Dyssonance

There is something I have taken to saying and writing and using more than occasionally of late. It bespeaks an issue that deeply and gravely worries me as an individual, a single person, about the country I live in and many of the people I interact with on a regular basis.

Cynicism is the bane of democracy. Skepticism is the hope of it.

When I first started using the phrase, I thought that people would understand it, would get it to the depth of how I get it, and maybe, just maybe, a few people would stop being so damned cynical.

My mistake there was in thinking that people understood the idea of cynicism versus skepticism, despite my *also* knowing that most people really have no clue about the difference between cynicism, sarcasm, skepticism, and and the various ways in which romantics scratched can be revealed.

I have had several long discussions about this, and inevitably, I have found that people honestly, deeply, truly think that the cynicism they express is actually skepticism.

And the scary part is that as a result, I tend to fall prey to the same cynicism that I abhor so much.

It probably doesn’t help that we are approaching rapidly on my birthday, and that the month twixt Christmas and my Birthday, which is Monday, and I get not merely more maudlin and introspective and depressed and all that other stupid shit that someone spending way too much in the past is susceptible to, but also I tend to get more cynical.

My birthday is odd.  I’ve talked in the past about how I mark the new year privately, on my birthday, and how I spend days kinda sorta moping, and this year is little different in that sense.

What I don’t often do is talk about the things that bother me, that I miss, that I am angry or disappointed in not achieving.

I live my life in yearly increments these days, each year a bit of a blessing in a way that a very, very select few are aware of, and that I tend to share primarily with people I’ve never met, in part because I can trust them more than I can people I do know.

Awareness of mortality is a hugely sucky thing, I will note. I will also note that there are ways out there to make it even more sucky. Ways that sadden me.

Two things, in particular, have been haunting me of late, things that spring from my past.  There is a fourth thing that I fear I will lose because I don’t make time for it, and I enjoy it greatly.

The thing I fear I will lose is an idea that is still growing for a character and the story around her. It involves something I love to do, being a sorta closeted mythopoet, and several subjects that I seriously enjoy – far more, I will point out, than any of the trans related stuff I generally deal with all day every day.

The two things I am haunted by are a job I am deeply conflicted about not taking (and the assorted issues that such really makes happen), and my son.

It so happens that I have five children.  Three daughters and two boys.  The four eldest are step children, who, in 12 years, never really warmed up to me.  I expected it, really, and although it caused a great deal of pain for me personally, I dealt with it because their blood father is a pedophile who molested at least one of them and one of their cousins.

My granddaughter — one of two grandchildren that are sprung from my middle daughter — loved me.  I always got a kick out of that. She was — is, I suppose I should say — a firecracker, full of spunk and spirit and she was in a hard core girly grrrl mode.

But my son, well, I love him.  I love him more than I am often comfortable admitting to anyone, because each and every day away from him is unimaginably painful, and about the only way I really get through it is to avoid thinking about him most of the time.

I have a seven year old picture of him in my living room. The last time I talked to him was May of 2008, all of five minutes. The last time I was with him was February of that same year, just 2 days before my surgery and a week and a couple days before my name change and gender marker and the rest.

I remember the date in February.  In a rather sad and pathetic way, I recall it because I recall the dates of my surgery and my court appearance. Not because it was the last time I saw him.

The last time I spent any time with him was in December of 07, when after going to great lengths to get my wife to allow me to see him I was finally allowed to do so, at a local amusement place with roller coasters and water slides and goofy golf and similar stuff.

There was a catch, though. I had to be “a man”.  And, although it literally hurt me at a level that my dark side will never allow forgiveness for, I went ahead and did it. Because it was that important to me to do so.  It was, I can say with emphasis, the third most horrific day of my transition.

Hormones had left no part of me untouched or unnoticed at this point, and the only clothes that could even possibly work well for being a guy where a t shirt in a guys cut that I bought and some pretty unmarked and not too tight jeans. A white t shirt.

And it was a tad bit cold that day.

From the ticket person and the people in line around us to passersby just watching us as we did things and tried to be happy with each other, the glares and looks and questions and whispering was constant, and I was already highly upset and all of it likely made my son feel as if I wasn’t really there, and I know my son was not inured to it himself.

It sucked.

(my wife, who I call my ex, despite still being legally married to her, despite neither of us wanting to be married, but also because I think that she kinda sorta secretly is waiting for me to change my mind or some such — which I know because she said such, even though she’s moved on and has a guy now that actually has nearly the same name I had prior to that name change)

Prior to that, the one experience was a quick night out at a pizza place. Where the ex bitched sorta loudly about how I was embarrassing her by walking like some little slut.

(yes, I was slut shamed by my own wife. the irony does not escape me)

I generally avoid talking about him, or, when I do, I breeze past it with as little actual emotional content as possible.

The last time I saw him was after I’d been told that I would be violently attacked if I ever set foot on the property where he lived, after he’d told me that he didn’t want to see me all girly and stuff, in his own words, breaking my heart but not my love for him, and I had just managed to finish dealing with a little bit of business handling some old belongings of mine that had been stored near where he went to school.

As I drove away, his school was getting out, and I searched all the faces of the kids while also not wanting to be seen, in case by some strange chance he might look in the window of a car he didn’t know and see me. My heart was in my throat.

I saw him.  He’d grown so much. The man he would be was starting to be etched into his face.

He will be 16 in February. When I am asked how old my kids are, I feign not knowing. I know exactly how old each of them is, their birthdays etched on my heart in no small part because their mother is a Jehovah’s witness who still kept to some of the old habits she gave up, and so birthday’s were something I did on the sly.

I don’t miss the girls or my older son.  I know that my granddaughter has a sibling, but I have no clue if it is a boy or a girl.

I know that my ex lives in a house not too far away from where we lived. I know that my children have been taught not to reveal who they are on the internet (in no small part because of me).

I know where all my children work, nevertheless.  I cheated to find out on two of them. this being a public location, I sorta won’t describe what that means.

If I *really* want to find someone, I can do it, though.  It takes a lot of effort, often taking place in the middle of the night, and I do have to know something about them in terms of some basic demographics, but yeah, I can do it.

The internet is very useful.  And I’ll even pay for information, sometimes.  It is amazing what you can get for 50 bucks — every single time they show up in court, overdue library books in some cases, and more.

But my son is more special to me than anything. For him, I would sacrifice almost anything.

It is odd, as well, how some folks use that against me, use it to prove that since I could use a portion of my anatomy to help bring a child into this world, that I can’t possibly be a real woman or a real transsexual.

I am being kind when I say those people are fuckwits. If they knew what actually went through my mind, in a language that is very well suited for what we would think of as cussing, they would blanche at what I really compare them to, and use as the exemplar of just how utterly poor a human being is.

I say I am not nice all the time. I’m not.  I am occasionally kind, often polite in person (though not so much online, unless I’ve decided to take some sort of mood altering substance), but I am not a nice person.

And that is the third thing.

I want to be a nice person.  I want to not think such foul and unpleasant things, I want to not have this sense of aloofness and reserve that happens int he back of my mind while I turn on whatever the hell it is that I have in person.

I am competitive to a fault.  I know many people who say that is a masculine trait.  I am easily angered, and I know even more people who say that getting angry is a masculine trait.  I know a lot of people who say that because my writing won’t pass some idiotic and poorly structured gender scanner that I am masculine in tone and style.

Well, I got news for you.

Take a girl and raise her as a guy, and she’s going to have “masculine” traits. Atypical girlhood doesn’t begin to explain it.

I try hard.  I put a lot of effort into doing good things — mostly to do good things.  The one thing I can say that assuages some of the conflict that arises from that is that good intentions can pave the road to hell.  It is not the intentions that are as critical as the result.

IT is a piss poor solace that provides.  Think about it.  Such a messy thing that is.

I miss my son, and yet I am also aware that I may see him one day.  It is a hope — that whole idea of some sort of cautious opportunity for clumsy reconcilation that no one is comfortable with.

Not unlike the one I had with my brother.

And yet, that cynicism, it dwells in me, and it sneaks up and says there is no way in hell.  His mother has poisoned that. Some other man is in his life now, taking my role, being the role model that she said I couldn’t be if I was a woman.

Incidentally, I hate that whole line of thinking. It is so utterly asinine and incredibly sexist and utterly fucked up beyond all recognition as anything approaching truth and reality and I know because I saw someone who doubted that same thing about herself that still did a damn good job.

In the palm of my hand I have a scar that reminds me of how I can be incredibly stupid and, well, a fuckwit, myself, and how sometimes such can end up in dying — because that’s what happened.

It freaked me out a little. I didn’t have any experience or anything. I do know that I have issues with benzo’s, and that I have to have an anesthesiologist present during the entirety of any surgery because I am *really* *really* sensitive, and that While my recovery is usually pretty good, I’m getting older.

I wanted that job not for the job, for the work, but for the chance it afforded me, personally.  It paid really well, and I live really frugally. I eat incredibly well, but fast food is a treat for me, and eating out is something I do only if I gotta have something right then or I’m on some trip.

I make my own food. the old fashioned way. I cook it.

So that job could have paved the way for me to do something I really wanted, something that I had thought just maybe I would get to in this last year.

Something I was always looking towards with anticpation.

Something that didn’t happen, despite working really hard to make it happen.

I did get some great stuff done. I oversaw an effort many said was impossible. I changed the lives for the better of many people.  I can add some really impressive stuff to a resume full of such things that has about as much real meaning to me as the empire state building has to a caterpillar.

It hasn’t been a wasted year by any measure. Yeah, I wanted to get more done and I have some grandiose plans and all that.  What year doesn’t go by with such things.

But this was really, really important to me. Still is — indeed, perhaps even more important, because every single day it eats at me a little more, a little deeper. It fucks with me at odd times and in odd ways and while I can keep building little walls to contain it, it always spills over and I’m back where I was.  It gets old being a little kid with a finger in a dyke — and I dinnae mean a lesbian.

There is that, too — the oddness of being bisexual is still not something I am wholly comfortable with, as my sense of oddness stems from the strangeness to me of my own attractions and interests being so different from what they were once in a different age.

When I was 25, I went through a period where I was extremely nervous about it.  by all accounts, I went through a period that is similar to what many people go through a little older — around the time they turn 30.

Indeed, it was 25′s proximity to 30 that made me get so weird, and I wonder if the depth of these feelings I am having is linked to the fact that starting on monday, I have only three years until I turn 50, and that’s when the clock hits a mark that doesn’t bother me in terms of being 50, but in terms of what it means for what is beyond 50.

I turn a nice, youthful 47.  Statistically, based on lifestyle and assorted other factors, I have a mean average of 27 years left. That is, I will note, based on statistics who’s algorithm was written well over a decade ago.

It isn’t that which bothers me, either — as I noted, I’m very familiar with my own mortality and having been there, I’m pretty comfy with it happening again.  It isn’t the end that worries me quite as much as how and why and what and when one does before that end.

I don’t need fame or fortune, I don’t need people to remember me, but I do want to leave a mark on this world that I can know exists beyond me, personally.

And perhaps a large part of that is the cynicism I have regarding the absence from my life of my son.

which is selfish and horrible.

for me, people. It might not be horrible for someone else.

The contrast there is hilarious to me.  I am, after all, quite selfish, and admittedly so.  There isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with selfishness.

Ah well, who knows.

it is, after all, nearly time for creating change, where I will be wandering about, being both Toni and Dyss.

Older, but not wiser…

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