When I got forced out of the apartment which I had lived in for four years, I figured that it'd just be a temporary setback. I'd quickly get set up as a freelancer, and with the help of friends I'd find a new house or apartment to live in.
None of that happened, of course.
While the freelancing thing is something that's slowly coming along, this had its own share of setbacks. Worse, however, was the attempt to find a new place. Three months later and many dozens of houses and apartments later we've seen so many terrible places, came across a number of fresh slumlord locations, had the place given to someone else before we had a chance to look at it, or the person or agency behind the ad simply never bothered to respond.
Now on Friday my belongings will be put into storage and I'll be trying to find somewhere to sleep. There had been the hope that this place in the Alsace that we looked at on last Friday would have worked out, with the documents being sent to the agency and them saying that they'd put the rental contract together. Today they went back on their words and now they'll 'contact us about the place' in the coming days.
With everything that could have been firmly burned to the ground this way it makes me wonder whether it's a healthy idea to try and hang around in this part of Germany. Or Germany at all for that matter. It really does not get any better since I first moved here in 2013.
To be honest I do not know what the right choice is. There are some people and things here in Karlsruhe which I would not gladly lose, but not having a home any more and just drifting from shelter to couch and to shelter is not the kind of life that I'm envisioning for myself.
When to give up, when to keep trying? I don't know.
After the mounting stress of the past weeks I went back to something which I figured I had left behind me after trying out many years ago. Despite all that may be bad about alcohol, it does have this pleasant numbing effect that makes it work better than any anti-depressants and similar medication that I know of. It's not a solution, but it might just provide that little bit of buffer to keep me sane.
What will happen tomorrow, Friday, during the weekend or afterwards? I don't have the faintest clue. I'm almost afraid to try anything any more, as things just seem to fall apart. Then there's that part of me which has long noted that my struggling over the past fifteen or twenty years has been pretty much futile. That since those adults decided to lay their filthy hands on my 5-year old body, my fate has been pretty much sealed.
I'm not sure how I'm dealing with homelessness and the continuing hope that things may soon improve. It's been promised to me for decades now that things would get better. I'm honestly still waiting.
I also still think that most people would be much happier if I simply ceased to exist. Including myself.
Maya
Wednesday, 15 May 2019
Wednesday, 8 May 2019
Life is that game where nobody tells you the rules and everybody laughs at you
As I already alluded to on Twitter over the past days, things are going somewhat sideways, currently (still?). When I rented this one apartment for two months, it was in the expectation that I would be able to find something new and permanent during those months. A house in the Alsace, naturally. Because I had been told that this would be easy and thus I trusted it would be.
That notion I quickly got disabused from, downgrading my expectations to 'just an apartment will be more than fine', but with landlords and real-estate agents either not bothering to return a response, or just telling me that the place had already been given to someone else, time began to run out quickly.
Now I'm supposed to be out of this current apartment by early next week, and I do not have an alternative lined up. Worst case it's going to be putting my stuff in storage and me roughing it on the streets. This week I'm still trying to find alternatives together with a friend, but it's going to be tough to impossible.
Worst of all has to be the constant accusations, whether spoken outright or not, that I have simply done things wrong. That I didn't put in enough effort (alongside establishing myself as a freelancer), and simply should have been more proactive (despite dealing with severe PTSD).
It all makes me feel so very sad that I didn't just get hired at one of those many places where I interviewed at last year. That I could be living in California, Spain, Sweden, Scotland or somewhere else, and would never have gone through any of this.
Clearly because I did something wrong.
Is it truly so amazing that someone in my position is struggling to feel a shred of positivity when it comes to being alive? When nothing seems to work out, and all you can get are snide, hurtful remarks from people. People who consider you to just looking for an 'easy way' when you ask them for help.
The general attitude I have encountered over the past fifteen years no matter which kind of life struggles it comes to is that people just don't care. They don't care about you being homeless. They don't care about you being in pain. They don't care about you being unable to find medical help. They don't care about you living in poverty. They. Don't. Care.
For people who live the easier lives it's hard to imagine just what it feels like to have everything from one's own body to one's living situation constantly go sideways, without any explanation given. Just that one should 'try harder'. Basically don't make any mistakes in life, or the wolves will eat you.
I'm desperately trying to stay optimistic and hopeful that somehow that this will work out, but the weight of pretty much half my life so far spent trying to survive is weighing heavily on me. If I keep screwing up this badly, and things will not get any better as a result, then maybe it's time to just quit trying, no?
Maya
That notion I quickly got disabused from, downgrading my expectations to 'just an apartment will be more than fine', but with landlords and real-estate agents either not bothering to return a response, or just telling me that the place had already been given to someone else, time began to run out quickly.
Now I'm supposed to be out of this current apartment by early next week, and I do not have an alternative lined up. Worst case it's going to be putting my stuff in storage and me roughing it on the streets. This week I'm still trying to find alternatives together with a friend, but it's going to be tough to impossible.
Worst of all has to be the constant accusations, whether spoken outright or not, that I have simply done things wrong. That I didn't put in enough effort (alongside establishing myself as a freelancer), and simply should have been more proactive (despite dealing with severe PTSD).
It all makes me feel so very sad that I didn't just get hired at one of those many places where I interviewed at last year. That I could be living in California, Spain, Sweden, Scotland or somewhere else, and would never have gone through any of this.
Clearly because I did something wrong.
Is it truly so amazing that someone in my position is struggling to feel a shred of positivity when it comes to being alive? When nothing seems to work out, and all you can get are snide, hurtful remarks from people. People who consider you to just looking for an 'easy way' when you ask them for help.
The general attitude I have encountered over the past fifteen years no matter which kind of life struggles it comes to is that people just don't care. They don't care about you being homeless. They don't care about you being in pain. They don't care about you being unable to find medical help. They don't care about you living in poverty. They. Don't. Care.
For people who live the easier lives it's hard to imagine just what it feels like to have everything from one's own body to one's living situation constantly go sideways, without any explanation given. Just that one should 'try harder'. Basically don't make any mistakes in life, or the wolves will eat you.
I'm desperately trying to stay optimistic and hopeful that somehow that this will work out, but the weight of pretty much half my life so far spent trying to survive is weighing heavily on me. If I keep screwing up this badly, and things will not get any better as a result, then maybe it's time to just quit trying, no?
Maya
Friday, 3 May 2019
Coming to terms with being forced into transsexuality
The most ironic thing about my intersex condition will probably always remain that I could not have known about it sooner because I simply did not know that it existed until I practically tripped over the term and read up on it at Wikipedia. For about a week during early 2005 I figured that I had to be transsexual because I had just realised that I really felt more comfortable in a female role, rather than the assigned male role.
After that revelation and subsequent roller coaster of events, it culminated in an MRI scan on the 21st of December 2007 which showed that I have both male and female genitals in addition to a feminine skeleton. During the following twelve years my body would gradually change, with the sudden arrival of a second puberty at the end of 2014 kick-starting changes that would see me not only drop hormone therapy fully, but find myself grasping at physical changes that simply could not be happening. Changes that essentially transform my body from that of an adolescent female into that of an adult woman.
Winding the clock back more than a decade, the struggle that I had to deal with was that the doctors at the VUmc gender team as well as those elsewhere in the Netherlands, the UK, US and so on, had virtually no clue about 'intersex'. I got told that it was not possible that I could be intersex. That they had found no sign of intersex on my body. That I likely was suffering some kind of psychological delusion that made me perceive my body improperly.
Imagine defending your views against doctors and psychologists for more than a decade, as first one group tells you that you are obviously a true hermaphrodite based on the MRI scans, ultrasound and ultimately an exploratory surgery and biopsy of undeveloped testicles. Then the next group will happily tell you that your body is totally that of a male, but that they'll gladly help you transform into a 'beautiful woman' if I only just would accept that I am not intersex, but just a transsexual male with a desire to become a woman.
A big part of my post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) comes from those experiences. Where people in positions of absolute authority would consistently repeat those statements, which had been contradicted by their colleagues months or even days before. It forced me to really think about myself, about this thing called 'gender' and what it meant to be a 'woman' or a 'man'.
Looking back, I can see that the role which I was forced into was essentially that of a female-to-male transsexual, made possible by my outwards appearance as a child being that of a male child since none of the primary female characteristics were visible from the outside. As puberty approached, however, this became problematic.
The development of secondary male characteristics on my side were rather spotty and ultimately highly ineffective, with no real change in my voice or facial hair growth noticeable, even as I got feminine hips and a slim waist. Later it would be found that my testicles had essentially not developed to the point where they would have produced more than minimal levels of testosterone. The natural production of estradiol by ovarian tissue on the other hand was apparently strong enough to start some breast development and kick-start a monthly cycle that started off with a super-painful first menstruation event when I was eleven.
Not knowing what was going on with my body, I was forced to suffer in silence as I believed that my body was that of a regular male, even as the secondary female characteristics were becoming ever stronger, with this sudden second puberty seemingly finishing what got started back then.
Doctors ever really helped me with this. Aside from this one Dutch urologist and the one German surgeon, it's been mostly me against the world, trying to understand what it was that made people want to make me believe that I had to be transsexual, and just what in blazen's name my real identity and body are.
With nearly fifteen years of intense experience and plenty of time to think about it all, I think that I have reached a point where a lot of it is beginning to make sense. The concept of 'male' or 'female' has only meaning in so far as they apply to the biological, sexual elements. There's no such thing as 'gender', just one's personality. There's no way to define a 'man' or a 'woman' outside of those crude biological terms.
As for transsexuality, it's always irked me that it was so hard to pin down, and to understand how such a term could conceivably apply to me. Quite recently I wrote a bit on the topic of Body Identity Disorder (BID, also called Body Integrity Dysphoria) [1]. This disorder/dysphoria seems to provide a lot of insight in the topic. The main characteristic is a person with BID feeling like they are 'born in the wrong body', with one or more parts of their body not being part of it, and extreme measures such as amputation being the only reasonable course of action.
As noted by R. Bou Khalil and S. Richa in their December 2012 published article "Apotemnophilia or body integrity identity disorder: a case report review" (doi: 10.1177/1534734612464714), a literature study shows a strong correlation between BID and transsexuality. While detailed research is still spotty, one could state that for a person to be transsexual they need to have BID, with a strong desire to get rid of those elements (genitals and/or secondary characteristics) that feel 'wrong' to them.
Generally people with BID have these fantasies of themselves in their 'new' body, living this different life in which they are happy, unlike in their current existence. This fantasy and the differences between themselves in it and their current reality is what causes their psychological suffering. So far only amputation (i.e. giving into their desires) has shown any reasonable success in resolving their BID.
Why then the insistence on 'transitioning' if a simple amputation of the offending body parts could suffice, skipping the hormone replacement therapy and big risks of sex reassignment surgery? One could postulate here that the concept of 'transitioning' gives those who suffer from genitals-related BID an acceptable way to deal with their problem. Acceptable in the sense that moving between the two binary states that are ingrained into society can be presented as an extreme but acceptable solution to this form of BID.
The misfortune then is for other types of BID patients that there is unlikely to ever be a socially acceptable way to present the amputation of a body part that doesn't have such a counterpart, or another state that they could transition to. To lose a limb or two, lose a hand or even become paralysed from the neck down are things that usually result in the affected person being met with pity at best and them getting shunned at worst. Not by celebrities championing their 'right' to undergo limp amputations. Here one would truly wish for a less tragic solution.
For me then, as someone whose body has so made it so clear that a binary sex is a nice theory but in reality unworkable, to me I find peace in such knowledge. That there's nothing wrong with my body. That there's no sex binary, and that there are no 'male' or 'female' roles, just societal roles which differ per culture. That we're all just individuals with our own personality, and that 'gender' is an obsolete, archaic term without relevance on a modern way of thinking.
Yes, there is still a lot of suffering out there, but most of it seems to be inflicted through society's strict and old-fashioned roles, as well as our ignorance on how the brain works when it comes to understanding things like the mapping between the body and mind. Those are things which still need a lot of research. With our current knowledge we can already clearly see just why performing non-medical genital surgery on intersex infants is so incredibly harmful, as it ignores this mapping between mind and body.
Yet above all, working through all of those different aspects of a topic that so consumes humans has allowed me to take my distance from it. Through a better understanding it has lessened my agony about how I got treated by doctors and psychologists. By gaining an appreciation for how things fit together and my own place as a decidedly non-binary person in this whole, it has given me a much deeper understanding of what it means to be simply human.
Because in the end, the thing to strive for is to simply be a human being.
Maya
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria
After that revelation and subsequent roller coaster of events, it culminated in an MRI scan on the 21st of December 2007 which showed that I have both male and female genitals in addition to a feminine skeleton. During the following twelve years my body would gradually change, with the sudden arrival of a second puberty at the end of 2014 kick-starting changes that would see me not only drop hormone therapy fully, but find myself grasping at physical changes that simply could not be happening. Changes that essentially transform my body from that of an adolescent female into that of an adult woman.
Winding the clock back more than a decade, the struggle that I had to deal with was that the doctors at the VUmc gender team as well as those elsewhere in the Netherlands, the UK, US and so on, had virtually no clue about 'intersex'. I got told that it was not possible that I could be intersex. That they had found no sign of intersex on my body. That I likely was suffering some kind of psychological delusion that made me perceive my body improperly.
Imagine defending your views against doctors and psychologists for more than a decade, as first one group tells you that you are obviously a true hermaphrodite based on the MRI scans, ultrasound and ultimately an exploratory surgery and biopsy of undeveloped testicles. Then the next group will happily tell you that your body is totally that of a male, but that they'll gladly help you transform into a 'beautiful woman' if I only just would accept that I am not intersex, but just a transsexual male with a desire to become a woman.
A big part of my post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) comes from those experiences. Where people in positions of absolute authority would consistently repeat those statements, which had been contradicted by their colleagues months or even days before. It forced me to really think about myself, about this thing called 'gender' and what it meant to be a 'woman' or a 'man'.
Looking back, I can see that the role which I was forced into was essentially that of a female-to-male transsexual, made possible by my outwards appearance as a child being that of a male child since none of the primary female characteristics were visible from the outside. As puberty approached, however, this became problematic.
The development of secondary male characteristics on my side were rather spotty and ultimately highly ineffective, with no real change in my voice or facial hair growth noticeable, even as I got feminine hips and a slim waist. Later it would be found that my testicles had essentially not developed to the point where they would have produced more than minimal levels of testosterone. The natural production of estradiol by ovarian tissue on the other hand was apparently strong enough to start some breast development and kick-start a monthly cycle that started off with a super-painful first menstruation event when I was eleven.
Not knowing what was going on with my body, I was forced to suffer in silence as I believed that my body was that of a regular male, even as the secondary female characteristics were becoming ever stronger, with this sudden second puberty seemingly finishing what got started back then.
Doctors ever really helped me with this. Aside from this one Dutch urologist and the one German surgeon, it's been mostly me against the world, trying to understand what it was that made people want to make me believe that I had to be transsexual, and just what in blazen's name my real identity and body are.
With nearly fifteen years of intense experience and plenty of time to think about it all, I think that I have reached a point where a lot of it is beginning to make sense. The concept of 'male' or 'female' has only meaning in so far as they apply to the biological, sexual elements. There's no such thing as 'gender', just one's personality. There's no way to define a 'man' or a 'woman' outside of those crude biological terms.
As for transsexuality, it's always irked me that it was so hard to pin down, and to understand how such a term could conceivably apply to me. Quite recently I wrote a bit on the topic of Body Identity Disorder (BID, also called Body Integrity Dysphoria) [1]. This disorder/dysphoria seems to provide a lot of insight in the topic. The main characteristic is a person with BID feeling like they are 'born in the wrong body', with one or more parts of their body not being part of it, and extreme measures such as amputation being the only reasonable course of action.
As noted by R. Bou Khalil and S. Richa in their December 2012 published article "Apotemnophilia or body integrity identity disorder: a case report review" (doi: 10.1177/1534734612464714), a literature study shows a strong correlation between BID and transsexuality. While detailed research is still spotty, one could state that for a person to be transsexual they need to have BID, with a strong desire to get rid of those elements (genitals and/or secondary characteristics) that feel 'wrong' to them.
Generally people with BID have these fantasies of themselves in their 'new' body, living this different life in which they are happy, unlike in their current existence. This fantasy and the differences between themselves in it and their current reality is what causes their psychological suffering. So far only amputation (i.e. giving into their desires) has shown any reasonable success in resolving their BID.
Why then the insistence on 'transitioning' if a simple amputation of the offending body parts could suffice, skipping the hormone replacement therapy and big risks of sex reassignment surgery? One could postulate here that the concept of 'transitioning' gives those who suffer from genitals-related BID an acceptable way to deal with their problem. Acceptable in the sense that moving between the two binary states that are ingrained into society can be presented as an extreme but acceptable solution to this form of BID.
The misfortune then is for other types of BID patients that there is unlikely to ever be a socially acceptable way to present the amputation of a body part that doesn't have such a counterpart, or another state that they could transition to. To lose a limb or two, lose a hand or even become paralysed from the neck down are things that usually result in the affected person being met with pity at best and them getting shunned at worst. Not by celebrities championing their 'right' to undergo limp amputations. Here one would truly wish for a less tragic solution.
For me then, as someone whose body has so made it so clear that a binary sex is a nice theory but in reality unworkable, to me I find peace in such knowledge. That there's nothing wrong with my body. That there's no sex binary, and that there are no 'male' or 'female' roles, just societal roles which differ per culture. That we're all just individuals with our own personality, and that 'gender' is an obsolete, archaic term without relevance on a modern way of thinking.
Yes, there is still a lot of suffering out there, but most of it seems to be inflicted through society's strict and old-fashioned roles, as well as our ignorance on how the brain works when it comes to understanding things like the mapping between the body and mind. Those are things which still need a lot of research. With our current knowledge we can already clearly see just why performing non-medical genital surgery on intersex infants is so incredibly harmful, as it ignores this mapping between mind and body.
Yet above all, working through all of those different aspects of a topic that so consumes humans has allowed me to take my distance from it. Through a better understanding it has lessened my agony about how I got treated by doctors and psychologists. By gaining an appreciation for how things fit together and my own place as a decidedly non-binary person in this whole, it has given me a much deeper understanding of what it means to be simply human.
Because in the end, the thing to strive for is to simply be a human being.
Maya
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria
Thursday, 2 May 2019
The worst part of PTSD is not feeling anything any more
It almost doesn't seem fair that when you have PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), it set ups your brain to work against you. Apparently all due to self-protection mechanisms that got pushed too far. One of these involves the amygdala and other parts of the brain involved in dealing with stress and pain regulation. In PTSD sufferers the recollection of traumatic events (consciously or as part of a trigger event) leads to what is called stress-induced analgesia [1].
Essentially this deadens one's perception of pain along with other sensory input. Another effect of this is a lack of emotions. All one can still feel are the negative emotions along with fear and varying levels of apprehension. The result of this when one is exposed consistently and for extended periods to those triggers which cause stress-induced analgesia is often that one begins to harm oneself [2][3]. Usually this involves hurting oneself in a way which may or may not cause permanent damage. This has some overlap with Borderline Personality Disorder [4].
Suicide is generally not the goal PTSD sufferers in this situation are aiming for. As mentioned [3], it's often a form of coping mechanism for upsetting feelings and emotions. It also helps to reduce the feeling of being dissociated from one's body and the general feeling of numbness.
I guess it took me a long time to realise for myself that my level of emotions and feelings is not regular. I had noticed on many occasions even as a child that the only emotion which I could feel strongly was that of sadness. As a teenager I'd often try to provoke this feeling by watching sad movies and series as it'd allow me to feel something.
The other thing that would evoke very strong emotions in me was gestures of kindness. When for example in a documentary or movie it'd be described or shown how someone or multiple bystanders would selflessly dive into the fray in order to save one or more people. Or someone being taken into a person's home after losing everything, for no other reason than to help that person out.
Any other kind of emotion, though? It's weird how you don't really realise that you haven't really been capable of experiencing such emotions for many years because the last time you really felt them was when you were like five years old. I'm not sure that it's better or worse that I cannot recall feeling such memories the way I did as a young child. If I could remember, it might convince me that such feelings actually are real and that I can feel them again one day.
As things are, however, I'm in a horrible situation, where I cannot find that new home, where I had to give up on trying to find medical help for my intersex condition, where I'm in a strange country and where I am at severe risk of becoming homeless or worse.
If I had found that home. If I felt safe and secure. If I had no big worries about the future. If I felt that I didn't have to push myself beyond what I'm mentally and psychologically capable of every single day.
But as things stand I don't know what'll happen to me next week, let alone a month from now. This basically means that I'm almost constantly feeling this numbness and dissociation, of none of this being truly real and - worst of all - that nothing matters. The point where one can think about taking one's own life or dying in general and only feeling a slight sense of relief as it'd end the sensation of pain.
The frustrating thing there is that the solution to stabilise my current situation is so incredibly obvious: find that home, ensure that I have nothing immediate to worry about in terms of my living situation or finances for the immediate future. Yet when one has 'mental health issues', then the only 'solution' that's on offer is apparently to be stuffed full with drugs, whether SSRI anti-depressants or others, and kept in a barren room with staff constantly checking up on you to see whether you have managed to hurt or kill yourself yet.
Maybe there truly isn't a solution, no way out of this situation.
That'd be tragic.
Maya
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3004970/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4155484/
[3] https://www.ptsd.va.gov/understand/related/self_harm.asp
[4] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/borderline-personality-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20370237
Essentially this deadens one's perception of pain along with other sensory input. Another effect of this is a lack of emotions. All one can still feel are the negative emotions along with fear and varying levels of apprehension. The result of this when one is exposed consistently and for extended periods to those triggers which cause stress-induced analgesia is often that one begins to harm oneself [2][3]. Usually this involves hurting oneself in a way which may or may not cause permanent damage. This has some overlap with Borderline Personality Disorder [4].
Suicide is generally not the goal PTSD sufferers in this situation are aiming for. As mentioned [3], it's often a form of coping mechanism for upsetting feelings and emotions. It also helps to reduce the feeling of being dissociated from one's body and the general feeling of numbness.
I guess it took me a long time to realise for myself that my level of emotions and feelings is not regular. I had noticed on many occasions even as a child that the only emotion which I could feel strongly was that of sadness. As a teenager I'd often try to provoke this feeling by watching sad movies and series as it'd allow me to feel something.
The other thing that would evoke very strong emotions in me was gestures of kindness. When for example in a documentary or movie it'd be described or shown how someone or multiple bystanders would selflessly dive into the fray in order to save one or more people. Or someone being taken into a person's home after losing everything, for no other reason than to help that person out.
Any other kind of emotion, though? It's weird how you don't really realise that you haven't really been capable of experiencing such emotions for many years because the last time you really felt them was when you were like five years old. I'm not sure that it's better or worse that I cannot recall feeling such memories the way I did as a young child. If I could remember, it might convince me that such feelings actually are real and that I can feel them again one day.
As things are, however, I'm in a horrible situation, where I cannot find that new home, where I had to give up on trying to find medical help for my intersex condition, where I'm in a strange country and where I am at severe risk of becoming homeless or worse.
If I had found that home. If I felt safe and secure. If I had no big worries about the future. If I felt that I didn't have to push myself beyond what I'm mentally and psychologically capable of every single day.
But as things stand I don't know what'll happen to me next week, let alone a month from now. This basically means that I'm almost constantly feeling this numbness and dissociation, of none of this being truly real and - worst of all - that nothing matters. The point where one can think about taking one's own life or dying in general and only feeling a slight sense of relief as it'd end the sensation of pain.
The frustrating thing there is that the solution to stabilise my current situation is so incredibly obvious: find that home, ensure that I have nothing immediate to worry about in terms of my living situation or finances for the immediate future. Yet when one has 'mental health issues', then the only 'solution' that's on offer is apparently to be stuffed full with drugs, whether SSRI anti-depressants or others, and kept in a barren room with staff constantly checking up on you to see whether you have managed to hurt or kill yourself yet.
Maybe there truly isn't a solution, no way out of this situation.
That'd be tragic.
Maya
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3004970/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4155484/
[3] https://www.ptsd.va.gov/understand/related/self_harm.asp
[4] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/borderline-personality-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20370237
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