The Beast Came Back

This is extremely personal, but if I don't get it out and explain why I'm so done right now I am going to explode.

After four months of freedom, without any sort of warning, my period came back. Do I know why? No. Is it normal after being on testosterone and it having gone away? Actually, most probably yes according to my google searches. (I called my Dr. and left a message all the same just in case, but I have yet to hear back).

I feel like I'm being such a baby about this. I've gotten through this before. I'm not even bleeding as much as a normal period - which is more of a confirmation to me that this is sort of just a "cleansing out" if you get what I'm saying. The problem is I have all the cramps, all the issues with eating, and all the emotional mindfuck that is normal for the periods I used to get.

The cramps I can deal with, the fact that my stomach instantly dislikes all food and will throw it up at a moments notice - or worse, just have me queasy and gassy for hours on end and I can't throw up - is not something I can handle so well. Mind you, this happens no matter what I eat be it good or bad, too much or very little. It's like my normal stomach problems are amplified by 1000%. There's a reason I started eating vegan and then gluten free, and unfortunately, it had nothing to do with the animals. It was for the health benefits (though I did start learning about the animal side later on and definitely stand for that as well, don't get me wrong. I came for my health and will be staying for the animals and the environment).

But… the emotional side - now that's what really fucks me. I become a person I don't even recognize. I feel bad when I'm around people because I get it, I become irrational and bipolar. I lose all sense. I become so negative. No one wants to be around me less when I'm like this than me. Still, I end up isolating myself and coming to battle with this bitch who's so mean.

I tell you, I try to be positive, but it feels like all happiness is suddenly sucked out of me. I get bursts of it back but there's always a crash that has me crying and upset, full of negative thoughts. It becomes very draining to take reign of this and cast it away. It becomes too easy to get down on my body. My chest begins to hurt as it becomes tender and that makes it harder to ignore. It's not the only body part that does this for that matter, but I don't want to name the other one. My body itself feels swollen. I do best to avoid looking at myself, to push it out of my head.

Still, every little thing sets me off, and I know it's irrational, but I fall into panic anyway. Everything feels wrong and there's a massive frustration that will come over me at times. I'll start shaking and won't be able to stay still. Many times it end in tears which only makes me more upset. Things that shouldn't offend me do. I become ridiculously sensitive. Like I said, I don't like nor recognize this person. But I'm stuck with her all the same. I guess you could say this is one of the biggest aspects of that female side that hits me and takes control of me. It's the hardest to escape because it's an impossible thing to control when it hits.

I know it will be over in a few days, and I've been really trying to console myself by finding distractions. It's in those moments that it hits me with one of those waves, one whopping blow, and I'm brought to my knees with so much emotion I don't know what to do with it that I've been really losing it these last couple days. I feel lonely and angry and my brain tries to project it onto others or little things, but in the end I always realize the thing I'm angry at is me, my body, how wrong it all feels.

I know this is a short post, but I needed to get this out. The act of writing this helped to pull me from one of those dark moments. Off to a land I music I now shall go.

The Weight

I had an actual post I was working on, but I haven't been able to focus. I've been dealing with a lot of chest dysphoria lately, so I decided to write a poem about that instead. Please note that when I say I've written poetry, I'm not following a specific form. I go with the flow of what comes to me. So, here it is.

The Weight

There's a weight upon my chest.
It just began to grow.
It once was flat, but now it's not.
They told me this is how it would go.
I thought that I'd be fine.
It's normal, that's what they said.
Yet there's a nagging anxiety in the back of my head

There's a weight upon my chest.
One side larger than the other.
Only by a smidge, yet I want to cry for mother.
Something isn't right.
Couldn't one just shrink?
I don't care if they're small,
Even not there at all,
Not a single wink.

There's a weight upon my chest.
It only makes me feel fat.
None of my shirts look right.
How can I fix that?
Do I need to diet?
Find a boyfriend who likes my boobs?
I'm feeling very empty.
There must be something I can do.

There's a weight upon my chest.
It's driving me insane.
It's shrunk a lot,
I'm so damn skinny,
Yet I still feel the pain.
It's hard to see an indent.
I still feel fat.
I still feel wrong.
Someone please, help me.
I don't know what's going on.

There's a weight upon my chest.
It's grown back out again.
Every bounce.
Every flounce.
It's all I see when I look down.
This shirt isn't that low cut,
At least that's what I thought.
I wish I had worn a tshirt,
Even if that doesn't fix it all.

There's a weight upon my chest.
I need to crush it down.
I bought myself a binder.
Will this help me now?
There's a new kind of constriction.
It's different to breathe.
But, oh my god, my shirt looks right.
I don't feel fat.
I'm free!

There's a weight upon my chest.
I cannot bind today.
There's phlegm in there.
I need the range,
To cough it all away.
But, now the sadness has returned.
Again, I'm feeling wrong.
I feel so much more aware of this.
After having a solution for so long.

There's a weight upon my chest.
The sickness still remains.
No matter how much I want to
I cannot bind again today.
This is wearing me down.
I'm getting very tired.
There has to be a permanent way
To tell my chest it's fired.

There's a weight upon my chest.
One day I could have it cut away.
But, that's easier said than done.
It's an awfully large bill to pay.
It's not just the cost.
Such procedures are apt to affect one's life.
After all, recovery lasts far beyond the day beneath the knife.

There's a weight upon my chest.
Until it's gone away,
I'll bind when I can.
If I can't, I'll just have to say--
"Don't think about it.
"Don't look down.
"It will all be okay.
"Chest or not, what makes you, you isn't going to change."

It Takes Courage

It's been longer than I intended between posts, but it doesn't matter. Like I said in my first post, there is no set schedule for updating this blog. I do it as I am inspired. Anyway, putting together this post in a coherent way has been tricky.

You see, I came out as transgender at work.

As I have mentioned in my last couple posts, this is something I have desperately been needing to do, but I've been holding back due to my own terror. Figuring out exactly why being authentic is so difficult me is the core of this post. Let's get to it, shall we?

I have lived my entire life afraid of being myself. Between the fear of losing friends, being annoying, or not being accepted by anybody, I have become quite guarded. Sometimes I'll sit down and search my brain, trying to find the sources of why I have such a hard time letting myself be wholly me. I've often been the pushover in groups of people, the quiet one who tags along and goes with what everyone says. I can pull to mind all the criticisms, all the times people that were supposed to be my friends made me feel small. (I'm not saying I was always the perfect friend either. I still regret how I ended certain friendships). I was often told I was being too sensitive, and to this day, it's hard for me to tell if my feelings are justified or if I really am too sensitive (usually I assume it's the latter). I wonder why I let it hurt me so bad. I guess it's because all that "poking fun" just added to the dissatisfaction I already had with myself. I already felt wrong, weird, out of place, even if I didn't have the words to explain it, then people would have to point out my shortcomings. The things I didn't know, how I was too much of a "prude," etc. I've often felt like a weirdo for things that are beyond my control.

I've noticed this complex in my head formed that if someone disagreed with me, I was probably the one who was wrong, and I needed to shut up and be schooled. I've made myself look stupid so many times unintentionally that it just became easier to shut the fuck up. It got to the point where I couldn't even raise my hand in class to answer a question. Group projects were a certain form of hell. When In groups, I often felt I was faking it more than anything. Even now, it takes a lot of warming up for me to talk to people in social situations (and that feeling of faking it still seeps in). Hell, I avoid cast parties or work holiday parties like the plague. The radio station only ever got me to one Christmas dinner (I was eligible to go to 3 or 4), and I often bail out of cast parties for plays I'm in. I get around people and I just freeze up. They try to ask me questions to get me talking and my tongue fails me. I never feel I can say what I mean. I dread even getting my hair cut because I'm expected to carry on a conversation with the person cutting my hair.

The walls I've built around myself are thick. As hard as I've been working to chip away at them these days, progress is slow. Each time I come close to knocking down another side of the wall, truly breaking free, my instinct is still to hesitate. I hate this. Where's my self confidence? I know that I'm not going to be happy until I can be 100% free, so what's the holdup?

The holdup is I have spent so much time systematically squashing myself down that it has become habit to second guess myself. Automatically, I expect that I am not good enough for people. I expect that people won't like me no filters and that the only way to make sure they won't leave me is to not be wholly myself. That is bad. Don't be like Sam in this way.

So imagine all this going down in my head and then add the need to come out, the need to be completely honest about who I am with people - and to enforce it.

Houston, we have a problem.

Coming out to my family last summer then my friends and extended family on Facebook back in October was the first hurdle. It was not easy and it doesn't seem to get any easier each time I have to do it. I'm lucky that everyone I know is accepting and just wants me to be happy. No one has argued with me regarding my gender nor my choice to transition. For that, I will be forever grateful. I wish every trans individual could be so fortunate.

Despite the acceptance, I let coming out at work be something I put off for a good amount of time. I knew it would be painful the more I prolonged the divide between my personal and professional lives - and fucking painful it has been.  With each day it only got worse. It takes a lot of energy to keep up the front of "Samantha," a lot more energy than I realize.

But my mind cries out with my fears:
"What if your bosses are freaked out by this?"
"What if work gets weird?"
"What if somehow you get fired for this?"

Yet as the nightmares got worse, as it got harder to get myself ready for work every day, I knew I was getting closer to the point I wouldn't be able to put it off any longer. It was the week before I came out when I finally had the last straw. I answered the phone with the usual "This is Samantha, how can I help you?" The man on the other end had a need to say that name a lost every other word. "Why hello, Samantha. I was wondering if you could help me, Samantha. Yadda, yadda, yadda, Samantha. Every time he said that name, it felt like he was stabbing me in the gut. By the time he cheerily said goodbye, I felt near tears. I wasn't going to be able to take this anymore. Even if it was just getting people to call me "Sam," I needed some form of relief.  

So despite the fears still chiming through my head, I revisited the coming out letter I actually started a couple months ago. I spent several days on it, had a couple other pairs of eyes look at it, and then came the hard part… deciding when to give it to my bosses. When I first pulled that letter back up and started working on it, I had made a silent promise to myself - I had to give it to them by the end of the week. Naturally, the anxiety got worse as the week progressed. My time of things continuing as they were was coming to an end. That was the scariest thought of all.

I mean, I think part of the reason I was afraid of coming out wasn't really just to do with my bosses, it was the customers. You see, you only have to come out to your boss or your coworkers once but when you work in retail it's different. Each customer that comes in, I have to make the silent decision - do I enforce my pronouns if they get them wrong? Do I try to explan? Essentially, I'm going to have to come out to someone new probably every day, and that's the scariest thing I've ever embarked myself upon. (I'm already failing but hey, cut me some slack, this is week one).

Then came the most important thing I had to tell myself:

"Sam, you have to do this because you can't live like this. Who are you living your life for? If it isn't going to work at MBE then you need to figure out where to go next now. The time to unnecessarily suffer is long past."

Somehow on Friday, March 3, I took the leap and as my vague Facebook post announced that day, I went from complete terror to sweet relief. My bosses were fine. I could tell they were shocked and hadn't  expected such an admission from me. Still, they assured me that the most important thing is that I'm happy. I couldn't have asked for a better response. That moment of acceptance, of knowing that there really is hope, and my life is not going to all crumble apart… that why it's all worth it. All the pain. All the stress. All the fear. It's all okay because one day you wake up and realize that all those negative thoughts, those stupid worries, they're gone.

The best example is March 6, 2017, the first day back to work after talking to my bosses. On that day, for the first time in I don't know how long, I woke up and went to work and I felt NO anxiety. Will it return? Of course, but that doesn't scare me because now I know it's possible for it to go away.

We're in whole new territory now. Whether I choose to enforce pronouns is up to me, but now that I'm out at least I have the right to. Plus, as the hormones continue to do their work, eventually I won't be misgendered anymore. While there will be new challenges and frustrations to deal with now, I'm happy I've moved on to the next step. Honestly, I still can't believe I actually did it.

So to anyone out there who is struggling with coming out, whether you do it tomorrow or wait a long time, I'm proud of you. It takes a lot of courage to be yourself.