Ceri B.

It turns out that the reason this particular bunch of shaving gel absolutely failed to foam up well is that it was shampoo.

I'm off for a checkup this morning. Time to update the blood chemistry tests, and I'm really looking forward to finding out what's up.
 

Ahhh. I got out to the Ingersoll Center's weekly trans support group for the first time since, um, several months ago. (I'm too lazy to go look it up, but it was summer.) I've just had one thing after another, but resolved to make it happen again, started specifically carving my schedule to allow it, and this week it fell into place.

It is so, so good to be in a roomful of people who actually do know what this part of my life is like.

I've noticed that when I set myself a timetable to do anything, even something I like doing, on a regular schedule, I end up resenting the constriction even though I freely chose it and like the activity itself.

I think that part of it is how tightly associated that sort of "do X every day" schedule is, in my life so far, with medical stuff. Take my prescriptions, measure my glucose levels, clean the air filters, and so on. So part of my mind thinks "that's medical and I'm tired of it" given the fact of the scheduling.

But part of it is that I'm still in the midst of this general disengagement from external obligations that aren't in my primary interests. I've been reading some about memory and consciousness, among other topics that support the historical research for Project N,  and I find research support for an intuition of mine. I've long felt that I remember most clearly when I'm in physical or mental conditions similar to the ones in which events I'm trying to recall took place. And, it seems, memories can bring with them evocations of those interior states, more strongly for some people than others. I hazard the guess that I'm at the high end of susceptibility to this and that I have more and varied traumas to recall than many folks.

So it makes sense: this urge I have to drop out of things I've done in the past is in part a very sensible response to the realities of memory on a physical, electro-chemical level. I need to remember this, and think about how to set it up so that the next time I want to do a regular-reporting or regular-posting kind of thing it doesn't hit on the same recollections.

This isn't an announcement of a decision made or anything close to it; this is me thinking aloud and knowing I'm in the very early stages of consideration. I like to be clear about the difference.

In the wake of turn off social media presences in my legal name I find myself, first of all, really, really enjoying the mental quiet. More time to be purely at my own pace, thinking my own thoughts. I'm in touch with nearly everyone I want to still be in touch with, but at a slower tempo. So that's good right there.

What I've been wondering about the last couple days is just how much of a tie I ever want there to be publicly between my old identity and my new one. It's not an impermeable wall or anything, I've written far too much overlapping stuff already for that. (I mean, I could ditch this choice of name and start over but I don't really feel inclined to do that.) The deal is that my surname is rare in the first place and very rare in my professional field, so much so that it'd pretty much always be a flag "yep, that's me".

Wondering in an idle sort of way whether I want to have that happen or not.
 

Something came into focus for me this afternoon, as I was exchanging e-mail with an old friend about, among other things, the temptation to believe that the definitions we use are as objective as the world we apply them to. 'Tain't so, of course. Both our categories and the options within them are definitions we construct, and the world isn't obliged to conform. But in practice we can't be always stopping to define stuff if we're actually engaged in any kind of exchange with others. We use available definitions where they don't miss too horribly badly and sort of roll on....

But right now I have very few obligations to be engaged in that kind of exchange. Meanwhile, I do have some real need to be reexamining more of my own mental landscape and my definition of it. I hadn't explicitly connected these things before, but it seems obvious as soon as I did it: I am withdrawing from blogs, forums, and other net interaction so that I can spend more time in self-definition. I'd been thinking "I'm withdrawing, and I'm re-defining", but I see that the connection is stronger than that.

My counselor's been encouraging me all along to make sure I take the proper time to deal with all of this stuff, both the actions called for and the thoughts and feelings they stir up. So this is very much part of that overall therapeutic project. And I'm glad to know that.

This all sounds pretty familiar. I wonder if some of the stories I've been stalled on might work with this in mind as I appraise and revise. Might be some good drama in the interplay between this innately damaging existence and people struggling with ones that are seen the same way but aren't. Hmm.

One of the things I wrote in my round-up of thoughts of living with depression is that it's important to recognize when you're just putting your face in the blender, and stop it. Another thing is that it's much easier to recognize others' need to do something and encourage them to do it than to apply this kind of advice to oneself. However, I'm trying.

The blender in question for me is political blogging. I was raised with an appreciation for social engagement. My parents grew up in the Depression, and Dad fought in World War II, and they always took the life of the nation seriously, starting with the idea that there is a life of the nation (and the whole world) and not just whatever works on corporate balance sheets. I like ideas and am interested in their consequences, and I know that many important good things come only through political action.
 
But not everything political is actually useful. There are things that responsible adults have to do, starting with voting and with being informed enough to vote (including recognizing when there are no acceptable options on the ballot, too—least evil is an important category but not always one that compels a vote). And there's stuff that has to be looked at between elections, most particularly at the moment internal challenges to established party figures via contested primaries and the like, and there's stuff that happens outside parties, including all the various manifestations of research and lobbying. But then there's just obsession and bickering.

In recent years I've repeatedly resolved to disengage from a lot of the basically sterile political back-and-forth online, and to use that energy for other things, but it never seems to last. But then things are different for me this time around. I have both the medical crisis at hand and the long-term gender concerns to occupy such time and energy as I can give them—learning about options and then doing something about them. So. I've just wrapped up my first quarter on Weight Watchers, started before I knew about all the medical stuff, and now I'm emerging from the first wave of crisis diagnosis and treatment. (There's more coming, but the pace is slowing substantially.) I have all of that to deal with, and my work.

This is my goal for the next six months: identify and donate to one worthy cause each quarter, to some group that seems to me to be lobbying effectively for causes of concern to me. And I'm going to try to keep away from every political blog I read that has a tendency toward vile stuff in the commentary, because that's upsetting to me and I need not to be pointlessly upset. Others can fight it out in the bloggic trenches; I want to focus on helping support those doing the most directly applicable work, and otherwise get on with my own life a bit more.

We shall see how well I manage this.

(This is, more or less, insider politics. If you don't know what I'm referring to, don't sweat it.)

My thought: I simply don't have the energy to follow any of this stuff properly, and the world doesn't need any more people holding forth in ignorance. So I'm tuning out for a bit as I get my act together - dropping a few journals and blogs, maybe throwing a site or two into /etc/hosts to help myself not throw my face in the blender. I have a real obligation to myself and to people who care about and support me to deal with the immediate health issues—I need to not risk dying when there's stuff I can do to reduce the risk, basically. And I have a matching obligation to be aiming myself with some good long-term planning, to avoid the kind of death-courting rut I fell into.

So. Doing my best not to read, not to get sucked into, fights that I have nothing to add to, no help to give, nothing but the risk of being ground down at a time when I need all the scraps of physical and mental energy I have.

I've always had this small bit of luck: I've never been told "We can't do the thing that would help most because you're too fat." This has always been a slight surprise to me, given how heavy I am, but welcome. Well, that run came to an end today. I am too fat for the kind of compression hose the vascular specialist would prefer that I use, so I'll be making do with something partial (once we find out what Medicaid will cover) and monitoring to make sure it's doing something for the rest of my legs.

I'm discouraged.

I don't need efforts at cheer or reassurance or any of that stuff. I'll be keeping at it, doing what there is to do, seeking the relief that can be had. Things will change. I just need some time right now to go ahead and deal with one of those hurts I've been dreading for a very long time that finally arrived.
 

Queen Emily of Questioning Transphobia is guest-blogging over at Feministe at the moment, and has a great post up about what the sex declarations on forms mean in practice for trans people:

A small example: Imagine you went to the hospital, with stroke-like symptoms (it was later found to be “complicated migraines”). Because you want to actually be treated, you do not out yourself as transsexual. When the triage nurse filled in the forms, he puts female, and you leave it there. All is fine, the doctor for once treats you seriously, possibly because of the presence of your mum, aunt and cousin (quick lesson you learn when dealing with doctors while trans: there’s safety in cis scrutiny. Bring your mum or your partner with you into the examination room).

Fast forward to a week later, and I’m (sorry, you) at a neurology department to see a specialist to organize an MRI, when one of the reception people comes out to see you and starts screaming that you’re a GODDAMN LIAR because your forms say I’m female but some quirk of the computer system has found your birthdate and surname and pinged up an old treatment from when you were six. Because of this, they decide that your name isn’t real either, and it takes three trips to different departments with your changed birth certificate (changed in name but not in sex). In the end, they put a post-it on your file, with your name, your legal bloody name, in quotation marks like it’s a fucking nickname. And these are the people who are supposed to help you.

Now imagine what happens in an emergency situation.

As she says, this is one of those things that cis people just plain don't deal with very often. I haven't run into it yet...but inevitably I will. Every trans person does. The whole post (of which I've taken just one part) is well worth your reading.