#depression daze

[wild-at-mind]

Had the shittest night out ever. I was home by 9:40. My god.

It was one of those nights where it puts things into sharp relief and brings together a lot of connecting things, and I suddenly realised that oh shit-these friendships I am attempting to maintain in this town are really one sided. That's not to big myself up, or imply that I'm in the kind of situation where one person needs a lot of help and isn't able to give much back due to life circumstances. That's not the position these friendships are in. The one-sidedness is just a factual statement- if I don't reach out and make plans, we don't see each other. When we talk, I listen to your stories and ask questions, and try to ignore that you seem disinterested in mine. I ask about your creative work, but you never ask about mine. You barely seem to care that we are both creatives.

This applies to not one but two people in this area who I am trying to maintain friendships with, trans person to trans person. The third one, I saw her yesterday and it was nice overall but she kept making references to how long it had been since we last saw each other- we live close and could techncially see each other much more. I felt bad that it took me so long to message her and finally arrange to come over, but part of me wanted to say- if you wanted catch up with me during this time, why didn't you message me? I would welcome that! Maybe suggest some times you are free for me to pop round?

Trying to stay in touch with people, maintain connections, even in the same town is so hard when you are adults with separate lives. (This is with everyone being child free as well.) It is especially hard when it feels like you are the only one making an effort. I have no idea how to break this pattern in my life. At least with my friends living elsewhere, we have an excuse.

Tonight I thought I was going to be seeing a friend 1 on 1 for drinks, but on the night my friend was like 'oh [younger ex colleague and her friend] are dropping by [venue] for 1 drink with us' and it just turned into them just being there the whole night. My friend, who is in her 30s like me, enjoys ribbing on this early 20s friend of hers and tbh their dynamic really seems like my friend likes being older and wiser and kind of needs younger people around for that dynamic. The way my friend acts around this 20 something year old (who acts more like a teenager, honestly) makes me like my friend less, honestly. I don't understand what she gets out of this often sexually themed ribbing of this younger, sexually inexperienced woman. (I know this about her because they both talk about it a lot.) I've tried talking to the younger woman by herself and from what she said she seems to think my friend is some sort of super experienced sex goddess. But from my perspective as someone on a level with my friend, I can see that she has an average amount of experience for someone our age, it just seems like loads to this early 20s person who hasn't had experience. Part of me wants to yell at my friend- why do you need this? What insecurity is this filling for you?

Ooooph by writing this out I think I realise- it's not that I don't like the younger friend, I do like her (though I probably wouldn't be friends with her organically, and she would say the same about me I'm sure). It's not even that I find that she acts childish annoying. It's that the way my friend behaves around her makes me like my friend less. :S

[bughead-in-the-comics]

From Depression Daze, Archie #250 (1976).

[wild-at-mind]



I think I actually am really upset about (everything) the referral call with my doctor. I had created this fantasy world in my head where my NHS doctor would somehow have advanced knowledge of trans and gender theory and that I could tell him the truth. Bending the truth scares me because I took long enough to get to this point because my experience of dysphoria was not what I had read it should be. It would feel like I was lying to myself somehow. But yeah I fucked up. Because he didn't know anything, and the conversation got weird. It was stuff like: did you have any adverse childhood experiences? Why are you mentally ill? Alongside more normal things like how long have you felt like this. Bearing in mind, he inherited my mental health care from my previous GP and didn't prescribe me my antidepressants, made me wonder how that would have gone if he was my GP when I was going on them for the first time. (But let's face it, it's not hard to get antidepressants on the NHS because there is Nothing. Else. Available. I can't stress that enough. So I'm sure it would have been possible. I just hope he doesn't expect his other mental health patients to be able to explain why they are mentally ill.) Having adverse childhood experiences isn't something you can help and it should not be stigmatised, and on a super advanced gender theory level yes there are people whose A.C.E. contibuted to their gender identity! However I do not feel that health professionals should be asking these questions with regards to gender referrals. It's complicated because I don't consider myself to have had A.C.E. although I did go through a stage of my illness where I really was trying to figure out why I was mentally ill (yaaay!) and disclosed some things to a psych which she said would go on my record. I guess he either hadn't looked at it or they didn't end up putting it on. The thing in question might be counted as A.C.E. on paper, though I don't personally consider it as such as ultimately I grew up in a loving and relatively stable home, which mitigates a lot of things.

From my awkward answers to his weird questions, he is now supposed to put together a referral to the gender clinic. I remembered to tell him which one I wanted (you can choose the one with the shortest waiting list even if it's far away, I think they have to do that as some of the waiting lists are like 5 years and some people just aren't near any of them). He didn't ask if I preferred a different name (I do). By the end of the call I was so frazzled that I didn't push the issue. Told myself it would be ok. I have heard horror stories about people ringing the GP to check up on their referral after a number of months and being told it was never put through. I'm trying to ignore that possibility. You're meant to get a letter within a few months but I have no faith in the NHS's letters. I had a cervical smear this year and they are meant to send you a letter saying if you have normal result or abnormal cells but I never got one. Fortunately as it's a test you can ring your GP for the result (thankfully it was normal). But me doing that should not have cancelled the letter- as far as I know there is no way the receptionist can, like, tick a box to say I was told my result verbally so don't send it. So where's my fucking letter?! On it's own it's not a big deal but as things are it goes on the pile of 'ohhhh fuck the NHS will probably dissolve within my lifetime....' that a lot of people in the UK my age and younger just kind of live with. Anyway, I realised today that I'm really not ok about any of this. The conversation with the doctor fucked me up and I've been feeling shitty ever since. I'm having an identity crisis. I'm still using my old name at work and now I barely know what my name is any more.

[wild-at-mind]

I’m not good at the moment, I’m so low. I feel like I keep reaching out to friends and getting nothing back.

[wild-at-mind]

I am curious: does testosterone make you go onto a non cyclical hormone system? Because I don't like this hormone cycle a lot of the time but I would probably miss the couple of days of focused productivity I get each month, and most of all the certainty that a particularly bad time will probably feel better or at least different in a few days.

[wild-at-mind]

I think the reason the transmasc support discord I was on didn’t work for me is because of the discord channel format, where it’s like a chat. I wrote in the support channel of this discord about how I’m in a long term relationship with a straight guy and we both want to stay together, and how difficult that is and the taboos around talking about it in queer spaces (e.g. he MUST self describe his sexuality differently if we are staying together because what’s really important here is that we all use the right words not my fucking pain, the idea of predatory gays trying to ‘change’ straight people being a toxic stereotype). It was hard for me to write that, and I hoped someone would see it and say they were going through something similar and we could commiserate, there seemed a decent chance of that seeing how many people were on there. But I think I got one sad react and a ‘I’m sorry, that sounds hard’. Both were kind, of course. And then more messages were put from different people needing support, we all need so much support, and my message disappeared off the top and now even if someone in my situation does join they will not see it. A similar thing happened on the forum I sometimes talk about- I would pour my heart out in a long post that no one would read or respond to. I would feel sad and sometimes even quite devastated, even though I knew no one had any obligation to respond to me (I’ve been in situations of being someone’s emotional punching bag for years on end and had no idea I was ever allowed to stop, no way would I ever be against someone not responding to something emotional someone else wrote if they didn’t feel they could). Then I would feel resentful of more ‘popular’ users who always seemed to be getting loads of loving support. Then I realised this was doing ugly things to my thought patterns, then I left. It does hurt to feel like you are trying to engage and no one is responding. Sometimes I write things on facebook that get no engagement, probably because of some algorithm filtering longer posts. My tumblr has long been a dead zone, and as I’ve discussed before that can be an advantage, but sometimes the porn bots and rate my blog bots being my only notes really gets me down. The one time I did get some engagement it was some discourse blogs reblogging someone’s rebuttal to a post I made when I was in the emotional equivelant of 3am and didn’t think someone would see it. In the post, clearly distressed I talked about how I don’t feel the bisexual community is strong or caring or even really there a lot of the time, and I was proved right because none of these presumably fellow bisexuals dropped me a line to say ‘hey I didn’t agree with what you said but you sound like you are going through something, hope you are doing ok’. No one on here does things like that, tumblr has long created this culture where anyone you disagree with is fair game for just being kind of mean, and bad faith reading is encouraged way more than good faith reading.

[wild-at-mind]

Tw religious homophobia

I love my mum but yesterday I think I realised I was right to be cautious about sexuality and gender stuff. She attends an accepting of LGBT people Evangelical church (this was explicitly clear on the 2 times I visited which is the way it should be in Evangelical churches imo- you must understand we can't ever assume!). My mum's boss, who is an independent financial adviser who employs just my mum and currently one vacant position, attends the Evangelical church I grew up in. My mum said she thought it was odd that her boss is 'anti-gay' (softening term for homophobic), when she is also divorced, because Evangelicals have been very anti divorce in the past. They only changed because their congregations would be half empty if they condemned divorce so strongly. I said no it makes perfect sense because like are changing with the times while pretending they are not which is the wont of evangelical churches. (full credit to Tor at speakingwhentheworldsleeps for teaching me this observation.) Among other things it means the church never has to face up to its past because they have always been this way, so wonderfully convenient isn't it?

My mum talks about her boss's homophobia as if it's ok because in time she will not be homophobic when the Evangelical church finally evolves to accept gay people. She did not seem to think of any downsides for the people who interact with boss in her day to day life. I said 'hmmm well I guess boss doesn't hire many people. Let's hope [boss's 2 daughters] are not gay'. It wasn't the best rejoinder but I could tell it made my mum realise for a sec: oh yeah homophobic beliefs actually have real world consequences and are not just private things!! Then she said 'or if [daughter1] or [daughter2] are gay hopefully they will tell boss after they leave home.' WTF. I'm stunned. Don't know where to start because how awful? Even if neither daughter is gay or bi that is so toxic. My mum appears to have no idea how damaging this is.

My mum revealed she thinks there are about 3% gay people in the population. .........this may explain why she talks this way, I think she thinks she has never met a gay person and never will. I tried to introduce the idea of a wider LGBT community, of bi and trans people neither of which are loved by Evangelical Christians, a much larger percentage of the world. I don't think she believes me and I truly think she thinks very, very few people have 'same sex attraction' (this phrase used in layman's ciscentric terms not as in the popular gender critical dogwhistle). I'm amazed. When I was at school the figure I heard for gay people was 10%. That was like 15 years ago. Obviously any figure will be a huge guess and definitely under the real figure and we don't know if gay means 'same gender attracted' or 'only attracted to the same gender' and even a survey just counting bisexuals will miss out people who are attracted to the same gender but in deep denial about it currently, or to such a small extent they consider it uncountable....point is her views are far more outdated than I could have ever guessed.

I hope anyone reading this understands that this isn't something I feel I can quickly talk her round on. I will try again some time when I'm not taken by surprise. I know her background on these things but she reads a lot of lefty online content now as well as a left leaning newspaper, I had hoped she had absorbed more. I'm sure this all feels very trite to people who have been kicked out or disowned. You're right, it is. And perhaps I should have made a far bigger fuss about her words and hoped she didn't guess why I cared so much. I think she has been left with the idea that maybe her boss's homophobia has consequences, but perhaps I should have been less calm.

Today I feel terrible, depressed and sad. Putting myself back into compartments. I'm lucky I can hide. I love my mum and I'm so sad about this. I knew I was right to not tell anyone in my family, the more people know the worse. I just want to mind my own business and bury my head in the sand and keep spending nice times with my mum. I know that makes me a hypocrite. (But also, I don't WANT her to think of me being damaged by the homophobia in our church when I was growing up. It feels cruel to do that to her. And I don't think she would understand how it could harm someone who is 'only' bisexual, because I could and did date 'straight').

[wild-at-mind]

TW internalised misogyny, internalised biphobia, self loathing

I remember a time on tumblr when people other than gender critical variety TERFs used the phrase ‘identify out of womanhood’, believe it or not, that was a thing said by decent people once. Anyway the reason I identified out of womanhood, or am currently trying to at least, was nothing at all to do with me thinking being a woman is bad. It was being a bi woman, specifically a bi woman who has never and will never date a woman due to already being committed to a man, that was the hardest thing for me. This isn’t about lesbians vs bi women at all, I won’t have any of that. It is about ‘people who understand why acknowledging that they are into women matters to bi women dating men, and people that don’t’. (Acknowledging could mean: expecting to be treated like someone with a stake in wlw matters even if they are dating a man, or just using their identity to describe themselves openly, or many other things.) I mostly encounter these things online, often in places that pretend to be supportive of ALL bi women, which is what makes it so painful I think. The stereotype is that the bi woman will bring her horrible, misogynistic boyfriend into queer spaces. She will predate her fellow wlw for threesomes. You’ve heard these ones. She probably is not even bi, really, she kissed a girl at a party maybe, every straight girl does that, why she decided suddenly it was important enough to her to form an identity around you have no idea. The fact that she and her boyfriend may talk together about women they find attractive is very offputting to you, almost despicable, and infinitely more disgusting than the prospect of a man finding a woman attractive just on his own. Because that’s to be expected, no, but a bi woman should know better than to indulge a man in that sort of thing!

A community that well recognises the importance of belonging suddenly seems to forget when they ask, well why does a bi women with a boyfriend need this kind of space anyway? Your relationship doesn’t define your sexuality but also bi women with boyfriends go in the special category of ‘least concern’, can leave whenever they want, and do. Your sexual history doesn’t define your sexuality, but here’s a list of famous people who we have deemed bisexual based on the list of people they are known to have slept with, regardless of what they actually identified themselves as. Are you looking for community, for history, well don’t you know bi women of every life experience have historically always been treated exactly the same as lesbians? Yes, you who have dealt with repression of your sexuality that caused you to entirely miss out on the opportunity to perhaps date women in the 2000s and 2010s, if you had been around half a century ago you would for sure have been brave enough to date women and join gay scenes! (Anyone who doesn’t find this generalisation comforting will be treated with slight suspician.) Add to that the general suspician any woman into women faces when she dares express sexual feelings towards women that are purely about sex. And that’s a lot. I don’t want any of this baggage. I couldn’t think of any other way to escape it and I feel so much better without it. There were other reasons, of course, but given that for a while on tumblr there was a whole ‘lesbians can essentially undergo a full physical transition and still maintain their essential connection to womanhood through their fierce and dedicated love of women! (info on bisexuals not found)’ movement, it’s no wonder I got a little confused. Who will connect me to womanhood?

You may feel that my problems could be solved by spending more time in irl bi spaces. Thanks for your concern, but I do (or at least I did, before covid). In fact all this baggage was actually hindering me in those spaces- meeting people who have roughly similar experiences to you is great, but it’s not fair to expect new people I meet to suddenly become my confidiant and take on the responsibility for making me feel accepted in LGBT spaces, even specifically bi+ spaces. I would love to socialise without carrying that baggage.

(Sorry if this is upsetting to anyone, I may delete it later, I don’t know. It’s just how I feel and have felt.)