2015 retrospective: Why worry?

"Why worry, there should be laughter after the pain
There should be sunshine after rain
These things have always been the same
So why worry now"
(Dire Straits - Why Worry)

Looking back on the year 2015 and what it has meant to me, I can see that it is a year of great changes and hopefully the beginning of the end of decade-long problems.

After first offering me financial security and then a way out of the Netherlands, my currently employer offered me a permanent contract at the beginning of the year, removing many worries and motivating me. This marks the first time that I have had such certainty in life that I can support myself without having to rely on others.

I found a lot of joy and entertainment in the project I found myself working on throughout the year for my job, gaining a lot of confidence in my own skills and hopefully gaining some respect and understanding from my bosses and colleagues as well.

This year I also found out that I am incredibly lucky, after getting hit by a car without it being my fault, and surviving the accident with nary a scratch, just multiple weeks of intense muscle pain and some lingering issues and scars as a more permanent reminder. I haven't heard anyone remark about weird twitches or changes in my personality recently, so I am pretty confident that I didn't get bumped on the head too severely, either.

After starting working on a book on Android-based gaming development in 2014, I managed to finally complete it nearly a year later, making my editors at Packt Publishing feel very relieved, I imagine. It was a bit of a harrowing experience, to be honest, having to focus on writing a pretty complex and technical book against the background of my medical and connected psychological issues, as well as uncertainties about my job prospects until that got settled.

In September of 2015 I did however get it all finished along with the editing, reviewing and last-minute changes and it went on sale soon after. If you search for my name and/or the title of the book ('Mastering AndEngine Game Development') it's easy to find at the Packt store as well as at Amazon. I sent my mother a copy as well, just so that she can have a copy of the book her daughter wrote. It feels pretty darn good to be finally done with this first book. Here's to the next ones :)

Soon after finishing that book, I also got rapid updates on the final chapter in the four-year old lawsuit against me in the Netherlands, for the vandalism committed by me when I suffered a black-out due to the psychological weight of many years of physical and psychological uncertainty and outright torture as well as a suicide attempt finally breaking me. While the judges all declared that I could not be held responsible for my actions due to these circumstances, they did however force me to pay the nearly 4,000 Euro in damages for some uninsured art works which got damaged as well.

So in effect they did hold me responsible after all, they just won't throw me into jail unless I fail to cough up this amount in time. I will get the formal statement forcing me to pay early next year, after which my options are to pay up within a month, or go to jail after all. On the bright side, this is the last time that I'll ever have to deal with the Netherlands ever again.

I set up a crowd-funding campaign [1] for this payment in the hope that may some others might want to share the psychological burden with me, and also so that I won't have to burn through my meagre savings for something which is ultimately a shining example of injustice. So far this crowd-funding campaign has reached 33% of the total amount I will have to pay, but with no activity during the past two weeks.

The unpleasant thing about crowd-funding campaigns like this is that it basically asks the public to judge you and your proposal on merit. While to me it's a major issue which has made me feel terrible over the past years, and has contributed significantly to my psychological traumas and feelings of resentment towards the Netherlands, it's hard to convey such a feeling of importance to others, who may feel that it's just a cheap trick by me dodge the responsibility for something I did.

Yes, that means agreeing with those who feel I purposefully and wilfully destroyed other people's property and try to blame it on some imaginary 'black-out'. The thought that people truly think about me and this campaign like that hurts. It basically touches upon me feeling cursed with having a healthy and attractive looking body, as it is incredibly hard to get any kind of sympathy when outwards everything appears to be fine. I hope that more people can put aside their biases and look at the facts.

On a more positive note, despite having had little luck during 2015 with getting any help for my intersex condition and associated medical issues, with doctors putting me away as 'just a transsexual', or worse (all fans of calling intersex 'DSD' can go keel over for all I care...), it seems that at the end of 2015 my luck has turned.

After two appointments with a new endocrinologist I'm being taken seriously, along with my hermaphroditic intersex condition, with the first hormone level tests already showing interesting results, and the prospect of answers and even reconstructive surgery for my female side rapidly becoming a very real prospect for the new year.

It's been over twenty years since I first began to wonder about what in the world my body was doing and changing into when I got my first period and began to grow breasts despite being told I was a boy. Now it appears that those decades of confusion, trauma and frustration may finally come to a close next year. It's almost too much to take in such a wondrous idea, and yet my traumatised mind is rapidly running out of arguments to dismiss the current events as merely the quiet period before another traumatising rejection of help.

Why worry, indeed? How hard it may be to believe when you're in the midst of the chaos, noise and death, at some point things seem to indeed get better. Go figure.


Maya


[1] https://www.gofundme.com/zufd2yh8