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
So it’s a few days later (and a few drinks later…whoo Friday night!) and I’m slightly calmer. I’m still stressing out, and I think that’s a combination of the hormones and legitimate stressors, but I’m better.
Part of that’s coming from having talked to my doc today and he suggesting another month on lower hormones, which is a deadline rather than just “well, lets wait and see.” So that’s helping my stress level.
Continue reading 'I’m freaking out less now… (hormones and hair removal)'»
I went to the sperm storage facility yesterday afternoon to make a ‘deposit’ (ahh, clinical language). The experience in and of itself was pretty awkward and uncomfortable, as the doctor wasn’t a very personable character and did little to make me feel at ease (or, indeed, make me feel like she at all cared about me as an individual). So already, this thing that I didn’t really want to do and had very mixed feelings about was an unpleasant experience. But I did it, I filled out the paperwork, and I got the hell out of there.
Then, last night, I got a call from the lab technician: there was no sperm in the sample. I was, to adpot a useful piece of slang, shooting blanks. And since my fear all along was that I’d have nothing to ‘deposit,’ I’m not horribly shocked, but am kind of freaking out.
Continue reading 'I’m kind of freaking out right now…'»
Today we focused more on stories from the body. We each had a big sheet of butcher paper and were told to draw the metaphors of our body. My ended up with a balloon head tied with string to balloon boobs and string arms, all attached to a weight keeping the balloons from floating away. Hanging from the weight was a bucket filled with perscription pill bottles, and at the crotch was a bunsen burner heating a thermometer to the bursting point. (Can you tell I have body and sexuality issues right now?)
We performed a semi-improvised piece based on an action. Mine was awkwardly rubbing my crotch, as if wiping something off your hand. The (general idea of the) text, with changes/additions/subtractions made on things I think would work better, didn’t work well, or I just forgot:
Mmmmmmm.
MMmmmmmmmmm.
MMmmmmasturbation.
Continue reading 'Second day of the workshop'»
I was convinced by my therapist (and beaten over the head by G) to store sperm. I know that going on hormones can/might/will cause chemical castration and, before this decision, I’d been planning to decide about having kids by not deciding and assume I wouldn’t be the biological parent of any kids. My therapist (and G) both said, reasonably, that by storing sperm now I can make the decision later. So before I’d have only had one option (don’t be a genetic parent), but now I’ll have two (don’t or do be a genetic parent).
The problem is that, having been on estrogen and progesterone for over a year, my body ain’t producing a whole lot of sperm. So on my doc’s advice, I’ve been scaling back my hormones for the past month. The idea is to scale back a little bit each week, leave ‘em at a lower level until ‘production’ goes back up, make the deposit, and increase the hormones back to the old level. I was never horribly enthousiastic about the prospect of scaling back the hormones, because I’ve felt a lot better since starting the hormones, but I’m doing it anyway.
That means that my estrogen levels are dropping and my testosterone levels are rising. Yeah, that’s the point of this whole hormone juggling. But I hadn’t thought through this whole hormone juggling, because the result (in addition to eventual sperm production…) is also that I’m quicker to anger and so amazingly horny all the time. I’d like to think this is part of my body readjusting and not just how I lived from puberty ’till 22, but who knows….
Anyway, this whole thing’ll be an interesting experience in how hormones effect behavior and emotions…
-R
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