Doubt and Dysphoria

Dysphoria is a constant in my life at the moment, but so is doubt of my trans status.How can these two things coexist, I ask myself a lot. I think it’s because the dysphoria is a horribly uncomfortable physical sensation but I can never quite identify whether it is a discomfort with having these parts, or a discomfort with the idea of losing them. This sounds stupid, I know I overthink, and over-obsess about all this, and will eventually end up self-destructing because of it. I’m not comfortable with the body I have, I’m not comfortable with the person that I am, but I don’t know how to change it. I feel like I’m wasting my life in this desperate space between happiness and unhappiness, clutching at straws that might help me sort my life out and feeling as if I fail every time, and maybe as if I don’t deserve to be happy.

‘There’s no point sitting here going crazy on your own’

I need to sort out three parts of that

*sitting here

*going crazy

*on my own

*sitting here

I need to find something to do with my life, I need to stop sitting around doing nothing the whole time, I need to stop my life being this wait to transition, because that’s not helpful for me, or for the people around me. There’s two types of depression, the type that’s caused when I sit and mope about things I can’t change, like transition, and the type that’s caused by trying to deal with stuff I can change, or at least stuff I can change my thinking regarding. That’s the type that I can work with and deal with, because even if it’s difficult, there’s a start-point. For now though, I need to find things to do. I have youth group, kayaking, and am preparing for snowboarding, so it’s not all bad…but… it’s not all good either. I need to concentrate more on my college work I think (he says, sitting writing this in a lesson), and do the amount of work I need to do to maintain my grades, because they’re…important and because maybe focussing on them will make everything else a bit more managable, and it’ll find me something else to do.

*going crazy

Something I make a bit of a habit of, apparantly. Michael, who I now just call ‘dad’ and I are working on how I c an reframe situations that would otherwise have upset me, but we haven’t got very far yet, and I think I find that in itself stressful. I feel as if I need to deal better with the ‘crazy’, the ‘head squirrels’ that actually leave me so battered on a day to day level. What are these? The insecurity that makes me believe that I really really don’t matter, and that nobody could want me in any way. The belief that anyone who appears to care wants something from me. The remnants of tiredness left over from my depression that make me believe every time that I get depressed, I should just cut myself and kill myself. The tiny part of me that still believes I’m nothing but a worthless whore, it’s that instinctive twisted thinking that I need to deal with.

*on my own

I’m not alone, I have a wonderful support network really, but most of it is online, and there’s not so much locally accessible support. I think I need to find myself an older brother type transguy in my local area, so here’s a callout for transguys near the Surrey/Hampshire border, UK

Thanks for reading

J

To all the older transitioners who tell me I’m doing what’s right

When I came out to myself as trans, I thought “okay, this makes it easy now. I’m trans, everything makes sense, I’ll go on testosterone, get top surgery, and then be happy”. I was an idealistic sixteen, and hoped that it was that simple. Nothing ever is.

I’m now 17, I call myself Jamie online, and by my birth name offline. I’ve been out to myself for a year, pretty much exactly (give or take about ten days), and I almost wish I hadn’t come out to myself.

I really do see how it can be harder for older transitioners to transition in many circumstances, and especially male-to-female, but I fail sometimes to see how that is easier than living a double life, living a lie to keep the people that you live with happy. My parents  haven’t accepted the idea of me being trans at all well, and I’m choosing to live as a girl until I leave college probably. Every week I have maybe one chance to present male, and then I tear myself apart getting dressed as a girl again, because it’s not me. People who barely know me have figured out I’m a transguy, where my parents call it a phase.

It’s not impossible to just live as a girl, maybe surprisingly it’s quite possible, but it isn’t a life worth living, and I’m going to be looking back on these two and a half years as the wasted years when I could have been getting on with my life, but instead spent them stuck in a rut waiting for a chance to get out. Alternatively I could see them as a place where I could deal with my issues.

Issues, yes. I have a lot of them, trust issues, abuse issues, eating issues (minimal, thanks be) and self harm issues, I could use this two and a half years to deal with those, so that I can start life as a well adjusted young man when I get out, but that doesn’t work, not when I go back into this unhealthy environment. Because it is unhealthy, I’ve gone back to being clinically depressed thanks to all of this. I say I can live with it, I can, so if it’s “transition or die” then I have no right to transition, because I can manage without, but that’s not how it works, I won’t live unless I do that.

There’s a lot more support out there for trans teenagers than there used to be. I’ve got amazing friends, and an amazing mentor, but sometimes it’s not enough, especially when people see me as trans before they see me as male, and I just want to live my life as a guy. It’s hard being young, I know exactly what I want and need, but I’m not allowed to go out there and get it, because I’m too young, so I’m left in this limbo instead.

I’m an intelligent boy, I would be looking at going to one of the best universities in the country if I hadn’t let being trans take over my college work, if I didn’t spend this whole time in a funk about not being able to be who I am, or at least not being able to be him, and have a managable life. I know things would be a lot harder if I forced coming out, I’d probably end up on a friends floor, but I’ve reasoned that that’s not going to work for me, that I’m not someone who could function so dependent on anyone for everything, and that I just have to do my best.

Sometimes, it’s easier just to stop, and think of how lucky I am, that I can live my whole life as a man, but often I can’t even do that.

This is a letter to all those older transitioners who keep telling me that it’s easier transitioning young.

It’s not easy

Jamie