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.