Quick Mid-May Life Update

I’ve now been in Oakland for just over two weeks and holy crap has it been crazy. With the exception of one, maybe two nights, I’ve been out doing social things every single night. Like essentially all the time I used to use reading, I now get to spend with friends. Once result of this is that it is way easier to build great friendships really quickly. I’ve met a number of people here, about a dozen of which I might call friends, but I’ve found maybe two best friends…

I’ve mentioned L before. She’s a queer archaeologist who I met at QAIG and who lives in Oakland. She’s pretty “masculine of center” as she likes to call herself. She’s got me playing softball…in an all-women league!!! Which is super awesome. And no, my “bigger muscles” (which are quickly going away from hormones) do not really give me much of an advantage. She also takes me to all of the lesbian/queer dance parties, which is SUPER awesome, haha. In fact, tonight we are going to one of the big regular queer girl parties in San Francisco. I am so excited! I am slowly feeling more and more comfortable identifying as a woman and as a lesbian and much of that is because of L. She listens to all of my crap and she listens closely and really thinks about it. In many ways, L has been a huge hub of me also meeting other friends. I could not thank her enough and I cannot imagine my time here without her!

My other best friend here, S, is a little older (just over 30), but doesn’t at all look it. She is married, but both her and her husband are incredibly social. S struggles with a lot of the same mental/emotional stuff as me and even though we are in very different places in life and are very different in that respect, our brains work in much the same way and after just hanging out once, we seemed to have a very intimate connection…it’s actually almost weird how quickly we attached to each other. S is decently feminine, so she is SO great to go shopping with and talk about/do all of the stereotypical “girly” things that I have missed from my life growing up as a guy. Actually, I am meeting S tonight to hang out with her before the party (she is Bi and is coming too!). Just the second night we hung out (a week ago!), she really showed that she cared about me. And when it happened, it struck me how crappy grad school can be for developing really deep friendships (not that it doesn’t happen)…after all, you have SO much time and effort that you HAVE to spend on school and not yourself…much less on friends. I also do have a tiny crush on S, but I legitimately have a crush on a few of my friends here, haha. I’ve mostly been meeting women here and along with my crappy compartmentalization right now, the line between platonic and romantic feelings has been blurred beyond recognition. Which is weird. But because I have a few crushes right now, it is pretty easy to not let any of them (well maybe one) get too strong.

I got a sewing machine and have already started altering clothes to help save me money. I got this awesome denim jacket for 80% off at banana republic, but it doesn’t have any pockets! So I put some in today :-) It looks the tiniest bit jenky, but that’s not atypical for my stuff, haha.

Overall, I’ve been finding that I want to identify closer and closer to being just a trans-woman (rather than something in between). Just the other day, I went to a fabric store with L, and I presented somewhat masculine (but not as a guy…just with a button-up, guy vest, and no wig) and after being called “he” and “sir,” I literally got dizzy. My gender dysphoria seriously kicked in and I just want to change and be identified as “she/’her.” And now, whenever I go out socially, I always want to first meet them as femme as possible. It’s too early to really understand it, but I have a feeling that my increasing femininity was always there, but was harder to access surrounded by so many people who knew guy-me. Here I get a fresh start.

Obviously life is complicated and there is other stuff going on, but these seemed like all of the important points to understanding where I am in life now. :-)

The Almost-Impossible Task of Calling For Help, Part of Why I am/was Suicidal: Part 1

Super-Corny Life Soundtrack Suggestion: Breakeven-The Script

This post is kind of difficult to write, but it’s been on my mind a lot, so it seemed worth putting out there. I can’t speak for anyone else, but for most of my life, I always imagined that as long as you have friends and family (or any real kind of support network), all you have to do when you need help is to ask for it. I wouldn’t say that I was entirely wrong, but holy shit, it is nowhere near that simple…

If you’ve kept up with my posts, you know that I am (or at least I was) dealing with suicidal thoughts. Well, suicidal thoughts are really just the final straw (right?! I mean if you go that route, suicidal thoughts seem like they would be pretty near the end of that path). There are a million things that happened that helped bring me to that place. I don’t feel ready to discuss most of them, so I need you to trust me; I have dealt with a lot of rough shit, both internally and with other people, since I started transitioning. It’s been a very bumpy ride. I’ve needed (and gotten!) SO much help. But often I end up getting that help a little late and not quite in the way I need, because actually calling for help is really difficult. It kind of feels like you are drowning in a pool and your friends are 5 feet away from you, standing on the side, but they can’t hear or see a single bit of your struggle until you use every single last bit of energy to make a blood-curdling scream, which they hear…but just barely.

The first, and probably largest obstacle is that you begin to doubt yourself and whether you actually need help. Right now, I am not stable. I have mood swings, some of which can send me into an awful depression. I freak out about tiny things. Some big things somehow don’t bother me. I don’t even vaguely know what’s going with myself. I can’t predict my thoughts, emotions, and the scariest of all, sometimes my actions. So…I don’t trust myself. If I get into a non-academic disagreement with a friend, before we even hash out all of the arguments, I just assume they are right and I am wrong. It’s actually incredibly strange to so quickly dismiss your own thoughts and beliefs, because you know there is a good chance you’ll end up disagreeing with yourself in just an hour or so, but it seems like the most logical thing to do.

A closely related issue is that because I don’t trust myself, combined with huge gender-related personality changes and slow psychological effects of HRT (I think), I don’t really get angry anymore. I just beat myself up. If a friend does something that would make most people angry, I kind of just take it and assume that I did something to deserve it. I actually do like the way I relate with people more now than before. I don’t fight. No one really gets mad at me. I’m not making any enemies…and I’m not further pushing away friends I’ve already pushed away. But over time, all the beating myself up left (and leaves) bruises and I just got exhausted. Because I had school and always had a deadline in front of me to make me stress out and people around to distract me (not always in positive ways), I was able to bury my pain and exhaustion and push on like the good soldier I was trying to be. But then…last quarter ended. Spring Break started. No more deadlines. Everyone left town. No more people to distract me. It was just me. And everything that’s happened. What do I even do from there?

That’s when I started my very quick drop into depression and self-loathing that brought me to first call out for help. One day, I kind of spiraled. A million thoughts rushed through my head. I couldn’t stop them. Most of them were pretty negative. I couldn’t stop crying. I had actually been about to start an appointment with my therapist, when she accidentally popped the balloon of shittiness that had been slowly and then quickly inflating over quite some time. I literally ran out crying with only one memorable thought: “I just want to go to my room. I’ll feel safe there.” So I drove home (not a great decision). The thoughts just kept coming and I just wanted them to stop. I wanted to stop thinking. I couldn’t take it anymore. And the irony is that this barrage of thoughts essentially made it so I couldn’t think. I could just freak out.

So if I can’t trust myself and my thoughts, if I start to freak out, what the fuck do I do with that? In an hour, I might be fine. On the other hand, I could be spiraling out of control all day…all week. But even if I do spiral out of control for a week, do I actually need help or am I somehow psyching myself out and convincing myself there is something wrong with me? I don’t trust myself, so it almost seems more likely that I am freaking out over nothing.

Then, I of course get afraid of becoming the girl who called wolf, for two reasons actually. First, if I am fine and am just driving myself crazy, if I go to my friends with this, specifically saying that I really need help, A. what will they think of me? And B. what if I actually do need their help in the future? Second, even if I am actually having real problems, who is to say that this is anywhere near the last or worst of them? I’ve never been in this place before. How bad does it get? How could I possibly know how that feels, even if I reach that point?! After all, it could always get worse. So if I go to friends now, what will happen? Will they just get fed up with me? Will it make it less likely they will help me in the future if and when I need even more help?

I’ve brought up this issue before and across the board, almost everyone has said something to the effect of “Well if they are real friends, it doesn’t matter…they will be there and they will want to be there for you in that situation, even if you aren’t sure what is going on.” In fact, on the older side, prior to coming out, I absolutely would (and probably did) say the exact same thing. The problem is…it’s never that simple. We don’t live in vacuums where friends just sit in their houses unless you are hanging out with them (I have met people who seem to believe this is the case, but it doesn’t seem to make it any more true). People have lives, and in the case of my friends, they have the exact same type of awfully stressful lives as I do. So I can’t blame them if they need to take care of themselves and their work.

Also, we can define the word “friend” however we want, but what advice-givers tend to forget is that there are a bunch of different types of friends. Do you have a friend who is incredibly fun to hang out with, but you probably wouldn’t want to have a deep life talk with them? Or even you might, but they wouldn’t want to have a deep life talk with you? You probably do. Most of us do. Are those people somehow then not friends? No. Not every friend will be your closest confidant.

So then is it possible to have a number of close friends, but not actually one who is willing/able to help in the way that you need? Fuck yes it is. That being said, I wasn’t in that position. But I had this awful anxiety that I already had pushed so many people away (generally by being uber-selfish as I struggled during the early stages of my transition)…or that I might push people away in the future, that I was almost paralyzed by anxiety. You definitely should recognize that I do have amazing support from my close friends…They have put up with so much from me and each been there…but in their own way. Plus I know that of I was majorly injured or something, they would make sure I got to the hospital.

However, I did push away one friend with a cry for help. ..

And here is where you might get to step a little into the mind of an unstable transitioning transgender 20-something…

With absolutely no intention of doing so, in an early cry for help, I accidentally pushed one of my friends away. I of course apologized a dozen times, but because my self-confidence is so low right now that I apologize non-stop, I fear that my apologies are (somehow) less meaningful. It sucks. But I pulled one of her triggers and she realized that being around me was a negative impact on her (oh god, the irony…) Then when I more explicitly called out again for help, this friend wasn’t there. Something very similar happened with another friend (I was not too proud to call [or text] multiple people). I pushed her away by unloading about myself too much and then she didn’t want to/feel comfortable coming to my aid (at least I think). Honestly, I’m still really confused about what happened, but when I was in the worst of it, I didn’t understand her point of view much at all. After I put out my (vague) call for help and she didn’t answer (positively), in desperation, I specifically told them about my suicidal feelings. But then (me still not seeing what they were going through), they still didn’t answer. And let me tell you, when you tell two people (who are two of your closer confidants) that you are suicidal, and they don’t even give you an “I’d miss you,” it feels kinda shitty :-(

These events had two huge effects. First, not only were these friends (I think) fed up with me, but whenever I thought about them, I could not help but remind myself “They would not care if you killed yourself.” And generally, starting about three days after I first told them I was suicidal, I would burst into tears multiple times per day thinking about it.. Eventually, that thought would lead into “If two of your closest friends wouldn’t care if you died, other people definitely wouldn’t!” Remember, I’m not stable right now. The second effect was that just seeing these friends tore me apart inside. I would physically feel my heart drop in my chest and all of my self-doubts would flood into my head. It was bad. So, I learned to avoid them. However, when people are in your department/circle of friends, such a task is pretty difficult. So…I either left social situations when they showed up, or I stayed and just tried to fight against the flood of thoughts and feelings swirling in my head.

If you couldn’t tell, another huge issue I am having right now is that I have somehow lost my ability to compartmentalize. That is a-whole-nother discussion. But regardless, “just not thinking about it,” just did not work anymore, no matter how many friends who told me I just had to try harder.

Ok, I need to stop the story here. A lot more stuff happened, both in Santa Barbara, and here in the Bay Area, but a lot of it is so recent, yet far enough away that I am no longer distressed about it (and don’t need to write about it), so I don’t have much perspective right now and need to wait a little. I will end with three points though.

1.Skipping to the end…If you are suicidal or in a similar situation to this, go to your friends, sure, but they should NOT be your first nor your only call. CALL A MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONAL or A SUICIDE HOTLINE. Friends may mean the absolutely best, but only about 25% of people (in my experience) have enough empathy or their own experience to actually help you. If you call out to one of the 75% of people who don’t understand, it may end up making things WAY worse. Call. A. Professional.

2. I was kind of hard on some of my friends. But right now, I honestly feel very lucky to have the friends I do. In fact, the ones who I got particularly hurt by in this post are the same ones who have been there for me a million times before. They are definitely friends and they are definitely good friends…They may just not be the right kind of friend to help in certain situations.

Oh…Plus I am uber biased. Don’t listen to me. I don’t even listen to myself! Haha

3.I know I talked about some rough stuff. But I am honestly good right now. I’ve met one seriously AMAZING friend here in the Bay Area and am slowly making other ones. I don’t feel lonely and I don’t feel stressed. Things are going to get better. And I am going to be ok :-)