I’m going to say some things that might sound scary but let me be absolutely clear that I have no plans to commit suicide or anything drastic like that.

I’m sick and tired of barely holding on to life. I’m exhausted from just surviving and it’s hard to see a path to a place where I’m thriving.

Now I know part of that is my seasonal depression talking. I’m on three meds now to try and control it but the best I have at the moment is “not as bad as it was.” I’ve tried messing with them but it’s a dangerous proposition when I’m in the midst of it. The last dosage change I tried put me at too high a risk for suicide for me to continue.

And part of that is the mental and physical exhaustion of being disabled. My back and neck always hurt and that background pain is draining. And then there are periods like the weekend I just had where a seemingly simple task like assembling and hanging a medicine cabinet puts me in 24 hours of acute pain. And it’s demoralizing to know that you can’t even do basic things anymore.

Another part of it is trying to exist in a world that wasn’t built for me. Our westernized society still doesn’t know how to be inclusive of trans folks even on the most basic level. Even queer community makes it hard to be recognized if you are outside the binary gender construct we all take for granted. And when you can fight for decades for the most basic human rights and have those stripped away in just one politician’s term, it’s pretty demoralizing.

But the biggest part of it is the dysphoria I have around how my body is gendered. I have been on hormones for 2 years now and it has helped a lot, but I still can’t look in the mirror most days and see myself looking back. I see a face that looks hopelessly masculine to me, and I hear a testosterone shaped voice come out of my body that can be fun to perform with but still feels like a form of drag to me.

I want so badly to be ok with the body I was given, but that’s not how dysphoria works. I can do all the body positivity building I want and all that helps with is my weight. There is still a misalignment of who I know I am, and the body that others see. I walk around daily in a shell that causes people to make assumptions about who I am. And even when those assumptions are right, it usually means they are focusing on the wrong things.

At this point I feel like I am just barely clinging on to hope that bottom surgery will alleviate enough of this feeling that I can relax even the tiniest bit. I don’t know for sure if it will, but I also don’t know if I could keep going if I don’t try. So for now, I survive.