Life at the moment
Life is proving a bit wobbly at the moment. I'm not completely sure about my mental health right now and it bugs me a bit. I think that probably most of it is me feeling a bit worthless after all the other stuff I've written about recently and I'm starting to take that out on myself by doing stuff that probably isn't probably good for me.
On the plus side, my sleeping pattern has deteriorated and then slipped through the night. I'm now waking up quite early and that means I have peaceful quiet time to sit and code. I'm finding that the coding is going quite well, though I still feel a lot of the time that I'm not very good at it.
I'm feeling a bit drained by everything. My emotions are still cycling from not being able to have children. Sometimes it's just purely that, sometimes I find a way to make peace with things and live with myself. It's weird. However, the peaceful periods don't tend to last very long.
I'm not entirely sure why, but it looks like two things are interfering. I'm not sure how big in and of themselves they are and whether they are major things in their own right, or whether they're parts of the same thing that makes me feel bad. I guess that's what this post is about.
So, the first one is remembering childhood stuff. This ties in with working at the school and working in general, not standing up for myself and other such things. Pre-surgery, I didn't have much of a problem doing that. However, I had the support of my parents to fall back on and that was the main cause of my strength. As I'm preparing to leave, I'm starting to realise just how much that support has meant to me.
I always thought that I'd get along fine. I managed it back before, in my twenties and always thought that, if I could cope by myself, while undergoing major mental illness due to gender dysphoria, I'd be easily able to cope once I sorted that out.
Only, I worry that, with the not being able to have children stuff, that's never going to happen. I'm realising that the support of your parents gets changed into the support of your partner. I'm screwed without that and transition just makes me feel even more dependent. It doesn't help that my body is saying "become more dependent, so you can have the babies you want" and it isn't helping that, even were I to want to adopt, I'd have to be dependent on a partner anyway.
The idea terrifies me. But lots of women do it and suffer few bad effects. On the other hand, they usually get to be the mother of someone's child and cherished for that. I can't see that happening to me, ever.
Sometimes, I can see myself as the mother of a child, anyone's child, in terms of adoption. That scares me, though, in the sense I don't think I would bond and the disconnect between "I would totally love my own child, if I had one" and "I don't think I can love anyone" is starting to get a little odd and it's making me wonder why.
It's also a bit odd in that, before the surgery, I used to be fine about loving the world and making everyone in it my child, in that sense. It kinda worked for me and I enjoyed it. It kept me sane and I'm not sure what's happening now that I feel like that's permanently gone from me.
I guess part of it is that, well, I've always hoped that I could get some of that expression through work. I could love the people around me and be useful and successful that way. But that's not how work works. There are professional boundaries and if I try that, someone will take it away from me as inappropriate anyway. So I've learnt not to do that.
Another part of that, however, may also be something to do with my childhood and how I was brought up. I'm starting to realise that a lot of the sadness I felt when I was very little, a lot of the emptiness, came from knowing I wouldn't be able to have children when I was young. By young, I mean around 7/8.
I can remember those things and all of that seemed to have crystallised when I went to secondary school. I certainly felt sad about stuff I could not quite identify and some of that stuff feels very similar to the childlessness stuff I'm going through now.
Given that I'm feeling that I'm useless, worthless and deserve to die because of it, I'm kinda terrified about how that affected me when I was young and, looking back, the answers are not good.
I have no emotional connection to huge chunks of my emotions and schooling period. When I was working in the school, they was an assumption that you use your appreciation of childhood, in which you were taught well, and you use that to become a good teacher.
I have to say, I wouldn't trust those parts of my childhood. They were uniformly bad. If I used that as a template for dealing with children, I would not handle it very well. I haven't been handling it well. I'm starting to realise that all of that is causing me to bottle a lot of stuff up and not talk to people. And I need to. I need to at least make certain actions based on this, otherwise, I'm going to tear myself up inside and explode.
On the plus side, my sleeping pattern has deteriorated and then slipped through the night. I'm now waking up quite early and that means I have peaceful quiet time to sit and code. I'm finding that the coding is going quite well, though I still feel a lot of the time that I'm not very good at it.
I'm feeling a bit drained by everything. My emotions are still cycling from not being able to have children. Sometimes it's just purely that, sometimes I find a way to make peace with things and live with myself. It's weird. However, the peaceful periods don't tend to last very long.
I'm not entirely sure why, but it looks like two things are interfering. I'm not sure how big in and of themselves they are and whether they are major things in their own right, or whether they're parts of the same thing that makes me feel bad. I guess that's what this post is about.
So, the first one is remembering childhood stuff. This ties in with working at the school and working in general, not standing up for myself and other such things. Pre-surgery, I didn't have much of a problem doing that. However, I had the support of my parents to fall back on and that was the main cause of my strength. As I'm preparing to leave, I'm starting to realise just how much that support has meant to me.
I always thought that I'd get along fine. I managed it back before, in my twenties and always thought that, if I could cope by myself, while undergoing major mental illness due to gender dysphoria, I'd be easily able to cope once I sorted that out.
Only, I worry that, with the not being able to have children stuff, that's never going to happen. I'm realising that the support of your parents gets changed into the support of your partner. I'm screwed without that and transition just makes me feel even more dependent. It doesn't help that my body is saying "become more dependent, so you can have the babies you want" and it isn't helping that, even were I to want to adopt, I'd have to be dependent on a partner anyway.
The idea terrifies me. But lots of women do it and suffer few bad effects. On the other hand, they usually get to be the mother of someone's child and cherished for that. I can't see that happening to me, ever.
Sometimes, I can see myself as the mother of a child, anyone's child, in terms of adoption. That scares me, though, in the sense I don't think I would bond and the disconnect between "I would totally love my own child, if I had one" and "I don't think I can love anyone" is starting to get a little odd and it's making me wonder why.
It's also a bit odd in that, before the surgery, I used to be fine about loving the world and making everyone in it my child, in that sense. It kinda worked for me and I enjoyed it. It kept me sane and I'm not sure what's happening now that I feel like that's permanently gone from me.
I guess part of it is that, well, I've always hoped that I could get some of that expression through work. I could love the people around me and be useful and successful that way. But that's not how work works. There are professional boundaries and if I try that, someone will take it away from me as inappropriate anyway. So I've learnt not to do that.
Another part of that, however, may also be something to do with my childhood and how I was brought up. I'm starting to realise that a lot of the sadness I felt when I was very little, a lot of the emptiness, came from knowing I wouldn't be able to have children when I was young. By young, I mean around 7/8.
I can remember those things and all of that seemed to have crystallised when I went to secondary school. I certainly felt sad about stuff I could not quite identify and some of that stuff feels very similar to the childlessness stuff I'm going through now.
Given that I'm feeling that I'm useless, worthless and deserve to die because of it, I'm kinda terrified about how that affected me when I was young and, looking back, the answers are not good.
I have no emotional connection to huge chunks of my emotions and schooling period. When I was working in the school, they was an assumption that you use your appreciation of childhood, in which you were taught well, and you use that to become a good teacher.
I have to say, I wouldn't trust those parts of my childhood. They were uniformly bad. If I used that as a template for dealing with children, I would not handle it very well. I haven't been handling it well. I'm starting to realise that all of that is causing me to bottle a lot of stuff up and not talk to people. And I need to. I need to at least make certain actions based on this, otherwise, I'm going to tear myself up inside and explode.