I asked Mom to pick up my prescriptions yesterday – apparently they weren’t ready on time, so she got them today.
At dinner today she said “In exchange for picking up your prescriptions, how about you clean your room.” That made me feel upset, because she seems to think that the only reason I would think to clean my room is to please her, and that my room is messy because I’m not trying at all, not because it’s a giant project. My room hasn’t been clean since I got home – and I need to decide where everything goes. It won’t really be clean until I’ve sorted the computer stuff, which will take a long time.
She also asked me about why progesterone is more expensive than my other meds, and said I should look into it. I mentioned that the online order form on CVS seemed to list it as equal to the others, which made her more concerned and made me feel even more uncomfortable. She also pointed out that the name of the nurse I had seen originally was on the scripts rather than my doctor’s, and asked me if I knew what was going on. She said “you’ll have to look into it, because to me it’s very confusing.” It’s confusing to me too. The whole medical system in the US is confusing. All of the meds I’m taking should be over-the-counter. Dealing with meds sucks when I’m it civilization, but it’s worse when I’m at home, since I can’t walk to the pharmacy and have to depend on my mother.
Before I texted my mom asking her to get them, I asked my dad if he thought it would be a bad day for mom to do so. He had said “yes” the previous two times. Sometimes I think I worry too much about asking my mom for stuff, but then she manages to make me feel bad over the most trivial things.
After dinner I went to my room and started ticcing “I hate myself,” and “I want to kill myself.” I didn’t intend for my mom to hear, but I think she did, because she came to my door and offered me a book and then asked if there was anything she could do to help me feel better. I said “no.” Later she asked my brother and me if we wanted to watch TV, as we usually do in the evening, and seemed surprised when I said yes. Then she said that when she had called earlier today to ask my dad about the plumbing (our water was off until 6pm and we still can’t drink it – I love this place), when I answered the phone and said “hello”, she thought she had gotten the wrong number because my voice sounded so feminine. That really did make me feel better.
Yesterday Mom and I went on a spring flower walk at a local park. It was cold, windy, and
snowing / hailing. We saw a lot of bloodroot, but not many other flowers. Mom had originally
signed up for herself and Dad, so when we signed in, one of the women there said “Well
that’s not $DADs_NAME!” about me. I don’t think she knew Dad, so she must
have meant that I couldn’t be him because I look like a girl. That was a nice piece of
validatation the made the experience worthwhile.
My professor sent me a copy of my paper draft with comments. I’ve been scared to look at it. I have to submit the abstract by Monday.
In an interview, my brother said he felt like his sister was smarter than him.
Said that he has a lot of misgivings with Windows, but that it’s hard to collaborate with someone using Linux. In class he met a girl using Ubuntu who couldn’t use the same development environment as him.
My brother apparently got the job he interviewed for today. IT contractor for the local urban school district. I said to my Dad “I told y’all that he would get a job before me.”
It does make me feel slightly better that it’s only $20/hour, which is less than I was getting for teaching. It comes with benefits and is presumeably full-time, though.
He asked me why I was having trouble applying for the job at my alma mater. I said it made me anxious because the people reading it would know me. I also mentioned I was hoping to find a job in a state with better laws regarding legal name changes. He seemed to think the state it’s it still seemed like a good place, because it has a high HDI scores in the world (?). He suggested I apply without a cover letter. I did – it turns out they didn’t even ask for one. I sent an email to my old supervisors mentioning that I had applied – I got an auto-response from one of them saying that she was now retired.
My brother was talking with a friend on the phone about trans women in sports. He seemed ot be advocating for adding more classes to account for different physical abilities.
He said “My sister, who I tend to trust, said trans women do 5% better than cis women.”
He also said at one point “anyone can become a trans woman” and “I don’t want people to become trans women so that they can do well in sports.” I’m not sure if he was explaining his thoughts weirdly because he was talking to someone less informed or if that’s really just how he thinks about it.
I wish someone would say that I was feminine. And that I would believe it.
Last Friday, Mom asked me to help Dad make dinner, then made faces at me as I began to do so. I said “It seems like you’re mad at me” and she said that she was disappointed in me because I didn’t help around the house unless she specifically asked. She added the she and Dad don’t have large dinners when my brother and I aren’t home. I felt terrible and couldn’t really say anything.
My dad called a truce by saying that we needed to get to working on the dinner. When we finished, I went to my room and didn’t join family to eat. Mom came to my room later and yelled at me about how my room looked and told me that I had to clean it up over the weekend and that we were all going to agree in writing on the chores we were going to do.
She also talked to me about my depression. I said I still felt like I was going to be depressed as long as I was living here – that I was trying to find a job so I could move out. She said maybe me being here was not as temporary as we thought.
…
Things have been a bit better now that I’ve been helping more. I’ve been pretty tired, however.
Mom accidentally called me “he” while we were watching TV today.
Bonjour.
Hier mon amie française $PRENOM m’a contacté et ça m’a animé pour étudier encore le français. Une stratégie qui j’ai vu les gens recommander sur reddit c’est à écrire des notes personnelles en la langue que tu étudies. Donc, j’écris ceci.
Je pense que je suis trop faible en la grammaire. Donc, j’ai écrit une scripte en Python pour générer les cartes d’Anki pour pratiquer le subjonctif. Ensuite, je voudrais faire la même pour la conditionnelle et le futur.
$PROFESSEUR ne m’a envoyé pas encore les conseils sur ma thésis. Donc, mon travail principal ces jours c’est chercher un boulot. J’envoyais une application chaque jour de la nouvelle année (sauf la première), mais je n’ai pas reçu aucune réponse pendant ces deux semaines. Il me semble que ce ne soit pas suffisant à avoir obtenu un master en informatique à une des meilleures universités dans le pays pour gagner un boulot…
I’m watching Hikaru No Go. It’s reminding me of when I was younger and still trying to get good at chess. This makes me feel sad, because I didn’t succeed in that, and it feels like I haven’t gotten really good at anything. I don’t even know what I would say I’m best at.
Chess +-
Music -
Programming ??
Math -
Writing +-
Teaching ??
Supporting ??
Art +-I’m not sure if programming is actually something you can be good or bad at in an important way. It feels like programming is the easy part – the difficult part is the math/science that lets you know what to code.
I’ve been having dreams of being in High School again for months, maybe a year or more now. Maybe it’s because in some sense I miss feeling like I was good at school – not just good, but a top student.
I’m $AGE. The brain stops developing around 25. Soon I’m going to start getting dumber instead of smarter. My only real accomplishments are getting into $COLLEGE and making a kind-of-cool web app. That’s more than most people ever do, I guess. But it’s not enough to matter in the grand scheme of things.
It’s probably more important to be happy than to “matter.” But I’m not happy.
Obviously I’m not going to be happy right now. I’m back living with my parents in this wasteland where I never get to see my friends. I don’t have a job or a partner. I feel like I don’t have any power over what happens to me as long as I’m here.
But when I was at $COLLEGE I was doing engaging schoolwork, had venues and friends within walking distance, and felt like I could do things without my parents. I was feeling better, but I still didn’t see life as especially worth living. I still wanted to die every so often.
So even if I get a job and move out, which seems possible, it couldn’t be much better than it was then. I’d have more money, but I’d also probably spend more time working on less interesting things than I did in school. So it’d probably be a wash.
I’ve never had a partner. So perhaps that’s the missing thing that makes other people’s lives seem worthwhile to them. That makes sense: most songs, etc. are about love. But it’s hard to imagine me getting there.
It might also be that other people are happy, or at least insufficiently unhappy to commit mass-suicide, because they’re not trans. That makes sense too. Half of us end up killing ourselves. Maybe being unhappy has nothing to do with my current condition. Just who I essentially am. That would suck.
Maybe trans girls who are pretty are the ones who don’t kill themselves. I could probably be pretty if I tried harder. Not pretty in the relative sense, of course, but in the sense of “every single cis girl my age I’ve ever seen is pretty.” That might also help me get a partner. But am a going to try hard enough? I didn’t when it was chess. Or music. Or art. Or anything else I thought I cared about.
Met with $THERAPIST
She said that last time in group, when I had talked about my anxiety as a dragon, she was holding back tears, because she had never heard me express myself – not in relation to the things that I feel are wrong with me – before.
I told her I was worried about flunking out of school, and she tried to convince me that it would be ok if I did.
She said that I really helped people at group be kind to themselves, and that me being alive and present is enough
And that I could have a life more than worth living.
Also that she was looking forward to my lesbian wedding.
I wasn’t able to talk to $FRIEND today or yesterday, and I’ve been finding 7cups less and less helpful over time… so I guess it’s back to my plaintext diary.
I told Mom that I wasn’t communicating because I felt ashamed at not getting something for Granny and Grandpa. She didn’t reassure me at all, which makes me think she’s upset with me for it but kept silent to keep things from getting worse. I still need to think about what I should do for them. Maybe I can get the $PROJECT done it in time for New Years? Then again, I feel this project has been dragging on so long that it might be time to let it go.
Mom also told me to email Grandpa to thank them for the popcorn maker. I was hoping to try it out today, but I realized I didn’t have oil. I will go shopping for it tomorrow.
Mom and $BROTHER and I are going to talk about $BOOK tomorrow. I feel kind of nervous. I want to talk about the relation I’m seeing between it and Elaine Pagel’s concept of mythos, but I think I would feel weird saying that stuff in front of $BROTHER. I’d like to ask Mom if she knows if any of the anthropology stuff is accurate.
I feel lonely.
I only really have two friends, and they both live in a different country from me. I’ve never had a partner. I’ve never been kissed or held hands. I’ve been fantasizing about having a boyfriend a lot lately. I don’t really have any online friends, even though I’ve been intereacting with people on eldritch.cafe and stuff.
My computer sucks. I don’t enjoy many things. I do things out of obligation. And in my free time I just scroll through my RSS feeds which don’t make me happy.
I haven’t communicated with $SCIENTIST since three weeks ago when it was required for the class. He seems like a very nice person, but I easily get anxious about contacting people, especially since I feel kind of out of place talking about some of these things. And this is one of those cases where it gets harder over time because it’s more awkward to re-initiate contact the later you do it.
My proposal was quite light on specifics on things like $SUBJECT, because that was an idea $SCIENTIST floated but about which I didn’t ask for clarification and I don’t really personally know what would be useful in this area.
I realize that this is probably going to be a problem if I’m doing case-studies or such as well.
It’s also hard for me to think of anything novel because I don’t have enough domain expertise to think of anything beyond what’s useful for exploring $SUBJECT in general, which is both a huge task and highly covered by science already.
I’m not actively suicidal right now – I don’t even know how I’d kill myself if I were – but I don’t see any value in living the rest of my life.
In middle school I decided not to kill myself because I wanted to experience college before I died. I figured that I’d die sometime in my mid-20s. Well, now I’m graduating (supposing that I pass Calculus), and my younger self seems surprisingly prescient. People ask me about my plans for life after college, but I don’t have any because I don’t really want to have a life after college.
I decided to major in computer science even though I was never good at math or science to begin with – I just liked the power that being able to code seemed to give me. But without math skills I’ll never accomplish anything important in the field, and that basically cuts off academia as an option.
So I guess need to get a job, and programming is the only thing I’m remotely capable of. But pretty much every company that hires programmers is either evil (like Google/Facebook/Amazon/Uber/Palantir) or useless (like Slack/MongoDB/Every single VC-Funded Startup). So, not much to look forward to.
Not that long ago I was thinking of moving to France – I’d probably have to go to grad school to get a visa, but it would at least be cheap over there and I could probably get through a master’s degree. But when I think about it more, it seems ridiculous. I can barely handle simple adult interactions in English – sometimes I can’t do stuff as simple as ordering food. So moving someplace where my language skills are only so-so would just be asking for trouble. So I’ll have to stay in this rotten country with no culture or public transportation or vacation time. Oh, and it’s probably going to be ruled by the dumbest person on earth for another four years since the democratic nominee seems to have given up on campaigning.
My transition feels like a complete failure. Estrogen has done very little over almost four years – it took away some muscle, gave me boobs that are invisible under a light sweatshirt, and maybe filled filled out my cheeks by a few cubic millimeters. Oh, and it killed my sex drive and made the skin on my ass wrinkly. I’m too anxious to do almost anything that would make me feel more feminine. I dress super androgynous and I never wear makeup because I’m afraid of messing up with it.
I’m twenty-fucking-$AGE and I’m on an anti-androgen and finasteride, but I’m still experiencing male-pattern baldness.
Lately I’ve been more sad than usual about how I’ll probably never have a partner. Having started progesterone probably has something to do with it – I’ve been craving for affection more than ever. But as a non-passing trans woman with extreme social anxiety, no one would want me, and even if they did and I didn’t end up running away from it, I don’t think I’m psychologically healthy enough to handle being in a relationship in the first place.