At this point, enough people in my life know about these two
things, so it feels safe to post them online. First, I started HRT (Hormone
Replacement Therapy) around 3 months ago. I take estrogen, progesterone, and
two testosterone blockers every day. It was a very complex decision, but I
don’t regret it for a moment. I did and am doing the right thing. I’ll try to
talk more about it in a future post (there are a bunch of things I want to
address but can’t here/now). But in the meantime, if you are interested, you
can totally google HRT to understand the process I am beginning.
The other thing is that for about three weeks now, I’ve been
seriously thinking about (really more feeling)
serious suicidal thoughts. I know you probably want me to talk more about this,
but I don’t want to talk/think about it too much today (sometimes you just need
to avoid suicidal thoughts altogether). But don’t worry, I won’t do anything. I
am ok. And I want to talk about one of those reasons.
But first I need to mention how incredibly supportive
EVERYONE has been in my life. I’ve reached out to a few people and all (well,
most) of them reached out right back. I can’t thank all of you enough. One
example is a few nights ago at our big archaeology conference, eight of my
friends called me into their hotel room to have intervention, tell me they love
me, tell me how worried they are, and make me call a trained counselor that
night. Lots of people have done so many things and I do feel incredibly loved and appreciated. Thank you :-)
The thing I want to tell you about is
meeting people through the Queer Archaeology Interest Group (QAIG) at the
conference. I must have met about 30 queer people and after I opened up about
some of my struggles in one of the panels, they introduced themselves, reached
out, and told me that they, these strangers, really care about and want to help
me. Between talking at the conference and going out for drinks last night,
there are about 25 people who I now feel comfortable around, around half of
which I now would actively identify as friends.
I kind of don’t even know where to start, but holy crap, I
feel about a million times less alone than I did before…and even what
loneliness I do still have (much of
which is related to being one of only a handful of trans people in the field)
is tempered by the knowledge that there is actually a large group of people who
can totally recognize me and my struggles and truly want to help.
On Saturday night, a number of the QAIG members went to a
number of the queer bars and clubs in San Francisco to go drinking and dancing.
It. Was. Amazing. It was surreal. And I totally felt accepted. For a number of
rather complex reasons, I presented pretty femme most of my time at the
conference and while out dancing with the QAIG, for the first time ever, I felt
entirely comfortable being and acting feminine and I didn’t feel like I was
doing any imitating. I was just being
me. If anyone in QAIG ever reads this, I just want to say thank you. I no
longer feel alone. And that is no small thing. For the first time ever, I don’t
feel like a weird outsider in both queer and non-queer settings. I have a
place. I am totally queer and I don’t think anyone would dispute that, haha.
There will be rough times in the future, but overall, things are looking up.
:-)
