It’s been almost exactly a year since I posted about feeling frustrated during rehearsals for the show I was in because I no longer had the muscle mass I was used to. Well, I’m finally registering for another circus class at work, a full year since I last had a free enough schedule to take a class. The class starts in a few weeks, and I’m a little nervous about it - I’ve gained zero pounds in the last 12 months, but have made gains in the T-n-A department (wink wink, nudge nudge). And, as I’m well aware, that fat (unfortunately) isn’t just magically taking plumpness from my belly, it’s also taking muscle mass. I haven’t been doing circus recently, so won’t have the “oh shit, I just did this last week and now can’t” experience I had a year ago, but while working on rigging stuff I have noticed it’s harder to haul myself up to the grid and such.
That said, I do take some consolation in the fact that I haven’t gained weight. (Indeed, I’m down from my max weight sometime in college.) I’d still like to lose about 10 pounds, but hopefully with the regular exercise from class and finally being able to bike to work, that’ll be achievable. We’ll see.
(As a side note, on the topic of being able to bike to work, what the fuck were the two inches of snow doing falling from the sky on Monday?)
-R
I know a place where no one’s lost,
I know a place where no one cries,
Crying at all is not allowed,
Not in my castle on a cloud.
-Lyrics from ‘Castle on a Cloud’ from Les Miserables
Les Mis is some of the earliest music I learned on the piano that I still play regularly. In fact, come to think of it, I’ve probably been playing Les Mis (and using the same beat-up book of sheet music) for over ten years. And, although ‘Castle on a Cloud’ isn’t my favorite song from the musical, a place usually reserved for ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ or ‘On My Onw,’ I do think it’s an evocative metaphor.
That said, the verse I quoted above never sat right with me. I completely understand wanting to exist in a place where no one is lost, and where there is no need to cry. That makes perfect sense. But the idea of not being allowed to cry always made me kind of sad; sometimes the grief of living just needs to come out in tears.
I’ve been crying a lot more lately than I’m used to, and it’s made me think about how I handle my emotions.
Continue reading 'Castle on a Cloud'»
I am all over the place in new and exciting ways. Yesterday I was having a really good day until, for reasons not entirely clear in retrospect, I started crying at G. (Prompting her to say, “Oh my god, you’re 13,” which did make me laugh.)
So yeah. I’m going through puberty in a major way. The first time around wasn’t very fun, and this time (even if it’s going in a better direction) still isn’t too fun.
-R
I’m doing a lot better than I was in my previous post, in no small part due to G being awesome and giving me a good pep talk. (And browbeating gently encouraging me to schedule an apointment with my therapist.) She also reminded me that not everything about going back on hormones is sunshine and roses (my words, not hers). Specifically, I know from experience that they can contribute to extreme emotions and, as she so-diplomatically put it, “I don’t think you should question what you’re feeling, but remember that hormones effects how you feel it.”
-R
(Sorry in advance to anyone who knows me in person and is weirded out by this too-much-information post.)
Just got a call from the lab tech at the fertility clinic I ended up going to and he said he was able to recover four viable samples from second ‘deposit,’ for a total of five viable samples. (Which means that if/when I chose to use ‘em, I’ll have five tries.)
So I get to go back on hormones!
It’s not all great news, as the samples apparently had about 50% mobility, which means I have tired, lazy sperm. As a result, if/when the samples are used my partner will have to be impregnated by in-vitro fertilisation, rather than artifical insemination. There’s sort of nothing to do about that now (ideally, I would have made the deposits before going on hormones at all, and hopefully had a higher mobility rate) but IVF is more expensive and more medically complicated than artifical insemination, which is unfortunate.
All in all, I’m ready to go home right now and start popin’ hormone pills again.
-R
I hesitate to write this post when things are actually going pretty well, but feel like I need to if I want to work through some of it…
When I started transitioning I knew it would be hard work. Hard physical work, like the excruciatingly painful and horribly expensive hair removal, and hard emotional work, like changing how I interact with friends and loved ones.
What I didn’t really think about were all the little ways in which it would wear me down.
Things like having people I barely know feel that they then get to make assumptions and judgments about me (not even necessarily negative ones!) because they know I’m trans. Like Jack, whose brother and brother’s wife were both trans, so even though I just met him he felt completely comfortable asking me how long I’ve been on hormones. And, damn me for not thinking ahead, I told him instead of giving a noncommittal answer to indicate it was none of his business. An answer like “trans people go on hormones for the rest of their life” or “none of your bloody business, person-I-just-met.”
Continue reading 'Sometimes it’s exhausting'»
emotion, gender, humor, the workshop, trans, transitioning
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boy, children, exhaustion, girl, hormones, humor, roommates, trans, transitioning
I’m sitting at home. I got to the bowling alley (at 8:50, inevitably) with a message on my voicemail saying that people were going to EU’s before bowling, at which point I sent MG a text saying “I am going home” and, well, went home.
MG is now calling me (five times so far) and I, like the mature and reasonable adult that I am, am ignoring her calls.
I hate getting this angry over petty things.
I hate feeling stressed about an hour in one direction or the other.
I hate feeling obligated to do things I don’t want to do.
I hate my body, and the way my body makes me feel, and what it is.
I can look back over the last twenty-plus years and rarely have I asked, “Why me?” but right now I can’t find the energy to care about liking myself for who I am or getting behind the positive things going on in my life or all of the other self-actualizing things I should be doing.]
But I sure as hell can sit here and hate myself, and wish I wasn’t living at my mom’s anymore (less than three weeks left!) so that I didn’t have to deal with her on top of everything else.
So there.
-R
A comment on this post asked for a little more detail on what laser hair removal entails (although G thought the commenter’s description, “I just picture you lying on a table while doctors shoot lasers at you and you whimper,” was pretty acurate to her understanding as well). (And, for those of you who’d like to skip ahead toward the end, where there’s a good bit involving how much it did hurt, feel free to do so now.)
First, lets cover how it works. Laser hair removal works by “selectively heating dark target matter, (melanin), in the area that causes hair growth, (the follicle), while not heating the rest of the skin.” (So sayeth Wikipedia.) What that means is they shoot a laser at a small area of skin and the wavelength is tuned to be absorbed by the melanin, destroying the follicle’s ability to grow hair. The area hit by the laser varies between specific lasers but (from my experience) is generally a bit smaller than the size of a dime. This means doing a large area (say, arms, legs, and torso) takes a long time and the denser or thicker the hair (facial hair or thick leg hair) takes longer. In addition, hair grows in cycles, meaning the hair growing now is not the hair that will be growing two months from now. So even if laser hair removal were 100% effective on active follicles (which it probably isn’t) you’d still need multiple sessions every couple months to cover each set of follicles as they become active, usually around every two months.
After a session, the hair will seem to be growing back at first but then (hopefully) the individual hairs will fall out. This is because there’s a little bit of hair still existing below the surface that doesn’t get removed with shaving (hence why waxing works for a longer period than shaving) and that little root beneath the skin still needs to get pushed out. Then, there’s a relatively hairless month, followed by a gradual return of hair as the next wave of follicles become active. (But hopefully less hair than was growing before!)
After that, it’s rinse and repeat.
Continue reading 'How Laser Hair Removal Works'»
I saw a few people were viewing this blog via searching for Whateley Academy fiction and reading the post I wrote about what trans-related fiction I was going to keep and what I was going to toss. Looking over the authors I noted, I first want to apologize if any of them are viewing the blog and seeing I chose to toss their work. (Eek!) I certainly hope that’s not the case.
I also think I was unfair to some of their work and/or its effect on me. I realized when looking over that post that I reread a lot of the things I said I was going to ‘toss.’ I think part of that has to do with my feeling worse due to hormone levels – when I’m feeling like I’m ‘backsliding’ with the transition there’s more of a desire to access a fictional world of someone who (by choice or not) moving forward with a transition. I think I’ve already touched on why that’s been true for me in the past, and think those same reasons hold true now.
Hopefully the hormones will be going back up in a few weeks and I’ll feel less of a desire to read some of the stuff I mentioned, but I also want to go back through and note a few places I was just wrong – where the fiction was better than I was (in my somewhat down mood) giving it credit.
-R
I know it’s the hormones and I still feel like shit. If anyone out there was trying to figure out what a sourless, soul-crushing sadness felt like but just couldn’t quite get it down, consider asking for my help, as apparently that’s what I’m good at right now.
And everyone is obviously right – a month or two more of shit is, in the grand scheme of things, worth putting my mind at ease for the rest of my life. I am aware that (the rest of my life) > (two months).
But knowing that doesn’t stop me from feeling like nothing is worth doing and I shouldn’t bother going to bed because tomorrow is just going to be miserable anyway.
-R
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