My Script!
02-05-01
I only put up the script for my T* and not the one for the syringes...I mean, really, who cares about the syringes. Hehehe...in two weeks, I get to self-inject!!!!! The nurse was all like, "You're going to have to get someone to do this for you b/c it's hard to see where the veins are back there." (For those of you just tuning in, you have to inject this stuff in your upper thigh/buttock muscle.) And I'm thinking,'okay, yeah, right, who am I gonna get to do this? My boyfriend can't stand the sight of blood, much less sticking a needle in my ass. My mom...okay, yeah *nods sarcastically* Do you want your mom wielding a needle anywhere around your butt? I mean, after all the crap you've put her through? This just seems like an open invitation for revenge doesn't it? *Sigh* Well, if I can shave without slicing my jugular, I can put a needle in my deriere.
"Why're you doing this?"
"T'piss people off." - Robert DeNiro to Cuba Gooding Jr. in Men of Honor.
"Don' worry 'bout de regrets in ya life, Bobby. Y'can work out regrets. It's de 'what if's' dat'll get ya." -Remy LeBeau, fanfiction page.
I started HRT November 30th of 2000, the last days of a millennium. I can't tell you the adrenaline that coursed through my veins as they plunged 50 mg of depo into my upper thigh.
It was as if I'd been walking for five years, most of it in the darkness and all the time, I could see my goal far off in the distance. It was close enough that I knew I could get there if I only continued on, but far enough away to make me look back and think, 'I could just turn around now.'
I'd walked in the darkness, emerged into the light and still somewhat dumbfounded by the brightness and caught up in the journey, I'd reached my destination.
I was no moron to think that starting shots was an end-all to my worries. I knew they were simply going to make it worse with the hassles they would bring on. And as the adrenaline pumped through my body, so did the fear.
I'd just made the biggest decision of my life. I'd reached my goal, this huge, ornate oak door that towered over me, shoved it open and was suddenly blinded by the brightness on the other side.
I realized with stunning accuracy that I didn't know where the hell I was going.
I spent the next two weeks b/t shots somewhat frantic. You see, all journeys must come to an end, but when mine did, when I reached my goal of starting transition, I didn't have another journey to start.
I don't know exactly what I'm trying to say.
Do I wonder everyday if I made the wrong decision?
Yes. I joked with my boyfriend that, unlike him, I'd never had the luxury of knowing who I am or what I wanted. My orientation has bounced all over the damn boards and though my life reads like a text book transsexual, I've never felt completely male or completely female. I'm an anomaly. Or atleast that's how I've viewed myself. Genderless. That's what I like. Of Being Without Gender.
I grew up around many strong women who inturn tried to raise me as a strong woman, and I grew up with an undying desire to do boy things. Society humored me for the longest time for my talents at crossing the gender lines, but always they told me that one day I would have to grow up to become a woman and do woman things and wear dresses and have kids...my response was in turn, 'fuck that.'
I could never look in the mirror and see myself as an old woman. Even one of those old butch dykes that wear their salt and pepper gray hair in a classy prep-boy way and their leather jackets like armour and insignia in the world.
To say I wanted to be a boy? Yeah, so no one would harrass me for the things I did. So I'd be acceptable. But that was then. Society, even alot of the trans society said to be a little boy I had to grow up to be a proper little man. To have a wife, two kids, a dog, to go hunting and drink beer with my buddies. To which, though it took me a while, I replied, 'fuck that.'
I think I'm grieving. I grieve the strong little boy/girl that got caught up in all this binary gender shit. I grieve the loss of innocence that that kid had to go through. I grieve the looks of disdain and that shame that that little kid had to deal with. I grieve my loss of normality.....forever. I dunno if I should really grieve that forever thing. I was never normal and people let me know it, but I had this idea in my head of what it'd be like. And, though I know it's thoroughly romanticized, I still want it damnit.
I'd like to know what it was like to wake up one morning and pull on the clothes you like, smile at the person in the mirror b/c it's you and walk out w/ out a care in the world other than school and your cheesy, teenage love life.
I've never had that luxury.
I've always looked in the mirror and wondered who I was. Always tried to look past the surface to what my face would look like after ten years on testosterone. What kind of man I'd make. Who I really was just under the surface of this skin that was so ill-fitted. I pulled on the clothes I didn't necessarily care anything about but could pass in and walked out the door, feeling hunted and insecure b/c who I am was determined largely by the clothing on my back and the way it fell across my body.
I worry alot because this isn't something you see alot of really...I mean, come on, almost everyone has a relative, however distant, that's gay. Not many people say "oh, yeah, that's my auntie gina. she used to be my uncle steve."
Primarily, the world still views transfolk as freaks, nuts, weirdos, whackos and child-molesters.
I happen to be of the mind that life is about learning lessons, and this is one of my big ones. I am what is not status quo in society. I defy certain boundaries and cross certain lines that some people believe shouldn't be crossed or defied. I have walked into society and become one of the people who are themselves for the sake of being themselves. I have fought and won this a hundred times over, but now, the fight is within myself. What I have been taught to be normal, I'm having to redefine. I have already redefined many of their ideas, now I have to redefine my own.
I wanted so much for so long to be normal and acceptable. A part of me still wants that and I'm slowing reconciling it; that it will always be just out of reach and that, in the end, it isn't for my greatest and higher good. I'm much more beneficial when I decide to fuck with society instead of be a part of it.
When they say you can't have something, you'll fight for it just to prove them wrong.
But in all that fighting and proving them wrong, I came to find out that maybe I need to stop saying I can't have so many things and prove myself wrong.
On the drive down...
11-2-00
have honey, will smear - magnetic poetry book
I keep running through the scenario of what it will be like to get my first shot. I wonder what it'll feel like. Will it sting when they give me the injection? Will it burn? What am I gonna do during the 2 hr drive back?
I'd really like J- to go w/ me, but I'm not sure. I worry I harp on my GD too much. I mean, I'm ansy, as it is, right. God forbid I get down there early. Geez, do you know how nervous I am going to be on the 30th?
I dunno, I'm thinking maybe I'll go alone cause I feel this to be a journey I'm making alone. Butn then again, I wonder if thats just me not letting anyone in, that-I don't need anyone attitude. How strange. To think of going down there for something this big. Driving down there and going in and have info explained to me and then a nurse or the doc telling me to drop trou and plunging a needle into my thigh.
Having an oil based chemical injected into my muscle that will change my life permanently, paying some fucked up amount of money for that and then what? what am I going to do? drive home? go drive around atlanta? maybe go to Outwrite and have coffee?
Geez...what do you do after you start shots?
"Wanna go to the Waffle House and get something to eat, babe?"
I think I'd like it if he went with me. I'd babble incessantly though. Maybe I'd do something to celebrate. I dunno. Maybe I'll curl up in a little ball and cry in the backseat of my car.
I'm thinking I'd like to go down, get the shot and then go to a WH, maybe have a cigarette to celebrate. Maybe I'd just be really quiet and pull out my journal to record the whole of the experience.
Maybe I'll come home and get drunk.
I wonder what it's going to feel like the first days, the first few shots...what's going to happen first?
On Endocrinology...
Mid-October
"If you're going to do something, you might as well go big." - Marc'ism on Charlie Beales.
"I'm an educated virgin." - Wallflowers
When I was ten and in day-care, one of the teachers there happened to say, "You should have been a boy." I almost started crying right there. Instead, I managed to make it to the little cabin at the bottom of the playground that no one would go in cause...actually, I don't know why no one would go in it. I thought it was a kinda cool place. So, I cried for a little while and wished I was a boy and then, like most kids, I went on with my life.
So now I'm eighteen and in a month and a half, I'll be driving two hours to see an endocrinologist about starting hormone replacement therapy, the process that will finally allow me to grow a decent pair of sideburns and the cheesy teenage mustache I've been dreaming of. Such is the life of this sweet little transgendered boy.
That being said, I'm scared. This whole thing is so big. I feel in my short life, I have made many drastic steps and while I have learned greatly from them, none seemed to carry with it this much fear and this much finality. In many ways, the events of my life have made me wise beyond my years, but at the same time, I am still just a kid. I'm eighteen and the step I'm about to take is much life having children. It's a life commitment. I want this more than anything. I want this for the peace it will bring between my mind and ill-fitted body. Once it begins however, it's forever. So I stand at this precipice in my life, starring off at the craggy terrain below and I wonder if my wings are strong enough to support me and let me fly.
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