Feeling my goddam feelings, ugh

[cosmolinguist]

The good news is that today has been less uncomfortable in the ineffable way that yesterday was.

The bad news is that today I've just been depressed.

But honestly, I think I still prefer this. At least I know what's going on.

• I dreamed about Gary coming to life from photographs like the huge one we have on our living room wall. Just strolling out of them and wanting to go outside with us.
• I still haven't heard anything from the top surgery people after sending in the signed documents. It's only been a week, but not even any automatic "thanks/here's what happens next" e-mail or anything.
• I also found out that the ultrasound the surgeon asked me to get first, to rule out cancer or anything, is not something that my GP can refer me for, not something that my gender clinic can help me with, and not something that the place I found when I googled "breast ultrasound" can do either.
• D was out on a date tonight and I was sad I didn't have anyone to hang out with.
• I'm sad that meeting someone else to date feels impossible. (I can tell myself it's just because of continued covid-avoidance protocols for this house but I know better: it has always felt impossible for me.)
• Skip this one if you don't want to think about my sex life.

  I'm sad that I volunteered for and accepted a commission to write about a sex toy but now to write about it I have to be more present in my body than I have wanted to be for a while. I agreed to do this a while ago and assumed I'd figure out how to feel better about it at some point but I haven't yet.
• Someone mentioning that they googled the name of someone they'd known years ago made me wonder what would happen if someone googled my old name. Some activist-y volunteer stuff came up, and I watched a couple videos of my old self doing and saying weird things (I also saw that video of Gary and me on BBC Breakfast that one time, awww....)

I'm feeling all too aware of my body. So breathing and relaxation exercises are helping even less than usual (and they don't usually work great). I'm finding it really hard to have to muster all my courage and executive function to do top-surgery-related stuff and not actually feeling like I'm getting any closer to it. Looking at old videos of my old self, I was sad that I hated almost all the clothes I was wearing because I'd chosen very few of them but had to keep them because I was poor. I was sad that I never really knew what to do with my hair. I was sad at how uncomfortable I knew myself to be when I watched myself sit and stand and walk.

(I did have better glasses though. I miss those blocky dark frames with square lenses!)

I'm not feeling miserable about any of these things (I think this is one of my favorite benefits of testosterone: I'm not incapacitated by my bad moods like I used to be), but also I'm not pushing the sad feelings away like I used to. I am trying to feel my feelings and not judge them. All of these make sense (even if they didn't that would be fine, but they happen to). All of them are temporary. Sometimes I am sad for my younger self precisely because I have improved things for my current self, and so the sadness is tempered with relief (or even surprise; a weird part of me remains convinced that transition hasn't really changed me).