(no subject)
This is quite long and probably would benefit from editing, but I'm probably not going to manage that. Sorry in advance!
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Miriam and I had a great conversation that resolved a failure of communications that had been going on for quite some time.
Miriam and I (really, 90% Miriam) have been trying to find technical solutions that will allow us to be social. Most recently, she's looked at elastomeric respirators and PAPRs such as the ones by CleanSpace. We looked at the options together last night and my mood crashed. For her, it was another in a long line of upsetting instances of her trying to find compromises that will let us be social in some way and none of them being good enough for me.
Meanwhile, I'd been thinking about how various kinds of interaction would work while wearing one of these. I'd had a lot of hope. But looking at the options available, I despaired. They look so weird; especially the elastomerics we were looking at. There are PAPRs that are much less obtrusive, but they're so very expensive.
So I crashed, and she was frustrated and sad. We talked on the couch and it came out that she has been feeling like this is about vanity for me. That I don't want to go anywhere unless I have a mask that will still let people see my face because I finally feel pretty sometimes lately. But I don't feel pretty; at least, not about my face. It's really about how people would react to me wearing one of these. I didn't use the analogy, but I feel like I'll look like one of those people who wear tinfoil hats to protect against mind control and people will treat me accordingly. Miriam suggested that the answer to this is therapy to help me with my life-long fear of taking up social space. That it's really hard for me to be trans in public, and masking on top of it makes that so much worse, and that therapy might be able to help.
She's not wrong about that at all. But, in fact, that's not actually what I'm most distressed by.
I took a nap for about an hour so my brain would start working again, and Miriam came in to join me. We snuggled and were both feeling better emotionally, and I asked if I could talk about the masking and my concerns again. She was up to that.
I expressed that therapy wasn't going to change the fact that I can't kiss people. That I'd been trying to imagine how dating or hooking up would go while wearing something like this and it feels incredibly awkward. And even if people were interested, it's hard to imagine having sex with someone and having no contact with them with my mouth or face. A big part of my distress is having this experience of fundamental sexual awakening that's come with my transition while being unable to do anything about it. The idea of not being able to do this for the rest of my life is deeply distressing, and it's not something that these compromise solutions have addressed. I'd expressed that this was something that was important to me, but I did not do so clearly enough.
I'm embarassed that sex is so important to me, and I think that's a big part of why I have failed to be clearer about it. The trans FB groups I'm in have so many people talking about dating and sex feeling right for the first time or posting salacious memes about things that I couldn't do because of Covid, and it hurt deeply. Someone in the local support group was talking about poly and trans relationships and it literally feel like an icy dagger in my chest, thinking that I could never have that.
I'd wanted these experiences my entire life, but eventually concluded that I just couldn't have them because they wouldn't work for me, and had gone terribly and traumatically wrong when I tried. Eventually, I found the term demisexual and decided that that must be me.
But I'm *really* not demi; I just didn't know how to relate to people that way as a boy. I'm nearly certain it would be different now. The thought of this entire array of experiences finally being accessible to me in one way but being closed in another, possibly for the rest of my life, really made me despair for my future. If the kind of life I'd wanted for decades would forever be teased in front of my face, just out of reach because of Covid, I really felt like the only thing in my life that made my future feel worth having was Miriam, whose presence in my life was simultaneously the thing keeping me from what I wanted.
As I've expressed to her months before, Covid and isolation is the first thing in our ten-plus years together that's made me think about whether I want to continue to be with her. I really, really do, but for the first time, I thought seriously and consciously about it. (For her part, Miriam was pleased to hear that I was thinking of and prioritizing myself in that way. We both think it's healthy for a relationship to be a continuing choice.)
I do want to stay, but having to make the choice of Miriam vs. trying to have the kind of social and sexual life I've always wanted sucks so much.
And my father's death and other losses lately have made me keenly aware of two relevant things. I have a limited amount of time left to me, and if I don't find more connections in my life, I'm eventually going to end up pretty alone, as as my mother seems and some of my parents' friends and connections seem to be. The thing I want to pursue most in my life right now is connections with other human beings. Friends, lovers, and whatever else is in between and beyond those things. And honestly, I worry that the state of the world is going to degrade in such a way that the kinds of community and relationships I want may become much more difficult. Shit's scary out there.
So Miriam understands now that it's not that I won't want to be social while wearing a big ugly elastomeric mask. In fact, I really *do* want to be social in any way I can be, and I look forward to those masks getting here so I can do *something, anything* with other people again. She also understands why those masks weren't resolving one of my fundamental sources of despair.
We're going to figure out how this can happen for me. Probably something like a schedule where I can do something risky and follow that up with days of wearing an elastomeric mask in the house and staying in the spare room. I'm building a Corsi-Rosenthal box that should provide something like 7 changes of air per hour in our condo. I have ethernet in that bedroom now so I can move my computer there if necessary. We're putting a small daybed in that room too so I can sleep there if necessary. Once all these things come together, we can think and talk more about how I want to proceed. This is really hard and scary for her because of long Covid, but she empathizes and really wants this for me too and I appreciate her so much.
I have hope for the future in ways that I haven't for a long time now, and have been feeling a lot more functional these past couple days because of it. The sense I've sometimes had that I'd have been better off I hadn't figured out I'm a girl because at least then I didn't know what I wanted, could have, and was missing, is reduced tremendously.
I think that maybe, soon, I'll be able to start being a part of those FB groups and the local support group again. They've given me so much pain, seeing other people doing things I can't, that I've self-isolated from the first places that have ever made me feel like I'd truly found my people.