#Waiting for me to torment healthcare wild

[skyloftian-nutcase]

Ooo, I’m getting war era Wild vibes for one of these sicktember prompts 👀 teehee

[gabriella-lost-in-the-big-city]

And in her heart was a sea of darkness… Pt. 1

The choice I make to say what I have to say in the next post is a risky one. It may change how people view me or act around me entirely. I may be seen as a victim crying out for help (and maybe I am). However, despite the consequences of talking about this matter, the whole point of this blog was to be nothing but 100% honest with the people that read what I write and give my self the opportunity to say all the things I wish I could say or do or feel on a daily basis. So without any other further interruption, here I go…

My depression has been with me since the 6th grade, a time where my emotional intelligence grew and I became more secure with my sexuality. I felt such guilt and fear for being a male (at the time) who had sexual/romantic feelings for other men since I grew up in Raleigh, NC from 2005 to 2014. Feeling like I could confidently be out of the closet as a gay male (let alone being a trans woman) was not an option in the south. I was surrounded by so many narrow-minded people that knew nothing but the tobacco farms and cattle that surrounded them, that still thought racism was a politically correct thing, that God, Jesus, and whoever else from the nativity scene where the only “people” that were going to save you from burning in hell for your “sin”. There were no political activists, social justice warriors, or open-minded liberals, just white Republicans chewing tobacco and riding down the highway with confederate flags in tow. It was not always like this, but when these images crossed my path I knew that there was going to be backlash on being anything other than white straight and Christian. I knew I couldn’t tell many people around me, especially not my family (diluted Catholics from El Salvador), so I spent the next 4 years keeping who I really was a secret (something I would pick back up when I discovered I was actually trans this entire time in college) and that really tormented me mentally. I felt alone among even my closest friends. I felt like I couldn’t get too close to anyone at school or in the neighborhood to avoid having them find out I was gay and possibly hating me for being gay. I began to develop thoughts of suicide during this time in my life as my depression worsened over the years. I just kept having these thoughts that things were never going to get better, that I would have to live the rest of my life in secret from my family, that I would never be loved for being who I am, and that my feelings/thoughts/actions would always be seen as wrong. My thought process was if I just killed myself I wouldn’t have to feel the pain and agony of my depression, I didn’t have to live my life in fear – distant from the world around me. In hindsight, the emotional turmoil I endured with my transition into the woman was way more deserving of a desire to commit suicide then what I went through in middle/high school. Middle/High school is the common cold and what I have been going through during the past 3 years of college is like a stage 4 pressure injury infected with MRSA.  I never like talking about my life as a gay male (2007-2014) even if it is a brief background story because I always feel it’s such a cliché/diluted story of what I’ve been through.

Now that you know that I suddenly didn’t just start being depressed and suicidal when I moved to NYC for college, this is where the real fun begins. I don’t want to focus on how I discovered I was trans all along in this post, so I’ll just skip that part for now. As a trans woman, my depression began to worsen – I finally found the answer I had been looking for to explain why I never could relate to the guys in the neighborhood or why I felt “different” all my life, but now I became an even bigger monstrosity in society. For some reason, people can be ok with people being Gay, Lesbian, or Bisexual (which even that is something people can’t get their heads around, but I digress), but are not ok with people being trans. My parents, for the most part, had dealt with me being “gay” neutrally a.k.a. they never really mentioned it after I came out to them. However, I knew that being trans was a pill they would not be able to swallow (a thought that would come true soon enough). I chose to act on my desire to be a woman my freshman year of college in secret from my family – I would put on my E.L.F. makeup on and look like a total mess and occasionally wear an ill-fitting dress from F21 and super high heels that I knew I could not walk in (something I still have not mastered). Some of my closest friends called me Gabby (which in hindsight I am so grateful they took the initiative on), but for the most part, I was still Justin (GOD I FUCKING HATE HAVING TO SAY/SEE/THINK OF THAT NAME). Over the course of the past three years, It became increasingly harder to be seen and treated as “Justin” as I came close to becoming the woman I am today, but in those early years it was easier to still be “Justin” as I had already made up my mind that there was no way I could live ha happy life being trans. My family would never respect or accept me (which is mostly true in my current situation) and I would never be truly loved by a man (or a woman) as a transwoman (which I still think is true because my run-ins with online dating are terrible, but we will save that for another post). I think the hardest part was having to keep everything a secret, especially when I moved in with my grandma my sophomore year where I literally had to pack Gabriella in a box and be forced to only be her when I was in the bathroom. I worked so hard those four years of high school just to have the courage to come out the closet and be free, just to be thrown back in with no way out in sight. On the outside, I pretended everything was fine on the outside, but I the inside, the negative thoughts I had about myself just fermented inside of me. There is nothing healthy about bottling things inside because eventually the pressure becomes too much and you either have to begin to release the pressure little by little or wait for the bottle to eventually explode. My form of dealing with my emotional distress was nowhere near healthy – from my self-diagnosed binge eating disorder to the binging of alcohol at parties to numb the pain to my favorite, the burning of my wrist with a lit cigarette, There are a variety of ways to commit self-harm, some choose to cut or inflict physical pain on themselves, but I chose the delightful burn of a recently inhaled cigarette. I had an affinity for cigarettes when I first came to NYC for college, the warm smoke entering my lungs calmed my nerves and the burn from smashing the cigarettes onto my wrist riled the inner masochist in me right up. It only ever happened a handful of times during my freshman and sophomore year of college, but I still have the scares that I guess will haunt me for the rest of my life. Looking back over the years sometimes I wish I had the courage to drink a little more, to keep the cigarette on my body just a little while longer and fry my veins, maybe grab a blade and slit my wrists or cut through my carotid, maybe jump in front of an incoming train or into incoming traffic, or down a whole bottle of pills from the medicine cabinet. I never had to guts to do more than what I did to self-harm or actually kill myself despite wanting to do it so badly – a part of me was scared of surviving my suicide attempts and having to live with the consequences or I felt bad for how my suicide would affect the people around me. However, my fears of self-harm and suicide slowly diminished – the pain or the consequences didn’t seem so bad and I thought that my life was way too insignificant to actually make a lasting emotional impact on the people around me. People die all the time, and sure it’s hard, but we eventually moved on and they become nothing more than a stone on the ground or ashes in the wind. And I am sure you’re asking yourself if all of that is true, what is stopping you from going back to hurting yourself or killing yourself, and If I wasn’t asking myself that very question every day of my life I would have an answer for you. I guess what’s still keeping me alive is that little part of me that feels like I do have some value in this work, that my work and future ambitions in healthcare and public health matter and are important. However, at the same time, I can’t tell you that there is also a part of me that is willing to give up my value in this world just for the selfish desire to just end my life long-suffering. I know this may seem crazy that this is how I feel, that I would be willing to throw all the good things I have worked long and hard for - to be where I am today, a semi-successful, semi-confident, semi-functioning TLW on the path of bigger and better things one day. If could be worst, I could be physically sick, have cancer, have a stroke, have my leg amputated, need a major organ transplant, etc – but then again this is just siding with the whole “mental illnesses don’t matter as much as physical ones” debate.

I can’t tell you what would make me feel better. I can’t tell you what will make me value my life. I can’t tell you when or why I have these thoughts, only that they worsen when I find myself alone or I am not distracted by the world around me. I can’t promise you I’ll be safe, that this is something or someone to save me. I’m a wild card, I’m a ticking time bomb, I don’t know how long I will last. All I can tell you is that I’ve felt this way, every day, with varying intensities, for the past 12 years. I don’t know if it will ever end. I know a lot of you this is a lot to digest, things you never thought I go through on a daily basis. However, that’s the way I chose things to be. If I was outward and honest with these feeling with everyone around me, I wouldn’t have all the friend that I have, I wouldn’t have accomplished all the things I have, I wouldn’t be able to smoothly move through life like I have all these years. My façade, a happy/sarcastic/melodramatic woman, helps me get through every day if my life – and I don’t know if I will ever truly feel that being happy is no longer something I just pretend to feel. This is not everything I want to say on the matter or it is a complete representation of how I truly feel (and I don’t know if it is physically possible to convey such feelings and have you truly understand them through words on the screen). This is just an abridged version of what goes inside my little head, behind the scenes, behind closed doors where you never think to look and see.

 - G