Quick housekeeping note: I’ve closed my Substack newsletter, for reasons I outlined here. I’ve migrated my posts from Substack to this blog; you can find the archive for them tagged as ‘Subtstack.’ Any personal essays I write going forward will likely live here. Short fiction and other projects will be hosted elsewhere (likely on Gumroad but still TBD). You can find more of my past personal writing at my old Tinyletter archive and on Medium.
[Content warning for frank discussions of mental illness, trauma, gender dysphoria, and self harm]
Hey,
I remember late last year feeling really frustrated at what seemed to me to be a lack of progress in getting my mental health stabilized. I had been in therapy for a bit over a year, and not only could I not definitively say whether things had gotten better, but I couldn’t say for sure what “better” even looked like.
I still had bad days; some so bad that I had to call in sick from work. I would have my anxiety or trauma activated and would be dissociative for hours, sometimes days, afterward. My feelings of gender dysphoria became more intense the longer I was on HRT and the more I got settled in as Bridget; getting closer to where I wanted to be transition-wise made the tiny differences stand out more, creating a sort of Uncanny Gender Valley effect when I would look in the mirror. I still engaged in self harm when everything would feel overwhelming, something I hadn’t even started doing until about two years ago.
I had days where I felt disconnected from everything and days where my brain felt like it was burning. I would fixate on what exact steps I could take to completely walk away from my own life. And I had trauma flashbacks— moments when I would be present in where and when and who I was, but also being an eight-year-old boy and listening to my mother scream at me and tell me she didn’t love me anymore because I did something she didn’t like, and these would all be happening simultaneously.
Since that moment of crisis, of not knowing if any of this was working, of carrying a sense of despair that it was always going to be like this, I must have turned a corner. I kept going to therapy. I started taking antidepressants in December following a difficult month. Slowly— almost imperceptibly so— the burden started to feel a little lighter.
I know this mostly because people I trust told me so.
A couple weeks ago I had A Bad Day. While talking about it with my partner, they said that for as bad as that episode was, I seemed present and engaged in that moment. My partner said that, not too long ago, I would be in that far-away place for the rest of the day or for several days after. It was a noticeable change.
A few days later, in recounting the episode to my therapist, she said she had noticed I hadn’t talked about running away in a while. A noticeable change.
Things are still hard. Sometimes very hard. But I have something now that I didn’t have before: an idea of what “better” can look like.
Take care,
Bridget