(Venting, just venting ....)
I think I'm in the stage of transition they call "living your life." There's nothing exciting to report, no events at all, but it's still hard. I often feel like I've fallen overboard in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and am trying to swim to shore and feeling like the effort of keeping my head above water is too much for me and I'll drown long before I get there. My therapist says I'm making progress, but I can't see it. Just swell after swell that washes over my head, leaving me sputtering to grab a breath before the next one.
Okay, I'm fully transitioned (except for SRS -- need to lose 100 lbs!) and living as a woman. And sometimes I can even see a woman when I look in the mirror. But I can't seem to get my life back together. I kind of make a list of the stuff I have to do -- go to work, pay bills, shop for food, cook, clean the apartment, sleep, go to therapy, electrologist, etc. And I never seem to get more than half of it done.
I simply don't have the energy to do it all, because so much is being sucked away. I seem to need an enormous amount of doing nothing and withdrawing time just to get through the day. Just living as a woman takes a lot of energy, it's like I have to be always "on", lest I melt into a puddle of self-hate. (But no, detransitioning is impossible -- I would die.) I don't have the inner conviction that I'm a woman to hold me up, which leaves me struggling with the sense that I'm a fraud. (But I don't feel like a man, or even an in-between. I don't have any gender feelings at all.)
And I'm dealing with complex PTSD. It's like transitioning pulled the cork out of a bottle and let all the demons of Hell (the Hell of my childhood) come out and swarm around inside of me. There's terror -- the feeling like you've just fallen off a cliff (it's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end.) There's the way every mistake or pseudo-mistake turns into proof that you're as hopeless and worthless a mess as everyone seemed to think you were back then. And there's the unshakable conviction that you can't rely on anyone -- that if you ask someone for support when you really need it, they'll resentfully reject your "unreasonable" demands and blame you for thinking you need it, the way your parents and indeed all the adults in your life did when you were small. And there's the whisperer who tells you you're making a mountain out of a molehill, everybody else manages all this stuff just fine, what kind of a lazy good-for-nothing are you that you don't just do it?
Oh, well, just move along folks, nothing to see here ....
