Content warning: this post discusses a suicide attempt. If you are feeling suicidal, please talk to someone about it. If you have no one else to talk to, there are telephone hotlines you can call to talk to a trained volunteer who can help you through this. In the USA and Canada you can call

• USA Trans Lifeline – For transgender people – 1-877-565-8860
• Canadian Trans Lifeline – For transgender people 1-877-330-6366
• The Trevor Project – For LGBTQ youth – 1-866-488-7386
• Suicide hotline in USA and Canada – For everyone – 988

So now we come to my fourth, and if the rest of my life goes well, last suicide attempt. It was 18 months after the previous one. In November of 1999 I was finally diagnosed as bipolar. Over that year I had begun learning about bipolar disorder. I think talking to a friend who was diagnosed with it was the first thing that turned me on to the possibility that I might have it, but regardless of how the thought got into my head, I started reading about it. I read personal accounts by people on the Internet, and perhaps most influentially I read Touched By Fire, by Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychologist who specializes in bipolar disorder and who is herself bipolar. This particular one of her books discusses the link between bipolar disorder and creativity in the arts, and at the time that was very much on my mind because I was writing music of my own and was on the periphery of the Irish music scene in my city, occasionally doing things like live recording of one of the local bands.

The discussions and descriptions in the book felt really familiar to me, because I recognized that my own mood swings were very similar to what Jamison was talking about. Based on that, and other things I read, I decided that it would be a good idea to talk to a psychiatrist about this, because the previous treatment I’d received for major depression had done absolutely nothing useful for me. So I made an appointment with a psychiatrist and went in to talk to her. I described to her my research and described my own experiences with mood swings, both high and low, and how they just kept repeating themselves over and over, and she agreed with me that a diagnosis of bipolar disorder was appropriate. She then wrote me a prescription for Depakote (valproic acid) and I started on a years long journey of trying one medication after another without success.

That’s right, the Depakote did not work. In fact, it may have made me worse. The official website for Depakote lists this warning: “Like other antiepileptic drugs, DEPAKOTE may cause suicidal thoughts or actions in a very small number of people, about 1 in 500.” It seems as though I was that 1 in 500, though there were triggering events to help move things along, too.

First, in mid December, a couple of weeks after starting treatment, I was fired from my job. To be fair, I had been doing really badly at work, being chronically late and missing deadlines for generating reports that needed to be submited to government agencies. It was the depression, of course, that was messing things up for me, but while I was now being treated finally, it was too late to save my job. Then a couple of days later, my mother, a very narcissistic woman who always needed to be the center of attention, told me she had an incurable liver disease and led me to believe, falsely, that it might kill her. This double blow coming on top of already severe depression just sent my mood careening off the edge of a cliff.

The next Saturday after being fired, in the week right before Christmas, I was feeling absolutely horrible, and in an attempt to cope with this I did something I was doing a lot of at the time: I went to my favorite restaurant. It was a Chinese cafe that some ex coworkers from the People’s Republic of China had introduced me to, saying it had more genuinely authentic Chinese food than most places in the city, and it was true. The food there was fantastic, and the way it was set up I could get unlimited self service refills of my drink and sit at a table undisturbed for literally hours while I ate and did things like read books, or draw in my sketchbook.

That day though, nothing I did helped to calm me down or improve my mood. I had my favorite dish, I had my fill of drinks (Mountain Dew, as it happens, so it had lots of caffeine, which probably did not help me to calm down any), and I tried reading and writing for a while, but nothing worked, so eventually I got back on my bicycle and rode back home. On the trip back I got more and more agitated. As in the previous incident, I think I got into a mixed state that day, combining the horrible feelings and suicidal thoughts of deep depression, with the energy and will to act of mania.

As soon as I got home, I walked in the door, went into my bedroom, put down my backpack and purse, opened up the drawer of my desk, and pulled out a loaded .32 caliber revolver that I had inherited from my grandmother the previous year. I was going to shoot myself in the head and end my suffering finally, once and for all.

But my hands were shaky and I was really not thinking or acting quite coherently, and as I raised up the gun I pulled the trigger prematurely, sending a bullet across the room into a window sill. The sound of the gun firing scared me – I am noise sensitive, among other things – and suddenly I felt that I couldn’t go through with it. I walked into the next bedroom and found my housemate standing there looking shocked and afraid and I handed him the gun and walked out of the house.

I just started walking down the street with no destination in mind. I just wanted to walk off the energy, and fear, and the loathing I felt for my own life, and just somehow clear my mind. I got down the street to a convenience store and went inside to buy a soda. While inside I saw a police car driving slowly down the street with it’s lights flashing but the siren off, and I just knew they were looking for me, so I stayed inside the store and used a pay phone to call a friend, the High Priestess of the Wiccan coven I was a member of. I told her what was happening and that I needed help, and she came and got me and took me back to her house to stay the night. The next day, she drove me back home, and I found out that my housemate had called our landlords and I was now being evicted because he felt unsafe around me. He told me he had given the gun to my boyfriend.

So that was the single worst week of my life. Fired from my job, told my mother had an incurable disease, tried to kill myself, and got evicted, all in the week before Christmas.

Now looking back on all of these incidents, I see the following. The first suicide attempt when I was 12 was purely driven by my gender dysphoria. I wanted to die not because I felt like my life was worthless, but because I felt that living life as a man would bring too much pain and I didn’t think I could handle it. The other three incidents, though, were not really gender related, and they followed each other in close order, the first being in 1997, the second in 1998, and the third in 1999. What they all have in common is that they all happened during the years where, in retrospect, I was in the throws of bipolar disorder, either undiagnosed and untreated, or immediately after starting treatment and being put on a medication that can increase suicidal thoughts in rare cases. Since that time, I have experienced lots of suicidal ideation during the 13 years it took to find a medication that actually worked for me, but I’ve never again actually come close to attempting to kill myself.

Even when I was on medication that did not fully control my bipolar disorder, I can now see that the medication did, at least, eliminate the worst of the lows and enabled me to continue living. If I had not had the medications – and there were 13 of them before finding the one that worked – I think I would have continued to make attempts to kill myself and it seems likely that at some point I would have succeeded. But that fate was avoided, thankfully, and so I am around today to share these stories with others.

I don’t know if these stories can really help anyone, but my hope is that someone out there who is feeling suicidal and thinking that they are alone in the world with no one who can understand them will read about my experiences and feel a familiarity in them and know that there really are people who have been there and who know how they feel and, most importantly, have lived and eventually found their way out of the darkness. Suicide can seem very appealing. It promises an end to pain and suffering. But it’s not an easy thing to do, and if you can just manage to avoid it, either by willpower or even by sheer luck, then there is hope for a brighter future. I found that future. In 2013 I finally found the right medication for me. In my case it was Latuda (lurasidone) and it was the first drug to ever actually stabilize my mood and end the cycling up and down. It stabilized me in a permanently depressed state, unfortunately, but my doctor continued working with me and we found that adding in Wellbutrin (bupropion) served to also bring my mood up to a non depressed level so that for the first time since I was a child I was both stable and more or less happy.

If you are reading this and think there is no hope for you, please let my own experience be an example to you that there is hope! You can find a way out of the depression or the mood swings that are making you feel the way you do. It may take a lot of trial and error, and it may take time. It may take 13 years like it did for me, but don’t give up! When you find your own solution, life will open up for you in ways that you can’t even imagine, and you’ll finally have the life you deserve!

Previous: My Closest Call

Content warning: this post discusses a suicide attempt. If you are feeling suicidal, please talk to someone about it. If you have no one else to talk to, there are telephone hotlines you can call to talk to a trained volunteer who can help you through this. In the USA and Canada you can call

• USA Trans Lifeline – For transgender people – 1-877-565-8860
• Canadian Trans Lifeline – For transgender people 1-877-330-6366
• The Trevor Project – For LGBTQ youth – 1-866-488-7386
• Suicide hotline in USA and Canada – For everyone – 988

So now we are up to my third brush with suicide and the one where I came the closest to actually harming myself. It was April of 1998. In January, I had finally acheived my lifelong dream – I had gender reassignment surgery. Goodbye penis, and hello vagina! It made me incredbily happy and for the first time ever, really, I no longer felt any kind of gender dysphoria. My lived experience and my body were now both in sync with who I knew myself to be. It should have solved all of my problems, right?

Wrong.

Even after 6 weeks of recovery, when I finally went back to work I still felt miserable. My depression was still in full control of my mind and life was still filled with pain. It would be in November of 1999 that I finally got diagnosed as bipolar and started treatment for it, but in March and April of 1998 I as yet had no idea that I was living with bipolar disorder. My particular variant is bipolar II, which is characterized by long periods of depression punctuated by a few days or weeks of hypomania. The longest hypomanic episode I remember was only 2 weeks long, and since it was hypomania and not full blown mania, it just always felt like my constant depression had finally let go of me and I was going to feel happy finally, so no one, including me, ever realized it was hypomania going on. But in those months after my surgery, it was the depression that dominated my life.

One day at work I was feeling especially bad. I started thinking that I needed to kill myself. That it was the only way to end my pain. At some point I reached into my purse and pulled out the Swiss army knife I carried, a Christmas gift from my grandfather from many years earlier. I opened up the larger of the two blades and contemplated it. I looked at my wrist and thought that it would be so easy to cut it open and let the blood flow out of my body, draining the pain along with it.

I was getting agitated, too. Normally when I’d think about killing myself I would not have the energy to actually do anything about it, but this day was different. I felt the suicidal thoughts, and I also felt like I had the will and energy to act on them. In retrospect I now recognize that I was in a mixed state, a condition bipolar people can get in where one cycles back and forth between depression and mania in a matter of minutes and you can go from one to the other and back again over and over. But I still had some will to live, and in a fit of rage at myself for thinking about suicide I stormed across the building to the office of the company IT guy, slammed my knife down on his desk and told him to hold on to it for me because I shouldn’t have it right now. Then I stormed out and back to my own desk. From his reaction a bit later, he obviously didn’t understand what was going on.

Back at my desk I stewed on my thoughts, thinking more and more about death. Finally, after maybe ten minutes of this, I went back to the IT guy and asked for my knife back. He must have thought I was agitated because of some computer hardware problem and that I wanted to use the screwdriver blades of the knife, because he grinned at me and asked “what’cha gonna open up?”

I said “me!” I open up the big knife blade and walked out of the office into the company lobby and started moving to cut my left wrist open.

But he was quick to realize what was going on, and he moved incredibly fast. Before I could cut myself he tackled me from behind and wrestled the knife out of my hand. At that point I broke down and just stood there crying while he held tight to my arm to stop me from running away, but I didn’t try and run. I was too overwhelmed to do anything at that point. I felt like I was such a failure that I couldn’t even kill myself.

The office came to standstill after that, with some people gathered around to watch. They called the cops, and eventually two police officers showed up and took me into custody. They put me in the back of their car and drove me to the big county hospital. I asked what was going to happen and they told me I needed to voluntarily put myself in the psychiatric emergency ward or else I’d be involuntarily committed and have to stay there a minimum of three days. So to save myself from being stuck there, I “voluntarily” admitted myself.

Once inside, my clothes were taken away and I was given paper pants and a shirt to wear. The place was pretty scary. Other patients were walking around in a daze, and mumbling to themselves. I expect most of the people there were homeless people who also had severe mental health issues. I tried to stay away from everyone and keep my head down.

After a couple of hours, I finally got to see one of the resident doctors. He seemed tired and uninterested in me, but interviewed me and asked about what happened, how I felt at the time, how I was feeling now, etc. Eventually he decided that I had calmed down and was no longer a danger to myself, and I was discharged.

When I got out, I found my parents waiting for me. I think my boss had called them. We went to their car and didn’t say much, but my mother insisted on stopping at a big flower shop nearby, where she bought me some flowers and a teddy bear. It made me feel better. I think we may have gotten something to eat, too, and I assume I told them what had happened. At some point they took me back to work so I could get my truck.

I went home, but when I got there, I decided that being at home was the last last thing I wanted, so I put down a bunch of extra food and water for my cats, threw my camping gear into the bed of my truck, and drove 6 hours west to a state park with a big granite dome that was a popular rock climbing spot. I set up my tent, and then just started walking the trail up the dome. I got to the top, found a nice place on top of a boulder on top of the cliff on the back side of the dome, and lay down to stare at the sky.

Did you know that commercial jets follow set paths in the sky? I learned about that that day just from watching the jets passing high overhead, following their roads in the air. It was quiet doing that. Calm. Relaxing. I watched the Sun set to the west. I saw the stars as they came out and filled the sky, actually visible for a change now that I was out of the city and in a rural area. It was one of the most peaceful moments of my entire life.

Eventually, I got up and made my way back down to my campsite, actually joined a group of college students in the camp site next to me and shared dinner with them, and then went to bed. The worst day of my life ended in peace and tranquility and unexpected companionship.

Previous: My Second Brush With Suicide
Next: The Last Incident?

First they came for the immigrants and I said nothing, for I was not an immigrant.

Then they came for the transgenders and I said nothing, for I was not transgender.

Am I the modern Niemoller?

Content warning: this post discusses a suicide attempt. If you are feeling suicidal, please talk to someone about it. If you have no one else to talk to, there are telephone hotlines you can call to talk to a trained volunteer who can help you through this. In the USA and Canada you can call

• USA Trans Lifeline – For transgender people – 1-877-565-8860
• Canadian Trans Lifeline – For transgender people 1-877-330-6366
• The Trevor Project – For LGBTQ youth – 1-866-488-7386
• Suicide hotline in USA and Canada – For everyone – 988

My second suicide attempt really doesn’t even deserve the name. I had the means, and the opportunity. All it would have taken was for me to have literally taken a single step forward. But it wasn’t planned in advance, and I didn’t actually do anything. Still, I count it because situations like that can be dangerous anyway and result in harm for people.

This one occurred after I had changed my legal name and gender, come out at work, and fully transitioned. It was, if I recall correctly, about a year after that. I was not feeling nearly as much gender dysphoria at the time as I had in the past, though since I had not yet had surgery, that still was a part of my life. Still, I don’t think this attempt, or the others that followed, were related to gender. Instead, I think this was caused by my developing, but still undiagnosed bipolar disorder.

It was some time in 1997, in the late fall I think. I had gotten up for work, eaten breakfast, gotten dressed, and driven to work. I worked in an office building that was about 20 stories tall on the 8th floor, and there was an attached parking garage that went up to about the 6th or 7th floor. I normally parked on the second floor from the top because there was a door into the building there, but this day, for some reason I decided to drive all the way to the very top of the garage where it was open to the sky. I parked in the absolutely highest spot in the garage. There were no other cars up there. I got out and was going to trudge into the office to start my day.

I was feeling terrible that morning, as I almost always was. My specific bipolar disorder is bipolar 2, which is characterized by long stretches of deep depression punctuated by a few weeks of hypomania where you actually feel really good and energized and get things done and think that maybe you have finally turned a corner and have broken out of depression once and for all. I think that because I spent so much time being depressed that is why I was diagnosed with major depression instead of bipolar disorder. But on this day I was deep in a depressive phase.

As I stood on top of the garage beside my truck, I decided to look out over the city. The sky was dull and gray and overcast, the weather cool, and there was a bit of a breeze. I was all alone. Then I noticed that there was a concrete beam about 6 inches wide that went out over the next lower level of the garage towards the edge of the building. I got an urge to walk on that beam for some reason. I had been a caver and climber a few years back before my transition and I enjoyed climbing on things. So I walked over to the end of the beam, climbed up on to it and began walking the beam out to the side of the building.

I reached the end of the beam and stopped, my toes right on the edge, and I looked down. I think it was about 80 feet down (about 25 meters). There was an empty field below me with a couple of small trees and some scattered concrete blocks leftover from some construction. I stood and looked down at the rocks below me. Then the thought entered my head that if I did a dive off the building I could land on those rocks head first. The impact would doubtless crack my skull and break my neck, killing me instantly. It would be a quick and painless death. I would no longer be suffering. I would no longer be in pain. All the torment I was feeling every waking minute of my life would be over. It was a simple solution to an intractable problem. I seriously thought about it.

What stopped me was Reason. “Reason” is the name I gave to a, for lack of a better phrase, “voice in my head”. I do not have dissociative identity disorder, and I never literally heard voices, but back before my transition Reason was the personification of the rational part of my brain and I held conversations with it a lot. Reason would usually show up to try and explain my behavior to me and tell me why I was doing things that were more emotionally based. On this occasion Reason suddenly said to me “You know, you’re afraid of heights. Right now you are very calm even though you are standing right on the edge of a big fall. You should be terrified and shaking, but you aren’t. This means you aren’t in your right state of mind. You should get down before you do something rash.”

And Reason was absolutley right. I have always been afraid of heights. Specifically, I am afraid of ledges and being in danger of falling. When I was doing caving and climbing, even when secured by a rope, my heart would race and my I would feel shakey as I approached the edge of a cliff or pit. Once hanging on a rope, I felt a lot better since I wasn’t in danger of slipping and falling any distance, but that fear of missing my footing terrified me and ledges were always a heart pounding experience. And yet, there I was standing an inch away from an 80 foot fall, and not only was I perfectly calm, I was actually considering deliberately jumping off.

So I decided that Reason was right. Even in my suicidal state of mind, I still had the presence of mind to want to do things for the “right reasons”, so I turned around, walked back across the beam to the upper level of the garage, got down, walked down the ramp and into the building.

Later that day, I went outside to the smoking area for a break. I do not smoke, but a lot of people liked to hang out there and chat on breaks. The building maintenance engineer was there at the time, Gilbert, and he and I got to talking. He mentioned that he had gotten a call that morning about someone standing on top of the garage about to jump off, but that by the time he got up there the person was gone. I admitted that it was me, though I didn’t admit to wanting to jump, I just told him that I was a climber and was curious about the view. He admonished me, but let it drop after that.

So what’s the point of all this? I guess the point is that not all suicide attempts are planned. Some just happen spontaneously when the opportunity arises. And what stopped me this time, was not fear, or worrying about the consequences, it was just a cold recognition that I wasn’t in my normal state of mind. I didn’t really reject acting on my thoughts, I just rejected acting without being in control of myself. I don’t know if there’s any deep insight to be had here, but this is one of my close brushes with death, and maybe someone else out there will find it resonates with them in some way.

Next: My Closest Call

Previous: My First Brush With Suicide

Content warning: this post discusses a suicide attempt. If you are feeling suicidal, please talk to someone about it. If you have no one else to talk to, there are telephone hotlines you can call to talk to a trained volunteer who can help you through this. In the USA and Canada you can call

• USA Trans Lifeline – For transgender people – 1-877-565-8860
• Canadian Trans Lifeline – For transgender people 1-877-330-6366
• The Trevor Project – For LGBTQ youth – 1-866-488-7386
• Suicide hotline in USA and Canada – For everyone – 988

Suicide is a difficult topic for many people to talk about, especially those who are facing it themselves, and for those whose loved ones have gone through with it, but it is something that we really need to be willing to talk about. People comtemplating suicide usually feel completely alone in their feelings and think that no one else could understand what they are going through, and this leads them to try and bear their pain silently and without help. That can lead to thinking that no one even cares, that no one will miss you if you die, or even that no one will notice at all that you are gone. But that’s not true! There are people who care, and if nothing else I am one of those people, so today and the next few days I will be writing about my own suicide attempts to help show that there really are people who have been there, who have felt the pain you may be feeling yourself, and who have nonetheless survived to live another day and even to find happiness.

The background to this story, and given the rest of this blog it should be obvious, is my transgender identity. At 9 I was making fake long fingernails out of Elmer’s Glue, and dressing up in my sister’s old cheerleader uniform. At 10 I was wondering why I had to change clothes with the boys instead of the girls for physical education class, and at 11 I finally realized that I really should have been a girl. And at 12 or 13 I decided that since there was no possible way for me to actually be a girl, then being a boy just wasn’t something I wanted to live with. I decided that I should die.

This was in 1982. There was no such thing as gender affirming care for youth at the time. There were no trans TV stars or fashion models. There was no Internet to get on to talk to other trans people. I barely even knew the word “transsexual”. To me transsexuals were just the “freaks” that got trotted out on daytime talk shows for the audience to laugh at and make fun of. They were sad, pathetic, mentally ill people who were probably drug addicts and hookers. To say I had no role models to look up to was an understatement. And because of this I felt completely isolated. I felt ilke I was the only person in the world who was genuinely a girl born into a boy’s body, and that no one would ever understand me or love me or accept me for who I knew myself to be. And so I decided to end my life so that I wouldn’t suffer anymore.

One night, I waited until well after midnight when I knew my parents and sister would be asleep. I then got dressed in a nightgown and robe of my mother’s that I had stolen from a closet of unused things, and I picked up a rope that I had found in the garage and stashed in my bedroom. I quietly walked through the house, nervously glancing at my parents’ open bedroom door as I passed through the living room, and I went into the breakfast nook. I picked up a chair from the dining table as quietly as I could, and went the the front door. Then I opened the door gingerly, and carried my chair and rope out into the night.

It was dark, of course, but I risked turning on the porch light so I could see. And there were the trees waiting for me on the short path to the driveway. I set up the chair beneath a horizontal limb and paused, looking at it. I was going to tie the rope to the limb, tie a noose in the other end (I did not actually know how to tie a noose, but I figured just a loop at the end of the rope would be good enough), climb up on the chair, put the loop around my neck, and then kick the chair away. I had also prepared a note that was pinned to my clothes explaining that I was really supposed to be a girl, that I didn’t know why I wasn’t born one, that I was sorry for hurting everyone, but that I just couldn’t live with the pain any more and needed to go away.

But instead of getting started I just stood there looking up at the tree. I wondered if the rope would stretch too much, or the limb, which wasn’t all that high, would bend and I would end up with my feet on the ground and stand there like a complete failure, unable even to kill myself. I wondered if I would make too much noise and my parents would wake up and come out to find me and take me down. I wondered if it just wouldn’t be enough to kill me and I would just wake up in a hospital the next day and have to confront my family and explain everything to them face to face. And I wondered if I would actually succeed and then my parents would be devastated and blame themselves. And I felt scared. And then I started crying.

After a few minutes of crying I decided I couldn’t do it. I carried the chair back inside to the table, went back into my bedroom, put away the rope, took off the robe, crumpled up the note and threw it away, climbed into bed, and cried myself to sleep. The next day was just another day; another day of misery and hating myself for being a boy and for being a coward who wasn’t able to face death.

Life after that was dull and grey, but it didn’t last. Not too long after that incident my mother found my hidden stash of women’s clothing and sent me off to a psychiatrist, but I never told anyone the details about wanting to kill myself, not until many years later. The only people I ever discussed it with were other trans people, because I felt like they, at least, would understand why I did what I did, both the wanting to die, and the not being able to go through with it. This is the first time I’ve put the story into writing in detail, though I have mentioned it before on this blog in How I Knew I Was Trans, Part 2.

I hope that anyone reading this comes away with an appreciation for how difficult it can be for a trans child who has no support or information to help them deal with being different, but I also hope that people can see that the act of suicide is something that does not come easily to people. It is not “the easy way out” as so many people like to claim. It’s an incredibly difficult decision and someone has to overcome a lot of fear and self doubt to be able to go through with it. I am not saying this to praise the “courage” of people who kill themselves, but rather to point out that calling suicidal people “cowards” is a really insulting and belittling thing to do to someone who is dealing with problems you most likely will never understand. Please don’t respond like that when you hear about someone wanting to commit or actually going through with suicide. Instead, just listen to them. Let them tell you what they are feeling and don’t question it! Don’t offer platitudes, don’t offer advice, don’t say you “understand” unless you’ve actually experienced similar things yourself. Just listen and be there for them. Offer your sympathy, your empathy, your support, and most of all your unconditional love. Let them know that whatever they may be feeling they are not alone!

And if you, yourself, are feeling like you want to die, then take from this the knowledge that you really aren’t alone! There are people out there who have been in the same or similar situations to you, who know what it is like to feel worthless and hopeless, and who have overcome those feelings and are ready to give you as much support and comfort as they can. Reach out to us!

If anyone out there is feeling suicidal and needs someone to talk to, you can reach out to me. You can find me on Mastodon at https://chaosfem.tw/@moriel or you can leave a comment below and I will get back to you as soon as I see it! And don’t forget the resources I listed above if you need to speak to someone right this very moment.

You do not have to be alone!

Next: My Second Brush With Suicide

Last night I went to see a show. There were only about 40 people there, but it is a small venue so it felt crowded and the conversation of the people there was quite loud in that space. I had meant to take an Ativan beforehand, because of my social anxiety, but I forgot, and only realized it once I arrived and started feeling overwhelmed by the situation, especially by the noise. But I was not defenseless! I reached into my purse, got out my noise canceling earbuds, put them in, adjusted the sound level to something I was comfortable with, and then was able to enjoy the show.

A couple of months ago, this would not have happened, because I had not yet started using noise cancelation as part of my daily life. In May, I was traveling and had a 2 hour layover at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport. For those who don’t know, it’s the busiest airport in the world, and so naturally it’s incredibly crowded and noisy. Now, I have flown less than ten times over the past 25 years, so I am not accustomed to it and arrived in Atlanta totally unprepared for how loud it was. I have sound sensitivities, which in the past I’ve always just dealt with by withdrawing and shutting down when I would get overwhelmed, and that’s what happened in Atlanta. But this time, the press of the crowds of people, and the incredible volume and chaos of all their conversations hit me way harder than usual. I actually went to a bar, two of them, even, because I was hoping that a drink would help me to calm down. In the end I had three drinks, two of which were doubles. Normally I might have one drink every two or three months, so this was an enormous amount of alcohol for me to consume, and it was over the course of less than an hour.

That, of course, was a terrible idea. All it did was get me a little drunk, and it didn’t help me cope with the noise at all. But then when I was walking towards the terminal where my plane would be, I noticed a little shop selling electronic goods. I had forgotten to bring my headphones for listening to music, and it occurred to me that music might help me fight the shutdown, so I went there to see what they had, and there I saw them: Bose Quiet Comfort 2 noise canceling headphones. Although a bit of an audiophile, I had never bought anything from Bose before, because they have a reputation for being overpriced, but when I saw “noise canceling” my brain latched on to that and screamed at me to get them. They were literally the most expensive thing in the shop and I was a bit embarassed at how much I paid for them, but I was desperate.

I bought them and immediately put them on and the world got quieter. I used the cable to plug them into my old cell phone that I had brought along as a music player (intending to use it with the headphones I accidentally left at home) and suddenly I was in my safe space of soothing music. After that I started to calm down finally and was able to make the rest of my trip in peace.

This was a great experience, but I did not start using the headphones on a regular basis quite yet. For one thing, the instructions that came with the headphones made no mention of the fact that you have to use a cell phone app to control them, so for the next couple of months I didn’t make much use of them. Then at a Pride Parade at the end of June, where I was once again feeling overwhelmed by the sound of the crowd, a new friend lent me her own noise canceling headphones and I found myself in mostly silence and it was bliss! After that I got online to figure out how to use my own headphones, found out about the app, and then fully entered the world of noise cancelation! Since then I’ve also bought the earbuds I mentioned at the beginning of this piece.

To say that noise cancelation has changed my life is an understatement. It has completely transformed my relationship to public events! Whereas for most of my life, public events have been pretty much off limits to me except under limited circumstances (musical performances have been OK, because the sonic environment is less chaotic), now I am able to go anywhere at all, put in my earbuds, adjust the noise cancelation level to suit the situation, and then I can enjoy it. I can hear the people near me who I am speaking to, but the chaotic noise from all the other people around me is muffled and toned down to a tolerable level.

Now, a lot of autistic people have sound sensitivities, and I have, these past few months, gotten involved in a couple of online communities where they hang out, and I have learned that a lot of us use noise cancelation to great effect. I wish I’d gotten into these communities years ago so that someone could have told me about this, but I’m glad to finally know anyway. My life is so much better now!

I’m reading an article (Slivers) from @Impossible_PhD on the Stained Glass Woman site, and I just came across this:

“If you’re lucky, the result of this is burnout, which is a combined flop/flood collapse. If you’re unlucky, it becomes cPTSD.

Often, though? It becomes both.”

And suddenly a light went on in my head. Two years and a month ago I quit a job I’d held for 13 years as a computer programmer, and I had worked as a programmer or system adminstrator going back as far as 1994 before that. I quit because I was burned out. How burned out? I would not wake up until almost right at 10am when I’d have to get online for a daily stand-up meeting. Sometimes I’d even do the meeting from bed. Then after the meeting I’d make breakfast, and maybe 3 days of the week I’d then go back to bed and not get up again until after noon. The other days I’d sit online for a couple of hours just reading Discord or news websites, and then I’d go back to bed. In the late afternoon, I might finally get the energy and will to actually do some real work. So yeah, really seriously, incredibly, astoundingly burned out.

So I quit. At first I played games. Then I started learning how to write games, thinking I could turn my programming skills in a new direction. But then, even that stopped holding my interest and I gave that up too. Since then I’ve struggled to find the willpower to look for a new job, because I know that thanks to my 30 year career in the computer industry (mostly) working with computers is the only thing I know how to do, so if I go back to work I’m likely to end up in another job that I hate and just burn out all over again. Looking for a new job is kind of terrifying to me and makes me emotionally shut down, hard.

So I burned out. And what am I doing now? I basically have flashbacks whenever I think about being a programmer again. I avoid places and people that remind me of it – I quit the programming related Discord servers I was in, for example. I no longer really see myself as a computer toucher of any kind and I feel dread when I think about it. The thought of going back to programming makes me feel like a worthless failure and makes my chest tighten up. I no longer talk to any of my old colleagues. And computers, once a central focus of my life for decades, no longer hold any meaning or inspire joy anymore. Folks, those sound an awful lot like CPTSD symptoms.

I think now I understand why I am having such a hard time getting myself to look for a new job and why I react so badly to the thought of going back into the computer industry. I didn’t just burn out. My job actually became a source of every day, low level trauma for me and now I’m dealing with the consequences of that.

This sucks.

Oh! And while I don’t neccessarily think I have CPTSD caused by my old career, I do think I have CPTSD from gender related trauma growing up, and maybe it and my career burnout decided to get together and do a little tango with each other.

I’ll also drop this little self assessment result here for grins.

For months now (four months, even) I have been going to public social events around town trying to meet new people in the communities I’m part of. I just want to get to know people and have them get to know me so that I can expand my circle of friends. However, I’ve been running into a huge problem: between my sound sensitivities and my social anxiety and my general austic social awkwardness, I have found myself shutting down at almost every event. I end up sitting alone, wearing earplugs, or even noise canceling headphones, trying to block out the noise of the crowd that is overwhelming my senses. Sometimes I will leave the room and go outside to take a break, but while I eventually calm down, I just get overwhelmed again as soon as I go back in. For most of these events, I have left early, usually without even saying goodbye to anyone. Needless to say, I have not been successfull at meeting new people.

But towards the end of last month, I had a regular appointment with my psychiatrist for a medication checkup, and while there I talked to her about all of things I’d been experiencing, and I asked if I could go on lorazepam (Ativan), which I had done about 11 years ago during my last extended attempt at being social. She agreed, and I picked up my new prescription the next day. Before anyone worries, I am not taking it every day, and having been on it before I knew I probably wouldn’t experience any negative side effects. (I haven’t.) I only need to take this when I actually have, or can expect to have, a severe anxiety attack.

Well, Saturday was my first chance to try it at one of these big, crowded, loud, public events, and guess what? It worked! I took the pill about 45 minutes before hand, right before leaving to go there, and when I arrived I preemptively put on my earplugs to give me some partial sound blockage. I went inside and … everything felt fine. It was loud, though not as crowded as usual, but my sound sensitivities did not get triggered. What’s more, I didn’t feel any anxiety (well, maybe a smidgen) about talking to people. I ended up talking to 18 different people that day, mostly people I’d never met before, and I had extended conversations with several of them. I even stayed until the very end and was one of the last people to leave.

It was actually fun! I don’t recall the last time I had fun a big public event like this. It would have been about 2003 probably. The idea of a big social gathering actually being fun is astonishing to me these days. I almost felt like an extrovert, for a change! (Though I’m not really one. I still expended energy for this, but it was not a massive burden like it normally is for me.)

I think the lorazepam is going to work out well for me. Hopefully it works well enough for me to finally really get to know people and make new friends. After that I will hopefully feel more at ease and be able to attend these things without the chemical aid. I’m looking forward to being more social, finally.

In fourth grade one day, I and another girl (remember, this was when people still thought I was a boy) were sitting next to each other while most of the other students were doing something else, and we had nothing interesting to do. Now the desks we used had wooden tops and at the top edge there was a little trough where you could lay a pencil without it rolling away. I watched in fascination as she got out a bottle of Elmer’s Glue and poured a bit into the trough. She let it air dry until it was just barely tacky still, then she carefully pried up the glue, now molded into a thin, elongated shape, and she pressed the still barely wet end of it onto one of her fingernails. Instant long fingernail! She then proceded to make “long fingernails” for all of her fingers.

Now that got me excited, so I eagerly got out my own bottle of Elmer’s Glue and started doing the same thing. It was the first time I ever “did my nails” and she helped me try to get it right, though sadly my efforts were not as practiced as hers and my “fingernails” didn’t stay on very long. Nonetheless it was a really happy moment for me and is one of the few memories I strongly remember from my childhood.

I was 9 years old at the time (almost 10) and my real gender was starting to burst forth even without me consciously understanding what was going on.

Seems like lately everything is conspiring against me to strip me of any and all masks, coping skills, and ability to avoid my problems. All the pain and confusion and anxiety at my core has been laid bare for me and everyone else to see. I don’t like people seeing the real me because it’s so chaotic. Under the emotionless exterior I’ve always presented, is a seething, roiling, mess of raw emotions and unfullfilled needs that looks like something that crawled out of a Lovecraft story, and when others are exposed to it I worry that they will run away from me, leaving me even more alone than I already am and feeling even more isolated and unable to cope.

But I also know, intellectually, at least, that right now, with everything exposed and open to the world, is my only chance to actually heal some of the pain and to get some of my needs met for a change, so I’m fighting the urge to shut everything down again. I just hope I don’t end up hurting others in the process.