church dreams

In three dreams over the past two nights, a specific church has been a featured location. It seems to be at night, and the prime angle is from a parking lot on the left hand side, more towards the back than the front, though I've been inside on at least two dream occasions. It's a more "modern" church, but definitely not one of the megachurch monstrosities. The light seems to be of a yellowish tint, both inside and out, and it feels like a known place, though not a religious or spiritual one to me. I'm definitely not a member or adherent in the dreams. I've been remembering more dreams very recently, and that usually has some meaning behind it, but there are no easy entries into meaning on this. My first thought was that it had something to do with my therapist (who's also a minister), since her office is in a Presbyterian church, but that's a very traditional cruciform building that looks nothing like the one in my dream.

61

Most people think of you as bright and happy, I suspect. For some time, it seemed like it was an aggressively cheery facade aimed at social acceptance and seamless defense that worked more often than not. Relatively recently, the aggression seems to be fading, replaced by a softer happiness with natural contours and variation, as though the solidity has moved from external armor to sustaining core. This looks good on you, very good.

bad

I've been in a bad place for a couple of days now, and it's just getting worse. I feel small, weak, and meaningless, that nothing I do really matters, that relationships and the potential for them are just falling away or receding into the distance, and that it's all a negative progression.

I can't help but feel like I'm in a situation of my own choosing, from which there is no clear or satisfying exit. I can become more the me I want to be, but at the price of losing social contact. I get by with people thinking I'm some kind of a guy, but I'm working on things that will change that. I want the changes, want to not be assigned guy status, but... I don't feel like I can honestly fight for girl status, and that even if I wanted to, it would have to be a constant fight with less than fixed results most of the time. I'm not a man, but people think I look like one. I'm not a woman, and I'll never have people think I look like one. I'm looking less like most definitions of a man every day, but that just means I'll be out in the pejorative freak territory, since there's no other option. It sucks, it's not fair, but that's just how it is, and ultimately, it's my choice that's led me here: yay, choice.

I don't really believe in xenogenesis. There has to be something in my culture that makes someone like me possible, because I'm a product of it. But if that's true, why can't I find more traces of it? Why can't I find more people in a similar place? Does it all come down to passing? Must I invest in it, only to selectively claim difference and deviation from an artificially opposite position? That better not be the case, because I don't think I can, either ideologically or pragmatically. I can't fit myself into this stupid line, but that's the only option out there.

I don't talk to anyone in my family. I've let all those relationships fade and wither, because of the way they treat me and because I have no faith in any of them handling me honestly. I've got friends I'm afraid to turn to because I already feel I make too many demands upon them, or that their lives are either full and satisfying, or already full enough of their own very real problems. I don't share with my co-workers because of incorrect assumptions about me and the burden of education should I try to make something matter. I've tried seeking out local trans groups, but that ended in spectacularly painful failure and the expulsion of the offending outsider (me). Therapy gets me little, because it seems like no one can speak authoritatively on my issues because no one seems to have been there before. At best, suggestions sound like unwarranted, pollyannaish optimism and at worst, condescending dismissal.

I have little to no satisfaction in my life. I'm so removed from my own desires and pleasures that I honestly don't know what I want, and can't reliably use that as a signpost for further investigation. I spend so much time preemptively trying to give others what they expect that I've lost myself long ago. With so much internal distance, it's not surprising that my relationships are often so unsatisfying to me.

I want things to change. I want to engage with life, with others, with myself more honestly, more directly, but I'm seriously afraid that the pain of doing so may well be too much for me to bear, and that I'll have to continuously bear it for the rest of my life. I'm very scared of that. I can't give up, but I'm already almost lonelier than I think I can bear. I don't know what to do any more.