Still alive
I kinda fell off the internet again. I was really burnt out and barely made it to Spring Break. I restarted T the week before break because I was a nervous wreck. By then, I'd been having negative effects from stopping for about two weeks, and I couldn't cope anymore. I'm going to make a T update kind of post about the whole thing, but the short version was that it was not pretty. I basically got to the same point I was at when I started, unable to function without it. I'll admit though, the first ten days or so were a valuable and hardly excruciating experience (that I have no plans to repeat any time soon).
I slept through most of the break and basically got nothing done but felt somewhat refreshed at the end. I'm pretty much abandoning the project I've been working on for the past six months, which puts me at risk of not being able to take my comprehensive exam at the end of the summer, but I don't feel like I have much of an option. Right before break, I made an appointment to talk to the head of the grad program and explained the problem. It's not that I don't have time for research. It's that I have only a few hours each day of peak mental productivity, and I can hardly get anything done like that, at lest not on something so abstract. At our meeting, he told me that my advisor had just contacted him asking if I was alright, and he'd told her to go easy on me. It's not what I want, but it may be what I need. I don't know if this is awkward or expected given how I came out to him, but we have not said a word about it IRL and barely a reference has been made in e-mails. Related: I need to write a coming out letter to my advisor and have been putting it off for almost two weeks. . . another thing I need but don't want, apparently.
Speaking of things I don't want but may need, I scheduled a consult for top surgery. I figure it couldn't hurt to have everything set up just in case, or rather, it can only hurt up to $100 and a day in the car. I've been very preoccupied with making a decision about this. I spend more and more time shut in at my partner's instead of in my office because at work I either am too anxious about not binding or have trouble breathing while binding. (I wish I knew if it was psychosomatic, but I don't know whether that would make a difference in what I decide to do. It doesn't feel like an anxiety attack though. It feels like pressure keeping my lungs from inflating.) Then there's the deadline of my insurance getting shittier after August, so getting it done before then would be free but getting it done after would be. . . expensive. I think I can get the money together regardless though, so that's a dumb thing for me to worry about. I also think about how my results will be better the sooner I do this, because I will heal better now than I will in the future just because of how aging works, and my skin elasticity will continue to degrade as long as I'm binding. Maybe that's another reason why I spend so much time at home not binding, because it's buying time for me to decide by halting the damage I'm doing to my chest.
I hate that this is a no-brainer for most trans guys. I wish I could have that. I was so gung-ho about it when I first found out it was possible, that something I thought up when I was 14 was actually real. I wanted surgery but not hormones then, ha! But I don't want to lose sensation, and I care about that much more than I think is reasonable. I know I'll have to accept the risk of not getting that back. It sounds like it's reasonably common to regain tactile and thermal sensation to some degree but erotic sensation seems to be almost universally out of reach. I don't care if I don't get to use it very often because of dysphoria -- I still feel entitled to it! I tell myself that maybe I can do this or that or the other thing to increase the chances of regaining sensation, but I am not an expert, so it's all bullshit. I almost wish I didn't have the knowledge of what it means to lose sensation, from a previous surgery. I was told it was a risk then, too; granted, it wasn't elective surgery, but I didn't give any thought to that possibility. I can't say I didn't try, but I think I do wish I'd succeeded in getting my surgeon to remove all of it in that previous surgery so I wouldn't have had the chance to drive myself crazy over the decision now and could have thought of it as necessary at the time. And that's where I'm going with this, waiting until it's as necessary as T was, essential to
I know it would make me healthier, and I think it would make me happier on a day-to-day basis. And yet, I keep coming up with weird conditions on that happiness. Like, I'd be okay with not getting my freakin' huge nipples resized if it meant retaining sensation, even though I wouldn't have the opportunity to be shirtless in public. I can imagine myself making that decision and feeling like it was the right thing to do, but I can also see a future in which I go the whole nine yards and become a normal guy who doesn't shy away from swimming, for example. What really gets me is that I can conceive of a universe in which I am not judged as female for having breasts and being totally fine with my chest being visible under clothes, so long as it is 1) small enough to not have to endure skin touching skin and 2) immobilized such that I don't feel the sickening jiggling when I move. (I feel similarly okay with some unfeminine women's clothes I have that fit me better than the men's versions with or without binding, but I'm too afraid to wear them because I don't want to be perceived as female just because I like plain clothes that fit well. I've been e-mailing back and forth with a non-binary friend who has similar feelings about its beard but is nonetheless considering permanent hair removal, so I'm not totally isolated with these feelings.)
Anyway, I don't want to go into this unless I'm confident I won't regret it, even if my regular doctor, endo, and therapist are falling over themselves to write me a letter. I don't know what I'm going to say to the surgeon when we meet, but I have six weeks to figure it out. Maybe the surgeon will turn out to be a really good salesperson and totally win me over. In the meantime, I should do that work I was doing before it occurred to me that I'd think better after getting this out. I'm hoping I'll have enough spoons to catch up with folks here a bit this weekend.
I slept through most of the break and basically got nothing done but felt somewhat refreshed at the end. I'm pretty much abandoning the project I've been working on for the past six months, which puts me at risk of not being able to take my comprehensive exam at the end of the summer, but I don't feel like I have much of an option. Right before break, I made an appointment to talk to the head of the grad program and explained the problem. It's not that I don't have time for research. It's that I have only a few hours each day of peak mental productivity, and I can hardly get anything done like that, at lest not on something so abstract. At our meeting, he told me that my advisor had just contacted him asking if I was alright, and he'd told her to go easy on me. It's not what I want, but it may be what I need. I don't know if this is awkward or expected given how I came out to him, but we have not said a word about it IRL and barely a reference has been made in e-mails. Related: I need to write a coming out letter to my advisor and have been putting it off for almost two weeks. . . another thing I need but don't want, apparently.
Speaking of things I don't want but may need, I scheduled a consult for top surgery. I figure it couldn't hurt to have everything set up just in case, or rather, it can only hurt up to $100 and a day in the car. I've been very preoccupied with making a decision about this. I spend more and more time shut in at my partner's instead of in my office because at work I either am too anxious about not binding or have trouble breathing while binding. (I wish I knew if it was psychosomatic, but I don't know whether that would make a difference in what I decide to do. It doesn't feel like an anxiety attack though. It feels like pressure keeping my lungs from inflating.) Then there's the deadline of my insurance getting shittier after August, so getting it done before then would be free but getting it done after would be. . . expensive. I think I can get the money together regardless though, so that's a dumb thing for me to worry about. I also think about how my results will be better the sooner I do this, because I will heal better now than I will in the future just because of how aging works, and my skin elasticity will continue to degrade as long as I'm binding. Maybe that's another reason why I spend so much time at home not binding, because it's buying time for me to decide by halting the damage I'm doing to my chest.
I hate that this is a no-brainer for most trans guys. I wish I could have that. I was so gung-ho about it when I first found out it was possible, that something I thought up when I was 14 was actually real. I wanted surgery but not hormones then, ha! But I don't want to lose sensation, and I care about that much more than I think is reasonable. I know I'll have to accept the risk of not getting that back. It sounds like it's reasonably common to regain tactile and thermal sensation to some degree but erotic sensation seems to be almost universally out of reach. I don't care if I don't get to use it very often because of dysphoria -- I still feel entitled to it! I tell myself that maybe I can do this or that or the other thing to increase the chances of regaining sensation, but I am not an expert, so it's all bullshit. I almost wish I didn't have the knowledge of what it means to lose sensation, from a previous surgery. I was told it was a risk then, too; granted, it wasn't elective surgery, but I didn't give any thought to that possibility. I can't say I didn't try, but I think I do wish I'd succeeded in getting my surgeon to remove all of it in that previous surgery so I wouldn't have had the chance to drive myself crazy over the decision now and could have thought of it as necessary at the time. And that's where I'm going with this, waiting until it's as necessary as T was, essential to
I know it would make me healthier, and I think it would make me happier on a day-to-day basis. And yet, I keep coming up with weird conditions on that happiness. Like, I'd be okay with not getting my freakin' huge nipples resized if it meant retaining sensation, even though I wouldn't have the opportunity to be shirtless in public. I can imagine myself making that decision and feeling like it was the right thing to do, but I can also see a future in which I go the whole nine yards and become a normal guy who doesn't shy away from swimming, for example. What really gets me is that I can conceive of a universe in which I am not judged as female for having breasts and being totally fine with my chest being visible under clothes, so long as it is 1) small enough to not have to endure skin touching skin and 2) immobilized such that I don't feel the sickening jiggling when I move. (I feel similarly okay with some unfeminine women's clothes I have that fit me better than the men's versions with or without binding, but I'm too afraid to wear them because I don't want to be perceived as female just because I like plain clothes that fit well. I've been e-mailing back and forth with a non-binary friend who has similar feelings about its beard but is nonetheless considering permanent hair removal, so I'm not totally isolated with these feelings.)
Anyway, I don't want to go into this unless I'm confident I won't regret it, even if my regular doctor, endo, and therapist are falling over themselves to write me a letter. I don't know what I'm going to say to the surgeon when we meet, but I have six weeks to figure it out. Maybe the surgeon will turn out to be a really good salesperson and totally win me over. In the meantime, I should do that work I was doing before it occurred to me that I'd think better after getting this out. I'm hoping I'll have enough spoons to catch up with folks here a bit this weekend.