Mental Health
Working through Blurry Emotions in Transition
Feeling emotions in a new way can be challenging
CW: Experiencing emotions for the first time inside my body as a transgender person. Mental health challenges and grounding discussed.
What has happened is supposed to be hard.
It’s normal to experience anger, grief, or fear in response to something painful.
I’ve struggled emotionally for a long time, but something has changed since my transition. It has been hard to define, until it came more into focus this past week.
It’s not that the emotions themselves are really overwhelming. They are proportionate. It’s that I’m learning how to truly feel for the first time.
It’s not that the emotions themselves are really overwhelming. They are proportionate. It’s that I’m learning how to truly feel for the first time.
That is really hopeful because if I can actually feel the painful things, that means that I’m also capable of experiencing real happiness and emotional pleasure on new levels. I can experience these things from the inside, the way most people do. I was certainly laughing as I wrote and edited this writing over the last few days. It was fun. I could feel the laughter from within, instead of from outside. That’s not something I’m used to experiencing. It feels strange, but wonderful.
It didn’t take many tears before the grief became too much to handle.
Perhaps it was the absence of tears over so much time. Maybe it’s a quirk of being a man. Maybe it’s part of fitting in your body well enough to experience emotions from the inside. It takes less expression of emotional pain to feel like too much. Maybe it’s similar to the way a flood will come so quickly after a long drought because the soil isn’t used to taking in the rain.
It wasn’t that the adrenaline was really sufficient to paralyze me.
It shouldn’t have been too much, if taken in the context of my full history. I’ve had much more adrenaline shooting through my veins for much longer and found myself far more functional in response. When the day is just a collection of panic attacks, you learn to breathe through them and keep working. Worst case, you hide in a closet within a closet for a while and just work on existing, until you can go back to functioning.
Living wasn’t really in the equation, even when I was doing outrageous things, accumulating some very different life experiences from the average person. It was as if I was along for the ride of someone else’s incredible story.
Maybe now that I’m doing so much better, a panic attack feels like a novelty. Maybe that’s why it hurts so much.
On a Sunday, at 6am, I called a hotline again.
It’s been a very long time, since I’ve done that. I had been awake since 3am, watching my past play over and over on instant replay. All of one’s history can fold back on itself endlessly in 3 hours. Each new fold told the story just a little differently. One little detail would change and become the new focus. Was the story still true with one different adjective or noun switched in, somewhere in the middle? Does one word change everything?
I’m used to telling them how to help me.
I’ve talked so many strangers through waking me up from a living nightmare, that I can do this in my sleep. I can do it while driving to work. I can do it while hyperventilating.
“I need a grounding exercise.”
“What’s a grounding exercise?”
“Go through the senses and ask me to name things.”
“Do you want to talk about your past?”
“No, just ask me questions. Any questions. Anything but the past.”
Why can’t I just do it for myself? Sometimes, I can. Sometimes, I need human connection. Sometimes, I just need to be heard, even if they are only hearing me name 5 things I can see, 4 things I can touch, 3 things I can hear, 2 things I can smell, and 1 thing I can taste. I need them to laugh with me when I name something strange.
- I see a picture of a boy in drag in a swimming pool that I can’t go to anymore, a metal cup, a fire, a crack in the ceiling that needs to be fixed, and a refrigerator that is suspiciously quiet.
- I feel the soft suede of the couch, the smooth surface of wood, the hard tapping of fingertips against the keyboard, and muscles under a thin layer of skin and fat that have hardened substantially over nine months.
- I hear a soft voice laughing in another room, the click-clack of erasure as I correct another mistake or the more fluid rhythm of creation as I write myself into being, and the sound of air escaping my body because it can right now.
- I smell the soapy scent of candle wax and the watery metallic smell of jasmine leaves that haven’t dried yet.
- I taste the tingling burn of a drop of extra hot horseradish sauce on a small spoon, as it wraps itself around my tongue, sending a thin wave of sparkling pain across the middle of the left side of my scalp. It makes me grab my head, but I like the pain. It helps to keep me inside my body.
This time was different, though. I couldn’t remember what to say. I couldn’t remember how to tell them to help me. I had forgotten because it had been too long, since I had needed help like this.
I was surprised that I was crying.
I haven’t cried much since starting Testosterone, except maybe while watching the last season of the television show Pose, which is the only thing that can break through any man’s stoicism.
I hadn’t been sure I really needed to talk to somebody until they said that they couldn’t help me because I was calling for the wrong problem. They were trained to help with problem X, but couldn’t help with problem Y, even if problem Y happened alongside problem X. I had given too much information, revealing that my problems were too complicated. There were too many layers, too many folds in the story. They offered to give me other resources.
I couldn’t make the words come out to explain that I couldn’t dial 10 more numbers. I couldn’t explain what I needed, much less try again with a new person.
They stayed on the line with me.
They took the risk of trying to help me with something that they weren’t trained to assist with. That was enough. I just needed us to both be humans together for a minute.
Sometimes, we don’t need a professional trained in Problem Y. Sometimes, we just need to be heard.
It helped a lot. I got to feel comforted from inside my body. That feels different.
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