Balancing On The Edge

Yesterday I didn't do anything but lie in bed with a crushing headache. Painkillers didn't help one bit probably because it's a stress-induced headache, similar to why my sleeping pills hardly seem to work these days. I tried to sleep a bit a few times during the day, but every time I closed my eyes I got assaulted by upsetting thoughts about sexuality and medical stuff.

The worst feeling I keep having to deal with is that of being identity-less. Nobody knows what I am, nobody tells me, and I don't know either. Why can't I just be neither male or female and live my life that way? My environment expects me to be one or the other, and I don't want to isolate myself from the world. Yet even now I can not say in good faith that I'm female. Every time I call myself that, or someone else refers to me as being female, I feel like a bloody fraud. It hurts so much.

I just returned from my appointment with my GP. She has contacted the VUMC, who referred her to the medical center (UMC) in Groningen, the other place in the Netherlands where a gender team is located. She will write a referral letter for me and I can make an appointment there. To be honest, though, I have zero faith in them not treating me the way the VUMC has.

For that reason I will with the help of others research my options at private clinics, both here in the Netherlands as in surrounding countries. I think that perhaps attention for my case via the media (TV, others) may be a good idea as well.

Of course, I keep thinking about the possibility that no test ever performed will find anything unusual about my body, leaving the female skeleton unexplained as I would be genetically 100% XY, with no female reproductive organs or even traces of them. Part of me believes that this will be the result.

Could I live with the idea that my body is male? No. My entire life I have been reminded that my body isn't male, especially during puberty. I have never been able to see my body as being male, nor has my environment ever been completely convinced of this either.

I just don't know anymore... I just found myself searching again for ways to knock myself out for at least a few hours. None of the medicines in the house would work for it, though, and I already tried strangling myself before. All I do each day is live towards the moment when Pieter returns home and I can feel happy for a few moments again. I fear that I will do something stupid really soon, harming others, myself or both.

Am I really crazy?


Maya