In which she mused on everything, and settled upon nothing.

There are definite pros to having a life full of excitement; always having something to do, someone to see, some place to be. That's certainly how it looks from the outside, anyway.

I'm currently laying in bed, wide awake, laptop resting on my knees, with the lights out. I should by rights be sleeping; I've been awake for... at least 48 hours now without any sleep. Before that, I'd managed a couple of stretches of maybe 12 hours in total, spread over 3 days. The majority of that was down to popping a bunch of sleeping tablets; however, the OTC stuff and me don't always get along, especially when I can't research all the side-effects of the random chemical they make it from. You see, for me to actually see an effect from OTC sleeping drugs, I have to take 2-3 times the recommended dosage. If I don't, then without fail, I end up crashing hard, and waking up around 15-20 minutes later, feeling like someone just beat me around the head with a sledge-hammer until I lost consciousness. It's a horribly unpleasant experience.
This past week, I've been ill, and probably in part due to that, my tenuous grip on a sleeping pattern has devolved into full scale insomnia - if I'm lucky, I'll get an hour of uninterrupted sleep, then be wide awake again, but feeling oh so very beautiful on the inside.

The one interesting side effect to my insomnia, is I find writing incredibly easy. It's almost as if some sort of creativity-faucet is inversely proportional to the amount of rest I've been getting.

This kinda brings me back to my opening paragraph. Life looks, to an outsider, like it could be quite interesting. Lots of little nuances, interactions, experiences.
I've been thinking a fair bit over the past few hours about what I actually do with my days, and it's frighteningly withdrawn.

My average day generally goes like this:

Wake up at some point in the morning. I feel I should point out, when my insomnia isn't fucking with me like this - very brief sleep, if any at all -, it usually takes the form of a fight to get to sleep, and then, upon eventually passing out, it being completely impossible to wake me.
I suppose I could claim, that it is my body's way of making up for all the time that it's awake, and sure, this would fly at certain times; like now for instance. The rest of the time I really don't have an excuse for why my body is so out of whack.

So yes, I wake up - usually between 9 and 10am.
Spend 10 minutes dragging myself out of bed - I'm not at all a waking person. It matters not if it's morning or afternoon, evening or night. If I'm just waking up, I will fight to stay under the covers where it's safe and warm.
Stumble into the bathroom, wash, and stare for a while at the mess that has bestowed itself upon my head. Attempt to run my fingers through it and wince at the knots.
Get dressed, wet my hair, put product in, blow dry and style it. I obsess over my hair.
Take my meds, check the train time-table, depending on what time of day it happens to be, and whether I'm intending to drag myself into work.
Get in the car and drive to the station.
Grab a coffee if there's time from the shop on the station platform
Sit on the train for 30 minutes, then the tube.
Run up the escalators and down the stairs for cardio, and also because I hate it when people stand on the left of the escalators. Principle demands I excuse them.
Get into the office around 1 hour 45 after waking up.
Leave the office around 6pm and take the reverse journey home.
Get to my car, get in, make this whole big thing in my head about there being things to do aside from driving straight home.
It's more of a momentary delusion.

"There's someplace you're supposed to be going tonight."
'Yeah? Where?'
"Oh. Perhaps not then."

Arrive back at my house around 7pm.
Spend an hour "checking e-mail".

This is the horribly pathetic, socially withdrawn aspect of my day. Between leaving the office, and arriving home, there's usually a couple of pieces of e-mail that arrive.
Seeing the little red dot with an unreadable white number imprinted upon it (unreadable because I have dock magnification disabled, and my dock quite small; not because I require glasses) makes my heart jump at the possibility that there might be a message, for ME, from someone ELSE. Maybe, hope of hopes, someone messaged me on that stupid dating website, which I should definitely purge my profile from.
Sometimes, it is just that. E-mails from people who care about me. Usually in that case, it's e-mails from people who care about me but need my help with something. The rest of the time, it's the same "Spam" that arrives on the same day and the same time each week.
New shoes, hair styles, books, etc etc etc. Online stores demanding my attention. A distraction for a few seconds, but nothing in comparison to interaction with someone.
Check twitter to see if anyone replied to any of the inane things I said today. Nope. Look at the two new people who followed me. Both spam bots, block and mark as spam.
Wonder if there's anyone online who'd want to talk to me. Browse my friend-list for 5 or 10 minutes, mentally contemplating what I could say to each person, beyond the obvious

Me: "hi"
Them: "hi"
Me: "how are you?"
Them: "fine thanks, you?"
Me: "yeah, I'm ok =]"
*silence as the conversation ends*

Generally figure that I don't particularly have anything interesting to say to anyone, and watch a downloaded TV show for a while.

At this point, I'll either convince myself that I should probably eat, and that eating should involve going to the supermarket (I *hate* supermarkets - too many people), or, that I'm not hungry, toast will do, and then I'll go to bed, and repeat the cycle.

Weekends are mostly the same, except they involve me finding arbitrary tasks, things to spend money on, that generally involve my transporting myself over some distance; usually an hour or two each way, to waste the time during which I'd be at work, if it was a weekday.


All of that saddens me to no end.

Fuck self pity, I *know* I have a problem, we're waaaaaaay the hell beyond admitting that something needs to change. I just seem complexly incapable of enacting this change.
The past few times I've tried - going out to do social things with people, for instance - it has been a complete disaster. I even joined a gym, and went. Being trans, let alone trans with OCD, anxiety, zero self-esteem and zero confidence; the whole going aspect was a Huge Thing™. That lasted oh, two weeks. I'll go back at some point; I just don't feel at all comfortable there, mainly due to the whole gym-gender-role-reinforcement thing.

I've found, that if I know a person very well, then I can quite happily spend time in their company, doing stuff. I'll have a really good time too.
I even found out, that I could extend this to one person I know really well, and one person I've never met before. It was quite awkward for the first 15 minutes or so, but, we all clicked, and became friends. I think it helped that these two instances were with girls (except the boyfriend of one of the girls, who is an exception to this incredibly convoluted rule).
The few times I've attempted this social interaction thing at work - when colleagues have invited me to go for a drink, or go bowling -; I've felt like a complete outsider, even though I work with these people all day long.
Groups bigger than 3-4, in an environment where there are other people, and where I can't hide in a corner, or hide behind my friends and use them as a human shield, leave me having panic attacks.
I've never been particularly social; I was never a complete fuckin' recluse though. Not until a year or two ago, and I can't really put my finger on any one thing that changed. Perhaps it had just been some repressed thing that surfaced at an expedient moment, to bring forth this shy, withdrawn personality.

One suspicion that I've been having, is that it's something to do with my male persona - I used to have a finely crafted veil of lies to tell to anyone who asked, to make them believe I was manly, and all that other bullshit. I was *good* at lying; really really good. Then one day, I believe I made the conscious decision to stop pretending to be something that I derided and disliked so much. After that, I found myself accidentally alienating myself from conversations, because where before I'd have laughed at the chauvinistic arguments and jokes going around a pub table between my friends, while the women there visibly swallowed their anger and pride, I started calling people out on their bullshit, and arguing things from the perspective of me, instead of my lie. Don't get me wrong, it's rather hilarious, the look on a true chauvinist's face, when you change from feigning support for him, to ripping him apart like you honestly couldn't care whether he died that very second. However, the overall effect of this, seems to have been a sort of suicide of that side of me. All that's left is a gay, feministic girl, trapped inside an incredibly worthless body.
I'm sure that any sensible person would have maintained their mask, until a time that they could transition from it, to their new life.
I never claimed to be sensible. I'm strong-willed.
There are some interesting things to note though; after alienating everyone and tearing that life-long mask asunder, I switched jobs, and went into the new one as me, in everything but physical form. I refused to bend my beliefs to the prevailing wind. As such, none of the guys at work particularly want to know me - they talk to me, since, they need to to be able to get things done.
The polar opposite is true for the women at work. My office tends to be the place where confabs take place. It's an interesting dynamic, from the perspective that besides my body-language and the way that I talk and treat them, I've given no indication that I'm female. That said, they probably think I'm just a really camp man or something.

I should probably give this sleep thing another go -- I've been writing for an hour now.

A New Beginning

I've tried to do this a bunch of times. Never really got very far, beyond setting up a blog, and then feeling contemplative for a while, before eventually giving up.

I suffer from pretty bad insomnia; it waxes and wanes, and right now, it's waxing pretty good, so I have a chance to lay down with my laptop and think about writing things that will help me figure out my own head. After all, that's my goal with this.
Equally, I expect these entries to begin and end abruptly, I'm not attempting to directly tell a story to anyone, and even though it is directed towards the third person; that's mostly for ease of self-analysis and just plain how I write. Mostly, I believe the entries will be free-typed, as a stream of consciousness, and I don't intend to go back and prettify them after they're written.

I was inspired while reading a friend's blog, where she mentioned self-analysis, and archived everything that had come before so she could start over.

I guess this is my new start, my chance to get it all out there and analyze; to try to figure out what needs to change, and how I can change it.

I don't want this to turn into one of those self-piteous blogs. I already have one of those, and I badly need to fix things, instead of dwelling on them. That said, no doubt, one has to dwell before one can fix, and so, I won't apologize if I do dredge the very depths of my self-hatred and self-pity, in search of some specific answer. I'm not asking you to read this, after all.

There was a relatively famous person once, who said something. For one reason or other, I'd never really consciously seen/heard it. That was, until Mom & Dad decided to go off on a big adventure, and home-made a load of notification cards telling everyone of their plans. I received one like everyone else, and on the back, it said:

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. -- Mark Twain

In her case, it's a blatant reference to the fact that they plan to sail around the world; on reading those few words, it struck a chord, and I realized that I'd been in denial for far too long.

Denial is the wrong word. It was more like repression, entirely due to fear. I've known since as far back as I remember that my body is the wrong gender; what was holding me back, was some sort of societal instilled reaction to being different. Even that doesn't exactly sum it up correctly.

I came out to my Mom when I was 13. She asked me "So, do you want to change sex then?", and for some reason, I blurted out "No.", then immediately regretted it for the next 11 years. I think that I was afraid to let her down. I'm still afraid of letting her down somehow, but, only about the serious, life-ruining things like getting thrown in jail; which is incredibly unlikely to happen.
I'm a fucking nun. Except for the drugs. And the alcohol.

Those 11 years were some of the most fucked up years of my life. I admit, some very fucked up things took place before I was 13, and probably set me up for all of the mental issues I have, exacerbated by the disparity between (and I hate to put it like this) brain and body. I say I hate to put it like that, because, well, I feel that there's more to someone than just a bunch of electricity in a computer. If that's all we are, then we're just programs. I'm an athiest to a degree or other (and a pretty big feminist), however, I can't help but think that the word "soul" sums it up so much better. The brain is a part of the body, after all.
To put it in other terms, the body is very much an avatar for a personality; in the same way that the internet gives people avatars to attach to their personality, the body is merely a predefined one that we get issued. Being unable to choose our avatar, and placing that in the context of societal demands and expectations aimed directly at our avatar for being too fat, spotty, ginger-haired, asian, black, sexually deviant, etc., puts an undue strain on our soul and changes its personality.
Everyone displays varying degrees of mental illness, the broken, bruised and distorted aspects of our personalities showing through; some more than others of course.

It took me 24 years to become blasé about coming out to people. (Admittedly, the one group of people who I am uncool about knowing right now, is work. It's a choice thing: right now, I'm not prepared (mentally or otherwise) to go down that path of life-fucking.) It's matter of fact now; I'm past caring what their reaction is going to be, if my getting something I need from them hinges on them knowing, the conversation usually goes along the lines of:

"XYZ? Why do you need that?"
'Oh, I'm transgendered; so, can you do that for me?'

Without skipping a beat. Hell, I don't even go red anymore. It's part of who I am to the degree that if you're not cool with it, then I'll find someone else who is, because while everything else about me might change, how I might never have another suicidal thought again, might never self injure again, might never abuse pharmaceuticals again, I will always be this, and I need help to deal with this.

I sounded strong then, surprisingly. Why a surprise? Well... to talk to me, you'd quickly figure out that I hate being different. Besides all of the other stuff, the drugs and fucking myself up, the only thing that I truly hate about myself (everything else I hate about myself, except for some of the very early childhood fuckery, can be traced back directly to this), is being transgendered. That's not to say I'd rather be back how I was before I recognized it - a relatively unassuming male -; because that's so far from the truth you wouldn't believe.
No, if I could actually choose, then I'd choose female, 100%. Not semi-half-way-almost. Give me fucking bleeding from my cunt every month and the pain that goes with it, give me being trodden on by patriarchal society, give me pregnancy, give me a chance to actually be me, give me womanhood. Not a half-way approximation. In many ways (and I've heard a few other people, both transmen and transwomen say similar), I feel that if it turned out I had XX chromosomes, but physically male, I think I could probably accept it and cope better.

Genetic validation. Totally fucked up.