repost :mood

I...realized a lot of my depression was because I felt very betrayed by the way my wife doesn't necessarily put a priority on keeping a job. She quit because she was sick of the job. It was a job worthy of being sick of, and I think her moving on was a good thing...but she just walked off and quit after one really rotten night. No other job lined up, not even two weeks' notice, just "I quit tonight."
I felt like she'd just pushed me over a cliff, because it then meant I had to pay all our bills for however long her unemployment lasted.
And she's blown off multiple jobs in various ways. It freaks me out harder each time.

So last night I talked to her about it and said she needs to do better about trying hard to stay continuously employed because it just ups the terror I feel about everything and function by repressing. That I was likely going to ask her to move out if she blew off another job, and that if it was her choice to save up and leave now,

And she said she was thinking about divorce too, because of the temper issues...I get really screamy, as I said-not verbally abusive, but shouty...and I don't know how to stop myself.

And this one incident where she felt really threatened by what I did-and I didn't mean it to be threatening, but I wasn't thinking clearly...and she had every right to be scared as heck.

She just moved a bunch of stuff around, that was all. But this was after I said, "Please only move a few things..."I kept telling her that I get really confused and upset when things get moved, and that you have to do it a little at a time or I get overwhelmed...She didn't hear what I was trying to communicate. I kept repeating,"Do it slowly, a little at a time, don't move too much at once..."

We have some major communication issues and are going to do couples' counseling ASAP.

When someone moves major things in my immediate environment it's like they rearrange the inside of my brain, and she didn't understand that's what I was saying to her. I was already severely depressed, under an enormous amount of stress.
SO... I got up to find the house turned upside down, EVERYTHING MOVED. I was trying to get ready for work. I went nuts.

I literally started screaming in frustration crying, howling, bobbing and jerking my head while my impulse was to get this thing and that thing I needed for work only to realize after taking half a step that she had moved EVERYTHING. It felt like I had been hit by a strong electric shock or a blow to the head.

I snapped. I wrote a psycho-looking note asking her why in god's name she did that to me, then stabbed it to my desk with knives and left them like that. Y'know, because it's not okay to tear up her stuff. And I self-injured also.
:(

(I know I went way, way over the line that night, and I can't allow myself to do that again, but after I did what I did in reaction...it immediately became about what I did...but thinking back about how horrible that night was for me, I once again feel that sense of someone horribly betraying my trust on a whim. It felt like she'd done it deliberately to make me that miserable. I was upset enough to start pseudohallucinating.)

So, she's been thinking about divorce, yeah. Even saving money for a lawyer, and I told her I wouldn't try to hold her back, she wouldn't have to pay an attorney, I don't think, I'd do my best to be helpful, co-operative and fair if she wants to go. We spent inheritance money of hers on sinusitis surgery for me in Mexico-which made us broke. I wish I wasn't such a loser-because I ought to be able to pay her back for it, but I'm so poor it would take years.

A lot of this is poverty-if I wasn't so close to the bone-if I made a real living wage instead of a wage that allows me to just make it to another day...well, I wouldn't be so freaked out.
Another way I fail both myself, her, even my Mom.

My wife looked at my blog too, and now she's forbidden me to buy 55 gallon metal drums. Drat. She already locked my pistol up, darn her.

So that's why I'm depressed, I guess...my marriage may be in its' dying days. Couples' therapy only has about a 50% success rate. I'm not inclined to optimism. I...know whatever happens, I don't ever want to hurt again like it's going to hurt if this ends. Which means never letting someone be this close to me again, never caring this much again.

I need to get another appointment, probably with a different county psychiatrist...the one I saw was the department head and was too busy managing the department to take the time to let me explain "horrible". I told her I was doing "horrible" when she asked.

I meant "Severely depressed, irritable, self injuring about once weekly on average, suicidal enough to make plans, feeling hopeless as well as a sort of distant terror, tired yet having trouble sleeping eight hours, despising myself, feeling very incompetent, getting intrusive thoughts of past things I feel guilt over, poor memory and concentration, feeling disconnected to anyone who cares about me, crying every night."

Aha!

OK...I have a plan!
To commit suicide the right way, I have to get a metal barrel and drill holes in it...the kind that can have a lid bolted on...and figure out how to float myself out to sea in the deliberately leaky barrel...and take sleeping pills-a bunch of sleeping pills...so I go to sleep and the barrel sinks.

Voila! body hidden! No cleanup.
How do I get myself into the water in the barrel? rolling inside the barrel, I guess.

Hello suicide my old friend

 My wife and I got into an argument, it's clearly my fault-being sincere...I ruined a good evening, I hate myself...I am destroying my marriage this way because I'm a worthless piece of shit.

I wanted her just to come with me to the store afterwards and she wouldn't even do that. 

I am visualizing driving to the bridge I've picked out to jump off of, and wondering what the fall will be like, before I hit, how scared I will be, will I have the courage to face the water coming up to kill me or am I going to close my eyes and go feet-first?
I wonder if I could get something to take the edge off besides alcohol, in order to make it less frightening and painful?  Would I then be safe to drive to the bridge?

I want to die, and she keeps the guns locked up, so I jump...or go buy a shotgun when she's at work...

I'm tired of trying...I love and trust this woman more than anyone in the world but I can't make it work with her...and I don't know that I want to carry on without her.
On the other hand, the appeal with the bridge is that I have a good amount of time to think about it before I get there, so I can know when I do that I'll have considered my decision.

I almost feel like setting off to the bridge right now, but I'm not completely without hope...so I'll keep trying, for now...but when she leaves me, which I think will happen, I'll help her go, then get my affairs in order....

Maybe I'll feel better later...but right now I feel like I'm looking the end of my marriage in the face and I don't think I want to go on after it.

So if my wife finds this after I'm dead, not that she would, she's (thankfully) able to take death in stride...and that makes suicide an easier choice for me...

I could have bravely soldiered on without you, dear....but there are reasons why I chose not to.   I'm not happy out of a relationship, but I cause all sorts of bullshit in one.  I might have happy moments, but my life's not a happy one, never has been, never will be.  I am crippled by my fears, yet daily loathe myself for my lack of achievement, and I don't see me overcoming that.


In short, I was a smart, funny, waste of oxygen, and in a lot of internal pain all the time.

I felt like I owed you better than I had to give, does that make any sense? I love(d) you so much, that I felt like going on without you wasn't worth it anymore.


Not that I couldn't, but didn't, and that's not your fault, alright?  I nearly did  myself in any number of times when we were together anyway-I'm just not able to be happy.
So suicide was my choice, and you can hate me for that essentially cowardly choice as much as you want.  I'm dead. Do whatever makes life easier.

insuranceless in the USA

I apologize to the person whom I partly wrote this to...but this was a good summary of my adventures with insuranceless chronic illness.

 When I got sick in 2002 it started with a runny nose.  And never stopped. So imagine having first bronchitis for a few months, then a cold that never, ever went away. For eight years.
Chronic pansinusitis.

Had I had decent insurance, I would have gotten an ENT consult and proabably had surgery for the problem within a year of diagnosis, if surgery was even necessary. I suspect it would have been, and even if not necessary, I still think it would be beneficial sans the infection. My sinuses and allergies have been chronic problems and chronically made my asthma worse.

My life has been totally derailed by the combination of the sinus infection and the inability to access needed care.  I lost my savings-better yet, I lost the ability to make savings...my independence, my apartment, my sanity. I now take more pills than Pac-Man.

You see, sinusitis made my asthma go nuts, my allergies go nuts...and now I'm running across research that suggests it made ME go nuts...apparently, cytokines, which your body pumps out during an allergic reaction, get into the brain and break down serotonin. You then have decay of the serotonin...this might explain why SSRI's coincidentally stopped working as well for me at the same time...because the serotonin is getting broken down while in the synapse....

You see, I was okay for many years on one mood medication. Now I'm not okay on three.

So my lungs were barely working for a while, I was chronically fatigued for a long while, and I had constant hayfever, pretty much. I am physically a lot better. My allergist said if I lost a lot of weight I'd get better. He was right...although I seem to have done it without the stomach stapling he suggested.

But my wife and I also tried to get surgery for me in Mexico..and the Mexican surgeon...well, he didn't do what should have been done-he only took out all the polyps...which was helpful, yes, and I feel better, yes...but it took all the money we had and only fixed the problem about 30%

Since 2002, my life has been one giant allergic reaction due to the presence of the infection. Sinus infections do that.

They also cause chronic fatigue, so I was either sleeping or taking ludicrous amounts of caffiene to work, so I could pay for medicine, for a long period of time. The reason I didn't go to the county sooner: the last time I was with the county, their fee schedule went up such that it was cheaper to go to a private doctor.

That, and they really do suck: they screw up my meds, they can be inflexible even though it causes me an enormous amount of headache, very inefficient, disorganized, have no effective complaint response, I see a new intern resident each time, and I can expect to spend two to four hours at most appointments, waiting for them to get around to me.
Sometimes I have to leave and reschedule so I can go to work.

The white bedsheet crew

Some yoyo put a KKK recruiting flyer in our driveway. My wife found it Saturday. She's all wigged out and the guns loaded. I'm all like...eh...yawn. Not because I don't necessarily take them as a semi-serious threat, just not a very BIG semi-serious threat. And they aren't a NEW threat, if that makes sense.
They have always been here, and when there's less crumbs falling from the table, the cockroaches WILL crawl out of the woodwork...

Probably less of a threat now since it became harder to get pseudoephedrine.  A lot of the white power guys were making their money off of bathtub meth production around here.

We're kind of on the dividing line between suburban and rural here, and on the Gulf coast somewhere, so, unfortunately this sort of thing comes with the territory.

I seem to remember this happening before, and nothing came of it.  But I'm contemplating a concealed carry for when I'm exercising in the neighborhood-and a handgun that is concealable.
My current pistol's a heavy sucker, and classic verging on antique-I don't want to get sweat on it.
Everybody knows us as the dyke couple, so it's possible I/we could get targeted...if anyone felt like targeting us. I just think they won't get anybody.

repost, but added to...

I pick fights over stupid crap! Stupid, stupid crap!

Today I started an argument because my wife tried to plant a tree in a plastic pot after she pulled the tree up up like I asked...and she got all mad because I wouldn't let her use good potting soil that was bought retail to stick some random tree in-I wanted to use the bucket and soil for growing herbs.(I looked it up, the tree was a green ash) .

And I just can't seem to stop arguing with her...I'm tired, I'm angry, and any time my wife does something or fails to do something...for instance, she did laundry once this week, and by today, when I woke up and found that, again, I couldn't find any clean work pants...and my wife hasn't bothered to fold and put away the giant pile of clean, disordered clothes on the dryer, or do any loads since Tuesday... because she's busy making this lovely, artistic mandelbrot program..I got really pissy.

Y'know, I had a painting I wanted to paint last month...but I was a bit busy trying to make sure the fucking bills got paid, honey...that kind of took precedence over my desire for artistic expression, no matter how much I felt like I chopped off a bit of my soul.
She isn't chopping off bits of her soul for survival's sake...she quit a job because she got called "sir" once too often.

Yeah, I think I have a right right now to expect her to do more housework, and the house is trashed. I work 48 hours a week, drive another 12 hours to do that...and I'm busting ass because she has no job. Admittedly, she quit for a fairly valid reason, but...her choice to walk off the job. I don't feel like I was offered a choice, I just feel like I get to deal with the consequences, and I'm fucking angry.

Also, very, sad.   I love and trust this woman more than I trust anyone else on the planet, and she seems to impulsively do stuff that turns me into a nervous wreck...since this isn't the first time she's just blown off a job for whatever reason...or told off the wrong person and gotten fired...and I'm really beginning to hate the awful unpredictability this adds to my life. I can't trust her to keep a job.  I've  been with her for eight years.  This is her life's pattern.

And that may well end up making me ask her to leave someday. As it is, I've demanded she get into DBT or CBT as soon as she gets a job. I also want her to go see a gender therapist, because she obviously has leftovers.

I'm also just tired...depressed, lonely, frustrated, angry as hell. My moods are whipping around like crazy-up one day, down the next.

BUT ALL THAT does not excuse me being a douche. It might excuse me thinking about ending my marriage...but not being a douche.


At this point I'm making a conscious bad decision...
I'm giving myself blanket permission to SI because it's the only way I know to control the level of bad that keeps happening inside me right now. I'm going to do something I've not done before also-explicitly buy razor blades for cutting.

Because I am not going to wreck my marriage stupidly. Am not, am not, am not.

Later:  I bought a package of ten razor blades.  I took one out of the package, and did my first cutting with it.  Ohhh...it is very sharp indeed, and the feeling of using the new razor to cut is...very soothing.

She gets to walk out of a job because the customers hurt her feelings, then I get to self-injure as I see fit. Fuck it.

I'd rather bleed than cry, to be honest

Part 2 of 2: Forget the system: what's wrong with the f*$^%ing electorate?!?!?!

Or: more CItizens, less Consumers.

 

Our vocabulary word for today, kids, is: brainwashing.

 

The American people are being brainwashed by a number of things.  The first of those things is advertising, mainly that of television.  Adverts are constantly, from the time we are old enough to actually see the television in some cases, streaming into our consciousness, and making us less satisfied with what we have-that's what they are designed to do.  The cumulative effect though, is less happiness, and defining our happiness by material things.

 http://mattbrundage.com/publications/materialism-happiness/.   (This is why I'm a dumpster-diver: I like having lots of things,especially new clothes.)

 

But people today not only don't realize they are being brainwashed, they are fishes swimming in a stream of propaganda.  Such that when someone tells them the full truth, it sounds very odd. (Try explaining the true complexity of any given geopolitical situation to a CNN or FOX watcher you know...they will eventually stop listening due to boredom, tell you you're lying, or ask for a dictionary.)  Because most media communicated to them is designed to talk down to them(so as to not challenge them and make them feel inferior), cater to their prejudices (ropes in more ears/eyeballs), and accuracy in reportage is no longer a big concern (accuracy causes cost of production to rise and profits to fall.)

 

So the corporate media have failed to make Citizens out of the American people, by not educating them about the issues in an accurate, reliable, and most importantly, holistic way.

The education system has failed to make Citizens out of the American people in many ways.   Not the least of which is by not teaching them about the ways of psychological manipulation .  Not knowing what it is, the fail to recognize it.  Failing to recognize it, they do not question it. Failing to question it, they believe it at worst, or at best, become suspicious and isolated.

Worse, the education system teaches so poorly these days that 18-year olds graduate not knowing enough facts to be able to tell lies from truth, a fact from an opinion, a feeling from a thought, or even how to determine when something is a lie or not: how to do one's own basic literature or internet research.

 

You see, I used to be a believer in anarcho-syndicalism...and in my heart of hearts I would like to see a radically destructured and restructured society.  But I came to recognize that this would require a very deep tectonic shift in the way people behave towards each other in order to produce a healthier, happier society.  I also came to see that that shift in culture was more crucial than government structure.

 

What we need is a critical mass of Citizens.  This as I define as people who are used to taking action for themselves AND responsibility for their society, try not to take actions that needlessly cause harm to others... care for the survival/happiness of all humans everywhere on this planet to some degree, and care about the survival of the ecosphere as well.  Citizens educate themselves, find out the truth, and try to make the world a better place.

 

 What we do have is a huge majority of Consumers trained to look for leaders, money, stuff, substances, food, sex, attention, and dominance over others to make themselves happy.  Worse, they will do so at great cost to their own future, never mind the future of others.  Because they have been brainwashed all their lives to need, need, NEED all this crap...and then will find the crap WILL not make them fulfilled when they get it-or not for long... they must have More Crap, or More Crap than someone else who has More Crap than they do...a constant influx of crap, like some sort of giant inverse cloaca...

 

Consumers consume...they do not create, they don't try to make a sustainable future for everyone.  At best, they may look out for their kids...but they don't think about the entirety of the world their kids will inherit.  That world can go to hell for all they care...and they just pull out their big spoon, and keep scooping. 

Tell them they need to take on more responsibility for the long-term consequences of their actions...and many behave like addicts when confronted-in an infantile, egotistic fashion.

 

As a dumpster-diver, I see a whole lot of working appliances, or ones that can be easily fixed, just waiting for me to come along and rummage them out...good clothes, tools, canned food good for years...thrown away because they didn't fulfill people. With no thought about its' potential utility to anyone else or how throwing away useful goods fills up a landfill uselessly. 

I despise waste...and my society is a profoundly wasteful one.  Can you walk a 30-foot square area thoroughly in any part of your landscape (that has not been recently tidied)-and not find trash? That's what I thought.

 

If you've read this rant, chances are I'm preaching to the choir, and you're already at least part of the way to being a Citizen. We need Citizens.  We need a critical mass of them.

Look around you.  Look for the tweaks.  Look for how a Citizen is created, how a Consumer is created.  Find ways to throw the levers and start shunting people from the Consumer memeplex conveyor belt (thanks, RD) to the Citizen thought/behavior set.

 

I'm not saying turn into a Communist...in fact, the Soviet Socialist Republic destroyed what it did have of this native collective spirit in a very devastating manner.

I think this actually runs deeper than politics alone,or at least what most people would call politics.  This goes right down to how we interrelate, how we think, and how we behave towards each other.

It's something I'm still mentally turning about in my head myself, so I'd welcome helpful feedback.

oops, I lied

Politics rant next time...first this thought-I was replying to someone else's post somewhere else, and I've thought this before:

If you take all the people who have ever taken antidepressants, add in anyone who's ever had a substance abuse problem, figure that a *ahem* large percentage of morbidly obese people are using food in a druglike manner(remember-me keeping my own binging under control's a daily struggle), consider caffeine, nicotine, and other addictive behaviors like shopping, shoplifting, gambling and the like...you realize that a majority of people in this society are using external things to habitually medicate chronic distress.

That seriously says to me the problem is not just individuals failing to adjust. Our society is not conducive to human happiness, nor is it meant to be...and I'm not sure when it was decided happiness didn't constitute a priority to be achieved.

politics rant: a 2-parter

Here's my rant o' the day about politics, and why, even though I voted, I know it doesn't matter that much:


The people who choose the people we vote for are not us.  They are not necessarily on our side. They do not necessarily have our best interest at heart.   They have an agenda that may or may not match the one we have for ourselves, and may or may not include the application of force or punishment.


I vote for the Democrats, but as a queer-identified person since the age of 16, I fully know what it's like to be "serviced" by only one major party.   They know full well that as rabid as the republicans have gradually become, very few of us are going to vote for the GOP.   Which means they don't really have to do very much FOR us, just not be malignantly OPPOSED to us.

They don't have to do anything to get our support, really-the far right republicans do all the work for them.


As for people who aren't gender or sexual minorities, though, both parties have been bought, and that's fairly obvious.   What's sad though, is that we, the American working-class, are now, as a group, SO broke, and the rich people so wealthy in comparison, that even were we to pool our resources, I don't think we can afford to buy our politicians back.


In my earlier post, I mentioned trying to grow my own food.  I'm also trying to learn to fix my own car...and I want to grow my own medicinal plants.
Americans really need to learn the kind of creative making-do that typifies third-world countries, because I think that is where we're headed-most of us, those who aren't rich.


The politicians don't want us to make our own decisions...but if we did, we would need to be the kind of people who made our own decisions...not just a few of us, but all of us-or at least most of us-would have to be more resistant to being deceived, because we've somehow become a nation of ignorant, pigheaded fools, very eager to have someone cater to our prejudices, rather than challenge them.

And that's going to be the second part...coming soon.

Barbie descends to Hades' realm at the turning of the year...

I am feeling mentally well but physically ill.  I wasn't up to much-my ear seems to be infected.  I was going to get more done, I always am...

Yesterday, we went walking, and found a place where buffalo gourds and passion vine are growing-I believe said passion vine's the kind that produces edible fruits...we need to get back out there real soon now and dig some of the plants up...also think there's Chinese Water Spinach growing there-identification's the issue-and that can go in the bathtub our neighbor gave us.  It's so easy to grow around here it's become an invasive non-native species, and if I wasn't worried about chemical toxicity issues, I'd be wild-harvesting like Bear Grylls on that stuff...but there's been a lot of dumping around here, this here's Oil Country, and they write the laws, pretty-near much

Generally, my thought is if it's invasive, nonnative and edible you probably aren't eating enough of it.

The wife and I went to a garden center, and were most annoyed to find that the fall winter veggies advertised as on sale were not on sale,even though the sale circular I read said so; there were signs everywhere that shouted "70% off!" and we had to void the purchase, take most of it back, and rechoose stuff that was actually on sale...

While at the garden center, we were looking around for more clearance items, and I found a dwarf pomegranate. It was only hip high...but it was actually mature and in fruit.  The fruits were the size of berries.

I showed this to my wife: "Look, honey, it's a tiny little pomegranate, with tiny little pomegranates on it."
My wife looked at the berry-sized pomegranates and said: "You could use those to make Barbie spend six months in Hades."

It took me a good minute to stop laughing.

Then we went to a big-box store and found two bargain-packs of kale...on sale! 50% off! Yay! Kale tolerates mild freezes-which is usually all we get here.

I bought some potting soil in which green onions and garlic are going to be grown, in a giant pot.  Green onions are really easy to grow, and you can't buy garlic chives in a store.

Tonight I'm going to meditate, I think.  My project is started-barely, but started nonetheless, and I'm going to try to make the final draft of my first sigil.  Oh, and gargle ten tons of hot saltwater, to try to depressurize my ear.

repost:wheeze and whine

I feel, well, silly, and weak, for not being able to deal with my pain quietly and on my own. I always end up talking about my interior agony, but I feel like that's a failure of dignity and self-respect.

I can't live a life of quiet desperation, it seems.
No, I have to be a walking whine and cheeze festival.

My asthma's behaving itself, I'm just not sleeping well-side effect of amping the dose of stuff that's caffeine and adrenaline analogues. That, stress, and the actual caffeine pills I take to combat the sinusitis fatigue.

Quite frankly, I also take the caffeine pills so I can get out of bed and do what I either need or want to do. Between the 48 hours I actually worked and the 12 I spent driving to get to the 48 hours I worked this week, if I want Me time, it has to come out of time for sleep.

Plus, dumpster-diving makes me happy. I like getting good stuff for free.

repost:FtWTF

I'll keep it simple here. even if it's so complicated I don't feel like I can stand it.

I've got these feelings of androgyny. I think this is adding to my sense of isolation, which was/is, um, at a level that affects my mental health...Probably part of the reason it takes three drugs to manage my depression instead of just one like it used to, although I may just be getting older and harder to treat. I'm lonely almost all the time now.
( I see so little of my wife, and when I do, she's teaching herself how to program again...)

I'd like to start talking to people about it, but I'm also thinking it may be premature to do so. To put it mildly, part of me very much thinks this might be some weird phase, and another part of me, well, would prefer I never realized this. But then there's a part that's sort of saying-yes, it all makes sense now...
I'd tell my old friends...wow, all two or three of the ones that are still talking to me.(How did I lose them all? where did they go? I was too busy being physically ill...)

I'm feeling horribly alone-because I am really alone a lot these days... and frightened about this, and wishing it would just go away and stop bothering me.

The thing is, of course, with Androgynes, gender dysphoria is less intense, but it never really goes away. Because you don't really do much...and most gender clinics expect you to transition to the OPPOSITE sex, not to some sort of middle-a middle that's not very satisfactory either...
I don't want to go back to being a freak. I find I like to be liked, I like it when people smile at me instead of calling security (!) to follow me through a store. I find I like at least the veneer of acceptance, I like not getting sneered at by people who don't even know me. I don't want random redneck assholes coming up again and saying "Are you a man or a woman? HARHAR."

I find I can't be myself and be accepted, only this time, it runs deeper than being a dyke in the 90's...I'm not just a dyke, I'm of a blended gender, third gender, whatever...something the dominant western society doesn't even acknowledge exist.

I mean, intersexed kids they surgically alter right after birth, without consent or even the knowledge of the child, which often proves to be a totally fucked-up thing to do to the child in question...but what if you're intersexed in the head?

I'm...just feeling like nobody's going to accept this out of me, much less understand it. And I hate it. And I'm obsessed with it.
Being a butch girl was okay, but this? this is just...weird. Really weird.
And it feels like one giant challenge too much on top of everything else that's kicking my ass-the money, get a better job, get wife some therapy, get ass to school, finish losing weight., take better care of my insane dog, fix my own car, grow a big vegetable garden, get my sinuses fixed, fix up the trailer house so Mom can sell it...

A reminisce:repost, sort of...and despair

The topic of suicidality came up on another site I go to.  There was an article linked about it.
Well, ever since I got chronic sinusitis in '02, my quality of life has gone all to hell. 
I need more money, but am far too sick to go get it.  I can't afford to live without mom's help, I can't save money, I have to live out here in the country, where the loneliness eats away at me.
My life has become this very painful and sharp-edged thing.  Sometimes there's moments of soaring happiness, but my overwhelming feelings are of frustration, fear, loneliness(soul-eating loneliness!), sorrow, anger, disappointment, and resignation. And tiredness, very often tiredness...unless I take caffeine pills, in which case it's replaced by a jangly nervous energy that isn't pleasant, but is better than the bone-deep tiredness and sorrow.  I may be hooked on caffeine pills and sudafed, at least a little.

My life hurts.  A lot.  Some days more than others.

I can barely remember the time I tried to blow my brains out a few years ago.

I ripped open the padlocked plastic box the pistol was in...only to find that my wife had put the trigger-lock on, without telling me, and that I didn't have the key, because she took that too.

I took a razor and cut "people suck" into the top of the box...probably cut myself up too, because I do that, it makes me feel better to cut myself up, and went to sleep.
A year or two later I couldn't remember having done all this until my wife reminded me that I had been the one to do it-for a while I thought she had cut the "people suck" into the top of the box, and I couldn't remember how the plastic hasp had come to be ripped apart, thought maybe I had trash-picked the box like that....then the incident came back to me, although in an oddly dim and blurry fashion.

So...

And it was impulsive, yes, didn't write a note, didn't have everything organized, was just going to get in the bathtub so the mess could be cleaned up in an easier fashion, stick the barrel of my gun in my mouth, and pull the trigger.  (Gotta aim for the brainstem, use hollowpoints.)

Was just feeling totally defeated and furious with myself for screwing something or another up yet again, or maybe just failing to do any better.

  Had I chosen to go to college instead of spending a decade being depressed, then bohemian, I would even now be making okay money, not wearing trash-picked clothes and repairing my own car.
Poverty does not allow for mistakes, you see, and I made a big one: I failed to go to college early and hard.  I should have done whatever it took.

(Learn your lesson, kids, or you too will spend nights ass over teakettle in dumpsters picking the rich folk's leavings.)

When I was on Effexor this spring I was starting to try to make plans and get my affairs in order...get things set up so my wife could get the car no problem...but I was too mentally disordered to do much of anything beyond go to work and school.
I was probably going to jump off one of two bridges. Either would have sufficed, although the one had a larger breakdown lane to pull off in, and was taller by at least 100 feet, so I probably would have used that one.

( It's also a prettier bridge.  If I do kill myself in the future, I will jump off the nicer bridge...better view on the way down.)

I also thought about taking a bunch of sleeping pills and swimming out to sea-hoping my carcass wouldn't turn up.

Right now, my meds are working...and I feel like living.  Right now.  That tends to be pretty tenuous, though.

And I know nobody else reads this damned thing.
Even if they did, I'd say it: there is a high probability I will look back on my life at the end, wherever that may be, and I will think "All that suffering...and it was such a mediocre, boring little life.  No great thing was accomplished, no great purpose served by all that agony, the agony just was, pointless, like a blind, screaming, idiot lunatic ramming their head into a concrete wall over and over."

 That, oddly enough, is the saddest part of it.  There is no point to it at all.

it's not just me

I think that at least 30% of the misery in my adult life can be attributed to the fact that I never have made a wage that keeps me comfortably well ahead of expenses-if it keeps me ahead of expenses AT ALL.
The other 30%, maybe more comes from lack of access to good, affordable health care.
And I'm at my midlife.  My personal store of hope that this will ever get better, or get better in time for me to build wealth while I can still get hired...

I think I may always be poor. Always be shut out of the glittering First World America I can see...hell, I can even work in it and for it, but I can't own a piece of it.
 To paraphrase Langston Hughes, I think my American dream is going to sag like a heavy load...and it will be deferred...forever.  I doubt I will live to see myself climb out of poverty these days.

repost: daddy issues

(This is honest. Which means it's got triggers in it. You've been warned.)

So...since I seem to be androgyne, at first I was all like "wheeee! so that's why I never felt right being a girl!"
And I felt all happy about it.

Now...details are not important about this, I guess, but I found out from an old friend of my Dad's that my Dad had indeed been raped as a child, and didn't know how to deal with it. Big surprise there, considering what he decided was okay to do to me...

(and now for the obligatory trip down memory lane...)
You see, I was having nightmares in part because of being orally raped at age four by a neighbor in the projects where we lived;also, in the same year, having another male neighbor there try to force me into his downstairs first-floor window at gunpoint and not being believed when I told my Mom. Gotta love the projects...
But what really gave me nightmares was when my uncle raped me in the bathroom of the house we had just moved into when I was six. I repressed it, yeah, so it wasn't in my conscious memory. But I was not okay mentally by that point. Damage was accumulating. Besides that, my dad would hit me-not to the point of bruising, but he was physically abusive.
So, when Mom went out and got a night job, I was afraid to sleep alone, because of the extreme nightmares. So I went to sleep with my Dad...and my Dad had sex with me. That became the tradeoff: I had sex with him, I was not forced to be alone with my nightmares. I dissociated the sex part; and a lot of other things as well-I have clear memories before and after, but those two years are almost a black hole-as in I can remember my kindergarten teacher, but I can't remember first, second, or third grade.
My maternal, widowed grandmother moved in when I was eight, and I think had suspicions of what was happening, because she generally wouldn't leave me alone with him. The sex stopped. He still slapped me around a lot though, punched on rare occasions.
(Okay, now back to the present.)

Well, confirmation my Dad had been abused triggered me-I freaked, and have just now calmed down.

I guess figuring out part of me is male, well, does that mean male like him? THAT'S a truly revolting thought.
I've thought of my male side as bright, noble and a little heroic in a scruffy everyman sort of way...honest, truthful, makes amends when he's wrong, not boastful, not arrogant, gentle and protective to those weaker than him, perhaps a little mischevious, but good-hearted...that's what I strive to embody, y'know...and I don't always succeed, but I think I certainly ought to try.
When I read novels, and I find a scruffy male rascal-hero, something in me has always responded very deeply to that...and I'm thinking now it's because I am looking at a funhouse mirror showing my ideal male self.

I am not ever, even if I figure out I am FtM, going to be like him. I will not stand for it!

My father has perhaps been a great negative role model for me-as in what NOT to do to be a good human being. Useful in that, despite his sorry self.
But feeling pity for him was very uncomfortable, because I survived recalling what he did to me, and the emotions involved, on a platform of hatred.
Apparently I still need to put that hatred and disgust onto him. I'm not ready to let go of it yet.

I'd like him to mean nothing to me anymore, one way or the other, and then I would know I was truly over this...although there's a matter of potential shaved off and years lost...and they will never come back. I will always be more physiologically vulnerable to stress because of the age the abuse started and the severity it built to(if you don't believe me, do a few searches on neurological effects of chronic abuse on children). I'd like to work on an ambulance crew, for instance, but I'd start dissociating when stuff was really bad.

Bottom line-I don't want to want or need anything from him. Right now he's still an object of hate, and I still need him to be that. He can be that, even absent(which he is, because if he shows up here, there's a serious chance I would kill him)or dead.
But I want to let go of that need. Forgive? not unless he works as hard at earning it as I have getting my sanity back.

repost: this election cycle

On a positive note about this election cycle...

Since my state's republican party wants to recriminalize homosexuality, and some of them would like to go ahead and round up openly gay people, I suspect...

And since I also suspect this election cycle will leave the crazies with control of the house, if not the Senate...

I'm wondering at what point I'll be able to legitimately claim UN human rights refugee status if I flee the country? How persecuted do I have to be? do I have to show evidence of actual persecution? or just prove a reasonable fear of persecution? Do I have to be rounded up myself and then successfully escape the camps, or document threats to me in specific, or just that there is a general threat to openly gay people?

Y'know, thinking positively...

repost: life in the gender funhouse

This is starting to be a long, strange trip. And unfun.
I'm feeling weird about not having pronouns,official bathrooms...about, well, being the T in LGBTIQ, the one *least* welcome at the party...
I almost came out to a friend, then backed off and lied about it...even though I'm sure he would have been fine with it-he's mostly straight, but wears more makeup than I do-goth makeup.

I am becoming more certain I'm right though(gulp).  I am androgyne, both male and female.

I don't know quite what to do about that...almost like I want to explode in a billion different directions at once when I think about the gender thing.

But at the same time, I like myself more. My self-confidence and decisiveness are growing. My male side, given acknolwedgement and welcome, is busy making myself right at home.
I desperately want what I consider to be an A/G haircut at the moment-I'm obsessing about it.  My muscles, given weights and protein supplements, are puffing up nicely.  My breasts are getting smaller as my weight drops into normal range.

Again with the changes...it feels like there isn't solid ground under my feet anymore.

repost:the trailer park grapevine

Yesterday, it occurred to me, since I go here and there on the net, and post things, I ought to repost here those forum replies which I find most eloquent, important, or whatever.

So, this is my first repost...but since I'm a compulsive editor, it's been modded:

...Interesting, how I can find out more things about my Dad from people I barely know, and therefore don't know whether to believe them or not.

My Dad may or may not have slept with a then 18-year old woman across the street...we do know he pulled the peeping-tom number on her when she was 16 and 17, and swimming in a backyard pool over there.
He confessed to her and a friend of his one night, when very drunk, that he had a son with a mistress when stationed in the Air force in Thailand, and had been sending money until my Mom almost caught him at it.
That little bit of info came out a few years ago...I've been meaning to see about tracking down and verifying that I do have a half-brother.
I can't help him financially right now, but maybe when things get better...and if he wants to emigrate I might be helpful...maybe.

Now today, I was out running the dog...and the slightly off old man down the street was outside...and he decided to talk to me.
He didn't realize whose daughter I was...and when he did...
I didn't realize my Dad had stayed with him.
Now remember-all this stuff isn't stuff I know to be true...but:
When I said that my Dad and I don't talk and don't get along, at all, and I don't know where he is and don't want to know, he told me some things...

Apparently, my Dad had been molested and raped as a child-the old man didn't know who. It messed him up in ways he was never able to deal with. And I am not the least bit surprised.

My Dad was also supposedly raped by a female bodybuilder while working as a cabbie this-not 100% sure I believe. I could see the vulnerability...he's never been very built, and him being...what he is (sex addict), she could have just asked him to screw her silly, and he probably would have agreed to try. Unless he said something that pissed her off about the way she looked. Which...in that case...and he does run off at the mouth... and if she was on steroids...

He's good at pissing people off.

And of couse after he moved to New Orleans and a trio of thugs almost killed him-robbery/murder, only they didn't quite succeed in killing him. He took 17 stab wounds, but was able to crawl for help. Was on life support for a month, but failed to die.

As far as it goes though...what was done to him DOES NOT excuse what he did to me.

But viewing that monster with...well...pity, is something that feels very uncomfortable. He damaged me. I'm not capable of being entirely the person I could have been had I not been so damaged. Potential has been permanently shaved off.
Admittedly, benefits have been added: I'm very tuned in to things, I'm sensitive to emotions, I have more compassion towards most things than I think I would have otherwise...but things I'd like to do I can't because I've been rendered way more physiologically vulnerable to stress. Besides that, I'm likely to have more immune system problems-child sex abuse survivors involved in the Putnam longitudinal study did. I suspect this will also cause me to die younger-because my body's always going to put out more cortisol and have stronger stress reactions than it would have otherwise had.

Anyway...
I survived him by learning to hate him. And since he did so much damage, I learned to hate him very well. Now, feeling anything but hate, loathing, disgust, and a desire to kill him...IS EMOTIONALLY DANGEROUS.

That all dates back to when I was 12, and he was taking me to school-a private school. I wanted to go to private school because I hoped I'd get bullied less there, but I was still getting bullied there, too. My depression-though I didn't know it then, would have been considered clinical.  And as always, my undiagnosed learning disability was making it outrageously miserable to do math homework.

I had made him late to work three times in a row because of the math homework and general reluctance to go to school, so he kicked me before we left the house, and kept slapping at me and screaming the whole way to work.
That particular incident pretty much changed our relationship forever. Because I used it.

I deliberately stopped loving or trusting him, because it hurt too much to do so. Whenever I started feeling warmth, or relaxing around him and talking freely, I would recall The Incident...and I would stop those feelings. I would visualize him slapping and screaming as he drove, me terrified and thinking about opening the door, jumping out onto the freeway at 60 miles an hour. I'd talk to him when I didn't have to, and I'd imagine him kicking me. I'd forget to be wary, and I'd visualize his face contorted in rage.

So I didn't kill myself over shame and disgust at what he did probably, at least in part, by hating him, and by fantasizing about killing him.
So feeling compassion for him??? it feels like handling an emotional nuclear bomb.

But today...that is indeed what I felt the barest whisper of. And it shook me up quite a bit.

The money situation has hit the fan again, that combined with the gender situation and this...and I'm struggling really hard just to maintain. 

I haven't done any cutting yet.  Maybe I ought to, because if it gets rid of this awfulness rattling around in  my head, it would be totally worth it.

I'd like to not need to cut anymore, but when I have these periods of intense unpleasantness going on, they are all that works sometimes to make me feel better.  I've  been on the verge of tears for two days now, my chest just aches, and everything else I have tried so far to comfort myself has either not worked or has actually made me worse.

I think I'm going to lose my wife.   I just do.  I believe that I just can't make her happy, and I can't make myself happy...well, period.
After the yesterday of Not Talking, it's like I feel disconnected from her in some crucial way that can't really be fixed now, like... that's it, it's time to detach, time to give up.

I just ache, but I don't feel like I can trust her to be there for  me, so I'm not going to ask anymore.

Nor do I think I have the right to ask.  I have let my bitchy self say it firmly one too many times.

okay, nobody's here...

I think it's safe to say I'm talking to myself here.


Nobody visits this blog.


I want to get as thin as I can.   I'm angry at my wife right now for not talking to me, because I don't quite understand what I did wrong, and she's refusing to talk to me, which means I don't get a chance to understand, much less apologize.


So fuck her then.  F*ck people and their concern, also.


She's not talking, I'm not eating.   I look at my body, and I'm supposedly now into what's considered "of normal weight." Give or take the occasional weight bobble.  My body is still ugly as f*ck.  Podgy and loathesome.


Yes, I lost over 100 pounds in the last 13 months, big f*cking whoop.  I'm still fat-it's not like it's particularly avoidable to see.  it hangs like sacks of nastiness on me.


I have been screwing up left and right-I know, I know.  I decided to try to fix the car on my own, then let my health break down through lack of maintenance and ended up foisting it on my wife and driving her truck for three weeks, leaving her no way to look for a job.


But she won't talk to me.  And if she doesn't care enough to talk to me, I am going to do what I want with my body.


What I want is thinness.  It's what I've always wanted, ever since I started blowing up and getting made fun of-I just want to be thin.
And the thinner I get, the closer I feel to looking...not male, not female, and most importantly, not grotesque.  Graceful. Slender, like a blade weapon.


No longer vulnerable and soft.  Hard and muscled is okay, yes, but the fat has to go.


Tomorrow, the car goes into the shop, and gets the water pump, and all the belts replaced.  It's going to break my bank account.


This car is an utter, hopeless nightmare to work on.  You have to jack up the engine to lift it clear of one of the motor mounts to get the timing belt off.  There are no curse words sufficient in the English language to properly condemn this level of engineering stupidity.

why I play my girl as ineffectual

Okay-my wife and I play Dungeons and Dragons...in fact, my wife was wahooed, somewhat unwillingly, into being the DM.


I started out playing a lawful good dwarf fighter, but them I got way too emotionally involved with my character, so I wrote  him out of the story (he got to go back home and get married to his sweetie).  I am now playing a chaotic neutral rogue.
I have been playing her very ineffectually though...and I wonder, is that just how I think of females? do I think of women as ineffectual?
I mean, I certainly hope not.
I'm glad that my wife doesn't read this blog, because, next game, my character's going to tear someone a new asshole.  No more missy nice rogue. I'm going to play her like the cold, hard, bitch I should have been playing her as all along, ruthless, courageous, cunning, wicked, with little impulse control and a taste for danger.
My wife doesn't want me to change characters again, you see, so I'm going to make her life as the DM  more interesting.

letter to my professor

This is _________. 
Don't know if you remember me.  I'm out of school at the moment (money+mental health problems were and are kicking my butt) but planning to enroll in distance learning at _____college this spring.  (Still working full-time, of course.)


It occurred to me today that you might be interested in a personal development that's been going on with me, since you're rather into gender and sexuality research.   I'm suspecting ( but trying to give it plenty of time to be certain) that I am not entirely female, psychologically.


That is to say, I'm androgyne. Bigendered, specifically-as opposed to neuter, I feel like I'm both, really, a little more female than male, but both.  I feel like it's important that I recognize and act on this somehow.


This appears to be something that draws less animosity than transsexuality-but it's also not studied, and people aren't really aware of it.  We don't have legal status... or pronouns, really, or visibility.  Nobody's hurled abuse at us on Jerry Springer.


And where do I take a leak in public?  I mean, I'll probably stick to my biogender for practicality, but I'm lying when I do...


Anyway, I wasn't so much writing to you for support as writing to you because I figured you'd be interested in asking me questions about androgyny...and I might not know all the answers to them, but I think having the conversation would be a learning experience for both of us.


I posted a link to an online version of the Bem personality inventory on an androgyny talk board, and someone observed that it's biased to say a personality trait *has* a gender attached.   And I remember that our textbooks said androgynous people were the most likely to succeed rather than rigidly "male" or "female" people...and I totally realized that the way that was put showed unconscious gender bias. And I did not question it.


It was a real facepalm moment for me.   You put on those third-gender x-ray specs, and suddenly you see things just a bit differently.


It's not "androgyny."  It's just that people with a greater range of potential responses to situations in their social toolbox do better than those with a limited range of responses.
Androgyny is a totally different critter, as I can attest.


Anyway, hope you and the family are doing well, and hope to hear back from you soon.

gender and names on the brain

I have recently come to the tentative conclusion that while my primary gender, my physical one-female, doesn't actually entirely cut it.  I think I'm bigendered, or androgyne.  Maybe.   I'm trying not to get all freaked, and to give the feelings time to resolve-as either temporary or permanent.

So until today, I've been all excited to realize I was androgyne, or as I like to put it, a/g.  Today, it occurred to me that I would eventually want a new first name if these feelings last...and this does not turn out to be a phase.

That's sort of scary.  I can pass off a more a/g way of dressing and cutting my hair as "Oh, I just feel like dressing practically."  "Oh, it's easier to put my hair back for work this way, and all those layers were a pain to keep up after."


I guess I can pick a nature name or color name, and have it not be explicitly be male or female.


Since this blog is going to remain anonymous, I'm not going to post my ideas here.