![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
[title to be read in a tone of horrified realisation]
I had a memory tonight and I want to scream.
It's about the end of the world. I was remembering the week of the zombie apocalypse. Sometime not long before I had actually 'come out' the deputy head (or possibly by that point he was the head?) of the library program I was enrolled in, advised that I was going to start presenting as female or something like that. I don't know how I did it.
And I think it was the day itself. Maybe I am conflating two separate days in my memory now? But I think it was the day.
I don't know how I did it, that day in November - must have been - wearing a skirt to class while I could feel the world about to end. Managing to sit and get my work done when I expected at any moment to see people running past the door, a smear of blood on its window and some monster pressing to get in and devour us all.
Maybe it was a different day? Research says it was a different day. The terror was late October and early November, whereas that time I went out in a skirt was mid-November. But closely timed, and when I was making a psych appointment because I knew I needed something to protect me against killing myself if my mind were to continue conjuring up such dreadful imagery and beliefs.
My point is that then I had many of the same fears and concerns, but I was still fighting through for happiness and bold enough back then to try wearing a skirt out in public. Bold enough to 'come out' to an administrator and attempt something like a public transition. And now we are seven years later and I have no courage to do the same in my workplace, nor out and about in general.
I keep feeling like that year end was a turning point where I was pushed back by my mother being unsupportive and pushed back by a spike in mental illness and my response was to retreat from myself and go back into timid hiding. Only this year am I making a push to get new clothes again and to update my presentation. And I still, still do not have the courage to confront anyone about it. Still do not have any certainty of myself to know what I should declare. I wish I had gone differently, I think so.
I had a memory tonight and I want to scream.
It's about the end of the world. I was remembering the week of the zombie apocalypse. Sometime not long before I had actually 'come out' the deputy head (or possibly by that point he was the head?) of the library program I was enrolled in, advised that I was going to start presenting as female or something like that. I don't know how I did it.
And I think it was the day itself. Maybe I am conflating two separate days in my memory now? But I think it was the day.
I don't know how I did it, that day in November - must have been - wearing a skirt to class while I could feel the world about to end. Managing to sit and get my work done when I expected at any moment to see people running past the door, a smear of blood on its window and some monster pressing to get in and devour us all.
Maybe it was a different day? Research says it was a different day. The terror was late October and early November, whereas that time I went out in a skirt was mid-November. But closely timed, and when I was making a psych appointment because I knew I needed something to protect me against killing myself if my mind were to continue conjuring up such dreadful imagery and beliefs.
My point is that then I had many of the same fears and concerns, but I was still fighting through for happiness and bold enough back then to try wearing a skirt out in public. Bold enough to 'come out' to an administrator and attempt something like a public transition. And now we are seven years later and I have no courage to do the same in my workplace, nor out and about in general.
I keep feeling like that year end was a turning point where I was pushed back by my mother being unsupportive and pushed back by a spike in mental illness and my response was to retreat from myself and go back into timid hiding. Only this year am I making a push to get new clothes again and to update my presentation. And I still, still do not have the courage to confront anyone about it. Still do not have any certainty of myself to know what I should declare. I wish I had gone differently, I think so.
no subject
Date: 2015-07-02 06:50 (UTC)From:You know, I can't honestly remember when I said 'that's it' and never returned, but it would have been some time after my fifteenth birthday and sometime after Christmas of that year.
An update never hurts! Have fun shopping! :o)