just another drop in the ocean…

So I don’t know if this will help, or make me feel worse, but I’m finding it difficult to deal with the present moment so I need to do something – anything – to avoid sinking lower.

Earlier this year I realized something about myself that I could no longer deny. I am transgender. It was the most intense thing I’ve ever experienced to have all of these things just click in a moment, and then no matter what I did, it was all I could think about.

At first, I just thought about what it would be like to have been born the gender I felt I was, and that made me happy. But it was a fantasy, and I knew it could never be a reality.

But then I started watching transition videos on youtube, and reading up more and more on transition, until I couldn’t think about anything else. It felt like my only option was to transition. It was transition, or … I can’t even think of second option because I couldn’t go on living the empty husk of a life I had lived up until that point, trying to convince the world, and myself, that I was the gender that I was born as.

Since then it has been a rollercoaster ride of 90%pain and terror and 10% hope. On days like today, that 10% has reduced to almost nothing, and I have the undeniable urge to just end it. But I don’t want to ‘commit suicide’ – I just want it to end.

I want to stop. Cease functioning. But not ‘die’. I don’t have many people who would care if I was to die, but I have a few, and I don’t want them to think they could have stopped it, or that it’s their fault. I don’t want them to be saddened by my passing. I want them to just go on living, normal, happy lives. Instead, what I want more than anything right this moment, is to vanish without a trace of ever having existed… into a void of nothingness.

While we’re wishing for impossible things, I’d prefer to just be ‘fixed’. For the world to see me how I feel. For the world to accept me, not as trans, or as my assigned gender, but for who I am. But that may never happen. Chances are, I will never ‘pass’, and people will treat me like a leper, a thing to be avoided. If I felt lonely before, I can’t even imagine how lonely I’ll feel after.

The pressure inside is just too great. There are all these pressures coming from every direction and I can’t deal. It’s too much for me to handle. I have full-time work, Monday to Friday, draining my life and adding to my depression. I have to pretend, all day. Wear a mask, while I’m crying inside every time somebody genders me incorrectly.

But I need to work, so that I can afford to do anything that offsets my depression a little – whether I need to pay for transition, or bills, or rent.  I’m in a trap of pain and there is no relief anywhere. No loved one who understands no comfort after a hard day. There’s just pain and more pain. There’s present pain, and then the promise of future pain, and the burden of past pain, and how the fuck am I meant to want to live?

I feel like I’m punishing everyone I know by coming out as trans. They all suddenly have to deal with the fact that I’m an abnormality, that I was born incorrect and that my entire life now will be a pathetic attempt to right a wrong that I had no control over. My parents think it’s something they did. My friends – the few left – care, but not enough to really warrant anything substantial. They’ll cry for a little while, and move on, and reminiscence about their trans friend who offed themselves because it all got too hard, and how they wished I had opened up to them.

But I’ve tried and they don’t want to hear how hard it is. All they can do is nod and pretend to understand and what can I expect from them? What else could they do?

But I couldn’t go on pretending that I wasn’t different, that was even harder. But now, what was general anxiety brought on by not fitting in is a deeper anxiety about being completely ostracized at any moment. Like the whole world will look at me one day as I’m transitioning and just say no. And part of me is okay with that. Part of me wants the world to just execute me, throw me off a cliff, or a bridge.

At least then I wouldn’t need to do it.

But it isn’t just work. Acknowledging that I am trans has made me lonelier than ever. I just want love, I want acceptance and love and I want to look in the mirror and see me and that’s it, and every day, I feel further and further away from that, and I just, I can’t do this anymore.

I keep trying to hang on a little further, a little more. My doctor is prescribing HRT in a week, and it’s been nothing but delay after delay, hurdle after hurdle. I desperately want to try the HRT because I’ve heard it gets rid of this endless wave of terror and depression but what if it doesn’t?

I don’t even want to know. I just want to be gone. I want to be gone and forgotten in a single instant and all that would be left is this anonymous message on a website – with no human having ever written it.

I wish I could make that so.

I just wish I had one meaningful connection. One relationship that mattered. One person that I could call, who would understand me, and who loved me, and whom I loved, and who could hug me now and tell me that it will be okay, even if it won’t be.

But all I have is my bed, and an endless torrent of darkness that will continue till the weekend ends, and then it’s off to work to feel even fucking worse.

I’m sorry; I honestly hope I haven’t brought anybody down. I don’t know who reads this, but maybe my shitty existence can make you feel somewhat better about yours, and hell, if that’s the case, at least I was useful in some way.