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creatur3creati0ns · 7 months

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The Past 20 Years

I thought this would be the best way to start this blog. I think that’s still what this is called. Clearly I have no idea what I’m doing.

I’ve told my life story before to a lot of people, yet every time I try to sit down to write some of it out, I just don’t know where to start.

Trigger warning for mentions of religious trauma, childhood trauma and abuse, mental illness struggles, mention of self harm and suicidal ideation, alcoholism, eating disorders, fatphobia, homophobia and transphobia.

I was born in Michigan, and when I was around five my parents moved me and my twin (fraternal) sister to Arizona. Around then, my grandfather passed away from lung cancer. Sometime before that, I think, my parents got divorced. I have a very bad memory, a lot of that is attributed to childhood trauma and abuse and lifelong dissociation. I really only remember what my mother has told other people while I’m in the same room.

My father always lived nearby, and eventually he moved back into the house. Separate room than my mother, but because she would leave town for work often, it was easier for him to care for us while she was gone. My dad is retired from General Motors and is an Army veteran. My mother was a commercial bus driver. My sister and I got to go on trips a lot because of it. Everyone from out of the country loved the two twins who were dressed up as cowgirls.

Sometime in third grade, my parents moved us to a rural part of Arizona. Very small and conservative town. We lived on about four acres of land, with neighbors pretty far away. We were about 15 mins from town, from civilization. The church me and my sister were dragged to every Sunday was about forty-five minutes away. It was then that my mother went back to college. After a few years, with homeschooling thrown in there, my sister and I got moved to a bigger town about two hours away.

This is probably when I start remembering my life the most. Now is a good time to mention my stomach problems, because it’s a huge part of my life and after reading this whole thing a few times, I have nowhere else to stick this paragraph in. My mother says I was practically born with these stomach issues, I don’t remember them as a young kid, only when I hit maybe 11 or 12. Without getting into too much detail, something is wrong with my stomach. I would love to be more descriptive, but after literal years of allergy tests and diets and even an endoscopy, no one has any idea what is wrong with it. Every food and drink (even water) upsets it and I have stomach pain nearly constantly. It’s gotten better in the past two years, mainly due to not being in school or around my family, but it’s still pretty awful. On average I spend at least two hours in the bathroom each day because of this, and I have to be careful with consuming anything in public if I don’t have a bathroom near me. Okay, that’s personal enough. It’s a big problem. I’ve had chronic health problems all my life, so just keep that in mind as you read later about the other crazy shit that my body pulls.

A few months into fifth grade we went back to public school, and my mother finished her college degree for social work about a year or two later. We were living in our van for a while, then an RV, then an apartment, and then finally the house where I would spend the rest of my childhood. My dad lived in his own room across the hall.

My dad is diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and has been on medication for it most of my life. He’s also an alcoholic. Three beers before noon, more throughout the day. He never was really drunk unless my mother had friends over. I didn’t like when he was drunk. He got louder. My father had anger issues my whole life. He yelled over anything someone did that upset him, except if it was my mother who did it. She was always the one in charge. Even though they were divorced he was deeply in love with her. He acted more like an adult older brother who still lived at home. He never acted like a father. I have a lot of trauma from his yelling. Dropping a glass or a drink or running into something. Folding a towel the wrong day, not cooking the way he liked. Any time I was in the kitchen he would come in and stand behind me, watching and not saying anything. I’m still working through all that. But I used to watch westerns with him on the couch, his arm around me. We would watch baseball and football, but baseball was my favorite. Or at least, it was his favorite. I got a lot of my music taste from him. Rock and roll on the radio whenever he was driving us somewhere. We bonded over that as I got older. I dyed my hair orange when I turned 18, and he loved it. Orange is his favorite color. When I started getting piercings he loved those too. Asked when I was going to get a tattoo. He had a few old ones from when he was younger, and he loved talking about them almost as much as I loved asking about them. As an outsider, my dad was a pretty cool guy. But he was an awful father.

I was always closer with my mother. I’m having a hard time right now thinking about what to write about her. She has some good qualities, but I’m not at the point in my life where I could name them sincerely. She is suspected to have borderline personality disorder that is untreated and ignored. She had horrific childhood trauma that she would casually talk about over Christmas dinner. It was her dad that passed from lung cancer. She tried her best, that’s what she always told me. But I honestly don’t care. She was a horrible mother, a horrible person.

At thirteen, I was in a car accident. Rear-ended at a stoplight while my dad was driving. My sister and I were in the back seat, and the car was totaled. The guy hit us at about 30 miles per hour. Hit the gas instead of the brake. We went home to eat dinner, and then my dad took us to the ER. Mild whiplash, no scans, no nothing. Told to go home. The next day I had my first ever panic attack.

About a year of panic attacks, self harm, grades dropping, and suicidal ideation, I finally told my mother about it. Primary care physician appointments nearly every week led to a Phoenix Children’s Hospital referral. Psychology, neurology, anyone who might help. After about another year I left with a diagnosis of a traumatic brain injury, social anxiety, and major depressive disorder. I was put onto medication. I switched medications about eight more times. Eventually my mother didn’t let me try anymore. Soon after I started getting chronic migraines and nausea. The nausea went away sometimes, but for over a year I had a migraine constantly. At its lowest it was a 5 on the pain scale. It never went away. When I woke up and when I went to bed it was always there. Even a shot of Toradol in my ass didn’t make a dent.

This is where I’ll talk more about my mother. Most of the issues started after the car accident. Along with my struggles came her ignorance. I would break down in front of her over school, she would stare at me coldly, saying that grades and graduating is important and that she’s trying everything that she can. I would say I was suicidal and self harming, she would cry and say she was an awful mother. I would leave the conversation with me having consoled her, telling her she’s great and I’m going to be okay. Of course, her doing everything in her power consisted of taking me to church programs that were meant to heal me, asking her prayer group to pray for me, telling me to pray and meditate when my chronic migraines were getting so bad I could barely stand, and threatening to take me to the hospital if I kept saying I was suicidal. The one time she took me to the ER, she wouldn’t let them put me into an inpatient program. She took me home to be on suicide watch. She said if I hurt myself during it that she would be arrested. She took me off my antidepressants and told me not to tell my doctors, to lie and say I was still on them. She did everything she could think of, but apparently she never thought of actually listening to what I was asking for.

I had started therapy maybe a month before my car accident, because I had come to accept that I was bisexual and I knew that, according to my mother and my father and my grandmother and my church and the Bible, it was a sin. That therapist stopped answering our calls after my mother told him that a few sessions in.

My mother continued switching me from therapist to therapist, most of them Christian, none of them I had a say in. When I finally found one that I connected with and who was helping me make progress, my mother stopped making me see her. I was realizing that my mother was abusing me, and I was trying to help myself and set boundaries, and according to her, “I’m your mother, you can’t have any boundaries with me.” So that therapist was out. With all the therapists I had seen, one of the worst was my second one, who was the step-daughter of the first therapist who ghosted me. She liked to quote scripture at me, and say that she wished God would let her love gay people, but unfortunately he didn’t.

The worst therapist I had ever seen, by far, was a woman who specialized in equine therapy. I was never into horses. My mother, though, loved horses dearly, which was of course the only thing that mattered. When talking to her, it was fine. I don’t remember it much. The way she practiced therapy, though, was, in my opinion, unacceptable. Because she recognized that I struggled with placing boundaries (because I was told by my mother that I couldn’t), she decided to try to help me by placing me across the room and speed walking toward me, not stopping until I place my hand out in front of me and say “stop” loud and clear. As you can imagine, this caused issues, because this was her very first solution to this problem, rather than actually talking about it. And refusing to stop until I say “stop” in a way that she likes seems pretty messed up. Each time she did it I was forced closer and closer to a panic attack. She told me her eventual plan was to have herself replaced by a horse, who was walking (maybe even trotting) towards me. This probably would have killed me, because I was honestly afraid of horses at the time. Yes, my mother knew this, no, it did not matter. Any time we interacted with the horses, I was filled with anxiety and fear and every week I dreaded the appointment, and left with more trauma than I came in with. I asked to stop the appointments quickly, but my mother made me go for at least a month. After I left, I was done with therapists for a while.

I struggled through school since the car accident. My sister and I changed schools after starting 9th grade. I almost dropped out a few times, and I don’t think anyone actually expected me to graduate. I sure didn’t. I had to get a 504, which was basically a set of rules my teachers had to legally follow because of my disabilities. My brain injury, and at the time, chronic migraines and nausea. This meant extra time on assignments, no presenting in front of the class, no being called on in class, and being able to leave class at any moment to go to the office if I started having a panic attack. I had to do this often. Some weeks it was every day, and I would be there for hours, missing classes. This caused me to fall behind more. I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital twice during high school, once in December of 2019, and again in April of 2021. I graduated in May of 2021, and walked across the stage high out of my mind on the half pill of gabapentin my mother gave me before the ceremony.

The last therapist I saw as a minor was through my high school. I was very close with the principal and guidance counselor due to my issues. We had to interact daily due to my 504 and me being constantly in the office. The last semester of senior year I took every class via Microsoft Teams while working in the guidance counselor’s office. My anxiety and depression had reached a point where I could not be in a classroom setting and around other people. She mentioned starting a group therapy for students, and when the therapist came to the school I was the only one who had signed up. I saw my chance, and I told him everything. The car accident, the panic attacks, the abuse, the self harm, the suicidal ideation, the fact that I was so sure I wasn’t going to graduate high school but my whole life depended on it and it was all my mother cared about. I had less than an hour and I talked the whole time because I knew this was my only chance. I hadn’t seen a therapist in a while and I was self harming daily, and was very close to a very real suicide attempt. And so he went out to the parking lot where my mother was (that’s a whole other crazy story. For a short time she was parked in front of the office all day to “make sure” I was doing my work and to “be there” if I ended up having a panic attack. My principal was not pleased.) and tried to talk her into letting me become his client. She told him that I had an eating disorder, which at the time, I had no idea she knew about because she never asked or did anything about it. There’s another point off for the Mother of the Decade award there. Long story short, she signed the forms, and he came to the school every week to see me. I joined the group therapy anyway, but the students just ended up unintentionally triggering me and the worksheets given out weren’t helpful if you had been in therapy for around four years already. He helped me get through the last few months of my high school career. He helped me go back to inpatient psychiatric care when things just got worse. When I turned 18 he still kept me as his client, despite being a therapist for adolescents. I stopped seeing him about a month after I moved out, because the company he worked for realized they weren’t getting paid by insurance so we had to end sessions immediately. He wasn’t the best therapist I’ve ever had (my current ones are a lot to live up to), but he quite literally saved my life and got me through the last few months as a minor, and for that I owe him. He was a sick dude and I hope he’s still good.

I turned eighteen five days before I graduated, and the first thing I did as a legal adult was go to the DMV and get my ID. My partner and I had been planning for a few months to move to Phoenix. Them for college, me to get the hell away from my family. I needed an ID for that, along with getting piercings and tattoos, which I knew I wanted to do immediately. My mother hated tattoos, piercings, and dyed hair but always told me that once I turned 18, I could do what I wanted with my appearance, even if I was still living with her. This proved to be a lie, because when I dyed my hair at 18 she got mad I didn’t ask her, and when my sister and I wanted piercings, we had to let her know in advance and promise it wasn’t a septum piercing because we were “still under her roof”. Don’t worry, after I moved I continued to mess up my appearance without letting her know and gave her multiple mini heart attacks over it. And I of course got a septum piercing. It felt good.

August of 2021, the lawsuit against the driver who hit me in 2016 finally came to an end, and I was awarded, quite frankly, a fuck-ton of money. I was eighteen. Safe to say the money lasted a little over a year. Between crazy medical bills and the fact that I was a teenager who just got out of an abusive household and started living with my partner, the money went by quickly. Especially when I wasn’t earning any money. For a year I stayed inside our apartment, had therapy appointments every week, doctor appointments almost every week, many tests and procedures and hospital trips. I started to have chronic hives a month into moving into my apartment, with no apparent cause. Every allergy test came back negative, and no one had any idea what was going on, but I was still spending a lot of money trying to figure it out. It landed me in Urgent Care about three times, due to my face blowing up about three times normal size. I left with a Prednisone prescription and an epipen. After 3 months of hives that never went away and would get worse randomly, my therapist suggested my body was trying to tell me that now was the time to start medically transitioning after waiting for five-ish years. Weirder things have happened, and there was a lot of evidence as to why this might be the case. This is probably something I want to talk about at some point, my relationship to my body and how it communicates with me. And it was communicating pretty clearly. “Testosterone now or I’m going to kill you” was heard loud and clear. I was in a safe place, physically, and, at the time, had money. So one gender therapist appointment and a single phone call later, I started testosterone February 17, 2022. I haven’t had hives since.

I developed an eating disorder in middle school, not long after my car accident. I don’t think those are related, but my mother was plus size all my life and there was not a day that went by that she didn’t speak badly of herself, and that definitely is related. Same for my grandmother. They were on diets constantly. I was put on diets due to my stomach issues, but never for my weight. I was average weight as a kid, and at around 14 I started gaining weight. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for my mother to comment on it. Into the “thinspo” and “ana” pipeline we go. I remained thin for years, and when I moved out I was probably at my lowest weight. Then my hives started. I was put on steroids for months straight. A side effect of that is weight gain. I don’t know how much I weigh, because I chose not to weigh myself, but I think saying I gained 70/80 pounds wouldn’t be too far off. It was a big change, something I could not control. All I could do was watch. It was a lot to get used to so suddenly, especially when dealing with so many other things in my life. My body was changing even before I started testosterone. As most people with an eating disorder know, gaining weight is your greatest fear. Pretty quickly my eating disorder got worse, and an old eating disorder I hadn’t had in years got kicked into high gear. I am fat now, and I am more than okay with that. It took around two years to come to terms with that, and it’s only been the last few months where I finally felt comfortable calling myself fat. My body will never be the way it was before. There’s stretch marks and fat where there wasn’t before. I’m no longer the thin 18 year old. But that’s what life is. I’m 20, and I’m on testosterone, and I have tattoos and piercings and stretched ears and dyed hair. I’m never going to look like I did before and that’s okay. I like that. I’m a lot happier with my body now. Unlearning internalized fatphobia was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I’ve made a lot of progress and I’m really proud of it. It’s still something I struggle with, but now I can say I’m “recovering” from my eating disorders, and that itself gives me hope.

I realized I was transgender when I was 14. There were signs before then, but as I said at the beginning of this, my memory is pretty bad. Since my mother didn’t know about this, I can only guess the timeline based off of my Snapchat memories and pictures I took at the time. I don’t remember exactly what was the final nudge, but one thing that sticks out is when my mother told me to be careful with how I styled my short hair, because I could “look like a boy”. I admitted to myself that that’s what I wanted. I did want to look like a boy. There were a lot of other complicated feelings that I honestly don’t remember. I told my best friend at the time, and she was accepting. I told my sister a few days later, and as always, she loved me and accepted me. I first identified as genderfluid, but that lasted maybe a day. I realized nonbinary fit better. I wasn’t a girl, I was neutral. I wanted to look androgynous and slightly masculine. I used they/them pronouns with close friends for a few years, and I went by Noah. At 17, not long before I turned 18, I told my best friend I am trans guy and my pronouns are he/they. I had known I wanted top surgery and hormone replacement therapy for years, and I knew I could still do that using they/them pronouns and being nonbinary, but one day I just looked in the mirror and it all clicked together. I’m a trans guy. I still don’t connect with “trans man”, and if we were to get into it fully, I am still nonbinary. But “trans guy” is the best descriptor for me right now. In late August of 2021 I told my best friend that I really liked the name Ezra, and had been thinking about it for months. I finally told my partner (over text, because I was terrified), and then came out to everyone on my Instagram and Snapchat, which had my friends and old classmates, as Ezra and using he/they pronouns. I try not to focus on the fact that I can’t completely remember how I learned I was transgender, and choose to focus on the fact that transitioning brings me a lot of euphoria and has turned my life upside down in the best way possible. I am so much more comfortable in my body, my life, my appearance, my relationships, and just how I move throughout the world. I am, for the first time, happy and content in myself. Still need top surgery, but you know, money.

I came out to my mother via text in late February of 2022. My grandmother said it was the same as if my mother texted me telling me that she has cancer. So you can imagine this was well received. I endured a week of phone calls and texts where my mother was crying, saying she wanted to kill herself. She told me she called a suicide hotline the night I came out to her. She was texting my sister constantly asking where she went wrong. She told me several times she “knew in her heart” that I wasn’t trans, that this was just the current trend. She was angry that I had never told her this before. There was a Zoom call with her and my sister where she spent most of the time crying and denying the homophobia and transphobia I was brought up on. My partner was out of frame holding my hand. The call ended with me breaking down in tears, telling her that I’m fighting to be heard here and that I’m sure about this and have been dealing with it for years and this is something that I never brought up because I knew this is how she would react. Eventually the call ended, and the next morning I had a therapy appointment. We talked about everything, and I decided I needed space from my mother. I told her that, and I have not talked to her since in 551 days. There has been one message from her since then, where she did not apologize, and said she loved me amongst a bunch of religious bullshit. My grandmother berated me over text and when I told her I was not going to have a conversation about it, she berated me more. I haven’t talked to her since then too, despite her texting me twice since then saying where Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner would be held if I was “still interested in family” and asking if I had “divorced myself completely from my family” which is truly a hilarious sentence. I, of course, never answered. My dad shared his opinion, which was based on misleading comments my mother told him. When I told him the truth, he never responded. Haven’t talked to him since, either. I am still very close with my sister, but it makes things hard when family gets brought up. I do my best with placing boundaries and being honest, and she is endlessly supportive and loving, just like she has been all my life. I’m doing a lot better. Going no contact was the best thing I could have done. In the week after I came out, both my mother and grandmother said horrible things about me to my sister and to her roommate. Things I don’t want to repeat here. Things like how I’m not her child anymore. I never got an apology from anyone. I think they expect me to come back and pretend everything is normal. I have a lot of family nightmares, and I’m working through all of this extensively in therapy. I’ll probably talk about all this more another time. But it’s still hard to think about. I was 18 when I stopped talking to most of my family.

Not long after my hives disappeared in 2022, and pretty soon after cutting contact with my parents and grandmother, I got kidney stones. That was a bad night. My partner had to drive me to the ER at 2am. I don’t have my license, mainly due to the issues I was facing in high school. All my energy went to staying in school and staying alive. Plus a car accident that gives you a traumatic brain injury and an insane amount of mental health problems is pretty traumatizing and doesn't really make you want to jump behind the wheel. By the time I realized my stomach pain was not my normal stomach pain, was consistently getting worse through the hours, and was in fact an emergency, the kidney stones were almost done passing. Still had to endure medical care professionals who had apparently never met a trans person before and a fun little CT scan. So I lived through that, without support from my parents, and that was tough but it showed me that I was able to live without them. I was 19 at the time.

The therapist I’m seeing now is, funnily enough, the same therapist my mother stopped me from seeing when I realized I was in an abusive household. After moving I found her on LinkedIn and contacted her. I’ve been seeing her for almost two years. She’s a great therapist and the progress we have made is immeasurable.

Another health issue that came up, around seven or eight months ago at this point, was photophobia. Photophobia is a sensitivity to light. It’s a symptom of a bigger condition. You guessed it, I have no idea what the condition is. This isn’t really the fault of doctors, though, my primary care physician said there was nothing physically wrong with my eyes and referred me to an opthamologist, but that’s about when the money ran out so I still haven’t been able to figure it out. All I know is that it is very painful. My left eye is worse than the right for some reason. Photophobia burns, it feels like someone squirt hand sanitizer in my eyes. My eyes get red and watery, tears start flowing and I physically can’t open my eyes without immense pain. The only way I have been able to help it is to turn off all the lights and close the blinds, lay down for a bit with my eyes closed, after maybe 30 minutes open them, and then slowly introduce lights back into the room. It’s a whole ordeal.

I think those are all of my health conditions, and they are very hard to deal with. This in addition to my mental health conditions make living very difficult, let alone living well. I don’t leave the house much, mainly due to my anxiety and my eyes. I’ve had the same friends since high school and I love them dearly but I’ve really only made one in my adult life, and I’m 20 now. Because I can’t drive I rely on others to get me where I need to go, unless there’s an easy bus route. I wasn’t able to take the bus for the first year and a half when I moved out due to my anxiety. Even the thought of it sent me into panic attacks. I can’t be out in the heat for too long, which sucks because I live in the Phoenix, Arizona area. I have bad heat intolerance, so bad that any time I leave the house I have to bring an ice pack. I used to not be able to walk long distances for a while without insane leg cramps (something that testosterone effects, apparently) but thankfully that’s gone away. I’m very much not physically or mentally healthy, despite how often I try to treat these issues.

I did have a job, though. Only the one, after the money ran out. March 11, 2023 to May 11, 2023. Doing exactly two months was an accident. I worked as a retail recovery associate for J.C. Penney. It was hell. I was having panic attacks almost daily, dissociating during the whole shift. My stomach issues were a hundred times worse, and the photophobia was acting up daily. I had to leave work because of it twice. I couldn’t see and it looked like I was sobbing while hanging up clothes. I liked the job, the work, some of my coworkers, and the customers. Repetitive and easy. I liked talking to new people daily. Misgendering was a huge problem, despite me wearing a pronoun pin. It doesn’t help that I was placed in the women’s clothing section because that’s where I was needed. Coworkers would misgender me constantly, one even found out my deadname somehow and wrote it down on a paper we were using for the dressing rooms. The main issues were with the managers. Every time I tried to call out because of my medical issues or just straight up fear and anxiety, no one would answer the phone, no matter how many times I called. I would leave a message on the manager’s phone, because that’s all I could do. Apparently they weren’t getting these messages, and thought I was always a no call no show. They didn’t tell me this until the day before I quit. They were deducting points from me without my knowledge and I reached a point where so many points were taken that I would be fired. I had to leave that day because of my eyes, but the second I left the store I had a panic attack. I called and quit the next day. No one answered the phone, so I had to leave a message. I still don’t know if they actually got that message.

Since then I’ve been unemployed. I’ve been to a lot of interviews, but no luck. My partner of almost three years has been completely financially supporting me. Thankfully my insurance covers my psychotherapy and EMDR appointments I have weekly, but my partner pays for my testosterone (about $50 a month) and my prescription medications (about $20 a month). They pay all of our rent and have been for months. They pay for our food and for the food for our pet bunny, Bunjamin Buttons. As you can imagine, that causes a lot of pressure on them and some issues for us. We’re working through it a lot right now, but that’s a story for another time.

I think you’re pretty much caught up! This is the first time I’ve ever written (most) everything down, and clearly it’s not in chronological order. Hopefully it was understandable. But that’s what I’m working with! At 20 years old I’ve lived the life of 10 men, it feels like. And I have the brain injury, OCD, PTSD, major depressive disorder, social anxiety, eating disorders, and depersonalization/derealization diagnoses to show for it. Fuck.

#life story #queer #transgender #trans guy #personal writing #writing #nonfiction writing #nonfiction #personal essay

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