Continuing to work through a specific trauma

Posted: November 12, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Fourteen years ago today, I was taken to the emergency room and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for nineteen days.  It was by choice – I voluntarily admitted myself, but once I got there, I realized that basically, I was stuck, and things got much much worse for me.  Essentially, I went from being in a confused and vaguely depressed state to suffering a full-on paranoid psychotic break from reality, which in retrospect, I believe could have been avoided had I not been there at all.  My plan in my head was to go there and sleep and restore my mind and body for a day or two, and then make a plan from there.  Their plan was to do what they do, on a medical and legal basis, and this took so long, I was unsure if I was ever going to get to leave.  Also, I was a month shy of 18 years old, so I was not yet a consenting adult, and my parents signed everything that needed signing.  (On the other hand, I’m relieved I was not yet 18, because that month’s difference was the difference between being on the Adolescent or Adult unit.  I am glad I was with people my own age and younger.)  This was during my senior year of high school.  I went back to school with a (mis)diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and even more of a disconnect from everyone around me.  I felt even more isolated, and self-stigmatized than before.  I sank into a severe depression.  I dropped out of a few of my classes and took a leave of absence from my job.  I tried to stay occupied with some art classes at school, but nothing at all interested me.  As the summer before college started, things finally did start to lift.  I got my driver’s license.  I started to hang out with friends a little bit.  I felt excited to be moving two hours away and starting college.

This experience has stayed with me as a lasting trauma.  In college, I wrote a lengthy personal essay about it, trying to capture every tiny thing I could remember.  I was in therapy for a long time after – I was actually doing a lot worse in general after being discharged.  I was on a lot of pills and unsure if they were helping.  Therapy, at least, was helping.  Therapy has been the one thing I’ve done for myself that has made the biggest difference in my adult life.  Therapists have taught me how to be a verbal person and communicate with others.

About a year ago, I worked at talking through this experience that still haunts me, in therapy.  My therapist was a little hesitant to delve into it – she’s not too big on rehashing the past.  But she did help me through it, and encouraged me to talk with my mom about it, in order to dis-spell some long-held beliefs that might have actually been way off.  Such as, “it didn’t really affect my mom that much, that I was there.”  So I did talk to my mom about it (however difficult that was), and felt myself getting to a new place through doing that.

And then this year (every year around this time, I’m thinking a lot about it again), I decided to gain access to my medical records from back then.  I didn’t know how to go about that because the hospital I was at has since been closed, demolished, and rebuilt into a new multipurpose health facility.  But I was told my records are somewhere, on microfilm, and I can get them at a fee of $0.75 per page.  So I went through the request form and noted I’d like to be informed of the length of the document before it’s sent.  Two weeks later, a heavy package arrived, with a bill for $168.10!  I thought we were talking about something in the range of 40 pages!  This thing is 210 pages, and this bill is much more than I want to pay.   (So I did email back and forth, explaining my request was ignored, and I did get the bill knocked down to $100.88 – still way more than I was planning to pay.)

The document itself is largely made up of pages that have no interest to me.  And many pages in which I can’t read the person’s handwriting.  But, in the process of gleaning as much as I can from it (and skipping over quite a few things that feel triggery, for right now), I’m coming to some kind of new terms with what happened to me, way way back then.   And, something is lifting.

Licensed to wed

Posted: October 27, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Last week, my partner and I went to city hall to fill out our marriage license.  We didn’t yet (and still don’t) have a definite plan for how we’re going to do this thing, other than we want to do it legally and simply by the end of this year.  And then we want to have a celebration with a big bunch of people and include a performance piece in lieu of a “ceremony,” this coming summer.

So the actual getting of the document was a little stressful – we were crunched for time and unsure about how these things go.  We gave ourselves time to get down there right when they opened at 9, and then I was going to drive her to work directly from there, by 10.  We were the second ones in line and everything went smoothly with filling out the form itself.  In the section where you mark either “M” or “F,” it said, “Sex (optional)” which was super fucking amazingly awesome and unexpected and we both purposefully left it blank.  My partner joked that it meant sex is optional in a marriage, and they want to make sure you know that going into it.

We brought up the form, and then a clerk basically typed up a new form, from what we had handwritten in.  She then asked us to check for errors.  We found two and she made the corrections before printing it out, having us sign it, and putting it in an envelope with some other information.  It was heart-racing exciting; we walked quickly out of there and talked about how we had time to spare to have some coffee at her place of employment before she started her shift.  I kinda did a victory leap down the steps and she laughed.

As we were walking back to the car, we talked about the fact that there had been errors.  Then she said, “I hope she didn’t fill in our sex markers.”  My stomach kind of dropped, because, honestly, I forgot to check that.  She pulled the document out of the envelope, and sure enough, there were two F’s typed into that section.  It felt devastating.  By this time, we were already in the car.  Our meter had run out, and we had no more change anywhere on our persons or anywhere in the car.  I started driving away, going back and forth in my mind about the logistics of getting this corrected vs. the importance.  In the end, importance won out.  My partner felt more flexible, but I needed mine to be blank.  So we parked elsewhere illegally, ran back inside, waited (because there was now a line), explained in an out-of-breath manner, crossed our fingers we wouldn’t be charged an additional fee (we overheard it was $10 for later corrections), got the changes made, and didn’t have to pay!

I did a double victory leap off the stairs, and upon seeing a man in a safety vest walking along the cars, sprinted toward ours so I could put the flashers on:  just standing, not parking illegally, sir!  Turned out he wasn’t a meter maid anyway, and I got my partner to work with zero minutes to spare.

chest piece

Posted: August 6, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A few years ago, I answered a call out for submissions for a new zine about about the trans/gender variant community and our relationships to our chests.  I wrote a piece and never heard back about the project.  I bugged them 2 or 3 times about it and still got no reply.  At the time, this was really difficult for me because the piece was coming from such a vulnerable place.  It’s just been sitting as a computer file since then, but I’m pretty sure it belongs here:

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Slowly dissociating from my breasts.  I used to have a love/hate relationship with them, but now I feel deeply disconnected and don’t think about them much.  Unless I think they’re visible under my clothing, in which case I feel really uncomfortable and fixate on hoping no one notices.  I’m lucky they’re so small.  I can get away without binding if I wear the right layers.  So I do that – limit my clothing options to save myself from tense back pain.  I don’t take that for granted, the fact that I do not have to bind. 

I used to cope with stress and frustration, fear and anger by cutting my skin.  I often ended up focusing on my chest.  A lot of times when I was alone, I’d be topless and fizzing with frantic energy.  I’d envision their gory, bloody removal and bask in that thought.  But I also loved them.  It felt good when they were touched; they fit perfectly and comfortably in the palm of each hand.  They seemed like they were a part of me / not a part of me … a part of me … not a part of me.

FROM 5/15/04: I was just wanting something intense to happen. Just by myself, here at the apartment. In addition, I have been obsessing about the removal of my breasts again. There was quite a while when I was ok with them, but I’m not anymore. So I had to pretend like I was going to cut them off. I used that knife and dragged it in sections to form a circle around both. Not deep. It hurt. No blood, but it’ll leave red marks. Like 2 bull’s-eyes. I kind of liked it, but now I look at them and what I did is fucking scary. No emotions to match these actions.

Now though, I don’t act out toward my breasts or dwell on the fact that they’re there. It’s sort of like I don’t really know them. Although sometimes I squeeze my nipples because it feels good, no one else can touch me anywhere near there, or oftentimes, anywhere on my skin at all.  That chest is not a part of me.

I got my first tattoo this past fall.  The image is a scratchy line drawing, a symbol I came up with to express my connection to a deconstructed gender identity.  It’s on my chest, below my right clavicle – to the right of my sternum.  I thought a lot beforehand, while thinking about placement, about whether to incorporate some pretty prominent scars… whether to see if the tattoo could hide them… whether to accentuate the scar lines with the tattoo…  In the end, I wore a tank top that would hide the scars from the tattoo artist, and had the tattoo placed near them but not with them.  Too much shame still surrounds them; they are too personal.  The experience itself was exhilarating and euphoric; I was zoning, reaching a blissed-out state.  And also pushing thoughts of self-mutilation from my mind with every pulse of the tattoo machine.  Hours later, I was out to dinner with my person (who had also gotten a tattoo that afternoon), and emotions unexpectedly flooded in.  Tearing up and unable to dissociate from the parallels between cutting my chest myself and someone else inflicting pain there.  I talked about self-injury and she looked worried.  She knows that was in my past, but I had never really talked about it with her.  I wasn’t regretting the tattoo; I was realizing that the experience had been triggering, no matter how tough I seemed and how good it felt.

I’d like to get more tattoos on my chest.  I fantasize about swimming, being shirt-less, with a sweet chest piece on display.  I am pre-testosterone and pre-surgery (or am I no-hormone and non operative?  I have yet to know).  For now I continue this non-relating to my breasts/chest.  Maybe someday that could change.  Maybe someday I will have the chest I envision (flat and muscular, a male chest).  Although I don’t feel completely male, I don’t feel completely here, in this body, either…

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I wrote this in 2010.  I’ve been feeling differently about my chest within the past few months, which is exciting.  I had been increasingly wanting to get top surgery, for sure, at some point.  But since being on this low-dose of testosterone, I’m not so concerned about it!  It feels good to be touched there.  Also, my pecs have gotten a little more prominent / maybe my chest is even smaller than before.  For now, I can live with it!  (We’ll see what the future holds.)

Also a quick rant:  If you are collecting submissions for a project, a rejection letter / email is 100X better than no email at all.  Or, if you end up just dropping the ball on your project, please let people who submitted know the status.  I was wondering for a long time what happened after submitting my piece.

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