About a month ago I published a short story on my Scribd account [1] involving a romantic/love story. As I mentioned in the blog post related to it [2] I basically used my own personality and doubts as the template for the main character. The focus on negativity, on degrading oneself in comparison with others and always finding blame with oneself regardless of the situation. I like to think of myself as an optimist, but below a thin layer of cheerful optimism looms the darkest, most negative thoughts one could imagine.
Through compliments I have been told that I am smart, intelligent, well-educated, pretty, beautiful, polite and so on and on. Yet against this darkest of dark everything rings hollow and false, even if I know these things to be (at least partially) true. Considering the projects I work on, the quality of my writings, my vocabulary and ease with which I make new concepts and skills my own, I must be at least reasonably intelligent. As for my physical qualities, that's too subjective and is to me more dependent on my current mood than on any kind of objective measure.
Two days ago I had convinced myself to break through my negative views on physicians and at least contact my family doctor regarding the monthly pains which had become especially bad after running out of the anti-conception pill. That same day I got an email response from this same doctor to an earlier email I had sent, when she was still on vacation. She invited me to come over for an appointment the next day. To me this felt like a minor victory already as I had assumed that she'd want to have nothing to do with me any more after suffering the humiliation at the hospital earlier this year.
During yesterday's appointment my doctor checked me over with an ultrasound scan, making sure she couldn't see anything out of the ordinary, especially after I had mentioned the possibility of endometriosis [3] to her as an explanation for the widespread, long-lasting symptoms. While she was able to give me a clean bill of health, she told me to contact my gynaecologist about it for further options in terms of examinations and the like.
Negativity aplenty. While during the about hour-long appointment with my doctor she was able to defuse my worries and concerns, prescribing me refills for all of my medication including the pill, the thought of re-establishing contact with my gynaecologist looms up like a massive obstacle of utter negativity.
Last time I had an appointment with my gynaecologist it was before the MRI scan earlier this year with the disastrous and humiliating outcome [4] in which the physician - after conversing with a Dutch colleague - decided to side with the Dutch version of MRI interpretations and deny that I have any female genitals. To face my gynaecologist after this is incredibly hard. Will he think that I'm a liar? Maybe delusional as the Dutch physicians and psychologists have maintained for the past years?
If it's really endometriosis there's really little which can be done about it anyway, beyond hormone therapy which consists mainly out of taking the anti-conception pill as I'm already doing. There's no cure, just treatment to reduce the symptoms and manage a life filled with monthly pain. There's no real point in visiting a gynaecologist in that case. Same with that whole humiliating struggle between Dutch and German physicians on whether I do or do not have female genitals. There won't ever be a conclusion on that no matter where I go or who I talk to.
The thing about negativity is really that it's hard to define where the negativity starts and the pragmatism begins. To a less experienced person pragmatism is easily mistaken for negativity as they lack the proper frame of reference to judge the issue from. I have sadly the benefit of over a decade of first-hand experiences with trying to find medical help for this intersex body of mine and based upon that in the first place physicians simply aren't interested in rare cases like mine and second they couldn't care less about the person behind the patient, let alone their mental agony.
When I describe the negative way the main character in the referenced short story thinks about herself, it's pretty much exactly how I feel and think. When I see other, pretty women, I can't help but feel pain and maybe somewhat jealous of them and their physical features while feeling clumsy, big and ugly myself. More like a freak of nature than anything 'normal'. Socially I feel awkward, just like this character, preferring to escape a situation when things become weird or awkward than to stick around.
The one positive thing my family doctor did accomplish yesterday together with the friends I hung out with at the hackerspace last night was to fix the negative feelings towards Germany in general, leading to me seriously considering leaving here. I really wouldn't mind staying here for a while longer, I think. All depends on getting a new job early next year, preferably still in Karlsruhe, and finding a better place to live in than my current noise- and trigger-filled apartment.
I'm a firm believer that to think positive one has to surround oneself with positivity, just like being surrounded by negativity as I have been for the past decade suffuses a person with the darkest thoughts and doubts like oil sticks to a bird unlucky enough to land on it. In my case it are this medical uncertainty and the related doubts about myself as a person as well as my self-image which cling to me like this choking, toxic oil, draining me of my energy and positivity.
Next year I'll try to keep fighting to change this. To get rid of this clinging pollution. Much like an oil-stricken bird I cannot do this alone, however. My intent for 2015 is thus to keep fighting while hoping that it'll be the first year that I get the help which will allow me to reach that major breakthrough.
Maya
[1] https://www.scribd.com/doc/246517504/In-Between-A-Love-Story
[2] http://mayaposch.blogspot.de/2014/11/in-between-love-story.html
[3] http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000915.htm
[4] http://mayaposch.blogspot.de/2014/07/in-end-everybody-lies-and-is-wrong.html
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