The lights went out

So, came out to myself, my wife, my therapist as trans. Started the start. Then my soul just flickered out. The feelings of gender perception all went away, and with them most of my sense of self. Bit by bit, it’s been feeling like parts of my spirit are breaking off. I no longer feel at all like I’m trans. Hell, don’t feel like a person, my gender is as important as that of a rock. Not depressed so much as numb. Panic attacks have started on a daily/every other day basis. Got a prescription for fast acting zanax. I am not following through on my desire to take it all the time, just saving it for times when professional demands make being depressed impossible. Otherwise I’m just watching the colors fade. I don’t think I ever was trans. I think I just spent so many years bearing myself up for any amount of feminine expression that I mistook the opened flood gates of repression to be a bigger reveal than it was. I’ve just spent 4 decades telling myself how horrible I am, and whether I was right doesn’t matter. I’ve made myself right.

 

It’s just how I’ve always been. I thought that it was a product of repression of gender identity. It’s not. I’m just another white cis het American male. I don’t have a community, and I feel like an intrusion in this one, which is why I’m not posting lately. I’m just another asshole straight white guy who needs to be “special”. I am special though. I have crippling treatment resistant depression, and always will. Most don’t.

 

Thanks for being nice to me everyone. When I say “I’ve made myself right,” I mean that I’ve spent so much time hating myself that there isn’t a self without hate. For a moment, when I was operating under the “I’m trans and am about to transition” assumption, I felt what I imagine being “born again” felt like. New me! Fresh start! Sins washed clean! I’m considering that it could have been any transformation that would have given me that feeling of freedom. I don’t think there’s anything or anyone in particular that I want to be. Just not this. Simply put, I have a thing written by with me that makes me miserable and unpleasant to be around. It comes and goes but never leaves entirely. It is incredibly painful physically and emotionally (I feel like I ate glass at the moment. To my knowledge I have not). Anyway, I think that my story is that I’m just another straight white male born in the century when some of us started to grow a conscience and realize “Wow… God’s gotta be PISSED at us for what we did to his children.” I’m convinced that my own raging at my own existence and wanting to become something else entirely is not necessarily while male guilt as it is the will to continue the species telling me to fucking cool it with, you know, being born of the coupling I was born of. I do feel intrusive posting here. The belonging I am offered has everything to do with YOUR kindness, not me. I believe strongly that LGBTQIA+ people deserve and have

By saying I’ve always been this way, I mean I do not possess any memory of a time before depression. It’s a dominant presence in all my earliest memories. The first one is getting caught by my mother in the bathroom, up on a stool so I could see the mirror, crying, and repeating “I hate you I hate you I hate you”. I was not yet in kindergarten. Her response was to remind me and make fun of me for it for years, mostly when her own mental health made life for our family difficult. Kind of her way of saying “Who are you to talk, YOU’RE the one with the problem.” Had a lot of problems with her. I was supposed to be one of those people that works but doesn’t have to. My grandparents became wealthy developing better ways for the American military to kill people. When I see images from Vietnam, naked burned children running in terror, I see my legacy. I feel the weight of personal responsibility. I thank in advance those who will tell me I am not to blame. I know, and I appreciate your kindness. It’s more than that. It’s like a curse. I don’t believe in the supernatural, like, at all. But the weight of responsibility is as real as it gets. The guilt is my only inheritance, the financial bequeathment mysteriously vanished somewhere between my grandmother’s death and my mom’s year of lavish globe trotting. I’ll never know exactly how that worked out, she had a stroke recently, so any thing unresolved is staying that way. I’m the only family who lives close. She is in assisted living (an arrangement I had to take on myself, along with the judgement by those who see me as “putting my mom in a home”). She is solely dependent on me for emotional support, and the job of taking care of her is wearing me down to a nub. I am trying to do my student teaching to become a high school teacher, which is not a job that can be done during an ongoing unaddressed mental health crisis.

What I need is a time out. I need a chance to work on myself. To do things for myself, to just be WITH myself, try to get to know who I am, because I have no fucking idea anymore. I’m thinking in all of those euphemisms for suicide that people use. “I want to go away”, “I don’t want to be around anymore”, etc. The suicide door is closed, locked, welded shut, and encased in 6 feet of concrete. It ain’t happening. Wanting to die while knowing without question that I won’t and just have to wait for it to happen on its own is actually worse than knowing the escape hatch exists.

 

An unfinished thought in my last post: I believe strongly that LGBTQIA+ people have a basic human right to safe spaces free from straight white cis male dominance. We dominate all other spaces and have safety everywhere. And yet for many of us, we can’t just let other people have things. I believe I was born with a spirit that matches my lineage: aggressive, cruel, dominating, petulant, and desperately in need of constant validation. You know why so many white guys love Donald Trump? They see themselves in him. That makes them feel good. I see myself in him too, except I loathe myself for it. They say that dogs bred for aggression can be raised to be gentle. This is true, but it takes work to overcome
traits that have been bred for many many generations. I am a dog that has been bred to dominate and hurt. I have been raging against this nature my whole life, turning my naturally given propensity for dominance and cruelty inward on myself. In a biological system, life finds a way to cull organisms that threaten equilibrium. I’m beginning to suspect that the epidemic of self destruction among white men, especially in America, is a product of nature restoring equilibrium. We are an invasive species.

 

I really do appreciate all the kindness. I’m going to try to express this as best I can. I can recognize the kindness, and appreciate it. It really isn’t lost on me, so thank you. It’s the content that doesn’t connect. When I try to analyze and assimilate any argument against my being fundamentally loathsome, my brain seizes up. I get the 1000 yard state, and I shut down. I appreciate the kindness, and I’m sorry that I’m not able to realize it’s intended effect

 

My apologies, I do not mean to offend. I am not in a good place and am doing a very poor job of regulating myself. That is no excuse. I am sorry.