Jagged little pill

I have to take these supplements every day or else my joints hurt. Yes, I’m getting older, and yes, I’ve been doing blue collar work my whole life, but more than that, I spent at least a decade, probably more, simply not caring about my body.

I’d assume this is somewhat typical. When you’re young you think you’ll live forever. You can watch your wounds close up in front of you whilst you search the cabinet for a bandage. For me though, I wanted to be broken. I wanted to use myself up, to sacrifice my body and to leave a husk to blow away in the wind, or some other such poetic drivel. Before I came to the realization I was trans I hated myself. I saw no reason why I shouldn’t work myself to the bone, do risky things, and not drink and smoke myself into a stupor every night. A very common phrase of mine to toss out was “I’m just waiting to die.”

Now, to my employers, this made me an excellent worker. I’d do the hard things. I’d work late, lift too much, get paid too little. I didn’t care. In a way it was a cowardly way to approach suicide, though, after a while, it started to be clear to me that I was far more resilient than I gave myself credit for. I was going to suffer before my body wore out, and I was starting to worry that I might not be up for it. The answer then came to be that I would have to hasten myself off this mortal coil. Being a firearm enjoyer, the quickest answer seemed to be eating a nine millimeter sandwich, but that seemed to be letting myself off easy. I still wanted to suffer.

So i figured one day, at some point in the future, I’d drive myself out into the woods, toss a rope over a limb, and hang myself. Not a far drop, I wanted to suffocate. I wanted to watch the world fade away, grasping at the rope futilely as my instincts betrayed my desires, then all of the anger would make sense. The body I’d hated so much for so long would cling to a world that I hated so much, and me, the real me, that lived inside, would finally end, and with it, all of the suffering I had to endure.

I didn’t though (obviously.) I’ve always been a fighter, and more than my share of stubborn, so I had to try one more thing, and, lo and behold, I finally had my answer. Transition literally saved my life. Now, however, I have to deal with some very interesting consequences.

The longer I’ve been transitioning, the more I have trouble relating to that person that wanted to hang himself. Not only because that dim world I lived in has gone, but because that is not all who I am now, or perhaps ever was. When I think about my life before, it is so hard to think of it as mine. I know, logically, that all of those events happened to me, but the extreme disassociation I had for the first part of my life has left me in a state of arrested development, such that here, while going though a second puberty, I find that I truly have to learn who I am all over. Whoever I was before, and the experiences I had, has come to have very little bearing on who I am now. The things I liked to do, the way I dressed, the people I liked to be around, all of those are in flux.

Aside from my partner, I feel so supremely alone in this world. Not only is this a lonely time, but naturally, as we get older, we drift away from the things we liked to do in our younger years. I have no lived experience telling me where to move on to now though. It is frustrating, and anxiety inducing, but all so exciting. I’m trying new things, slowly making new friends, but where as a teenager it is so easy to be fluid, I’m a thirty-six year old woman. I have a job, responsibilities, and, yes, aches and pains that have pigeon-holed me.

Experiencing such a great change in the middle of my life is by far the biggest mental trip I have ever been on. Perhaps on a daily basis I have to catch my breath and reassert myself into the world, lest I be swept away into the waters of disassociation by the massive “what the fuck” of it all. I’m sure, as time goes on and I get farther into my transition I will cement this personality more, but for now, it is quite the experience.

For now though, despite everything going on, I just have to live my life. The world, the country, the species, all of it is literally burning down around me, the difference is now I don’t want to be swept away by it all. I’m all full of piss and vinegar, and that fighting spirit, the little part of him that held on so that I could raise like a putrid flower from his corpse, isn’t going to shy away from living while everyone else wants me dead.

In the end, he got want he wanted, but I like to think that as he slowly fades into oblivion, that the anger he expected has been replaced with a certain peace watching me step out into the light.