Hi everyone, I'm Alyssa, I'm from London and just getting started out on here. I'm 19, in uni and studying biomedical sciences in London. Pre-everything, I think one friend suspects, but not out to anyone yet.
I've been around here since yesterday but I somehow managed to completely miss this section.
As such I have prepared a wonderful story to put you all to sleep. Guaranteed to be 10 times more effective than Ambien (Zolpidem).
I was about 8 when I decided that if I could not be happy then I would make other people happy. It was around about that age when I learnt laughing made you feel better and resolved to laugh as much as possible, at anything that came my way (usually myself). As Peggy Noonan said, "Humour is the shock absorber of life; It helps us take the blows".
It worked, I suppose, I'm still here, I can't really remember much of it, but what I can remember is that I can count on 3 fingers the number of times I had really felt joy or happiness for the first 18 years of my life, but more about that later. That is not to say that I wasn't content, they are not the same things. It seems fatuous to describe happiness as the absence of pain. And yet for a few years I was mostly content, and for 11 years I told myself that that is what it meant to be happy.
I know differently now. I lived a half life every day. Diminishing by half, again and again. Reducing down to a baser form. Uranium to Thorium, Thorium to Radium, Radium to Radon, Radon to Polonium and Polonium to Lead. And so I looked the same, weighed the same and lived the same way. But inside I was slowly evaporating into a shadow. I don't remember so much of my life, an odd thing given how many people have described my memory at times as "scary". But yes, I was living the shadow of a life. All the world was a stage. And all the men and women merely players. It seems I chose the fool. I said my lines, played my part, more out of duty than a love of existence – and yet I existed. I left my lines behind me and kept the lies strapped to my back. Weighing me down with the weight of the sky.
I remember reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, the discussion of how the legendary titan might avoid being crushed "the greater [the titan's] effort, the heavier the world bore down on his shoulders". The answer was to shrug – I always wondered what happened to the world when that happened – inertia is a powerful force after all. Anyway, apart from that passage, that book seemed to be the one thing more interminable than my life. Yet I took the advice to heart. Somewhere in the darkness I could feel the weight of the sky pressing down on me. And I tried to shrug and found that I couldn't.
Everything was gone, happiness, sadness for the most part as well. A little fear remained, I suppose it kept me from terminating my act mid-play. But that was it. I saw the void and told myself it was better that way. That I who could not remember ever feeling or knowing happiness, could at least not feel sadness, that I could be content. Well, contentedness was a waveform, and it collapsed from under my feet, and left me floating in the blackness – that's the problem with Uncertainty, with constructs built of shadow; They vanish in the day. The day was quickly over. In an instant. So I said my lines, more out of duty than everything else. Waiting for my exit.
No Exit, Sartre could not have found a better name for a play about Hell. Or a better way of describing it: "Hell is other people". That is to say, Hell is to see yourself as others see you, to look into their eyes and find yourself staring back. To see yourself as something detestable, and it drove me crazy, because I knew how they saw me. That's the problem with empathy you don't just understand others, you also understand how they see you. But they did not see what I saw, or maybe they did, and the one thing seemed like two. Like an optical illusion. They saw the youth and I saw the crone. Et in Arcadia ego.
I looked in mirrors, but my eyes were gone. I looked through everyone else's eyes and took that for reality. A lifetime of escapism through fantasy books, videogames and a dilettante's interest in quantum physics, and learning – there is something beautiful about knowledge, something alluring. Something distracting. Anything to distract, anything to drag you away from the real world for a single second. Once again I said I was content. But contentedness was not happiness and to be distracted was not to be content. I was not content.
And once again my eyes turned inwards, to review my life and try to find some sliver of memory, they're there, I know it. But they are quicksilver in your hand. Or better yet, gallium. Melting away when you grasp at them, reforming just out of reach. I should have known better that to go chasing shadows. Close your eyes, think and you'll find the shadows you've been chasing dancing on your eyelids.
I'm here now, I can't remember everything, there are some things that are just gone forever you just need to accept it – to stop crying over spilt milk; If only I could cry anymore, every time I must force them out, it's not a natural catharsis, not a perfect one, but it at least makes me feel more human. Anyway, I cannot give you the story of my life, I lack that, and so maybe this will not live up to its potential cogency. But there's no time to worry about that anymore, I'll try and remember the best I can and interpret as little as possible. Here goes:
I never wanted to be a girl, since I was young anyway. It seems odd, to be so sure now that the ground has collapsed beneath my feet. But then again my childhood was always rather odd. I was an introvert, a reader with a voracious appetite, one of those unfair people who goes through high school and university without ever having to revise or really work at all. It certainly doesn't help that I went to all-boys boarding schools all my life. I never really interacted with girls until uni. But anyway, I muddled my way through my early years, always aware that something was amiss. The schools were good, I did well, but I never really felt any sense of achievement that came from achieving. Was I afraid I would do badly, yes. But no exultation at the end of it either.
I emulated my mother sometimes, wrapping the towel around my chest instead of my waist, silly things like that. I vaguely remember stumbling around in her heels as well, whenever she went out. I tried on her clothes from time to time, but it never really meant much, I was always rather scrawny so it all seemed to droop too big off me like a tent. So ended quickly my first forays into sartorial elegance. Makes me wish I had a sister who I could have grown up with. I hated haircuts, I would always say no, but after one rather big escalation I started phrasing it more jocularly, slightly more mischievously, until I was the only person who actually knew I was saying no. It's easy to be a victim I suppose.
I remember getting out of the bath, hair slicked back and realising I looked a bit like a French girl, towel around my chest, of course (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3mc29m?GK_FACEBOOK_OG_HTML5=1). I did that every day until I holidays ended and I went back to school, I never really stopped doing it, but I didn't do it every day on holidays after that – until my face changed anyways. Why it didn't click with me then, I don't know, but I liked it. I suppose I was a little innocent, a little naïve. I didn't know what porn was until I was 13 and didn't masturbate until I was 15, I never really did much of either. Haven't watched porn for a long time and I masturbate once a month just to release pressure, I never really feel the need.
I experimented with writing for a while at about the age of 13, got to about 13,000 words of the most prolific garbage ever written, I still need to find it again it's buried somewhere in an old computer. Not really the salient part though. It is, and remains to this day, my first real experience of happiness, that singing in your chest rising like the dawn and all that. It was about changelings, children replaced by fairies. And central to it was the self loathing of the protagonist, a changeling, for what he saw as his nature. But as I said before, I'll interpret as little as possible. The furthest I'll go is in saying that it was cathartic and recognizing it, but not knowing why. I knew I
was venting some pain, but I didn't know where it was within me.
At 14 I had moved into high school – again an all boys boarding school. I took an audition for the choir and realised I had a beautiful treble (I always called it soprano though) voice and that I loved singing. Realising I could sing for the first time was my second experience with happiness. I did that for a year, and then I hit puberty. I remember my doctor saying that if I didn't eat I wouldn't go through puberty. I don't remember what I did after that, nothing probably, I didn't eat much anyway. I was lucky in a way I suppose, it hit me late, and not as hard as it could have. But it still felt awful. I stopped singing and the closest I ever get now is humming gently under my breath. With it came the realisation that I hated my voice, I thought everyone did, so I thought nothing of it. I also hated erections as well, and always thought my penis looked odd, ugly, out of place. I thought everyone else did as well, why else would people brag about them so frequently and so loudly, it seemed like overcompensating. And throughout it all I felt isolated, not really interested in sports or gaining muscle or having sex (I mean, why? I never really felt as much attracted to the few women I ever saw, as I felt envious of them – once again nothing really clicked). I wore my mother's clothes a few more times when she was out during the holidays. But once again I was too small. I'm 6 ft 1" and weigh 48.5 kg, my BMI has held constant at 13.5-14.5 for all my life. Needless to say nothing fitted well then, I didn't look like a man in a dress, I looked like a man in a tent.
My final happy memory in the 18 year saga was on holiday, at the age of 16 or 17. It was in a dream, I don't remember them often, I have very few. But this one always stuck out, a big slap in the face wake up call of a dream, you don't need to have read Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams to figure it out. I dreamt of estrogen of all things, as a pink (of course) powder sitting on a table in a room, somewhere in the Caribbean. There was a man offering it to me, saying it was happiness, and he had my face, just older, so much older. He was only 30, and the light seemed crushed from his eyes, 13 years older than me and he held the weight of 13.82 billion years over his head. I suppose he was holding up the sky. I reached for it on the table, took a handful and poured it down my throat. It was like some wonderful drug. Ichor of the gods. Ambrosia coursing through my veins. That was my third memory of happiness. I reached for another handful and I devoured it. I imagine I must have been the first person to ever become addicted to a drug in a dream (probably not). And as I reached for the hundredth handful everything faded but his voice "you can come back here if you want" and his voice sounded young again, with just the faintest hint of a melody behind it.
It still didn't click, I spent so many nights searching for that dream, but I suppose you shouldn't go living in dreams and neglecting reality, and I never could return there, it's a little like Narnia I suppose – eventually you need to stop living in a fantasy world and come out of the closet. I still think about that dream, it always sets a little glow in me, not anywhere near as much as before. Not happiness, but maybe, just maybe hope. It's only now that I know what his/her last words mean. Back at high school I started watching videos on and by trans people on youtube, feeling jealous, hating my body, hating my voice, not really wanting to get out of bed.
I turned 17, still watching, still nothing clicked.
I finished my exams, turned 18. Got into uni. And then it all hit the fan.
I met girls, lots of them. And where all the other guys were getting moony eyed, and wood, lots and lots of wood. I was getting jealous, feeling as if I was getting robbed. I compared my experiences with everyone else's and realised what I felt was not "normal", that I didn't fit.
Payback time.
It hit me like a tonne of newspapers (weighs the same as a tonne of bricks – just more informative and gives a slightly new meaning to the phrase newsflash.) And suddenly I felt awful. I threw myself into my studies, but nothing would make it go away. I made an impromptu gaff out of a sock and an elasticated waistband (saw it on the internet). I haven't taken it off except to (thoroughly) wash it and replace the loop of sock from time to time, that was about a year ago, I wear one during the day, and another during the night, and it seems to collapse the corpus cavernosum slightly so I don't get erections as much, particularly in the morning as they last so long it makes me want to die. I painted my toenails, but I always kept them covered with some really comfy socks when I was around the house, anyway my feet get cold so I never really saw my painted toenails except in the bath, and I loved it. When they weren't painted I felt a horrendous sense of loss. My parents went away for 10 days and for 10 sweet days I had the house all to myself. I had bought some real clothes online and wore them while no one was there, painted my nails from Friday afternoon and wore them to uni on Monday, where no one noticed them except a girlfriend (girl who's a friend) but then removed them in the evening because I chickened out. While I had them on I couldn't stop looking at them, feeling so happy. Like LOOK! These are my hands, finally. It was like I had been living without half my fingers for my entire life. I felt a similar sense of loss when I removed them (the nail polish, not my fingers), but hey-ho that's life.
Anyway stuff got worse. I started feeling worse and worse, but after figuring out my gender, diagnosing depression was ridiculously easy. I learnt about dysthymia, realised I'd been suffering from it for a long long time. I recognized it but it wasn't what I was and am feeling most acutely at the moment. Probably atypical depression, but I'm not going to go much further than suggesting. Anyway, something had to give and I felt like a testosterone time-bomb counting down to self-destruction. And so everything comes full circle and after a long time ghosting the empty corridors of google, seeing stuff here so often, I decided to settle down here. Felt more happiness in a day than I have in my entire life since yesterday, so I suppose that's proof I'm doing something right, still not feeling great but it all balances out eventually, and I've built up a great debt of sadness that needs to be paid off first. I tried getting medicines online, but it's so prohibitively involved and difficult and simply poorly explained and organised that I suppose it's the universe's way of telling me to go the traditional route. Meanwhile trying to organise GPs and therapists and all that stuff, still need to come out to my parents. My mother returns from abroad in two days time, so maybe then, staying on susans to keep myself motivated until I stop being a coward and take the plunge. But everything seems to be looking up.
This isn't the whole story, there's stuff I don't remember, there's stuff I'm not ready to share, but as far as things go it's a fair summary of everything so far. If anything I've stopped doubting my sanity. I might even modify it to make a coming out letter.
Hi Alyssa :icon_wave:
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