I turned 30 this weekend
(Boring musings that I have the energy for)
I turned 30 this weekend, right in the middle of the right kind of depression.
My mom (she visited, too, and we went to Provincetown) still asks me to explain the before and after of my mind on hormones, and I still haven’t figured it out, except to say that anxiety comes in at one-sixth the intensity, and depression is…a more artful sort of melancholy? More than a single shade of gray? Actual sadness, with the touch of occasional despair and longing and even rage at the world, instead of just looking forward to the taste of dinner? Unfortunately, it still makes me entirely uninterested in doing jack shit outside of working and sleeping late when I’m not.
But it’s still the right kind of depression, experienced on the same planet as everyone else. I’ll gladly take it, though I admit it’s even harder to talk about, for fear of TERF-branded “I told you so!”s and an even greater fear of apparently failing at my successful acquisition of a better life via gender transition. I do not feel allowed to be depressed.
It’s ridiculous, because I actually have a mental image now, and I actually look at the real one in the mirror and can walk around my apartment shirtless or naked without a second thought. I finally, comfortably just exist. And ‘mental health’ outside of that is still a thing; big surprise. Work’s been horrible, Putin’s been horrible, my native state of Texas has been horrible, SCOTUS has been especially horrible, and I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that a 30-something cousin just died of a fucking prion disease. I still do not fully understand the feelings that this extraordinarily rare and bad fact should be producing, but perhaps the other factors quieting down a bit over time will evoke some interesting grief.
But yeah — I turned 30 this weekend. I celebrated the actual date in the exact manner I dreamed of when I became capable of dreaming again, as myself,
surrounded by friends and barbecue and an oversized, diabolically frosted and beautiful rose-covered cake. How I do love flowers.
I took an extra day off, too, to recover from the routine changes after my mom went home.
I slipped in my physical on the morning she left, and it turns out I’ll need an echocardiogram soon, due to a couple of symptoms and an inconvenient family history that roughly consists of ‘aneurysms that have gone BOOM far too young in 3+ otherwise healthy aunts and cousins’. They couldn’t schedule me until August, and I’m much more worried about what the bill will be than the exceptionally unlikely event of 1) something actually being wrong with my heart, and 2) something bad actually happening before then.
Which brings me back to the depression. See, after I went to the doctor, I found myself indulging in the hope that I’d just so happen to have a congenital, convenient way to leave this world with a bang. Okay, Norm’s functioned long enough and bigots suck and being autistic sucks and there’s a war and stuff (and the hope for having a more creative career one day is absolute zero during capitalism and becoming more zero by the day, so keep running on this god-forsaken treadmill, ya privileged techie loser!)….bye.
Anyhow. I’m unfortunately as tenacious as I should be grateful, so the plan is to be here as long as passive circumstance lets me. At very least I managed to write something for the first time in a couple of months, so it’s a start!
