Some Things Change; Some Stay the Same

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s the first Thursday of November.

The first Thursday of November last year, I learned how to self-administer testosterone injections, and gave myself my first shot.

It’s been a year.

A year ago, I wasn’t entirely convinced that I was making the right choice. I was convinced, however, that I had to do something, and since starting HRT was suddenly an option that was open to me, I went for it.

And after a year, I have to say…I haven’t regretted it for an instant.

It’s not that I hated being a woman. I just…wasn’t particularly good at it. This body that I recreated with the help of hormones fits my soul in ways it never did before.

I am infinitely more comfortable and confident now. This doesn’t mean that I am comfortable and confident 100% of the time, but I waste much less energy on self-loathing than I used to.

The sound of my own voice rarely causes me to cringe anymore. On the best days, I love it. On the worst, I just realize that old speech patterns, just like any other habits, sometimes die hard.

I have an ever-increasing volume and distribution of facial hair. I realized this week that I have actually reached the point where I can shave in the morning and have stubble by the end of the work day. I’m sure there are men who find this annoying. I think it’s wonderful. And I’m learning to feel a sort of benevolence toward the hair sprouting pretty much everywhere else on my body. The hair on the top of my head may not be growing as quickly as it was…and it’s possible that I’m losing it more quickly than I used to. But I’m not any more afraid of balding than I ever was of going grey (which is to say, I’m pretty sure I can rock it however it plays out).

I’m still soft, and I have curves, but they’re distributed in some different places. My lower body is much more compact, where my upper body feels more solidly built. And for the first time since, well, the onset of my first round of puberty, really, my weight hasn’t fluctuated more than five pounds in the past year.

My Bipolar cycles have evened out to some extent. They’re still there, and still noticeable, certainly…but I have fewer days lost to feelings of madness, and it’s much rarer for me to feel like I’m out of control.

In a couple of weeks, I have a court hearing scheduled to legally change my name. I still have a few loose ends to figure out, but everything feels like it’s clicking into place.

I’ve been unspeakably lucky. I have a supportive partner, supportive friends and chosen family, and even a largely supportive work environment. I have dear friends on their own similar journeys who have not always been so fortunate, and I hope I never lose sight of how much of a privileged life I lead.

It’s been quite the ride, but I wouldn’t give it up for the world. Here’s to a year of adventure ahead!

Happy Anyway

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I’m sick. I tried for a while to convince myself it was just fall allergies, and maybe it started that way. But it’s become evident in the last few days that I do, in fact, have a cold (which may turn into something even less fun today, since I got my flu shot yesterday).

On top of that, it’s been pretty overcast the past few days. Yesterday’s dreariness in particular made me acutely aware of how much my mood and general ability to be an adult are influenced by the weather. When it’s cloudy for more than about 24 hours, all I want to do is hide in a giant blanket nest and not come out again until it’s sunny.

But you know what?

I’m still pretty happy.

Because, really, life is pretty good. I might be feeling under the weather, but there are still reasons to smile:

Tomorrow is Halloween. It also marks three years since I first tried on the name Alyx and found that it fit. It fit so well that it was briefly terrifying, because I knew exactly what sort of precipice I was stepping over. But the terror quickly gave way, because it felt so…easy. Comfortable. Right. Pronouns may still be a weird thing for me to navigate, and I’m not always sure exactly what is going on with my relationship to my body, but my name? That’s mine. There are no questions there.

In a few weeks, I will legally become Alyxander. I will have an ID card that matches my actual identity. And HR now knows and has told me what they need from me to change things over in their systems. I have all of the prerequisite paperwork together; it’s just a matter of waiting, now. I’m nervous, but mostly, I’m excited.

And, though it’s an exceedingly silly thing, I bought aftershave for the first time this week. It smells kind of like it belongs to a curmudgeonly old man, and I love it. This may be the thing that pushes me into shaving more than once a week. (Not that I don’t like shaving, because I actually do: I have a wonderful double-edged safety razor that I bought myself as a “yay, I started testosterone” present, and a brush and some great soap that I got from my partner as a Christmas gift last year, and I find the whole ritual kind of soothing. I’m just lazy. Not so lazy that I won’t link to all of my shaving gear in a blog post, apparently, but lazy enough that I only end up shaving when I look really scruffy, which takes about a week these days.)

Post-Vacation Musings

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Vacation was, on the whole, lovely (though I more or less forgot to take pictures, so I can’t show you how lovely it was). Here are some things I’ve been reflecting on when looking back at the weekend:

  1. Driving through Wisconsin in the fall is actually a pretty great things to do. The trees were gorgeous, and there wasn’t as much construction as we’ve run into on some other trips, so it was a pretty relaxing drive. Being a Minnesotan, I tend to poke fun at Wisconsin quite a bit, but this trip made me think that maybe it’s an okay state after all. 😉
  2. I completely adore my nephew. Every time I see this kid I get more excited about being an Uncle Ommer and about knitting him all sorts of cozy things. (The Yoda hat was a smash, and I will shortly be starting a sweater for Christmas and a blanket for his birthday.) I was quite nervous going in, because I know he’s at that age where stranger anxiety is a thing. But though he wasn’t immediately sure of me, he never got upset, and warmed up to me pretty quickly. We were buddies for the handful of minutes I got to hold him, and that makes me unspeakably happy.
  3. While there were some frustrating things surrounding spending time with my family, none of them were so egregious that they couldn’t be outweighed by time with my partner’s family or with friends. We didn’t fit in visits with as many people as we often try to do, but the time we did get with friends felt extra special and left us feeling refreshed. Deep conversations were had, and I was able to vent when I needed to and move on.
  4. I’ve been working meditative time back into my schedule (not quite on a daily basis yet, but close). Making that time on vacation helped me feel much more centered and grounded, and I hope I can continue developing that habit.
  5. I have truly wonderful people in my life. I’m incredibly lucky.

On the Road Again…

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s road trip time!

When this post goes live, my partner and I should be a little over halfway to Minnesota, where we’ll spend the weekend running around like mad people getting caught up with friends and family as much as we’re able to in the space of three days.

It’s a beautiful time of year for a road trip. I imagine as you’re reading this that we’re enjoying some gorgeous fall colors as we drive through Wisconsin. The weather’s cool enough to wear all the knitted things. Really, this might be my favorite time of year.

I tend to deal with a fair amount of pre-travel anxiety, and this week is no exception. There’s always too much to get done before we leave, and never enough time to do it all. But I know the payoff is always worth it.

I get to see my nephew this weekend. I get to give him his Yoda hat (which I finished Tuesday night, a whole 30 hours before our departure), and see in person just how much bigger he’s gotten since the beginning of August. I know he’s getting to the age where stranger anxiety is a thing, so I’m nervous that he won’t like me. I want us to be buddies.

This trip marks the last time I’ll be renting a car under this name. So that’s exciting.

It’s also the last time I’ll probably make it to Minnesota this calendar year…probably the last trip for quite some time. Starting next month, we want to really cut back on our spending (particularly what we spend going out to eat), and I want to start seriously paying down my credit card debt, so I don’t really know when our next trip will be. I hope I can keep that in mind this weekend and take full advantage of the time we have in our home state.

Hopefully next week I’ll come back with some interesting stories (and maybe even a few pictures)!

Hats! (or, ‘Tis the Season to be Knitting)

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I haven’t posted much about it on this blog, but I happen to be a knitter.

My partner is also a knitter (and a knitting designer). Knitting was actually how we met. It’s a really important part of our lives. My partner is a much more dedicated knitter than I am, though. As part of an effort to decrease the amount of yarn we have stashed in our apartment, he’s been tracking how many yards he knits each month, and let me tell you, those numbers are impressive (over 16,000 yards for the year, he tells me). Particularly when compared to what my numbers would be, if I kept track. (I have finished a total of six projects this year. He’s finished at least forty-two. And no, I’m not exaggerating.)

See, I have this problem where I want to knit all the things. So I cast on one thing that I’m excited about, and within days (or hours…), I get excited about something new, and cast that on…which basically means I currently have about ten projects in varying states of completion on different sets of needles scattered about the house. I also knit a lot less in the summer (because we don’t have air conditioning, and it’s hard to get my easily overheated self excited about working with wool when it’s 90°F outside). The last project I finished was a super quick project in July that I finished in under 24 hours. Before that, it was a pair of socks in April. (This problem is not really isolated to just knitting. I have attention span issues with most creative things I pick up. Some of it has to do with Bipolar cycles, but a lot of it is just the fact that I want to do ALL THE THINGS, and I don’t have time to do them all.)

I am an extraordinarily selfish knitter. I can count on one hand the number of people aside from myself that I am willing to knit for. One of those people is my seven-month-old nephew. I decided before he was born that for his first Halloween, I would knit him a Yoda hat. After he was born, someone else brought that idea to my brother and sister-in-law (whose wedding was Star Wars themed), and I promised them it would happen.

Halloween is fast-approaching, and we have a quick trip to Minnesota planned in the next couple of weeks. I decided last Thursday (which is the day of the weekly knit night at our local yarn store, which I have not been going to nearly as often as I’d like) that I needed to get cracking on this hat. So I bought the yarn, cast on at knit night, got about halfway to the crown…and realized that the hat was not only going to be big enough for my nephew (who was easily fitting into 9 month hats at 6 months), but it would be big enough for me. (Possibly for me AND my nephew at the same time.) I ripped it all back and started over.

And then I got distracted. My partner had been worked on this great hat that’s made out of sock yarn, and as I was working on the baby hat, I realized I had the perfect skein of sock yarn for a hat of my own: purple and black stripes, in a fiber blend that I felt was too nice to use for something that would go on my feet, that was part of the boatload of yarn that came into our lives after one of our knitting friends passed away last year. And I got excited about the idea of a stripy hat for myself. So I put down the baby hat, pulled out the sock yarn, and cast on.

The great part about knitting something with stripes is that it’s easy to find motivated to do “one more stripe,” and therefore finish the whole hat. Long story short, I started the hat on Saturday, and finished about 1am this morning. And it looks great:

Hat!

(I don’t have a picture of me wearing it yet, because the friend I inherited the yarn from had a cat at some point, and I am allergic to cats, and since just working on the project made me very sniffly, I decided to give it a bit of a wash before putting it on my head. It’s drying as I’m writing this; I’ll try to get another picture up later today.)

Thankfully, I have today and tomorrow off from work (hooray, Jewish holidays!), and tonight is knit night, so I’ve got plenty of time to get the Yoda hat for my nephew cranked out. And now that I’ve satisfied my selfish knitting impulse with a nearly-instant gratification project, I’ll be able to focus on the thing that has an actual deadline…right?

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Adulting

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s been quite the week.

I successfully filed my name change paperwork last Friday and was assigned a court date that’s now a little over seven weeks away. So now I’m working on pulling together everything I need to bring to court (and to the DMV, where I’ll be headed directly after the hearing).

Adulting is hard. And scary. I’ve done way more of it in the past week than I’ve made myself do in a while. And I’m proud of myself for doing the hard and scary things.

But then yesterday at work was just one of those days, and I ended up leaving a little early and skipping my weekly volunteer commitment because I felt like shit, choosing to hide at home where I could curl up under blankets and read and pretend the rest of the world wasn’t there.

Adulting is hard. And scary. And it’s a process that often feels a lot like two steps forward, one step back.

But still, progress is progress. I’ll get there in the end.

Forward Motion

/ Alyxander James / 2 Comments

‘Tis the season for Jewish holidays, which means I get a bunch of paid days off in the next month, including today and tomorrow (for Rosh Hashanah). Since I am not Jewish, this gives me some free time to attend to various personal business matters I haven’t gotten around to taking time off for, but that really need to happen.

Today, I’m going to the doctor to get labs done and check in on my hormone levels.

Tomorrow, I’m heading downtown to file the paperwork for my name change.

It doesn’t feel real yet. It probably won’t feel real until a couple of months from now, after my court date, when I’m holding my new driver’s license with my name on it.

My name. The one I chose for myself. The one that fit so effortlessly the first time I tried it on that I thought it couldn’t possibly be real.

I’m not yet Alyx in legal terms, but I’m Alyx in my dreams. And in my social life. And at work.

I have been Alyx for nearly three years now.

I am not looking forward to the fiddly bits of legally changing my name – changing over bank accounts and credit cards and utilities and dealing with social security. But I am looking forward to the day when I can hand a bartender or TSA agent or car rental agency employee my ID and not need to spend all of my energy praying they don’t look too closely at the feminine name on the card in contrast with the sideburn-sporting dude in front of them.

Tomorrow, I take the next official step in being recognized for who I am. And while the part of me that resists going outside of my comfortable bubble of routine is terrified, mostly, I am excited.

It’s time for forward motion.

Reminders of Weakness

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

On Tuesday morning, as I was making the bed, my lower back spasmed. After a panicked thirty seconds when I thought I wouldn’t be able to move at all, I slowly got out of bed, got dressed, and headed in the direction of work. I was halfway there when I realized my back was hurting worse as time went on, so I got off the bus, hopped on the next one coming in the opposite direction, and emailed my managers to tell them I would be working from home. As the day went on, I found I could sit, and I could stand and walk around, but the in-between bits of getting to and from one or the other? No way. Super painful. I ended up working from home Tuesday and Wednesday, taking lots of ibuprofen and making liberal use of a heating pad.

I have a bad back. The first time my back went out, I was twelve. Back then, I was a cheerleader (no, really, I was!), and a stubborn middle-school ego combined with a coach who didn’t have the training or common sense to realize that a twelve-year-old couldn’t possibly understand the long-term ramifications of pushing themselves past their limits…well, it was a problem. (The day my back went out was a game day. My team was furious when I told them I couldn’t be the base for any of the floor cheers. I had to call my mom to come pick me up before the game, because I was scared that they would make me do it anyway.) I did irreversible damage to my back in the three years that I was a cheerleader, and it’s haunted me ever since. My back is always tense, and almost always hurts in some way. Most of the time, I can deal with it fine, because it’s just become the backdrop of life, and I’m not super conscious of it. Every so often, though, something like Tuesday morning happens.

It’s always the stupid little things. This time around, it was making the bed. The last time this happened (almost two years ago), I had leaned down to pat my napping partner on the head, and found I couldn’t stand again. And every time it happens, I am reminded of how fragile humans are. In the space of half a second and one half-hearted arm motion, it suddenly became difficult to do the most basic things like getting out of bed, or going to the bathroom, or putting on socks.

Bodies are weird and wonderful and amazing, even if we don’t fit the ones we’re in and have to take matters into our own hands to form them into shapes we can feel comfortable wearing. And even when I’m laid out flat from a back spasm, I’m thankful for mine: without it, I wouldn’t be able to experience this amazing life I’ve found myself living.

My Life in a Monday

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s not often that a single day provides a snapshot of the kind of life I have, but this Monday sort of did just that:

  1. Monday morning, I took the last pills in my existing bottles of psych meds. I had placed a refill order last week, and knew that both my prescriptions were ready for pickup, and I knew I needed to collect them on my way home from work. Unfortunately, my pharmacy is in no way, shape, or form on the way home: in fact, I have to pass home to get there, and go twice as far in the opposite direction. I spent the entire day at work trying to talk myself into going. Finally, as I walked the half mile to the bus (which would take me to the train, which would get me within a block of the pharmacy), I realized the solution: I would allow myself a silly indulgence if I otherwise behaved like a responsible adult and picked up my meds (more on that in #2). Long story short, for the first time in many, many months, I picked up my prescriptions on time and didn’t miss a single dose of anything.
  2. The silly indulgence? While I was out running my post-work errands, I swung up to Barnes & Noble and picked up a copy of the newest Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook. I had been kicking around the idea anyway, because starting the end of this month I’ll be joining a D&D game run by someone my partner met in college (who happens to be a minister and is doing this game as part of an independent study for a class he’s taking at Loyola), and we were planning to meet Monday night to work on creating a character for me to play. The more I researched the newest edition of the game online over the weekend, the more excited I got, and so I went for it. It was very helpful to have a copy of the book for each of us to look at while we rolled up my character (a dwarf sorcerer – this would probably prove to my family that I am a godless heathen) that evening, and now I’m all set for the future games I’m sure I’ll be playing. Nerdery abounds!
  3. And then Monday night happened, and I laid down to go to sleep…and waited…and waited…and waited…and my brain just wouldn’t shut down. I wasn’t even perseverating over anything in particular; the gears just wouldn’t stop turning. Thanks to the insomnia and the fact that I needed to go in to work early, I ended up running through my Tuesday on approximately 3.5 hours of sleep and two shots of espresso and crashing by 8pm.

This is my life: learning to be a (sort of) responsible adult, discovering new and exciting depths to my capacity for nerdiness (and probably disappointing my relatives in the process), and never knowing exactly what to expect from my brain. It’s an adventure, and not always grand…but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Three Things on My Mind

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

After last week’s monster post of gratitude, this week has been pretty quiet. So here’s a glimpse at what’s going on in my brain:

  1. I really, really want to get out of debt. I’ve managed to accumulate a fair bit of credit card debt in the past couple of years (due in large part to being underemployed for the first nine months we lived in Chicago, but in larger part to the fact that I like to spend money…it’s a problem). It’s been hanging over my head and I’m sick of it. So starting in October (because this month I have to worry about paying for the name change), I am going to begin aggressively paying down the balance on my credit card, with a goal of having the whole thing paid off by next October. It’s a big goal, and I’m going to have to seriously cut back on frivolous spending, but I think it’ll be worth it. I’m also going to try to start building my savings (which currently amounts to approximately $20).
  2. For the first time since college, I’m starting to think about and plan for my future. When I started college, I had this ridiculous five-year plan that involved getting both my BA and my MSW and becoming a social worker. For many reasons (including the fact that it just wasn’t a good plan for me), that all went up in flames…and I never really replaced my dreams with something new. It’s been years since I planned for much of anything more than six months out. But that’s starting to change. The future is more enticing than terrifying, and there are wonderful things on the horizon.
  3. I’ve been thinking about faith a lot lately. I was raised believing that salvation was this deeply personal, unshakable thing that had very little to do with one’s own merit or power. I personally can’t believe in a God who would send people to hell for asking questions (or worse, for dying oblivious to the existence of some “perfect” religion). I believe that grace extends to everyone, regardless of where they were on life’s journey when they reached their finish line. I may call myself “functionally agnostic”; I may not belong to a church. But that doesn’t mean I lack a spiritual life.