The rotten stuff

Last week I said that I would "write about all the rotten stuff later". Well, it's later.

I've been putting it off because, to be perfectly honest, I don't like crying. I'm getting better about it; I 'm not ashamed of it any more, but I still don't like it. And I know that I'll do plenty of it before this is written.

In most ways, I've been really lucky. My friends and family have been wonderfully supportive, I'm establishing a small group of new friends who have only known me as Annie, and all my experiences in public have been positive ones. But there's one thing that keeps it all from being what it should be, getting in the way and frustrating me at every turn. Money.

Up to now, everything I've done has been relatively inexpensive. Thrift store clothes, makeup from WalMart, and shoes from eBay. A wonderful counselor who works on a sliding scale and charges me whatever I can afford that day. Sometimes that's been nothing.

I've managed to handle paying for hormones, and the cost of the support groups I go to are underwritten by a local organization. I've managed without the expenses of a car, taking the bus wherever I need to go or occasionally calling on friends for rides. I've even done a website tradeout to get my laser hair removal free.

But now I've hit a wall.

I've done just about all I can without a major expenditure of money. All the stuff that's left is incredibly expensive, at least from my perspective. Full Facial Feminization Surgery can cost over $40,000. Even just a nose job and brow lift (both of which I desperately need) is over $6000. Breast implants can add another $5000. And Sexual Reassignment Surgery is over $20,000, even having it done in Thailand. It's more here in the States. Even a bilateral orchiectomy (better known as castration), so I don't have to take testosterone blockers forever, is in the neighborhood of $3000.

Any way I look at it, I need to spend a bare minimum of $30,000. Considering that my after-tax income this year is about $20,000 and my expenses are about $22,000, it's going to be a long time before I can go much farther. And I'm not getting any younger.

I desperately need a better job, but it's hard enough finding work at my age without the extra little complication of having to say, "Oh, yeah, by the way, That's not my legal name yet..." Sometimes it seems hopeless, that I'll be stuck spending the rest of my life in this weird in-between state, unable to go forward and ready to die before going backward.

But I have to have hope. I have to believe that somehow it will work out, that eventually the perfect job will come along, that everything will be okay. It's a matter of either having hope or stepping out in front of a truck.

I just hope it happens in time. I have an image that comes to me every so often that plunges me into the deepest, darkest despair. Sometimes it's a nightmare, other times simply a waking thought.

The image is one of me, many years from now, lying in a hospital bed. The end is near; there's not much time left. My hair has been cut, my makeup taken away, and the doctors and nurses all are calling me "mister" and "he". I try to plead with them, but my voice is too weak to make myself understood. My eyes close, but I can still hear them talking. "What was he trying to tell us?", one of the nurses asks.

The room fades away, and is replaced with an image of my tombstone, with my male name on it. The inscription reads, "He wanted more."