Update

I'm in college again. This time to get my bachelor's degree. You know, finish what I started all those years ago when I was an eager young high school graduate with big dreams of becoming an engineer. A lot has changed since I started this blog. I discovered words and vocabulary to explain what was going on with me gender-wise. I now prefer the pronouns "they/them/their/themself" in the singular. If you don't agree with "they/them" in the singular you can kindly fuck off. Thanks. Or google it. There's tons of articles and blogs written by English majors and grammarians to tell you how it is actually been used in the English language for centuries. Thank you.

And on to the next thing. I forgot this blog existed. I got most of my thoughts out in a journal I keep by my bedside. I haven't really thought about anything to write in a long time. But tonight I feel like writing horrible poetry. Prepare yourself.

I long for the night when I can finally do i
t
dig deep in my flesh
with the shiny knife watch the blood
like I watched yours that night
I fucked things up I'm sorry
I had a panic attack you fucker
the water mixed with your blood
I saw it all that night
I saw it all and
one night it'll be mine

Fuck the extra x chromosome in my DNA

I need to come out of the closet.  Once again.  But this time it is my own fucking choice in the matter.  No concerned mother reading my diary behind my back and then telling everyone information I wasn't ready to be outed about.  This time, I have to come clean you guys.  I am a man.  Okay, more like a small, timid, scared boy.  But I wish to be a man. Maybe some day.  But I won't be a man the way society expects a man to be.  I probably will never have a beard, or a mustache, or goatee, or any facial hair for that matter.  I probably won't even have a five o'clock shadow.  I won't ever have a penis, unless I get famously rich and medicine advances in the future and I can afford to have a decently made one implanted, but as far as I can see and tell it won't happen.  I won't ever be taller than 5'3".  Basically I'm a short, perma clean-shaven, girly boy.  And I say girly boy because I know I have "feminine" traits.  And this is what I need to talk about.  Society, gender roles, and gender dysphoria.

I was born inside a girl's body, which once I reached horrible puberty, it became a woman's body.  But the little me inside, the little boy who played football, the little boy who played with tonka trucks and cap guns, the little kid who also played with barbies occasionally in an attempt to please my mother, well that boy never really felt comfortable in a woman's body.  Some of the most distressing days were when I would go clothes shopping.  That was when I felt the most uncomfortable in my body.  It had nothing to do with weight, although it did play a minuscule role seeing as I grew up with an anorexic and bulimic mother.  No, the most jarring thing about clothes shopping is the changing room.  Mirrors.  I hate mirrors.  When I brush my teeth I close my eyes infront of mirrors.  But clothes shopping forces you to see yourself infront of a mirror so you can see if the clothes fit right.  And infront of that mirror is when you shed off all your clothes and you gotta see your hideously woman figure staring back at you.  Those hips, those breasts you never wanted, that you actually cried about as a child when your aunts and relatives joked about you eventually growing them when you become a woman.  Yes, THOSE breasts.  The way your face looks. The long locks you keep because whenever you dare cut your hair a little shorter the remarks you get from certain people leave you reeling and unhappy.  You're forced to look at this body you hate.  And yes, the lack of a package in your underwear.  Not only that, but you gotta squeeze into misogynistic clothes that are too tight and made to accentuate these features you loathe.  You gotta wear something to keep society happy.  Because I can't cross dress.

I have started to cross dress.  I have even binded.  I have a packer too, which I just need a strap for right now.  And sometimes, when I'm feeling confident and manly I'll even go into the Men's restroom.  And yet, I still don't pass.

I got my hair cut the shortest I have ever had it cut in my entire life a couple days ago. Here, I'll even post a fucking picture of it.

So that's my new haircut.  Pretty fucking short hey? And the clothes I wear, I've been methodically shopping strictly in the boy's section for months now slowly phasing out all the girly shit I used to wear as a goddamn imposter.  

So why this blog entry?  Why am I griping about my gender dysphoria to the silent void of the internet? Because despite getting my hair cut boy short, despite my attempts to come off as male, despite cross-dressing and binding, despite going to the men's room when I need to pee, people still use female pronouns with me when they don't know me.

When I'm out in public, binded and cross-dressed, I still hear things like 'she' or 'ladies' or 'gal' or what-have-you.  Am I not passing? Am I not handsome enough? Is my voice not deep enough? Is my dick not long enough? Is my walk wrong? Do I hold myself the wrong way? I'm so obsessed now with passing as male.  Not because I want 'he' pronouns, not yet anyways, but because I don't want to be seen as she.  I want to be androgynous, I just don't want to be 'she'.  

And why not? Can't I be a girl who likes boy things? Can't I be happy with the body I was born in? 

We learned in class that suffering is our dukkha, our failed expectations and projections.  We're given the hand we're dealt, but instead of the Ace-King in our hand or maybe just a pair of jacks we long for the pair of aces.  So long as we want the pair of aces and we only have jacks in our hand, we'll suffer.  And so we must learn to become unattached.  Accept the jacks and not want the aces.  Be grateful for the Jacks... but but but I want to whine. But but but nothing. 

I was born a female, I should just be happy I'm alive and can walk and can see and taste and am in relatively good health. 

Then why all this suffering?  Because of a pronoun? 

Am I not justified to feel this pain of being in the wrong body? Will working out even help? Will working out get rid of these child-bearing hips?  Will working out lower my voice? My voice is too girly.  My laugh is too girly. I've been pushing my self to be more manly.  Lifting things and pushing my physical strength to come off as a man.  There's only so much I can do. 

I don't even think testosterone would help.  I really don't.  Because I know if I start down that road I'll further ostracize myself. 

I know I'm not the only one.  I know this isn't new. But this is my struggle.  And I needed to talk this out to the internet void, because I don't know where else to turn. 

I'm extremely unhappy with how I look, how I sound, how I feel. I think I get it now.  Why transfolk commit suicide. I get it.  

Chop the limb off before it can flower
Stomp on a mushroom
Take a bloody shower
Commit to creating a volume
Of nothing but wasted power
Then maybe I can sniff the fume
Let my body be lowered
Into the ground I'm doomed
Don't cry please not at this hour
I'm off to another room
Away from pain and on towards the tower
This is it, inherit my heirloom
Be not sour
For it is time I reside in my tomb

SSI and suicide to simply say it

I'm on the brink of applying or more appropriately begging the government to pay me to be jobless.  Not unemployment. Disability.  Why?  Because I'm finding myself at a crossroads:  Continue on this perilous path of intermittent therapy and non-stop pharmaceutical binge in hopes to build a dam to plug up the river of psychosis threatening to overtake my mind and drown me and possibly lead me to either commit a horrendous act on the public and then myself or perhaps cut my own life down to prevent said act; or quit work and take out mountains of loans to support myself while I go to school.

Why can't I have the option of going to school to better myself and take a break from work because of mental health reasons?  I'm scared that people who know me personally and even those who don't know me will look at my case and think 'you don't need disability, look how articulate you are! You were able to work in Australia just fine full-time, what's the problem now?'

The problem now is that I don't have my ex anymore.  There is no way I could have handled having a full-time job safely without her by my side taking care of me during my relapses and bouts of severe depression or psychosis.  She dealt with me unable to cook, unable to move, unable to leave the house, unable to leave the bedroom.  She dealt with my paranoia, my suicidal ideation, my suicide attempts, my hallucinations, and my detachment of reality.  No one knows of this shit because I hid it very well.  If I was off my rocker and couldn't function a simple shaky phone call to work "sorry I'm sick -fake cough-" would ensue.  If I was invited to a party? 'Oh sorry mate, it was LAST NIGHT? I thought it was NEXT week.. hahahaha'.  But in reality?  I knew (or didn't know if I was so fucked in the head) that the party was that night but I couldn't get out the door to go either because I was paralyzed with anxiety, depression, or lost in a world of derealization and depersonalization.

But I'm coming forth.  Right now.  To admit to my mental health afflictions.  And to voice my concern about what is about to happen and how I view this situation going down.

Basically one of two things will happen -- I could qualify for disability and no longer have to work while I go to school so I can focus on therapy so that this cycle can stop being so fucking severe and seemingly random.  Or I could be rejected and try to continue going to work and probably eventually successfully kill myself or others or both.... or I could be rejected and quit work and take on a mountain of debt that I will never be able to pay.

Do we really live in a world where society expects those with disabilities to 'pull themselves up by their boot straps' and 'get over it' and get a job?  The kind of jobs I can get that would accomodate for my challenges don't pay well at all.  Why should I be sentenced to a life of poverty?  I'm a hard fucking worker! And I'm smart as all get out. I just worked almost 22 hours in the last 30 hours and the day before that I pulled a 27 hour day and worked over 20 hours that day too. Don't tell me I'm lazy for wanting to be on disability.  Unless you have PTSD, depression, anxiety, and/or schizophreniform (possibly schizoaffective disorder) then you really don't know what it is like to be me.

Try working while your head goes fuzzy and your hands aren't your hands anymore.  You're a puppet. You know you're a puppet.  You're a mass of genetic pudding that was given many numbers and names and right now, as the government transmits your actions to your brain, you watch yourself perform your work duties, because right in that instance you aren't you and you're not even sure there was ever a you to think you were a you, an individual. No, right now, as you flip folded clothes and hunt for the tag to scan the sku, you're just like that piece of nondescript clothing -- a piece of clothing that on the outside, if viewed not at the store stacked with the others, but on the body of another government trained drone, it appears to be unique and special!  But you see the truth, right now, in a cramped back room in a box retail store that dots across America part of the capitalistic machine turning everyone into zombies and sucking the lifeforce out of this planet by overconsuming all the resources from trees to water to air to human souls.  The truth is simply this:

The clothing outside the store seems special and unique yet it isn't.  It was manufactured and then given a name (polo) and then a number (the sku) and dumped in a truck and shipped out to a store where you are counting it right now.  Counting something that is like you.  You seem special and unique, but you aren't.  You were manufactured out of lust like the majority of every single fucking human being on this planet.  And then given a name (Steve) and then a number, so many numbers, (social security number, employee number, driver's license number, etc).

What have we become? What have I become? Was there an I ever?

And so, I stood there, watching my puppet self perform these tasks on literally no sleep.  I calculated in my head and figured out that I was awake for 26 hours and counting.  I went from shift to shift to shift in the last two days.  No time for rest.  No time to feel real.  Maybe I was never real.

Once the shift was done I tried to get home.  And failed. Miserably.

Sitting on a log felt good.  Laying in a dandelion field felt better.  And then my roommate came and got me and took me home.

I still don't feel real.

But I keep telling myself to just take my medicine and go to therapy.  How much longer do I need to go to therapy for a sickness with no cure? The only way to get me back is to take back my life, but the government owns it.  I never had a life.

How Do We Fix Society?

The last couple of days I have been watching a lot of documentaries about psychology.  For once it wasn't so heavily based in abnormal psychology, which is my usual focus.  I am well acquainted with most major disorders including personality disorders, mood disorders, dissociative disorders, psychotic disorders, pervasive developmental disorders, and others.

The first movie I watched was a documentary about sleep and what the benefits of sleep mean and what are the effects of sleep on the human mind.  I still need to do more research into some of the theories thrown about in this movie, because I'm always skeptical about theories and things until I do more research and review experiments that more concretely explain what is going on.  I'll get more into this later.  The second movie was about the effects of stress on the human body.  Lastly, I watched a special on solitary confinement and how this questionable prison treatment effects inmates and how it could prove to be more detrimental and actually reverse recovery for those subjected to isolation and humiliation over the course of years.

A theory proposed in the National Geographic special on Sleep was a finding that when one enters REM (Rapid Eye Movement) stage of sleep that people report, once woken up during REM, that they are experiencing more negative emotions.  People disturbed from a non-REM dream took the same test and were discovered to report more positive emotions and outlook.  However, without REM sleep the human mind cannot fully rest and it was also discovered that those who received REM were more creative and able to make loose connections of words more easily and come to revelations.  One psychologist proposed that those suffering from Depression perhaps spend too much time in REM sleep, seeing as REM sleep tends to invoke more negative feelings in a person.  As mentioned earlier, I still want to do more research on this before I agree wholeheartedly and run around telling people "oh you get too much REM sleep".  And even if that was the case, what can a psychologist do to help their patient?  Is medication really the only solution to help those with chemical imbalances?

Now with stress I learned many interesting things backed up by years and years of research by separate scientists.  One neuroscientist discovered by observing and taking blood samples of some baboons in Africa that hierarchy in societies play a major role in how much stress someone will feel.  Another scientist conducted research in England called the "Whitehall Study".  Basically those on lower social statuses tend to accrue more stress.  More stress affects the body in numerous ways supported by scientific research:  reproductive system changes, dopamine (chemicals that tell your brain to enjoy life when you're doing something fun like a hobby or maybe trippin out on mdma) levels are decreased, fat cells are stored in dangerous locations that are linked to poor health such as higher risk of heart disease etc.  What's interesting is that those on lower social standings such as people living in the ghetto do have more to stress about and are constantly existing in an environment that is less than ideal when you can take a five minute subway ride and see out the window all the hundreds of two-storey big yard houses that are just miles away from your dingey, bullet-hole ridden, sunken roof townhome. How much more depressing would it be if when you have to walk by rich mansions to get to your run down home where you don't know if you'll be shot by a nearby gang when those rich folks up the hill are worrying about dandelions sprouting up in their trimmed lawns?  I'm not saying rich people never are stressed out, but certainly those who are poor are facing more stress and a feeling of powerlessness that aggravates stress levels.  I know, because I'm poor and stressed the fuck out about money and where I'm going to get my next meal.

Lastly we look at Solitary Confinement. This documentary suggests that solitary confinement changes people over time.  Their paranoia levels increase and they are more prone to lash out and act impulsively, which usually lands the offender in one of the most punishing vicious cycles this writer has ever encountered -- you're further isolated and have further privileges revoked which make you more susceptible of acting out which will thus further isolate you which makes you crazier and so on and so forth.  It really is sad and disgusting.  Why is this even allowed in America still?  I bet there are people out there that will exclaim "well it was their own fault for ending up in jail!" One of the inmates at solitary confinement was just a drug dealer and user.  A lot of these people they interviewed actually had non-violent offenses, but because they lashed out at a prison beforehand they're thrusted into this controversial jail.  The isolation eats away at them and those who were probably not even violent in nature are now becoming more volatile.  We are social creatures.  How does anyone think this is a good idea?

And now I'm trying to put this all  together.

Social isolation breeds psychosis.

Lack of sleep breeds psychosis.

Too much REM sleep breeds depression (supposedly, I'm still on the fence with this 'discoery').

Stress breeds unhappiness and health problems.

Health problems can cause more depression.

Now I examine my own life:  I suffer from insomnia, when I get paranoid or depressed I isolate myself from others, and whenever I do sleep I tend to sleep too much which would mean I probably end up in REM too much over the course of those 12-14 hour sleep binges, and since I'm low on the social structure (my income is well below the poverty line here in the USA) I suffer from a lot of stress which causes a lower immune system and causes more health issues.

I have a lot of shit going against me here and then I wonder why I'm so fucked in the head and suffering from mental disorders up my ass.

And let's not even focus on my life here. Look at those who end up in prison.  They even mention in the Solitary Confinement doco that a lot of those poor bastards who end up in there have mental illnesses.  But we closed state institutions because it was unethical?  Sometimes I wonder what have we done to help those who are still suffering from schizophrenia or anti-social personality disorder?  Sure, we closed the hospitals that would abuse them, take them in against their will, stick needles in them, bash them, rape them, and even lock them up in solitary confinement in a padded room for days or months according to their outlandish or violent behavior.  But what happened when all of those sick people were released when the hospitals closed?  Now we don't have facilities to HELP these people!

Now all we have is the broken prison system.  Or the streets.  Yeah, go curl up in your cardboard box, talk to those folk only you can see and hear, who tell you that those around you are out to kill you, and so you snap one day and grab some shoelaces from a discarded boot and choke someone on the street to death because you're convinced that you were sent by God to kill that sinner in their tracks before they could do Evil in the World.  And then you wake up in solitary confinement, your meals given to you in a slot, and you're told to take these pills this morning and later in the evening you're given more pills.  Is this really the life you should lead? You didn't ask for this illness.  You didn't know those voices inside your head were a fabrication of faulty wiring in your brain.  You didn't know.

And even those who do know the difference between right and wrong... they need REHABILITATION.  Not ISOLATION.  Not POLICE BRUTALITY.  NOR DISCRIMINATION.

Yeah, sure, those who are violent and dangerous need to be removed from society.  But can't we offer them counselling and help so that when they're released back into society we can minimize the relapse rate?  Minimize the suicide rate?

I feel like everything I'm learning in psychology is all connected.  Everything I'm learning in sociology and anthropology.  Everything I've been accumulating in my brain over my lifetime is all pointing to something.

Our society is broken.

Right down to the economics.

But I must end this blog post here. I need to further collect my thoughts.

But one fact remains solid in my mind:

Our Society. IS. BROKEN.

It's a Senses Fail kind of life for me

Senses Fail - "Angela Baker And My Obsession With Fire"
I won't forget the day that, that I came to
And I started thinking that there's more
Than just perfect prom queens and silver spoons
And all I ever wanted was someone to
knock me back to the bliss of ignorance
'Cause I feel like running head first into traffic.

And so I'm here to say
That thoughts in bed with pain.

I won't forget the day that, that I found God
In a kitchen knife now and on my arm
So paint the pale white floor with, with my red life
And tell myself this pain is the pain I love
As I swallow the pills of happiness
And you watch me fall like New York in an earthquake

And so I'm here to say
That thoughts in bed with pain.

I stand outside my pretty house
I light a match to start the fire
I call the cops to let 'em know
It's 22 Walthery Ave.

I thought I wanted this.
I thought I wanted this.

(I'm here to say)
I said I wanted some more attention
I thought I wanted a story ending.

(I love the pain, I hate the pain)
I just give in.
(I love the pain, I hate the pain)

I think that the truth is I'm scared
I think that I'm just scared to live
I think that the truth is I'm scared
I think that the truth is I'm everything that I hate.

can I please be numb again?

snow fields
wind
ice
cold. frigid deathly cold
is all I know.
in the snow

shaking, trembling hands
questioning my own existence
who am I?

reflections.
llaw eht no rorrim
tell me tell me tell me

who am I?

in the snow.

I don't know.