Log in

No account? Create an account

I just have to.

Turns out the import function for Live Journal on Dreamwidth works a treat. So does the cross-posting function. Let the bubbling contempt flow.

A quiet night in.

Nearly four years ago, I was sent home after gender reassignment surgery. I was given a small supply of Endone. Tonight I dug into that for the first time ever and it hasn't done a damn thing. One of the symptoms of this burgeoning chronic illness is horrible levels of discomfort when I stand and especially when I walk. Going from the front door to the car of the person picking me up yesterday left me feeling like I'd just sprinted a few blocks. A few people have suggested that this is POTS, or postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. The symptoms are a very close fit. So things like having a shower or getting dressed require rest stops where I pant and flop and feel like death. In a new and entertaining twist though, this has joined forces with another condition which isn't dangerous and usually doesn't cause me much discomfort at all but in conjunction with the POTS hurts more than recovering from surgery did, even in hospital. Given that this is likely to get worse if I do anything which aggravates the POTS, such as getting dressed or walking even tiny distances, I'm very much NOT looking forward to the appointment with the doctor I have later today. As it is, there are lots of involuntary spasms and high-pitched noises This is the least fun I've had in a very long time and I'm including things like coming off my bike and cracking my scapula in 2012. I would like this to stop now please.

Night terrors.

It's nearly 3am and I cannot sleep. I have a meeting at work tomorrow where I will be advised that I no longer have a job due to "breach of policies", that is, I'm working too slowly. Tomorrow will be the first time I have gone to work this week and I will be going in purely for that meeting. At that point, I will no longer have a job and subsequently, an income.

This is not a surprise. On Monday, being driven to the shops and buying some groceries was enough to reduce me to a panting, sweaty, aching wreck. Today, making dinner did something similar. I can't work. Hell, I can't even look after myself. I had to rely on a friend to buy cat food for me the other day so that the fluffbrat didn't go hungry. So not a surprise. But this is where the wheels really fall off my life. I lose the ability to retain my home by dint of my own efforts. Doing the simplest things HURTS and renders me incapable of doing another of the simplest things. So I can't lay down and close my eyes without thinking of tomorrow, and then I cry. Crying is another of those simple things which can be exhausting, so I should avoid that. So I make ugly terrified keening noises while tears run disconcertingly into my ears and my cat flees to the relative peace of the loungeroom. This is no fun so I've made a pot of tea and am just going to try to draw breath.

I am so over this. I am over being sad and angry and frightened and sore and exhausted. I think I'm into the bargaining stage which is awkward because there is nobody to whom I can beg to make things better. So I'm back to anger. It's a really good thing that I'm still way more interested in being me than being nothing because dark thoughts can be awfully dark. I just found a whole other set of ways in which a lot of things in the world that people take for granted are not for me anymore. I wonder just how circumscribed my existence is going to be. I wonder just how long my friendships can remain active in the face of me not being able to do much to maintain them. So I see my life shrinking in scope and the days running into each other until disability trickles into old age and I gently and oh so blandly and tediously wink out. This was not the life script I had in mind and I mourn the self who I had hoped to spend the remainder of my life with. I need this to not be my reality, please.

Further down the spiral

Yes, I'm back with a vengeance. I have a lot of feelings to blog out and a whole new era of what the fuck even is this bullshit to negotiate. So there will be a bit of a wave of posts.

My mother came over to visit today. When she initially suggested that, I made dithering awkward noises and then decided to come clean and explain that I wasn't really home to visitors because of the frankly squalid state of my home. The upshot of all this was that my septuagenarian mother came over and cleaned my kitchen for me while I dithered around the edges. The extremely minor picking up and single load of laundry I did was enough to leave me shaky and vague with sheer fatigue. Just to re-iterate, minor housework and lunch with my mother destroyed me. So yeah, I'm not just a bit slow and tired, I'm at the stage of basically not being able to look after myself anymore and my elderly mother can run rings around me. I do not feel like a grownup anymore. This is apparently my new reality and I genuinely have no idea how I'm going to make it work.


Learning what spoons are.

The last three weeks at work have been an exercise in futility. I actually made it all the way through last week but that was because I don't work Fridays now and Thursday was a public holiday. So I managed three days. When I say I managed three days, I mean I stumbled home on Wednesday and immediately fell into bed. I was completely written off for the next day and a half and was still sketchy enough that I was super flat for the rest of the weekend. This week I was flat on Monday, staggered home on Tuesday literally shaking with fatigue and lasted about 45 minutes today before coming home and going to bed for seven hours. I've just gotten up and I ache all over and thinking is something which happens slowly and with effort. I'm clearly trying to function well beyond my capacity at the moment and it's a bit disastrous. There's no way I can manage to go to work tomorrow. I'd probably get there and last maybe an hour as an exercise in showing willing.

On Mondays, the first half of the day is usually fine. I start to feel nasty sometime after lunch. Tuesdays are inevitably worse, probably because I pushed on Monday. So hopefully two half days per week, ideally not consecutively, would work. I really hope I don't look back on this entry and sigh wistfully but I know it's a possibility. I think I've got to the point where this body has no redeeming features though. There is basically nothing I like about it at all.

When the wheels fall off.

No, I haven't posted for a while. Just over a year ago, I gleefully moved into my new unit and looked forward to the next chapter of my life. It's not been the best chapter. To cut to the chase, my health has deteriorated to a ridiculous degree. Work has become a horrific struggle to the point where even cutting back to four days a week has been useless. I took three months of long service leave and badgered doctors and other health professionals, hoping to find and answer, and maybe recover some health with rest. Two weeks after restarting work, I crashed so hard that I came home, fell into bed and slept for more than 20 of the following 30 hours. I saw my GP last Friday and she has referred me to a rheumatologist using terms like "fibromalgia", which, now I'm looking for it, fits horribly well.

People have told me that this isn't the end of the world. And no, it's not fatal. But I'm squinting at my finances, trying to work out how not to lose my unit while living on the DSP. (which provides no allowance for mortgages, unlike rent - apparently it's ok to pay off other people's mortgages while on a pension, but not your own.) This unit was effectively going to be my quality of life insurance for when I was expecting to retire in 20-30 years time. Now...this is going to require some epic juggling, and that in turn will require more juggling, just to find the personal resources to do the epic juggling. Walking more than a couple of hundred metres destroys me. I weigh nearly 120kg - 70kg me from 4-5 years ago would be beyond horrified. I am now morbidly obese, transfeminine, essentially disabled, middle aged and several flavours of queer. I am the living, complaining manifestation of the abject.

There are still good things in my life, but I am watching the latter half of my life dwindle to a tiny dessicated shadow of what I thought it might be. Having had the barest sniff of almost living in a body that fits me, that body has broken in several important ways. It's like opening a Christmas present only to find that someone has trodden on the exquisitely delicate contents before you got to them.

If you need me, just follow the sound of swearing.


I have said in the past that depression is an insidious thing in that it does, by its very nature, make it awfully difficult to do anything about. It's a self-perpetuating condition in a lot of ways although obviously it's more complicated than that. Having said that, if you can get enough of a wedge in the gap that you can address some of the underlying causes, then your ability to continue to do things to cope with it increase enormously, or at least that seems to be what's happening with me. A new prescription for medication has made a real difference and acting on a blood test that showed me to be low on both vitamin B12 and vitamin D may well have helped quite a bit. I'm now cycling three days a week with every indication that I will be able to step this up in the near future. I've lost nearly 5kg (only another 20-25kg to go!) and cycling is already much easier. I'm finding socialisation much easier although it's still easy for me to become overstimulated and exhausted and a few relationships have become closer and more rewarding. I'm actually happy and feeling like I have agency. This is all extremely promising.

I had an almost-on-a-whim purchase recently. A friend was selling his very nice mountain bike and I'd regretfully decided that I couldn't justify spending $750 on a bike. Visiting him to check out his garage sale, we started talking again and the looking at bikes I'd done in the interim had made me realise just how good a buy this was. So I'm now the proud owner of a fastidiously modified and maintained Felt mountain bike. This will allow me much more rewarding trail rides and provide the impetus to do exactly that.

Flat hunting is becoming more prominent now that I have the mental space for it. I attended an auction yesterday and although the property was out of my reach, it always had a bit of a "too good to be true" aspect to it and in the end was so far beyond my limit that I wasn't even disappointed. There are other potential candidates and I will continue to hunt.

I didn't get the job I wanted. I'm a little dubious about why exactly I was turned down and it's very easy for me to be paranoid about this but others around me are agreed that it seems dodgy. I shall follow this up gently while also consciously going through the emotional process of letting go of that particular hope.

So a period of growth and change. 2014 was not my best year but 2015 could be really good. Onwards.

I'm back

It's been a while since I posted. Future me will be annoyed because although others read this and that fact is one of the things that makes this valuable, the primary reader of this journal is future me.

So where to begin?

I have a cat again. She was born on the 3rd of September and I picked her up on the 31st of October. She is wilful and talkative and a locus of chaos and beautiful and I love her. I spent some time trying to come up with a breathtakingly cool name for her before realising that she didn't need a clever name, just one that can easily be said with love. So I went with my first impulse which was Penelope. She will never be called that but is simply and always Penny. Also Pennycat, pretty one, scampercat, fluffmonster and when I'm feeling silly, Pfenig Hlepan Wollenbrek ForÞsdottir. (subject to me checking whether that's even remotely correct) She has an elegant sufficiency of fluff, beautiful markings and all the wonderful absurdity that any good kitten has. She is also probably the single best thing that happened to me in 2014.

A couple of weeks ago I got my second tattoo. It's an E H Shepherd illustration from Winnie the Pooh of Christopher Robin leaning back against Pooh pulling on his boots. The story behind it is that Pooh goes to visit Christopher Robin and finds him putting on his boots. He is excited because Big Boots mean Adventures. Christopher Robin had trouble getting his boots on and had to lean back quite hard on Pooh to manage it which made Pooh happy because he was already having a Useful Day. It turned out that Christopher Robin was preparing to head out to discover the North Pole. So it's a reminder that when setting out on a grand voyage of discovery, sometimes you need to lean quite hard on your friends. An acknowledgement and a reminder to pay it forwards. It's also a pretty thing and it makes me happy.

Mental health...lots there.

I started one lot of medication and found that while it took the edge off my anxiety, it also makes me tired and even less likely to be motivated to get things done than I used to be. It also didn't make me any more keen on socialising and if anything made that worse. So yesterday I got a new prescription and I'll see how that goes. Hermiting and disengagement remains an issue and I wound up deciding not to drink alcohol at all for the forseeable future as that was getting to the point of being distinctly unhealthy. I am resolved to try to get out of the house more. I really really ought to create things. It's become clear that body issue are a major part of my mental issues and this is not a single issue thing but rather a series of things that interrelate in a complex way that involve gender identity, sexuality, fitness, cultural expectations and myriad other things I haven't yet properly sorted through. I'm getting a clearer picture now though and starting to make plans to deal with this.

One of these will be exercise. Last week I went on a three day bike ride along a rail trail from Mansfield to Tallarook. It was a lovely ride and I did it in the company of several wonderful queer women who were mutually supportive and encouraging. This was a fortunate thing as it turned out that I had rather badly over-reached myself. On the dirt rail trails, my limit was about 30km before I essentially completely drained my body's reserves of energy and just had to stop. Given that we rode 60km on the first day and 40km on the third day, this presented difficulties. By the end of those days I had stopped thinking clearly by the time we got to where we needed to be, literally staggered thoughtlessly in circles, collapsed in the nearest convenient spot and cried, not because I was upset but just as a sheer physical reaction. Two days later I broke out in hives and I suspect I essentially crashed my immune system. If I had done this ride in early 2012, I would have romped through it easily. So my fitness is gone and I now weigh over 90kg. I've declared that I need to do something about this numerous times. Maybe I can make it stick this time. It really really hurt this time and I'm finding a host of reasons to hate what I've done to this body.

There are other things that I'll address another time but they involve work and a home and the process of reexamining those as well. Life is in flux. This is probably good.

The elephant in the drawing room

In my last post I wrote of hormonal imbalance and the difficulties that I'm facing with it. I spent the past couple of days with a friend who, with surpassing delicacy and tact, got me to confront the idea that I'm actually suffering from depression. This is not something that I really wanted to admit to myself but it all makes an unpleasant sort of sense.

I'm not that fussed about the social stigma. I have that across a few axes these days anyway and I know too many people who live with mental illness in one form or another to subscribe too heavily to that sort of rubbish. It does, however, kind of fall into the category of conditions which are managed rather than cured, often with pharmacological solutions that come with unwelcome side-effects. I'm not especially keen on this. It's also looking all too much like the bumpy ride I had into transition - denial, uncontrollable emotional turmoil, crisis, epiphany, coming out and I foresee a matching period of life upset, adjustment, therapy and a degree of further marginalisation. (ok, maybe the stigma does bother me a little - people can be stupid)

This, as with the hormone imbalance, is all speculation. I've had no blood tests, no consultations, nothing. I'm guessing. It's entirely possible that there's a little of situation, hormonal AND depressive aspects to what's going on and that this will only be resolved though careful investigation and a fair bit of trial and error. In the meantime, I'm going to be fragile, scatterbrained, a little reclusive and wary of doing a lot of things.

So I've made appointments to see appropriate people and am trying as hard as I reasonably can to do what cognitive work I can off my own bat. I suspect that it's all to easy for this to turn into all sorts of bullshit destructive downwardly spiralling badness and I very much want to avoid having my life fall apart yet again, potentially in all sorts of irretrievably horrible ways. I'm not sure I'm actually frightened by this but I'm apprehensive. I have no idea what my capacity to deal with this is, given that it's something that erodes that very capacity. I've taken time off work simply because each day there had become an exercise in endurance. I'm going back to work on Monday and I'm not looking forward to it.

So I'm contemplating a workplace change, about to start looking at buying property and coming to the realisation that I may be dealing with some kind of mental illness. I suppose I did say that my life needed shaking up. I should be more careful what I wish for.


It might be time to shake things up properly again.

To be honest, the very thing that's prompting this might be a very good reason why now is not the time to do it. I've been getting more and more hormonally out of whack pretty much since surgery, which is something I hadn't realised until I had a really good think about when this all started. I've had flat and off key patches which haven't really coincided with situational stuff and they've been getting worse until I'm now at the point of randomly fighting off context free tears and adrenal surges, especially at work. So I effectively got progressively escalating PMS that's been going on for months now. So this is the perfect time not to make life changing decisions because they may not be the most balanced ones. But I'm going to lay some groundwork and start thinking about it in earnest.

It mostly involves work. Even taking wobbly endocrine systems into account, work feeds me depressing stories every day and I'm increasingly starting to feel like I'm complicit in some appallingly bad management of people who need help far more than they need a sheriff's officer turning up on their doorstep. So the plan is to take some leave. I have a consultation on the 29th to get a referral to a trans friendly endocrinologist so hopefully this will resolve ongoing issues but in the meantime, if I take the time to re-evaluate how I want to live, talk with some good friends, assess alternatives and just have some relatively undemanding time then my life just might start shaking itself out in the way I've been waiting for it to do. It seems that I have to be the one who does the shaking. This is also very much about getting back to the process of moving out of my comfort zones. I'm not doing that anymore and it's a productive, empowering, transforming thing that I really ought to have as an ongoing part of my life.

So I will look and thing and talk and write and then once I've dealt with the body beating me about the emotional head and shoulders I can get serious about actually rejigging the parts of my life with which I'm dissatisfied. I have the ability to do this. I am surrounded by some of the most amazing people I can conceive of who support me and want me to achieve things. I've demonstrated to myself that when I have a purpose and lever myself out of ruts, I can actually make things happen. It's time to stop believing that I can't actually do anything significant or worthwhile because I realise that's actually what I do think now that I see it all set down in words.

I've given myself time to move on from surgery and now I'm going nothing. I should stop doing nothing.