Saturday, June 29, 2019 - Part Two

[Published retroactively on 2021-09-03, with only very minor edits.]

The last entry was from like 1AM and then I went to bed and then I did today and now it’s close to 11PM. So mleh.

 

I’m going to try and stay simple here because I don’t want to get stuck trying to be fancy with words. A bit ago I was poking around reading about thought habits and wandered into an article on CPTSD. It talked about some of the awful things that can appear in survivors and victims. A lot of it was sadly familiar (which isn’t terribly surprising) – problems with emotional processing, relationships, self-image, etc. I’ve known for a while now that this model fits me very, very well.

But I re-read some of the symptoms with recent events in mind, and it was unsettling. It just kind of added up to making me feel really uncertain. I had the sudden question that maybe I’ve been thinking that I am trans but really it’s just the confluence of a bunch of fucked up trauma stuff.

I think that “usually” it would have been really easy to dismiss that out of hand and not even really notice the thought. But given the bumps I’ve had lately with doubting my identity and feeling like it’s hard to stay visible even to myself… it was scary for a moment.

I did talk myself out of it pretty quickly. In fact I very nearly just moved on without writing anything at all. But I want to poke at this a bit, because maybe the process will be helpful to reflect on later. And, if I’m really honest, I kind of hope that this can help create something that others can benefit from too.

One of the big points I found helpful was remembering that there are definitely plenty of trans people with CPTSD. It’s totally a legit thing to have both experiences in one person. So the “argument” becomes more focused; if I am “not trans because it’s just trauma” then what exactly distinguishes that from the (acknowledged) case where maybe I’m both?

Obviously the simplest refutation requires demonstrating that “me being trans” is a real thing, independently of “me being a trauma survivor.” This gets murky really fast. I can’t rely on chronology, for example; my early recollections of trans-indicative experiences are still very much in the same time period as the ongoing trauma itself, so it’s difficult to say “ha, I was trans before I was fucked up by the other stuff.”

So there’s more subtlety needed than simply “here, trans and trauma are totally separate buckets.” Instead of reasoning that I am both trans and traumatized by pointing out that the two exist independently, there is promise in doubling down on the idea of them coexisting. Specifically: trauma is assumed to be the more “stable” element (I’m not scared of being wrong that I have CPTSD…) so how, exactly, would things look if I had CPTSD but the “trans identity” was a retroactive idea that I had constructed recently to “explain” trauma effects?

I keyed most of this in my head on one central observation. I learned about CPTSD a while ago, and first really began to explore the framework as a way to help myself heal right around a year ago, almost exactly. For months I tried to use things like affective self-therapy (“inner child” type approaches) and found them disheartening and frustrating. I seemed to always resist the attempts and even recoil or lash out very negatively in response to them. I actually had pretty much given up on self-talk until very recently… when I discovered, basically by accident, that my intense negative responses to self-talk were not based on the actual content or ideas involved. I wasn’t rejecting the concept of communicating with myself; I was disgusted and defensive about it because I had always been trying to talk to a boy. I started over, looking to make contact with a girl instead, and almost literally overnight everything I felt about affective therapy changed completely. Since then I have had incredible and increasing success with interacting with facets of myself, provided I am respectful and (often most importantly) I gender them correctly.

These pages open, in fact, with a very vivid example of this. I learned, in short order, not only to operate from the “inner child” paradigm, but also to see parts of me that are in the present. I talk and joke and reassure Little Amelia almost constantly now; and I am always tickled when she quips back at her Big Sister Amelia in her distinct, adorable, elementary school girl voice. I spent time with my contemporary facets – boy mode, Sarah the enigmatic enby genius, and of course Amelia as I have settled into now. (I had a fascinating trip into the ideas of plurality/multiplicity and, although I now feel quite stable and singular, I have a lot of unanswered questions I would love to explore someday, when the spoon reserves are a bit less depleted.)

Anyways, my key reasoning was pretty simple. CPTSD is a set of responses that develop in reaction to prolonged trauma; affective therapy is aimed at engaging the portion of the self that most intensely remains trapped in that horrific experience. I started attempting inner-child work long before I had any conscious notion that I might be trans. And it didn’t work, because I was trying to operate with the notion that I was a cis male. It began to work once I involved the new understanding that I’m a girl. The inner perception I had of myself, in CPTSD’s framework, was formed and locked in long ago – and already a girl, long before I had any thoughts at all that maybe I’m trans.

(Pedantically, lest the objection be attempted that maybe I just ret-conned my past to be a girl out of wishful thinking or something, at that time I was still very much hesitant to even think about female identity; consciously I was still identifying as male and maybe enby in a fluid configuration. Discovering that my past was a girl was a surprise to me – far from any kind of overt revisionist bullshit.)

So really… far from CPTSD being the source of some kind of delusional belief that I am a trans girl, it’s actually a pretty compelling (not to mention validating) argument that I am definitely trans, and have been for a long time indeed.

Saturday, June 29, 2019

[Published retroactively on 2021-09-03, unedited.]

Dance like no one is watching… until the day when you are ready to dance like everyone is watching.

 

I’m quibbling with myself over the date on this entry, because it’s 0115 and I haven’t really slept so maybe it’s more of a Friday entry, and Friday had some good stuff to talk about, but… bleh. Whatever.

 

Earlier tonight I gathered the courage to email HR. Super preliminary; I just privately contacted someone I trust from the department and asked to talk in person next week. But it’s a huge step and I am trying to permit myself some pride and comfort in having done it.

Things continue to inch forward on the transition path. I am maintaining my resolve to see it through, and… I’m happy about that. I’m proud of that. I find a ton of reassurance and confidence in that. Somehow, though, it is still hard to own.

Dysphoria has been a real battle this week. I’ve said that I’m not unsure of who I am anymore, and that what I am feeling is a pained reaction to the discrepancy between my certainty in myself, and the world at large. And that is true, but incomplete. There are times when the pain is overwhelming enough that it really does become hard to see me anymore.

I haven’t disappeared, and that gives me hope and encouragement to a depth that I’m not sure I can really describe. It’s true that I am learning so very, very much about how to love myself. But something I said a while ago in these pages still rings true – I don’t want to have to do this alone. I know that I can, and I swear in the most sacred and binding ways I can reach that I fucking will – if that is what I must do. I just hope I don’t have to.

 

My memory is foggy, mainly because I think I was in the middle of trying to fall asleep at the time, but frankly the circumstances are irrelevant. Earlier tonight I found more name.

I am eternally worried about absolutely everything and therefore obviously not sure yet; but the same warmth and belonging is there, and the same chills when I think of hearing it from someone else. It’s so… pretty, and poetically suited to me, and just… right.

Hi! I’m Amelia Joy.

 

Saturday, June 22, 2019

[Published retroactively on 2021-09-03, unedited.]

Something I’ve been enjoying a lot in the past couple of months is the feeling of freedom in how I move. It’s incredible to me… not just that certain physical motions are intensely gendered, but how utterly invisible that is to most people. I mean – they can probably spot something “wrong” but that’s probably the extent. I don’t think it’s typical for people to be low-key conscious of every muscle contraction in their body because they feel compelled to make sure it’s gendered “correctly.”

I like moving around, when I can, in a fashion that feels more natural to me. Maybe it’s feminine? Hard to tell at this point. It’s definitely not straight-guy.

The dancing is definitely the distilled, refined, pure form of this. There is something amazing about just dancing like a girl.

I thought about this a bit ago, and realized that I have wanted to move, freely, for a very long time. I remember a moment in I think 5^th grade or so. For a while I would spend time alone in one room in the house, carefully isolated away from everyone else, and just dance. I think there was probably music involved but I honestly can’t be sure.

I remember feeling so right – moving, unfettered, just expressing myself by flowing around the room. It was like a direct tap into a spring of some kind of primal, beautiful joy.

I am much less certain about why that ended. Maybe someone saw and said something, maybe not; maybe I just thought too much and got myself scared. I think I remember a rush of the shame and fear. Whatever happened, I left the experience with a very loud and clear lesson, which is that proper boys do not do “that” and I better not do it ever again if I knew what was good for me.

It still churns in my soul… that I can’t remember much of anything, that the pervasive abuse even happened in the first place that led to all that memory loss, that it’s taken so long to re-emerge, that I still have incredibly conflicted feelings about the people who hurt and abused me in the first place. It hurts to know that an ecstatic, happy little girl once got told she wasn’t allowed to dance, and she had to carry that lashing in her heart for so many years.

But now… now it is 2019. It may have taken a while for her to heal, to find the smuggled memories from so long ago and lovingly dust them off again, but they’re intact.

I still love dancing like a girl.

And for the first time in my life, I really understand why.

Friday, June 21, 2019

[Published retroactively on 2021-09-03, with only trivial edits for privacy.]

Slowly putting things into place. Skipped work today. Going to take the weekend to square away as much as I can. Setting up a definite plan of action for starting HRT. Researching name and gender marker change laws; at the moment it’s looking like I’m going to want a lawyer. Working out who I need to talk to and in what order so I can come out completely at work. Planting the first seeds for my eventual exit from [the industry I work in], into whatever lies beyond.

I didn’t expect to be 33 years old and having to learn how to get dressed all over again.

I observed today that I don’t really feel any kind of response to the idea of HRT being, essentially, a medical ritual I have to do every day for the rest of my life (effectively). I don’t even think of that as a meaningful thing, because I made peace with taking pills every day, like a fucking decade-plus ago.

I had a brief moment of excitement earlier, thinking about vocal training. I grew up speaking a tonal language – and, if I may permit myself a rare moment of utterly self-absorbed gloating, I frequently impressed native speakers. I should have phenomenal control over my voice frequency, right? Oh, yeah, dumbass, you haven’t spoken that language at all since before you finished puberty. What a weird and oddly exciting little scene in my head… how totally unusual is all this?

I’ve unquestionably crossed some kind of threshold. My dysphoric thoughts and general discomfort from gendered things have changed in texture; I don’t wonder who I am or what I should be doing anymore. There’s a clarity and intensity of purpose now. When I feel bad, it’s specifically because something “tangible” doesn’t properly reflect that I’m a girl.

But it isn’t totally a foregone conclusion. I can still lapse back into the paralyzed uncertainty, or even the decades of socialized habits that are coded male. I still have to fight, internally, to keep sight of me. I know the truth, and I’m starting to really invest heavily in manifesting that truth, but it isn’t… automatic I suppose?

It’s the difference between “knowing” in the sense of “information that I can call to mind and easily regard as true” and “knowing” in the sense that people get gravity. Push someone over a small ledge and they will react very specifically – not because they “know” that there is some sort of downward-trending blah blah whatever the fuck. You shove someone off a curb and they will react to catch themselves. Automatically. Reflexively. They’re not suspended there in midair for a moment thinking about Newton and whether or not those inches of height differential will be meaningful. They fucking know gravity.

Anyways, I’m still learning to know that I am Amelia.

For now, at least, I have to be careful. If I let off the gas too much I will slow down, and this week has proven that I can slow down too much. Fortunately, no real serious consequences, just a lot of inner turmoil and soul-searching and a few hours of PTO from work.

And I’m getting a lot better, at… most of life, really. It’s easier to find motivation to do things. Easier to gently untangle from the snarls of over-analysis and injured thought that have come to overrun my mind over the years. Easier to maintain that momentum and stay excited by the ongoing revelation of who I am – not just to me, but to everyone.

Easier to be kind to myself when things don’t quite line up the way I want.

Easier to remember that I just want to care about people, even me, and start dismantling the accumulated habits of my life before. Easier to resist the judgment and psychoanalyzing I would have subjected myself to over those habits, and just… move on. I want to grow the kind, considerate, and helpful girl. I don’t need to dissect the other stuff. I just need to love her and take care of her.

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

I don’t want to be a programmer anymore. I want to be a trans rights activist.

[Editorial note: I published this retroactively, on Friday, September 3rd, 2021. It is a thought that has stuck in my mind and my heart ever since the first time the words occurred to me, two years prior. I've since found a way to do both at the same time, and I am deeply grateful for the opportunity.]

Sunday, June 16, 2019

[Published retroactively 2021-09-03, unedited.]

What an amazing fucking day.

Got a ton of stuff done that had been just languishing – mostly domestic chore type garbage, but important to finish nonetheless.

Beautiful sunset in the park again.

Soaked in a scented bath for a while and just relaxed. Listening to Marco Torrance and savoring a raspberry flavored Coke.

Still learning the finer points of navigating daily life in a skirt, and I realized a bit ago that I’d inadvertently chopped the closing button off the back of one of the new tops I bought, but for all the silly little mistakes and stumbles, I’m just… laughing about it. Slowly learning how to be a girl. Totally happy to weather the bumps along the way.

I’m finding more and more peace with myself lately. It’s all still so infinitely hard to explain or describe, but… it’s ok. I believe in myself and trust myself and I know this is all going to an amazing place.

I’m increasingly driven to resist drowning in the negative spirals I lived in for so long. I’m building a pretty good set of tools for that, too.

It’s 11PM and brain is a very sleepy girl, who keeps quietly reminding me that we have work in the morning. So the words may get a bit less overwrought and ridiculous for a bit. But I still have a thing I want to say.

The negativity thing is important. Today is Father’s Day. I don’t really know why, but for the first time in as long as I can remember, I don’t want to dig into all the buried pain and horrible past that goes along with this day for me. I don’t want to hurt over it, and I don’t want to live in it anymore.

I want to be happy, today. And every day. I want to walk around in a wooded marshland park and watch the sun set and cry because it’s so pretty. I want to listen to old nostalgic music and just enjoy the shivers it sends up my spine at all the beautiful parts. I want to drink a silly sugar drink that reminds me in some incredibly tenuous way of a half-memory I have, of a little girl sneaking out into the yard to steal raspberries off the bushes.

There are many things I need to resolve in my soul, still. Plenty of pain and darkness and deep wounds to mend. And there will be time for that healing.

Right now, as Calling Lluvia Del Verano queues up on the speakers, it’s time to just be a happy girl.

I love you, Amelia.

Friday, June 14, 2019

[Published retroactively 2021-09-03, unedited.]

I don’t have anything deep or fancy to say tonight.

Earlier I watched the sun start to set over a marsh, in a nearby park. It was pretty… and it was powerfully unusual for me to notice, and appreciate it. I could see flowers and moss and vines and trees and hints of animals that were staying out of sight of the human visitors. I could feel the warmth of the retreating sun balanced by the gentle breezes. I liked it, and I felt like I was allowed to like it, which was a strange sort of comment on my experiences with gender normativity.

And there were sad things too. My dog is gone now, and he would have loved to come to the park tonight. Sent off another coworker to a new job today – the latest in a heart-rendingly interminable line of goodbyes over the course of my life, and another reminder that no matter how many times I do that, I still am terrible at letting people go.

It was happy, just on the surface alone, to be there for that sunset. It was happy on a different level to even be able to feel at all. It was happy in a new way again to be there as me. And it was sad and lonely and called back echoes of so much tragedy and suffering from my past.

I thought I had something important, there. Some idea about blending positive and negative. Undoing the polarized concept I seem to have about how emotions work. Learning to live the actual essence of life instead of the extreme distorted outliers of bipolar episodes or nothing at all.

I think I have the idea, but I don’t have words. I am tired now. It’s been a brutal week for my mind and I honestly just want to let her rest.

I’ve survived through so much. It’s still hard to let myself think about my life in those terms. Could have been so much worse. Sometimes it takes a moment like tonight to nudge that back towards perspective. I shuffled around the park paths in tears, overwhelmed at turns by my unexpected ability to see and enjoy the simple beauty of the woods and fields on a summer evening; and the sadness from so many directions that came to join; and then the stunning realization that I am genuinely in awe that I am alive to feel any of this.

Why would I be in awe of this, if there was nothing in my past to have hurt me?

 

 

 

Something I wish I had understood sooner in life is that there are no stage directions.

I mean, there were people saying stuff like that I guess, and maybe I’m just the slow one for not getting it. Nobody will give you permission. Nobody will tell you when it’s “time.” Nobody will spell out the best possible thing to do for every single scenario.

Nobody can tell you that you belong with them, if they don’t even know who you are.

I think all the motivational junk you get thrown as a teenager and “young adult” (vomit) pretty much goes the same direction with this though. Nobody’s going to give you A Sign, so go have initiative, be bold, be daring, do something whimsical, whatever.

And there is value in reminding ourselves to be brave and take responsibility. There is merit in proactively shaping our lives. I just feel like we are missing a really important perspective on the whole thing, and it makes me sad.

Yes – go make courageous decisions! Yes – go defy expectations and push the boundaries! Yes – go try and be willing to fail gloriously, rather than never live at all!

And also:

Remember that not everyone has courage. Maybe you didn’t for a while. Maybe you still don’t.

Remember that not everyone is safe to defy expectations or boundaries. Maybe it could be literally deadly to do so. Maybe just living up to expectations is an incredible struggle.

Remember that “trying and failing gloriously” might be poetic and inspiring when talking about space ships or something. It may be far more painful, exhausting, and daunting when the most one can try for today is to stay out of bed long enough to microwave some food instead of eating it cold.

Nobody is going to give stage directions. We like to respond to that by trying to drive each other forwards, with challenges and motivations and lofty sayings.

But maybe we should just fucking give each other stage directions.

Monday, June 10, 2019

[Published retroactively on 2021-09-03, unedited.]

One of the reasons I take my transition desires seriously is that they are very different from other things I want.

What should I get for lunch? Oh, hmm… maybe a sandwich? Do I want a sandwich? What kind of sandwich? The place that makes that kind of sandwich is further away… but you can get this less appealing type of sandwich closer – and cheaper! Is that compelling enough? Or should I take the hit and get the first kind? Maybe I don’t want that kind so bad after all. Do I?

Give me a decision to make, and I’ll find a thousand questions that are somehow all super important for making the actual choice. If I don’t know much about the decision, or the implications of various choices, it gets even worse… first I need to understand all the ramifications of all possible outcomes, and then I will ask a thousand annoying questions about all that.

I over-analyze the ever living fucking shit out of everything.

And then there’s transition or gender expression matters. Everything just feels like the polar opposite of my usual process. Would I like to have long hair? Yes. Am I content with the color of my hair? No, jet black or broke, mother fucker. I have never had appreciably long hair or any other color (discounting the blinding white-blonde thing I had naturally, at a very young age). I have no point of reference here, no anchor from which to understand the impact of these desires, and I don’t fucking care. I feel no need to ask questions, to weigh options, to consider consequences.

In general, I have a lot of trouble wanting things. So when I pause and observe that I really, really, fucking want boobs – that sort of makes one take notice. When I am suddenly insistent on not analyzing things to death… I think that’s a pretty good sign that the feelings are fucking real.

Wednesday, June 5, 2019

[Editorial note: published retroactively 2021-09-03, with some minor edits for privacy. In hindsight, I find this a fascinating look at the way my psyche was struggling to resolve some seriously complicated things. As I sit here and think about my current self-described genderflux identity, of wavering between "girl" and some kind of agender non-binary person, it's amazing to realize what has - and hasn't - stayed with me from this experience.]

This is actually overdue by just more than a week; at the time I managed to scribble some hasty notes in my phone before ultimately falling asleep, and then I subsequently failed to find the energy to actually type up the full account between then and now.

Despite having spent a lot of time in the last week trying to articulate exactly what happened, I still find it incredibly hard to capture, for some reason. So I’m going to stop procrastinating and just try and relate the events without exposition or backstory.

Monday the 27^th was Memorial Day. I didn’t work that day, obviously, and had been nervous about having the time with no plans or real structure. That weekend I spent a lot of conscious effort trying to keep myself from just disintegrating emotionally; trying to at least have a moderately decent time.

I succeeded and was feeling fairly good about life, and went to bed. As I lay there trying to fall asleep, I started thinking, as I tend to do. I can’t remember what started it or even really much of what I thought about over the next several hours; partly because, as usual, my memory is in very poor shape – but mainly because of what ended up happening near the end.

I was wrestling with the feeling that gender fluidity was periodically “taking away” parts of me. Honestly… I’d had several boy days in a row at that point, and it was hard to take. I kept thinking about Amelia. What she would do in various little daily situations. What she would say in response to something. How she would feel about an idea or an experience or a tiny vignette from the day. I missed her, badly.

More than that, I just felt like she would do such a better job of being me. She’s nicer, kinder, more… pure and incorruptible… funnier, braver, more real in some strange sense. She’s the person I want to be, and the boy-mode husk is… not. I trust her to live a good life, and it seems so brutally unfair that she can’t just drive all the time.

I have to get over my inhibitions about the next part. If I could explain it better, I would.

I was laying there, boy mode me, lamenting that I couldn’t just step aside forever and let her live instead. And unbidden, unmistakably, she simply said, “I trust you.”

The next hour or so was a fascinating exploration of my identity and how it is built out of various components, particularly gendered ones. It still drives me fucking nuts that I can’t even describe this properly. Amelia talked to me. In the background was an enby, making quiet, unobtrusive, yet profoundly impactful interjections now and then. (It took a while to learn this, and I’m still not 100% certain, but she seems to go by Sarah. Definitely the enigmatic but unarguably wise and insightful type.)

For having a week to contemplate, I still don’t think I can do any better than my original notes.

Mulling over stuff while trying to sleep. Trying to keep up the exercise of staying in a good mood (was successful).

I can engage my gendered aspects (?) somewhat at will right now. Can’t quite select a gender overall, but there is a lasting connection to me in there somehow.

Been in boy mode much of the evening. Wasn’t thrilled about it most of the time. But as I toyed with seeing me as a whole, something cool happened.

Amelia found her voice, and told boy-me that she trusts him.

Of course he thinks Amelia walks on water and can do no wrong, so he’s super encouraged by this trust and approval.

Enby-self sort of hung out but we don’t yet know their pronouns or name. They seem very content to be quiet and unobtrusive. They are officially invited to make contact if/when they feel safe and interested in doing so.

Amelia gets first dibs on the body representation, for the record. Unanimously agreed.

Boy-mode got this mess through three decades of life, and achieved considerable success in the process. He also managed to find Amelia and wages an epic battle for her rescue. We all love him and trust him even if he doubts his qualities.

The scribe dutifully notes that all parties present have digressed into an enthusiastic discussion on the many superlative merits of “boobs.”

Sunday, June 2, 2019

[Editorial note, from 2021-09-03: In hindsight, I now know that this was a misdiagnosis, predicated on a wild misunderstanding (on the part of the medical professionals involved) of the profile of child abuse related trauma and gender identity crises I was struggling with. While the diagnoses were wrong, the pain and confusion were real, and some of these questions and challenges still mess with me to this day. This is mostly unedited, save minor tweaks for privacy and a small removal of a mention of someone best not discussed.] 

I have bipolar disorder.

I no longer have readily accessible records of what happened, but I do know that the month of August 2007 will always be burned into my awareness.

I was living, alone, in a dingy basement apartment that I’d done a terrible job of decorating (and maintaining). The refrigerator was probably the cheapest model sold by any store in a three state radius. The lights were awful early-generation LED bulbs that barely illuminated anything. I kept the curtain shut all the time and lived in the perpetual dark on a chaotic and massively unhealthy schedule… if you could even call it a schedule.

My job was all on the computer and my employer was based in [Editorial note: I'm redacing this to just "Europe" for a bit more privacy]. The many-hour time difference made it annoying to coordinate, and had a way of complicating my routine quite badly. Worse, I worked in a notoriously unhealthy industry, where obscene work weeks and deadline pressures were considered normal.

All in all, I had a fucked up time trying to sleep properly. I would pull many consecutive all-nighters without so much as resting my eyelids, then crash and just pass out for sometimes as long as three or four days after. I started researching sleep disorders in my tidbits of spare time.

I had a list of a few things I thought might be treatable conditions, but I was uninsured and (on American paper at least) totally unemployed, so getting actual treatment felt implausible. Instead, I started reading up on DIY “fixes” for sleep issues. Supplements, scheduling programs, lifestyle changes… nothing really grabbed me. Until I ran across polyphasic sleep.

There were two or three interesting accounts of people playing with polyphasic sleep and keeping proper, detailed, disciplined records of the results. I studied months or maybe even years of these people’s data, and finally decided I wanted to try it.

The approach I tried was pretty simple: work for several hours (or whatever; be alive and operational I guess). Sleep for two or three hours, whatever felt like a good REM cycle. Plan the next chunk of time; if you have scheduled obligations or whatever, work around them as needed. Try not to go too long without a nap, and absolutely never let yourself nap more than a couple of hours at once.

The story was that the first few days were hell, and it took a week or two after that to adjust for the most part to the lifestyle, and then very rapidly the body would learn to rest in this cadence and you’d wind up feeling better than ever and with more awake time than Mere Mortals – so you could go be killer productive, or whatever.

I have no idea, over a decade later, how long I tried that shit. Maybe several months or so. But I do remember the summer of 2007.

My sleep never stabilized. If anything it became dramatically worse. My moods became volatile and extreme – cranky, depressed, bitter, lethargic at times… and then with no recognizable pattern, I’d be incredibly energetic, motivated, optimistic, productive, good at everything. Almost brilliant even.

The mood regulation issues closely followed my sleep problems. I started to worry, but in a low-key sort of way. Like denial. It just got worse. I remember waking up once, I don’t even know what time but maybe it was dark out, and I was unshakably convinced that I had solved an incredibly difficult outstanding mathematical problem in theoretical physics. In my sleep. I was so confident in this discovery and the ease with which I could articulate it and prove it correct, that I just rolled over and went back to sleep. I woke up again, later – initially just as confident, but quickly confused and scared and ashamed to realize that I couldn’t even remember which problem I thought I had solved.

There were incidents with vivid hallucinations, more grandiose delusions, weird and incredibly pronounced – but blisteringly temporary – changes in my personality and behavior. Pointing the car down the interstate onramp, pushing the gas all the way down, and just… not letting it off. Ending up frustrated that the poor consumer sedan’s speedometer stopped being reliable past 120 MPH. I began to connect dots between my own personal experiences and what the medical literature described as mania.

The depression kept being a problem. I’ve struggled with suicidal thoughts since middle school, even occasionally got as far as making detailed plans and practicing various aspects of carrying out those plans. So for a while I didn’t really even register that it was “unusual.” You know… not showing up to work, unannounced, for a week… normal, right? Curling into a ball under your desk and pleading with any power that might hear you to just end your existence… pondering death and nonexistence for hours on end… writing down lists of ways you would improve the world by being dead… all normal. So normal it’s totally unremarkable that I was doing that sort of shit basically every single day. Normal! Right?

Something snagged at my awareness and I finally started to suspect something was seriously wrong.

It all finally blew up one night that summer. In my dim, uncomfortable, poorly-furnished apartment, I lived through the single most terrifying experience I had ever had in my life. All I really remember is the end. It had become unavoidably clear to me that the evil aliens (or demons?) who lived in my refrigerator were insistent on making some kind of obscene racket all night. I argued with them, seethed quietly at them, and eventually began punching the refrigerator over and over in a vain effort to shut them up.

I stopped, after a while, only because my hands were bleeding and I couldn’t stand the pain of hitting the fucking thing any more. The noise didn’t even pause for a second. I collapsed onto the shitty, cheap linoleum, cradling my bleeding hands, and began to cry soundlessly. I was violently attacking a kitchen appliance to stop it from making a sound that only existed in my mind.

The worst of it hit, right there, on the floor. It was a visceral, unmistakable, vivid, physical sensation: the feeling that I was straight up losing my fucking mind. For what felt like forever, I stared directly into the horrific maw, the knowledge that I was going to go permanently insane on this stupid fucking linoleum floor and the last thing my mind would ever register would be the gut-wrenching snap as my human consciousness ruptured completely.

I fell asleep at some point, I assume at least. Most of that part of my life is incredibly hard to remember. That happens.

At some point soon after that, I reached out to my family, and asked for help.

Over the next few weeks I started getting diagnosed, and then treated. It took a while for me to find a doctor who wasn’t a disgusting piece of shit and/or mind-bendingly incompetent, but either way, I started to find quiet and peace in my mind.

In the aftermath, I did a lot of reflection.

I finally connected the remaining dots between my sleep chaos, mood instability, and all the rest. I looked back on the previous few years in particular and was struck by a singularly disturbing pattern. It seemed, to me at the time, that feeling strong emotions was almost always a precursor to a bipolar episode.

I knew that wasn’t quite right, on some level at least. I fought hard to get my medications reconfigured and even my diagnosis adjusted because I was starting to feel dead – like nothing actually happened to me anymore. I was dimly conscious of the world and somewhat interactive, but I had no thoughts, no feelings, no soul. I finally got that fixed (which, shockingly, entailed finding a new doctor) but some damage was done, somewhere. For many years after, I lived in constant suspicion of emotion.

The bipolar shit blended nicely with other artifacts of my life, in the sense that it made it really easy for me to just want to avoid feeling anything. Ever. And I had the tools to bury those feelings, stunt them, exterminate them entirely.

I became so convinced that feeling things was evil… I rated the effectiveness of medications based on how well they kept me numb. Around the beginning of 2018 I was working through the ten billionth medication change of my illustrious mental health career. I dragged it out for a while because I just reflexively assumed that the changes were bad. We lowered the dose of this pill, and a few days later I felt sad – case closed!

Somehow the lightbulb finally clicked on. I wasn’t feeling meaningless, arbitrary, unreal emotions. I was actually feeling alive. For the first time in a decade I took a tentative step into the world of actually feeling things because I was fucking supposed to.

Even now, after a year of learning to feel and actually embracing it all… after a year of seeing my life open up and become unfathomably richer and happier and better… after so many mountains of evidence proving that this is how things should be… I continue to clean up the leftover land mines and debris of that particular disaster. I still have to dismantle the urges to suppress what I feel or think.

And I still live in a low-grade fear that maybe it will all come undone again… a wrong turn with the medication, or a really bad day, or whatever else. Am I happy? Do I really enjoy my life? Am I truly learning to appreciate who I am and be proud of myself?

Why did I laugh and smile so much today?

Am I allowed to like being alive?

Or am I just manic?