear that something is seriously wrong when you are going through the worst part of it where it’s wracking you. and then a gratitude that you can come back from that. and do little things. like, even eating half of a single cracker by this time tomorrow will be something i am grateful for. it puts things into perspective. then you’re seeing life in general with a sense of optimism, or at least, hope that you will be able to do something good with it. if even a cracker feels like a big deal….

[spaceforathing]

things happen when you’re on the floor just heaving the contents of your body up.

i was looking down into the shower drain, lying down, supported by my arms, woozy like i was going to pass out.

and i just thought, yeah, the kind of SRS i’ve considered is just never happening. not as long as i might need some kind of medical care in the future. imagine going in with this indeterminate androgynous body to some ER. imagine, not having kids, not having a living spouse, not having a real support network, and being subject to whatever might happen to you, in elder care, with that kind of body. imagine living in whatever country, where “normal” (straight passing) gay people and classic “binary” trans people who do the full-transition are already barely tolerated. or visiting and having some accident happen while there. which, my own country is already basically like that, in many places. do i have to live in san francisco or new york to just be treated like a human? and what happens if the r*ght gets their way and the entire country shifts more and more in their direction? are even those places safe in the long term? (berlin thought that it was safe, before, well….)

maybe even non-SRS transition is impossible, then. conflict between visual appearance and what you have under the clothes. just as stigmatized. maybe i need to basically resign myself to butch dyke-appearing mode, “butch on t”, just pushing gently on the edges of the limits of that, and suck it up. maybe it will never be safe to go where i’ve considered going, places which might be right for me. gender-wise. i want it to be safe to do that. idk if it will be. i will test these limits as i go into transition, test the waters and see what i feel safe doing. but at the end of the day, this thought will always be in my head. my experience in life didn’t involve growing up in a progressive place, with an lgbt support network to go and reach for the stars without doubt, and i don’t have the sheer brass tacks and gutsy confidence to just GRAB what i want the way that some of these loud-and-proudly andro-gender-fucker body-modifiers do. and i WANT to build that confidence, but idk if i can. i want to. at the end of the day, though, i will always be thinking of this. that if i’m forced to make a choice, what will i do? human survival comes first.

i think of this with every health scare. even if i do somehow manage to fix my health problems for good, and get to enjoy some younger years without them, as you age, the body will give you some to deal with. what then?

[spaceforathing]

staying in someplace temporary, going to be moving on to somewhere more permanent hopefully soon (and not back in the fking car :( )

spent like 6-8 hrs yesterday v*miting and sh*tting on the shower floor, like my body was just, falling tf apart. actually insane. rinsing the surface and having to lie down there in between — no choice, going back to bed not an option — just disgusting. at some points i almost passed out. whole body starting to get pins and needles, couldn’t even keep down water and gingerale w/o v*miting.

went to the ER finally. they helped me w some things in a bag but, told me my bloods came back as normal, no infection or problem w my electrolytes. yeah right. so despite going there to receive some, didn’t. she asked her usual dr and he said that they don’t bother looking closer at these things a lot of the time in an ER, short staffed and burnt out, not caring about individual care as much, which i definitely felt. whatever, they gave me something for nausea and pain, so, i’ll live.

not sure whether it was gastritis or a stomach flu or food poisoning or more than one of the above. (i KNOW i ate some off vegetables but it was one of my favorites so i ignored it, stupidly. :/ but there’s also something going around apparently)

just………….this comes after putting together more and more that i almost certainly have a GI illness, including that my respiratory problems probably all stem from that — gallbladder can present as “feeling like you have a tourniquet wrapped around your lungs”, and apparently, stomach stuff runs in my family. so i was on a wild goose chase this whole time. i’ve been taking generic prilosec to try to work on it but need a real appt with a real stomach dr to deal w this. i probably also have something called bile reflux, which is like acid reflux and has its symptoms (to the point where they’re hard to distinguish) but more focused on the bile duct. which fits with the weird yellow/greenish stuff i regularly hack up when brushing, weird tastes in my throat etc.

so, easy to imagine, having a problem with the stomach and fucking BILE duct, it was much harder for me than someone else to just…get to the point of STOPPING V*MITING. my body kept doing this horrible thing with the valve at the back of the throat where i was burping with every breath, it felt like a swamp in there. all the bile in my stomach in a trash can eventually.

just. i’m so fucking sick of dealing with these symptoms. but more than that, i’m angry that i had to be the one to put two and two together about what i might have, rather than being helped sooner, and went on a wild goose chase to lung doctors for so long. jfc.

i just want dealing with this to be over, and i want to have whatever fucking surgeries they will throw at me to fix it (some people do get cured by some methods! it’s possible!), i want it to be over for good and not a lifelong thing, and i’m excited to move the fuck on and stop having to deal with all this.

[spaceforathing]

resent my body so much for doing what it does, and all the ugly garments i currently own (can’t really call them clothes), that i’m just letting myself bl33d straight through these fugly und3rw3ar onto the leggings onto a towel i just can’t care anymore………it’s all impermanent. one day hopefully soon, everything i own will be replaced. and eventually i won’t be hormonally disposed to bl33ding. the only thing i care about in the equation is my actual body itself, which can be showered and cleaned. idc if my pajamas have permament stains, the pants are black anyway…they’ll just be worn until my p3riods stop and then until they wear out, and then just be cut up into rags. everything but my body is fleeting and disposable

finally unlearning my mildly 0cd (?) panic (or really, the standard uncomfortable reaction most people have to messes) by deciding what my priorities are in life and healthily not giving a fuck

shame it had to come through sex dysph0ria and depression at delayed life decisions

[spaceforathing]

i can post about personal trans stuff because it’s more broadly connected to others as a group experience.

i can’t post about my irl issues related to material wellbeing so easily. because it denies me privacy and dignity on top of that already happening to me. because it’s already occupying all of my everyday life.

i isolate and lose contact with everyone during these times…i make posts like missives (or distractions from rl) but messages take a standstill.

[spaceforathing]

watching videos like this just depresses me. can’t tell if she already just spoke that way or was in progress with doing voice work pre-physical transition (or even on estrogen already?) so that her transition would be seamless. it is just so apparent either way that this is just a woman in drag, who is having to make herself do something that she can’t, under duress. it makes me so sad for all of us that have had to go through this. and me in my still pre-everything state.

making it excruciatingly obvious that this is the exact same way that i live and appear (in reverse), despite past delusions that i was successfully closeting myself, it was so obvious.

imy past few years i’ve put work into my voice, too…which ftms rarely do, since  the idea that T does it for you is promoted, but is becoming more common…with HRT nowhere near attainable, something had to be done. i literally couldn’t bear living and hearing that high-pitched voice come out of my mouth every day with no end in sight. it was not optional for basic comfort and mental survival. nails on a chalkboard.

because of all  this, i can’t relate anymore to the conversation about whether to stay in or come out, because i clearly never had the option, after the point of realization. for physically transgender/transsexual ppl it is just not the same and never will be, i have no choice. it’s too much to carry on like this. seeing her have to live like that vs videos from after just drives it home. makes me feel understood and exhausted at the same time.

i wish people could really see and understand that we are who we say we are… could see videos like this the way that i do.

[spaceforathing]

aside from the donations posts, i’ve pretty much been refusing to talk about the ugliness of our irl situation, because it’s just depressing to me to post about, it denies us any actual privacy to delve deeply into it, and…what is there to even say? keeping it simple gets things done, as we’ve experienced with these charities…online, no one would read a longer post, anyway. and it doesn’t matter, because at the end of the day we deserve that privacy more than people deserve to know more.

we’ve only gotten one donation since making that post, of ten dollars, despite a lot of reblogs, which isn’t anyone’s fault and is pretty much what i was anticipating would happen. people are strapped for cash even if they do want to donate. we’re working with local churches (which is where the funding is, predictably) and orgs to try to make the car situation happen before we’re out of here. literally it’s coming down to the wire at the last minute. no promises but something might be happening re: the living situation. but i don’t even like to say that because i’m skeptical and mildly superstitious at the same time lmfao

[spaceforathing]

the way that they will literally give estrogen to male criminals and call it “chemical castration” and recognize it as a form of suffering

the way that doctors will prescribe testosterone to cis men who are recognized as having “low T” for this reason, because it’s better not to experience that

the way that, if you were born ftm/ftm-spectrum/transmasc you are literally experiencing this from birth, a testosterone deficiency, where you’d benefit from added T.

only, conveniently, they don’t want to conceptualize of it that way, instead casting you as a woman who wants to add T and is deviating from “her” standard body type.

the way that this perspective ignorantly analyzes human health from the outside (of the body) in, rather than the inside out, judging physical states by their outward appearances, rather than the body’s system and how it works on the inside. something that we recognize now and will increasingly in future recognize as being barbaric and a form of thinking that denies things like the existence of germs or promotes medieval medical practices like bloodletting etc. vs. modern practices such as doing blood testing for health problems, which recognizes that it’s what’s happening inside the body’s system that counts more.

the way that neurological tests are pretty much reifying what we know about ourselves already that our brains respond to situations in ways that fall in line more with the sex we recognize ourselves as and not as the one we appear as. the way that trans-expert doctors have already been calling us a form of neurological/invisible intersex for a longgggg time but no one listens to them lmao. the way that it’s all so patently obvious, but only if you actually listen to trans people. all of it. all of it. alksdjflkasdflkasjdflksad.

[spaceforathing]

the fact that my transness not only persisted, but became even more loudly painfully insistent of a need to fulfill throughout the entire time that we’ve been homeless, rather than simply disappearing as other vital survival needs took precedence, is apparently a large part of what finally convinced my mother that it was not something i would grow out of but actually very real.

[spaceforathing]

(looking in a mirror, dysphoric): you will never look remotely male/masculine. look at that face. you look like betty boop now and in the future you’ll look like betty boop with a mustache. give up now dumbass, abandon all hope ye who look this fucking way. terrible.

(looking at my selfie after taking one): apparently literally look like this but with some added estrogen