It's surprisingly hard to keep up a professional façade when you notice that most of the sensation in your right leg slowly drains away during the day at the office. Near the end of the day you're just lugging along something more closely resembling a wooden leg, except for the stabbing pains in the hip.
For me this is an almost monthly event, often occurring after my body decides it's time to start menstruating. This first starts what feels like major inflammation in the vaginal area as the fluids cannot exit the body. I noticed this a couple of days ago when I was lying crying on my bed for a while as the pain was just so bad.
This nerve irritation, swelling or whatever it is then seems to work its way mostly into the right side of my body, with my right leg going numb during a couple of days. When I touch the leg's skin I can feel part of the normal sensation, but numb and accompanied by a tingling sensation. The pain sensation is nearly fully gone during those times when the leg is very numb.
All of these issues are monthly since over twenty years ago, increasing gradually in intensity over those years until reaching a crescendo this year. I could be overdosing on oestrogen right now thanks to my Hormone Replacement Therapy not taking into account an increase in oestrogen produced by my body, as the linea nigra - the vertical line on my lower abdomen - seems to suggest.
Next month I'm seeing a gynaecologist. In December I'm seeing an endocrinologist about it. I should feel hopeless, I guess, but after more than a decade of seeing specialist after specialist it's hard to feel anything but bitterness. Bitterness at being abandoned, at being rejected, cast away like some kind of failure, put away like a crazy person.
Every time some doctor or similar opens their ignorant faces and denies that I am intersex, but have to be transsexual, they are denying these struggles I have and still am going through on a monthly basis. They're denying my hormonal issues. They're denying the medical findings so far, including my absurd hormone levels as a teenager and undeveloped testicles. They're denying that I am the person who I know I am.
Suffice it to say that I'm not feeling very happy at this point. Chronically depressed with bouts of suicidal depression is more like it. Going through a day feeling like life might possibly be kinda okay is for me an exception achievement. Feeling like life is a goddarn chore and that I cannot wait to cast off this stupid, retarded body I was born into is far more common.
But really, why would I be happy after struggling with this body which between intersex, migraines, monthly pains and just being damn ugly has caused me enough grief already, and now seems to be gradually failing on me. Last weekend I spent mostly in bed, feeling like dying from the pain in my abdomen, as well as from the two-day migraine.
I'm not happy. I refuse to be happy, because it would be a lie. My life is a complete tragicomedy, with me as its unwilling victim. Knowing this doesn't give me any kind of pleasant, or raise in me the expectation that people will rush to my aid or that suddenly I will receive the medical care a hermaphrodite like yours truly absolutely must receive over their lifespan.
I have no expectations of life. There's just what I can do myself. Decades of brutal lessons have taught me that I can only trust myself. And I hate that feeling. I want to believe in happiness, in life, in others, in help, in sunshine and carefree days. Yet I cannot.
Struggling through daily life and observing others having dull, boring, uninteresting lives I feel pained. It's not jealousy, or something as basic as that. It's more like observing an alien species I have read about in books, but which is otherwise wholly unknown to me. Even if I know that I'm supposedly part of said species, there might as well be a meter-thick armoured glass between us.
There's just hate, bitterness, isolation and the enormity of living out my life in a hostile world where everything I do is wrong. Where me existing is wrong. Where me trying to participate in daily life has horrible consequences, whether external or internally via my post-traumatic stress disorder twisting my perception of the world around me into the perfect nightmare scenario.
Even if I do receive medical help this and next year, I do think it's better for me to just be alone, by myself. Maybe some day I will be able to trust people again. Maybe not. But I will not force myself.
And if I do not receive medical help again the coming months? I do not want to think about it. How much pain is too much? How far can one's psyche be pushed until it irreparably shatters along with one's motivations to keep breathing and living?
I just want to stop feeling pain. The pain of my body. The pain of my mind. The pain of my soul and psyche. The pain of nightmares haunting me in my restless sleep. Just make it stop... even if nobody helps me and I am left alone, by myself again, with just the one thing I can do.
I don't think I was ever ready for a life like this...
Maya
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