June 19, 2015

Mitch:

"Thanks. You, too." I hang up the house phone for the thirty-second time and it takes everything in me not to lose it right here and now on my poor keyboard. I have spent two and a half hours trying to find a physician who both knows what hormone replacement therapy is and is willing to prescribe me refills. I have already finished all of my uploads for the next couple of days while I waited around on the damn phone. Most of the offices I have called have never heard of it before, and those who know what it is get this snotty tone in their voice when I explain that I need it because I am transgender. I know they are making jokes about me to their coworkers when they put me on hold to go ask the doctor whether or not they are willing to take me on as a patient, and every answer is a resounding 'no, we don't do things like that here.' Apparently when you're in a minority of the population, your health care doesn't matter anymore. I am a statistic to be cited and a freak show to be gawked at, but god forbid anyone tries to help me. Even the representatives at the insurance company didn't know what to do and politely bowed themselves out of the phone call. I am so far from legitimately male that even the doctors won't try to humor me.

I can see why people self-prescribe. I used to wonder how anyone could do that to themselves when I had a list of doctors in Montreal and Pennsylvania I could choose from, but I hadn't thought it would be this bad when I moved down to the South. That's just it: I didn't think. I never think about this shit until it's too late to do anything about it. I scroll down the list of providers on the app for my insurance company and I call the next number, knowing the answer before they even pick up. I go through the usual rambling, outing myself and doing tricks for a vial of T. I wonder if Dr. Knudsen would be willing to continue to refill it for me even though I won't see him anymore. I highly doubt it.

It takes another fifteen phone calls and another half an hour of gritting my teeth before I finally find someone in Largo who is willing to see me and talk to me about it in person, and she will still probably turn me away as soon as she takes my co-pay. This is why I started calling around eight weeks before my vial would run out – it gives me a chance to find someone who knows what they are talking about and who won't just smirk and slam the door in my face. It's hard to stay optimistic, and not get 'bitchy' as Jerome is so fond of saying, when you have to live with this huge, dark secret hanging over your head, and when you know that you wouldn't have any of the things you have today if people knew the truth. I am always one slip away from falling headfirst down the side of the mountain, and it is a very slippery slope. It fucks with your mind. It changes who you are and who you can be. It forces you to always strive higher, farther, better, and it doesn't cushion your fall when you come crashing down.

I don't want to think about this anymore. I put the cordless phone back on the receiver and make sure to leave my cell phone on my desk before I head outside to the pool, grabbing my swimming goggles from the junk drawer on the way outside. I unzip the extra-large hoodie I have been hiding in like a shell and throw it aside on the chair closest to the pool, just within my reach from the steps of the pool. Jerome won't be awake for at least another three hours and I don't know of Ryan having any plans to stop by today. I can finally have a little bit of peace and just forget the world for a little while; swimming laps has always been able to help me clear my mind. I need to deal with this before it gets any worse. I need to find me again.

The water is still warm in the late afternoon sun as I slowly drop down into the deep end, making as little noise as possible so I won't wake up the sleeping Bacca. He has dealt with more of my shit over the past few days than I had any right to put him through. It has been exactly one week today since Mel's meltdown and I haven't heard a single word from her since. I'm sure she found her way home, scamming some poor sucker into buying her a plane ticket back to his house for a couple of days of fun and shopping. I knew she was a gold digger the first time I brought her down to Florida to visit; she hadn't seemed like that when I had met her back home during my four-month college attempt. I saw the warning signs months ago, but I was so desperate for someone who would accept me that I didn't care if the love was real. I was hoping that she would want to stay on a pedestal badly enough that she would somehow overlook everything that was wrong with me. This is the place I have sunk to: I am willing to trade money for pretended affection. I hate myself so much that I can't imagine it being any other way, and I don't believe Jerome when he says that things will work out between us. Of course it won't work out. He doesn't see the shit that floats around inside of my head. No amount of smooth-talking or joking around is going to erase the precarious cliff of self-doubt and disgust I live on.

What was I thinking, trying to transition? Some deluded, childish part of me thought that taking hormones and altering my body would somehow make me into something that I can never be. I can still see the scars and if I want, I can even still feel the stitches holding the phantom incisions together. I am a monster, trapped somewhere between the two worlds. I can never be fully male or fully female, and I will never be able to pass as either one. Even if I won the fifty thousand dollars today and I could just walk into a decently reputable plastic surgeon's office and tell them my order, I would still never be a man. They could strip the skin off of the back of my thigh, they could rip everything apart and sew it back together again, they could give me silicone testes and a phallo implant, they could turn me inside out and gut me, but none of it would matter. I would never be able to forget and leave it all behind me. I would still be XX and I would still have to out myself every time I go to a new doctor, or have a background check done, or fly on a plane with my needles in tow, or date somebody new. I would still have to constantly struggle to keep my weight and cholesterol down and have my blood checked obsessively for abnormalities. I would still second-guess every thought and desire that crossed my mind to see if it might give me away. I would still find something else to pick apart and hate about myself. I will never be good enough and there is nothing I can do about it. The mess made out of duct tape and super glue is finally coming apart.

What did I think I was going to get out of it? Did I think that pissing away all of that money on surgeries and bloodwork was going to change something that I am down to the atomic level? Every cell in my body is screaming at me that I am a fraud, and that I will always be her. Mitch was never real. Everyone else sees that except for me and the handful of sorry suckers I have somehow convinced otherwise. How could my family let me slip so far down into insanity? Are they laughing behind my back, too? Marley definitely got a good chuckle out of it before Mom and her got into it about her not hurting poor Michelle's feelings. I hate that fucking name. I hate all of it, everything and everyone. I wish I had enough money stashed away that I could just go upstairs and pack a bag and disappear into the sunset. I don't want any ties to her, none at all. I don't ever want to hear that name again or see that face in the mirror. I want to buy an island off of the coast of Antarctica where I will never see Michelle or her broken body ever again. That isn't me; it's just what everyone else sees. I don't want them to look at me anymore.

I haven't turned the lights on in my room or my bathroom since I threw Mel out on her ass, afraid of what I would see reflected back at me in the mirrors, the windows, the TV screen. I have been trying to avoid social media as much as humanly possible so I won't see retweets or edits of pictures of her. Facecam and vlogging are completely out the window because I can't stand to look up and see her frowning back at me on the screen, let alone edit the fucking thing. My clothes have all magically grown two sizes over the past week so that nobody can see the carnival operator hiding underneath all of it. I can't make myself look down at my bare chest because the whole situation is grotesque and nauseating. I would have worn a shirt in the pool if it wouldn't have weighed me down so much. Things are just like they were two years ago when I started dissecting myself, hoping it would make me feel better. It covered up the problem, but it didn't solve anything. The last ten years of my life have been a giant Band-Aid, but now someone has ripped it off and all I can do is scream.

What do I do now? I have lost myself.