Picking Up The Pieces

Yesterday Pieter and I went to the local health center to pick up my new batch of sleeping pills as well as the referral letter for the UMCG. Once back home and after having had dinner, I went upstairs first to the computer room and started reading through the referral letter and the attachments my GP had added, mostly letters from the VUMC, Erasmus MC and AMC. Especially the former two confronted me with a look through the eyes of those doctors and such.

The effect of reading their reports was... I don't know how to describe it. During dinner, Pieter and I had been watching the Star Trek (Next Generation) episode called 'Frame of Mind', in which Commander Riker finds himself trapped in illusions, with him trying to discern what is reality and what isn't. He had people in one 'reality' telling him that he was suffering from a mental illness and needed treatment, while in another 'reality' he had his friends telling him that he was safe and there was nothing wrong with him.

I felt this split too. On one hand there is my environment, never accepting me as being a boy or man, more than willing to accept me as being a girl, intersexual or not. On the other hand there are the medical specialists who firmly deny that I'm even remotely like a girl and most definitely not intersexual, but that I do need serious treatment to 'fix' me. It's like one is the 'pleasant' reality and the other the 'harsh' reality. I also know that I'm not crazy. I'm not a normal male. Yet in the 'harsh' reality they keep telling me I am.

What is real? Am I crazy? Will I have to admit to something which neither I nor my family or environment believes in? Is this 'pleasant' reality the lie? Is the 'harsh' reality? I truly don't know... all I know is that I'm not crazy. Which may be true or not true.

This morning I woke up feeling incredibly down, with the previous thoughts still firmly embedded in my mind. I just can't seem to fit things together... all my experiences, all facts, everything people have said to me. Just everything. It's like I have a pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces, each of them handed to me by someone else, yet while putting it all together it seems as though they're all pieces of many different puzzles.

What can I do but suppress all those useless thoughts? What option is left for me but to discard futile ponderings on my body? Why concern myself with things unobtainable to me and not focus on that which is still available to me? That is the mode I slipped into again during the day.

Today I finished the first refresh of the Nyanko.ws website in years, with more changes coming up. Thanks to Trevor and vicmarcal for their help in debugging the (live) site :) I did some (puzzle) work on Jan's site. It's fun to piece together an entire database worth of data from a minimal set of input files. At least it's a challenge :P My normal 2-hour nap turned into 3 hours today. My headache and coughing hasn't really changed compared to yesterday, but at least the fatigue is less, probably because I'm suppressing bad thoughts so heavily now.

Anyway, I went to the gym yesterday for the first time in nearly two weeks where I met up with my gym girl again. She had been sick for a while. It was good to see her again. One thing I was pleasantly surprised by was when she told me that she felt strangely uninhibited when talking to me, something she rarely experienced with others. I told her that I had been told that before :) She also told me that she has finally read the 'about me' section on my main site and felt surprised at what my situation is, as it's quite different from what she had imagined. She seemed to take it well, though, even if we didn't get much time to really talk about it yesterday.

A feeling I have had on and off the past months especially, and more and more strongly recently, is that of denying myself access to anything related to my body which goes beyond its basic functioning. My body is a vessel, a mere tool with no other purpose than to follow the whims of the intelligence inside it. Everything else just seems so superficial then. The whole male/female thing, sexuality, looks, and the worlds we have constructed around them. It feels good to stand outside for a change and consider turning my back on it forever.


Maya