Moving on

One thing you probably wouldn't get a sense of if you follow my blog regularly is that I do have quite a lot of moments of relative calm. I tend to write these entries more often when something is exciting or something is really bothering me, depressing me, or frustrating the hell out of me. I don't have all that much to say when things are just normal, and most of the time, things are.

This is not one of those times, so you get one of my usual blog entries today...

I need to quit my job. I can't do this. I'd really like to switch to a job where nobody knows me, and they're getting to know me as Suzanne for the first time, never having worked with him. I can't point to any particular reasons why I shouldn't be able to carry on in my old job, but I'm pretty sure this isn't good for me. In fact, it's killing me.

Maybe I already needed a change of jobs before all this started and my transition is just opening me up to the reality of that. Maybe I'm just not as good as he was at this job. That's what it feels like. It feels like people expect me to be something I'm not; something I can't be. They want to go on like nothing's changed, but something big has changed, and that something is me. I just need a job where I can reinvent myself without living in the shadow of my former self. It makes a difference, whether people knew you before or not. I don't mind if they know I'm trans, but I don't want them to have known me as a man.

This decision is one I've been putting off since I first transitioned. I couldn't change jobs then, but something told me this was going to be a problem. I still wanted to give this a good chance to work. It isn't going to work though. I sort of knew that when I had my first 1-on-1 meeting with my manager after going full time, and I mentioned to him that I was glad the company supported my transition, and I was especially happy that management was so supportive, but knew it had to be harder for him, since he has to work directly with me. I asked him whether it was strange for him, and in his reply I sensed discomfort: "well, you know, whatever."

I'd have been fine with genuine support or an honest admission that he was put off by my transition. Trying to carry on like nothing's changed isn't going to work for me, though. That's how I feel he's been treating it, and even though I doubt he would admit it to himself let alone me, I don't think he's comfortable with this. That's going to just continue to strain our working relationship. Maybe I'm wrong about the cause, but lately it feels like he's just looking for things to find fault with me and ways to blame me for things that are outside of my purview. I'm not getting much encouragement in there. I think he'd be relieved to see me go, too.

Well, he wins. I'm leaving. Today, I updated my resume, applied for a couple of other open positions within the company, and spoke with two directors I've worked with in the past about things they have open or opening up. I feel like I've been with my current group for about 9 years too long, and even though I love my team, I find myself hating my job lately.

I'll look for something in a new company as a possibility, also, but until I'm done with sex reassignment surgery (currently planned for the end of the year), I don't know that it would be a good thing to start off with a new company needing to take over a month off. It's better if I can find a way to stay here in the company for now, but I can't stay where I am.

This job is holding me back in more ways than one, and feels like an anchor to my former self. Maybe that's just me, and maybe it's not just me, but it's still there either way. I'm glad I transitioned within my current position, but I think now it's time to start fresh.

Scared straight

I read another news story recently about a child in England who is 12 and wants to have sex reassignment surgery to become a girl physically. The usual controversy erupts about whether it's okay to supress her (genetically male) body's natural hormones -- hormones which, left unchecked, will make her look masculine -- until such time as she's legally able to choose surgery at age 16. People against her parents allowing her to blocking testosterone at such a young age point to the 80% of transgendered children who, if allowed (forced?) to develop naturally as their genetic sex will never opt to live as their preferred sex. People in favor of allowing the child to begin transition (or at least delay things) at such a young age point out that that's total bullshit and these other people have their heads up their asses. And the debate continues...

When I was 12 years old, I met a transsexual in person for the first time. I had more than a passing* interest in the encounter, being well aware at the time that there was something different about me. Karen (formerly "Kenneth"**) was a client of my mother's, and had been fired from her job as an airline pilot after transitioning. She eventually got a nice settlement out of Eastern Airlines, which went bankrupt a few years later (and let that be a lesson to other companies out there). I don't remember why she came to the house, but I do remember meeting her. Have I mentioned this before? Well, it doesn't matter.

The experience was honestly not a pleasant one for me, although Karen was perfectly nice. She was frightening to me. When I saw her, I saw what I might become, and I didn't like it one bit. She was quite large for a woman, with a masculine voice and face. I remember those hands, too. They looked huge to me. Giant, burly things. Karen had been an Air Force pilot, and I assume as Kenneth, she was quite masculine. I'm probably combining the memory of meeting her with the transsexual played by John Lithgow in The World According to Garp, which also came out about the same time as this encounter. Lithgow played a former pro football player who transitioned from male to female, and he looked every bit the part. I'd bet Karen wasn't really that unfeminine, even, but that was my impression as a kid meeting her. I'm sure she looked a lot better than John Lithgow (no offense to him intended, but I don't much suppose he'd care, not actually being trans).

If Karen had been indistinguishable from a genetic woman, I'm pretty sure I'd have had an easier time accepting my own transgender nature. I think I'd have seen in her the possibilities of living as a woman. Instead, I saw in her the difficulties of being someone who looks out of place in their own body. Coupled with the fact that she'd been laid off for transitioning, it was not a very appealing thing for me to think that this could be me. It was not a pretty picture in any way, really. I think that experience (and many others mostly from television and movies) were enough to make me suppress these feelings and deny them for years and years, because the reality of my situation was just too frightening to me. Or the reality of what I thought my situation was was too frightening.

I have a great deal of respect and admiration for transsexuals who have the courage to live their lives the way they want to even though they will always stick out because of the effect of hormones on their bodies. I know for me that could have been a dealbreaker, though, had I grown to be 6'5" and built like a linebacker. I'd bet I'm not alone in that. It definitely makes it a harder choice.

I hope that kid in England gets the medical treatment she deserves, and a chance to make her own decision without testosterone making it a much harder choice. I'd be willing to bet that if she's allowed to develop physically as a woman instead of a man at puberty, she won't decide to back out. I can't say whether she'll be happy or not, but I doubt she'd be happier if allowed to develop "naturally".

As for me, I'm glad I'm in the 20%*** who still opted for this post-puberty. I'm not all that jealous of those who made the choice at age 12. I don't much care anymore that I "wasted" so many years (since, as others correctly point out to me, my time as "Scott" gives me something of a unique experience and was hardly a waste), but it's still a scary thought to me that I could have gone my whole life thinking**** this was impossible or too difficult.

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* note: ha ha
** style note: I see a lot of writers who would put the female pronouns and her female name in quotes in this story, but I think I speak for the entire trans community that we prefer it my way: She, Karen, used to be "Kenneth", who was at one point considered a "he". Are we clear?
*** note: I have no idea if that statistic is accurate
**** and thinking of ways to add four footnotes to one blog entry -- mission accomplished!

Dream Analysis

I've been having some weird dreams over the past few days. I already mentioned the one about my face burning and then I realized my makeup was causing me to be disfigured. These were similarly strange, but not as scary.

In one of them, I was acting in a movie, only it seemed to be completely ad-libbed. Or maybe my part was but everyone else was scripted. I was playing a transsexual. Mostly, the movie seemed to involve me in a variety of social situations and meeting people and their families (kids and such). I kept screwing up, even though I didn't have lines. Then, after we filmed the last scene, one of my costars called me "Elizabeth", which was my name (not my character's name, my actual name) only I didn't realize she was talking to me because I didn't think that was my name (note: it's not). But it was in the dream, and I just didn't know my own name.

Another dream was probably heavily influenced by the fact that I had the Xbox randomly shuffling through my mp3 files while I was reading, and I dozed off for a couple of hours on the couch for a nap. There's a song by Oingo Boingo called "Change" that's like 16 minutes long, and in my dream, the Xbox was playing that (it probably really was) and the song was repeating and I couldn't get it to stop. There was a party going on at my house, and I was trying to get it to stop repeating and play something else, and somehow the Xbox worked like a jukebox by putting quarters in it. And there was loose change everywhere, like all over my house, spilling out of jars and lining shelves. Still, I couldn't fix the thing. I woke up and I had a lyric stuck in my head from the song:

I like my stupid life just the way it is
And I wouldn't even trade it for a herd of screaming kids
And it hurts my brain to think of all the stupid things I've said
And if I could change the future I would change the past instead

Only that's not quite the actual lyric. That second line is from a different verse. It's supposed to be "And the chaos that surrounds me like a flock of screaming pigs". [What? No Boingo fans out there? Ashley, back me up here.]

Okay, I don't completely understand what those dreams are about. But since lately I've been confronted with two people on my team at work having kids (one last week and one due next week) two other friends getting married and others having kids, I'm going to go ahead and conclude that one thing that's bothering me is that I'm now sterile. It's possible that I couldn't father children at this point even if I were to go off the hormone therapy. I don't want to father children. I don't even know that I ever want children. Still.

So maybe that's the part of "Scott" that's dead and that I mourn. Maybe that's why messing up some miter cuts on crown moulding has me sobbing hysterically, because I didn't think it through carefully enough before I made the cuts.

Maybe I'll talk to my therapist about those dreams. I told her about the face-burning dream and she said dreams are my subconscious mind trying to work some things out. Sometimes I wish it would work these things out and leave me out of it. I've always thought my stupid brain is too smart for my own good.

Or maybe it's all just hormones.

Remodelling

Last night I cried on the phone with Jani for a good 20 minutes, I think. I pretty much cried myself almost to sleep. Blerg. Oversensitive and tightly-wound are not ways I thought I'd ever describe myself, and yet here we are...

Lately, I've been focused on several projects around my house, mostly painting and redecorating. My home office is almost done. I've got lots more to do when these are done. Sometimes I need the feeling that I'm making progress that I can see, and painting a room gives me that sense of accomplishment.

Yesterday, I was going to finish off the office and start painting the guest bedroom. Instead, I learned the hard way that it's really hard to get the cuts right when you're installing crown moulding. [I also learned that it's really hard to nail a 10-foot piece of crown moulding up all by yourself and I think later I'm going to learn how hard it is to pry one down when it's nailed in really good.] In the light of day, it should be mostly salvageable, but yesterday I felt hopeless and bitterly disappointed with myself for getting to the point in this project where I can't give up, but realizing I don't have the ability to do it, and it's going to end up a horrible mess. I can fix it, though. I knew it wasn't really hopeless, it just felt that way.

The worst part was the feeling that (a) I wish I hadn't decided to do this project and (b) I felt like I couldn't admit my failure to anyone. Stupid, ashamed and helpless. That was the feeling. Jani was the only one I could even talk to about it for some reason, and she wasn't answering her phone, so when she called me back I was feeling really lonely and isolated in addition to helpless and ashamed. And I was already curled in a ball on the couch, bawling, when the phone rang. Jani calmed me down after 20 minutes or so. She's good like that. I still felt lowsy, but not hopeless.

This project -- not just the office, but the whole house (and not just the house, of course) -- seems overwhelming to me sometimes. I don't handle the minor disappointments as well as I should. My expectations are too high. I know all of this. I still can't help it. I try to keep moving forward as best I can, but there comes a point in a lot of projects where you feel like you can't turn back and if at that point you suddenly realize you've made a huge mistake and the whole thing could come crashing down on you, well, it's not a good feeling, that's all. And when you're taking on a big project all by yourself, you've got nobody to blame but yourself if it all goes wrong.

This room is in a state of flux right now, but it's starting to come together. It's already about a million times better than it was before, even though I'm not done quite with it. It's going to be great when it's finished. I know that.

I just don't always see things that way when I suffer a setback.

Staring into the void

I wish therapy were this Thursday instead of next. Group therapy is tomorrow and every Wednesday, but that's really hit-or-miss lately. Last week was "miss", in a big way, which kind of brought me down because the week before was really, really good and I went in to last Wednesday with high hopes that were dashed about 15 minutes into the session. The last 45 minutes were completely pallid, for reasons I won't go into. It was not productive, and let's leave it at that.

My biweekly sessions with Dr. Payne are still going very well. I find it easy to open up to her and talk about anything at all. She was the one who got me thinking last week about whether I mourn the loss of my former self. I'd like to explore that more, but I'm not sure I'll get anywhere in group therapy, and writing about it here is not likely to give me much insight either.

But I can try.

Scott is dead, as I talked about in my last post. In some ways, he feels like something I could hide behind, and in other ways, he felt like a part of me. He was both a friend I now grieve for and a cancer I'm better to be rid of. I feel a loss, and yet in most ways I don't feel any different without him.

It's very strange. I doubt you could understand what I mean. He's not here anymore, and I miss him in some ways, but I don't want him back, and I can't really figure out what if anything I've lost. I'm the same person and yet I'm not.

Yeah, this isn't getting any clearer, is it?

Okay, let's focus on what I feel is gone from me, because that's the part that's hard to pin down. If Scott was a facade and nothing else, then I haven't lost anything except a comfortable way of hiding from things that I did not want to confront, namely a world that I was afraid would not accept me without him. That might be right. Not so much a piece of me that's gone as a coping mechanism for dealing with my own doubts and insecurities.

I'm worried he was more than that, or that in getting rid of him, other parts of me had to be sacrificed. Like, for instance, with Scott came social acceptance. No, most people accept me as Suzanne, so I don't think that's it. Maybe normality. I don't feel normal. As a guy, I could convince myself and others that for all practical purposes I was a guy. As a woman, well, in some ways I feel closer to people and yet for all the acceptance I feel I can't help but dwell sometimes on the issue that it's going to be really, really hard to find someone who accepts me romantically for who I am. And by "for who I am" I mean as a normal woman, not as a tgirl/tranny/she-male/fetish/freak. Because I'm not interested in being accepted as that. I'm not that lonely yet.

But if that's all that's gone from me, then that's not really part of me either, because I was never going to really feel normal in a relationship as a guy, either. I never did, not completely. So, the thing that's gone is still just a way of fooling myself and others that I'm something I'm not. I don't think I'm any worse of minus that crutch. And maybe there's even someone out there for me who will accept me for who I am as a partner if I just stop complaining, get off my ass, and get out and meet him or her.

I think I feel a bit better about it all now. I see the loss of my male self as more of an addition by subtraction than anything else. Good enough for today. Tomorrow maybe I can find something new to whine about. Goodbye, Scott. You were fun to hang around with, but you weren't real, so I'll try not to mourn you.