Gradual Recovery

This is mostly a quick update to let everyone who reads this blog know that I'm still here and still in relatively good health. I do not wish to discuss the events preceding my suicide attempt a few weeks ago or too many events afterwards as I'm already suffering far too many PTSD flashbacks related to them and reliving the events is decidedly not healthy or productive. Those months have really traumatized me like nothing before, far exceeding anything even the doctors and psychologists in this country have managed so far. Anyway...

What I have been trying to do these weeks I have spent in Rijssen so far is to put some semblance of order back into my life after having it derailed so cruelly and messy. Business-wise I'm more or less back on track; I finished some outstanding projects and after I bring the Intersection Online magazine online coming weekend after the last batch of Nyanko CMS modifications and upgrades, I will be resuming full-time work on the TileWars game so that it'll be ready for release next month. Later than planned, but there's little I could have done about it.

I have had an unfortunate run-in with the 'beauty-salon' here in Rijssen, the one in the medical center. Despite being ANBOS-certified (required for electrolysis), they managed to botch the treatment using old equipment, poor skills, wrong settings, lack of disinfecting before and afterwards, and so on, resulting in me walking around for over a week with swollen patches and scabbing. I sent a message to the ANBOS organization informing them about this and they said they'll take notice. Tomorrow I'll be going to another salon in Deventer, a nearby city.

Interesting this morning was my intake appointment with a GP, also at the medical center. This woman already triggered some warning bells during the beginning of the conversation when I told her about my intersexuality. She kept refuting commonly known medical facts, such as the number of intersexual births. Eventually she revealed herself when she said she didn't feel a 'connection' between us, and that the communication was 'difficult'. She didn't want to take me on as a patient, and refused to explain why not.

Based on her previous remarks it was pretty clear that her main objection was with my intersexuality. That she was a strict Christian person wasn't much of a secret, but her refusal to accept me as a patient without clarification showed her to be more than just strict. If she truly rejected me solely based on my intersexuality, thus my gender, then she would be guilty of discrimination. I decided to not bother with it, though. I didn't want her as GP, and it's not worth my time or energy to make such people see reason.

In the end I went to another part of the medical center where another team of GPs had their offices and made an appointment for an intake tomorrow morning. I think that tomorrow's appointment will go a lot better. I will also be able to pick up my new batch of hormones tomorrow after ordering them today.

My situation at this point is at best precarious. I'm under far more stress than would be healthy in the short-, let alone long-term. I'm prone to sudden and extreme mood swings, and have significant difficulty maintaining a positive outlook on life. My suicide attempt a few weeks ago was the clearest indication of how unbearable my situation had become, and no one can claim that my situation has significantly improved since that time. The terrors of the past months keep haunting my waking hours as well as my sleep, and as I wrote to my psychotherapist today, I need to somehow move forward to escape this situation.

Last week there was a minor break-through in this, when this man from the crisis center Almelo dropped by while I was having another emotional breakdown episode. He quickly recognized, also through his work with young, gifted autistic people, that my problem was not my gender issue, but my Asperger which makes it virtually impossible to deal with my current situation. What I need is help, and guidance; assistance to help me move forward until I get to a part where I can do things on my own again.

Next Monday I'll get a phone call from this same man and I'll hear what they exactly have planned for me and who is going to take care of me. To me it felt like a huge relief to finally be talking to someone who truly understands me, and those like me. The most crucial thing I think he said was that while Asperger people are on average of a higher intelligence than others, they lack in a few crucial areas which mistakenly gives the outside world the impression that they are intelligent and very capable, while this is only true in a few areas, all of them analytical and intellectual, and where their idea of how it all should be like works.

In my situation, for example, my idea of how things should work is that there is some obvious, clear way to find a place in or near Amsterdam where I can live, and some way to finance it all which is obvious and just works. Instead I find this tangled mess of discordant organizations and broken down system of regulations, subsidies and assorted other systems. This discord between my vision of how it should be and how things are causes a great deal of stress and uncertainty, and is the main cause for why things just seem to 'lock up' inside my head.

This is a common thing with Asperger people, or Aspies as they like to be called. Preparing everything in advance, and having the utmost difficulty when things get changed halfway through. Routine, certainty, space and rest are the central things in an Aspie's life. Take any of them away and stress levels go through the roof.

I really hope that next week will be the start of my new life, so to speak.


Maya