To struggle for survival

What I want my life to look like in the short to medium term: to live somewhere quiet, work a day job to make money, write books and work on my software and hardware projects in my spare time. Finally get those robotics, AI, asynchronous CPU architecture and similar projects into a usable state. Have my autobiography published and hopefully change forever life for all intersex people around the world for the better.

Instead, where I am now: being thrown out of my current apartment despite having paid all my bills and not caused trouble. Not having a job despite many months of applying and flying all over the world for on-site interviews. Struggling to finish my current reference book within the deadlines as the full-time job search and dealing with depression and bouts of suicidal thoughts make it almost impossible to be productive.

Each day my situation feels more hopeless. The hope for an easy resolution to my situation has died months ago. With each new rejection after a job application or simply a lack of response it becomes ever more clear that my existence is optional and in no way required or essential.

But to survive is not about feeling comfortable. It's about still dragging yourself forward through the mud and freezing rain even after you have broken both legs, had an arm crushed, running a fever and almost delirious from the pain. All in the hope that things will get better if you keep going. For how long? Until you collapse and die.


While trying to find a job and with it the relocation help I seek, I am ignoring the worsening physical pains and warning signals by my body. At this point endometriosis seems almost certain, with peritonitis (inflammation of the lining of the abdominal wall) providing a clear explanation for the generalised abdominal pain and extreme abdominal swelling at the end of each monthly cycle. This in addition to the extreme and localised pain in the perineum around the same time, which would also be triggered by the blood and/or other fluids that get released.

Of course I have tried to find help for this during the past years, but without luck. And now the symptoms just keep getting worse, possibly also due to the stress that I'm under as a result of my current situation.


What will happen next? I do not know. I may get lucky and my wish for a more quiet, predictable life may come true next week after yet another on-site job interview. Or not, and I can keep struggling to somehow find that way out of this Hell. Yet I am terrified of this dark side, this voice that keeps pushing me to admit defeat, to give up and terminate this impossible existence.

Am I meant to exist? Hermaphroditic intersex people like myself are very rare, because most times embryos merge like that, a miscarriage results.

I don't even know what I am. Who I am. I'm still in the process of trying to make sense of this body of mine. Of what has happened so far. To somehow deal with the trauma of the past years, even as I try to move forward.


What's fair?

This is survival. There's nothing fair about surviving. It's when everything has gone wrong to the point where one's existence has practically been lost already.

I want to survive this. I want to move on, to move forward, but the deck is stacked against me. With the incredible physical and psychological pain combined, this makes it seem all too tempting to give up. That's my fear.

Like seven years ago, when I also found myself in a similar situation, I didn't know what to do and everything was hurting. That was when I remembered the two boxes of sleeping tablets which I had in my room. They were the only real way forward which I could see. I was so happy that I had found a solution. Something which I could do, instead of just letting things happen to me.

I slept really well after I realised this. The next morning I got up all cheerful and feeling extremely calm and at peace with everything. The pain and agony that I had been feeling inside for what seemed like years had all vanished. There was no hesitation as I took all of the tablets out of their packaging and swallowed all of them with some water.


I still feel that things should have ended there. Me having been born still feels like a mistake. Me not dying seven years ago feels like a mistake.


Yet I still want to live. I just want... no, what I need to live is for all of this pain to be taken away by others. The pain of being unwanted and unneeded, of being the cause of problems and just a collection of unfulfilled promises and regrets. For people to trust me, instead of seeking to betray and discard me. To accept that I have a traumatic past, but that things will be fine once I'm in safety.

If not, then there is no stack of sleeping tablets available to me. Yet the temptation remains. I don't know what may happen if this dark, traumatised part takes me over again. The point where I will have lost the fight to exist in society, in this life and also the fight against the traumas from my past.


Even as I prepare for yet another attempt next week to make this future I want work out, I notice how much my attitude has shifted over the past months. From feeling hopeful and quite certain that things will work out, to pessimistic and downcast in addition to feeling exhausted as I struggle to care about the fact that I am still alive. And still surviving.


Maya