Several Pieces, part 2

 My habit of trying to make myself seem similar to others has often made it difficult to understand myself. In essence, I often don't pay much attention to what's going on inside me, when it's emotionally-problematic. This varies by stress--when fearful or anxious, my awareness of my own weaknesses and limitations sharpens to self-hatred. In many cases, I may try to take refuge in the comfort that I'm liked by others--at which point, the bundle of shared traits connecting me to some group or individual gets used to prop up a badly-damaged ego. Threats to that sense of identity get percieved as  threats to me. 

 In 2003 through very early 2004, I was isolated again.  I had a few friends, but nothing approaching a group. I was depressed, as usual, but tried to spin things in a positive manner. Classes had just begun Portland State University--before that, I had been goofing off at several local community colleges. I don't think I successfully completed a single course at any of them; college was a status symbol to me, something that helped to buffer me from the confusion of losing my social existence at the church. Since I wasn't taking it seriously in the slightest, I didn't bother to figure out a degree plan--I just applied to the biggest university I could find, and got in.

 I didn't actually want to be in Portland at the time, which made matters worse. I had no sense of how I'd move anywhere else, but I dearly wanted to be in Vancouver, BC or Seattle if I couldn't make Vancouver work. I still saw myself as wishing to attend school, but my career ambitions (at the time, I wanted to be a cognitive scientist, or a roboticist, or work on AI) didn't match my skills, and I hadn't taken a math class since early on during high school If I'd been very disciplined, I might have gotten a decent start on that, but thanks to the severity of my ongoing depression and basic lack of any real life experience, I didn't really expect to live out the next two years, and was unable to concieve of plans that stretched even further into the future. I went to school because it was what I did to protect me from myself. I Was A Student, which meant I wasn't broken and didn't have to hate myself.

 It's funny how persistent that dichotomy was in my thinking. I was so intensely suicidal that trying to *accept* depression, introversion, pessimism and the possibility of Asperger's seemed like one step away from giving in to the desire to end my own life...this has been my default state for years, and yet I honestly thought that the world just sort of worked that way. Accepting these pieces of myself, and trying to live with them, is something I only concieved of very, very recently. 

  I first concieved of the desire to transition around this time. I had a lover who had previously been a friend of mine. Our friendship started to change permanently, some time before, when he voiced the desire to become she, and (additionally) feelings of romantic interest in me. I hadn't taken really well to it initially--I think, looking back, that I had actually been in love with zir (current pronoun-of-choice for this individual) for some time, but was still coming down off of the aggressive case of Fundamentalism I'd only recently kicked. Zie was aware of my imitative tendencies, and reacted quite poorly when I was finally able to articulate, typing across the ether amid choked sobs, that I too wanted to be a woman.

 I don't blame zir for blanching at the time. I had never once voiced this explicit desire in zir presence before, though it was common knowledge between us that I considered myself to have a female "sub-persona" (who was of vast significance to me). At the time, I simply didn't see it as a valid choice, and it never really occured to me that it might be otherwise. It was something to suppress and contain, and I had enough to worry about already. I was wholly ignorant of all that can go well, and ill, when transitioning gender--I lacked any sort of conceptual vocabulary to handle it at all.

Thus, until someone brought it to my attention, and laid it out where I could examine and start asking myself serious questions, I had utterly failed to examine myself in this way. I had not "always wanted to be a girl", even though I often wished I could be treated as one (and the name I picked when I later changed my legal identity is one I had wanted to be called since about age 10). My Christian years meant aggressively stamping out any signs I might be other than a heterosexual, gender-congruous male. I've often wished I could have a record of my mind-state as it was at the time; I dimly recall suppressing a lot of things, such as my sexual interest in men and my conviction that theism didn't make any sense; however, the details are lost to me. Like Qin Shihuangdi uniting China, I rooted all aspects of myself that passed muster under a flag of identity, and purged the rest with vicious hatred.

 It is difficult, sometimes, not to wonder who I might have become, had I resisted the pull of acceptance that led me to church...