and then i have to remember, these are temporarily depressed thoughts from a traumatized mind. i’ve been through some shit in life. a lot of people have. i’m not even enjoying anything i used to. this isn’t “the normal (optimal) me”, speaking from a real place in my mind that reflects my own happiness. i’m just……… tired, and there’s that side that wants to accept its own exhaustion and not do anything, just hibernate post-trauma, to take care of its own brain, that feels that changes seem too daunting.

but like… the side of yourself that wants to change, that’s the side that will save your life. that side that keeps its mind open like a child, that imagines what would be most beautiful for yourself, and wants to reach out and get it. you HAVE to ignore the other side, and feed this side instead. you HAVE to wake up and do what’s right for you, for your future, not just for your temporary survival.

things that contribute to your comfort zone will kill you. the very phrase “comfort zone” is misleading — you can be incredibly uncomfortable, and just resign yourself to it, just stay that way where nothing changes, purely because it is what you are used to doing, the way you had to live for so long. but that side will fucking kill you. you HAVE to kill it first, before it steals more days, years of your life — because IT is killing YOU now, whether you do something about it or not.

you HAVE to make a long-term plan and do, and work for it.

you HAVE to take risks that feel scary, strange. you HAVE to expand your capabilities past what you think you can do.

you HAVE to challenge yourself. you HAVE to get EXCITED for that challenge! like a child excited for the first day of school. or nothing will change. you have to. it is not optional. you have no other choice but to get up and fucking do it.

i just…………… i feel things about this.

you HAVE to remember that the side that wants you to stay in stasis, with things all the same, is your enemy. it’s killing you and you need to be stronger. faster. even on days, especially on days when you don’t possibly feel like you can, at all. but you have to.

you HAVE to feed the side that’s a little evel knievel, that takes risks, that wants to go boldly dyke-ily forward and race through life in your fucking motorcycle jacket… you literally have to or you’ll die.

“did you always know you were right?” what a validating, respectful question, to someone who had been so judged in such a rigid time period and environment, someone who didn’t let any of that grind her the fuck down…for a mainstream television talking head to ask such a compassionate question, take such a stance, and in a little subtle way. just throwing it at her, in a way, to say that “yes, i’m on your side.” unexpectedly.

i am thinking that untreated thyroid is the main factor — it runs in my family, i have all the symptoms, and an initial test came back with the levels looking strange, though more extensive testing hasn’t been done yet.

based on other symptoms, i theorize a possible autoimmune or hypermobility spectrum problem ehlers-danlos syndrome, too. (seems to be verrrry common in transmasculine people…and my mother seems to likely have (milder than mine? or just ignored?) symptoms too…and i really wonder about ethnic causes/predisposal to it, as i’ve seen sooooo many people from certain heritage similar to ours talk about having this issue, and i don’t think it’s an accident.)

untreated adhd absolutely has to be a part, too. there is too much info going around to suggest that a tendency to sleep in the morning, wake late afternoon to evening, and be awake through the night, is tied on a physical/neurobiological level to adhd neurology.

(i wish that people took this shit more seriously, as the brain is a bodily organ and a real thing… brain-body is one functioning whole, and of course things happening to certain parts of the system control the total of it. there was this post i have saved that suggests there was a link between impulse control disorders and LEAD — which, everyone knows that lead was a major fucking factor throughout our grandparents’ and even parents’ lifetimes. how many things even now painted in lead might we be exposed to? furniture and walls in schools etc…how thorough was the removal, actually? shit i just do not have the energy to research right now…. i would believe it was partly an existing tendency throughout history, and then that something like this might have aggravated certain problems in people, maybe not originated them… but who knows.)

this is why, as soon as i get a job here soon, i’ll be taking evening or night shift.

i have just forced my body to endure painful attempt after painful attempt to force it/myself through being awake during the day. it never works. i have been treated as lazy and/or “depressed so get medication for it!” (despite having no depression symptoms, just PTSD/trauma which is situation-based and will leave with therapy + efforts to change my situation….. i was not born with “organic depression” like some seem to be.)

i have been told all this bullshit, over years, about pulling myself up by my bootstraps. and it’s nonsense. and i’m done with it, completely done with it. it’s time to just work with my situation and try to fix it, in my own way. and to accept my current limits and be kind to myself, rather than judging myself.

my body is what it is, my limits are what they are. i will work with these limits rather than self-hate for them, rather than accepting pushback from unhealthy people who are from older generations that are used to “just deny it’s there and it’ll go away, work your way through it,” etc. well-meaning or not, just because they are used to that. i worked TWO FUCKING SHIT JOBS AT ONCE and worked my body into the ground, until i had to quit one, then go part-time on the other, then left that one, too, just fucking spent from not just the health problems but the toxic psychological environment. i just won’t do it anymore. i am not accepting other people’s unhealthy imposition on my fucking life, idc what form it comes in.

i was looking down into the shower drain, lying down, supported by my arms, woozy like i was going to pass out.

and i just thought, yeah, the kind of SRS i’ve considered is just never happening. not as long as i might need some kind of medical care in the future. imagine going in with this indeterminate androgynous body to some ER. imagine, not having kids, not having a living spouse, not having a real support network, and being subject to whatever might happen to you, in elder care, with that kind of body. imagine living in whatever country, where “normal” (straight passing) gay people and classic “binary” trans people who do the full-transition are already barely tolerated. or visiting and having some accident happen while there. which, my own country is already basically like that, in many places. do i have to live in san francisco or new york to just be treated like a human? and what happens if the r*ght gets their way and the entire country shifts more and more in their direction? are even those places safe in the long term? (berlin thought that it was safe, before, well….)

maybe even non-SRS transition is impossible, then. conflict between visual appearance and what you have under the clothes. just as stigmatized. maybe i need to basically resign myself to butch dyke-appearing mode, “butch on t”, just pushing gently on the edges of the limits of that, and suck it up. maybe it will never be safe to go where i’ve considered going, places which might be right for me. gender-wise. i want it to be safe to do that. idk if it will be. i will test these limits as i go into transition, test the waters and see what i feel safe doing. but at the end of the day, this thought will always be in my head. my experience in life didn’t involve growing up in a progressive place, with an lgbt support network to go and reach for the stars without doubt, and i don’t have the sheer brass tacks and gutsy confidence to just GRAB what i want the way that some of these loud-and-proudly andro-gender-fucker body-modifiers do. and i WANT to build that confidence, but idk if i can. i want to. at the end of the day, though, i will always be thinking of this. that if i’m forced to make a choice, what will i do? human survival comes first.

spent like 6-8 hrs yesterday v*miting and sh*tting on the shower floor, like my body was just, falling tf apart. actually insane. rinsing the surface and having to lie down there in between — no choice, going back to bed not an option — just disgusting. at some points i almost passed out. whole body starting to get pins and needles, couldn’t even keep down water and gingerale w/o v*miting.

went to the ER finally. they helped me w some things in a bag but, told me my bloods came back as normal, no infection or problem w my electrolytes. yeah right. so despite going there to receive some, didn’t. she asked her usual dr and he said that they don’t bother looking closer at these things a lot of the time in an ER, short staffed and burnt out, not caring about individual care as much, which i definitely felt. whatever, they gave me something for nausea and pain, so, i’ll live.

not sure whether it was gastritis or a stomach flu or food poisoning or more than one of the above. (i KNOW i ate some off vegetables but it was one of my favorites so i ignored it, stupidly. :/ but there’s also something going around apparently)

just………….this comes after putting together more and more that i almost certainly have a GI illness, including that my respiratory problems probably all stem from that — gallbladder can present as “feeling like you have a tourniquet wrapped around your lungs”, and apparently, stomach stuff runs in my family. so i was on a wild goose chase this whole time. i’ve been taking generic prilosec to try to work on it but need a real appt with a real stomach dr to deal w this. i probably also have something called bile reflux, which is like acid reflux and has its symptoms (to the point where they’re hard to distinguish) but more focused on the bile duct. which fits with the weird yellow/greenish stuff i regularly hack up when brushing, weird tastes in my throat etc.

so, easy to imagine, having a problem with the stomach and fucking BILE duct, it was much harder for me than someone else to just…get to the point of STOPPING V*MITING. my body kept doing this horrible thing with the valve at the back of the throat where i was burping with every breath, it felt like a swamp in there. all the bile in my stomach in a trash can eventually.

just. i’m so fucking sick of dealing with these symptoms. but more than that, i’m angry that i had to be the one to put two and two together about what i might have, rather than being helped sooner, and went on a wild goose chase to lung doctors for so long. jfc.

finally unlearning my mildly 0cd (?) panic (or really, the standard uncomfortable reaction most people have to messes) by deciding what my priorities are in life and healthily not giving a fuck

i can’t post about my irl issues related to material wellbeing so easily. because it denies me privacy and dignity on top of that already happening to me. because it’s already occupying all of my everyday life.

watching videos like this just depresses me. can’t tell if she already just spoke that way or was in progress with doing voice work pre-physical transition (or even on estrogen already?) so that her transition would be seamless. it is just so apparent either way that this is just a woman in drag, who is having to make herself do something that she can’t, under duress. it makes me so sad for all of us that have had to go through this. and me in my still pre-everything state.

making it excruciatingly obvious that this is the exact same way that i live and appear (in reverse), despite past delusions that i was successfully closeting myself, it was so obvious.

imy past few years i’ve put work into my voice, too…which ftms rarely do, since  the idea that T does it for you is promoted, but is becoming more common…with HRT nowhere near attainable, something had to be done. i literally couldn’t bear living and hearing that high-pitched voice come out of my mouth every day with no end in sight. it was not optional for basic comfort and mental survival. nails on a chalkboard.

because of all  this, i can’t relate anymore to the conversation about whether to stay in or come out, because i clearly never had the option, after the point of realization. for physically transgender/transsexual ppl it is just not the same and never will be, i have no choice. it’s too much to carry on like this. seeing her have to live like that vs videos from after just drives it home. makes me feel understood and exhausted at the same time.

the way that doctors will prescribe testosterone to cis men who are recognized as having “low T” for this reason, because it’s better not to experience that

the way that, if you were born ftm/ftm-spectrum/transmasc you are literally experiencing this from birth, a testosterone deficiency, where you’d benefit from added T.

only, conveniently, they don’t want to conceptualize of it that way, instead casting you as a woman who wants to add T and is deviating from “her” standard body type.

the way that this perspective ignorantly analyzes human health from the outside (of the body) in, rather than the inside out, judging physical states by their outward appearances, rather than the body’s system and how it works on the inside. something that we recognize now and will increasingly in future recognize as being barbaric and a form of thinking that denies things like the existence of germs or promotes medieval medical practices like bloodletting etc. vs. modern practices such as doing blood testing for health problems, which recognizes that it’s what’s happening inside the body’s system that counts more.