Trans 101 With Julie - Interlogue 11 June 2017

I want to tell a story this morning before I lose myself in Azeroth. I should make this a blog entry, and I very may well in the future depending on how long this is, but we'll see. Buckle up, this is gonna be a long and bumpy ride.

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I have suffered from depression all my life. I mean the word suffer; at my worst I am suicidally nihilistic. It's always there, it's not something I escape from...even in my quietest moments there's a voice there telling me how much I don't deserve this. I have been depressed ever since I was in single digits...I was not a happy go lucky kid, I was not allowed to be part of things with other kids my age, and I gravitated to adults, who I could at least speak to and with on a similar kind of level.

The obvious thing here is that I knew even when I was little that something was terribly, horribly wrong, and that everyone made a huge mistake and thought I was a boy because of physical attributes, but try explaining that when you don't have the language to do so, when you are so deep in your self examination that you've turned yourself inside out.

I was hospitalised 3 or 4 times for varying degrees of suicidal ideation between 1990 and 200-something.

The first time I openly expressed my real identity was in the early 1990s. Having been exposed to RHPS after I went to college, I felt I could finally put words to the things I felt. could finally see that I was...well, I was still broken, but I could see there was maybe a way to put the pieces back together.

Cue Julie singing 'I know the pieces fit cos I watched them tumble down...'

I had a therapist, we'd talked extensively about me transitioning, she was calling me Julie (see how long I knew my name?), she was looking for a specialist for me so I could get the ball rolling on actually transitioning. She agreed with me that this was something I needed to do in order to rescue myself.

Abuse, emotional and psychological and external, kept me from doing that. I sublimated, subsumed, subverted, sub-everything-ed it.

I stopped seeing that therapist.

Another 10-ish years of abuse and gaslighting followed, interspersed with feeble attempts. 2000-ish I made a grab for the ring...and a few months later was diagnosed with lymphoma. 2008 everything had fallen apart in my personal life, the relationship if it could be called that was a farce, and I leaned again.
That's when I had my heart attack.

I have kept struggling. I have kept fighting. I started seeing a new therapist. She seemed amenable to dealing with my gender things...and other people at the mental health center certainly were...my psychiatrist and the staff on that side were, and are, amazing. But when it came time for a letter...she disappeared. I'd invested over a year in therapy for this, and in the space of 2 weeks it disappeared.

I was done.

I was so done.

I was already out here...I'd stopped hiding and lying here in July of '14. But I kind of reached the point that I was certain I'd be able to go no further.

I did some researching, but it was half assed. I emailed a few places, and never got any response back...including from the clinic in New Hope, where I'd pinned my hopes on going. The depression was hard core, and by this point I was on both an anti-depressant and a mood stabiliser/bipolar medication to keep me functional.

I sent one last e-mail out.

(Side note: I just took a look, because I have a weird tendency to keep stuff that I'd have no reason normally to keep...and I do in fact have the initial e-mail I sent out:

"Hi!

My name is Julie Knispel, and I'm a female identifying individual living in New Jersey, about an hour give or take from Philadelphia.  I've been researching clinics and service providers that might be able to assist me with my transitioning, including contra-hormonal therapy.  I've read a lot of very nice things about Mazzoni Center, your website looks awesome, and I wanted to reach out to find out how to make things...work, I guess?

I've known about my identity for a long time...adolescence, really, when my body did things that didn't quite equate out with what I expected it to.  Like a lot of people, I had a lot of issues understanding things, made worse by living in the middle of nowhere pre-internet and thus no way to look things up.  Add in generalised homophobia in my area (as in, loads of people ridiculing New Hope PA because of the strong LGBT presence there, and thus terrifying me even more), and it was a perfect storm of stuff.

I haven't self-medicated, tho I suppose it would come as no surprise that the thought passes my mind.  But I want...no, need...to do this right.

A lot of preface and prelude, and I am so sorry...nervousness 😊

Anyway...is there any info you can provide?  I'm at a point that I >need< to move forward.  It's tearing me apart inside having to deal with the soup of stuff that feels so ick inside me.

Thank you SO much for any info and advice you can offer."

Side note ends.)

And 2 days later I had a response from Mazzoni in Philadelphia with attachments and info and an actual friendly sounding voice in the e-mail...

>>> Hello Julie,
Thank you for contacting Mazzoni Center! I know it can be difficult to reach out, but I am so glad that you did. My name is Abby Roh, and I am the Trans Care Services intern at our family practice health clinic. I would be happy to try and answer questions that you have. I’m going to include a lot of information in this email about our services so that ideally you’ll be fully prepared when you come to us for care. <<<

I had a feeling. I really did. I tried not to get my hopes up because they'd been dashed against the rocks SO MANY TIMES, but I wanted to believe. I really did. And they said 'when you come to us for care,' as if it were a foregone conclusion, that they knew they were the right choice for me.

So I called. I was scared, and shaking, and so afraid I'd be told over the phone 'no sorry you don't sound trans enough buhbye.'

I got a friendly voice on the phone, who spent like 30 minutes with me. They sat there, answered my questions, were patient when I got weepy, and I decided to make an appointment.

At which point I was told the first appointments were 6 months out.

And I nearly lost it.

This was the closest I had ever been, and I suddenly felt the ring being pulled away.

I leapt...because if I fell, it would be OK, there'd be no other reason to carry on anyway.

I scheduled the appointment.

Six months later, I walked into a clinic in Philadelphia with my friend Gillian. She sat with me through the whole thing...added insight and stuff to the doctors and social workers, who were amazed someone I'd gone to prom with in HS as a boy would do this for someone.

I walked out of there that day with a script for aldactone.

One month later I had my first script for estradiol.

I still need my antidepressant and my mood stabiliser.

But here's the important thing.

Estradiol is what is saving my life.

I don't disassociate, I don't feel like a shell moving through life like some automaton. I feel like a human being.

I feel.

That's the big true thing. I feel. And yes, those feelings can be intense. When I laugh sometimes I don't know when or how to stop because it's something that continues to be new and I have no basis of a lifetime of emotional knowledge to understand. And I cry, but the tears are less a way to get out the fact that I am in agony so I can continue to not feel and more an expression of everything. I cry when I'm happy because it's so intense and pure that it shocks me into being unable to do anything else. I cry when I'm sad because it's so real. I cry when I see beautiful things, hear beautiful things, because they are so emotionally true.

This bottle is what is saving my life.

And when I got this filled at the clinic's pharmacy, and saw my very first pill bottle with MY name on it?

I cried.

And laughed.

And for the first time in my life, I felt I HAD a life.

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If, as they say, the past is a foreign country (and it truly is), it is also true that what's past is prologue. And I tell my prologue in order to say this:

If you're on HRT, you know these feelings, because you've prolly had similar ones.

If you're not, but are going to be...it's going to get so much better. It really is. Trust me.

And if you're not and don't need to be...it might be difficult to understand, and I'm not sure I have a good metaphor, save to maybe say that finally having the proper hormones in me is like finally finding the one missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle you never bring out cos you can't finish it, only now you can and the picture is beautiful.

Estradiol is saving my life.

And it gets better.

Thanks for hanging with me on this. I'ma go pretend I'm a blood elf in black plate armour smashing demons in the face with my swords that are 40% longer than I am tall, cos I'm hardcore.



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