Digital Alterity

Originally published on my Google+ and Facebook pages, back at the beginning of June…

This isn’t a particularly easy post to put out on the Internet, but here goes nothing…

In the next few days, I’ll be changing my name on Facebook and Google+ from “Rusty Haskell” to “Kate Haskell”. I’m changing my name here on social media because that’s the name that I’m now going by at my new job and in face-to-face interactions with people. I’m in the process of changing my legal name to “Kathryn Ripley Haskell” as well. I would really appreciate if you would use female pronouns (“she”, “her”, etc.) and feminine words (“woman”, “wife”, “aunt”, etc.) when referring to me.

I’m transgender. This means that, on some level, my brain constantly “expects” the rest of my body to be female. Since all the incorrect hormones started floating around in my blood during puberty, I lived every single day with an intense depression and feeling of anxiety/wrongness that doctors call “gender dysphoria”. I hid this from everyone as best I could because I didn’t want to burden anyone and I didn’t feel like my feelings were “real”.

This might seem pretty sudden to some of you, but I promise you that it has been anything but. I’ve been in consultation with various doctors about this for almost two years now, and Allyson and I have been dealing with this privately for longer than that. For the past eight months, I’ve been on hormone replacement therapy (HRT), receiving the hormones that any other woman of my age/build would receive, and within about a month of starting HRT, all of my dysphoria/depression just went completely away. I smile and laugh, and I actually enjoy life rather than just pretending to do so. Allyson and I are closer than ever.

I’m happy to answer almost any question you might have either here in the comments or privately. In addition, I’m happy to recommend books you can read about being transgender. I understand that it’s a very unusual condition, and I’m probably the first openly trans person that many of you have met. Don’t be afraid to ask whatever’s on your mind.

I heartily recommend this helpful brochure from PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) about being trans. There’s a lot of good information in here.

http://community.pflag.org/Document.Doc?id=202 [PDF]

Every Friday, I’m going to serve up a delicious helping of articles I saw on the Internet that you really should consider reading. Those of you who follow me on Google+ will likely already have seen some of these links, but there will always be at least one or two that I haven’t shared.

• “I’ll tell you why movie revenue is dropping…” by Roger Ebert
• “Your Morning Cry: Single Mom Found Dead With A List Of Dreams In Her Pocket” by Cassie Murdoch
• “How to Drink: Whiskey” by Laneia
• “‘Plus Sized’ Clothes: Translating the Baffling Euphemisms” by Christina H
• “Being Mad On Twitter” by Margaret Cho

I’m in the process of losing weight for the last time. Long-time readers of the blog will have been with me through a couple of weight loss journeys, but this time, the weight loss is different. You see, this time I’m losing weight for the last time because the weight isn’t ever going back on from here.

The Ghosts of Weight Loss Past

Related to all the problems that eventually sent me to the doctor, in the past when I’ve lost weight, I somewhat paradoxically felt worse about myself. Dozens of well-meaning people, both in person and over the Internet, would rave about how great I looked even as I become more and more uncomfortable with the face I saw in the mirror every day. Eventually, I would make a conscious decision to start putting the weight back on, if only to stop the flurry of compliments about my appearance.

And frankly, a really scary word has been thrown around when I honestly described my previous weight loss regimens to my psychologist. She calmly and patiently described my 1000-calorie, six-miles-of-walking days as anorexic, and I can’t really disagree with her assessment. For me, the cycle of weight loss and gain contained an element of punishment. I would alternately starve myself and then subsequently make myself ugly with slow but constant weight gain. I did this in part in an attempt to atone for imaginary “sins” that no rational or loving God would even consider to be sinful.

Basically, I was pretty fucked up, and it totally wasn’t even my fault. Thankfully, balancing some important chemicals in my body has made a much happier environment for my poor beleaguered brain. I eat right because I actually want to take care of myself. I don’t have to force myself to go running when I get up because I’m not depressed and despondent every morning, and most importantly, I actually like the face I see in the mirror a little more every day.

The Results

A little over a year ago, I weighed 147 kg. That’s pretty fucked up. It’s the heaviest I’ve ever weighed in my life. I had to buy a new scale because my other scale couldn’t handle me any more. Today, I weighed in at 118.6 kg. That means that I’ve lost about 28.4 kg (over 60 pounds) since I started getting help.

Most of that weight loss has actually happened since the end of August. Back on August 24, I started keeping a journal of everything I ate, and I started daily weigh-ins tracked with a moving average trend line (which you may know about from my flirtation with The Hacker’s Diet). Just like in quantum physics, it seems that the observation itself affects the result. On August 24, I was 137.3 kg. That means that, in a little under five months, I’ve lost 18.7 kg (over 40 pounds).

But wait, the concerned among you might ask, are you starving yourself again? I’m please to report that the answer to that is a resounding “Hell no.” Initially, I was eating around 2000 kcal/day, but once my medicines kicked in and lowered my metabolism a bit, I moved to eating about 1850 kcal/day. Many days I go over that amount, but it’s always somewhere in that neighborhood. This restructuring of my diet paired with getting back into running has led to a consistent weight loss of around 0.85 kg/week (a little less than 2 pounds/week). Both my endocrinologist and my psychologist are pretty happy with both my rate of weight loss and my dietary plan.

Are you the sort of person who thinks more visually? Then this chart is for you:

My overall weight loss since 2011-08-24

The Best Is Yet To Come

I’m looking forward to living a healthy life. I don’t think of what I’m doing as a “diet”. In fact, saying that I’m on a diet is one of the easiest ways to make me annoyed. I’ve just stopped eating like an asshole. I fully accept that I’m going to be eating similar to this for the rest of my life. Sure, I’ll eventually get to eat 200-ish kcal/day more when I’m just trying to maintain my goal weight, but I’m never going to just sit down and eat half of a large pizza without planning the rest of my diet around it ever again.

I eventually hope to settle in at around 65 kg (143-ish pounds). That would put me in the healthy/normal BMI range for my height. If I’m slightly more than that because of strength training, I certainly wouldn’t be sad about it though. By my projections using weight loss simulation software from the NIH, I hope to be at my goal weight by about August or September of 2013.

And I’m never going to shop in a specialty store for fat people ever again, dammit.

After a few months away, I’ve finally started playing WoW again. Everyone, meet Bellworth.

I started playing WoW because I missed hanging out with my guildies and because Skyrim inspired me to play a rogue. I initially planned on making an orc rogue, but I decided that the undead reflected my closet gothiness a bit more.

I’m going to be leveling Bellworth without any heirlooms or stockpiles of gold from my established characters. Bellworth is the 99%. In RP terms, Bellworth is not part of the secret cabal that Hemlock and Besom set up to keep things running in spite of the Horde’s current moronic leadership.

I haven’t decided on a backstory for her as of yet, but she’s sneaky as hell and makes her own weapons as a blacksmith.

A few years ago, I kind of dropped off the planet. This blog presents ample evidence of this fact.

For reasons I’m not yet ready to get into, daily existence became such a Herculean effort that just getting up and going to work took all of my energy. This wasn’t a sudden thing, mind you. I’ve been frank on this blog about my struggles with depression and isolation, and it just finally reached the point where I didn’t see a point in publishing my thoughts, or perhaps more accurately, my thoughts became such a dark and toxic place that they were only suitable for private spaces.

You can probably go back and review these entries and see my attempts to continue life as it had been through sheer determination and brute force, but what you probably won’t see is that, even during the times when I was “up” and really active, it was in defiance of my persistent hopelessness and despair. I did what I could to hide the severity of my condition from everyone, including those closest to me. To quote from my personal journal that I was keeping during the worst of it all:

You want to know why this journal isn’t a happy place? Because my head isn’t a happy place. I know you, dear reader, probably interacted with me in the past. You probably thought I was happy because I went about my life as though everything were normal. I laughed, and I made you laugh. I was goofy, friendly, witty, and kind. But this is what the mental climate is like. This is what you didn’t see, what you can’t see. Don’t feel bad. I’m adept at keeping all of this hidden. It’s a fucking survival technique. No one likes depressed people. I sure don’t. If all you hear from someone is how bad things are, you lose all desire to talk to that person. It’s a one-note symphony, and it just gets tiresome. Please don’t feel bad about this. There’s no shame in it. It’s natural for you as a human being to not seek after chronically negative experiences. You avoid it for the same reason a dog avoids stepping in a fire ant bed. So yeah, I learned very quickly to not do that. This journal is like this because my headspace is like this. I just don’t see the point in sharing my headspace all the time. Or preferably at all…I’m not faking. I’m not lying to you. I am very much the person you have always known. I just work very, very hard to live my life as if my depression didn’t exist. You are interacting with the version of Rusty that has spent twenty years learning to ignore the darkness in favor of talking about the light. It’s what I do, man.

And I love each and every one of you so much that it hurts.

But this entry thankfully isn’t intended to be a funeral dirge. Instead, this post is a moment of renaissance. I’m embracing my inner Jean Grey and being reborn in a flash of heat and flame. You see, I finally got help.

Back in October of 2010, I started seeing a psychologist about all this shit I was valiantly attempting to hide from everyone—including myself. Over the course of months, at my insistence, we built a scientific case that something was definitely amiss and that we could prove it with evidence. After months of hand-wringing, I finally opted to give pharmaceutical assistance a try. Within about a week of taking the first of my new medicines, I was able to drive in the middle of a torrential downpour without my heart rate even going up. I was able to call people on the phone for work without five minutes of psyching myself up. Within about two weeks of adding in my second medicine, I stopped waking up sad for the first time since puberty. This was something I previously thought of as impossible.

Seriously…Waking up with terrible sadness and hopelessness every morning of your life? I hope you only have to imagine that because because I wouldn’t wish the experience on anyone. To go from that to just feeling tired and normal as my first awareness of being awake feels like the first time you ever played The Legend of Zelda or that time when the girl you really liked decided to kiss you.

There will be a day in the not-too-distant future where I’ll feel more comfortable talking about everything that has been going on with me with the whole Internet. Heck, some day I might even publish all those private journal entries here on my Changelog in the hopes of helping someone else in my position, but right now all of that belongs in private safe spaces where I can work on building up my emotional well-being and my psychological chitinous exoskeleton. None of those are the purposes of this entry. I’m just writing to clear the decks, explain my virtual absence, and shake the digital cobwebs off this motherfucker.

I’m back, bitches. Tremble in fear and awe.

One of the professors just came in, checked his mail, and started to head out the door. He stopped halfway out the door and turned back around.

“Do you ever have a bad hair day? It always looks so nice.”
“Well, I guess I’m just lucky in that regard.”
“You don’t. You’re very lucky.”

And then he turned around and walked out the door.

I am of the opinion that every person on the planet should read the following comic series. This includes all those people who don’t think they like comics.

1. Gotham Central by Brubaker and Rucka.
2. Watchmen by Alan Moore.
3. Y the Last Man by Brian K. Vaughn.
4. New X-Men by Grant Morrison.
5. Fables by Bill Willingham

Get crackin’, people. This will be on the final exam.

As those of you who follow my Twitter and Facebook know, I’m officially a homeowner. Allyson and I closed on our first house back on June 10th, and we’ll actually be moving in on July 8th.

Now, I’m not the sort of person who gets really excited about all things homeowner. Going to Home Depot or Lowe’s is still a form of torture for me. I don’t get all excited about landscaping, building shelves, or installing gutters. Even still, I’m pretty excited about some of the parts of moving into a standalone house that we actually own. For posterity, this is a non-exhaustive list of those things.

• Having my computer out in the main area. My computer has always kind of been squirreled away in an “office” area of our apartment. Because a great number of my interests and hobbies happen while sitting at a computer, this has led to me sequestering myself away from the rest of the apartment for my leisure time. At the new place, we’re planning on putting our computers right out in the main living area, allowing me to play Starcraft 2 out where everyone actually is.
• Having a sewing/craft room with a door. I actually went to a class to learn how to sew, but I could never bring myself to sew at home because I would have been using our kitchen table and fending off a rather excited kitten while I tried to work. Now I’ll be able to shut Kerrigan out and sew without worrying about spearing a stray paw with the needle.
• Finally hooking the subwoofer on my computer back up. Having lived in apartment complexes, I haven’t really been comfortable turning on the subwoofer on my computer’s speakers. As I know from having extremely shitty neighbors, bass carries right through walls, floors, and ceilings. I’m too nice of a person actually have the bass turned on. Once we move, I will gladly put on some dubstep with the subwoofer cranked, content in the knowledge that I’m only bothering my cats.
• Setting up my new kitchen. Since we moved out of our massive kitchen at Covered Bridge, I have found it hard to be inspired to cook delicious things. Now admittedly, part of that was due to the whole succumbing-to-years-of-depression thing, but at least partially, it was also due to just not having enough space to get creative. I’m looking forward to having a bar/kitchen island again. I will actually have space for my appliances and still have prep surfaces.
• Our new library area. As we started planning out where to put our stuff, Allyson was possessed by a muse of incredible brilliance. She mentioned the idea of putting our dining room table in front of our fireplace and lining the opposite wall with bookcases, making a combination dining room and library. This immediately satisfied a need that I didn’t previously even know that I had. I’m going to have a library, bitches!

Little Dinosaur a photo by fuzzcat on Flickr.

This little plastic toy showed up on my desk at work one day without explanation. Now he just lives there.

Last night, I took anxiety dreams to the next level by combining two together into one package of horror.

The dream started with the usual oh-shit-I’ve-got-test-in-a-class-I-haven’t-gone-to-all-semester nonsense. In this case, the class in question was an agriculture/biology class. Now the interesting bit is that I wasn’t actually all that concerned about the exam in my dream. I kept reassuring myself that the professor was known for easy tests and that I’m really good at bullshitting on exams.

Then, right before the exam, the professor pulls out a strange mesh container. Also, some representatives from Orkin Pest Control Services show up to observe. Turns out, part of the test involves some sort of in-class demonstration/activity that happened involving what’s in the mesh container. Apparently, our class adopted a bedbug. That bedbug was likely already pregnant, and the activity was supposed to show how many bedbugs a single pregnant bedbug can produce. I started panicking about the container.

The classroom is now my bedroom. Also, I’m alone in there with Tux, my trusty cat familiar, and he has taken an interest in the container. I look away and continue trying to work on my exam, and when I look up, Tux has torn a hole in the container in an attempt to get the bugs. I’m pretty sure he ate the adult bedbug, but then I saw the tiny specks crawling all over my bed. He had let the baby bedbugs loose.

As you can imagine, I woke up from this dream almost immediately at this point. It has been years since we last dealt with bedbugs, and I can assure you that time hasn’t diminished their psychological effect.