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The exciting conclusion

I hurt myself today. My arm, to be more precise.

It’s not exactly a major injury, but it seems like a great way to put this in perspective. Let me back up. In 2005, I started working at Target; I had essentially been sedentary before that, so I was not exactly in good physical shape. I wasn’t exactly smart either, as I had the notion that “anything that I can maintain a grip on, I can lift,” and so I did some pretty stupid things at Target. Like, lifting 200lb grills into peoples cars without help, and participating in a minor competition to see who could hold the most 50lb bags of cat litter (I won, at 6), and so on. Pretty stupid stuff. I knew it was stupid, even, but I didn’t care, because I was pretty sure I’d be dead by the time I was 25. Not like a back injury would really matter later, right?

Heading back to today, I managed to minorly injure my arm lifting a 47lb box (it was labeled!) to shoulder height after a 30 second struggle. Since 2005, I’ve worked grocery jobs, so I’ve been lifting the whole time. And that’s where my strength is after just under a year on HRT.

I’m going to preface (postface?) this with a disclaimer: this is my experience. It’s possible yours, or someone elses, might not be as intense, or quite as fast, but I can’t speak to that. So that’s out of the way, what does HRT change?

Absolutely everything.

Before I started HRT, I had this notion that boys and girls were fairly similar. The gender gap, “Men are From Mars”, etc, that was all just guys taking any excuse they could to be jerks. (or whatever) I mean, really, we’re all the same, right?

No. Jesus christ on a stick, no. I was so ridiculously wrong I don’t even know where to start.

I could go on rambling about the physical changes (which were…are…really important), which were pretty amazing. I was 24 when I started estrogen, which definitely had an effect, but I took to it very, very quickly, and the changes came on scary fast. There’s a certain line from Ender’s Shadow, one of my favorite books ever (admittedly, about a serial killer… I won’t dwell on that) about a character who has a birth defect in his leg and gets it corrected, which basically went “Soandso’s body expected to be strong, knew how to be whole,” and that’s sort of like how I feel now. Not even a year on estrogen, and I have just sunk into it naturally. It’s like I’ve been subsumed into it, and it’s the greatest feeling ever,but enough rambling about the physical, you can get that at like, Wikipedia.

I’d rather talk about the mental and emotional changes, though they’re quite a bit harder to track directly; how do you measure your depth of emotion? They also came on quite a bit slower, while I was able to detect physical changes as early as two weeks, the others really didn’t start hitting me until about four or five months in. I remember about two or three months in, I was feeling confused and discouraged. I’d read tons of personal experiences, I’d read Whipping Girl, and so on, and they all talked about mental changes. Where were mine?

Thankfully, I was just impatient. The first thing that really hit me was crying at the drop of a hat. Technically, I’d probably have been crying because the hat existed, and then started crying more because the hat was dropped. I probably averaged about 6-10 hours/week of time spent somewhere between “sniffles that won’t stop” and uncontrollable sobbing. I cried about pretty much everything in my life, things that happened, things that I wish had happened, things that I knew would never happen. I cried over love songs, at movies and books, when I saw babies, and if I saw a loving family. Technically, I still tear up at those today, but it’s somewhat more controllable. In the beginning, it was all very raw and primal, and I had absolutely no control over it. Now I can, to some degree, say “I am in public, I need to get out of this store before I start bawling” and keep it togetherish.

I spent a lot of the months after that crying on a friend’s couch, which neatly segues into another change I really noticed, the desire absolute requirement for human contact. I find myself to be much more social now, and that I get lonely very quickly. Some of that is no doubt is related to my new-found self confidence, and how can I say exactly what estrogen is responsible for? It’s more than just being social, though. After a very fucked up childhood (if you’ve read the entirety of this series, that tiny version doesn’t even scratch the surface), I learned how to cope with things. Coping with things did not involve talking about them. Ever. Now? Talking about something is the best, most cathartic way to handle something. I can think of a half dozen instances in the last month that I tried to work through something on my own, failed, ended up crying on someone’s couch and talking about it, and instantly felt better and was able to work through it. Needless to say, I am immensely thankful for my friends and all they have done for me these last few months. There’s no way I would’ve made it through this without them.

In closing, I guess, nothing is the same. And I’m okay with that, it just feels so very, very right. Previously, I really wasn’t sure what something “feeling right” was like. I mean, I’d enjoyed things, surely that was what it was? No. It’s like a comforting blanket that just makes my heart skip with joy to think about it. There is nothing that I would give this feeling up for.

Aaaand that’s the conclusion of essays on My Life™ and The Trans™. I don’t honestly know if this means I will be blogging on on a more regular basis, but it does mean I’m no longer scared of blogging because I might actually let something slip about how c-c-crazy I am. There’s a certain level of comfort in knowing that you are naked and don’t have to worry about hiding anything.

This entry is worth 1.4 pictures

That book, this blog entry: about the same length.

I just finished re-reading my entry from yesterday, and I can’t help but laugh at how simplistic and amateur it seems. Even the visual aide is slightly off, the crossbars being ever-so-slightly out of alignment. It’s sort of quaint. Ahwell. So. The Trans. Or rather, my story, and what exactly lead to me randomly outing myself in the ‘net equivalent of a deserted parking lot.

My story technically begins when I was born, but the first few years are fairly uninteresting. I was a military brat, my parents had both been in the Air Force together. My dad, probably for intentional reasons, kept getting transferred. About once a year, to be exact, so by the time I was 6, I’d lived in Korea, the Philippines, Germany, and a solid half dozen states. Up until that point, I’d had a fairly normal life; I went to school, my parents were “okay” even if they fought somewhat often, and they treated me really well. (Read: spoiled) My mom was, if nothing else, a very smart woman; she may have ended up as a housewife, but she’d been at the top of all her classes in the Air Force.

One thing I’d like to point out at this point is that the concept of “transsexualism is the result of a damaged early childhood” is completely bullshit. My formative years were really quite good: my parents weren’t abusive, I wasn’t abandoned, I didn’t have a hyper-dominating mother to imprint on me, etc etc.

Anyway, my parents didn’t particularly enforce gender binaries on me, there was no “you must play with this toy” or whatnot, the only real thing they put pressure on was reading and learning. On the flipside, I didn’t really push the boundaries too much, I liked my legos. I guess from the outside, I appeared to just be a normal boy, if rather on the shy side.

Roughly when I was 5 was when I started figuring out something was “wrong”; the first actual memory I have of The Trans was in a hotel somewhere (probably Oklahoma) with my mom. She was taking a nap, and I was bored and spent some time playing in the bathroom with her makeup. Unfortunately, she was really, really mad when she woke up. Like, angry and then crying on the bed kind of mad. It was fairly traumatic, and I swore I’d never ever do it again. As it were, that promise was kept for the next few years because my life started to tank in a bad way. My mom started going crazy, my dad just wanted to get away from it, and my mom and I spent the next 5 years rubberbanding between living with my dad, living alone, and living with her parents, never spending more than 6 months in any one location. A bit into that, after living in New York, South Carolina, Florida, and finally Mississippi in the span of no more than half a year, my mom decided homeschooling me would be the best bet.

As far as my childhood went, that was probably the single worst decision made for me. She was getting really flaky at that point, I was gradually getting more and more reclusive, and.. things just sucked. Years 8-10 were pretty horrible, her parents (who we stayed with about a third of the time) were abusive. Eventually I managed to guilt my mom into leaving them for good for what they were doing to me, and we went back to my dad. That lasted for nearly two years, and in the span of that two years, we lived in Minnesota, Saudi Arabia, Oklahoma, California, Saudi Arabia (again), and then my parents finally split for good. He went to Prague, she went to Florida, and I followed her as always. We started renting a condo on the panhandle, way out in the middle of no where.

We were about 12 when I got there, and I was firmly in the grasp of puberty. I was also horribly depressed and angry all the time. So, typical teenager :D The only upsides of my years there were finding some very good friends on the internet, who I’m still in daily contact with 10 years later (see: Cast), and through the magic of the internet, finally discovering a name for what I had. Beyond that, there was nothing good in that time. The very short version of that is that I had absolutely no contact with the physical world for several years, nearly lost the ability to talk, and so on. Near my 18th birthday, my dad had rejoined the Air Force after 9/11 and was stationed at a nearby base. I asked him if I could move in, and ended up doing so.

Moving in with him sucked, but it was the badly needed start of good things. At this point, I was absolutely determined that I couldn’t transition, ever, so I’d just have to bury it and make a life for myself. I really pushed, and despite the fact that I could barely even handle a conversation at the supermarket, I got a job at McDonalds. That lasted 3 weeks (which was not my fault!), when I came home to discover my dad and a woman at his trailer. Or rather, his mail order bride. I said something like “Yeaaaaaaahokay” and went into my room, where I hopped on the computer and bitched to my friends about what was going on. By complete and sheer luck, one of them, WhiteStar, happened to be in the process of saying he was looking for a roommate. To this day, I have no idea why I asked, why he accepted, and how the hell it made any sense, but I offered to move in with him and he accepted. I was in Florida, he was in Colorado.

WhiteStar and I never were the most bestest of friends before that, and we didn’t entirely get along after that, but I really do owe him a debt of gratitude for his part in that. And an apology for being suck a weird sadsack during the time we lived together. ♥

A few weeks later, I was on a bus to Colorado. The following years are pretty boring, and mostly summed up as: I got my GED, then I got a job, made a few (casual) friends but couldn’t handle much beyond that, got a new job, worked two jobs for a bit, got a new apartment for myself. At the end of that, I’d been in Colorado for about 5, perhaps 6 years.

It was around July 2008, and my life was the best it had ever been: I had a decent paying job, a few casual friends even though I was mostly still lonely, I’d lost some weight, etc. I was the unhappiest, angriest and closest to suicide I’d ever been. In a moment of desperation, I told my problems to SoM. He was awesomely understanding, and for a while I felt better. That didn’t last. The anxiety kept getting worse and worse, to the point that after having two anxiety attacks in one work shift, I came home and broke down. I remember saying “SoM, I think even if I know it’s completely hopeless, I have to do something, I just can’t take this.” I also remember his reply, “so do it.”

His advice (and not just that simplified summary of days of talking about it), bizarrely, I managed to accept. On the night of dec 4th, I decided “Tomorrow, I will start my transition”, and the next day I woke up… peaceful. Bordering on serene. I wasn’t anxious, or angry, or suicidal. It was a really, really weird feeling, something I hadn’t known in years. December 5th is probably the date I celebrate the most now, as I think it has the most meaning. Aaanyway, a few weeks later, I started laser, then therapy, and then on May 5th I finally got onto hormones, and my life has been nothing but awesome since then. As I write this, tomorrow will be 11 months on hormones. My life is so much ridiculously better. For the first time in my life, I can honestly and truthfully say I am happy.

You now know stupidly more about my life than you should. Ever. I will explain more in the next portion of the series.

What a twiiiist!

I have this annoying habit of sitting around thinking about how to begin blog posts. Literally, I will sit there for 3 or 4 minutes going fiddling with the opening line “It was a dark and stormy night” oh, no no, “The night was dark and stormy” etc. It’s really quite vexing. It vexes me. Which is why I’m not doing it, and am instead spending that time explaining to you, the non-extant reader, the time I would normally be spending on this. Anyway, the opening line for today was some manner of “So, I dropped off the face of the earth. Intentionally.”

“Why,” you query ever-so-politely, “would you do such a thing?” Indeed, what possible reason could there be for coming out with a blog and finally getting around to setting up a Twitter account and so on, and then not using them? I suppose the answer is that I wasn’t sure how much of myself I wanted to share with the rest of the world; it’s less “ah, the interwebs can see into my (unspecifically boring) liiiife”, and more “there are facets of my life that I am seriously debating trying to hide forever. do I really want to do this?”

As it turns out, the answer is Yes. and No. Technically, it’s both. On the one hand, I.. actually, down that road is a long subtopic which will detract from having the point of this post anywhere vaguely within the first thousand words. tl;dr:I’m trans. Transsexual to be more specific, and I wonder what the first thing that pops into your mind when you see that word is?

Things that are not transsexual. Not pictured: pretty much everything else in the universe.

The term transgender, specifically, is an umbrella term, and could basically be summed up as “people who don’t directly meet the ‘norms’ of gender”, and as such it technically includes GLB people. (The accuracy and likelyhood of that getting you bitched out is not up for debate.) Transsexual, however, is much more specific and essentially is “people who feel as if they have the wrong bodies.” It does not include Rupaul, or Ms Doubtfire, or guys that think putting on a dress could be kinky, or anyone that has ever appeared on Springer, or any other stupid-shit TV show.

If you are reading my blog, there are a few possible options for what you are:

  1. a search engine or spam bot
  2. one of my friends noticing I finally updated my blog
  3. some random person who was googling “reverse oreo insertion techniques”

Statistically, #1 or #2 are much more likely, but I’m going to keep barreling ahead assuming you’re #3 and don’t have any idea what transsexuality really is. Since I have nothing better to do (seriously, I could vacuum or sleep, but meh), here’s my plan: I’m going to spend the rest of this post giving a brief overview of what this is about, then I’m going to make a second entry for my backstory, and then a final one intended both for potential transitioners and as a time capsule for the future.

What is The Trans?

As it were, The Trans is my loving name for this whole thing, which I am entirely amused to think of being a communicable disease of some sort. Possibly the kind you could get from sharing needles.

Anyway, this is an absurdly long question. Or.. it could be. The really short answer is that you’ve got some poor soul with the brain of a girl and the body of a guy (shockingly, the reverse is also true. Yes, Virginia, there is a transmen). Moreso, the brain’s self-image is pretty strong, strong enough to cause anxiety, depression,  possibly resulting in suicide, and so on. Soul crushing is a pretty accurate descriptor.

A lot of people seem to take issue with this. They feel that trans peoples are just perverts or crazy or whatnot, and can get riled up rather quickly.  Needless to say, it’s a complex issue. This whole Trans-thing isn’t exactly new, but the advances in medicine and thinking allowing transition (e.g. from one gender to the other) to be a reality are all pretty new. For the longest time, reparative therapy, also known as stuff like electroshock therapy, was the most common way of handling it. That, or like, stoning.

The other way of treating it, transition, is used to bring the body in line with the mind. It’s pretty easy to change the body, but doing anything with the mind is still a few years beyond our technologies. Yeah, there are drugs and such you can use, but amusingly, the only drug that actually works is a hormone. Specifically, estrogen for trans women, and testosterone for trans men. Going much beyond that is beyond the simple scope I was aiming for, so I’m going to end this line of thought here.

On the next episode of The Trans (tomorrow, I need sleeeep), I’ll explain a little about my personal experience with it.

There are two questions I always ask myself when cleaning: a) how did dust get there?!, which I can usually explain away as air currents, and b) how did hair get there?!, where “there” is usually the ceiling in the corner of my bedroom or somesuch, and I cannot explain it. I’ve never seen hairs lazily drifting upwards on a breeze. Ever. Which means the only logical explanation for the half dozen foot long hairs I found cleaning my bathroom today is, of course, gnomes. Sure, they look innocent enough, so long as you’re watching them bounce around on the top of your dune buggy, but the moment you turn your head, bam, they run off, determined to steal socks and place hairs in improbable locations.

… Moving on.

I make no claims towards being a tidy person. I’m actually something of a messpot, however, I probably tend a bit towards OCD in terms of cleanliness. I might have stuff scattered everywhere, but it will be clean stuff. Case in point: I’ve spent about 3 hours cleaning my bathroom today, which in truth wasn’t really dirty. It’d been like two weeks since I cleaned it, but I’d just done a quick wipedown. No, today was different. Today was war. If there’s one thing I definitely took away from my mother, it was her fanatical devotion to ammonia. There really isn’t anything it can’t solve, even things that don’t really need to be solved, which is why I found myself in the bathroom, performing what amounted to Exterminatus (warning: that is the worst design scheme ever. black on grey?! I want to stab you now) on the surface of every object in the bathroom, which considering the number of tubes, bottles, and canisters I have in there, was quite impressive. It now shines with the furious righteousness of a thousand (really clean) suns, and I’m pretty sure I can still smell ammonia on my skin, even after taking a shower.

In the event you’re saying to yourself “did she really just take the time to blog about cleaning her bathroom?” the answer is yes, for which I blame the fumes. Cleaning aside, I got rid of a ton of stuff I don’t really use, or was mostly empty, or whatever. My sink looks way happier.

Speaking of stuff I don’t use, I’m on vacation this week (worst segue ever?), and I was feeling a little frisky for some gaming, so I dug out a game I’d bought but never played (segue saved!): Titan Quest. Oh. My. God. I’ve played a lot of Diablo II, I’m not ashamed to admit. The whole “I’ve leveled a character to 80-85 a dozen times” thing, you know? It’s like a bi-yearly pilgrimage to the unholy land, which Titan Quest was supposed to be a modern replacement for. It’s a replacement, alright. Namely, they took everything that makes Diablo II good and replaced it with bad. Bad and tedious. There’s not even a stash!

How to make a good idea into a bad one:

  1. Start with idea: a Diablo II clone
  2. Make every 3rd monster drop “yellow” random stat items
  3. Increase the area size by 50% (especially towns. Why are towns so big?! there’s nothing there. size adds to realism and immersion, but there’s no risk of anyone being immersed in TQ), without adding anything interesting OR adding more things to kill
  4. ??? (Have absolutely no clue about difficulty or mechanics when designing your monsters)
  5. Profit! (Sell it and make a ton of money on a pile of crap)

I’m pretty sure that was on a whiteboard at some point in the TQ design process.

I should’ve gone with another play through of Baldur’s Gate II, my most favoritest game ever. I will now list things in life that are better than Baldur’s Gate II:

I’m vexed.

Back on Christmas day, I was coming home from a friends house. It’s cold out, but despite the snow falls 3 days prior, this is Colorado; most of the snow has melted, and the roads are dry as a bone. Except for the ninja-like patch of snow and ice directly in the center of the corkscrew onramp. The snow is fairly unmoved by the fact that I’m going 15 miles an hour, and in it’s defense, the guard rail was also fairly unmoved by the fact that I bounced off it.

Well, that sucks, right? Bad Christmas present, and all. Meh, life happens. Anyway, I should interrupt this mini rant to talk about my parents: I can credit them with birthing me, feeding, sheltering, and clothing me, and that’s about where the credit runs out. Minor details like “how the world works” and such were pretty much not covered. Anyway, there I am the next morning pondering my insurance policy, the one that I had gone through and made every attempt to minimize cost on it when I was forced to get it. On a random side note, thank you Public Service Credit Union for sending me a letter saying my deductible was too high for my loan. If they hadn’t done that, I would’ve been sitting there staring at a $2500 deductible. Yeah, ouch. As it turned out, it was only $1000, which is… actually still rather ouch.

Here we are today, and my monthly payment has gone up $28/month (before the raise from my claim, which they say is “around 20%”, or another $30. Blarg.), as I’ve now lowered my deductibles to $100 comprehensive/$250 collision. Much easier to wedge into a budget randomly.

The moral of this story is: okay, life has lessons. This would be a prime example of one, but honestly, it’s a lesson I shouldn’t have had to learn, or maybe I should’ve, but no one else should. In truth, I should’ve done more research towards car insurance, so I’ll take responsibility for that, but after having (of course) taken the opportunity to kvetch about the situation to most of my friends, I discovered that more-or-less everyone else also had absurdly high deductibles. Evidently, neither the fact that I had limited parental instruction on life, nor the fact that I had missed out on highschool had affected how ready I was to face the world.

It seems to me like “The Care and Feeding of your new or used car”, or perhaps “Insurance and finances 101″ would make excellent high school classes. Admittedly, I only attended public school through the 4th grade (which is something I’ve regretted for years), so I guess it’s possible that we abruptly started teaching kids things that are relevant to being an adult, but I think we’re still too busy trying to push abstinence-only sex ed.

So, I was musing today on exactly why I’d decided to start a public blog, and no, blaming it on Iri and Bele really isn’t fair. It’s not as if I really have such a dearth of free time that I needed something else to waste my time on. No, as it turns out, I decided to start this blog because I don’t have enough time (oh, how I’m ever looking forward to squeezing college into this somehow. I’m not even sure what I’d give up, sleep? what sleep?!)

Seeing as that doesn’t make any sense at all, an explanation is in order; over Christmas, I ended up watching Julie & Julia, which could be summed up as a blog-turned-book-turned-movie (the blog is a fun read too, and it’s super cool to read it after watching the movie, and see the events unfold from a different perspective) about a girl who decides to blog her way through 520-odd recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a mere year, both as a challenge and also to ground herself in life. Well, that’s half the story anyway, the other half of the movie is Julia Child learning to cook, and eventually writing the book… because she needed something to do. In other words, this blog exists because of a movie about a girl who wrote a blog about a girl who wrote a book. It’s getting to be a bit unwieldy, this stack of girls writing about things.

wait! wait! this just in:

<Van> technically the movie inspired me to blog
<nubble> me too

(that’s Iri) It’s a trend! … Okay, so I thought I’d see if Google Trends could provide information on this. Um, “blog” is super insane search rating and a cute little movie doesn’t even come close. So, no.

Anyway, there was a plot, a line of thought here, and now it’s gone. I blame Iri for linking her new year’s resolutions. Not so much for the resolutions, they’re pretty normal… adjusted for the fact that Iri is absolutely batshit crazy when it comes to food (“mmm, toast!” I swear, it’s all she eats. sometimes she’ll do toast and a tomato on the side. Not like, make a sandwich or anything..), but I digress. No, I’ve been horribly derailed by her put-together blog. Look at those stock photos!

In truth, I hate new year’s resolutions (mine was 1280×1024. sometimes, life sucks being a nerd with a small CRT.), because they seem so… unmotivated. “Oh, look, it’s arbitrary goal day. Time to make myself promise to do something I know I’m not going to keep to!” On the other hand, today is January 4th. A somewhat lesser known date, specifically, Schrodinger’s death. Also the date of completion for the Burj DubaiKhalifa. Put them together (with a liberal enough interpretation), and what do you get? Something big, that may or may not exist. Or Cthulhu, I’m not really sure which. Either way, that’s a much more accurate description of NYresolutions, and it’s one I can get behind!

I think for this year’s Schrodinger’s day, I will assert my intention to possibly do two things:

I’m going to learn to cook.

Right now, my diet would make most sane people die on the spot. From salt poisoning. I eat so many Ramen noodles it’s not even funny. When I’m not eating those, I’m eating rice. Or pasta. These are all high carb foods that require little to no effort, skill, time, or money. Admittedly, money will be an object here, but there’s got to be a way to eat good food without breaking the bank (henceforth defined as “spending over $100/month on food”), and I’m going to find it. Maybe.

I’m going to stop living like Iri eats.

I’ve abruptly decided that there’s way too much in common with how she eats and how I live. My life, my closet, my possessions, it’s all stuff that I like, but none of it actually goes together. It’s sort of like having a full wardrobe and simultaneously having nothing to wear, only on a grander scale. It kinda sucks. It’s such a vague thing to be annoyed about too. Perhaps I just need to find some glue, a little something-something to bring everything together. Or, maybe I just need a sense of direction in life so I don’t end up with a random mishmash. Probably the latter.

I think that’s enough quantum goals for this year.

So, it’s a blog. I know, I know, crazy and unique.

(Super important) backstory:  I’ve actually had a blog for some time, though it technically functions as more of a diary than anything. It still exists. But, a diary being what it is (namely, private. well, mostly..), it really didn’t bode well when two of my friends decided to start blogging and wanted to link to me. I mean, that just wasn’t going to work. Thus, this.

Plus, I already had this completely bitchin’ domain name, which seems to fit in well enough to form a triumvirate of blogs. My comrades in arms? Iri(http://mintyninja.com/) and Bele(http://www.jalapenopirate.com/). Oh, yeah. In the event you, uh, don’t know me, I use nicknames for a lot of my friends. Technically, it’s their chat handles, but still. In other news, we all have weird domain names. It’s awesome.

In thematic news, the choice of blog theme probably says a lot about the writer. Mine is (currently) greenish blue and looks fairly generic. Perfect! I’m not actually sure what this says about me.

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