But Wait.... The Doom!

So the universe actually listened, I've spent a few weeks being cuddled by my gorgeous friend, girlfriend now actually. 

I've also been sick with the longest flu I've ever had, but she's been taking care of me and I've been trying to take care of her.  Which has been so nice, I'm used to struggling on my own. 

Theres definitely still part of me that's waiting for some inevitable doom, like when and how will this niceness be taken from me... 

Will she panic and run away, will our varying traumas and mental health issues drive us apart, will her parents kidnap her and throw her in conversion therapy.... She has a tendency to catastrophize a bit, but what she doesn't realise is I do too.  I am just quieter about it and hope for the best.

We are planning on moving in together soon, but in the mean time we are trapped in this weird limbo where she's living out of suitcases and between my bedroom and our friends house. 

I know it wears on her a lot, and I wish I could fix it all for us. 

So anyway, that's the update, I'm simultaneously over the moon and kinda stressed.   So hey universe, for your second miracle can you find a way to get us our own little nest. 

Love, 

Abigail 

Anxiety... but make it casual

I can't believe I haven't posted since January, I've wanted to so many times and just couldn't quite bring myself to write.

Anyone who has been following along knows that I've been really lonely and more than a little bit anxious about actually getting intimate with people.  

Sure, I fall in love so fast and so hard at times.. It's usually just me being hopeful that I mean as much to them as they mean to me. 

Lots of the time it's really confusing feeling like a really strong attraction that might be best friends, platonic soulmates, or future wife.... I tend to only really feel physical attraction long after I've decided I like a person's soul.

Anyway.... So all the romantic goo Abigail aside, I met a girl who is probably the most sexually liberated human I know.  Its a little intimidating even if I always considered myself pretty open minded. 

We got on, would hang out drinking, just bonding time... When she springs me with the "hey do you wanna have some zero commitment sex?"

It had been like six or seven years, and I feel really safe and understood by her, so I said yes.  And it was really fun, helped kill some of my anxiety about how things would work now and it was just really nice to feel wanted in that way again. 

We only had that one night though, it's not going to be a regular thing.  And it's actually really frustrating.  When you've gone that long you've just kinda given up on wanting it anymore.  You crave intimacy more. 

So suddenly I'm like dammit I want more.... 

I never even thought I was capable of unemotional unattached sex, so it's been a complex time in my head... Like I can see the appeal, it was really nice, but it wasn't meaningful and I feel like I betrayed my own profound longing for actual love. 

I don't like the idea that I could start accepting less than I want. 

But I'm also really tired of being alone and wanting more than I'll ever get from people, how many times can I end up hopelessly infatuated and hurt.  If there's a limit to that I must be getting close. Maybe occasional casual stuff could be enough to keep me happy. 

Right now, I've been spending lots of time with a girl I adore... And as usual I already know it wouldn't work.  She's not looking to date, she's pretty deep in no strings mode and has her own things to deal with. 

But it doesn't stop those smitten sighs of wishing it could, that somehow I'd be the right person and the choice. 

I'm so good at finding the people who can almost love me.  

Anyway that was the kinda core big thoughts lately.... Aside that I lost one of my best friends and don't even know why, I'm just being aggressively ghosted, and that's really hurt. 

My health is still in the gutter with no signs of ever getting better, which means I can't work, which means I can't escape this town and find some trans friendly community elsewhere. 

It's all a bit bleak and depressing honestly. 

But I keep giving tomorrow the chance to surprise me.  

Go Where The Love Is

I've spent so many years either running away after heart breaks or running to wherever I think the love might be.  Just desperately trying to find where I belong in the world.

And I've wasted years of my life waiting to see if things would work out.

Right now I'm living back home and even though I have lots of friends here, I still feel lonely so much of the time. 

When I go out for a night out, its all side eyed glares and uncomfortable, if I dare to install Tinder it's the same four butch lesbians and couples looking for thirds. 

It's really hard being a demisexual in a small town, I bond with people hard, I fall in love, and then I end up sad they don't feel the same way.  I'm never as special to people as they are to me. 

So maybe it's time to repeat the cycle, pack everything up, and go where the love is. Or at the very least the possibility of finding it.

Where there are other LGBTQIA people, where i could feel less like some kind of alien exhibit for people to be curious about. 

I just don't know where that is yet.

Broken Hearted

I'm always broken hearted in one way or another, but as it turns out this time it's quite literally.

I have been feeling like there was something wrong for years really, I'd get a racing heart rate and out of breath doing the simplest things, and I have suffered extreme fatigue for most of my life. 

But this week I went to work and just felt awful, the fatigue was overwhelming. I felt faint, dizzy, headachey, and just all round terrible.

So I decided to go to the ER, and at least initially they gave me the impression they thought I was wasting their time, until they connected me to EKG. 

Probably the first time I've been all the way topless in front of anyone after transition, and it's a bunch of doctors and nurses getting really rough with my boobs, that was pretty violating.

My heart has been beating fast for years, anything from 100-150 while resting.  In the ER it topped out at 174 and all the doctors and nurses came running.  I definitely felt like I might pass out but they kept asking if i had chest pain, could I hear them, am I okay.... Which just panicked me more. They gave me beta blockers to slow me back down, and a bunch of IV fluids and stuff.  So thankfully I actually went to hospital not a GP as a casual patient. 

If I'd gone home and ignored it, I might not be here right now. 

My diagnosis is Atrial Fibrillation which basically means my heart gets trapped in a bad rhythm and beats far too fast.  Its been all over my family and killed my grandmother, and definitely didn't help my father's case. 

So I'm not sure if I mentioned it here but I've had the weirdest sense of impending doom for ages now, and this just feels like the beginning to me.

So the next step is to see a cardiologist for an echo cardiogram and possibly an MRI and CT scan of my chest, to see if there are any surgical procedures that might help, and how bad the damage has been.

And here's the hard part right, this thing fucks over healthy people pretty effectively. 

But I have an extensive history of drug use, a lot of which are reasonably cardio toxic, I've probably snorted my own body weight in stimulants in my lifetime, I've smoked most of my life, I've had more than a few bottles of wine, and frankly I eat like shit a lot of the time.

So I'm really scared of what those scans are going to say, the impending doom just feels like it's starting not gone. And I'm worried about them finding other things wrong in this process. 

These meds also seem to make my back pain astronomically worse, I've been in crying pain all morning. So that's another ER trip probably. 

On top of all of this I'm still having bursts of tachycardia (bpm over 100 while resting) and every time that happens I worry that maybe I'll get unlucky, maybe I'll just die doing something stupid at work or lying in my bed. Because let's face it they're the only two places I ever am anymore.

I'm scared it could all be over randomly, and I'll never be able to find my person, I'll never get to finish any of my writing, I'll never get to tell everyone I love them, I'll never get to show off the more complete version of me. 

And I cry.  I'm pre mourning myself which probably feels overly dramatic to some of you.  But I'm really really scared. Every twinge in my chest, feeling the pulse in my legs if they touch while I sleep, every headache and fluttery beat of my heart.... Just scares me.

And I know I'm completely powerless against any of it, so if it happens, the people I love should probably already know it.  I love you. 

Anti-Numb Emotional Rebound

Whenever I need to deal with anything emotionally hard I have a tendency to get kinda clinical, like if I just focus on all the things I need to do to establish my emotional safety then I can avoid actually feeling whats hurting me.

I busy myself with the administration of it all, and then comes the crash.  The numb automatic mode runs out, and I kinda disintegrate. 

Today was the first day I've actually stopped and felt how hard it is to not have that person I share everything with, and realize it's going to be awhile before I have someone like that again.  It's not about second guessing my decision, it's more like finally actually mourning that loss. I definitely miss her. 

So what do I do during the emotional rebound, well I cleaned my room, did my laundry, made my bed, put on a face mask and a candle, and cried.

Basically again I kept my brain busy as long as I could on other tasks... And then I ran out of things to do.

I doubt this is helpful to anyone else, but I kinda wanted to document the thoughts, and the responses, maybe it'll help me next time I break my own heart.  Because let's face it, I'll never stop feeling this much, loving this hard, and probably getting hurt more.

Anyway, here's to the people we loved and lost, the people we've yet to love, and to the lonely broken hearts. 

Love,

Abigail 

Clean Slates

So basically this is the end and the beginning in a lot of ways, I deactivated my personal Facebook account last night after getting my backups downloaded, and that decision was mostly just around the kinds of feelings and moods that Facebook tended to cause.

As a transgender person we tend to see a lot of comments on Facebook which specifically treat us as less than the general population, we are discussed in terms of legislation over our bodies, our private lives, our ability to choose for ourselves.  A lot of those comments treat us as a problem to be solved rather than as individuals with lives, loves, friends and family, passions and dreams.

Its the same kind of arguments against people of other races we've seen before, the same arguments we saw on gay marriage and almost every other horrible period of human history where a minority suffered violence at the hands of bigots.

So every day, at LEAST once or twice a day I would see some comment which basically said I should die, or that I shouldn't be allowed to exist as a transgender person, that I'm somehow mentally ill and need to be cured or killed.  It gets really draining, even with all the positive posts celebrating being trans that I also see... for every hundred positive posts it only takes one of those spiteful people to really make me spiral.

And if you've been keeping up on all my other posts, it was also a place where I was constantly reminded of how much I have been hurting about the girl I mentioned, its really hard to try and move on if you are seeing them even virtually everywhere you go.

So here we are, its digital detox time, I figure I will try and write a lot more on this blog which should result in better content here that's a little more detailed than I could ordinarily get away with on Facebook, there will be less editing, and of course without all the memes and foolishness hopefully it will be easier to take it all a bit more seriously.

I think because I tend to be quite light hearted and silly, people tend to see me as somehow incapable of seriousness or that my feelings are never really hurt.  Hopefully this post should clarify, that I actually hurt an awful lot of the time, and the seriousness definitely happens I just haven't always been the best at showing it.  It's much easier to laugh than cry.

The other thing I am looking forward to is having direct conversations with people more often, rather than people relying on my ridiculous levels of spam on Facebook to count as keeping up with me, I hope they'll take a few minutes to actually talk to me occasionally.

I love my people, its going to be a strange and difficult thing to deliberately distance myself like this, but I really hope it will actually make me a better friend with more emotional energy to play with.

Lots of love,
Abigail

Emotional Chew Toy

So you think someone loves you, but really you're just their emotional chew toy, lots of fun when they want to play, that is until you fall to pieces.

I feel like shit, and I hate the level of gaslighting involved.  The same girl who tells me all the ways she loves me and wishes we'd worked out just a few weeks ago, and now because I want it to happen, or not, I'm treated like a lunatic and like it's all in my head. 

It's just really disappointing to be treated that way by someone you thought cared. 

But it's done, I made the healthy choice, and here I am just feeling unsure where to from here.  I'm trying really hard to stay the same loving optimist I always am, but it's hard. 

There's a sense of relief too though, it's over finally. 

The Follow On

I guess it does actually all catch up, snippets of human affection from people who you can't be with actually aren't enough.  Sometimes its just safer to stop hoping and hurting yourself waiting for it to last more than a night at a time.

And I know I deserve better than that kind of thing, but its been well over a decade, and nobody has put their hand up for that particular task.  The loneliness is real, the anxiety is also real.

My last real relationship was in 2010, and it was a nice simplistic hetero situation, I have no idea how to find whatever I need to find now.  I am basically looking for that pan/bi/lesbian needle in the haystack that will love me for me, and I am trying to find it in some of the smallest most narrow minded places in New Zealand... it's actually really hard when all my friends are telling me I deserve better, or I will one day find the most amazing person to be with.  I am 43... being real there are not that many awesome years left to enjoy the early parts of dating people, traveling, adventuring.  At what point does it actually get too late to start over.

I cry at night sometimes, for the girl I wish I could be with, for the girl I wish I was, but mostly I cry because I want to matter enough to somebody again that I am where they want to be.

Waiting for happiness

It seems really silly to put your life on hold for some potential future happiness that might never come, if it were any one of my friends I'd tell them to stop being so stupid. 

But that's exactly what I keep doing really, because I love someone that just can't happen, and in my head I feel like I'd rather wait forever for that than try find something similar with someone else. 

It just seems so unlikely, I have basically loved this girl since we were dumb kids, and it keeps almost working out but not quite. 

And sure I should take that as a sign, or take my own advice about not being with people who need to he convinced to be with you. 

But it's just so different, and nice just enough of the time that it's hard to forget.

Anyway just needed to do the 3:15am vent, because of all my dumb feelings. 

Intangible Thoughts

I don't know if anyone has ever noticed but quite often I'll write a blog post as a way to try and process something, and then a few hours later delete it because frankly a lot of the time I feel stupid as a result.

I have all of these intense feelings that feel like ghosts, they're never quite all the way there, but I feel their presence. 

Most of those posts lately are just me being disappointed about things not working out the way my foolish heart would prefer. 

And it just feels gratuitous, life's not like a movie, you can't expect it to work out just because that's what happens when you love someone.  Reality is messier. 

I have started my course finally, and it's going to occupy rather a lot of my time, so hopefully it will be a much needed distraction from my own thoughts. 

The work is interesting, and I'm really looking forward to it. 

Love,

Abigail 

How To Be Attracted to Everyone

Happy New Year everyone! 

I really hope that you have had a most amazing festive season, and that you haven't found yourself in the numerous highly strange situations that I have.

So lets go back, to just a little before Christmas time, I'm just a feisty lady living the best life I can manage, and have somehow found myself in love with one of my closest friends, the same friend I've loved for years.  

It's just a crazy situation, and realistically can only end a few different ways, most of them not great.

But you know me... I am an optimist, Queen of the Longshot, and I like to believe that love is always worth having.

However, you also know that this is my blog... where things are never quite as simple as they should be.

Much as I really thought it might end up happening someday, and various pieces of evidence had hinted that I wasn't completely insane to think so, I finally had "the talk" about it with her.

And she told me that it couldn't ever happen for various reasons, it really hurt because she had decided all of these things without ever talking to me.  

I am a flexible lady, I adapt to the situation always, if I knew there were requirements I probably could have met them you know? 

But I hate the idea that I would need to convince anyone to date me, or talk them into it.

So as much as the no hurts... she is still one of the most precious people in my life, we talk about everything all the time, and I can't ever lose that.  

So I let myself be sad for a few days, and now I need to start thinking about dating again.

I had basically been emotionally unavailable to anyone else for quite a long time just because I had that tiny shred of hope that someday her and I would find a way to make it work.

And that brings us to New Years, I volunteered at a music festival and set off with a positive attitude about meeting new people.

It was all fantastic bonding time with my good friends, really good discussions with a lot of new people, and of course some peculiar shenanigans along the way that I am not quite ready to write about.

But what honestly surprised me the most, was the tail end... the after party, the bonding over food with the other volunteers, and the fact that I actually found one of those boys...

The ones I have talked about on Facebook whenever people have asked me about my sexual preferences, that only existed theoretically up until this point. 

The 0.0001% of boys I am attracted to.

He's just a gorgeous fun man to be around, and I found myself quite shocked to be so instantly smitten by him.

So we have spent a few days hanging out, and it has been really nice, I am just assuming at this point that we will be best friends forever.  

If you are my friend on Facebook you have probably seen my post about Alterous Attraction, where you could either love someone, date someone, fuck someone, or be their best friend just as easily, and whichever one happens you'll be totally happy.  That's basically where I am at with him.

And as if that wasn't enough, I installed Tinder just to see exactly how bad it would be in my town...

I matched with a girl, and we exchanged a few messages, but I really don't think my lifestyle and attitudes are going to match hers.  

I am quite open about the kinds of silliness I get up to, and I don't think she would approve at all.

But it IS nice to get the validation of someone wanting to talk to you, that you are theoretically considered a viable romantic interest.  And that made me feel pretty happy actually.

Where does that leave me.... honestly I have no clue, and I don't even care.

I'll just keep being me, and hopefully at some point somebody will just see me and think "That peculiar lady is fucking gorgeous and I want her"

If that person is you, be incredibly direct and just tell me, because apparently I can't read intentions.

So for now, that's it... its time to start getting organised for my study this year, to take my life a little more seriously, and basically switch into productive mode for awhile again.

My holidays have been crazy, but my year needs to be much more calm.

Love you all,

Abigail

Mourning and Tranquility

One of the hardest things about transition is the mourning, you mourn for the life you wish you had growing up, you wish you'd had those formative years in the gender you know you are.
You mourn for aspects of the life you had as well, I personally feel sick whenever I see my old name on things these days, but thats not to say it was all bad.

Watching old concerts and things tonight, and remembering all the amazing women I was with at the times that I saw them, I miss being loved, I miss being able to share things with somebody else, I guess im mourning the romantic side of myself that I have basically buried for the past decade.

And then on top of all of this I am also mourning the life I could have had if I had been diagnosed with ADHD much sooner, how much easier things could have been, how less frustrated I would have been, and how less likely I would have been to drown everything in drugs for so long.

Much as I am super sorrowful tonight, in general lately I have been feeling the best I have without hard drugs in my life.  Sure my ADHD meds do have a little dopamine impact, but its beyond that, its the clarity I feel, the certainness about things, and combine that with the steady progress hormones have had on just making me feel at home in my own skin and its a really unique feeling.

I guess this is how normal well balanced individuals feel most of the time.

A month and a half to go... and then I can see other human beings again, a friend recommended getting a massage and I think I am going to have to, if only for some human contact in a relaxing context.

For tonight though, I am just going to drink in the nostalgia, I am going to let myself be sad for all of the people I ever loved and who I never knew how to love properly at the time.
As a human being I feel like I have grown enough for ten life times in the past two years.

Anyway, just wanted to note this.

Love,
Abigail

Intimacy

For the past year or so I have been really struggling with intimacy, there were times a decade or so ago where most people would have said that I was inappropriately affectionate.
But I haven't really dated or had anyone touch me in years now, and the last girlfriend I had to break up with because the pressure to be intimate was a bit much.

But its really starting to bother me because I do miss personal contact, and sharing my life with somebody else, and all of those other things that come with being in a relationship.
I miss emotional intimacy more than physical intimacy I guess you could say, but thats not to say I am completely anti physical, I just need there to be enough emotional first.

I get anxious even thinking about it though, all the things I used to love the most about the start of a relationship scare the shit out of me now, those first awkward conversations and the first few times you touch one another used to be so exciting.

I really hope I can work this stuff out sometime soon.

I just needed to get this out.

Love,
Abigail

UPDATE: fuck okay I would be kinda negligent if I didn't update this a bit after my last weeks owch fest, so basically on my way to go to court I also stopped to visit one of my close friends and stay a few nights with her.  And it was seriously the nicest thing I had felt in literally years, just being that close to another human being, spending time around someone, sharing in life.
But the double edged knife of suck that we all kinda know is coming, is that I have had the biggest crush on her since the day I met her, so for me it actually kinda hurt, because it was like this amazing preview of what that life would be like.  And so here I am again at the end of that, just feeling kinda empty, don't know whether I should talk to her or not, don't even know how to have those kinds of conversations anymore.  I am beyond out of practice at these things, all I know is I really really miss feeling loved.

Modern Relationships

I just wanted to write something about human contact, and the people who mean something to us, there are an awful lot of posts online about how technology is ruining our ability to be empathetic or our genuine human contact, and I really take offense at that.

In my lifetime I have met some of the most exceptional human beings, I have been really lucky in that regard both in real life and online.
And maybe its not like that for everyone, but from my perspective if you meet someone who you can be yourself with, and who see's your damaged imperfect soul and loves it anyway, it shouldn't matter what they look like, where they are in the world, whether you have ever physically interacted.

The therapy of those deep personal conversations with people applies no matter who they are, there is nothing more blissful in life than sharing your deepest heartfelt feelings and thoughts with someone who not only listens and understands but enthusiastically encourages them.

If we somehow decided that only face to face interactions like those counted, we would have far fewer of them.

In New Zealand where I am now, I can sit under the stars on a freezing southern night with a group of my friends discussing our place in the universe, and how we can be better people, and its beautiful and social and I bask in those blissful nights.

But I feel exactly the same way when I am talking to my girls in Kentucky who love me like a sister, when my gorgeous friend in LA tells me that I am a beautiful precious soul, my grumpy trans friend from the wilderness of Washington state, or when the friends I made in Europe are telling me they miss me. 

I feel amazing no matter how I interact with people, and lots of them I have never met, and I may never meet given my current legal predicament.

As far as intimate relationships online go, I have had a few, and emotionally they were probably more fulfilling than my real life relationships.  But they will never be the same as real life, you need physical intimacy and closeness for things to really progress.  But it's every bit as easy to be infatuated and fall deeply in love with someones soul online.  Dangerous as that is.

I do miss being loved and touched by people, I have been really lucky to have loved and been loved by some beautiful women in my life.  And I wish I'd tried harder to hold onto a few.
But by not holding on, I am able to be me now, so now I just need to get myself to a point that I feel like I can date again as me.  And hope I have that feeling again.

Ugh... so there we go... vent over.

I love my people, I guess is my point, so thank you for being a part of my life.

Love...

One of the things I really struggled with when I was considering letting people know that I was transgender was the fact that it would completely change how I date.  And I think it's worth talking about really, it might help dispel some of the illusions that people have that telling people you are transgender is somehow just a phase or an attention seeking behavior.  On YouTube I have seen numerous comments about people being "transtrenders" which is probably an entire post on its own really.

But honestly, we are voluntarily reducing our dating options massively, that's no small life choice entered into easily.  OR we become somebodies sexual fetish which at least for me will never work.

So LOVE.... My entire life I was I guess a heterosexual man from the outside worlds perspective, and of course I was always a very sensitive soul who needed to find exactly the right types of lady to be with, all of my relationships were quite monogamous and intense.  And I had a desperate need to be loved.

When I moved to Germany it was at least partially because I had just undergone a fairly intense breakup and that is my typical response to fairly intense breakups, which is probably a pretty self destructive response but I am nothing if not a slave to my very intense emotional responses to things.
So there I was in a foreign country where I didn't speak the language, and my dating options were quite limited, I got very used to living on my own for the first time in my adult life.  And... well I feel like I have gotten stuck there really.  Like including someone else at this point would feel really strange.

And then of course it was in Germany that I first labelled myself transgender, which has somewhat changed my attitude towards dating.  I feel like it would be quite unfair to fall in love with someone and then expect them to understand my wanting to transition.  And finding someone who would be okay with it just seems so daunting.

But I have also realized recently that I deeply miss that level of affection with other people, I tend to fall in love with anyone who shows me any form of kindness at all, and that is hard too.  It makes it really difficult to determine whether I actually feel something for these people or if it is just an intense overreaction to something that I have neglected for so long.  But having experienced a few moments that were similar enough to being in a relationship really showed me how much I intensely miss those feelings, and that was just with one of my incredibly good friends.

I really want to be loved again, but I am also keenly aware that the people I have loved have quite often been the reason for me to stay firmly in the closet about who I am.  Because my need to be loved overruled my need to be me, and I just can't do that to myself anymore.  So I think I need to find some very timid way to step a toe back in the pool, find some regular affection where there is very minimal pressure, and not immediately dive headfirst in expecting it to be the last relationship of my life as I normally would.

It's a really strange position to find myself in, and I just wanted to document it, in case anyone else is feeling this way too.  And if anybody has any fantastic suggestions to resolve this, please do let me know.

And of course if that job description sounds like something you might be interested in (affection without commitment, a partner who will someday be a woman, and probably some complex emotional scenarios) then definitely let me know, and also you should probably seek some mental health advice because those would be some weird things to find appealing hehe.