I've told anecdotes, but never really explained me: who am I, what's my context, what's my damage? So here's my whole goddamn life story. I've broken it into four parts, about 1,500 words each, for ease of reading and referencing. Part 3: ages 23-29. (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 4)
I was able to resume my life. Well, except I couldn't ever fly a plane now. So I reverted to astrophysics. I got into a place called Whitman College and started there that January, at age 23. I was a model student at first, except my C++ class (fuck that class). I made friends, more friends than I'd ever had in my entire life. I had jobs for once, as a physics tutor and astronomy lab assistant. It was wonderful.
But there were three snags. First, my longing to be girls I saw had only grown more intense as time passed. If I ever saw two girls together (holding hands or whatever, or, god forbid, kissing), my heart melted into a puddle of sorrow. I've always played a lot of video games and over time it became harder and harder to get myself to play as a male character (it had to be a really good game with no female option to get me to do it). I just didn't have it in me. I couldn't connect. And when they'd fuck up and forget to check gender, and I'd get referred to as "sir" or a "man," it was incredibly jarring. Basically, my trans issues just kept building.
Second, friends. I made friends and wanted to have fun with them. All the time. I slipped into partying constantly, binge-drinking, and smoking pot at work. I became a shitshow. You can see some of the stories from then if you dig up Storytime Sunday in this blog's archives (browse by date, search doesn't work for this). I got into hallucinogens and had a blast. I railed coke and amphetamines, I'd drop acid on a whim, I smoked oxycodone, I'd solo a fifth in a night. One night I was on alcohol, weed, coke, molly, mescaline, acid, and shrooms all at the same time. I was going for Gonzo.
Third, and this compounded the other two, my bipolar went untreated. I flunked a semester after a depressive episode and finally sought treatment. The doctor, the only practicing psychiatrist in Walla Walla, gave me Depakote. It was miserable. I became an emotionless zombie who could barely add two numbers in her head. He wouldn't give me any other options, so I said fuck it, episodes are better than that hollow shell of an existence. I'd get manic and spend a ton of money partying harder than ever. I'd get depressed and not leave my house for weeks. I'd get manic and not leave my house for weeks because I was obsessively masturbating to my intrusive thoughts or getting lost in an imaginary world as a woman.
I did some cool things while I was there. One summer I went to Mt. Wilson Observatory to do actual research. I detected a spectral line from a very awesome star (RS Ophiuchi) that no one had ever seen before. I was doing original research! It was amazing. But I was stupid. I didn't backup my data. So when my laptop got stolen, all that research disappeared into thin air.
But I still had my research papers on things like strange quark stars and 1E 0657-558 to keep me feeling warm and fuzzy. I'd wait til the end of the semester, then get hopped up on caffeine and go to the library three or four days before it was due. I'd binge research, constantly drinking more caffeine. I'd only break for bathroom, cigarettes, and pot - no sleep. After researching 40+ sources, I'd write the paper, in LaTeX (and sometimes MF), straight through, with no spell checker. I'd finally stagger out of the library 10 minutes before it's due to turn it in, hallucinating from sleep deprivation. I knew I was inducing mania doing that, and I thought that made me clever - I wanted manic hyperproductivity and creativity. It worked to produce the best work I've ever done, at least. (Which I also lost, because stupid.)
I dropped out after a few years, with my semesters mostly either A's and B's or D's and F's. I moved to Albuquerque, following friends. Instead of starting again at UNM, I sat around and did a whole lot of nothing. My mom became increasingly deranged and I eventually cut ties with her. I haven't spoken to her in 4 years; I doubt she even knows my name.
I decided to try treatment again. I found a doctor. He ended up being a clingy quack who crossed a lot of boundaries, diagnosed me with basically everything in the DSM, and tried to have me locked up in the psych ward again when I fired him. That's it, I said, no treatment - it's worse than episodes.
My dad pressured me to work for him (as I probably would have in his shoes) and I got a telecommuting job. I was bad at it. Really bad. It didn't help that no one trained me. That, and my hopelessness, and the bipolar, and the intrusive thoughts, and my shameful secret of feminine ideation, they all took their toll. About a year later, I had a severe mixed episode while on vacation with my family and nearly threw myself off a building; if a friend hadn't called me back and talked me down, I probably would have.
I quit my job and did nothing. But I had to do something. Over the next months I settled on a plan: I'd try treatment one more time, and if it didn't work I'd kill myself. It gave me an out from suicide. So I found another doctor and went to her.
She was charming. And disarming. I opened up to her. Slowly, but still. She got me to quit drinking (I was drinking a fifth a day as a baseline) and smoking pot, and she started putting me on medication. After I quit smoking and drinking, I started to get really vivid dreams - I rarely dreamed before. It was awesome at first. But within a couple weeks it turned into nightmares, every night. Nightmares bad enough to wake me up screaming. And it was often dreams of the abuse I'd suffered.
I revealed my intrusive thoughts to my doctor and my obsessive rumination on past events that I couldn't break out of. When the night terrors started, she put two and two together. Some kind of traumatic stress injury, clearly. Digging into my attachment problems and other issues, she diagnosed me with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD). It was a relief to finally have an explanation for the intrusive thoughts, though I feel incredibly guilty and dirty having something related to borderline personality disorder.
I went back to school at UNM. I didn't take many classes, but at least I got good grades. I got an A in an astronomy special topics class and was asked to join a research project. I gratefully accepted.
To be continued...
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