Last week my psychotherapist contacted me to inform me that she had been unable to get into contact with the surgeon. Instead she had called the clinic and they told her there that I should contact the surgeon via the general email address for the clinic. This was a bit of a setback. Writing this email (in German), addressed at this surgeon proved to be very hard. Even though I regularly write German emails for my work, when I sat down to type the email to the surgeon, it was as though I had never used German.
It took me a few hours, then with help of Google Translate I managed to formulate something resembling a proper email which I sent off. The automatic response informed me that it would take at least five working days to get a response. It's been nearly ten working days now. For about a week now I have been struggling with intense depression as a result of having to suffer through more hope.
There's a very real possibility that I will not get a response, that even repeated reminders to the clinic will just make things drag on until ultimately the whole thing kind of bleeds to death. Just like every other time before, except for this one time when it did work out and I had this one surgery which changed my life.
Yet I do not believe any more that I will get this final surgery. I do not believe that physicians, psychologists, etc. really want to help me. I do not believe that being intersex makes me anything other than a pariah in the eyes of society. Next week is the next appointment with my psychotherapist. The temptation is strong to just end everything there.
Give up on the idea of help from surgeons, give up on getting help with the monthly pains, give up on PTSD therapy. Accept the very real possibility of living with chronic pain and the high chance of suffering sepsis or cancer as a result of an untreated, largely unexamined hermaphroditic condition.
At least I could maybe build up a life. Maybe.
Ignore everything to do with intersex, LGBTI and such nonsense from now on. Stop cooperating with the media. Stop helping other intersex people with advice. Pretend to be normal. Never finish my autobiography.
Focus on the things which can change. Things which I can control.
I know it's impossible to do so. I wouldn't have suffered through the past twelve years if it had been possible to give up on getting answers. The only way I have found which allowed me to give up was by being in enough pain that only suicide offered a solution. If I really gave up on things next week, I'd basically be choosing death.
Yet to continue like this, to constantly be forced to remind physicians of their duty and their job, to feel ever more like an unwanted pariah and pest is no solution either. I'm not sure in how far I should be taking these chronic pains and other symptoms seriously, or how bad they really are. Maybe it's normal to regularly feel so sick that it feels like one is dying. I don't know what's normal.
Maybe it's normal to have chronic pain, to accept living in deplorable apartments, to be ignored by doctors, and to feel tortured by both the briefness and unfairness of existence. Maybe depression is merely the acceptance of reality.
There's nothing which I would want more at this point than to have the surgeon contact me after all, have the surgery, find a wonderful home to buy next year and leave so many horrible experiences and memories behind me. Yet thinking like that involves hope, and hope is merely the prelude to suffering.
I want to be proven wrong. There's nothing which would please me more than to be able to not feel trapped by the whims of other people any longer, to have medical professionals revealed as actual, sympathetic human beings instead of uncaring alien beings stuffed into a human shell.
I want to feel human so badly myself. Not intersex, not a woman. Just myself. Yet I do not have all the answers yet and my psyche is too shattered and damaged at this point to give me anything but a garbled look at what this 'self' may be.
My enemy is hope. My enemy is time. My enemy is ignorance. My enemies are preconceptions and bias. I cannot fight against something which is intangible, or so firmly lodged into the psyche of others. I want to be nice to others and have others be nice to me, but I feel so saddened by the thought that most others do not think that way.
There's too much strife, anger and lack of understanding in this world.
Maybe my own small story will have a happy ending, or maybe not. I cannot tell. All I can do is stay away from the dark, dangerous parts of life. Even if it means abandoning all hope of a happy ending.
I pray it doesn't come to that.
Maya
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