Friday 26 December 2008

At The End Of Everything...

Yesterday I celebrated X-Mas for the very first time. My family never celebrated X-Mas other than by putting up an X-Mas tree and some snacks, but because Pieter only celebrates X-Mas this was the first time that it was a truly special day, with unpacking gifts under the tree in the morning, followed by a day filled with yummy food and lots of movies (about 6-7 hours total). I thought it was a fun day, despite multiple attempts on my life by the dogs during the day.

The dogs had been given fleshed out bones by Pieter as their X-Mas present, and on two occasions the dogs managed to place a bone on the stairs, right where one would step on it if unaware of it. Another time one of the dogs managed to lob his bone between the steps of the staircase to the second floor down to the staircase underneath it, a second after my head passed through that very location. Just goes to prove that dogs are actually planning to take the lives of the people around them all the time. Best friend of man... yeah right. We (meaning Pieter ;) ) even had to clean up the mess they made during the day, including one dog barfing up on the floor and others pretending that they hadn't been outside for a week by springing a leak, if you catch my drift. Ah well :P

To me this year represents the end of a lot of things and steps into an uncertain future. At one side I have cut off communications with nearly everyone, including my direct family, as I simply do not feel comfortable being around 'normal' people. At the other hand I have got lots of work, am working on a game with my dear friend Trevor, who is also giving me a hand with a new big, commercial project I started a short while ago, something which I'm enjoying a lot, as I get to learn and do things which are new to me. If things work out, Trevor and I could have a very successful software and game development company next year.

Lately I have been sleeping okay, thanks to the sleeping pills I'm taking now. My subconsciousness won't leave me alone, though, and likes to rub it in via my dreams that I am different. Many of my dreams feature contact with others, and never, not even in the dreams of many, many years ago, have I ever felt like I had an identity. I'm either an observer or a child, though sometimes a child with the body of an adult, including the desires, which I then experience in a very distant manner, without understanding and without enjoying.

Sunday and Monday night I ended up crashing emotionally, crying myself to sleep after a hysteria attack, which was especially severe on Sunday night. Tuesday morning I went to see Pieter shortly after getting out of bed as I was feeling horrible again. The rest of the time, such as right now, I try to diffuse the pain and frustration I feel inside through a mask of indifference.

What I have come to realize is that with things like this, I can not be among others, as doing so only hurts me. The world I feel happiest in is a cold, clinical environment, where I can work on all kinds of technological and scientific projects without ever having to deal with emotions ever again. Emotions beyond those of a child, of course, as it are the more developed emotions of an adult which I can not deal with, which have never (properly) developed inside me, but rather torn out of the soil and trampled to be left to rot and fester in the sun and rain.

My rational side is most definitely on the level of an adult, even far beyond the capabilities of the average person. In terms of emotional skills, I doubt it'll ever reach the level of even a 12-year old. I intend to at least protect the childish emotions I do have and which are stable. If I have to completely isolate myself from society except through my work, so be it. Clearly nobody cares about whether I am truly happy, for I am not.

Pieter can see it in me as well, and not just when he is sitting beside me, offering me comfort when I'm crying uncontrollably again. I'm feeling absolutely and totally miserable inside. There is so much pain inside of me that there is little place for anything else. During one of the many times that the pain had welled up and taken control of me I came up with the idea to get some attention for my pain and suffering through a truly last-ditch effort: a hunger strike. Thing is, rationally I can see some benefit in this idea as well.

Yes, it is desperate, and it is risky physically, but it'll allow me to get the attention I feel I need. Right now I can feel the chaos and pain swirling inside of me, like a black vortex. I realize that no matter what I do, this vortex is only getting bigger and will consume me at some point. It just needs enough stimulation, which is the reason why I am cutting myself off from the outside world. Yet what I desire is a way to actually resolve this stand-off. I'm not going to let some stupid, ignorant and selfish people ruin my life like this.

I want to lead a 'normal' life, I don't want to lock myself up and pretend I already am happy, that I can just pretend I don't have an adult body. I want to live... Yet the way I have been treated and still am indicates to me that I do not truly exist. There is no definition for what my body is, my emotional distress is duly ignored and the stress of living with a fake official identity, nor its emotional effects seem to ring any alarm bells. Nothing I do matters. Everybody will just ignore it. That is my general feeling. When somebody offers help I'll just smile, as not a single grain of hope is left in me.

Just a bit longer and it'll be exactly 4 years since I started to ask for attention and help for my situation. Four years filled with fighting against a wrong conclusion by 'experts', them accusing me of hitting my own mother, of being not right in my head, of being a very confused boy. Four years of having every thing I said misinterpreted or ignored. Four years of others showing me that the world of adults is a cruel and unforgiving place, with sexuality being so crucial and yet so sick and twisted. Four years of waiting and more waiting and disappointment after disappointment, of desperately searching for help and only getting told that I'm just male, of getting a medical opinion (twice) confirming the best-case scenario, only to have others disagree with it again.

I truly see no hope in a fifth year...


Maya

Wednesday 17 December 2008

Identity...

To answer the many comments I have received on my previous postings, here are my responses.

First of all, I accept that my body is primarily female in build, and also that I have always felt more comfortable with the role of a girl, or woman. I'd even go so far as saying that I have never felt male, can not imagine being one, and most definitely can not understand males. So far it sounds pretty okay, right?

My issues are many, with the physical issues centering around things like:

Being unhappy with/uncertain about my voice. I get a lot of nasty remarks about it, and while generally I try not to pay a great deal of attention to it, I'd really like to have the effects of the high testosterone levels undone through surgery.

Having facial hair growth. It's okay if people don't touch my face if they aren't yet aware of this, but if it were to happen and someone would recoil in horror/disgust or so, I'd gladly die on the spot. Having red marks after shaving is another thing thing I hate and something which is hard to cover up in the summer. The laser hair-removal therapy works, but will take at least another year.

Those are things which hurt and make me feel uncertain, whether it's in public or talking via phone. Their impact is not as great as the more purely emotional issues have on me.

Not having a sexual identity. Even aside from all the negativity I have encountered related to sexuality, my impression is that physically I am incapable of having sex. Incapable in the sense that there's a kind of mismatch between physical parts and the neural layout, leading to only disappointments and frustration. This is also the primary reason why I want more research on how my body is put together, how it works and what can possibly be fixed about it.

Unless one goes through something similar, it'd be hard to imagine the sheer amount of mental and emotional distress this kind of not knowing, not understanding generates. It is why I can not deal with references to sexuality and/or relationships no matter in which form, as it all reminds me of this big gap in me.

For the physical side, it hurts to know that sex with a female is both physically and neurologically a kind of travesty, while sex with a male is physically impossible as far as I'm concerned. Both of this generates a lot of bitterness inside me, makes me want to pretend sexuality doesn't exist, that my body doesn't have all these useless desires.

In all this, how am I supposed to feel like a girl? How am I supposed to be happy? What does having this body offer me but pain and frustration? Should I ignore all these things which I can not explain or deal with? I try, I fail regularly, it causes more pain.

I think too much, you say? I should just seek the things which make me happy and move from there? That too I have tried. You don't know what it's like to be happy one moment, then see, hear or read something which triggers what feels like a super-charged electric shock inside you, which makes you feel dazed and absolutely miserable for the rest of the day. You tell my subconsciousness to stay out of this. I can't do it.

As for my reasoning that I am 'nothing', I know that I have to be something something intersexual, but it's a huge range of more distinct labels. Like someone searching for a name for the disease one has, finally knowing the exact name and definition of it is an extremely relieving moment, even if that disease is terminal. There's nothing humans fear more than the unknown, the undefinable.

In other news, next Monday I've got an appointment with my GP. I have been feeling more and more tired every day, taking frequent naps and generally being short of breath during exercise, even if it's walking a few hundred meters. I have had this more or less my entire life already, but it seems to be getting worse this year. Since my mother had anemia when she was a child I'd like to have this option checked out.


Maya

Friday 12 December 2008

Dodging Bullets...

No, Alianirlian, I haven't made a terminal decision. What I'm going through these past weeks I'd rather describe as a war, a war between rational and emotional sides. This war has really entered a new phase ever since my last visit to the hospital and is making my life more difficult than ever before.

At this moment I refuse to visit family as well as lots of other people, my phone is turned off, I quit MSN, and I have restricted my internet access to just a few trusted sites. This all purely out of self-protection, or self-preservation even.

The thing is that my emotional side has had it, has snapped, has gone over the edge, has flipped out, has gone down in flames, left with a bang, etcetera. I could write down a list of at least 2,645 instances of things which I just have to read, hear, see or merely think about and which'll bring me crashing down into the pits of utter despair and emotional distress. I can feel this despair and frustration churning just below the surface every second that I am awake, even if it isn't controlling me.

The knowledge that I can be relatively happy one moment, encounter one of the hundreds of possible triggers for my traumas and related, and feel like absolute and utter s*** for the next few hours, probably wearing me out so much that I'll need to sleep for a few hours... I don't even want to deal with people in general anymore, as at any point in a conversation they can say something which'll make me feel like that. Same with movies, music...

I've had an appointment with a psychiatrist last week Tuesday. Yesterday I got a letter informing me that I have an appointment with the same psychologist I had before during which he'll advise me on what next or so. This'll take place on January the 13th. My impression so far with the whole psychiatrist thing? Utterly useless. I'd be long dead and buried if I were to actually rely on them before they'd even finished working their way through useless, widely spaced appointments involving merely talking and tests. I can see absolutely no practical use here.

Equally useless is the medical system. I'm left with dozens of questions about my body, but no doctor appears to be interested to even listen to me. I'm still waiting on that report from the gynaecologist/sexologist as well. It is due to this that my emotional side has gone completely haywire. How can I not see myself as a freak, an abomination, a thing without definition, without a right to exist? When I talked to my GP earlier this week, she agreed that there is indeed no suitable description for me using which I could introduce myself to others. I'm not a girl, I'm not a guy, I'm not confirmed intersexual. Ergo I'm nothing.

I'm a faceless, identity-less human, a person with no further definition. Other than my intellectual capacities there is nothing, can be nothing. This is all I am, all I'll ever be. Why was I born like this? Why me? Why is this frickin' world so goddamn unfair? Why doesn't anyone truly give a damn, merely pat me on the shoulder and walk on? What the f*** can I do with wishes for the best or such nonsense. It won't feed a starving person either.

I've been dreaming a lot the past weeks. Those dreams have mostly been about this war, this struggle with myself and my surroundings. One dream repeated a few times in a different setting, these involved me getting close to a girl, with her then leaving me suddenly or something happening which made it impossible for me to ever contact her again. This definitely refers to how I feel that I've just been used by all girls I thought I got close to, who got their fun and then left me without giving me a second thought.

What do I have but my intellectual pursuits? Nothing as far as I can tell. I doubt there truly is that 'someone perfect' for me, and even if there is, my emotional side will never allow me to trust anyone ever again, or so it feels. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice... there are times when I feel like I'm just a box, which, if someone were to shake me, would rattle loudly inside. And no glue in sight.


Maya

Thursday 11 December 2008

Someone Perfect...

To find someone who is just like me, who shares
The same desires and dreams, values and likes.
Someone I could talk with about anything, any time,
Who'd listen and whom I'd listen to in turn, who'd
Share, provide, take and give, always ending up with
More than we'd start with, losing track of time.

Gazing into your eyes, I see every part of myself
Exposed, lying bare to the elements within your soul.
Simultaneously you're exposed to me likewise, I feel
Every sensation of unrest, of doubt calmed like the
Waves upon an endless sea, warmed by the shining sun.
I wish I could stay in this warmth, this calm forever...

As this dream is breached and begins to fade away,
Harsh reality informs me that I'm merely a fool.
Never shall I find such a person, despite all of my
Searching for something which is unobtainable.
Yet the dream lingers on, never letting me forget
Its sweet caress and intense inner peace and joy.

Life is merely a grey copy, a reflection in a
Dust-covered mirror, only harshness reigns supreme.
The comparison with the dream, the pain I feel inside.
If destined to never meet you, I wish to rip out this pain,
Discard what is useless to me, leaving me in ignorance of
What could have been, only captured in a fading dream.

As I keep searching, the dream fades away ever more,
The feelings I desperately protect inside withering.
Fading hope, ever-increasing pain, loneliness. No one
Who can answer the dream, all I see are reflections of
A lie others indulge in, feeding their sense of misery,
Yet never realizing how their lives have been destroyed.

My ambitions still reaching for the far-away horizon,
Stumbling on, your image nothing but a blur to me.
In the distance, distorted, a figure. Standing still,
Waiting. For someone? For me? Such nonsense.
Coming closer, the blur a real person again, the
Embrace, the eyes, the warmth. Perfection.


Maya