A Mind Asleep

I went to the Bans Off Our Bodies march alone. I guess no one is really “alone” at a protest march. There were lots of other people there, but I felt alone, even being surrounded by so many people. A stage had been constructed on Constitution at the east end of the National Mall. I sat by myself in the grass with the Washington Monument to my back. We all had our backs to the monument—the massive phallus jabbing into the sky—as we listened to the women on stage tell stories about their lives. A middle aged woman told us about when she decided to abort a pregnancy—a child they had wanted—in order to spare the rest of her family. The child would have been born with a heart condition that would not have allowed him to live very long, and the child would have required constant and expensive care until he died. Caring for the child would have consumed all of the family’s time and wealth. Her 7 year old son would have been left to fend for himself for years as the adults busied themselves w...

A Letter to Myself  My therapist suggested I write a letter to my younger self as part of the process of grieving the parts of myself I had to abandon for the first part of my life. In the process of writing the letter, it hit me how much I had lost. The difficulty I experienced due to gender dysphoria on a day-to-day basis was really astounding. I had no idea what was going on, but it affected me on a deep level. I was not OK for most of my life. I powered through and made it work, but I was definitely not OK. I think part of coping with having to not be myself was denial of both the root problem (gender dysphoria) and denial of how bad my mental health was. Coming to terms with my gender dysphoria was fairly easy. The realization of how much I've lost in the past 40 years because of my depression and other mental health issues has been much more traumatic. Writing this helped me to come to terms with some of it. There really was no way around it, as I point out to my younger self...