Shapeshifting for beginners – my first three weeks on T

Three weeks  ago today I had 1000mg 1M of Nebido, a slow-release formulation of testosterone, injected into the top of my right gluteous maximus muscle in my bum. My girlfriend held my hand, and as I felt the sharp prick of the needle and relaxed into a wave of satisfaction, she wept ine the power of the moment.

I have begun my shapeshifting journey by way of masculinising therapy and I am feeling my transformation from the inside out. So much is happening to me it feels, I have to say, sometimes overwhelming and I have an urge to bolt somewhere to safety while my body, mind and spirit transmutes. My organismic self has never felt so alive, boosted in turbocharge by a hormone it hasn’t ever felt in such abundance before.

The most profound change I have noticed so far is how I feel about myself. My self-belief has soared and my understanding of who and where and how I am in the world is becoming clearer to me. I am also more profoundly aware of my personal limits than ever before too and have been wrapped up with a constant ethical dialogue going on in my mind about how I am relating to my young clients. I still have not experienced any negative issues with the young people as they discover my new gender identity. As I expected I can get some very direct and personal questions, e.g. “will you have a willy?” to which I answer that I am not prepared to talk about my private parts in the same way as I would not ask them questions about their’s!!! Questions like “will you be able to get your girlfriend pregnant?” I answer with factual accuracy (erm… NO!) and I respect that the questions are asked to satisfy a natural curiosity about an area of difference that most have never come across personally before.

I get a sense that my openness is encouraging healthy mind-stretching about what it means ‘to be a man’ and questions of self-identity. It’s probably not surprising that many teenagers are intensely interested in seemingly existential challenges to this thing we call ‘self’ and what it means. These years are all about finding one’s own self-identity, separating out from parents and learning to be independent. I remember acutely those moments in my puberty first time round when it all went so horribly wrong and I was left with a fragmented and shattered sense of self. This time round I get the most amazing opportunity to do it in a way that is congruent with my gender-identity and I feel my sense of self has a much stronger integrity now. My boundaries feel clearer at a time when they appear so fuzzy. Wow, at three weeks this can only grow now and my shapeshifting mind-body-spirit continuum can morph and vibrate with a freedom I have only dreamt of before.

This week particularly I have felt some strong and powerful changes.  Some are subtle but intense, some are obvious and equally though differently intense. I am just going to list them here or else I’ll just get lost in the detail again and not finish what I set out to achieve in these wee small hours of a welcome Saturday morning. I am consciously working on having better endings in many aspects of my life and way of being now I am acutely self-conscious about my patterns of ambivalent attachment and my habit of starting things and not seeing them through properly!

1. “I’m liking your stronger hands” says my girlfriend, “they’re significantly stronger, maybe 40% stronger”. This is good news for her as she’s often complained that my massages are a bit too gentle and she likes it now I am feeling my physical power more  – as I do too – not in a ‘power-over’ way but in a ‘power-from-within’ way as Audre Lorde writes of in ‘Uses of the Erotic – the Erotic as Power’ (link to come).
2. my fingernails are significantly stronger too – my dad reckons I’ll soon be able to untighten screws without a screwdriver soon like he can!
3. I’m not crying so much and when I have done it’s more of a smarting stinging in my eyes instead of letting it all go like before
4. my libido is SOARING and it takes barely a hint of sexual connection or connotation for me to be set off on an intensely erotic moment – I feel this physically, coming on almost like a cramp. If it’s at an inappropriate time I have to deal with an uncomfortable wriggling awkwardness until the physical feeling passes. Sometimes it is purely a physical sensation of arousal that I can mentally ‘box’ using an old CBT trick on the brain until the feeling goes
5. I have moments of rash impulsivity and moments of reckless egocentricity – my girlfriend has again noticed these acutely!
6. my voice is deepening and is much easier to control at lower ranges – I had a wonderful time this evening in a candlelit bath discovering the new tones and sounds of my changing voice as I sung along to ‘Feeling Good’ by Nina Simone
7. my eyebrow growth has got thicker and more pronounced
8. it is much easier to climb stairs and exert physical energy – I am enjoying feeling my muscles growing and it feels good to flex them and develop them
9. My body fat is already shifting and my face is losing some across my cheekbones, my hips and legs are morphing perceptably
10. My sleep pattern is all out of kilter, I can find myself completely unable to sleep some nights and every week so far I have had at least one night like this. My timekeeping is consequently bad – it was already with the anti-depressants I am on but the T is having a definite and very challenging effect on my bodyclock – not good for my punctuality record at work!
11. My invisible whiskers are on constant alert, sensing the emotional reactions to from those around me, looking for threats and signs of hostility. It’s tiring and draining but it also carries a familiar adrenaline buzz for me. I feel more in control of my whiskers now than I ever did before I worked through my last PTSD episode - triggered three years ago when I went to the police 25 years after I was raped by my then sub-aqua/canoeing ‘coach’ at 15 years old
12. I am finding I am having to completely review and take stock of my entire emotional palette. What I have spent tweaking and tuning these last four years of my counselling training, through therapy, self-reflection, feedback from others, theoretical understanding and plenty of opportunities for learning in practice through my work with clients and people in general. I have this week expressed my anger in ways that are incredibly challenging to me and re-learning ways of self-regulation in the presence of new hormonal drivers is testing for me and for others around me – I hope I am a quick learner!
13. I believe in me more than ever EVER before

Sunny side up is how I want my stress please…

It’s hard to be cheerful all the time, with a genuine sunny smile. Some days I really don’t feel like that at all and I shrivel and curl up inside with my jaw grinding as methodically as I breathe. But at least you know that when I smile I mean it, and quite a few of my days come sunny side up now I am on the road to being me.

It’s just that my body is pissing me off big time right now. It’s like my physical boundary is disintegrating as my skin inflames, prickles, bleeds and scars. My left eye is infected, itchy and sore. My gut is feeling bad, I’m nauseous at times and I’m wondering if my ulcer is coming back. I probably didn’t do it any favours last Thursday when I drank the remainder of orange and mango juice from a carton that had been two weeks open in the fridge. Bad move when you’re already on the third stage of your employer’s sickness policy.

Stress comes out in me incredibly physically. My body mirrors the frantic pace of my survival thinking, but it struggles to keep up. All the cortisol and adrenaline that continues to pump around my blood is eating me up from the inside AND the outside it feels. It’s well documented that higher cortisol levels caused by chronic stress have particularly damaging effects on immune function and inflammatory response. Hence my difficulty in resisting infection and why my ezcema is so bad right now! Chronic stress is painful, a day in day out pain that flows like a river through you. Sometimes, often, it is a murmuring brook that trickles and meanders with you in daily life. Occasionally it deepens suddenly and you feel the dead cold of the bottom that you fear plunging into. Rarely, it blows your body into shutdown, causing you difficulty in breathing and momentary paralysis. My body’s responses to external stresses like threats are also on hyper-alert which is tiring and draining. My fight-flight-fright-freeze response has been fucked up over the years with various trauma and it takes a lot out of me when I feel under personal threat. I’ve felt more of that recently since I’ve been living as a guy and it’s a weird and scary thing being conscious of my vulnerability in a way I haven’t experienced before I did my counselling training and my own personal therapy.

I notice that in the come down from the adrenaline torrent I can get emotional. When I get emotional people around can’t help themselves but experience me as female again. The social pressure on guys not to cry is enormous and it profoundly changes the feeling of vulnerability I have when I get emotional now. Being a guy who cries carries more risks it feels than being a woman who is in tears.

Of course I mean MY body does this under chronic stress. Maybe your’s is different. But if you also have experienced chronic stress then you will connect with some part of what I feel. I am struggling right now with living with chronic stress as I try and recover from a serious depression and make the biggest single change of my life as I make my transition from female to male.

Like millions of other working people I am struggling to keep up with rising costs and debt repayments as wages freeze. My breakdown last year when my partner and I lost our home had many financial consequences and I am working with the National Debt Helpline to get a debt management plan together or face bankrupcy. These are shit hard times and I have a feeling it is going to get worse before it gets better. The stress of dealing with liability orders, baillifs, informing them all that I am no longer Ms or Miss, no I cannot make a payment right now, I live back with my parents and have no assets except my car and I need that for work etc etc. 

But, on the other hand, I am aggressively determined to find £350 between now and May so I can see a private gender consultant and get my testosterone therapy underway. It pisses me off massively that this amount of money is less than what I spend in a month to run the car I need for work. In fact the WHOLE of my debt is less than a quarter of my annual salary. But like loads of other people I just cannot get credit to make it an affordable monthly payment these days, so it can and has in my case, spiraled further and further out of control.

Can someone explain to me why exactly it was only the bankers that have been rescued by government bail-outs in this current recession? The ones who are responsible for this fucking mess! What I want in this coming general election is for someone to have the bollocks or sharp pointy heels to call for writing off a good chunk of personal debt for individuals (especially people made redundant), a freeze on all interest and charges, an end to criminally extortionate financial fees, interest and charges and to enable millions of customers to reclaim what they have been forced to pay these last years.

I am seething with Santander who have just taken four weeks to explain why the computer still says no to my reasonable request to have ‘Ms’ taken off my bank card. Their legal advisor has informed them that the bank is under no legal obligation to comply with my request until I have in my hand my Gender Recognition Certificate some year and a half down the line for me. What about their ethical or moral obligation to one of their customers? Do they think it is ok to put one of their customers in a position where they are embarassed or humiliated when they are challenged over possible fraud because the retailer sees a guy trying to use a woman’s card? Even worse I could be at risk of serious assault in that conflict situation. So I am off to the Co-Op who tell me they will have no such problem with my request! Plus I can now try and claim back all those bastard charges Santander and previously Abbey have extorted out of me these last four years.

But it’s stressful in the extreme when you’re fighting off the vultures who want to strip your bones when you’re weakened and down. I am also completely desperate to get out of this alien skin and create the physical form for my real core gender. When I say desperate I really mean it now. It feels like I cannot move any further forward without starting my testosterone and getting my breasts removed as soon as possible. I need my body to be healthy and resilient for the changes ahead and my stress is getting in the way of this. Not only that but the WAIT is doing my head in now. I have to pay for a private consulation because it could take me until the end of the year or beyond if I wait for the NHS to deliver. My now new GP has agreed to continue the prescription once I have seen a recognised gender specialist. This is now going to be happening at the beginning of May, indeed quite possibly the day after the next General Election. But at least it is NOW going to be happening and that brings me some tangible relief that I could be starting my testosterone soon. I can then turn and begin to truly face the world as myself.

I am stressed about being ill again when I am so trying to look after myself. I am tired of the insomnia I am wading through night after night after night. I need the turbocharge boost of testesterone surging through my body to see me through this profound transition. I mean business and I want to deliver. But my depression is tugging me back constantly, kept at bay with a high dose of citalopram and the knowledge that I am doing a good job at work, generally coping well and am now only a matter of a couple of weeks off finally qualifying as a therapeutic counsellor. But inevitable obstacles and some deeply intense moments of vulnerability have made me understand that I am still living with depression and in no way ‘cured’ when I have a string of good days one after the other. I have been referred to a doctor by my employer so my depression can be assessed to see if it falls under the Disability Discrimination Act. That would protect my employment rights as a worker with ongoing mental health issues because the last thing I need right now is to lose my job on top of everything else.

I will be following the General Election from the perspective of someone who wants to see social, economic, political, environmental and ethical justice in this ravaged world. I have my own agenda of course. I’m a 43 year old professional worker hit hard by the recession like many others. I value solidarity not selfishness. I celebrate the rich diversity of our communities in this country I don’t feel threatened by difference. I detest racism and other forms of prejudice. I work with young offenders and their families and I want to see the resources provided to keep children and young people safe while allowing them to be young, take risks, play, learn and not get criminalised for being young and making mistakes. I want to see investment in safe and secure temporary housing/short-term foster placements for young people in crisis, to see more resources provided for working therapeutically with children, young people and their families. I want to see a whole heap of creative and radical policies up there to choose from about how we can get from the pit of doom we’re tumbling into now to a future where it’s need not greed that dictates public spending and where we are respected as workers and human beings who should be valued and respected wherever we are born in the world.

Above all else I want life to be about good stress not bad. I get a buzz from the adrenaline of taking on challenges and working with different people that I can learn from. I love the buzz of being physical when you feel happy in your body … I felt that during my testeosterone spurt of middle-late childhood. I just cannot wait to feel that again but this time with an adult brain to assess risk and an emotional literacy I wasn’t at all capable of as a kid!!!

Climbing out of the Abyss – part 3b

Into the Abyss - Jeffrey S. Pearce

KAPOW!!! KAPOW!!! The next two cartoon sucker punches to my already reeling mind-body-spirit continuum came in quick succession in the middle of my first supervision session with my manager last week.

Regular readers will know that I am lucky to have a line-manager who has bent over backwards to make sure that I know I am supported. It was she who had coincidentally ‘been there’ in my moment of death-defying choice between self-anniliation or self-acceptance. Had she not been the wonderful, empathic and accepting human being she is, who knows where I would be right now?

Anyway, I’ve returned to work now – albeit I’ve finished my phased return and am using annual leave up to give me 3-day weeks up to the end of this month. I have reports allocated to me and young people and families to assess and prepare programmes of work for. I’m happy back at work, getting into the swing of things, doing what I enjoy which is working with children and young people who have been convicted of criminal offences.

The first KAPOW came when my boss told me I was the first transgendered person to come out in the city council I work for. People are scrabbling around updating policies and procedures and wanting to do the right thing by me – but I’m going to be the guinea pig it seems. I had no idea I would be the first. It took me back to my heady days after I had come out as a lesbian when I was 21 and at college. I had been elected Welfare Officer to our Student Union, and was the first out lesbian the SU had ever had as a Sabbatical Officer. And boy was I OUT!

There is a certain powerful rush of energy that comes with the liberatory feelings of self-acceptance and then coming out to others. It’s like a headrush of responsibility to know that you are blazing a trail for others along the way. I will not speak for other people unless I have been given permission or asked to advocate or elected to represent. I can only speak for myself. In the words of Che Guevara:

“I am not a liberator.

Liberators do not exist.

The people liberate themselves.”

Obviously I want to make sure that my experiencing transitioning is as positive as I can make it. I’m lucky that the council I work for is pro-active when they learn about a diversity issue that they have not had to deal with yet. I am also a Unison member and able to get support from the Unison LGBT Network and National Officer. I’m lucky that I am transitioning at a time when my trades union has already paved the way, learning from the experiences of others who have transitioned before me. Taken all together with the wonderful support I have had from my team-mates, my managers, my partner and family, and all the transgendered people I have been connecting with these last three months; I am one lucky guy!

The second KAPOW came straight after the first. Like I said before, I had been off work with a serious depression between August and December. I started back just before Christmas and have been on a roll ever since, getting into the swing of things. Then first week in January I get hit by the norovirus winter sickness virus that has spread through the residential care home where my Gran lives. She got this nasty bug on Christmas Day, bless her. Then in dashing to the loo with the bug I twisted and hurt my back, which all meant I was off bloody work again sick for a week. This has now triggered the Third Stage of the Sickness Policy at work so I will be having a meeting with my manager and someone from HR soon, actually the person who is whizzing around trying to get the transgender policies all up to speed!

In the course of the discussion I had about this with my manager, she mentioned that she had flagged up to HR that my depression might be considered under the Disability Discrimination Act….

KAPOW!!! I had never even considered that my lifelong struggle with depression would be counted as a disability. I have long been an active supporter of the disability rights movement and I understood very well how people with mental health problems face prejudice and discrimination as much as people with physical disabilities. But I had never considered this in relation to myself before. Ever.

It suddenly overwhelmed me quite how deep and pervasive my depression has been in my life, and how it is so closely intertwined with my gender identity issues that have been there for me in all likelihood since I was just a few cells attached to my mother’s womb. When it hits me like that I do one thing only and that is cry. So I had tears streaming down my face and my boss asking me if I wanted tissues – but if she went out she’d probably draw attention to me. I had to laugh – I’m such a blub sometimes when I get emotional. But it’s true it’s a big big thing to consider oneself disabled.

When I got home later I looked up the Disability Discrimination Act and how it relates to mental health problems. It’s true… my long-term problems with depression have been a disability for me, under the terms it is defined in the guidance I have seen on the MIND website http://www.mind.org.uk/help/rights_and_legislation/disability_discrimination

So I guess this will mean ANOTHER meeting soon!

Back to work

Back to work

Some more good news by the end of this last week…. I am going back to work on Tuesday! Went to the doc on Thursday and she signed me back fit. We had a discussion about the anti-depressants I’m on and I checked in with her about maintaining the dosage I’m taking. Because I’ve been feeling on a real high lately, I did have a thought about starting to reduce the citalopram. But that’ll come later….as things continue to improve… hopefully.

I then went to our occupational health nurse who could also see the dramatic change in my mood and confidence. She had no problems with me sorting out a phased return with my managers as I’d already talked through a plan for returning with my managers anyway on the informal hours I’ve been popping in these last few weeks to prepare myself for returning to work.

Now it’s agreed! I can get back this week, build up my hours over the next four weeks, and use the rest of my leave to pad out part-time weeks while we get the issue of my contracted hours sorted out – as I need to drop back to part-time hours from full-time (which needs a bit more creative thought in the current climate of job-hatcheting in local goverment!!).

Woohoo!!!!!!! It feels really good to be crossing that bridge back to some sort of normality on the job front again.

The second area where I’m going ‘back to work’ is another great breakthrough I’ve been waiting to be ready for with regards to my as yet uncompleted diploma in therapeutic counselling. I should have completed in summer 2008. But at the time everyone else was tying things together, reflecting on how much their training had impacted on them in a very personal way, changing the relationship they most importantly had with themselves, I had plunged into a relationship which had revealed in stark scary technicolour some aspects of myself that I was not ready at that time to face. It created a fundamental block which certain parts of myself absolutely resisted confronting. I guess looking back, that was where this most recent depression originated, in the brutal inner conflict that was exposed in the wounds of that relationship – at a time when I should have been wrapping everything up!

Anyway, I finally reconnected with my tutor a couple of weeks ago as I now feel that I am in the right place to get the work completed. What was so heart-warming was the way in which the college board and awarding body have been so utterly supportive of me. It had been a Great Mystery why I had dropped out at the very end of what is a heavily challenging course of study when I was recognised as a gifted trainee counsellor who always delivered good assignments and engaged well in all aspects of theory and practice.

The long and short of it is that I have been given an unprecedented extension to complete the two case studies and self-review outstanding by Easter. On completion of these and a bit of portfolio tweaking I am set to finally qualify Easter 2010.

So, it’s back to work again for me with a realistic plan of how I can get from here to where I want to be in a few months time. I’m sure some opportunities will come my way for developing some freelance income. It’s weird to be feeling confident in myself and confident that good things are going to happen this coming year.

Roll on 2010!!!

Climbing out of The Abyss – Part 2

Today I got my first letter from the Gender Identity Clinic with West London Mental Health NHS Trust. What I’ve been waiting for!!!!!!

It’s been three weeks since I last saw my GP. That appointment came a week after my last suicidal thoughts, the day I first spoke about my decision. In the meantime I’ve done a whole lot of coming out, talking and listening to the people I love, writing my blog here and posting stuff on Facebook, emailing friends etc etc.

Mostly I have either had a really positive and warm acceptance from those that love me. I’ve received some incredibly moving responses from friends and family far and wide and I’ve been humbled by how much I appear to be valued by people who know me. There’s been some challenges for some people I recognise, and I’m sure we’ll work through these in time. But there have also been some resounding silences too. Stuff that rattles me a bit if I’m honest as I’m not now sure where I stand, if they know or not, if they’re REALLY struggling with it and don’t know how to tell me?? Or maybe they just haven’t had the time to follow the links I’ve sent them or the posts I’ve made.

Still mostly these three weeks since I last saw the doc, I’ve been feeling better and better. The depression has been lifting and I’ve been getting my energy back and looking forward to getting back to work. It was my birthday earlier this week and my mother-out-law and sister-out-law bought me (on suggestion it has to be said!) a book about Two Spirit gender identities in Native American communities. I had a wonderful birthday and this one, at 43, felt a special one to me spiritually because it was the first one where I had accepted myself for who I was.

The following day I went into work for the morning. I work in Youth Justice and there are massive changes underway with the introduction of a new Youth Rehabilitation Order and what is known as the ‘Scaled Approach’ to youth justice. I’ve been off since July now and as a way of getting me back into the swing of things I asked to attend a few mornings before I go back to work officially as it were. The first one was yesterday and while it was really great to be making those first steps, I did find it a bit overwhelming. Again, it’s the not knowing who knows and who doesn’t and how am I going to reintegrate back into the team as the New Me, as well as the stuff I feel about not being there to ‘carry my bit’ when there’s been a bit of an upsurge in young people going through the local courts while I’ve been off! It’s hard. And it was a timely reminder for me that I have to pace myself. Not only am I recovering from a serious illness (DEPRESSION IS A LIFE-THREATENING ILLNESS!!!) but I’m ALSO facing a major life-changing transition with my gender. I need to not set such high expectations of my self that just because I’ve been happy with making my decision, it doesn’t necessarily follow that I can bounce back just like Tigger at work and jump back in to the deep end!

Anyway, I digress, back to The Letter. Well after all the anticipation again, I said before that the only letters I get at my girlfriend’s place are my medical ones, I opened the letter as my nephew-out-law was being read his first birthday cards today….(Happy Birthday wee man!!!!)….and saw that the Gender Identity Clinic ‘would be happy to accept the referral’ but my GP had short-circuited the referral process and needed to get me assessed  first by our local secondary care mental health team.

Hmmmm….this is what I thought I’d said to my GP in the first place, but hey-ho, she wrote off when she said she would and she seems genuinely supportive so I guess I might be her first trans-gender patient who’s requested this maybe. Anyway, the long and short of it is that the Gender Identity Clinic now know my name and I can get on the blower tomorrow and get my doc to get the local mental health team to give me an appointment.

Am happy though that it’s moving forward. I’ve realised that I now don’t want people to refer to me as Ms/Miss or any gender-identified pronouns – it feels weird to be getting letters addressed to ‘Ms …. ……..’ and I’m lucky my first name is gender-neutral so it’s easy to address letters to me just using my name.

Guess what? The letter was post-marked on my birthday. I like how the Universe works sometimes

Climbing out of The Abyss – Part 1

It can be a frightening thing when you slip down into the abyss of a deep depression. But when it’s happened time after time in your life, in a strange way it becomes a familiar cave or lair in which to retreat when the threats outside in the world become too much to bear.

For me my experience has been pretty much a lifelong ‘pulling’ towards the labyrinth of subterranean tunnels and caves of my depression. Ever since I was one month old I have felt that pull as my own. My mum had Post-Natal Depression come on when I was just a few weeks old, an age when I would not be able distinguish much between my own and my mum’s feelings. She had it bad again about nine months after my brother was born, around the time I was coming up for 2 years old. Mum’s depression has come and gone throughout my infancy, childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Dad’s also had his own experiences with depression too.

Mum and I have learned how to talk together now, as adult to adult, mother with daughter and now learning to talk as mother and son. We had a deep conversation today about the difficulties she faced as a young pregnant teenager in 1966. How she never told anyone she might be pregnant with me, even though she knew she was, until she was confronted by my gran and granddad one afternoon in June 1966 who suspected and were upset and angry with their unwed 18-year-old daughter. By that time mum was 5 months pregnant. She was told to get to the doctors that evening to get the pregnancy confirmed so she got on her bike and pedaled to first one village, where the doctors was shut, and then to the next village where she was examined and told she was indeed definitely pregnant – coincidentally by a doctor who was my dad’s GP. Mum described being shell-shocked although secretly happy because she wanted to be a mum more than anything. Just then wasn’t the best time…

Mum cycled her way back home to tell her parents. She said that her dad, my granddad, went out to the phone box in the village (they never had a phone for many years) and rang my dad’s parents. Mum has never known what was said but by the next day dad was brought over to gran and granddad’s house by his parents and they all decided that it was best mum and dad got married. They married on 20 July 1966 a month later. No-one else was at their wedding other than their parents and my dad’s sister, Janis, and her husband, Silas,who we would all go to live with until mum and dad could get somewhere to rent.

I was born in November that year, at my auntie’s house where my mum and dad were living with her, Silas and her three young kids – my cousins. My mum described how excited and happy she was after I was born – my auntie Janis there as was my dad, aged 18, who helped deliver me. It wasn’t long though before she noticed how changeable Silas was. How his moods fluctuated between being OK and being incredibly nasty and vindictive. All was fine with Silas until I was born, and even then he had met my granddad after his night shift and had gone and collected my gran and granddad (mum’s parents) so they could see us the day after I was born.

Mum felt pretty quickly that Silas had issues with them being there. It felt like he was jealous of them having the youngest grandchild (me) then as prior to that it had been their daughter – my cousin – who had been youngest. Whatever the reasons behind Silas’s change of moods the long and short of it was Silas picking arguments, behaving possessively and in a highly controlling way. But his mood turned on a sixpence when mum and dad moved from the Old Nurses Home flat they lived for 3 month and into a council house on the same street as them and he helped dad decorate the new place as though nothing had happened previously.

Silas stopped speaking to mum and dad for a while. Mum felt for Janis as they were as close as sisters and Janis had always looked out for her younger brother (my dad) and my mum and me. Silas was sleeping around, a familiar pattern for him. When Auntie Janis was in hospital nervously waiting to give birth to her fourth child, and there were worries as Janis had nearly died with haemorrhaging with her third child about a year before I was born…and Silas was shagging a girl who worked in their shop at the time too. Mum told me that she was getting the house ready for Janis to come home from hospital, cleaning round, changing the beds etc, when Silas came and sexually propositioned her. Mum was raging about it and told him where to get off. Apparently he also tried it on with my nana too. Mum never told dad…though she says she doesn’t remember if she did or not. I do wonder if he does remember that. I’ve always had a feeling that there was some bad energy around Uncle Silas….and I know from what mum has said that she felt a huge rage towards him. Once she had to actively engage her conscious brain away from totalling his car she felt such a cold rage towards him for what he had done to Janis. When my mum and dad got away, mum was left feeling guilty for leaving Janis to deal with Silas and his Jeykyl and Hyde personality alone.

After we moved house to another town when I was five years old, mum got depressed again, being so far away from her mum and dad (remember this was when all you had if you’re lucky was a letter posted once a week) and with three young kids of five and under. At some point things got so bad that dad took mum to the doctors and he advised dad to ‘take away anything harmful’ from mum. I don’t remember any of this happening at the time but I do remember mum being really down and dad being stressed.

At around 10 years old I had my own depression precipitated by feeling excluded kids at school. I began banging my head on brick walls located around the school grounds. I’d stand further and further away from the wall on each occasion and fall rigid with my forehead crashing into the brickwork. I’d get a bit of a crowd at breaktimes sometimes. At least other kids thought I was hard…

What had led to that thought of being different was an innocent game of kiss chase where I’d had a grand old time chasing the girls at playtime to try and kiss them. Oh how they squealed lol! But usually I’d be off playing tennis ball footie with the boys…and when they came back from playing to find me having my pick of the girls, well the ‘lezzie’ stuff began. I didn’t know what to do with it other than bang my head in frustration.

Well….it’s late now and I could write all night. But I have work to go to tomorrow morning and I need my sleep. This post will have to continue tomorrow when I’m conscious enough to make sense.

Nite-nite

Thank you to everyone!!

I want to shout a massive THANK YOU to everyone who has sent me personal messages of support, their thoughts, even a CONGRATULATIONS!

It’s very easy in these cynical times to forget the power of basic human solidarity in times of trouble and change. I can feel a warm wave of that fundamentally instinctive feeling as I am  some beautifully moving connections with friends and family old and new.

Writing my Stubborn Dogs blog is proving to be enormously therapeutic as I wrestle with the reality of coming out of what has been a severe depression, albeit this time round being able to manage it in a different way than before. I am beginning to feel better in myself, now that I have made what is this life-changing decision to have surgery and hormone therapy, although its only been three weeks so far.  That I feel so much support and honesty out there is really important in my growing confidence. But I have to be careful not to try and run before I can walk.

It’s a big day tomorrow as I dip my toes back in at work to begin to reconnect there. My reality check with my therapist this morning has left me feeling that I really do need to take care as I climb out of it….and not try and rush to the summit carrying more baggage than I can realistically manage. My poor old brain cells are doing their best to get the synapses running smoothly and free from major technical faults. My medication’s stabilised. And I now have a future to be looking forward to, with a wonderful partner, family and friends to share with. I’m sure my work colleagues will be as supportive as they’ve been before when I go back although, as with everyone, it’s something you can only get your head around if you have an open heart to ‘difference’ and change and are prepared to re-evaluate sometimes deeply buried attitudes and prejudices that we all have in us.

Thanks to my friend Jo who sent me a lovely email along with this quote from Nelson Mandela’s inaugral speech in 1994.

“It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?  Actually, who are you not to be?”

Thank you for following my musings so far. There’ll be plenty more posts to come as this will sure be a long process so I hope you’ll continue to visit and chip in when you feel you want to say how something seems to you.