WARNING: long, whiny pity party ahead.Okay, it's only been a month since
my last check-in, but I feel like I want/need to put down in words what's been going on and how I feel, even if not much has changed.
I'm really sick of being me right now. Being where I am, being stuck with how I am. I get up, go to work, come home, eat, veg out, and go back to sleep. Rinse, repeat. I surf the web, mainly looking for stuff to read that will distract me from being conscious that I exist. (Funny, that's exactly how I'd describe my free-time activities back when I was 10 or 12.)
Part of that, I now think, is due to my job. I'm a programmer, but the way things work, I end up having to do a lot of analysis to figure out exactly what to program. I used to love my job; I'd get on the early train so I could get started sooner. However, the company has gone through several stages of being gobbled up, and now we're just a cog in a big, disfunctional multinational corporation. We've gone through near-annual layoffs over the past 10+ years, so the group is 1/4 the size it once was (but we don't have less work.) A lot of the environment I work with (data centers, networks, desktop, ops, etc.) is now controlled by other groups which have their own priorities and don't see any reason to consider our needs when making policies or handling our requests. It's kind of a hostile work environment (though not in the sense that phrase is usually used.) And deadlines that make us work as hard as we can just to keep up. There's no time to do double-check anything or do anything right or to do anything but the absolute quickest thing that will get the job out the door. We're know we're setting ourselves up for a disatrous failure, but we can't do anything about it.
I have about 3 years until the standard USA retirement age, but just yesterday I got this feeling (=realization?) that I may not make it. I took about 3 weeks vacation at the end of last year (use it or lose it), and I noticed after a week or so I started feeling halfway human again. I started caring about things again. It wasn't until then that I realized what I'd lost. I'm realizing that making a living is crushing everything in me that makes life worth living. Unless I can figure out some miraculous way to stop being bothered by the pressure and the obstacles and the nonsense, I'm going to have to quit or take early retirement or something just so I'll still be alive in 3 years.
Just today (we have today off), I managed to get back to sewing, which I hadn't had the energy to do for the past six months. I finished up a little alteration that had been hanging around on top of my sewing machine for six months, and I've started working on another summer dress that has been in the back of my mind for a year or so.
I've started my transition; at least, I've started regular electrolysis and I'm now envisioning what I'm going to do: HRT staring maybe 6-12 months from now, RLE once I get to the point of being gendered female at least some of the time. In my mind, at least, it's no longer "if" but "when." I feel like I'm on my way, even though the scenery hasn't shown any signs of changing. ("Are we there yet? Are we there yet?") I don't feel any sense of excitement, but I'm not sure if that's just how it is at this point in transition, or it's because of how burned out I feel.
At this point, I seem to have two therapists (not to mention the psychiatrist who's prescribing my meds.) My gender therapist is now also my trauma therapist and it seems like pretty much all my issues are coming up there. I still like my first therapist, but I'm not sure how much she is helping. I'm considering stopping going to her and just going to the gender/trauma therapist.
The rest of my life is still a mess. I haven't had the energy to do any cleaning other than laundry and dishwashing. I finally got around to reconciling my checkbook with the last 12 months worth of bank statements. I've skipped a number of my "fun" activities lately because doing them was more stress than I could handle. Most of the maintenance things I do to give myself some sense of control of my life are beyond me most of the time.
