Earlier this week I had an introduction meeting at the corporation which owns the apartment I most recently looked at to rent. We went through all the usual questions and wishes, and I mentioned of course that I really prefer a quiet place. The man I was talking with mentioned of course that what is an acceptable amount of noise differs per person.
I wanted to explain that I have severe post-traumatic stress syndrome, that many noises from neighbours, heating systems and such startle me and make me want to flee or even commit suicide if they continue for an extended period of time. But I didn't. I just said that I like quiet apartments, with no neighbours above me and such.
A few days ago I was on my way to do groceries on my bicycle, when first this guy and then a girl ended up waiting next to me at a traffic light. They started kissing. The sensation of sickness, rage, terror and panic was just too much to describe in mere words. I wanted to scream, yell, run, get away from there. For hours and until the next day this feeling lasted. Yet I kept it all inside until I was back home and could cry and openly express the ripping pain I felt inside.
I am well aware of how far my PTSD and related traumatic disorders affect my life and how irrational the beliefs are which originate from these traumas, such as that everyone wishes to harm me, that all men are rapists, that all physicians and psychologists are evil, conniving psychopaths, that the only reasonable thing I can do is to take my own life. That there is nothing left to salvage in my life or in humanity as a whole.
Maybe it's because all of it sounds so completely crazy and out of touch with reality that I cannot and will not talk about with just anyone. I also realise that heterosexual couples have likely no idea how much emotional pain and suffering they cause with their openly affectionate and intimate behaviour. The hatred I feel towards the latter is born from the pain they caused, not because they knowingly and willingly caused my suffering.
Yet all of it comes down to that thanks to these traumatic disorders I have a lot what normal society would call 'crazy' inside of me. Safely locked away until something triggers it. And very few people - basically only those with traumatic disorders themselves - can comprehend what it feels like to survive through each and every day like that.
My name is Maya, and I have multiple traumatic disorders, yet I do not talk about it out of fear that society will shun me even more.
Welcome to today's enlightened society, I guess...
Maya
Saturday, 14 November 2015
Saturday, 7 November 2015
Wednesday, 4 November 2015
How not being punished gets one into jail
It goes something like this:
But I'm not being punished is the claim. Today my lawyer communicated me the final verdict in this case back in the Netherlands, and despite the very act being illegal according to Dutch law, I still have to pay this artist for being too lazy and/or stupid to insure the works she put up on public display where any child could have tipped them over.
To me the impact of all this is largely psychological. There's the injustice of having to pay, sure, but to me this last ruling seems to also have cut the last thread of hope I had that maybe my country of birth would maybe not have been quite so bad. With that hope shattered, and nothing else tying me to the Netherlands after I pay up this punishment, it feels like a chapter will have been closed.
For all I care the entirety of the Netherlands can go slide into the North Sea. All that I harbour towards this country as an institution and symbol is negative. It's a haven of corruption, of intolerance and bigotry. That I got my first name and official gender changed there was almost pure luck, the latter only thanks to German doctors providing the details and performing the procedures Dutch doctors refused to perform or where they felt had to lie about the results.
I will start a crowdfunding thing for this amount I will have to pay later this week, just in case anyone feels like lightening my burden somewhat - both financially and psychologically - since it's still a considerable chunk out of my meagre savings. I have only been able to save up for the past two years, after all, courtesy of having been robbed clean of money and possessions in 2013.
My general mood at this point is still one of mostly shock, as well as bitterness and disappointment. It is the last vile act by a country which I once saw as my home and where I felt at home. After more than a decade that feeling of safety and belonging has been stripped away, until only the barren reality remained. I cannot and will not ever return to the Netherlands. It's a part of my past that is so hideous and so repugnant that it benefits no one to linger any period of time on it, let alone within its borders.
Only way forward from the lowest point is up, right?
Maya
- Be born intersex.
- Get psychologically and physically tortured for years, suffer severe traumas.
- Try to commit suicide and fail.
- End up in the national Bible Belt and try to find a new doctor.
- Get refused by first doctor for being intersex.
- Get accepted, then receive hostile attitude at other doctor.
- Try to ask for help anyway, get the run-around.
- Have one's dissociative identity disorder (DSD) triggered at said doctor, suffer a blackout.
- Wake up in a cell, naked, bruised, battered and with an extremely sore knee, courtesy of the police.
- Suffer through countless court-cases, have charges of attempted murder and such dropped.
- Enjoy many months of revalidation, permanent nerve damage and bruised bones.
- Be found guilty of vandalism, but not get any punishment due to the circumstances of the event.
- Be still forced to pay thousands of Euros because the uninsured art work of a local artist got damaged.
- Face the threat of paying up or spending 39 days in jail.
But I'm not being punished is the claim. Today my lawyer communicated me the final verdict in this case back in the Netherlands, and despite the very act being illegal according to Dutch law, I still have to pay this artist for being too lazy and/or stupid to insure the works she put up on public display where any child could have tipped them over.
To me the impact of all this is largely psychological. There's the injustice of having to pay, sure, but to me this last ruling seems to also have cut the last thread of hope I had that maybe my country of birth would maybe not have been quite so bad. With that hope shattered, and nothing else tying me to the Netherlands after I pay up this punishment, it feels like a chapter will have been closed.
For all I care the entirety of the Netherlands can go slide into the North Sea. All that I harbour towards this country as an institution and symbol is negative. It's a haven of corruption, of intolerance and bigotry. That I got my first name and official gender changed there was almost pure luck, the latter only thanks to German doctors providing the details and performing the procedures Dutch doctors refused to perform or where they felt had to lie about the results.
I will start a crowdfunding thing for this amount I will have to pay later this week, just in case anyone feels like lightening my burden somewhat - both financially and psychologically - since it's still a considerable chunk out of my meagre savings. I have only been able to save up for the past two years, after all, courtesy of having been robbed clean of money and possessions in 2013.
My general mood at this point is still one of mostly shock, as well as bitterness and disappointment. It is the last vile act by a country which I once saw as my home and where I felt at home. After more than a decade that feeling of safety and belonging has been stripped away, until only the barren reality remained. I cannot and will not ever return to the Netherlands. It's a part of my past that is so hideous and so repugnant that it benefits no one to linger any period of time on it, let alone within its borders.
Only way forward from the lowest point is up, right?
Maya
Monday, 2 November 2015
That horrible moment before judgement is rendered
Waiting for a possibly life-changing or at least very important moment in my life is something which I have gone through more than a hundred times in the past decade. From the thrilling adrenaline rush prior to a live TV appearance, to the nauseating, hyperventilation-inducing experience of doctor appointments, down to the absolute horror of hearing the results from a doctor or such.
Sometimes the latter can be positive, such as when I had my first MRI scan in Germany and the radiologist afterwards confirmed my intersex status. Usually it is negative, however. Most appointments with doctors ended up with them trying to make me 'see' that I had to start believing that I am not intersex, but transsexual. That everything I had been told by German doctors was a lie and nothing on the MRI scans showed that I could possibly be intersex, let alone a hermaphrodite.
Similarly soul-crushing is to wait to hear judgement rendered against you in a legal case where officially you haven't even received punishment, but you are still waiting to hear what your punishment will be. I assume that paying a very large sum of money is a form of punishment, at least.
This particular ruling will occur tomorrow, definitively ending a more than 4-year long journey from court case to court case through the Dutch justice system, which saw charge after charge against me dropped as my medical background and its resulting psychological traumas provided sufficient reason to explain and excuse my behaviour, leading to the previous verdict, dating back to a court case last year when I last appealed the verdict preceding it.
Here, too, is there the possibility of extreme joy or extreme psychological pain. Joy if the punishment is not upheld and I am free to go. Pain if I have to accept the punishment, for I will have to give up a large chunk of my savings, and I will feel even more bitter about a so-called justice system which violates even even its own rules under which it is not allowed to assign monetary punishment if no other punishment is assigned.
Two possible outcomes tomorrow. The end of too many years of agony and many psychological and physical scars and injuries. Hopefully the last I will have to do with the Netherlands in any form or shape. Hopefully another step towards me moving on with my life, instead of being held back by the past.
For now there's only tension, uncertainty and nausea.
Maya
Sometimes the latter can be positive, such as when I had my first MRI scan in Germany and the radiologist afterwards confirmed my intersex status. Usually it is negative, however. Most appointments with doctors ended up with them trying to make me 'see' that I had to start believing that I am not intersex, but transsexual. That everything I had been told by German doctors was a lie and nothing on the MRI scans showed that I could possibly be intersex, let alone a hermaphrodite.
Similarly soul-crushing is to wait to hear judgement rendered against you in a legal case where officially you haven't even received punishment, but you are still waiting to hear what your punishment will be. I assume that paying a very large sum of money is a form of punishment, at least.
This particular ruling will occur tomorrow, definitively ending a more than 4-year long journey from court case to court case through the Dutch justice system, which saw charge after charge against me dropped as my medical background and its resulting psychological traumas provided sufficient reason to explain and excuse my behaviour, leading to the previous verdict, dating back to a court case last year when I last appealed the verdict preceding it.
Here, too, is there the possibility of extreme joy or extreme psychological pain. Joy if the punishment is not upheld and I am free to go. Pain if I have to accept the punishment, for I will have to give up a large chunk of my savings, and I will feel even more bitter about a so-called justice system which violates even even its own rules under which it is not allowed to assign monetary punishment if no other punishment is assigned.
Two possible outcomes tomorrow. The end of too many years of agony and many psychological and physical scars and injuries. Hopefully the last I will have to do with the Netherlands in any form or shape. Hopefully another step towards me moving on with my life, instead of being held back by the past.
For now there's only tension, uncertainty and nausea.
Maya
Sunday, 1 November 2015
Why feminists like Sarkeesian and kin really get on my nerves
To not have heard anything about Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn and other self-professed feminists the past years, one must have lived underneath one serious rock. Amidst unsubstantiated claims of sexism in video games, broad-ranging fraud in gaming journalism and the (in)famous quote by Sarkeesian that 'everything is sexist, you just got to keep pointing it out', a surge of so-called '3rd-wave feminism' took hold of the world.
What this essentially came down to was media report after media report of gang rapes on university campuses, of women being only paid a pittance at work compared to their male colleagues while having to suffer constant sexual harassment. Of women only being used as objects in movies, video games and accusations of young boys being 'programmed' this way to become abusive, objectifying monsters themselves when they grew up.
Most of this was quite familiar to many people already, at least those who had been around during the late 90s when the now infamous lawyer Jack Thompson made it his campaign to point out that everything in video games was about violence and that this was the explanation behind the (non-existing) rise in real-life violence, including the Columbine mass-shooting which supposedly was 'caused' by the video game 'Doom'.
Thompson's range of lawsuits and basic premise was soon to be found to be without any merit whatsoever, with study after study finding no link between violent video games and real-life violence. In fact, around the time that the first 3D first-person shooters were being introduced in the US, the crime statistics show a sharp drop-off in violent crimes. Ultimately Thompson was kicked out of the lawyer profession and faded away into obscurity.
Fast-forward to 2014 and we got Sarkeesian and others loudly proclaiming that it is 'proven' that sexism and sexual violence in video games teach boys and men to be sexist and violent towards women in real life as well. Sounds familiar? It should be, because it's the same song and dance all over again, only this time the main character is a woman and not a lawyer. Cue the 'must protect all women' politically correct memes.
After collecting over half a million dollars in donations and getting invited to the United Nations to propose legislation which would make it basically illegal to disagree with a woman/feminist on 'anti-harassment' grounds, those of us who are not part of Sarkeesian's army of loyal feminists and social justice warriors now are expected to go along with this, or risk being accused to 'harassment', 'rape threats', 'internalised misogyny' and 'supporting the patriarchy'.
Frankly it's all such an immense pile of hogwash, it is astounding that the world plus dog have gone along in it for so long. Or at least the mass media has, reporting on each accusation uttered by Sarkeesian et al. as if it is part of the Holy Gospel itself. Some have already jokingly begun to refer to Sarkeesian as the Pope of the Church of Feminism.
Now, let's wind back a bit. First of all, let's see what Sarkeesian and yours truly have in common. We are both white women. We were both raised in a rich, Western country. Both of us have been provided with virtually every opportunity imaginable. And yet Sarkeesian is claiming that she receives constant harassment and abuse from men, and that women in general in Western society are being oppressed, objectified and have little say in their future.
I cannot say that I share this opinion at all. In fact, I have a view on this issue which Sarkeesian doesn't and likely never will have, thanks to the things we do not have in common. I was namely not born as a regular woman, but as an intersex - specifically a hermaphrodite - woman and due to this spent the first two decades of my life thinking that I was male, due to my body's physiology and my environment.
Basically I am supposed to have experienced the 'male privilege' people like Sarkeesian claim exist and which women do not have access to. If this exists, I am not sure what it would be. I was bullied, harassed, beaten up and had to defend myself against bullies despite supposedly being part of the 'patriarchy'. I went through primary and high school being lonely and feeling different, ultimately finding out about my own giftedness.
Being gifted is a terrible curse and gift. Society doesn't understand it and the amount of cruel jokes, misunderstandings and outright abuse you receive as a result of it is astounding. All that you are theoretically capable of is mostly wasted on trying to deal with a society which is primitive, flawed and ignorant. It doesn't feel like you truly belong on the same planet as the people around you, but were transported there from the future or some advanced alien society.
Later I also found out that I had never been male, but am this intersex female. A hermaphrodite. If I thought before that being gifted was hard to live with, being openly intersex quickly made me reconsider that notion.
I learned about the horrific world of genital mutilation being forced upon intersex infants in so-called 'normalisation' surgeries, medical records being kept hidden from the victims of these practices, and a general approach towards exterminating every trace of intersex individuals, even classifying intersex as a disorder, with the term 'Disorder of Sex Development' (DSD).
For myself, I was brainwashed, made to believe that I had to be transsexual, go along with the whole transsexual protocol and undergo genital mutilation so that every trace of my intersex condition could be removed. I would be 'cured' at that point. I am pretty sure that is the standard approach among psychologists and physicians towards intersex cases. It is the reason why I fled my country of birth, to escape this level of persecution which saw me unable to get proper medical help for my condition.
As a result I suffered severe Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), along with a host of other traumatic disorders, as I began to suffer medical complications as a result of my untreated intersex condition. At this point I am still looking for medical help.
Did I mention that I have also been living as a woman for the past eleven years or so, the past three officially, even?
Being a woman never was a problem. Sure, I had to learn how to deal with (heterosexual) men, as due to my lack of a real puberty I was left completely naive and wholly unprepared for male attention. True, I did get raped back in 2006, but I would not put that on 'being a woman'. On that issue I blame being intersex and the largest 'gender team' in the Netherlands mistreating my case in every way possible, reducing me to an uncertain shell of a human being, looking for just someone to give some attention. On that count my hatred is fully directed towards the pig-faced bastard who did this to me, as well as those Dutch medical 'specialists'.
So no, being a woman never was a problem or issue. Being gifted and intersex most definitely were, though. It makes sense in a sick kind of way as well: men and women are normal in society, after all, while gifted and intersex people are seen as 'freaks' and not quite 'normal' humans. With doctors teaching (prospective) parents to see intersex children as being the victims of a birth defect, tragedy is unavoidable. Have fun randomly assigning a physical sex.
And gifted children? Child prodigies often burn out at an early age, never fitting well into society. Most others prefer to withdraw from the same society which harassed and bullied them and later simply refused to understand them. It is mostly just a lonely existence.
Returning to these self-professed, 3rd-wave, radical feminist types like this Anita Sarkeesian, I would thus like to in summary proclaim them to be a collection of self-absorbed, delusional and very pathetic whiners. They like to imagine a world in which their existence is required, where they can feel validated, even if it is at the cost of those women who do not wish to go along with their ideology, not to mention society in general.
I would never call myself a feminist. I proudly proclaim myself to be a humanist, for I do not discriminate. To me each person's suffering is equal. As I type this, both men and women are being oppressed in the cruel, Shari'a-ruled country of Saudi-Arabia. In Thailand young girls and boys are being raped in brothels by mostly Western tourists. In oligarchies like the US a small elite remain unfathomably rich at the cost of everyone else.
I am a strong believer in giving everyone an equal start and opportunities in life. One's accident of birth should be no ground for determining in any way or form what one can or cannot become in life. I believe in self-determination: full control over one's own life and body. I am vehemently against non-critical, non-medical surgeries on babies, infants and others who cannot make a decision about it themselves. I could not care in the slightest what the gender, sex, sexual-orientation, skin-colour, religion or favourite colour or food is of the person in question.
And Sarkeesian et al.? They would like to prosecute everyone online who disagrees with them, because mean messages on Twitter give them 'PTSD'. They're not victims. They just play one on TV.
Maya
What this essentially came down to was media report after media report of gang rapes on university campuses, of women being only paid a pittance at work compared to their male colleagues while having to suffer constant sexual harassment. Of women only being used as objects in movies, video games and accusations of young boys being 'programmed' this way to become abusive, objectifying monsters themselves when they grew up.
Most of this was quite familiar to many people already, at least those who had been around during the late 90s when the now infamous lawyer Jack Thompson made it his campaign to point out that everything in video games was about violence and that this was the explanation behind the (non-existing) rise in real-life violence, including the Columbine mass-shooting which supposedly was 'caused' by the video game 'Doom'.
Thompson's range of lawsuits and basic premise was soon to be found to be without any merit whatsoever, with study after study finding no link between violent video games and real-life violence. In fact, around the time that the first 3D first-person shooters were being introduced in the US, the crime statistics show a sharp drop-off in violent crimes. Ultimately Thompson was kicked out of the lawyer profession and faded away into obscurity.
Fast-forward to 2014 and we got Sarkeesian and others loudly proclaiming that it is 'proven' that sexism and sexual violence in video games teach boys and men to be sexist and violent towards women in real life as well. Sounds familiar? It should be, because it's the same song and dance all over again, only this time the main character is a woman and not a lawyer. Cue the 'must protect all women' politically correct memes.
After collecting over half a million dollars in donations and getting invited to the United Nations to propose legislation which would make it basically illegal to disagree with a woman/feminist on 'anti-harassment' grounds, those of us who are not part of Sarkeesian's army of loyal feminists and social justice warriors now are expected to go along with this, or risk being accused to 'harassment', 'rape threats', 'internalised misogyny' and 'supporting the patriarchy'.
Frankly it's all such an immense pile of hogwash, it is astounding that the world plus dog have gone along in it for so long. Or at least the mass media has, reporting on each accusation uttered by Sarkeesian et al. as if it is part of the Holy Gospel itself. Some have already jokingly begun to refer to Sarkeesian as the Pope of the Church of Feminism.
Now, let's wind back a bit. First of all, let's see what Sarkeesian and yours truly have in common. We are both white women. We were both raised in a rich, Western country. Both of us have been provided with virtually every opportunity imaginable. And yet Sarkeesian is claiming that she receives constant harassment and abuse from men, and that women in general in Western society are being oppressed, objectified and have little say in their future.
I cannot say that I share this opinion at all. In fact, I have a view on this issue which Sarkeesian doesn't and likely never will have, thanks to the things we do not have in common. I was namely not born as a regular woman, but as an intersex - specifically a hermaphrodite - woman and due to this spent the first two decades of my life thinking that I was male, due to my body's physiology and my environment.
Basically I am supposed to have experienced the 'male privilege' people like Sarkeesian claim exist and which women do not have access to. If this exists, I am not sure what it would be. I was bullied, harassed, beaten up and had to defend myself against bullies despite supposedly being part of the 'patriarchy'. I went through primary and high school being lonely and feeling different, ultimately finding out about my own giftedness.
Being gifted is a terrible curse and gift. Society doesn't understand it and the amount of cruel jokes, misunderstandings and outright abuse you receive as a result of it is astounding. All that you are theoretically capable of is mostly wasted on trying to deal with a society which is primitive, flawed and ignorant. It doesn't feel like you truly belong on the same planet as the people around you, but were transported there from the future or some advanced alien society.
Later I also found out that I had never been male, but am this intersex female. A hermaphrodite. If I thought before that being gifted was hard to live with, being openly intersex quickly made me reconsider that notion.
I learned about the horrific world of genital mutilation being forced upon intersex infants in so-called 'normalisation' surgeries, medical records being kept hidden from the victims of these practices, and a general approach towards exterminating every trace of intersex individuals, even classifying intersex as a disorder, with the term 'Disorder of Sex Development' (DSD).
For myself, I was brainwashed, made to believe that I had to be transsexual, go along with the whole transsexual protocol and undergo genital mutilation so that every trace of my intersex condition could be removed. I would be 'cured' at that point. I am pretty sure that is the standard approach among psychologists and physicians towards intersex cases. It is the reason why I fled my country of birth, to escape this level of persecution which saw me unable to get proper medical help for my condition.
As a result I suffered severe Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), along with a host of other traumatic disorders, as I began to suffer medical complications as a result of my untreated intersex condition. At this point I am still looking for medical help.
Did I mention that I have also been living as a woman for the past eleven years or so, the past three officially, even?
Being a woman never was a problem. Sure, I had to learn how to deal with (heterosexual) men, as due to my lack of a real puberty I was left completely naive and wholly unprepared for male attention. True, I did get raped back in 2006, but I would not put that on 'being a woman'. On that issue I blame being intersex and the largest 'gender team' in the Netherlands mistreating my case in every way possible, reducing me to an uncertain shell of a human being, looking for just someone to give some attention. On that count my hatred is fully directed towards the pig-faced bastard who did this to me, as well as those Dutch medical 'specialists'.
So no, being a woman never was a problem or issue. Being gifted and intersex most definitely were, though. It makes sense in a sick kind of way as well: men and women are normal in society, after all, while gifted and intersex people are seen as 'freaks' and not quite 'normal' humans. With doctors teaching (prospective) parents to see intersex children as being the victims of a birth defect, tragedy is unavoidable. Have fun randomly assigning a physical sex.
And gifted children? Child prodigies often burn out at an early age, never fitting well into society. Most others prefer to withdraw from the same society which harassed and bullied them and later simply refused to understand them. It is mostly just a lonely existence.
Returning to these self-professed, 3rd-wave, radical feminist types like this Anita Sarkeesian, I would thus like to in summary proclaim them to be a collection of self-absorbed, delusional and very pathetic whiners. They like to imagine a world in which their existence is required, where they can feel validated, even if it is at the cost of those women who do not wish to go along with their ideology, not to mention society in general.
I would never call myself a feminist. I proudly proclaim myself to be a humanist, for I do not discriminate. To me each person's suffering is equal. As I type this, both men and women are being oppressed in the cruel, Shari'a-ruled country of Saudi-Arabia. In Thailand young girls and boys are being raped in brothels by mostly Western tourists. In oligarchies like the US a small elite remain unfathomably rich at the cost of everyone else.
I am a strong believer in giving everyone an equal start and opportunities in life. One's accident of birth should be no ground for determining in any way or form what one can or cannot become in life. I believe in self-determination: full control over one's own life and body. I am vehemently against non-critical, non-medical surgeries on babies, infants and others who cannot make a decision about it themselves. I could not care in the slightest what the gender, sex, sexual-orientation, skin-colour, religion or favourite colour or food is of the person in question.
And Sarkeesian et al.? They would like to prosecute everyone online who disagrees with them, because mean messages on Twitter give them 'PTSD'. They're not victims. They just play one on TV.
Maya
Saturday, 31 October 2015
Some ways to ruin a weekend
Yesterday as the last working day of the week was winding down, I found myself not exactly enthusiastically looking forward to the weekend. My main issue was that of the court ruling next week in the legal case in the Netherlands [1]. The matter thereby is that even though I have been cleared of any wrongdoing which would necessitate punishment, they can still punish me by having me pay an exorbitant amount of money as 'reparations'. To me that's still punishment and current Dutch law agrees with me, but one never knows what the court will decide.
As a result I wasn't looking forward to heading into the weekend, knowing what is waiting for me after it. I'll just have to face whatever comes, but that doesn't make it any easier.
Then last night I began to feel quite nauseous. Heading to bed early, I figured it was just the stress and maybe the food that day. Today I felt just tired and soon began to suffer from the same nausea again, accompanied by stabbing pains in my head, focused on the top left side. I know from experience that this pain means that part of my skin in that area will soon be turning extremely sensitive.
The nausea was new, though, or at least this particular flavour of nausea. This one was more subtle than the usual types I suffer through. After the day is nearly over and while I am writing this, both the nausea and pain seem to have pretty much fully faded, though I can still feel the skin on my head tingling and otherwise feeling weird.
Also at some point during the day I decided to throw this stabbing-pain-in-the-head symptoms into WebMD just to see what it would throw up and there I actually stumbled over an interesting symptom in its list of suggestions. The symptom related to sudden, aggressive anger and linked to a condition called PMDD, or Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder [2], which is an extreme version of premenstrual syndrome (PMS) [3].
PMS is something I am of course quite familiar with, but PMDD was completely new to me. Of the PMS symptoms as listed on Wikipedia I am intimately familiar with the bloating, lower back pain, abdominal cramps, swelling and tenderness in the breasts, cyclic acne and joint (hips, knees) and muscle pain (legs mostly).
A few days ago I was complaining to my best friend that I was feeling so incredibly irritable lately, to the point where a single setback - no matter how minor - would cause me to want to incite in rage. When I wasn't feeling like that I would just want to cry and feel horrible for myself. While the latter symptoms aren't that unusual for me, the former definitely are. It takes much more than just something simple to make me want to throw something heavy across a room or choke a puppy. But there I was, constantly having to hold back from sudden outbursts of rage.
Of the symptoms listed for PMDD, I can recognise a number which overlap with my PTSD and other traumatic disorders I have been diagnosed with:
Symptoms which I can more or less unique assign to PMDD would be the following:
What is clear to me is there is likely a severe and developing hormonal balance issue forming within my body in so far as it hasn't already. From the appearance of linea nigra and other pregnancy symptoms to increasingly severe PMS symptoms, including migraines, it's becoming hard to deny that proper research is an absolute and urgent requirement.
I will have to compile all of the above along with the medical files and a summary of the research questions and facts so far for my appointments with the gynaecologist and endocrinologist the coming months. PMDD is however an interesting addition to look at it if the symptoms do not vanish by themselves if the stress factors are reduced or removed.
For all I know, this feeling of incredible tiredness and being quick to anger is simply due to normal PMS combined with stress, PTSD and general lack of sleep and rest. The heavens know that 'rest' is one of those words which have fallen into disuse over the past decades until they ultimately got stricken and discarded from my personal dictionary.
Not having to pay that ridiculous punishment, getting proper medical help at long last and moving to a new, quiet place would go a long way to alleviating much of the stress I feel burdened by at this point. Only the future knows what will happen next, though.
I hope that my body can stop being a bloody medical experiment, though. It really isn't fun any more...
Maya
[1] http://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2015/10/dutch-justice-when-punishing-is-not.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premenstrual_dysphoric_disorder
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premenstrual_syndrome
As a result I wasn't looking forward to heading into the weekend, knowing what is waiting for me after it. I'll just have to face whatever comes, but that doesn't make it any easier.
Then last night I began to feel quite nauseous. Heading to bed early, I figured it was just the stress and maybe the food that day. Today I felt just tired and soon began to suffer from the same nausea again, accompanied by stabbing pains in my head, focused on the top left side. I know from experience that this pain means that part of my skin in that area will soon be turning extremely sensitive.
The nausea was new, though, or at least this particular flavour of nausea. This one was more subtle than the usual types I suffer through. After the day is nearly over and while I am writing this, both the nausea and pain seem to have pretty much fully faded, though I can still feel the skin on my head tingling and otherwise feeling weird.
Also at some point during the day I decided to throw this stabbing-pain-in-the-head symptoms into WebMD just to see what it would throw up and there I actually stumbled over an interesting symptom in its list of suggestions. The symptom related to sudden, aggressive anger and linked to a condition called PMDD, or Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder [2], which is an extreme version of premenstrual syndrome (PMS) [3].
PMS is something I am of course quite familiar with, but PMDD was completely new to me. Of the PMS symptoms as listed on Wikipedia I am intimately familiar with the bloating, lower back pain, abdominal cramps, swelling and tenderness in the breasts, cyclic acne and joint (hips, knees) and muscle pain (legs mostly).
A few days ago I was complaining to my best friend that I was feeling so incredibly irritable lately, to the point where a single setback - no matter how minor - would cause me to want to incite in rage. When I wasn't feeling like that I would just want to cry and feel horrible for myself. While the latter symptoms aren't that unusual for me, the former definitely are. It takes much more than just something simple to make me want to throw something heavy across a room or choke a puppy. But there I was, constantly having to hold back from sudden outbursts of rage.
Of the symptoms listed for PMDD, I can recognise a number which overlap with my PTSD and other traumatic disorders I have been diagnosed with:
- Feelings of sadness or despair, or even thoughts of suicide
- Feelings of tension or anxiety
- Panic attacks
- Trouble sleeping
- Feeling out of control
Symptoms which I can more or less unique assign to PMDD would be the following:
- Mood swings or frequent crying
- Lasting irritability or anger that affects other people
- Lack of interest in daily activities and relationships
- Trouble thinking or focusing
- Tiredness or low energy
- Food cravings or binge eating
- Physical symptoms, such as bloating, breast tenderness, headaches, and joint or muscle pain
What is clear to me is there is likely a severe and developing hormonal balance issue forming within my body in so far as it hasn't already. From the appearance of linea nigra and other pregnancy symptoms to increasingly severe PMS symptoms, including migraines, it's becoming hard to deny that proper research is an absolute and urgent requirement.
I will have to compile all of the above along with the medical files and a summary of the research questions and facts so far for my appointments with the gynaecologist and endocrinologist the coming months. PMDD is however an interesting addition to look at it if the symptoms do not vanish by themselves if the stress factors are reduced or removed.
For all I know, this feeling of incredible tiredness and being quick to anger is simply due to normal PMS combined with stress, PTSD and general lack of sleep and rest. The heavens know that 'rest' is one of those words which have fallen into disuse over the past decades until they ultimately got stricken and discarded from my personal dictionary.
Not having to pay that ridiculous punishment, getting proper medical help at long last and moving to a new, quiet place would go a long way to alleviating much of the stress I feel burdened by at this point. Only the future knows what will happen next, though.
I hope that my body can stop being a bloody medical experiment, though. It really isn't fun any more...
Maya
[1] http://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2015/10/dutch-justice-when-punishing-is-not.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premenstrual_dysphoric_disorder
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premenstrual_syndrome
Thursday, 29 October 2015
Reflections only ever lie
Today was a pretty warm day and silly me was wearing my winter coat as I had been doing for the past (colder) weeks as I cycled to the office. At arrival I was thus more than happy to take off said coat before heading into the building and let the warm Autumn air cool down my skin somewhat.
Walking inside with my coat on one arm and wearing little more than a tank top above my jeans, I waited for the next elevator together with this man who was already waiting there. Right from the beginning it was obvious that he liked what he saw, as his eyes scanned my body. Engaging in friendly conversation despite all this, I was nevertheless happy to get out of the elevator on my floor.
I know from experiences that heterosexual men consider me to be quite attractive. I think I can kind of understand why, yet at the same time it makes me feel confused and sad.
There are many times when I catch a glimpse of myself in a reflection somewhere and I suddenly realise that damn, I do look like a woman. Many times when I am alone I will stand in front of a mirror, acknowledging that I can only describe the body I see reflected back at me as that of a tall, ivory-skinned, reddish-haired woman. I will then proceed to tell myself in an ironic tone that I really, really look like a guy, as all of those doctors and psychologists have been telling me for over a decade.
Also, before that decade I was simply supposed to be a boy, then a guy, and that was the end of it. Now I'm a woman. Kinda. Depends on which doctor or psychologist you ask.
The two doctor appointments I have the coming two months are essentially yet again about bringing clarity to the question of what I actually am. What should I be seeing in a mirror's reflection? What do others truly see when they look at me? What is the medical and biological reality? Could I maybe truly be not only a woman, but also be fertile as one? What is the reality I should accept and embrace?
The fact that there are male to female transsexuals out there who look pretty much like natural-born women terrifies me. It feeds the fear that looks can mean absolutely nothing. That the outside is irrelevant and can be moulded into anything one likes. That the mirror's reflection lies to me.
That just makes it more important to me to learn what is going on inside this body of mine. Whether I truly have been menstruating for the past two decades and that this explains the monthly pains during that time. What my natural hormone cycle looks like. Whether I am overdosing on hormones right now because my body is far more feminine than I had assumed years ago when I tested my levels for the last time. Whether I have functional ovaries.
Whether I truly am intersex.
Part of me acknowledges that it is not a settled matter, that at this point I'm still a nothing, a no-body, a medical question mark. That at this point nobody can say that I am male, female, intersex or something else. Medical opinions are all over the board after all.
Some days I wonder whether I will ever know the truth, or whether there even is a truth. This then leads me to consider the point of continuing to live if the coming decades will be just like the past decades, filled with doubt, uncertainty, fear and continuing scorn and harassment from so-called medical and healthcare professionals.
I wish I was born normal, or not at all. Anything else is just a life filled with incredible pain.
Maya
Walking inside with my coat on one arm and wearing little more than a tank top above my jeans, I waited for the next elevator together with this man who was already waiting there. Right from the beginning it was obvious that he liked what he saw, as his eyes scanned my body. Engaging in friendly conversation despite all this, I was nevertheless happy to get out of the elevator on my floor.
I know from experiences that heterosexual men consider me to be quite attractive. I think I can kind of understand why, yet at the same time it makes me feel confused and sad.
There are many times when I catch a glimpse of myself in a reflection somewhere and I suddenly realise that damn, I do look like a woman. Many times when I am alone I will stand in front of a mirror, acknowledging that I can only describe the body I see reflected back at me as that of a tall, ivory-skinned, reddish-haired woman. I will then proceed to tell myself in an ironic tone that I really, really look like a guy, as all of those doctors and psychologists have been telling me for over a decade.
Also, before that decade I was simply supposed to be a boy, then a guy, and that was the end of it. Now I'm a woman. Kinda. Depends on which doctor or psychologist you ask.
The two doctor appointments I have the coming two months are essentially yet again about bringing clarity to the question of what I actually am. What should I be seeing in a mirror's reflection? What do others truly see when they look at me? What is the medical and biological reality? Could I maybe truly be not only a woman, but also be fertile as one? What is the reality I should accept and embrace?
The fact that there are male to female transsexuals out there who look pretty much like natural-born women terrifies me. It feeds the fear that looks can mean absolutely nothing. That the outside is irrelevant and can be moulded into anything one likes. That the mirror's reflection lies to me.
That just makes it more important to me to learn what is going on inside this body of mine. Whether I truly have been menstruating for the past two decades and that this explains the monthly pains during that time. What my natural hormone cycle looks like. Whether I am overdosing on hormones right now because my body is far more feminine than I had assumed years ago when I tested my levels for the last time. Whether I have functional ovaries.
Whether I truly am intersex.
Part of me acknowledges that it is not a settled matter, that at this point I'm still a nothing, a no-body, a medical question mark. That at this point nobody can say that I am male, female, intersex or something else. Medical opinions are all over the board after all.
Some days I wonder whether I will ever know the truth, or whether there even is a truth. This then leads me to consider the point of continuing to live if the coming decades will be just like the past decades, filled with doubt, uncertainty, fear and continuing scorn and harassment from so-called medical and healthcare professionals.
I wish I was born normal, or not at all. Anything else is just a life filled with incredible pain.
Maya
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