Halfway

I haven't written anything personal in ages, the pressure of writing so much academically has been so draining.  

My best friend in class left, and that actually messed with me a lot more than I thought it would, she was escaping a potentially unsafe situation so I had to be understanding, but she was a great motivator to study and a kind ear for my day to day chats.

And then on top of that I've had ridiculous fatigue issues again so I probably need to go and get some blood removed.  That usually helps. 

But I have hung in there, I'm half way through, and we start our first placement soon.  I still don't know where mine will be, but it's exciting.

In other news, I asked a girl out, she didn't say yes but she said no in the nicest way possible. And it was actually huge for me to be that vulnerable again, it had been years.

Sometimes we just need to take leaps of faith and forget all the hurt. 

I might submit some writing to a contest. There's a decent prize, and it'd help me so much.

What else, hormones and meds are nice and stable, I have some breast growth again which is nice.

I also spoke with a psychiatrist recently to get approval for surgery, during that interview she told me I could actually get breast augmentation for free through the nearby hospital so I am now on the waiting list for that.  She is also going to give me letters to update my gender marker on my birth certificate and to give to surgeons overseas for my face and genital surgeries. 

Things are moving ahead, and I need to remind myself of all of this on the days where I feel stuck and aimless.

So there you have it, the key things that happened in my life for the past six months really.

Lots of love,

Abigail 

Whats In A Name?

It's interesting to watch how people react to changing a name and pronouns, there are lots of people now who actually met me as Abigail, and I actually love hanging out with them because to them there was never anything else.  They always get things right.

That's not to say of course that everyone else is failing, a lot of my closest people have actually done really well at adapting to the change, when they slip they correct themselves even when I haven't even noticed it.

But the ones who don't, I have no idea how to encourage them to do better without sounding like a massive bitch.  There are a few people who basically just loved my old name and don't want to stop using it even though they know it actively hurts me to hear it.

And some others who I think will always refer to me as he/him, it's like a tiny little cut every time it happens, and some days it feels like I could just emotionally bleed to death.

So if you read this, and you care about me please always use Abigail/Abby and She/Her when referring to me, it legit makes me a happier human being.

Love,

Abigail

The Apocalypse Update

It's a really interesting time to be alive, we always knew that a modern day pandemic would happen but this is the closest we have ever actually been to the kind of apocalypse people dream of.
All we can really do is be extra careful about everything and hope we make it out the other side relatively unscathed.

But now everyone is staying at home, this gives me a sick little giggle, now everyone is on house arrest.  And I am an old expert at this at this point, if you need to know how to survive this scenario the most important thing is to actually spend some time getting to know yourself.

The first time I was in any real isolation was in a dodgy attic above some grumpy old Germans, of course I could still leave but that time was really where I defined myself and learned a lot.
And in the past six months, I have only left the house once a week, so I am very much used to this.

So what will I be doing with my quarantine time? I think I am going to actually start working on my voice training, makeup skills, and generally stop being such a grubby old swamp witch that lives in pyjamas.

One of my nieces friends came over tonight, she's young and trans, and it just was like rubbing my nose in the fact that I am a feral animal in comparison.  I mean sure I have 40 years of testosterone to fight which is by no means easy.  But I really should be using this downtime to better myself.

Oh one other thing I learned because I checked how much my Australian superannuation had lost because of the end of the world, is that I could actually apply to use it for surgery - there is precedent for that happening.  I would have to be willing to say that being transgender is a chronic mental health issue which is fucking ridiculous but I'd be willing to take that bullet for the ability to afford one of my many expensive surgeries.

And the last update I have is that I have finally been diagnosed with ADHD, and am taking an extended release variety of Ritalin now.  It has been night and day improvement to my mood and mental function.  So that's amazing.

Um I guess that's all, stay safe, stay healthy and have a wonderful apocalypse everyone.

love,
Abigail

So What Next?

I have finally been sentenced for my foolish drug importation escapades, so for the next nine months I am confined to my Mums house with an ankle bracelet on.  I can only leave to go to my regularly scheduled counselors etc

But my probation officer asked me to try and think of work I'd like to do, or courses I'd like to study, and any additional help I might need for mental health stuff.

And the problem is, right now I cant think of a damn thing...

My original plan was to study psychology and counselling so that I could basically start my own little private practice helping out the LGBTQIA people and their families, and maybe write a few books, start a cult yknow.., basically carve out a perfect little niche universe for myself.

But I never really gave any thought to how I would do any of that with a criminal record, its not that I CAN'T do it, its more that it adds a lot of extreme difficulty and delay to that.  And I still have to consider transition costs... how the hell am I going to come up with 100k now.

Like do I just say to hell with my altruistic side, and go back to I.T work, but then who would even hire me at this point.

I can absolutely understand why so many trans people end up turning to sex work, because I feel stupidly overwhelmed, trapped, and frustrated right now.

Anyway, I have 9 months to do SOMETHING with.... if you have any recommendations please do let me know.

Because I feel like I am going to go fucking crazy.

Gatekeeping in Mental Health

So today was one of those days that you hear about all the time, I was having a conversation with a psychiatrist to try and do something about my anxiety.

The guy was bonding with me over my IT/general nerd things and I thought everything was mostly going okay... and then he tells me that I am doing my transition "RIGHT" because I waited this long and these damn kids these days think they're transgender and have no idea, and that's why they all end up killing themselves.

It's SO hard to deal with that kind of situation because obviously I was there looking for help, and arguing is not the best way to achieve that.

So I basically just sat there gritting my teeth....

Honestly I WISH I had the option when I was young to do something about this sooner, but lots of people strenuously object to the idea of young people transitioning, so here's where I stand on it.

If your child/teen insists for an extended period of time that they are a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth, and they frequently talk to you about that and want your help, then you should listen to them.  Visit a child psychologist who specialises in gender diverse people, and READ, read everything you can.
If the time comes that your child wants to transition you can consider puberty blockers which basically prevent them from being forced through puberty and being affected by hormones they don't want and the physical effects of those.  And that buys them the time to make an informed decision for themselves as an adult.

I get that its scary.... but the alternative can be much scarier.
The idea that people are claiming to be transgender, genderfluid or nonbinary to be "cool" is really fucking silly, we don't choose this.  We are this.

Love your kids.  Talk to your kids.  Avoid bad mental health professionals.

Oh and I guess just to kinda finish that initial story, I was prescribed Escitalopram an SSRI to help with my anxiety.  Lets see how that goes over the next little while, fingers crossed.

Love,
Abigail

Dreams and Other Observations

One of the stranger things about being on hormones is the dreaming, if you have ever quit smoking you probably know the type of dream at least, intensely vivid and hyper real.
The past few weeks I have been somewhat depressed due to all of this legal stuff going on, but I find myself really drawn to my dreaming time.  I am staying asleep longer to cram more of them in, because even though some of them are a little scary they feel super real, and in my dreams I am still free to do anything at all.

In fact quite a few of them have involved debauchery at music festivals, or rampant drug use while racing around the Italian countryside in fast cars.... they're exciting, so I tend to want to see how they end.

The other strange development is that more often in my dreams I am so thoroughly feminine, it has been really nice to exist in a perfect scenario where I am just me, and don't have to think about all the icky real world things that need to happen to be myself.

Aside from the dreams, I have been slowly lightening my hair and next week I will be going to hopefully end up fully blonde, I have been lazer zapping myself to slowly remove body hair but god its such a horrible long process.  And I have yet to even start on voice training really, and that sucks because between my voice and my body hair they're the two things giving me the most dysphoria.

My legal woes look to be resolved soon, basically as soon as I get back from the Dunedin Winter Solstice party I will enter my guilty plea, and then we move on to sentencing which I am still quietly praying will be home detention... but I don't know, it could just as easily end up as 3 years in prison.
And because of all of that, and the fact that I won't have an income while I am serving whatever sentence I am given, I will also be starting a No Asset Procedure which is like one step removed from a full bankruptcy.  So just another way my life will be forever a bit harder.

Anyway, I guess thats all the updates I have... much as its mostly pretty grim, I am okay, I am going to be okay.

What Happened?

I haven't written anything here for months, and that isn't because I don't want to, it's because I am honestly not sure where to begin, and exactly how much legal risk I would be taking to do so.

And I am really writing now because I don't want to go into this too many times more for each new person I tell, and I want to get a little more to the heart of things than I have been in person, I have a nasty tendency to make light of serious situations so here is a much better place to get honest.

I went for a visit to Europe earlier this year, and when I returned I made the worst decision of my life and bought with me a schedule B restricted substance, in fact I probably mentioned that substance in my entry about drugs (GHB/GBL)
As a result I was arrested at my border reentry to New Zealand, spent a week in prison, and am now out on bail pending my court case where I will be pleading guilty.
Before you all play Google lawyer, the maximum charge for that is around ten years, with my relatively clean criminal record it might be more like two years, so that has really changed my life in an instant.

So why would somebody risk something like that? As some of you know or probably guessed I suffer fairly extreme anxiety and PTSD at times, and GBL in very low doses does a phenomenal job of alleviating those symptoms.  In the past I was prescribed Valium but in New Zealand that is not prescribed and Quetiapine does nothing for me.
And I remembered what GHB/GBL were like in recreational doses, so tried some in sub-recreational doses just to see how it would go, and it was like a weight was lifted.

And of course that is a really problematic attitude to have, remembering that GBL was legally available in Germany I decided I would get some there and just bring it home.  Of course if you are going to risk something like that it's kind of a case of bring as much as you can.

So anyway, I was caught, with quite a lot of it.... and as a result I am no longer at university, my court case is on May 21st and life is somewhat on hold until the outcome of that.

I am doing everything I can to try and prove to the courts that I am not the evil drug dealer they think I am, that I am usually speaking an incredibly positive person with a lot to offer the world, and that this was an isolated incredibly stupid decision.
I have started seeing a drug counselor, and will likely spend some time in a residential rehab center, and then I just need to hope that its enough to avoid a very serious sentence.

Whats bothering more right now is my future, this is going to impact literally every area of my life, my transition and my ability to travel.  And I have no idea what to do once my sentence is over, I am going to need a lot of help over the next few years.

So that's the short version of events, I may write another post about my time in prison at some point as well because it was fairly traumatic and life changing.

In other news, I have started testosterone blockers which make me really sleepy all of the time, but have noticed a little bit of breast growth which is exciting.
I have an at home laser hair removal device which I am using whenever I remember to, I figure any amount of progress on that front is a good idea.
And I am going to start doing my vocal exercises soon, though I need to find a way to do these alone now since I can no longer afford or reach the vocal coach in Dunedin I had found.

Anyway, if you read all of this thanks, I just needed to put it somewhere I can point people to.

Developments

There has been simultaneously rather a lot going on recently and also nothing at all, I am currently on break from my university studies until around the start of March so there has been a lot of time to relax and get caught up on movies and video games which has been lovely.

And amidst all of that lazing around I have also been trying to find a place to live for next year, I went and saw an awesome share house with a really nice group of people on Thursday so I really hope I get that one.  And it would mean living with another trans girl which would be strangely comforting I think, to have one person I could talk to who would understand exactly whats going on, and who I could get some pointers from.

My credit card is finally paid off, that's a pretty massive achievement really, and hopefully most of my other bills will also be paid off around March if everything goes according to plan.

But first! I am going for a brief visit to Europe to visit as many of my friends there as I can fit in, and to tick the Venice Carnival off my bucket list, well at least to tick it off in "boy mode" and I hope to get back there in a few years to do it again in "girl mode"
So basically the plan for that is hire a gorgeous 17th century costume and buy a mask, go to a masquerade ball in a palace, and just soak in the gorgeousness of it all.

And as far as my transition is concerned I also started taking hormones a few weeks ago, at the moment I am on a relatively cautious dose of estrogen (25 microgram/24hrs patch) and so far no testosterone blocker but we are looking at revising that when I see her again in March.
I really didn't expect to notice very much so soon, but I was wrong about that haha.
I've been a little headachey which I think is just down to needing to drink more water, and thankfully its solvable with some paracetamol, I've been ever so slightly more emotional and crying about all manner of random things on TV, and then there's the tender breasts.
It comes and goes, but it's just this strange feeling of ache and tingle for sometimes all day, sometimes just a few hours.  While that might sound a bit disconcerting its also probably the most noticeable sign of change, so even though I mutter about how tragically painful it all is, it actually makes me really happy as well.

The next steps I need to take are reasonably straight forward, I need to expand my wardrobe of female clothes and I need to start my voice training, all of which of course requires a little more money than I will generally speaking have once I pay off all my bills.
But I will find a way, and in the meantime I will also need to practice some makeup skills with an aim to be presenting feminine full time from around mid-March.

So everything is happening, and nothing is happening, and I couldn't be happier about all of it.

The Baby That Never Was

Okay so forewarning, this one is going to be a little personal, I'm a bit tipsy and it has been an enormous few weeks and I am barely holding onto my calm.

But I really wanted to talk about something that has bothered me for the better part of a decade and only gets more relevant the closer I am to taking hormones.

Parenthood... Motherhood... Offspring.... Making Lives

So my last real relationship was with somebody that I definitely couldn't have ever ended up with, two mentally unstable people who were deeply attracted but could never find a healthy middle ground with one another, fundamental disagreements on life direction and various core moral things.
It was doomed and we just circled one another wishing it wasn't doomed and biting small pieces off one another the whole way down.

I could get into a LOT of detail, but I won't because that's not really relevant to the issue I want to talk about.  When I was with her, she got pregnant, and we chose to abort.  And neither one of us has ever really questioned whether that was the right thing to do, because it so clearly was the right thing to do, we weren't working and dragging a baby into the middle of it would have been really silly.

But here I am a decade later kind of wishing that baby had existed, and wondering what they may have been like, imagining the possibilities of who they may have become and who I may have been if they had existed.  I think about this way more than I will ordinarily admit.

But that's not going to be a possibility for me for very much longer, they throw around tentative numbers like 3-6 months after taking hormones before fertility basically goes out the window.

Freezing semen costs WAY more than is really practical right now, so that's not really an option, and so here I am... occasionally and with ever increasing frequency thinking about that baby that might have been.

I wish I had a child, I feel like I have an enormous amount to teach someone with the life I have led, and who I am now.  Or at the least, I wish a part of me had lived on in someone else.  As things stand I have been single basically ever since the girl I talked about above, and the likelihood of meeting someone who randomly wants a baby in the very immediate future is basically not happening.

So I have been easing myself into a future of that just not happening, and it makes me sad.

My Mum is a huge part of why I am who I am, she taught me all the best bits of me, and I am actually super jealous of my friends who are mothers, I really wish I had been able to experience that.
And as I get older even the possibility of adoption is basically not something I can do.

I don't know what this post really hopes to achieve, a kind of venting I guess, a random cry in the darkness for the baby that never was, and never will be.  Like writing a wish on a piece of paper and throwing it into a fire.

So if you have a child, love them, teach them, help them.

And if you want a child before March and need a donor, you have until then.

Lots of love,
Abigail.

Therapeutic Word Menagerie

I don't write as often as I actually should, writing has been my therapy for myself since I was about six years old and I really need to try and remind myself of that more often.

Anyway I have been going through some relatively simple and entirely complex things at the same time really.

So as most of you know I quit my job, moved cities, started university and I thought I had a pretty solid life plan organised you know? Get a psych degree, write some books, council LGBTQI folks...
What I probably didn't elaborate on was how I actually came to that decision, and it could best be described as the result of a serious head injury and a fucking ridiculous living situation.

I was working in a job where I felt incredibly undervalued, I was living with a flatmate going through her own fairly serious mental health concerns, and then to top it all off I needed to spend a few months essentially lying on my back with almost no stimulation.  So that was a LOT of thinking time.

So there I was lying in a dark room, with nobody but myself and my thoughts, and you'd think I had done enough of that in Germany being mostly isolated for a year.  But no...
And I basically came to the realisation I needed to be doing something more for my dreams, I needed to be taking steps towards my goal not away from it, and I needed to be away from all the things exacerbating my own depression.

And because I was depressed and recovering from a head injury, I did what I have been known to do on a number of occasions and made an incredibly impulsive decision to uproot myself and go chase the dream.  Relying on a LOT of things to work out in my favour along the way for it to work.

Here we are a few months later, and guess what... those things didn't work out in my favour.
Mostly monetary things to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, which has left me even more anxious, even more depressed, and of course not really committed to my studies to the extent that I really need to be.

Shits bleak... this is probably the lowest I have felt in a long time, but simultaneously the most free I have felt in a long time.... so let's get to some of the better things.

My appointment with the endocrinologist has been booked, so on December 17th I will be seeing them, and hopefully soon after I can be approved for hormone replacement therapy, assuming they don't find any crazy hormone/thyroid type issues which is entirely possible given that I have felt exhausted my entire life.  Not the "Uuuugh Mondays" kind of exhausted most people feel, but rather the "I can't face getting out of bed ever again" kind associated with the glandular fever I had when I was 20 that never really ended.

But anyway, its a positive... things are happening and I am really excited about it.  It has made me think about all kinds of weird things.  Once I start hormones its unlikely my penis will be useful for much within about a month.  And to be honest I haven't really used my penis for anything much in the past six years, but just knowing that soon I wouldn't be able to even if I wanted to sort of makes me want to go get rampant with it.  Like a disgusting genital montage, taking cute pictures by a lake with a picnic basket, scrapbooking memories of the peen, throwing a goodbye party like its going backpacking in Europe...

I probably won't do any of those things though, because any kind of sex that actually involves dealing with it is a bit weird in my own brain still..it has kinda been an issue the past few times I even tried.
Like there is a scrolling list of things making me feel uncomfortable going through my head at the time.  Penis... Stress....Money....Emotions.........and.....sorry I don't think this is going to work.

The other positive, is I feel really free, I think when you are so close to complete collapse you reach a really unhealthy but satisfying point of not really giving a single fuck about anything.  When bankruptcy is a very real possible outcome you can really just throw yourself at any scenario knowing whatever the outcome it won't be as bad as the potential shitstorm you are facing in the future.  It's fantastic.

More people than ever know about my plans, I have been really considering getting my name change out of the way as soon as I can actually afford to do it.  Just so that I have that extra step along the path covered, ticking a thing off a list for the endorphins, that kind of thing.

Anyway I guess that's all I really have to say for now...I am like the cat in the tree, hanging in there baby... and I will endeavour to let everyone know if that status slips much further.

"One could imagine a delight and a power of self-determining, and a freedom of will, whereby a spirit could bid farewell to every belief, to every wish for certainty, accustomed as it would be to support itself on slender cords and possibilities, and to dance even on the verge of abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence." Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book V, Aphorism 347

Tightrope Artistry and the Perils of Hormones

I haven't written anything here for a long time since I have been so busy moving islands, starting my university classes, and trying to pull together some semblance of a financial plan.
For that I am hardly sorry at all, but we are about to have one of those milestones together, so I thought I should get some of my thoughts on paper.

Next Tuesday I will be speaking with a therapist about starting Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), so for those that don't really know how that works, the process is basically a discussion with a therapist about whether or not HRT is right for you.  In the past this was a process that involved a lot of "gatekeeping" (people assuming they know you better than you know yourself and preventing you from doing what you need to)
Luckily for me, I am doing this through the University's Student Health services, who apparently work on the basis of informed consent being enough, so for someone like me who has spent the past decade keeping up to date with things shouldn't be too big of a challenge.

So what happens? Usually speaking you will then need to go and see an Endocrinologist to determine your baseline hormone levels, and then with a combination of testosterone blockers and estrogen they will gradually shift that baseline to be more in line with a cisgender female.

Typically speaking the results of that will be fat redistribution to the butt/boobs/hips/face, an awful lot of mood swings because you are essentially going through puberty all over again, thinning of body hair, and I may end up with acne for the first time in my life properly (I somehow dodged most of that growing up)
And after a year or so of that, I will start looking at next steps like breast augmentation and facial feminisation surgery.

The other major thing I will be starting pretty soon is voice training with an awesome local lady who works with a friend of a friend, so I need to get myself ready for that.  The totally awesome thing about that is she also does singing coaching which I want to get involved in as well, because its one of my secret loves.  I was in the choir when I was very young, and I loved it, I just hated the teachers involved.

So all of these fantastic things are going to be happening, and then we step onto the big metaphorical tight rope right.... if I am going to sound like a girl, and have my teeny HRT boobs going on... there's going to come a point where presenting feminine is going to have to happen.

And I really want everything to line up nicely before I do that if possible, like rather than just diving into everything at once and suffering maximum "man in a dress" remarks, I'd like to ease into things a little... wear a smidge of eye makeup on the regular, dress a little more androgynous, let things develop, get a halfway acceptable voice going on.... then bust out the cutie Audrey Hepburn dresses I'm destined for once that's going to work.

Nothing ever works out as simply as that, and I expect hurdles, setbacks and oh god disparaging glances... but I knew all of that a year ago when I told everyone this was the plan.  But now its all happening, so its time to put on my badass warrior girl pants and handle it.

Anyway I will update when I can.... there will be some combination of tears, exuberance and shame probably in the next several posts haha.

Love you all,
Abby

Educational Resources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_hormone_therapy_(male-to-female)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_therapy_(transgender)

My Girl Wants To Party All The Time...

The fact that I take drugs is not something I hide from the people I am close with, it is not something I really think should be hidden, or ashamed of.  Whatever side of the drug debate you stand on I don't mind, and I understand both sides of it.  I have seen what they can do to people, I have experienced at least some of what they can do, and I have also seen some of the ways that they can really help people too... so how do you know when its too much?

Bill Hicks once said that we never hear about the positive drug stories, so I want to give you a couple of mine that actually changed my life substantially for the better.  Lets offset a few of those "man cut up his girlfriend with a samurai sword" news articles okay?

For an awful lot of my younger life I was plagued with low self-esteem, there are a bunch of reasons for that which are probably better discussed in a clinical setting but I understand them and I have worked on them.  And much as most of you who know me may find it incredibly hard to imagine, there were times in my life where I was very quiet, nervous, shy, and unable to talk to people.
And that really does seem like a different life to me now, but during my teen/early adult years I really just latched on to a few core groups of close friends and they were my people.

So when I moved to Sydney, I found myself alone in a huge overwhelming city with no real friends, and I had to really force myself to go out and try to meet people.  And then I found MDMA (E, Molly, ecstasy)....
On MDMA you feel like you can trust everyone, you open up, you can talk for hours with any old random you find in a gutter or smoking area of a club, and you have thoroughly meaningful conversations with those people.  (there is also a lot of hugging, glowsticks, and dance music)
So for somebody like me it really taught me that if you are not scared of the rejection of being that honest and vulnerable with people, you CAN absolutely make meaningful connections with other human beings.  And I think unlike most people who run around on pills the most core difference was that I realized that if I could have those conversations with people on drugs... there was absolutely no reason that I couldn't also have them while sober.  And so the noisy emotional vulnerable honest creature that you all know and love today, was born from those sweaty Sydney nightclubs and long rambling bullshit talks in hotel bathtubs.   And so it will always be hard for me to hear strenuous anti-drugs objections, because the gift of meaningful moments with people is the one thing that has actually saved my life more times than I can count.

And then of course there was the moment I described earlier where LSD allowed me to inspect myself enough to be able to realize who I really am, and what that actually means to myself.
But another time I did it, I was basically home alone and having some self-diagnosis time, and I thought to myself how would the 16 year old me react to the me of today, would that wide-eyed sober child approve of my drug taking antics and my running around the world throwing my life away on a regular basis.  And so I basically had this conversation with myself, and it was deeply therapeutic, at first I felt like he would have been disappointed in me.  So I also explained all of the once in a lifetime moments that I had along the way.  In the end it was really nice to feel like we had resolved our differences.  For anyone who has never taken LSD that will probably sound super rambly and odd... but for those few who have, you probably understand.

SO.... all these beautiful things, and yay moments.... and then the other shoe drops.

Another substance I play with on occasion is GHB (GBL, fantasy) and it basically takes you from sober to the pinnacle of drunken selfish obnoxiousness in the space of moments, and lasts for around two hours.  You will basically be a loved up floating monstrosity of self absorption and you will be incredibly horny.  In short its a really dangerous feeling for someone who is repressing who they are, because on that substance you give absolutely zero fucks about hiding things.
And so while I was overseas I was able to get litres of it at a time reasonably cheaply, and you only take 2mls of it at a time to get high.  So whats a girl to do with literally hundreds of doses of readily available relief from feeling like she needs to hide, but do a lot of it, on a regular basis.
The thing with GHB is that you start getting used to it, so you start taking more of it to try and feel like it did early on, but REALLY it is affecting you just the same and the higher dose is actually a bit more than you should ever take at once.  And that leads to... spontaneous unconsciousness, in public places...and if you do it long enough, your body will actually panic when you try to stop unless you reduce your dosages very very gradually.
If you have ever wanted to feel like you are having a stroke... that is how you do it.  So that is the one time I have ever been physically addicted to a drug, it hospitalized me, it caused depression and erratic behavior and it was really not good for me.

And yet.... even now if I can get just a little of it once in awhile, I still do it, I just don't ever want so much of it available to me that I can ever become dependent on it again.  And that's the real kicker, knowing why you do a drug, knowing what it does to you, knowing its all an illusion... it doesn't always help.  Sometimes a fake moment of being truly free to be yourself is worth it still, even at such heavy prices.

And of course there is the standard drug of damage, the most ill-reputed of desperate filth... crystal methamphetamine (P, Crank, Shabs, Meth)
When I was going out partying back in the day I tried crystal meth a bunch of times, and it never really held that much allure to me, it was fantastic for partying all weekend, but I never really felt the thrall a lot of my friends did during that period of my life.  It only ever felt like a tool to remain awake and focused for long periods of time.
So how have I managed to find myself having problems with it?.....Work.
In the past year or so, I have found myself using it more than I ever did before simply for the fact that it allows me to focus and be productive, and I have always struggled with that.  At one stage I actually did visit a psychologist for an evaluation for ADHD and while she said that I was definitely symptomatic it was not negatively impacting on my life enough to medicate it.  BUT... that was when I was unemployed and not in a relationship so there was no yardstick with which to measure it anyway.

So here I am, in a job which involves juggling numerous large scale projects and I am the only one in my office who can handle that work so it all falls to me.  And so on occasion I have used meth to achieve the required miracles, but of course that comes with all of the downsides, what goes up must come down... and on that substance the down is a nasty haze of uselessness for a few days where I will be ridiculously unproductive.  Right now I am doing my best to avoid that, and it has been mostly successful, but really, I just wish I could feel that focused in some way without it.

The other thing about that substance, is that it can be used to buy yourself a 12 hour window where everyone else is sleeping to get some you time when you are totally drowning in work and feel like you haven't had a moment to breathe.  And that can be a really enticing proposition when you are depressed and need a break.
And theres your vicious cycle again... afterwards you will experience a massive burst of depression on top.... and so you want a little more to feel better again.

So there you all go... drugs.... my experiences....

And at the end of ALL of that... I still think there are a lot of situations where drugs are actually super beneficial, and for those of us who need that level of escape sometimes there are just not any options to relieve the root cause that makes us need that escape.  Its not always about robbing old people to get "high", sometimes its just a desperate need to express parts of ourselves we normally can't.

For me... I need to start transition sometime soon, which means finally talking to my employers about it, which means finally talking to my doctor about it, which means a lot of really hard moments... so forgive me.  There is a plan to handle this in the long term.  And in the meantime kids, if you want to take drugs PLEASE do them safely around people who will take care of you.

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.

How Do You Know? How Are You So Sure?

I think that's a pretty common line of questioning from the people who I have talked to about my gender identity, and honestly those are the two questions that at some stage we have to ask ourselves as well.  I can only really talk about this from my perspective and that goes for everything else here, there may be common threads to transition but almost every person experiences things differently.

So with that in mind....

The tired old cliche is that "I have always just known", and I think probably for the next generations of transgender people that will probably be true enough.  But back in my day (because I am absolutely archaic compared to these glorious modern creatures) things were a little more rigidly defined.  While its true that I always knew, from my perspective at the time there was something deeply wrong with that, and it was a "problem" to be corrected from societies perspective.

The problem with that is that you become victim to that conditioning as much as most of the general public are, for years now crossdressers and transgender people have been portrayed as abnormal monsters or the punchline in most media.  The general public are not really informed and tend to think of it as belonging somewhere on the sexual deviancy spectrum.

So you are raised in this culture where you need to stay hidden, nobody can ever know how you feel, how you would prefer to look, how distressing the realization that quite probably you won't EVER get to be the person you long to be.  And so you have to try and come up with ways to manage.

For almost my entire life I have surrounded myself primarily with women, I find it much easier to talk to them and always have.  The guys that I consider close would probably all be considered somewhat soft and delicate by your average alpha male type.  And so most of my life I just fit in as "one of the girls" even if it was a token membership to the club.  It helped a lot to be thought of that way even if it was said jokingly.  Because with the girls I could just be myself, be expressive, emotional, and bond on a more intimate level.  The stark contrast to that was pretty much any interaction with a "manly man" it's honestly like talking to a badly written chatbot online.
It's like they have some form of approved content list... that goes something like sexual conquest bragging, cars, dick measuring in the form of drinking/drugs/again sexual conquests/income etc, sports... and basically once you fall through the cracks or are discovered as not knowing a goddamn thing about any of that you are immediately suspect.

And the most fucked up thing is that spending a lifetime being told what SHOULD be important to me as a man, you actually have to learn to fit in with that shit, and thats a problem not just for the transgender girls its a problem for everyone who has to deal with these assholes.  This is how toxic masculinity starts... talk about women like high scores or you're a faggot....ummmm....
And why the fuck does everything need to be a contest?  Every fucking interaction has to have a winner and a loser with these people.

So yeah...I don't really want to give that much more time, clearly hanging with the lads was shit, it eroded parts of my soul I didn't realize how hard it would be to get back, and so I spent a lot of time alone and thinking or hanging out with my girls.

One thing I will say is that I firmly believe that transgender people REALLY end up knowing themselves, when you spend your whole life questioning who you are, what you are, how you can be the sublime version of yourself you can imagine if you just close your eyes and ignore all of that fucking body hair for a second. 

When I moved to Germany for a few years after a particularly rough breakup I suddenly found myself in a situation where I was completely alone, with minimal options to talk to anyone, zero influencing factors or other people's feelings to take into consideration and I really spent the majority of a year tucked away in an attic thinking about who I am.  Normally speaking you would have your friends, your partner, your coworkers etc who all influence who you are whether you see it or not.
And the thing I realised was that most of my life had been wasted attempting to fit in rather than attempting to fit me.  Along the way I had confided in some of my closest people about how I felt, usually with a typically defensive type explanation of it just being some lighthearted crossdressing.
Because up until that point that was all I could really afford myself, when you are deathly scared of people finding out that you are deeply resentful that you are not a woman, you really don't want a flatmate to find a stash of clothes and improvised bra padding you know?
A little kink I have found is at least forgivable by most people.  But once it is more than that its like the step too far that you can't walk back from.

And then there were hallucinogens.  I am fairly honest with people about my drug use, so no matter what your personal views are on drugs I want you to just hear me out for a second.

So LSD is a really interesting substance that allows you to consider things in a lot of different ways, you can consider a viewpoint from multiple perspectives, argue the point from each perspective and generally come away with a deeper understanding of each sides view and reasoning.  You can imagine scenarios and ask yourself hard questions from an ever so slightly detached mindset and be okay with the answers no matter how personal or confronting they may be.  Which is why it is being used to treat people for PTSD, depression, childhood trauma etc... you can process these things without as much harm to yourself.

The scenario was that a friend and I had been tripping and talking all night as you tend to, solving the worlds problems, envisioning a utopia of enlightened humans working together etc all those fantastic cliche hippy things...as well as watching all the pretty sparkles on everything.
Once we were nearing the end of that, my friend went to bed, and he told me I could go and sleep in his daughters bedroom.  You have to imagine this bedroom, we are talking six year old girls pretty pink unicorn fortress complete with bunk beds....
So there I was on the top bunk, in the pretty princess fort and as had been the case for that year alone in Germany I again was thinking about what to do about myself.  And I began to imagine how life might have played out if I had just been born a girl, the thing you have to keep in mind is that on LSD its not just a wistful sigh of that would have been nice.  Its a full blown reproduction in incredible detail, no crushing human development moments were spared, I experienced bullying and heartbreak and the eventual comfort that comes from knowing yourself and contentedness within your own skin.... and after living that entire life compressed into a few hours lying in a bunk, I cried, for quite a long time actually.  I escaped back to my apartment and called my best friend in Australia to talk to her about it, and I think that was the first time I actually openly applied the label transgender to myself, because I knew that just continuing to exist with this constant sense of unease was never really going to be enough after feeling how much more confident and at peace I could be.

Right now I know at least 30% of you are going to be thinking, but a drug addled imagining is hardly a thing to determine your life from.  And I just need you to know that the particular night I just mentioned was just the catalyst, I have felt that way my entire life, I recall really vividly when I was quite young that my only option would be to fake my own death and move to New York... because somehow in my child brain that was a place where living in the open as a lady would be totally okay.
I spent my entire life suppressing that urge to just pull a vanishing act... and the only reason I never did was that I didn't want to damage my family like that.
So there was this constant internal debate between the vanishing act, accepting my internal identity and giving it rare moments of expression in private being somehow enough, and my most pessimistic self saying that maybe you actually are just a fucking damaged mess of a human and you should be grateful nobody knows.

I don't know if everyone feels like that.... but its not really sustainable.  You know the old thing about when you cant make a decision just flip a coin and even before it lands you know what you want the result to be?  That has been womanhood from as long as I have been aware that I wasn't a part of it because of my body.

So yeah, drug epiphanies may not count to you, but it helped me just surrender to myself long enough to accept that and end the debate.  So I don't really care if you don't like it.

One other thing I want to mention because it has been a bit of a personal revelation in the past few months, I have ALWAYS desperately needed to be loved, for a lot of reasons I don't feel like going into tonight.  And my relationships have always been quite serious, emotional, and intense.  But one thing I never realized until quite recently was that some of those relationships were really just about the girl being in some way exactly the kind of girl I wish I was.  So not realizing I would get involved and think it was love, when really it was more like a deeply sincere admiration.  I think in future I need to notice when something is an intense platonic admiration to save all of the hurt feelings later.

Someday

The title of this blog is intended to be fairly tongue in cheek, since I am transgender and have spent my entire life feeling abnormal, and still do really.  And of course at any point in conversation with an anonymous internet zealot online I get called an abomination.  So you know lets run with it.

The feeling of dysphoria is a feeling of abnormality as well really, so i think it fits, and the oddities well they're all of the things that are going to happen along the way during my transition.  I expect there to be a lot of them, my life up until now was not really oddness free.

This is going to be a really hard thing to write for me, in many ways it is the second step for me after taking the arguably harder first step of talking to my friends and family about being transgender.

Over the past few years I had watched hundreds of YouTube blogs and read thousands of pages on the internet to somewhat help me along, and to really understand what the process of transition is going to be like.  And the one thing I noticed about most of those resources was just how much they stuck to the steps in whichever country, and provided tips around passing, which are definitely useful things to know and will in some way also be covered here.  But very rarely did those girls actually talk about their feelings, the setbacks, the internal monologue and doubt of it all.

So I am hoping that I can do that here, to help myself work through things, to try and put into words some of the things I think and feel and understand them better.  And I guess as something to talk about with a clinical psychologist since that is one of the many steps along the way.

This blog will be fairly frank in its language, probably awkward at times, and won't be softening things up just because the audience could be almost anyone.  So please if you don't want to hear about specifics its probably better to walk away now.

So the background, a little over 39 years ago I was born, and branded a male.  And really life ever since has been difficult to reconcile.

As the story so often goes, when I was younger I was absolutely crushed once I was old enough to actually begin to understand genders.   And was told that it was not something you can change.

I was always a little resentful that my sisters were allowed all of their nice clothes and weren't expected to really care about cars and sports.

I wore their clothes when chances to presented themselves, and I tried a few times to wear my mum's makeup...which probably actually just ruined it.

But it was really clear growing up that the way I was feeling was not acceptable.

In my first years at school I was teased because I spent all of my time with girls, which is absolutely criminal to a 7 year old boy.  The worst a 7 year old can really do is tease you about wearing dresses and hurt your feelings.

So as you can imagine by high school and quite a few difficult conversations along the way I had learned what I think an awful lot of us learn.  If you don't want to get beaten up regularly its much easier to just do your best to fit in.  Even if you can't relate to people, you basically just have to learn what I imagine most girls learn as well to make things easier. And that is to smile and nod, and pretend that all of the ridiculous shit that boys say is reasonable.  Only for me I needed to go as far as to be able to fit in among them.  So I am not sure I really escaped the toxicity of masculinity either way, in fact I am not sure anyone does really.

Unsurprisingly most of high school I was still considered weird, nobody knew how I felt, but I was definitely not fantastic at fitting in and not making waves.  I was reclusive, read books, wrote stories, hung out with the other weirdos.  Basically still a target.  And this was in a country school so we are talking the picture of cliche jock douchebags.

And I only really mention this to paint a picture of just how much this conditioning matters, we train ourselves to be invisible, to not be targets and that probably goes for other groups of people who are targeted by bullies as well.  But that conditioning gets so strong that you start questioning yourself, and that feeling of abnormality just ruins you, because no matter how hard everyone else tries to convince you, or you try to convince yourself, the feeling persists.

And that is basically how the next few decades went... I would dress in girls clothing when I could, and then feel stressed that somebody would find out.  So I could rarely actually keep any around.

Of all of the girls I dated, only one was not actively repulsed by the idea when I finally got around to telling them about it.   And so I resigned myself to just knowing this truth about myself that I could never act on.  Every time I was referred to as "just one of the girls" I would have an enormous smile that I could only have on the inside.  And basically life was just about finding other things that could potentially fill the void of never being what I needed to be.

Most of those things were intoxicants of a huge variety.

So if we skip over all of repetitious cycles of desperately wanting to do something about it, deciding I couldn't for whatever reason (mostly fear of rejection) or keeping a job or girlfriend.  We basically arrive here... at the point where someday is no longer good enough.  I told my friends and family last year, and haven't actually started a transition yet because I still need to talk to my employers about this.  And there is the next someday really.   But that someday needs to be soon.   So thats the story up until now in relatively short form.  I want to write something else about the differences between cross dressing and being transgender, because that was really one of the biggest questions I had to answer about myself.  But that can wait for the next post.

Night kids,

Abby