self-determination – Bibiane's Blog

Resurfacing

Two years of all-out anti-trans messaging by the fascist forces have finally had a toll on my mind. A month ago as I showed many stress symptoms, I got a diagnosis of PTSD, qualified as “complex” but “complex PTSD” isn’t yet an official diagnosis. I realized that I had assimilated a lifelong self-repression that had boiled over once more.

I write “once more” because half a lifetime ago I had episodes of self-harm that could have ended my life. However at the time the therapists I saw all focused on making me more manly, which only contributed to my pushing everything deeper inside me. My crises became more private, and I coped by reaching for inexpensive wine after social encounters. There were people who clearly had problems of their own as they would get drunk during the social encounters, whereas I just used it as a way to numb my feelings at night. But after the pandemic, with the help of a friend, I stopped drinking. Now it feels so good to be able to say “no” to alcohol, I think everybody should give it a try (but that isn’t the subject of this writing).

So it boiled over due to this messaging that not only got to my ears and eyes, but also the feeling that we became a subject of discussion, and people had opinions about all things trans. Having taken DEI trainings in the past, I knew that other people – let’s say most non-white people – have been putting up with similar repression, and in that sense I am privileged. It doesn’t mean I don’t get stressed out.

I took a break from all talk radio, chose a few pieces of music to play repeatedly in my ears, changed my routes to quieter streets (I walk or bike), avoided discussions, made sure I always went to the cashier who knows me at the grocery store, and of course continued to attend dance classes. Practicing modern dance, and especially when movement originates from my feelings, has been sustenance.

So it’s not surprising that I am resurfacing because of my art… My self-repression would have me apologize to pretend to be a dancer (in the competitive way that doesn’t really occur among dancers, but rather among the viewing public), and wanting to be a singer (who do I think I am?). I wrote a couple of poems earlier this year, after a few years hiatus. I managed to get together the idea of a queer open mic, and because I enrolled friends into it, it had a successful debut. I did a solo dance, and read the two poems I have recently written.

The solo dance, a “rehearsed improvisation” or basically a choreography that will always be in development because every time the dancer is responding to different feelings and understanding of the song. The song I chose I recorded at a concert by the Oakland GMC, knowing my friend’s voice is in it. Sometimes I would wake up in the morning and have a new idea of what a particular segment would look like. It’s similar to playing by ear instead of from sheet music (also because in dance, there’s no equivalent to sheet music other than what your teacher shows you to imitate).

I made myself even more vulnerable by choosing a pair of leggings and a leotard in tones of fuchsia and mauve.

What’s good about open mic is that you can perform in a friendly environment. I was still nervous, of course, and I even said to my friend one minute before starting that I had forgotten everything! But I made it through! I was the only one to know where I went “wrong” and I was motivated to be vulnerable again by signing up to read the poems.

I am now tempted to try to develop other dances, to write new poems. I thought I would submit the poems to a magazine, but then I figured I didn’t have the time, and putting them on my wordpress site would reach more people, more friends who don’t get the magazines anyway.

I will try to post the video recordings on this site here, as it is even more private and about my personal development.

As for the ptsd, I am learning new tricks. While mentioning that I had a mild form of claustrophobia, for example, I revealed that it was not as mild as I thought: I had just learned to live with it. As with other forms of anxiety, it is good to lead your mind away from the source of the anxiety. But “living with it” also means you have to be vigilant, and that’s just extra work that you pile on with other stressors.

Go read my poems on bibitiphane.org and let’s see if I can post videos of the dance and the reading here…

Sometimes I Feel Like a Child Needing a Hand…

Sometimes I feel like a child needing a hand to go through a difficult moment, but there’s no hand… Do I mean I’m helpless? There’s a positive bent to it: most of my life I have learned to solve my own problems. But unlike the heroes in movies, I have serious vulnerabilities and I get swayed into perfect storms like the one I just experienced.

I remember High School Physics only for the demonstration of how waves interact with each other. You can experiment in a bathtub if you wish: waves originating from different sources at different frequencies add (and subtract) when they meet, and create stormy conditions. The emotional storm I was experiencing originated from nearby waves (recent interactions) with waves that have been going on in my body for decades.

I hate myself (more about that later) for even exposing that I blame my mother for several things, but other adults when I was a child were either harmful, uncaring, or just plain scary. My peers from my age group were either bullies or indifferent, and all I could really do was to try as hard as I could to bring good grades from school in order to get recognition from my mother. That was hard work also because I seemed to have trouble learning in class especially when interrogated. Several of my waves originate from events in childhood that were outright traumatic, or were themselves trauma caused by the responses to my responses to trauma. After that the best protection against the daily bullying is to make yourself as quiet and invisible as possible.

Now that decades have passed with a few episodes of self-harm, I find myself coping with gender dysphoria in my own way. It does come back, like a ghost, or… what I learned about abusive people. I feel very vulnerable, but I return kindness with extra kindness, and sometimes I have to control it so the kind people will not feel invaded by my desire to hang on. I read signs of abandonment when others are just living their own lives, and again I try to solve those issues on my own. It is very tiring, and it comes to that storm I was describing, when I try to please everyone, sacrificing myself, doing unsolicited volunteer work and then fearing the wrath of those whose work I just did. And so on and so forth.

Sorry this was as cryptic as I could make it… I don’t want to describe real situations and actual people. But in recent years, my entourage has been very positive, I find I can love people and read how much they can take. The hardest part for me is to understand that I am not the cause of someone’s sadness, and to take a step back before I try with all my capacities to fix it. That comes from a form of emotional blackmail my mother practiced with me. The sad thing is I don’t remember her being happy with me while I do remember her anger at me when I returned from school in complete distress (she was angry at the fact I had peed in my pants as a result of the chain of events that had caused it). Or when I had tripped from roller skates and hurt my knees. Or when I had been stung by wasps. They were all accidents, but somehow instead of comforting me she focused on whatever I shouldn’t have done. I have a hunch this doesn’t lead to being curious or adventurous…

After reading this text above, I hesitate to show it to anyone, but I tell myself it might help someone. Maybe parents and caregivers can be more aware of how they react to unexpected behaviors in children. Maybe other adults can learn to address their childhood issues with less harmful ways than drugs, alcohol, or self-harm. It can be daunting, because I know how easier it was to drink a bottle of wine to put myself in a slumber to forget a confrontation. Come to think of it, that will be the subject of my next post!

I Am Such An Introvert

The first time I took the Myers-Briggs test, I was young and English really was my second language in that I had to reread some of the questions… But my then Jungian (a distinction they made back then, which was kind of fun because I learned to write down my dreams) therapist said I was definitely an I, very much an N, but the other traits were not too clear. As a matter of fact, I had answered as I thought I should, a bit in the way I lived back then, which was living as others want me to… Several years later, with a larger English vocabulary and a better knowledge of myself, I took the test and came out definitely INFP, still with a 100% Introvert.

Today I’m not sure I would test any different, but my friend once remarked I had been outgoing and cheerful during a bike ride, and that would be a demonstration I’m not such an introvert as I claimed. But I didn’t feel it that way, I still wanted a quiet night after that bike ride. And I didn’t socialize much at the lunch stop, I remarked. I think my friend imagined an introvert is automatically antisocial and brooding. I do have social anxiety, especially with people I don’t know, but above all with people who act like the adults of my childhood (I only recently figured I’m now older than many people I see as “adults”). They seem to expect something from me that I never can deliver.

We introverts often share stories of difficult relationships with parents, of course. It makes sense that we came to this world feeling parents and adults didn’t invite our self-expression. For me as a potentially trans person (it took decades to figure that out), they expected something I couldn’t deliver, and they appreciated peace and quiet otherwise. Yet many of my siblings are introverts, even though they wouldn’t want to be recognized as such. There’s a societal expectation that being an introvert is a major flaw. For me, however, it is an integral part of my personality, and it somehow explains why it took me so long to recognize where on the gender spectrum I feel I can rest comfortably.

I have also learned not to sound like I complain about how adults interacted with me when I was a child. Perhaps that is making everything more difficult now, that coming out as transgender I feel that my friends and siblings want an explanation, but then they will challenge it, not intentionally but sometimes sending me into the spiral of lost self-esteem.

I am not unhappy about being introverted. I must say I found great help from a single book called The Introvert Advantage, and sharing it with introvert friends. I found other books sounded like they had been written to fix us, or make us join a union of introverts (so unlikely!), as opposed to just understand how we can be happy navigating within a world that favors extroversion. But I have questioned whether I became more introverted after the first few years of my life.

It would make sense to me now. If not outgoing, I wanted to dance, but that was frowned upon. I tried to touch the piano, but was told not to. I held my little brother with apparent care in a photo. But there was the period when life was just very difficult, and it seemed to define how I operated thereafter as a quiet child trying to bring only good results from school, never really bothering my parents for advice. Once I had found Computer Science as the greatest place to be quiet while being creative and productive (and I should be grateful that I felt protected by a small group of friends, and an advisor who just let me run with my ideas), life went on without gender nor sex… Things got complicated later when people wanted me to be “normal,” but that’s another story. Let’s just say that I was saved a few times by knowing how to deal quietly with chaos (but yes, there were really hard moments I’m not going to share).

It makes sense that not being able to express my gender early in life made me more of an introvert. But I like being an introvert, even though it feels like I would have fully transitioned many years ago had I been less so. Let’s just live as best as we can with what we have!

Dismissing the Ghosts

I haven’t written for a while, and it wasn’t for a lack of personal news, but rather for having to process “my ghosts.” I felt it would be inappropriate to mix a narrative of transition with details of how and why it has been delayed. Regardless of what series of events my ghosts have enacted and repressed, I think it has been very useful to identify them and to find myself free.

It isn’t that I suddenly discovered them: this has been a long process. Ghost #1 was identified first, and much good came out of it. Ghost #2 has always been like a bystander, and ghost #3 has always been for me both the one setting behavior rules that made me a very gentle person, and the one pushing for self-destruction and self-loathing… It is just that as I tried to diminish and sabotage my efforts at letting my true self out, I discovered that they were the ones blocking my progress.

The unexpected catalyst in this discovery: I was helping (and here I am, doubting myself) someone process the death of an abuser, by saying what I thought was the key to the power an abuser has on the person, even after they have died. Then I understood I had adapted my story to a general pattern of abusive behavior. In it, finally, I said we have to realize there was no love, but that we spend the rest of our lives wondering how we failed to get that love. In my story, everyone including myself had excused the ghosts by saying they were just living with their times, and with their own baggage. That was not enough, in my experience, and I had to figure out that I had to stop looking for love that did not exist.

It is, I think, like jumping off a cliff with the knowledge that I have wings. The wings are kind of new, I need to try them in the different wind conditions that are coming at me, but only I can move them.