Time Like These

turned on Radio 1 just in time to hear Greg say "coming up next, the final Rickie Melvin & Charlie!"

So naturally I had to text D and make sure he was listening. Their show is a favorite of both of ours.

He came downstairs a minute later, and said "I was just going to make sure that you were listening."

Two old men, listening to pop music, swapping stories about what we heard around our meetings and other work the way my mom and her bestie used to catch each other up on their soap operas...

In the first twenty minutes, I gasped out loud like I was in a drawing room where the murderer has just been annoucned, I yelled at the radio, I cackled so loudly that I'm amazed neither of the others next door said anything about it....

Yesterday and today at work were extremely deep-work deep-thinking days. (I've been asked to "put together a [public-facing few hundred words usually] for our website about [all of our work in one of the hugest and definitely the most intractable topic in my 4+ years in this job]." I've written fourteen pages of densely informative text and I am still waiting on a section from someone else.) My parasocial relationships with the people on the radio are almost all the company I've had.

me deciding to take the last week of the month off from counseling: it's good to have a breather, save a bit of cash, I have another commitment on that evening, and it's just refreshing to have a break

also me, the last week of almost any month: :frantically scribbling notes: good thing I have counseling in a couple days/tomorrow/etc...

However! This morning I was able to figure out all by myself how something that has been fucking me up is related to a Pattern of upsetting things that I've noticed in other areas of my life. So at least it makes some sense now that I'm reacting in the otherwise-weird way that I am...

I am proud of myself for this.

So the Pattern is me being upset when things that had been very difficult/stressful/etc. become easier than I ever imagined they could be, which just drives home to me how arbitrary and unnecessary the misery was in the first place. Examples of this that have come up for me include returning to the UK on a visa vs. with a UK passport, interacting at work with men who I can't help but get the feeling are so much more collegiate toward me than they would have been if they'd met me when I was still having to be a woman...

I always knew that borders and patriarchy exist to bring suffering and misery. But the intellectual knowledge did not prepare me for the emotional experience of still being the same person and being treated so very differently -- once I had access to a more privileged position.

And now, with the top surgery. Part of the reason I don't really want to tell anybody, I don't want too much happiness or excitement to be directed at me, is that I'm angry.

I am so incandescently angry. Because one of the most consistent things in an experience that otherwise leads me to problematize the pre-transition/post-transition boundary is that I have hated the landscape of my chest since it started changing, when I was ten years old. I daydreamed about a breast reduction long before I ever realized that top surgery a) was a thing or b) was something I could yearn for.

And yet for years I've been put off, stressed out, driven to such extreme unction that I have written the first thing I have ever wanted to be a zine (I'm still in the process of hammering out details of commissioning a transmasc artist to illustrate it for me!)...

And then yesterday morning, once we'd finally sent off all the documents Friday afternoon, D and I got an e-mail first thing Monday morning CEST saying

Hello,

Thank you very much for your documents.

When would you like to have the surgery?

Kind regards
[name]

D actually laughed a little when he read it. He asked if I'd seen the latest e-mail from them and I hadn't, and I couldn't figure out what from them could make him chuckle, but then he read it out and I got it. It's just so absurd, after years of hurdles and triggering very old body dysmorphia and trying to delicately navigate diet culture and the disordered eating and mental illness it has inculcated in me, after more than once finding myself convinced this would never happen for me... Here they are just, like "When would you like to have the surgery?" That's the whole e-mail -- that's all they need to know from me! Beyond the basics of my demographic information, the fact that I can pay, and the fact that the tissue they'll remove shows no signs of cancer, that's all they needed.

That's about all that ever should be needed (minus the need to pay, but whatever; I'm lucky that I have money that never really felt like mine anyway with which to pay for this: ever since I realized that my half of the equity in the house I'd never wanted to buy would mean I didn't have to worry about this, I've just been grateful for that). I am this person and I have made this choice about what should happen to my body.

It never had to be so drawn-out, unfair, or mentally and emotionally dangerous and painful.

It could have been like this all along.

I'm angry about this and I'm heartbroken about this.

That's why I can't cope with people's normal, happy, excited reactions to what is normally understood to be a very good thing.