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That’s what she said, “I don’t mind”, she kinda gave me the feeling it hadn’t been necessary for me to give her the information.
After a party last saturday I slept at a friend’s place, though only know her since Ladyfest three weeks ago. I needed a place to sleep because there’s no night train from Utrecht to Nijmegen, and I couldn’t stay at an other friend’s place who couldn’t stay long at the party. So it was solved when the girl I met at Ladyfest offered me to sleep at her place. Although I hadn’t told her about my situation, being transgendered/transitioning, and I thought it would better to tell her. I felt like telling her, not because I want everyone to know, not because I need recognition as a transgendered person, not because I’m afraid people dislike me if I don’t tell them. I told her because I look like shit in the morning, because I’m still burdened by facial hair, and especially when I sleep at someone’s place I rather not have them find out and start asking me questions when they see my unshaved or just shaved (reddened) face in the morning. I actually never was afraid she would mind, or could be ignorant of it, she simply didn’t mind and that is looking back at it a better response than saying ‘thank you for telling me‘. The practical thing with which I felt uncomfortable was that there wasn’t a seperate bathroom at the student dorm she lived, there was a sink with cold water and seperate shower. I don’t feel comfortable with my facial hair, nor when people can clearly see it, nor when people see me shave, that last situation was what could have happened, but luckily didn’t, so it was more the cold water that taunted me than being cautious of someone in the dorm seeing me shave. That is the only reason why I think I won’t sleep over at that place for the time I still have the burden of facial hair.
The best thing is though that I could be relieved from that burden by May next year, starting October 29 I will have a laser hairremoval treatment once every 5 weeks. It will cost me a dear dime, I will be partly reimbursed by my insurance, but the costs which I have to pay for myself will be more than half of the total cost I guess. Well now my focus will be on the official name change and as soon as possible I will continue my study, within a month, that’s for sure, and I might even be able to start my research by the end of October, it’s daring, and that’s exactly what I need.
It isn’t unbelievable, but it sure is totally fabulous that due to an e-mail I sent to a local booking agent Emily Jane White now will be playing in my town late November. It’s still a two month wait, but I’m really excited, I do hope to chat a little with her, before or after her show. My main task now is to get as many people there as I can. I actually e-mailed Emily to tell her how happy I am with her coming to Nijmegen. Well you can read her reply for yourself.
Hey Sophie,
Thank you so much for helping me get a show in the Netherlands! So kind!
I look forward to seeing you at the show on the 26th!
all the best,
emily
Yes that smiley is hers, so cute, I don’t think I’ll make a move on her, although she is a very beautiful woman, my age exactly and she’s an amazing singer. Yes now I do ask myself why I wouldn’t, but in the absence of the knowledge about her sexual preference I will adhere from any flirting…. I promise 
Yesterday evening I started to write a private diary again, this time online, I once wrote in a physical diary, but it didn’t work out that well. Writing this new diary will not mean that I quit here, there’s just some thing I want to write in my native language which aren’t in my interest to write down here. Maybe some day I will want to publish it, but until that day I will keep all of it private. Of course certain content will be the same as content on here, but a blog is simply different from a real diary. I also like to work on my Dutch writing skills, so my diary will be a good place for that, and I definitely need to strengthen my English writing skills, which I will try to do on here. I’ve been writing here for almost a year so it wouldn’t hurt to make some progress in that sense.
There’s a busy week ahead of me so expect some posts in the next few weeks about the real progress I make in my life. Good news is that I am actively working on my name change ,the laser hairremoval of my facial hair, and buying myself that washingmachine I want.
Only one month to go to celibrate my 12 months of hormone treatment, although I won’t have huge reason to celibrate because it could still take up to 21 months before I have my srs. I actually just now did a little calculation, lets say between 100 and 150 patients have to wait a year long for their srs and thus have to be on hr. They all get cyproteronacetate, a 3 month prescription of it costs the insurance about 125 euro, they hardly need it after srs and actually the estrogen intake will be lowered to post-op, but to simplify it I will only take the cypro costs. So you get 125 times 4 (makes a year of cypro) times 100 or 150, you end up between €50.000 and €75.000. That amount of money on a yearly basis for the time the waiting list is over 12 months could be saved if the Dutch genderteam was granted a bigger amount of money to pay surgeons and pay for operating space. The waiting list has been over 12 months for the past 4 years, so that’s €300.000 lost on medication which could have been spent on bringing down the waiting list to maybe 6 months instead of the 15 months one has to wait for srs currently.
I’ll adddress my position concerning the waiting list situation in another post, now lets talk hormones and happenings.
So one central happening past month, after it started with a nice modest party I threw myself for my 26 birthday, was the mess I got in with my mom. It’s exactly the third issue that made me very emotional this past year, and of course hormone treatment is quite uplifting for the experience of emotions. I rather not show my emotions to anyone, in my teens I came to the conclusion that I could better handle themself which would be better than being mocked over it or being misunderstood. I do believe I need to let go of it, tear down the cocrete wall I erected back then, but rather not in instances where I’m still misunderstood like with my mom. There’s no solution in sight for the current troubles, but I better focus on more urgent issues, like studying, getting a wasmachine, starting to do physical exercise, starting facial hair removal, and having my name officially changed.
I described in a previous post my issue with my attitude towards getting things done, procrastination has been part of my life for as long as I know, while it first started with shyness it grew out to be a major problem on which I try to wotk very hard, which is very hard as you can guess. It affects my transition too, becuase there’s those things I just mentioned I do want to get done, but which fall victim to procratination like a whole lot of other things. Anyone thinking procratination on those transition issues is sign of a transition going bad is quite wrong, showing they don’t know me.
Well, were there any pleasant happening past months? Yes indeed there were. I not only celibrated my birthday with my friends at the start of this eleventh month of transition, but I also went to Ladyfest Amsterdam (a feminist festival), which was awesome, met a couple of kind Greek girls and enjoyed the music and atmosphere together with a few friends. A week ago I went to my grandmothers 90th birthday, despite the problems with my mom I had a nice time chitchatted with some cousins and other family-members. Especially the cousins hadn’t seen me for a while, so they had some curiosity to be stilled, which I’m often quite okay with.
Well of course I also had more social endeavors past month, but can’t go name them all, do want to keep some to myself for the sake of having this be a blog on my transition and not on my social life.
I’m still seeing my speech coach, trying not to procrastinate with my speech exercises. It does make me aware of the vulnerability of my voice, it was quite unpleasant when the morning after that ladyfest night I could hardly talk. It wasn’t like being hoarse, because I could talk like normal in the evening again, and only noticed my scratchy pitch was more present than the days before. It took a week to get my voice to normal again, but due to the recent tensions and a dry cough past week I still feel I can’t get my voice to do what I want as much as three weeks ago.
On other physical and hormonal issues I notice that I have a strange diversity of headaches, sometimes it’s irritating but most often a such headaches don’t bother my more than a few minutes, so I’m not really worried about that. My bodily developments aren’t huge, like it was the case in previous posts. I do get the feeling that my breasts are more sensitive in the second part of every month, don’t know if they’re still developing. Do hope so of course, but as soon as I can save up money for breast augmentation I will, because it’s hard to believe that I can still get a full b-cup when now 11 months on hormones I only just have an a-cup. Progress on other bodily issues will probably need more time than a month to update on, like body hair and body shape, although I’m already pleased on that last one.
Don’t expect too much big news on my one year hormone treatment celebration post, I am thinking though to treat me on a less a less improvized way to get my full a-cup. I might just spend those €30 euro’s on it, good thing is that I can still use those improvised cupsize enlargement for future purposes (i.e. create cleavage and wear an invisible bra).
And one more thing I featured in an article of the best known lesbian magazine here in the Netherlands, got lots of positive responses to that.
Things that were acknowledged by her in the aftermath:
1. She acknowledged that I had a closed personality as a child
2. She acknowledged that she thinks she knows me because she raised me, and believes that I’m still the same person (i.e. a boy)
3. She acknowledged she rather wants me to be nice boy which would offer me a nice unproblematical life
4. She acknowledged that she thinks I’m depressed
5. She acknowledged that she agreed with teachers who thought I was less intelligent and talented to study
My understanding of this, being the only person whom knows me:
1. So she never got to know me
2. So she claims to know someone whom shut everyone out, making sense there (uhuh yeah sure…). And so she denies how much I’ve changed, how much more of myself I now show, and minimizes me to merely the coping mechanisms I used and can still use to handle her behaviour.
3. So she denies my existence as an individual and disrespects the person I am
4. So she prefers to think negatively about me than positively, proving again she doesn’t know me
5. So she couldn’t motivate me, thus she demotivated me
I acknowledge:
1. That she at times did her best to be a good parent
2. That our relationship was and continues to be one of misunderstanding and hiding
3. That this blog is my domain where I decide what I write, like one cannot censor the author of a book
4. That I am not capable and hardly willing anymore to invest in someone whom denies my existence as the person I am
Her understanding of all of this…. that’s up to her, I don’t want to care anymore, her negativity is what I can do without very well. For I am a positive person, despite my shortcomings, I stay positive.
Just now I made a phonecall to the Belastingdienst (i.e. the Dutch tax office), although I was unsuccesful in getting my question answered, I was even more unsuccesful in something else. My official documents still say I’m male, also my name know by instutions is still my birthname, not the one I use, not Sophie. I do not mind to compimize a little when I call those institutions whose files say all of that, so in all dignity not to confuse the Belastingdienst I called introducing myself with my old name and using my old male voice. The kind lady at the other end of the line seemingly didn’t agree with the temporary facade I created for her, she ma’am-ed me three times quite confidently. So there you go my man-facade doesn’t work over the phone, I never use my old bass-voice except at instances like these, but it clearly doesn’t work. So should I just give up on that, should I for the timebeing just confront the officials with my truth going against the official truth ? It is very tempting when I notice that my old voice which doesn’t even sound as my voice did. It’s the only thing they see, and it doesn’t convince, so I should just as well stop kidding them and quit comprimizing my identity for just a few minutes.
To finish the story I dropped the fake man voice the third time that lady ma’am-ed me, and continued in my own voice. No problem, much more comfortable that way. So a thank you goes out to the lady from the Belastingdienst for unknowingly telling me I should just stick with me and never use that man-facade ever again. It is silly.
I’ll see how it goes tomorrow or monday, because I have to call the Belastingdienst back, because the information on which they notified me hadn’t been integrated yet. Yes they first sent you a notification and the day after that they put the info from the notification in your files (which thus hadn’t been actually done yet), the madness.
It is evident that my attitude lacks urgency on the issue of studying and thus graduating. I did make some changes in my daily life, but it hasn’t yet lead to progress on my research proposal, at least I only made minimal progress. I know that I’m a person who’s hard to motivate for something if the goal of a task is for own personal benefit. And let’s agree I should be the main motivator in such case, but I can’t motivate myself. I flunk at planning my daily life, don’t have problem to live up to appointments and I’m okay with doing things for other people. For some reason though I have huge difficulty to be the selfish working girl whom gets good grades and rushes trhough her study. On the other hand it is undeniable that I got myself to study at university and managed to get a bachelor’s degree. The question is, did I do it for myself, what was it that got me there and what is it that I lack at this point in time. I often think it has to do with plain involvement, as long as I’m up close to what I’m studying, as long as I’m in a study flow I will function to a satisfiable degree. That doesn’t mean my attitude is radically different when I’m involved, the circumstances are better to study because involvement creates a flow of curiosity which creates motivation to study which creates thinking patterns which help me set my goals and plan my tasks.
So here I am unable to really involve myself, I can touch the flow whenever I read an article, whenever I think of what I want to do, but as soon as I’m involved in other things I loose touch of involvement in studying. I have it all clear in my mind, I need to be the involvement to realise a working girl attitude, instead of touching the involvement and smell a bit of that attitude. Having it thought out doens’t activate me, the question is: what does activate me to be the involvement? I have no clue, I am a person whom can easily distract herself, I have diffculty to fix my concentration on certain goals, I live day to day, to day, to day and today. My past with not being able to envision a future for myself could be a decisive reason why I cannot focus on goals further away than a few weeks at most. I was told I delay responsibilities, and that’s true in the eye of the beholder. The fact might just have been that I couldn’t focus on tasks until urgency of a deadline made me focus, until the goal the day was comprehensible to be part of the nearest future. In this stage of my study I am the only person to set the urgency, too bad I cannot set my urgency to be urgent enough because I lack the ego to do that for myself, my urgency is too abstract in the case of graduating. As long as my attitude concerning urgency, motivation, focus, goals, and my future are too flawed for the job I will not get to the point of graduating. Isn’t that a pleasant self diagnosis, not really no.
Many times I said to myself: just do it! Making that true is thus harder than I would like it to be, but it’s getting more urgent to indeed just do it. Though saying it’s urgent is quite different from sensing it’s urgent. The sense of urgency for this will turn out to rise to the surface too late to actually do research and write that thesis which will make me graduate and deliverme my master degree. The idea that I will manage to radically change my attitude concerning forementioned issues is a challenge which is too big to change within a few weeks. Thus I will just have to do it, simply read, write, research, document, and write, because if I don’t it’ll be too late. That thought does resonates a certain urgency, I hope it’s enough urgency. In this case it’s hard to stick to my optimist self, I need to be realistic, though not lose my optimism, because if I do I might just lose touch of those things that do make my life a good life to live, no I don’t need no negative flow.
If anyone wants to keep me to my urgency in this, please do so, you’re very welcome.
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