Reeling in Recovery

In the tomes of literature I received from the doctor’s office prior to my facial surgery in November, I read a few things about how patients should try their best to stay positive in the weeks following surgery, and that depression or regret is natural. I certainly felt a tinge of that from the first surgery I had in contending with this gender bullshit that is the utter bane of my existence, but at least with my bottom surgery I also had the feeling that part of me was finally right… so there was a bit of internal harmony that drowned out most of the depression I felt when I was laid up, cloistered and healing.

The experience I have been contending with since my facial surgery in November has been quite different. I saw this surgery as crossing a finish line of sorts. I saw it as the second of two surgeries I wanted for decades, and that I needed to have so I could be the truest version of myself, fit this truest version of myself into the world, and grant me some semblance of internal peace.


Wow, has it not been that at all.


First off, I need to say that, even though it’s been three months since my surgery, I still feel pretty beat up. My chin is almost completely numb, as is my upper forehead and the crown of my head. I also now have an incision that crescents across the top of my head from ear to ear, and the scar is very visible because they had to shave that area to make the incision AND because the scar there is going to prevent a swath of hair from growing back. Couple that with scalp trauma from the surgery itself and the hair loss that seems to come from going under general anesthesia, and my hair has never looked worse and never looked thinner.

Add in to all of this, that while the surgery has helped soften me a bit, it’s still nowhere NEAR enough. While the frequency may be a little less than it was before, people who see me on the street still pretty much instantly “sir” me. In short, to the world… and to me… my face ultimately still looks male, and my staunchest hope in going through this ordeal is that this would NOT be the case.

On top of that, my neck and jaw still look SO wrecked that they may have looked better before surgery, and I don’t know how much, if any more, I'm going to heal.


All of this is CRUSHING to me.


People have told me, “Well, if you’re not happy, you need to tell the surgeon. You paid a LOT of money for this and he should be able to fix whatever you’re not happy with.”

But the thing to realize here is that: a) you can only do so much, and I kind of trust that the doctor did all he could, and b) if I have to go through the pain and discomfort of yet another surgery (not to mention cover the additional cost of reserving another operating room and anesthesiologist, which both aren’t covered by the surgeon), the very thought of it makes me want to dive headlong through my third-floor window and plummet skull-first into the concrete below.

I just can’t bear the thought, especially after going through the insane pain, expense, stress, and struggle of having two major surgeries in the span of 11 months.


But if all of this… if all I struggled DECADES to get to and get through... isn’t enough, then what do I do? There is nothing left for me that I’m planning on. There is nothing I can look forward to for solace.


Before the surgeries I had, I was depressed, and hurting, and upset at my situation in the world, BUT I lived with the constant hope that once I got these surgeries taken care of, it would be enough for me, and I would feel better.

Now that these surgeries are behind me, and there is nothing else I can point to that will help me live my life and help me fit my new self and my new life seamlessly into the world, I am beyond depressed. I am completely forlorn and utterly hollowed out. I am supremely bereft of hope. Because I know now, FOR CERTAIN, that no matter what I do and no matter what I struggle to achieve when it comes to this transition, that it’s not EVER going to be enough. People are ALWAYS going to see me as something I’m not. I’m ALWAYS GOING TO FEEL WRONG… ALWAYS. There is NOTHING MORE I CAN DO ABOUT THIS.

And with all of this weighing on me, I can’t think straight, I can’t be social. I hole myself up and avoid everything and everyone. I struggle just to make it through the work day and be constructive and it is enormously tasking just to do that. I have never felt this hopeless in my life. I have never felt this upset in my life. I’m trying to fight on and do whatever is next for me, but I have no idea what that even is, because with this plan there wasn’t another step. There were the two major, difficult steps that I took, and now there is nothing. There’s just me contending with the results and trying not to break down every other minute of the day… which is even more difficult every time I look in the mirror.

I feel completely crushed and I don’t know what I can do to make me feel better, if there is anything at all. It hurts in ways I can’t even describe. I feel like my life has careened into a dead end. How do you recover from this? What do you do next?


Well, if you’re me, you continue to go to therapy, and work on your weight and your overall health, and hope there is still some miraculous healing that’s going to take place and things can somehow still get better. What else is there to do? I’m stumbling like a beat-up zombie through the world at this point, trying to find any source of joy I can in what has suddenly turned into the most excruciating and painful time of my life.


And for those who say, “Well, you just need to learn to accept it,” well, they just need to learn what it is to be trans and about the pain that comes with it. They need to learn that THIS is what the experience is… you CANNOT accept it, because if you COULD accept feeling SO off and SO misunderstood all of the time, then you wouldn’t be trans. It is the VERY DEFINITION of what it is. You feel wrong. Always. I hoped that this would make me feel not wrong, and while the first surgery did to a big extent, it’s still not right. It’s STILL all wrong. It’s all wrong and I don’t know how to make it better.

THAT is what the experience of being trans is in a nutshell. Dealing with these feelings and trying to just hold on in the middle of a raging tempest. Though why I’m holding on at this point is anybody’s guess. Yet, I do. I honestly don’t know what else there is to do.


All the best to you.

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As an addendum to this post, actually writing this stuff down and getting it out of my head and onto “paper” has helped a little. I felt a bit of an uptick in my attitude from a few days ago when I first spit all of this out of my brain. I’m still plodding on the best I can and trying to take the best care of myself… even when the depression hit so violently that I heard cigarettes calling to me again after spending years with the habit pretty much kicked. I was just looking for that stress relief again, and, really, a distraction. It says something that I haven’t gone back to them yet, like so many other trans people do… because, let’s face it, when you have no hope, do you care about the damage that nicotine is inflicting upon you? Apparently I'm hanging in there enough to not go back down that path.

That said, I’m still not good, but I’m a smidge better than when I wrote this post initally. This being a blog about the whole trans experience, though, I felt it important to share the rawness of it all.


One final thing. Yes, I’m partially destroyed at this point, but I still do realize that people have gone through worse than this and that I do not hold a monopoly on life struggles. This is just my struggle… and while there are worse things to go through, it doesn’t make what I and other trans people are contending with any fun at all. In fact, it’s still pretty fantastically terrible.

Thanks for reading.

Back in the (Horrifying) Saddle Again

Over the past 15 years or so I've been a participant in a good handful of trans support groups. My time with these groups varied, and there are different reasons why I stopped attending each. I stopped going to the most recent one I went to, which was probably about five or six years ago, because seemingly any time someone had something to say about their lives, it was essentially, "I really wanted to kill myself this week," and this was said with all the tragic earnestness in the world. We would then discuss it until it was time to move on to the next person, who then would echo these same engulfing feelings of mounting despair and hopelessness… "I really wanted to kill myself this week." And so it went for the full hour.

The sentiment was as ubiquitous as it was affecting. These dreadful feelings cast a palpable pall over the meeting room every time I attended. 

Still, I was at a point where I was trying to connect with and help others, so I went to this group every week for a few months and tried to offer input and advice whenever I felt like I had something supportive to say. Eventually, though, it just got too grueling and depressing, and going to this particular group really started to bring me down more than not going. This is especially so because I had dealt with the whole wanting-to-kill-yourself-on-the-reg kind of feelings for years. I fought my way through them, and hadn't been truly suicidal in quite some time. Hearing the despair in the room was starting to wake these dormant feelings from slumbering deep inside me, and I knew it was time to get out.

And I don't mean to sound glib or cavalier about this, but in dealing with being trans, and reading about it, and hearing people's stories about their own journey with it over the course of a decade or so, you realize that the statistic saying that 40% of trans people attempt suicide is not only accurate, but may very well be a conservative estimate.

Being as stalled as I am with this process, lately I’ve been trying to make a firm effort to finally get past this stage of transitioning and on with my life. In doing so, I have started therapy again (which has been a GOD. SEND.), and I am fairly certain that I need to be around some people sharing this experience and to try to at least be some part of this community. I don’t have any trans friends, and while I have a ton of support from some awesome and amazing people in my life (MANY thanks!), there is a different kind of connection that you can forge with people that truly understand on a deep, innate level what you’re going through and what you’re feeling… because they’re going through it and feeling it as well. I need this in my life right now.

So, even though I was filled with the trepidation that my past forays into trans support groups instilled in me, I went back to one tonight. It was an interesting experience that I haven’t fully processed yet, but there were some first impressions that I’d like to share. 

There was a degree of familiarity to the proceedings, even though I knew no other people in the room. And while there was only one mention of a suicide attempt (in the past tense, thankfully), the stories that these people told were still tear-inducing, infuriating, and, in some cases, utterly horrifying. To hear these people… these strangers… bear their souls, to hear about their heart-wrenching struggles with their families and the people closest to them was all too similar to stories I’ve heard through the years from trans people who I’ve sat in groups with, and brought back to my mind in crystalline fashion the heartache, fear, anger, hurt, and raw vulnerability that I have experienced in similar situations and that still wells up in me during bad times.

Weirdly, this almost took me aback. In contrast to how much visibility, acknowledgement, and public support trans people have begun to experience over the past few years, the reality of the experiences I heard this evening was a clear display of just how much further we need to go as a society so that trans people aren’t suffering the way these people are… and the way I do as well.

In addition to this, I have felt that with as much acceptance as trans people have been getting lately (compared to even just five years ago), there is now a backlash. There is now a staunch, focused outrage about us, and with the most recent election, and the reaction elicited from this election… be it hate crimes, hate speak, or just amplified hatred in general… things with transpeeps have taken a step back. And it’s scary for us, even more so than the usual day to day is.

And so I’m writing today to implore everyone to seek a deeper understanding, to strive for an abundance of love, and to truly embrace those good people who happen to be different from you. Help acceptance grow. Help alleviate suffering. Help heal. Help in any way you can. There are people who truly need it, and help can only be achieved through a unified, concerted groundswell of effort, because there is seriously a mountain of work that still remains undone. Tonight proved this fact to me.

The good news here is that one mere minor step anyone takes in this direction can go hundreds of miles in helping someone out. If we all take that one minor step, think of how much bad can be eradicated.

Sincerest thanks to those of you who have already taken a step in this direction, be it large or small or many. You know not how much good you do. 

As always, much love to you all.

Flying Blind... But Still in the Air

"Of flight or fly, This choice is left ye, to resist or die."
- Alexander Pope

It's been about 6 months since my last inspirational and uplifting post, and over 7 months since my last post of any real substance. In that time I've experienced a kind of "shut down". Essentially I just couldn't process and/or deal anymore. I didn't know what else to do, so I tried to shut off my brain as best I could. Seemed reasonable... or not. Actually, I think that it was more of a defense mechanism than anything else.

You see, the majority of my thoughts during the past months just flat out hurt. They hurt to think about. They hurt to dwell on. The hurt to write about. I didn't want to get into it. I didn't want to think about being trans, or my place in the world, or just about anything really. I just wanted to be. If only.

Pretty much every bad thought about being trans had a few good kicks at my ribs (and/or my psyche) during that time, and writing about it would usually help to ease this. Writing would get these thoughts out into the open and help me to deal with them more. Writing would help me to see my way around them and maybe even find a solution buried in the ranting. In this case, however, writing made it worse, because I was thinking about an impossible situation even more than I had been. It mired me in The Bleak even more so than I was already. I couldn't do it. I no longer felt liberated and mentally cleansed after I was done writing. What I did feel was hopelessness, sorrow, and yet more hopelessness. Writing proved to be nothing more than an intense dwelling on the unattainable. I couldn't do it... and for years and years it had been my predominant way of coping.

What I have come to realize through this sunny stretch of time, is that what I want out of life is truly unattainable. I will never have it. And when you're hit with the realization that all you want out of life is the one thing that you can never have, it kind of leaves you in a "ready to die" kind of mode. Not a lot of fun. It was best not to exacerbate it. So, I shut my brain off to it and just tried to be... an especially black-or-white decision, since the alternative is NOT to be. Aren't I just SO fucking Hamlet-esque? Bleh.

The important thing here, however, is that through all of the shit... through all of the despair... through all of the life-loathing thoughts of suicide... I still plodded on. I still tried to be. I still tried to exist. Even when it seemed like everything in my world was telling me not to.

The key to this was staving off my constant thoughts of trans-like issues in any way that I could. Old bad habits resurfaced – overeating, smoking, not caring that I was overeating and/or smoking. The last of these being the most telling indicator of where my head was at. I mean, can you really give a shit that you've gained 20 pounds or that you're killing yourself slowly with cigarettes when you're just out and out apathetic about the very concept of being alive? If so, I'd have to think that it's pretty damn difficult to do.

All of the above came about (in short) because I truly realized what I stated earlier: I can never have the only thing in life that I ever really wanted, and the only thing in life that I really care to get out of it. Never. It's not going to happen. Ever. Never. Ever. Ever.

So... now what?

Well, here comes the part of my life where I completely reassess what I hope to get out of it, what I'm looking to attain in this world, and what steps I can/should take to salvage something good from the rubble of my utterly smashed hopes and dreams. It's quite literally cultivating a change of my entire perspective on the world and my place in it, AND doing this while still dealing with the fact that I'm oh-so desperately trans. I mean, that feeling isn't going to go away (and from what I've seen, it's only going to get worse). So, how do I deal with this issue – THE issue – inside these new parameters?

Well, first things first.

I am throwing away the lens that I used to view my life for so many years. I have to find a new one, and I don't think that's going to be a swift process. Until that time, however, I have to be okay with the fact that I don't have any real idea of where I'm going. I mean, it's hard to know where you're going when you can't even see.

Be well.

An Update

I haven't been on here in a while, so I figured I'd at least pop in and give an update. The update will actually tell why I haven't been blogging here. It's short, sweet, and to the point. The following is an excerpt from a "catching up" e-mail that I sent to a friend recently.

I'm also at the point where I don't know that this life thing is all it's cracked up to be. I've been fairly apathetic about being alive these days. I have no real reason to live and absolutely nothing to look forward to. Then there's the whole being 6'4" and trans thing to kind of take the wind out of any sails that I have. I've been pushing and pushing to make things happen with it, and I find myself going in circles... if not outright going backward. I am just completely mentally exhausted and I can't find A reason to push myself anymore... especially because I'm realizing more and more that what I'm pushing myself for is a total and complete fantasy that can never be achieved. It's the only thing that even matters to me... and it's a completely hopeless endeavor. It's the only thing on my mind... and I am SO miraculously tired of thinking about it. It governs everything in my life, it's never going to go away, and in fact, it only gets harder and harder to deal with. This is what I have to look forward to. It'd be different if I hadn't tried a million different things to make it better. But I've been fighting and fighting for years now, and losing... time after time... and things are only getting worse. It is DESTROYING me. Quite literally. And I don't know what else (if anything) I can do about it. I don't even know what's left to try, and more to the point, why I should even bother. It's never going to go away. Never. And, as I said, I am so, SO tired of dealing with it. I can't even explain the depth of the pain these days. I'm not even sure how I deal with it. I guess it's just a one day at a time type thing. I don't really know.

These same sentiments have been expressed to a couple different people, none of whom really know what to tell me at this point. And the hope wanes more and more.

Be well.