Day 7968 | Day 8044 | Day 8076
It's been a while since I've written much here. Partly it's a reluctance to acknowledge that what's happening to me is real and partly I want to see how everything turns out first so I can analyze in retrospect rather than admit to my overwhelming uncertainty about the present and future. But mostly it's that I've become so wrapped up in my personal struggles that I've become nearly blind to anything else— world shrink is a good description.
A little over two months ago I came out to my parents as transgender. I'd held the letter in one hand and a bottle in the other. The letter because I couldn't say the things that needed to be said, the bottle because I couldn't do the things that needed to be done. It went, I suppose, as well as it possibly could've—I shouldn't downplay the importance of a supportive and accepting family. Yet it's a support without reassurance, acceptance without empathy. Hollow, analytical, and without an emotional component as though I'm merely a problem that needs to be solved.
I've discovered that my parents are much more comfortable with addressing the practical aspects of my being transgender and transition than with my emotional needs through the process. Therapy, insurance, doctors, medications. Those are concrete problems with definite answers: easy to grasp and settle unambiguously and my parents have been a valuable resource for me to draw upon when figuring those things out. But when I try to connect to them by talking about the constant fear that I'm making an enormous mistake, about feeling isolated from everyone and everything, and about worrying that people will stare at me for the rest of my life, my parents are suddenly absent. It seems as though the natural reaction to your child saying 'I feel like a freak' would be to respond 'You're not a freak.' But instead what I get is a sympathetic 'Yeah...' trailing off to a painful silence.
This only reinforces my instinct to hide everything and remain emotionally distant from my parents since being open yields no benefit. I truly feel an emotional connection with only one other person and though our love for each other has grown into the most rewarding friendship I've ever had, it is not enough to be able to rely upon just one person for support. The fact that we're now living several hundred miles apart has also put a distinct limit on how we are able to support each other, no matter the depth of our feelings.
So in some ways things are radically different from the way they were a year ago or even just three months ago. I honestly never really thought I'd tell my parents about my gender issues or even that I'd still be alive at this point in time, yet here I am. But in other ways it's still remarkably status quo. Isolated, depressed, and in constant, barely-controlled fear. The difference is that there's a spark of hope that refuses to be extinguished despite how hard I try. Life's funny like that.