Ink

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I very nearly forgot to write a post for this week: I was home sick yesterday, which threw off my routine enough that blogging almost slipped my mind (plus, you know, I was sick, and therefore pretty unmotivated). This week has been a bit of a bummer in the health department. However, there is some excitement in my near future, so I’m going to focus on that. 

Next Friday, after work, I am getting a tattoo. 

I currently have only one tattoo. It’s a trinity knot on my right forearm that I got done five years ago, as a reminder of the interconnectedness of mind, body, and spirit and of the fact that I was a complete person: a reminder I very much needed at a time when I’d been feeling pretty fractured. 

This new tattoo follows a similar theme of body, mind, and spirit. Last summer, I began using tarot cards as a means of meditation. I’m not using them to make any sort of attempt at clairvoyance, but I find that the meanings behind the cards can be an excellent mirror for the subconscious. Typically, when I meditate, I’ll draw three cards, and look at the meanings of the cards individually and as a whole, and what I find in those meanings helps bring my mind into focus. The tattoo I’m getting next Friday is based on three cards from my favorite deck, which each correspond to one of the aforementioned aspects of body, mind, and spirit. 

First, there’s the 9 of Pentacles, which is a card that’s all about a sense of home. As I’ve been dealing more with dysphoria, I love the idea of a reminder on my skin that I carry my home with me — that my body is home. 

Then, there’s the Hermit, a card that deals with solitude (which appeals to my introverted self) and the pursuit of Truth (which appeals to the part of me that never stops asking questions). The Hermit also lights the way to Truth for those who come after him, which is a really great reminder that as my mind has opened and learned new things, I can lead others by example to the same. 

Finally, there’s the Ace of Wands, which is full of creative energy. As a writer, a knitter, and a musician, the urge to create is an integral part of my spirit, and I am most fully myself when I am being creative. 

I am incredibly excited about this tattoo (the cards will be in a ring around my left forearm). A little nervous, too — it’s been a while since my last one, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this tattoo causes some drama with my family. Ultimately, though, I’m looking forward to it. In the end, it’s just another step in molding this body of mine to match my internal vision of myself, which, along with a beard (which is steadily filling in on my face now), has a number of tattoos. I’m making this body a home I want to live in. And that’s important. 

Three Happy Moments

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

My schedule remains ridiculous, I feel like I’m never going to feel rested again, and life marches on – truly, things are going well, and I have very little to complain about. To stick with that theme, here is a short but sweet list of three particularly happy moments from the past week:

  1. I knit my nephew (who just turned one the beginning of this month) a Yoda hat for Halloween last year. I made it plenty big (both because he has a big head and because I wanted him to get a lot of use out of it), and from what I can see of pictures my sister-in-law puts on Facebook, it’s something he wears a lot, which is excellent. Last Friday, my dad was babysitting and sent me a video of my nephew, wearing the Yoda hat, wandering around out on their back porch and watching his shadow move as he shook his head and made the ears wiggle. It was pretty much the cutest thing ever, and I’m still giggling about it, and also super impressed that a one year old could make the connection that moving his head in a certain way made the shadow move.
  2. On Sunday, my partner and I went over to a friend’s apartment, and that friend gave us fabulous haircuts. I was feeling pretty scruffy and a little gross pre-haircut, but after the haircut (and the shave I gave myself that evening, because hey, that beard is starting to come in more), I’ve actually been feeling pretty okay about myself. It’s been a nice confidence boost, particularly coupled with the new binder.
  3. On Tuesday, before my songwriting class, I was hanging out around the Old Town School and knitting a hat. I got some inquisitive looks from children and adults (dudes knitting is not altogether uncommon, but uncommon enough that it tends to turn heads), but mostly people were walking by without noticing. At one point, two young sisters walked past, slowed down, and the older said to the younger (in that stage whisper of childhood that I’m sure she thought was inaudible to the adult she was referencing), “Do you think he’s better than Grandma?” The younger one answered, “Maybe…” It was all I could do to not bust out laughing.

Transition, Present Tense

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I was struggling to find a topic for the blog today, and then I remembered a conversation I had with a friend a couple of weeks ago that I had thought would be a great topic for a post. (Thanks, KW!)

My friend asked me if I thought of “transition” as a past tense verb for myself, here in this stage when I have the ability to grow awesome sideburns and am read more and more frequently as male. The immediate answer was a resounding, “No!” There are still things I’m waiting for, like the arrival of a full beard, and concrete steps I still want to take in terms of physical transition at some point in the future, like top surgery. I am still very much “transitioning” – present progressive tense, dynamic and ever-evolving.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized…I don’t believe that “transition” will ever be a past tense verb for me. I think I will always be evolving and learning, shifting and growing. What allows me to feel comfortable in my body today might not tomorrow, or next month, or next year, or five or ten years from now. I am transgender, and queer, and those things won’t change…but precisely what those words mean to me just might.

It’s entirely possible that this outlook is a product of where I’m at in life. The six years that have passed since I took my first tentative steps out of the closet have been packed with change. Every six months or so has brought with it another world-shattering revelation. Every time I think things have slowed down and I have achieved equilibrium, something else comes up. It’s been quite a wild ride, though in retrospect I wouldn’t give up those big revelations for the world – I’m so much happier now. Still, it’s hard, from my current vantage point, to believe that things will ever really slow down. I could very well be wrong. This is another thing the past six years have taught me – I do not know everything about anything, including myself. There’s always something more to learn.

In any case, this is where I am for the moment – in transition, present tense.

March Mayhem

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I am, at the core, a homebody. Given the choice, I could spend days on end in my house, curled up with books, movies, and knitting (although if I’m forced to stay in my house due to illness, injury, or inclement weather, I do go a little stir crazy). There are a number of other personality traits at play here – I am an introvert, and have a tendency toward laziness. But mostly, I just really love being in my own space.

This aspect of who I am is often at war with another part of me – the one that wants to do ALL THE THINGS. This month, this latter part appears to be winning.

As of this week, aside from my usual 37.5 hours of work, I will have, on a weekly basis:

  • Guitar classes Monday evenings, and an approximate 10:45pm return home,
  • Songwriting classes Tuesday evenings, arriving home around 11pm,
  • My volunteer gig at the Old Town School of Folk Music‘s Resource Center Wednesday evenings, arriving home around 10:30pm, and
  • Knit Night at Windy Knitty Thursday evenings, arriving home anywhere between 9:15 and 10pm.

On top of all of this, I decided this week to start getting up at 5:30am each morning and attempt to do some sort of home workout – Pilates, weights, stretches, that sort of thing. I fully believe that “health” is a pretty nebulous concept, and it’s absolutely not my goal to hit some arbitrary numeric value that a doctor will deem “healthy”. However, I am increasingly frustrated with how quickly I tire out, how hard it is for me to keep up with people, and how frequently my back goes out due to a lack of core strength. I also know from past experience that being more physically active is better for my mental health. So, I’m easing into increased activity.

I also need to work practicing guitar and writing a song into each week. Plus the things that need to get done around the house.

I will be honest: last week I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it, in light of the battle I was having with DepressedBrain. I ended up needing to leave the office early on Friday to avoid having a total meltdown at work. Thankfully, Friday evening brought with it the arrival of a new binder, which helped to mitigate some of the dysphoria that was making a significant contribution to DepressedBrain. (The binder, by the way, was ordered from these guys and is amazing – equivalent binding power to an Underworks 997, but replacing the fear of permanent ribcage damage (which was the reason I had to switch to the much less effective 982 a while back) with something so comfortable I almost forget I’m wearing it – and may warrant an extra blog post for a review at some point in the near future.)

I was feeling rather better Monday morning, but I have to admit, I still didn’t really believe I was going to be able to handle this schedule until shortly before I started writing this post yesterday afternoon. I was absolutely exhausted by the time I got home Monday and Tuesday, and yesterday I had a hell of a time getting myself out of bed. As the day wore on, I was pretty sleepy, but I think I hit the point where I started to remember how to work through the fatigue. I am convinced that, eventually, being more active will mean that I will have more energy. I just need to stick with it long enough.

Part of me continues to wonder what on earth I’ve gotten myself into. But mostly, I’m feeling optimistic. And that’s a nice change from the past few weeks.

Never Saw It Coming

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I’ve known that I was Bipolar for close to six years now. In those six years, my cycles have typically followed a fairly predictable pattern. I’ve rarely jumped with no warning from one end of emotion to the other: usually, there’s a ramping up or a sliding down that happens and warns me of what’s coming.

I don’t know if it’s because there were sad things that happened while I was manic, which made things weird, or if it really was just very sudden, but that wasn’t how this most recent turn to DepressedBrain went. There was no easing my way down into darkness. I didn’t see it coming. It hid just out of sight and jumped out at me from behind a corner and suddenly, out of what felt like nowhere, I’ve found myself at one of the lowest points I’ve hit in the past year or more.

I wrote last week about the fact that I’ve recently started battling with body-related dysphoria for the first time. I’ve spent the past week trying to deconstruct what that means for me, what it feels like, why it’s so hard for me to figure out how to work around it. I don’t have any easy answers, but these are the best words I’ve found for it so far: after I started on testosterone and my body started changing, I experienced a period of time where I felt more comfortable than I ever had before in my skin – like I fit in my body for the first time that I could remember. There was this sense of wholeness, and rightness, to it. But now dysphoria has swooped in, and I’m back to feeling fractured: it’s not so much that I hate my body, but that it doesn’t feel like it belongs to me. It doesn’t fit me anymore. And that’s maddening and heart-wrenching, particularly after having experienced something better for a while. I don’t really know what to do with it.

I wonder if, maybe, the best thing I can do is take my focus off myself and onto other people. My sister was in town last weekend. (We don’t share any genetic material, but many years of shared experiences. Her family of origin treats her in ways no person should ever be treated, and I’ve had my own frustrations with my family of origin, so we’ve pieced together families of our own, and they include each other.) Neither she nor I nor my partner felt particularly up to venturing out of the apartment and into the cold (or for a host of other reasons), so the weekend consisted of a lot of me cooking a lot of good food and all of us sitting in the same space reading books and reminiscing. I was reminded how fulfilling it is for me when I am able to create a safe space for someone I love. Being a host stresses me out to some extent, because I always worry that I’m not being entertaining enough. But knowing that I am creating a space where we can all be ourselves mitigates that stress to some extent, particularly when I’m taking care of someone who I know has too few safe spaces in their life elsewhere.

I may not know how to take good care of myself in this moment, but at least I can still take care of other people. It’s not a long-term solution (or, really, even a solution at all), but it feels like it’s helping.

My Brain is Unpredictable

/ Alyxander James / 1 Comment

My brain is unpredictable. This is nothing new. I am Bipolar, and have been aware of that fact for almost six years. I have navigating my way through unexpected brainspace down to a fine science.

In the past week, though, my brain threw me for a loop: this week, I was unexpectedly visited by the dysphoria monster.

I should have known it was coming. I mean, I’m a trans guy. It had to happen eventually.

It’s not the first time I’ve dealt with dysphoria. Not entirely. But my whole previous experience with dysphoria was centered around my voice, and how uncomfortable that made me, and with the introduction of testosterone into my system, that faded into the background.

No, this is a new experience. I knew I was incredibly lucky, up to this point, to not have experienced a great deal of body-related dysphoria. I’ve seen many people near and dear to me go through it, and was grateful to have dodged that bullet. It seems, though, that my relationship with my body is changing.

On the one hand, I’ve reached a point where, for the first time in my life, I actually like myself. I’ve gone from loathing to tolerating to feeling benevolently indifferent to actually liking who I am as a person the majority of the time.

On the other hand, I’m finding myself increasingly anxious about how I’m perceived by the rest of the world, particularly because of certain realities about my anatomy.

I bind my chest pretty much every day (unless I’m not leaving the house, and even then, I might). But I can’t wear binders that are especially tight, because I have an enormous ribcage, and the tighter the binder, the more my ribs hurt, and the more I’m at risk for causing myself some serious medical problems. Lately, I’ve felt like the binder I have that I was satisfied with a couple of months ago just isn’t cutting it anymore: every day I’m more conscious of the fact that I often look like a butch lesbian with sideburns. (Which is not to say anything against butch lesbians – I think they’re delightful – I’m just not one of them. I’m not a lesbian at all. I’m a [very] queer man.)

Before I started pursuing HRT, I went over the course of about a month from being reasonably okay with the fact that the world was insisting on seeing me as a woman to having daily panic attacks because I was terrified that no one would ever see me as anything else. I haven’t gotten back to the point of panic attacks, but I’m worried that it could be lurking right around the corner.

My brain hasn’t been too bad a place to live in for a while now. I don’t love that I’m going to have to relearn some coping mechanisms that I’ve let slide since the last time I had to wrestle regularly with myself. But I guess that’s all part of life in transition.

Some Happy Thoughts

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I’ve been feeling under the weather with yet another cold this week, so to keep this week’s post easy, it’s coming to you in a list. Despite not feeling the greatest, I’ve been finding reasons to smile. Here are a few of them.

  1. I’ve been getting back into writing outside of this blog. After a four-month hiatus, I’m going back to songwriting classes starting in March, and I’m trying to generate some new material on my own before that, in an effort to ease my way back into things. I’ve actually written a couple of songs I don’t hate!
  2. I’m also picking the guitar back up, which has been an adventure. I played a bit in high school and college, but was never very good, and was convinced that I just couldn’t do it. Turns out that learning good form when playing mandolin actually can be applied back to guitar, and now I’m finding it’s a lot easier for me than it used to be. (I’m taking a guitar class next session at the Old Town School in addition to the songwriting class. Clearly, I have lost my mind.)
  3. We’re seeing Mouths of Babes, a lovely new musical venture by a couple of our favorite musicians from other bands, in concert on Sunday. I have no doubt that it’ll be a wonderful show, and I’m hoping to walk away feeling inspired to keep writing and practicing like I have been in the last couple of weeks.

Superhero

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I wrote the post below back around May of 2012, long before this blog existed (indeed, quite a while before the impetus for this blog’s creation – the start of my physical transition – was even something I was seriously considering or thought possible). I was reminded of it yesterday as I found myself musing about the fact that no matter how hard I try, I can’t make things better for the people I love 100% of the time. Sometimes the people I want to help the most are the ones who really can’t be helped until they learn to help themselves. But that rarely stops me from trying. It’s funny, looking back at these words that I wrote two and a half years ago, and realizing these are lessons I am still learning, and that I will probably always be learning. I’ve grown in many ways, but it’s a good reminder that there’s always room for further growth. Anyway, enjoy this little throwback, and I’ll be back with something new next week!

This will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever known me very well, but I have a confession to make: I have a bit of a superhero complex.

This is nothing new. Some of my best-remembered dreams from my childhood are of me rescuing damsels in distress. (Those, and the dreams where I could fly. Bonus points if the dream involved both.) I was the kid on the playground in middle school who would come to recess armed with extra pairs of mittens and end up giving away every pair I had, including the ones I had planned on keeping for myself. Usually my scarf and hat wound up missing, too, and the only reason I kept my coat was that there was some sort of rule about that. Today I am tickled pink when I find out I am the first name that comes to mind if a friend is stranded somewhere in need of rescuing, or if someone is having a meltdown in the small hours of the night and just needs to reach out and text or call someone for the reassurance that they’re not alone. I love being helpful, and feel utterly useless when I can’t be.

Sometimes this can be problematic. I’m getting better about it, but sometimes I try to help fix things when really, all I should do is listen. Sometimes I try to save people who don’t want saving, they just want someone to sit and be with them for a while. But I am learning that it’s okay to be a superhero sometimes, and that, in fact, superheroes can sit and listen and be sometimes, too, and that doesn’t make them any less super.

I don’t have a cool superhero uniform, but I do have a wonderfully dapper wardrobe. I can’t fly, but I will do whatever I can to help a friend escape when necessary. I am not particularly strong, but I will still pretend that I am and help you move your furniture and throw my weight around if you feel threatened. I don’t have x-ray vision and I’m not psychic, but I am highly observant and intuitive and will often catch on to more than you expect.

I am a superhero when I provide safe spaces for others to explore identity without fear of judgment, where I can offer openness and love and acceptance and encouragement. When I can ask honest questions that further discovery. When I am fully myself, leading by example.

I am a superhero when I am prepared to drop everything at a moment’s notice to go and give a friend a hug. When I can make a bad day better with a smile or a joke or a compliment sincerely given.

I am a superhero when I stand up for myself.

I am a superhero when I can stand quietly next to a friend, putting and end to the attentions of an unwanted suitor.

I am a superhero when my mere existence causes my more conservative friends to think a little harder about what they believe, because I am a real person that they love and not a nameless, faceless statistic. When I make strangers on the street think twice before assigning me a gender.

Sometimes superheroes are just regular people trying to do what they can to make the world a better place. Hi, my name is Alyx, and I am a superhero when I remember that.

 

Complexity

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Yesterday, I woke up at 5am, opened Facebook on my phone, and saw the news that an exceptionally lovely woman who volunteered with the youth group at the church I grew up in had passed away in the night. She was kind and joyful and too young to die, and while I’m now many years removed from that church, I found myself struck by a deep and complex grief.

Earlier in the week, I felt myself heading into a manic upswing. And mania doesn’t usually just go away because things get sad…it just finds different ways to process the negative emotions. Rather than the numb sorrow of depression, this sadness is sharp, acute, intense. Manic grief is, on its own, complex.

But added to that is the realization that there were a lot of adults in my formative years that I don’t necessarily agree with now that I’m an adult, and some of them probably wouldn’t want anything to do with me now (though the woman in question here would not fall into that latter category, so far as I know), but they kept me alive back then, when I was starting to wrestle with my own inner demons and darkness. It’s because of them that I could grow into the person I am today. Thinking about them is creating this weird mix of feelings of loss and nostalgia and gratitude and more loss.

I didn’t know this woman well, and aside from wishing each other happy birthday on Facebook, we hadn’t talked in years. Still, she left an impression that has stayed with me, and I can’t help but wish I could have said “thank you” one more time. If heaven exists, it is for people like her – if I can live my life with a fraction of the kindness and joy and grace that she did, I will have done well.

Confessions of a Storyteller

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I’ve always loved books.

There is a video, somewhere, of me at age two, sitting on the floor, surrounded by what was probably the majority of the books that usually lived on my bookshelf, holding one upside down in my chubby little hands as I looked at the camera and declared (in the present tense), “I read!” several times before launching into a story that I’m certain made sense in my head but was entirely incomprehensible out of it.

I still remember the moment when I actually did read for the first time. I was three years old, in my parents’ bathroom, studying the pages of Green Eggs and Ham, and as I looked at the book, suddenly the sound of the word in my head (I had the book memorized) connected with the letters on the page, and I realized I was reading. It was magic, and I was hooked.

I was the child who broke the heart of more than one teacher who was forced to tell me to stop reading, because I was also the child who would inexpertly try to hide whatever book I was currently reading behind the textbook I was supposed to be studying in an effort to get through a few more pages during class. I never had a huge number of friends at school, but that rarely bothered me. I had a huge, active imagination, and books were the catalyst through which I could visit exciting new worlds.

Really, I’ve just always loved stories.

I knew, even as a child, that stories had the power to make otherwise inscrutable concepts accessible, to create a shift in perspective, to bring laughter into dark and dismal places. As an adult, I am even more impressed by the power that stories have to effect change. Particularly as a queer, transgender adult whose life doesn’t fit nicely into the generally accepted queer, transgender narratives (“I knew I was gay in kindergarten!” or “I knew I was trans when I was three years old!” – not to say that there is anything inherently wrong with these narratives)…I am increasingly convinced that it is imperative that those of us whose stories differ from the “mainstream” of queer culture tell those stories, because as more of us claim our own narratives, fewer of us feel alone.

I’ve been telling my story in bits and pieces for years – I took my first fumbling steps out of the closet almost six years ago, and have used storytelling as a means to process my personal evolution. However, last week I received a request from a family member for a narrative of my journey from straight, cisgender woman to queer, transgender man, and I realized for the first time that I have never actually written it all down in one place. (Granted, the story is ever-changing, and there will never be one complete account. But it had never crossed my mind that I’ve been working exclusively in vignettes, capturing a moment here and there, and never a longer story arc.)

So over the weekend and into the beginning of this week I’ve been writing it all down. As I am writing this Wednesday morning, I have more than 3,200 words…and while I have the bulk of the major events of the past six years down, it is still far from complete. It doesn’t include many of the vignettes I’m sure I’ve written down before – like coming out to my best friend from college when I had the world’s biggest crush on her, or how I started identifying as a gentleman years before I ever identified as transgender or genderqueer, or what it felt like the first time a stranger called me “sir” (which also happened well before I identified as anything other than cisgender).

I’m an inveterate storyteller with a story so full of plot twists that I’m having trouble telling it in a way that is both coherent and complete. I suppose, if I have to pick one over the other, I’ll go with coherence. (Choosing coherence over completeness will also increase my chances of getting this sent out within the week, like I promised.) Still, now I feel like, at some point in the near future, I need to at least try to get a (mostly) complete narrative down as well, even if it’s only for me. Particularly as I move into the strange new world of male privilege, I don’t ever want to forget where I’ve come from.