Yesterday: Bath with a friend

Not a bad night’s sleep, although I didn’t want to get up – Saturday is usually my lie in day. I had a single sleeper last night, but that was enough to make it hard to get up.

I tidied my beard this morning; I swear that there’s less hair than usual – would low testosterone reduce beard growth, I wonder?

I’m off to Bristol to spend time with a friend. I’ve not seen her for two years, and I’ve not been good at keeping in touch in the meantime, however I asked her to be someone my husband could talk to about my castration and my darkness and the dysfunction that I brought to our relationship.

I felt I needed to apologise to her because I thought that I’d used her; she was fine – she didn’t feel used, she just felt that I’d asked for her help. I am glad: she is such a darling, lovely, sensitive person, and a treasured and much loved friend.

I talked a little about how I came out and what it felt like and how I feel now. She understood; she had friends who were trans, one was asexual. The school she worked at won Stonewall awards for inclusivity and her and her friend had championed that.

We both bemoaned our religious upbringings and the shame, judgements, and curtailment of freedom and expression that forced upon us both. She lost a nephew, who took his own life because he felt that he couldn’t reach out to his family because of the religious background. As it happens, he would have been loved and accepted, but religion has a lot of making up to do before people who aren’t “normals” truly feel safe.

We talked a little about our mutual experience with the menopause. Her’s lasted seven years. Mine has gone on about three months! I really hope that mine isn’t going to go on seven years! Well, hopefully, I’ll be getting hormones soon. I wonder whether the eunuch menopause doesn’t last as long as the female one because we don’t have ovaries that are slowly shutting down.

We had interesting discussions around gender and identity; she really understood. She also understood the burden of shame and it’s destructive powers. In a different way, she has felt the burden of shame herself.

She took me to a bookshop in Bath, I picked up a book on autism and how we should consider some changes to the world to make it a little more autistic friendly. The guy at the check out was lovely and talked at some length about his experiences as somebody on the spectrum (he had a beautiful smile also and a wonderfully engaging manner). It was interesting to learn that many creative people are autistic; in the past autistic types were thought of as being withdrawn and were more associated with cerebral occupations like programming.

Most of my surviving immediate family are somewhere on the spectrum; my dad us (in my brother’s and my opinion), my brother thinks he himself is, my husband has thought that I may be (a friend also suggested that I may be neuro-divergent), and my eldest nephew.

The friend I was with is of the opinion that we need some more fine tuned words to describe autism; in her role as a school teacher she looked after special needs children of all kinds, including some very withdrawn autistic children. She feels that with so many high-functioning people claiming some level of autism, the word has become a little cheapened.

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Today

A good night’s sleep. I took one b vitamin pill last night to see whether that would give me more energy in the morning for my run. It didn’t. My wee was very yellow and I struggled exactly the same as if it’s not taken the supplement. Seems there is no point in taking them at night. I’ll keep it up for a few days and see how it goes.

I felt lightheaded and faint around two kilometres into my run and ended up doing a run/walk to get back home. I may try running in the evening to see whether it really is just an energy thing.

My husband and I talked again this afternoon. I was tired, but did my best.

We started by me saying how my fear of loss had controlled me, and by extension how that fear had controlled him. However, I’d taken his loyalty for granted and prioritised retaining the relationships with my friends and family – in particular my mother – over him and our relationship. It made sense at the time, however I can now understand how that fed into the very behaviours of my husband that made me most unhappy because it caused him to feel unloved and unvalued.

The conversation then moved onto how I felt about the possibility of opening up our relationship. The way the question was put “have you imagined me [ie my husband] having sex with another man?” seemed to suggest that I ought to feel something bad about it. I’ve not thought about it at all, except in as much as I wanted him to be happy and fulfilled and I want to get out of the way of him achieving that. The truth is though, that I’d deliberately not been thinking about him having sex specifically, possibly because I was afraid it might make me feel jealousy or some other uncomfortable emotion … so expect another post with me more explicitly exploring that!

The way I felt at the end of the conversation wasn’t good. I felt shame about my behaviours and a desire to self harm. Putting a scalding hot object on my skin was the immediate thought. Then I thought about jumping out on front of traffic. Drama queen! I voiced then to take some of the power out of them.

I’m knackered. I’m going for a lie down. That’s not a euphemism for anything. I’m going to do a bit of hypnosis before doing tea.

And now I’m making paella for tea!