Paradigm Shift in Planting Trees

I’m alive and in extremely good humor. Last October/November took a harder mental toll on me than anticipated (getting Covid while healing from surgery, watching our cat die.) Healing is going mostly great. I have another follow-up appointment in August at the one year mark to talk about scar revision surgery because one of mine is wide and inflexible, but it mostly looks great and it absolutely feels great. I’ll have to post an update shot soon, but I’m hesitant because I’m dropping weight like crazy right now so in a few more weeks the shot may be inaccurate. Who cares though, right? Take another.

So I’ve been living on black coffee and Spotify for a week or two now. Let me tell you about the quasi-spiritual experience that I had to kick it off, just promise not to call an intervention or get me committed. My partner got a new kind of edible and offered me some. It was a piece bigger than I would have attempted, but I was like, hey, it’s also a thin ribbon of candy so maybe it’ll be fine. Apparently I am a lightweight with the chemicals in the devil’s lettuce, which I’ve come to understand over the last year, but this knocked. Me. On. My. Ass. I have never been bricked so hard in my life. I’m talking the ‘press your temple and your taint at the same time to factory reset your body’ but not a joke. I was stuck on the futon, immovable.

When my partner got me to bed, I had laid on my back with my arms partially in the air, completely unable to put them down. It was a wild ride. Side note, before it bricked me, it was kicking in strong while I was redoing the Finnish duolingo course and I want to shoehorn in a brag that I was kicking that owl’s ass the whole time I was losing my mind. I promise, I wasn’t imagining it, lol. I was flying up that leaderboard. Anyway, that’s not exactly what kicked this episode off.

Two days later, I was still feeling the effects of the edible, but I had the most potent lucid dream. I normally wake up when the alarm goes off and fight to get out of bed for the next ten minutes. That dream had me awake over an hour before the alarm and I had to go get my phone so I could type it out IMMEDIATELY. I was still typing like a madman when it was time to go get dressed. I need to lean into this emphasis hard when I say this part: I have been typing ever since.

This has lead to the most important writing and comic art project of my life. That small lucid experience has managed to smelt together a heaping amount of past projects into one seamless, perfect entity and the whole thing is exploding like a Tunguska event and writing itself. I’ve finally put this art studio laptop to use and began sketching, inking, and coloring to knock the rust off. I’m not happy with the state of my colors yet, but I may share the sketches so far. I’m doing quick portraits before tackling outfit design.

My good friend at work keeps musing about the soulmate-like relationship between drugs and the arts, and I told her that the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner made so much more sense to me now. It isn’t only acting as my muse, though. I haven’t had an episode like this in six or so years. I am so married to everything that I am doing that I can’t stand to eat. If I can manage to eat, I inhale the food so that it doesn’t sideline what I’m doing for too long. By the time I convince myself to go to the restroom, it’s almost too late for the same reason.

Everything my soul has been crying out for is getting done. I am writing, I am drawing, I am replacing my wardrobe (slowly and responsibly, I’ll get to why in a moment) and preparing to throw out the clothes I’ve worn to death, I’m working out, I’m chronically playlist crafting and blasting music constantly. It’s like I have an intangible IV plugged into my soul siphoning anima straight from the heavens. I am so alive. I can feel nuanced emotions that I’ve acknowledged and even written about but never once truly felt.

My self confidence is through the roof and that is the feeling that is newest to me. On top of critical gender dysphoria, I’ve suffered mostly privately with … what was it … body dysmorphia? I can’t remember. I’ve not ever been able to look in a mirror and see the body looking back at me as mine. It’s a very complicated and dizzying sensation. At best, it has been like piloting an exosuit and checking in on it here and there for maintenance. I’ve never been able to do anything with my hair because I cannot connect or sympathize with what I’m seeing at all. No different than trimming a hedge bush I guess, but not an artsy French manor garden one. Just the blocky wall of a bush maze. I’ve always just brushed tangles out and let it air dry because I don’t have the manual to my exosuit to tell me how it’s supposed to go.

That’s out the window for the first time in my life. I feel every fiber of my soul in every strand of my hair. It’s not an object in the mirror. I’m animated. I’m playing with my expressions and body language in the mirror. I’m putting effort into my look… with absolutely no peer pressure to. Shit, I needed to replace my shampoo for over a month and not only did I do research, but I came out of the store with shampoo, conditioner, and… wait for it… a mousse. I haven’t put actual product in my hair since… I guess since I was a ‘little girl’ and my mom did it for me. I have hair curlers on the way, too. I’m about to see what I can do with my mostly flat fine hair. I’ve always wanted to try curls.

My partner also made a half joke about getting beard touch-up dye for men whose beards are greying, since mine wants to come in so blonde. I doubled down on it, got the lightest of the brown shades, and applied it the next day. I was afraid it would end up like when I was a wee thing, transitioning while working at the deli ten years ago, starting to get a little lip whiskers and putting brown mascara on them to look like a fourteen year old that should really shave. No. Let me tell you, because of them coming in blonde, I had way more than I realized. My chest fills with mirth now seeing myself. I want to take and post so many damn selfies. I think if I was not on T, it’d get to me. Might have a happy little sob.

[TMI Warning] My poor partner. It’s reignited my libido. Labels aren’t the most important thing to me, as ultimately, I’m me, but I do have diagnosed OCD and I get doggedly curious to see how specifically accurate I can find a term for what I’m feeling sometimes. A few months ago, I’d determined I must not be pansexual… just panromantic. That the closest thing that could apply to me is the Grey-Ace flag, divided between Demisexual (as I am pretty much exclusively attracted to my partner) and something that doesn’t seem to have a term… where only very specific fetishes can stimulate my interest. This change, though, has reminded me exactly what sexual attraction is and, determining that I am, in fact, currently a raging pansexual, I am also waiting on a dime to throw myself at my partner’s feet. [End TMI Warning]

So, this is all sounding pretty manic, amiright? I have been saying episode instead because I am not diagnosed with Bipolar disorder or anything related. What got me into therapy when we moved here was a questionnaire I had to take at a general checkup, where one of the questions was signs of bipolar or strong mood swings and I had to explain that, in the previous year, I had had an extreme swing akin to what I’m going through now, but maybe a bit less than this one. I lost so much weight in that period that coworkers were talking about staging an intervention for me. Our therapist, however, didn’t call it, saying I was not taking my medication for anxiety responsibly at the time.

I have problems with that statement. I am never taking my medications responsibly. It will be my downfall later in life, I’m sure. Let me tell you: snapping into these episodes gives me the internal desire to take my medication correctly. These past five or six years of chronic depression have been a struggle, but magically I have a swing and now I’m taking my medicine like it’s a fucking treat. I feel like if it had something to do with taking anxiety medicine irregularly, it wouldn’t have taken six years to break the depression. What do I know?

I do know I am not particularly interested in diagnosis or more medicine. Prozac does enough to make me feel good. If this is mania, I have a responsible head about it. I’m watching my money and monitoring my impulse control. Since the egregious anti-trans legislature in the state bordering us to the north specifically targets those of us diagnosed with Autism or Depression, I frankly do not care to have any diagnosis on my fucking record, even if it is the truth. My work friend said ‘yes, but that’s being fought and it violates HIPAA.’ I understand. I also understand my apprehension has one foot in the tin-hat-theory boat. I’d just rather wait and watch the climate right now.

I also can’t lose this feeling. I absolutely cannot lose this feeling. The thought of half of my brain, half of my ability to experience the world as a human is intended to being medicated away or atrophying back into depression is unacceptable. The thought of it going away on its own is already enough to send me into a panic attack. I am suddenly not a robot and I like it. For the first time, I feel like if I am to be dragged back into the abyss, it will be done with me kicking and screaming, not ducking my head and submitting.

I do need to eat, though. I’ve got hunger pains for days, but the feeling is so profound now. I can feel it, savor it, hold it out of myself and converse with it. I had a double shot of coffee on mostly empty stomach at work last week just to feel the shakes and convulsions. Wow, that sounds bad. I just finished going to the hospital and getting a heart monitor attached two months ago for weird heart or chest issues. I have yet to hear back about the results, so I’m fucking glad it wasn’t serious enough to kill me in that time.

Seriously, though. Fuck all y’all, being able to just… hear a song, watch a movie, read a book and just naturally feel all this. This is amazing. This is divinity. All of these hollow concepts of cause and effect mean so much more to me now. I am sympathizing with circumstances I’d normally be so hyper critical of. I’m so awash with life. In the words of Empire of the Sun, “all the universe is humming with me.”

It’s been great at work. I normally can’t get near people unless I am extremely comfortable with them. Seriously. If someone walks by me and I feel the slightest body heat come off of them, I almost retch. I won’t reach for an item that’s within like four feet on either side of a customer, sometimes more. Lately, though, everything is a breeze. Two shit bags that routinely come in just when the store opens and purposely park their cart to block you off came in, and I practically danced around them, sidling between the cart and the shelves. Their fucking faces were priceless. I was sandwiched between them being human feces and a mournful song in my ear screaming about suicide, and here I was, ethereal, confident, half a breath away from giving them the confident metal man point meme pose:

I’ve got to ramble about my playlist building next time. When I’m being serious, I make some bangers. When I’m not, I make some hilarious fucking playlist titles and concepts. Now pardon me, I need to make myself eat something more than a quick protein drink and hit the bathroom again, much to my chagrin. Gotta get back to work on this magnum opus.