#Climatechangesuicide

[mothergwendoline-blog]

Disclaimer: This blog contains discussion of suicide and depression. If this makes you feel unsafe, please leave.

The Greatest Act of Kindness

So I made it back into the psych ward. The funny thing about talking to emergency psychiatric services is that they’re often wrong when it comes to environmentalism. Which is hardly their fault, but it makes for difficult conversation when they ask why I want to kill myself. I tell them the planet is dying. They tell me;

“But you don’t have to worry about that! Good people are working hard to protect the planet. And even if they weren’t, human civilization won’t end for hundreds of years!”

This is heroically naïve. So I correct them politely. I tell them that young people like me can’t expect to live until old age, that the world will see two billion climate refugees by the end of the century, that the ice caps and permafrost are melting, the seas are rising, heatwaves ravage arable land, fresh water is running out, plastic fills the oceans, insects are facing their Armageddon already, the Arctic is literally on fire, the Clathrate Gun has likely already been fired, we’re in the middle of an extinction event and, to put it bluntly, we’re all going to die. Then I get told to go to the hospital.

I presume I’m admitted primarily for suicidal ideation as opposed to apocalyptic visions but to me they are inextricably linked. I want to die primarily because the world is ending but all emergency services hear is “suicidal”. I wonder how many other calls are made due to climate grief and if I have any siblings near me in the death throes of despair. The world is overpopulated, I contribute nothing to actively benefiting the planet and halting climate change, I may as well be dead.

So on Wednesday around midday a staff member from the psychiatric ward paid a visit to my home and picked me up to be voluntarily admitted and watched so I can’t kill myself. I have a bedroom to myself, everyone here does. It’s actually reasonably large, warm, cozy and the bed is big enough for someone as tall and fat as me. I’m not allowed to vape in the patio or garden, the smoking area is a dirty little patch of concrete out the front with three deck chairs. The other patients here are quiet and all as sullen as I am for the most part. I get checked on every hour to make sure I haven’t made an attempt on my life and we get notified when food is served. The food is not vegetarian but I am too depressed to care. I wonder about the other patients and check my privilege. For although my family is poor, I have a roof over my head, clothes on my back, three meals a day and basic hygiene. Do the other patients have this at home? My guess is some of them don’t from the things I can hear. For them, the psych ward must be almost enjoyable.

Because I’m voluntary, I’m not placed in the secure ward and I’m allowed to leave during the day which is essential for maintaining my exercise regime. Wednesday is my rest day but otherwise I have maintained regular exercise and intermittent fasting. Thankfully, I have not gained weight. I haven’t lost weight but I’ve managed to maintain a balance, which is fairly normal for the first few weeks of concentrated diet and exercise.

I don’t know if I feel any better; not really for the most part. But I have people watching over me making sure I can’t do anything. It’s petty little solace but I am determined to reach my goals before I kill myself on the footsteps of government. That’s the sole reason I admitted myself. Not to prevent suicide entirely but to postpone it. Of course, this I cannot reveal to psychiatric services or they may commit me.

In the meanwhile I have little to do and am driven mad with boredom. There are no activities in this house, I occupy myself solely with writing. I have little peace other than words in this place, my blog and my stories. Hospital time moves slower than usual days outside. I feel itchy with restlessness but as it is I am already living life an hour at a time, trying to make it through the minutes without planning to kill myself. I want to drag my fat fatigued body into one of the bathrooms, lock the door and lay myself down on the linoleum and slit my wrists open under the shower and watch the blood go down the drain. That was how I did it the last two times I attempted, it’s a peaceful and humbling way to go.

I do not know when I will be discharged from the psychiatric ward, perhaps in a week’s time they say. My medication will be checked but as it is I’m already on a powerful dose of anti-psychotics and anti-depressants. I am being enrolled in a group therapy service and first need to be assessed to see whether I am suitable for group therapy.

The nurses on the psychiatric ward differ greatly from the incredibly helpful and homely to the jaded and bitter drones just working a paycheck. I’m told that whenever I feel suicidal I must go to the nurses, talk to them and try have a conversation about my troubles. “They are trained professionals” my counselor told me. So today when I saw an article about the arctic wildfires and heatwaves in the Northern hemisphere and fell into a deep depressive anxiety, I did what I was told and sought out help.

“Have you taken your PRN meds?”

“Yes” I say.

“What usually helps when you are in a state like this?”

“Talking to people about my fears”

“What else?”

“Nothing” I answer truthfully.

I’m told to take some more PRN and sit in the lounge and try distract myself with writing. So much for professional therapy. I hate it in the lounge, the other patients only ever watch the most mind numbing dribble on TV. Friends, The Chase, The Simpsons (the bad new episodes, not the golden years), other game shows, and the news. I hate the news. I can’t stand it. It sickens me and hits something deep and existential in my brain. Seeing the flashing play-by-play repeats of global horrors drives me insane.

It’s gotten to the stage where I no longer know what a healthy environment and lifestyle is to me anymore. Whenever they discharge me, what will I occupy myself with other than diet, exercise and seeking employment to fund transition? These are all worthy goals but they are not purpose or belonging, and where to belong is harder still to discern. And I know whatever menial employment I find myself in will hardly suffice either. Writing is all I have. It is my world.

I think what makes my life so draining and complicated is that I know suicide is my inevitability, so it is hard to think of any future or purpose other than death. Whenever I take my medication, go to therapy or get admitted to the psych ward, I only see it as postponing the inevitable. I know I’m going to kill myself in about five years’ time and I know where I’ll do it. In the meanwhile, everything I do feels like idle busywork passing the time. My life is an ethereal state of prolonged palliative care, only I am the only one who knows I’m terminally ill. But it doesn’t feel like an illness and I wonder whether it is. I feel calm, collected and certain. The planet and society are sick, not me, I am merely a symptom of a broken world. When humans rape and pillage nature so brutally and selfishly as they have done, what can be expected but for people such as myself to seek escape? To me, suicide is the greatest act of kindness I can show myself.

Mother Gwendoline

[mothergwendoline-blog]

Trans Isolation

Disclaimer: This blog contains discussion of suicide and depression. If this makes you feel unsafe, please leave.

For a journal of a mad woman dedicated to suicide I certainly seem to be forward thinking. If nothing else the thought of my transition goals are one of the few things enabling me to wake and face every day. Make no mistake, the planet is dying, we live the last era of humanity and I fully intend to end my life before the apocalypse but I will be damned to go without seeking joy where I can. Barring the recent resurgence of extremist hatred and fascist uprising, no small matter, I am fortunate in many ways to be well positioned in life. Though I am poor, through fortune of being allowed to live with family whilst I recover from my last two suicide attempts, I at least am afforded some stability. I have a roof over my head, hygiene, relative physical health compared to many and food in my stomach. I think on my ultimate suicide daily, how and when I will accomplish it, but where is already decided. I will take myself to our government and end my life at their doorstep in environmental protest to the constant neglect and abuse of our planet at the hands of the powerful. When will be after I reach my original weight before my binging, after breast augmentation and a return to the sex industry, and finally after bottom surgery. I give myself about five years. I am not be the first climate change suicide but I intend to be a notable one. I expect I shall make national or hopefully international news for demonstrating in blood the very real harm those in power have done to our Earth. Soon we shall see an uprising of the masses and I have every hope the rich and powerful will beg us for mercy as we overthrow them.

For now, it is the joy and meaning of self-improvement that motivates my living. I have resumed weekly electrolysis treatment of my facial hair. It is a slow and constant progress but eventually I will have a soft, smooth kissable face. Of course I am mostly concerned with ridding myself of the immense dysphoria of having to shave away my beard but I am also glad to become more attractively feminine. Beauty is fickle and open to debate but I have my own concept of my personal beauty and I will obtain it through hard work.

I found a nice beauty therapist for electrolysis, I have had two of many treatments to come. Although she is a tad blunt on matters transgender. This would shy a lot of people away, too many trans folk are in my experience fragile and easily wounded by misplaced comments. My beauty therapist refers to us as “transes”, or “my girls” more affectionately. She told me a tale of how her second husband, after their divorce, left her to become a “transvestite”, her words, in a large city and is now a “street walker”. She holds no resentment to the ex-spouse or to trans people, which is fortunate. She did ask a great deal of questions of the trans experience, most revolving around socialization post-transition which I found an uncommon and interesting query.

The beauty therapist said “most transes I’ve known prefer to socialize with [cis] women rather than other transes” and asked why I choose to socialize with other trans people. Solidarity and good company I suppose. But it did raise an interesting question in my mind about the shame and self-imposed isolation of trans people. There are many trans folk, mostly older white women in my experience, who prefer to live lives without other transgender people. I can empathize to this. For a long period of time after my transition I refused to call myself trans; I was just a woman, plain and simple. There is still a great deal of truth to this but now I see myself as a woman and as a transgender person equally. I can only make guesses for others but for me there were, at the time, a great many things I detested about the trans community. For one, the promotion of finding happiness looking visibly trans was something I did not, and still do not rest easy with. Only now I hold no resentment towards others who hold this position, I simply see myself as sharing different sentiments. I used to want to go completely stealth, to move to a new city where no one knew me and live a life closeted about my gender history. However, things changed. I hold no grudge against people who want to live stealth, for some that is their truth and meaning and I respect it. For me, I look at the horrible state of inequality and abuse faced by my trans siblings and I can do nothing to remedy this without being open and out with them. I am trans, I want and need trans people in my life and though my goal is to pass and obtain bottom surgery, I will continue to remain open about who I am. So to the inquisitive beauty therapist I am not sure what to say in answer to her questions. Perhaps it is best said I believe that, if my being out can offer solidarity and comfort to other trans people and if it can help peaceably advance our equality, then I will be out. Barring of course an anonymous trans blog. I can be out in my public life whilst seeking my privacy online.

On that note, I have started going to a transgender support group held every few weeks at a local LGBTQ center. I waited outside vaping with a handful of other “transes” whilst waiting for our meeting space to be set up. All a very quiet bunch but then again, it is hard to have deep and involved trans talk out in public waiting on the street, the privacy is important. We were let in to a warm and inviting office lounge coopted into a meeting place. We shared food (all vegetarian, it’s always vegetarian), drank special teas and spent the next hour and a half regaling our lives, our woes and joys of life being transgender.

There were many shy, all but broken people in the room. This, sadly, is much in line with my other experiences of such support groups. The condition of life for trans people is unfortunate, many come from families who have abandoned them, others cannot come out for this very fear. I found myself to be one of the most extroverted people in the room which came as a surprise to me as I am usually the shyest in the room. Or perhaps I have simply grown in social confidence and should pat myself on the back for breaking out of my shell. I was also one of the longest “out” of those in the room, this being a young group and myself having been out since about twenty-one years old. I was not the oldest person there, but one of the oldest in trans years. It afforded me an interesting position, to listen to people talk of such things as beginning hormone replacement therapy, or their first venture into a public restroom, or even planning for their first surgery, whatever that may be. It made me take a moment to reflect and feel happy that, although I am young and have yet so many transition goals to achieve, I have already accomplished a great deal.

I started HRT about six or seven years ago, I have fully socially transitioned and am out to everyone in my life, and I have had FFS. I still remember acutely my first trans milestones. The first time I used a public women’s restroom was at a hospital after my first meeting with an endocrinologist, just when I started HRT. I decided then and there I would be brave and allow myself that infinitesimal right to go to the bathroom of my true gender. Exiting the cubicle, a mother and her child were in the room and she looked at me with shock and horror and moved her child away from me so that she the mother stood between us. I washed my hands and quickly left in self-disgust, even though it was her wrong and not mine. I pass better now but at the time, even though I was wearing a dress, makeup and handbag and had my hair done, I was visibly trans. Even in this day and age there are still those bigoted and ignorant people (sometimes hateful) who believe our very presence is a threat, to children no less. You could ask me to be sympathetic to her and consider what she was thinking. But you should also ask the same of her, to be sympathetic to me. And ultimately that is what it comes down to.

Transgender people have a right to use their correct restrooms and it is for others to abandon their hateful prejudices and look at us as common, equal human citizens. I am tired of the lackluster, unscientific, illogical and bigoted complaints of TERFs and transphobes. “It is a space for females” they would say “And you have a male body”. But sex and biology and gender roles are not, nor have the ever been so simple. But this blog is not an essay to justify the rights of trans people to use restrooms, plenty others exist. This is a personal journal to catalogue my experiences of transition and fitness. Hearing others at the trans support group talk of these milestones in transition with apprehension and fear made me look for the first time and realise I take these actions in stride. Using a public restroom, dressing how best suits my gender expression, entering gender specific spaces such as women’s art groups. Of course there is still adversary and transphobia I encounter regularly but I have become somewhat dulled and desensitized to it. On reflection it angers me and fuels the fight for rights and equality but it has also become a day-to-day occurrence.

After another month or so of rest and recuperation, once my mental health is less volatile as a result of therapy, I intend to find work in the city. I’m an artist, a writer, so finding work within my passion will be too difficult to obtain steady living as yet. A nice office job, secretary, clerical, data entry position will suit my needs and experience. And it will make the cost of transition achievable instead of digging away at my steadily diminishing savings.

Exercise at the gym has been treating me well although I have yet to lose weight. I recently had a severe depressive crash which resulted in my relapse in drinking self-harming again. I also broke my intermittent fasting for several days and returned to binge eating out of sadness. Thanks to exercise I have not gained weight, but I have not lost weight either. From today I will be trialing one month of intermittent fasting and will post my weigh-in at the end of the month.

I will likely have to return to a psychiatric hospital for a few days as my suicidal ideation is reaching its breaking point. Self-harm is a dire warning sign for me. Although my family are loving and empathetic, I need to be somewhere I can receive professional care.

Ultimately my goal is to obtain a referral through the public mental health system to attend a private psychiatric hospital which I would otherwise have no way of affording. And I believe I am an ideal candidate. I have had ongoing mental health struggles since the age of about ten or eleven. Since then I have been in and out of public psych wards and attempted suicide twice. I believe a private psychiatric hospital with intensive daily therapy is my best and only shot at obtaining a meaningful quality of life. But obtaining a referral is exceedingly difficult.

And that is where I shall end this entry. Between gym, electrolysis and the trans support group I am filling my life with meaningful pursuits of happiness, but I require something far more drastic to improve my mental health. Unfortunately we live in a world that chooses not to listen to suicidal ideation until it is too late. And then the mourning comes, an outcry of people exclaiming “What were the signs? What could we have done?”, but our drastically underfunded mental health services remain barren and individuals like myself bear the brunt of lack of care.

Mother Gwendoline