Transition with an identity disorder

almost never easy, almost always worth pushing through

Hello everyone, I know it’s been a long time. I have actually written that sentence for maybe the start of three or four episodes that just never ended up getting finished but I’m determined to finish one now. Life, as I imagine many of you will relate to, has been busy and big and hard and difficult and I have been doing what I can to make it from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep each of those days. But here we are and I am ready to talk about things again. Things that are important to my transition journey and maybe things that will resonate with you as part of yours or that will help you learn and understand more about what some people may go through in their transition experiences.

Again, I am but one person, experiencing but one transition, and have only my experiences to share, but I do hope they help in some way to give comfort or understanding to others about the complexity we navigate through.

So what I want to talk about a bit is something I am currently seeking out new therapy support for. Transition at the same time as I navigate through an identity disorder. For those of you who do not know, I have Borderline Personality Disorder. It is not fun to live with, for me, or for people around me, but with work, we all manage.

There is a lot of shame when you transition and wonder almost every day if what you are doing is the right thing. Every time you see yourself there are a lot of questions. Will I ever feel right in this body? Should I have told anyone how I felt about my identity? Would life have been better for everyone if I had never said anything? Am I making progress with transition or are things getting worse?

The things that are feeling really hard for me right now are really physical based. I wake up and realize that as part of the feminization process, my meds don’t do all that much to my figure two years in. I can’t afford to remove all the hair from my face yet even though I have spent years in electrolysis. Facial feminization isn’t affordable right now either. My voice doesn’t change. I’m 44 and there is still a lot of anger at not having been able to start this earlier. A lot of time I try to be gracious with myself and be ok that these feelings are part of my transition and that the hard moments are currently more prevalent than the happy ones.

And this is hard because there aren’t a lot of forums to share these feelings. There’s therapy if you can find someone that specializes in this very specific form of therapy, but I am here to tell you that trans therapists who are affordable and who work will cover and who are familiar with BPD and who are taking clients and who can deal with suicidal ideation and self harm and comfort you through all of these things, are really hard to come by.

But, it is my reality that things often feel really hard. And yes, it is fair that things are really hard for trans people in a climate that is so outrageously and dangerously set against trans people having any kind of supportive transition. How do you manage your way through these hard periods?

Community. This isn’t the idea of trans community as a whole I have realized even though it is what I thought when I began transition. I thought I would be able to turn to anyone who was trans at any point in their transition, with access to any type of care, with any intersection at all. It is not the case for me. I need the love and I need the sadness of those who have experienced a lot of the difficulty I have. The people who after two years of medical transition are still getting yes sirred all the time and still have wildly masculine features. I cannot relate to a lot of other people in parts of transition and forcing myself to does not help. These people can help me understand that while things are hard, they are not wrong.

The community work I do with the broader trans community is to understand that together we all have different things we go through and that they all need to be understood and supported by one another. There is a lot of commonality for trans people even if there is so much variation in our experiences.

Value work. This is so wildly identity driven and individual. If I can’t tie things I am doing to things I value in life, I am lost. Not lost as in I don’t know what to do with my life, but lost as in there is nothing in my head. There is just blank space when it comes to who I am.

Values work is something I started doing in therapy, stopped doing, then picked up again when I was in inpatient treatment, and is something I know I need to do again now. It asks you to look at your core values and then you basically take a look at the areas in your life where you can apply these and you come up with ways you can apply them. So things like parenting, and relationships, and work, are all places where your values show up.

Values are things like justice, authenticity, bravery, exploration, learning, compassion, and on their own they seem simple enough to think about. But the real task and the real importance when your identity starts to disappear, is to think about the exact ways these apply to your life. How does bravery apply to me? Is it putting on makeup and going to work because I know that’s what feels good for me? Is there some way I can apply bravery to my parenting? Is that being open with kids about my mental health?

When you have an identity disorder you kind of have to be intentional about these things. In my experience you most definitely commit to the values you pick and you really need to think about them and not just look at the list your therapist puts in front of you and think “yep. that’s it for me, I’m good.” There is a tendency in my brain to see one that looks good for me and that has really good fits for me and then latch onto it in my brain. But without the second step of sitting down and writing down the ways it applies to your life, it really doesn’t do that much good for me.

To many people this might sound like a really fake way to live values, but to someone like me, I need to actually have a list of things I can do in my life to live values. To see how the things I do every day apply back to who I am. There has been a lot of shame up until now about having to live this way, but I am working on alleviating that. I guess that in itself is values work.

Finding and living in joy when it shows up. I’ve talked a lot about shame and guilt and sadness today because those are things I experience and things I want to acknowledge have been part of my transition. But, they don’t control my experience either. I think for myself, it is easy to get consumed by these overwhelming moments and not let myself live in the happy ones where I do celebrate the happiness that has also come from transition.

There ARE moments I see myself and recognize me at 44 becoming the person I have always been. There are times that being able to be an older trans person who gets to show younger trans people that we exist feels amazing. There are times I do a wing with my eye shadow where I think holy shit, this is so amazing, how did I get here?

It is really important for me that I let myself celebrate the few moments of euphoria I get really loudly. I want to share them really openly. I want people to see them and see me the way I have always wanted to see me and I don’t care how brashly I share them. This is all part of the ups and downs of the emotional cycle that comes with the identity disorder I have. The lows they are certainly low. They are painful and they feel never-ending. They prevent me from living happily, from loving others in a way that feels safe for them, from showing my body the kindness and care and gentleness is needs in such a large transition like I’m going through.

So, in these highs, I am happy, I am seeing me, I am pretty, I am a body worth sharing and showing and giving and loving. I take pictures, I take walks, I eat dinner on patios. I share myself in public when so often I don’t. I have been told to write these moments down in a gratitude journal and I see the value of this in these euphoric moments. I have a page in the same journal to capture euphoric moments—-moments when I find myself feeling exactly like the person I envisioned becoming. It’s big to capture them quickly because it is also hard to explain just how quick these feelings can leave you with BPD.

A perfect euphoric moment wearing a harness and flowers in my hair can be taken away because I see someone on their phone or because someone’s tone is off. And when my brain goes, my identity goes. I feel an immediate need to change clothes, to put on a hat, to take off makeup, to shed my feminine identity. Capturing these euphoric moments reminds me that I am trans and beautiful and loved this way and can continue to pursue transition in a way that is comfortable and safe for me.

These are really the things I can do for myself to help me realize and remember that the down parts of my brain do not control my transition. Certainly they have an impact, and I acknowledge that, but they cannot be the sole part of my transition. Every time I share the hard parts of transition I do get messages of support. I also get messages of thanks from people experiencing similar feelings. There is such a need to continue to do all of these things—-to share experiences and help people understand, and to share these experiences and help people know they are not alone in feeling hard things in their transition.

Thank you for being part of the group of people here to listen to this. It is never my favourite thing to talk about the difficult parts of being trans, but I do think there is incredible value in doing it. Because I am trans and finding it hard does not make me any less so. It doesn’t make you any less so either.

Until next time, thank you for listening.