Twelve to thirteen years ago I decided that the world did not currently have a place for me with regard to my experience of my own gender. I committed to doing the best that I could from my current position, working to make the world better even if I had no expectation of seeing the change I needed/wanted in my lifetime.

A lot has changed in the intervening years, both within me and without. I need to seriously reconsider my position on this, particularly with regard to what might be better than my current state, if still not ideal. Of course capitalism complicates this (I pass as a cis guy for economic reasons), and my social anxiety and intense fear of rejection are also at play, but I shouldn't avoid things just because they are hard and scary.

This is slow going. I'm writing about it to hopefully make myself more accountable.

Monday night I dreamed about crying.

In my dream I woke up in bed to notice Janiene was in bed, awake, and trying to figure out what it was that she ate that was making her stomach upset. She settled on "Impossible meat stew".

I remember saying, "I dreamed you were already gone..." (meaning, already dead). Then I put my head on her shoulder and started crying, both from relief and because the knowledge of her death being not very distant.

I woke up in bed, alone, nine months after she'd passed away, and I almost wept.

My boss, his boss, and his boss (all with whom I'm on a first name basis) sent me gift basket to mark their acknowledgement of the loss of Janiene. My company has been very understanding about my need to be out to care for her during home hospice, and now that she's gone. I've said semi-jokingly that I feel like I'm working for Hank Scorpio; my company may not make the most socially responsible decisions about how they create and broadcast content, but fuck if they don't go out of their way to take care of their people.

"Their people", I suspect, comes with caveats. I don't know how much of this upper management (up to at least the SVP level) affiliation has to do with becoming "one of theirs", one for whom allowances are made and ranks are closed (to an extent). Part of me wonders to what extent it's boosted by the assumption that I'm white/cis/het: it makes me being a manager among managers more understandable, I suspect.

But all that aside, it's nice to have space, even if I decry others not also having space.

Saturday I did not change out of my comfy, slightly padded bra (to my standard slightly minimizing sports bra) when friends were coming over to check on me. Not a subject of commentary or conversation.

Sunday I went to the same friends' house for dinner, saw another friend, wearing the comfy (not sports) bra and standard clothes. Again no commentary or conversation.

Today, anxious about taking a walk without some degree of minimization rather than accentuation, because strangers on the street are less inclined to be kind to me than my friends.

J is back in the hospital, the third time in a month. This time it looks like her pneumonia is back (that was the first overnight visit this month), and she has a blood clot in her lung. All of this is not uncommon for cancer patients, or at least for metastatic patients, I'm told.

I don't know if this is anomalous, or if this is the beginning of a new normal.

From the bad place, keeping it here long term.

15 or so years ago I had a therapist I was sure was going to be the key to figuring out how to make my life better on many fronts. Based on prior experience with other therapists, I wanted someone who "got it" on a lot of big fronts from the start, and who could keep up with me as I talked my way through my issues by way of philosophy, pop culture, and painfully mixed metaphor. This one hit all of those requirements: theologically trained, trans, queer, quick and clever with a restless mind, and older, with more experience in the world I was hoping to learn from.

We established the groundwork quickly, and at first it seemed to be going swimmingly. While I would have to pause to explain some of my pop cultural references (music, in particular), it wasn't odious, and she was more widely read than I was in Western philosophy as it touched upon, or was used by, progressive theology.

It stopped working around the 18-24 month mark. In retrospect I think it might have been a mix of analyst to analysand transference (something I had never considered until much later) and too long a time in which I set the rules and she eagerly followed along. In relation to our work, it seemed like she collapsed and withdrew, unable or unwilling to challenge my thinking when it wasn't serving me, seemingly lost. She agreed that I described my situation in sharp detail, but had no suggestions for how to change it.

One of the early gems of our time together was the realization that I made about radicalization around the concepts of sex and gender, and how I'd broken the pattern a lot of trans people seemed to have, based on those I knew and read about.

My theory was that many trans people transitioned to something that served them better (almost always something that could be interpreted as a point on the gender binary, at least initially), and then with a mix of relief of that particular trans pressure, plus maybe different personal experience, some (the ones I read obsessively, anyway) went on to realize that the idea of sex and gender being fixed, solid categories was not accurate either personally or systemically.

I hit everything mind first. It's both a blessing and a curse, but it's my mind and I've come to accept that. For me, part of studying transness became picking at the threads around sex, gender, attraction, manifestation, change over time, change by culture, the structural limits of binarism, and multitude of plateaus possible to either visit or inhabit. The seed of this great unwinding was well planted and germinating before I ever engaged with endocrinological shift, greymarket, OTC, or medically supervised.

One of the consequences for me was that the idea of "transition" seemed a bad investment; why would I work rigorously to seemingly reinforce concepts I found both anathematic and incredibly painful? As an AMAB person, the incline is steep (because of the sociocultural distortions of patriarchy and its dependent misogyny). Having realized the foundations are all bullshit, even if the power consequences are quite real, I had/have no appetite for standard transition work.

And now I'm in my 50s, still unhappy with my place in the world, still radicalized, still seeing no way forward. I keep remembering my therapist saying, "What you describe sounds accurate, and I don't know what to say."

I've been back on the estrogen patch and progesterone capsules for just over a month, and I can see a difference, primarily in my breasts. The are back to bouncing slightly when I do my morning workout without support, and that's pleasant.

Straightening up recently I found a holiday gift card that I'd misplaced and overlooked. Today I used it to buy a test pair of pants and shorts from American Tall. Being 6'3" (1.905 m) and shopping for boy clothing is a challenge, but nothing like shopping for girl clothing. I'm cautiously hopeful that American Tall can help.

Yesterday I consciously decided not to change into a minimizing sports bra for a social visit (with a friend who's known me for decades, and known I was trans for almost as long). It feels small and vulnerable, bordering on suspicious to even mention it, but also felt like something of a milestone.

Autism is a subject that won't go away, and/or I'm having trouble avoiding. I don't know if this is a combination of media saturation, my own embarrassing low grade hypochondria, a desperate need for inclusion, and fear of rejection. The idea that I might be autistic pisses me off, and right behind that is fear. I don't understand either, yet, and not knowing only increases my anger and fear.

I have a first cousin once removed who, by all appearances, is under the trans umbrella (gender non-conforming, nonbinary, genderfluid, or something else: I'm not 100% sure). This person is the grandchild of the aunt and uncle who were most rigid in enforcing rigid, assigned at birth gender roles on me well into my twenties.

I'm not close to my family, in large part because of the fraught history and lack of accounting of the cruel and inflexible rules they imposed upon me. I was a problem discussed when not present, and one that the "adults" collectively acted like wasn't a problem in company.

I'm both genuinely pleased that a family member a generation down the line doesn't have to deal with the pain and bullshit I did, and simultaneously bitter and resentful that they and their grandparents benefit from my still quite raw vanguard experience.

Long, involved, interconnected dreams last night about identity, transformation (both mental and physical), and minds/selves becoming more than solitary (dual in one case, well beyond thousands in another). Magic was heavily, heavily features as an assumed core.

I woke from one dream in which I'd become a POV character, a tall woman in a short red dress, sobbing in deep, heartrending way because she/I couldn't sing, couldn't get past all the self-doubt, hesitation, and all the history of gendered bullshit around voice and meaning.

What woke me was realizing it as a dream; I realized it was a dream because I rarely cry in the waking world, and almost never loudly or unselfconsciously.