stormdog | Entries tagged with isolation

I'm still hurting from not being able to stay at the brewpub at the trans and allies event with the person who recognized me from the online support group. It kept me from going to the group again today. I want connection, but it hurts so much.

The anxiety I feel about going out to places while wearing a respirator seems worse too. Miriam went with me to pick up an online pet food order and to get some stuff at CostCo, and part of it is because we like doing things together, but part of it was supporting me. I was in a sort of constant low-grade anxiety the whole time I was there, and asked Miriam to stay with me in line instead of going to order hot dogs to take with us because interacting with the cashier on my own was scary.

I used to enjoy chatting with random strangers. Once I even spent most of an hour chatting with a busker in New Orleans, sang a song with him for some tourists, and played a few chords on his guitar to demonstrate the left-handed way I was playing because of wrist pain. I have a picture of him I took on Flickr. It seems like another life. Sometimes I think about him and hope he's been ok.

I'm talking in therapy about the problems I have with taking up metaphorical space and setting boundaries (and thereby indirectly addressing the fear I have when I don't meet social expectations), but it feels like a band-aid on a wound that needs sutures.

I don't know how to fix it. Instead, I'm pointedly trying not to think about it lately and getting lost in manga and anime.

I've continued to be a mess. No surprise there I suppose.

My neck and shoulder continue to be in pain. This morning, though, it was improved enough that when I woke up I was able to roll over and lie on my stomach for a while. That's been mostly out of the question for about two weeks, so that's a relief.

I tried to go to a walk-in clinic on Tuesday, but the two that I went to did not have walk-in hours that day, and I gave up. It was nice to be called "ma'am" at the second one at least.
On Wednesday, there was a trans and allies night at a local brewery, Malty National, that Miriam and I talked about going to. We ended up not staying long because of Covid exposure, and I've been having a really hard time since then. I wrote:

Miriam and I got to the trans and allies event yesterday and only stayed for 10 minutes or so because even though the building wasn't very crowded yet, C0₂ levels were already pretty high. High C0₂ levels indicate poor ventilation, and are a proxy for one risk factor for Covid transmission. I bumped into someone I know from the online group who invited me to join them for pizza (which I couldn't eat because of the respirator), but I declined and went home with Miriam. And then I intended to be in the online meeting for the trans group on Wednesday, but I was too distracted and/or distressed and missed it.

I'm having a really hard time with this. I don't know how many more years of this I can deal with. I don't know what else to do. I'm sad and lonely.

I'm still having a really hard time with this, three days later. That, on top of being sick and being in pain have really destroyed what regularity I'd managed to find in my schedule with exercising and managing my food better. It's really hard for me to feel like anything is really worth doing in the abstract long term.

That said, I'm working on trying to get a CV done to either submit for academic library/archives jobs or to construct resumes from as necessary. If I get it done, I'm going to order some pizza for myself, because at least immediate tangible rewards feel somewhat motivating.

I do rather like the picture of myself I took when I got a little dressed up to go out, ane before I had to put a big ugly respirator on my face. This is the ear I'm going to get a helix piercing on, as soon as my mental health is good enough to manage taking care of it.

Yesterday, I was having something like a panic attack in the morning. I wrote:

My brain is a mess lately.

This morning, a combination of two things are in there. 1: I have to get out of bed to take care of animals even if taking care of myself doesn't matter. 2: What if something happens to Miriam (who is going to a job-related thing) and she's just gone without me even getting a chance to see her again, like my dad. I was in tears at the door as she was leaving, asking her to please be safe as though she's going to visit a war zone instead of driving across town to the university.

Today, though, with the pain reduced and the chaos in my brain a bit more under control, I'm going to write about my ideas for my upcoming name change.

This is not a very polished post.

The last few days have been pretty rough.

I attended the weekly online trans support group the week before last, for the first time in many months, and had a really nice time. I'd been avoiding that, as well as the Facebook trans groups I was in, because reading about people being social just hurt too much when I can't do those things myself. On top of my dad's death and everything else, it was too much.

But I'd gotten my grief somewhat more under control. Miriam and I had also worked out ways for me to be social in limited ways, too, and together that had me feeling stable enough to want to be reach out again. I did and it was good.

This past Wednesday, I was in the group a second time and it made me crash pretty hard again.

I ended up talking a little bit about how distressed I'd gotten in grad school when I was reading about social justice in an urban context. That I ended up feeling like there was nothing I could do to fix the broken systems and it made me non-functionally depressed. One of the local community organizers talked about how hard it is for her, too, dealing with the bureaucracies and politics of the local area. She's been burned out, and has recently been trying to reconnect with her motivations for doing the work that she does. A primary motivation for her is community and "queer joy." "I want to kiss cute girls," she said.

That hurt so much. Of course she didn't mean it to. But it hurt deeply. On top of that, she was also talking about having just begun a relationship with a new partner, so she was pretty bubbly about that and about community and joy of being with others.

I still can't have that in the same way. I WANT TO KISS CUTE GIRLS TOO, GODDAMMIT. I want to meet people and date people and have sex with people. But I can't, and I don't know when I'll be able to and it hurts a lot. That need for community would be one of my primary sources of motivation and joy if I could pursue it, but I can't right now. Instead, it's a source of pain. What do I do instead?

I left the group early and was not at my most emotionally stable for a couple days. I was working on getting myself together when the next thing happened.

I've wanted to get together with Train Girl for so long. I like her, we have similar interests, and we are both starved for in-person contact and touch. She recently said that I am her only local trans friend and am important to her. She posted on Facebook wondering whether there are still professional cuddlers since Covid, and I pointed her at Cuddle Comfort, a website that connects people looking for cuddles. I also messaged her and said that if we could work around our mutual masking/Covid safety needs, I would love to have some cuddles with her. That there is nothing I want more in my life lately than people to cuddle.

Earlier today, she posted on Facebook saying that she's looking for local people to cuddle, and is no longer masking but is up to date on shots. I've already told her that masking is a hard limit for me: people I'm in spending time with in close proximity for longer periods must be masked for me to be able to do that. That being the case, and her looking for cuddles when she knows I am available, suggests that it's not an option for us.

That hurts too. It adds to my feeling like my own desire for community and touch and kisses doesn't work in the abstract by showing me that it doesn't work in this very specific instance either.

I shouldn't read this as overly symbolic, or as an omen maybe, but it feels like it. Train girl is the first person I've expressed interest in since transitioning. She's sort of an example to me of me figuring out what I want and knowing how to pursue what I want now that I know who I am. There are so many reasons to think we'd get along fabulously and have a wonderful time cuddling and watching stuff together. But because of Covid, I can't.

Meanwhile, lots of people I know in Illinois are talking about the convention they're at this weekend and that hurts too, and I'm just feeling broken.

Miriam's parents are here right now too, so that's disrupting routines and making things difficult even more.

Miriam and I went to the grocery store together this morning. While she masked up and went inside to get a few things, I sat in the car, tried unsuccessfully to find music to listen to, and just sat with my fear and loneliness. When she came back, she presented me with a bouquet of flowers and it was such a wonderful gesture that I completely lost my composure and cried against her for a while.

I would be lost without her.

But I'm feeling pretty hopeless right now. And the places I've tried to reach out in new ways — the Reddit T4T group and the Discord servers I've looked at — have made me feel more isolated too. I'm feeling like self-isolation again is what I need to do to get away from the pain of constant reminders of my isolation.

This is quite long and probably would benefit from editing, but I'm probably not going to manage that. Sorry in advance!

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Miriam and I had a great conversation that resolved a failure of communications that had been going on for quite some time.

Miriam and I (really, 90% Miriam) have been trying to find technical solutions that will allow us to be social. Most recently, she's looked at elastomeric respirators and PAPRs such as the ones by CleanSpace. We looked at the options together last night and my mood crashed. For her, it was another in a long line of upsetting instances of her trying to find compromises that will let us be social in some way and none of them being good enough for me.

Meanwhile, I'd been thinking about how various kinds of interaction would work while wearing one of these. I'd had a lot of hope. But looking at the options available, I despaired. They look so weird; especially the elastomerics we were looking at. There are PAPRs that are much less obtrusive, but they're so very expensive.

So I crashed, and she was frustrated and sad. We talked on the couch and it came out that she has been feeling like this is about vanity for me. That I don't want to go anywhere unless I have a mask that will still let people see my face because I finally feel pretty sometimes lately. But I don't feel pretty; at least, not about my face. It's really about how people would react to me wearing one of these. I didn't use the analogy, but I feel like I'll look like one of those people who wear tinfoil hats to protect against mind control and people will treat me accordingly. Miriam suggested that the answer to this is therapy to help me with my life-long fear of taking up social space. That it's really hard for me to be trans in public, and masking on top of it makes that so much worse, and that therapy might be able to help.

She's not wrong about that at all. But, in fact, that's not actually what I'm most distressed by.

I took a nap for about an hour so my brain would start working again, and Miriam came in to join me. We snuggled and were both feeling better emotionally, and I asked if I could talk about the masking and my concerns again. She was up to that.

I expressed that therapy wasn't going to change the fact that I can't kiss people. That I'd been trying to imagine how dating or hooking up would go while wearing something like this and it feels incredibly awkward. And even if people were interested, it's hard to imagine having sex with someone and having no contact with them with my mouth or face. A big part of my distress is having this experience of fundamental sexual awakening that's come with my transition while being unable to do anything about it. The idea of not being able to do this for the rest of my life is deeply distressing, and it's not something that these compromise solutions have addressed. I'd expressed that this was something that was important to me, but I did not do so clearly enough.

I'm embarassed that sex is so important to me, and I think that's a big part of why I have failed to be clearer about it. The trans FB groups I'm in have so many people talking about dating and sex feeling right for the first time or posting salacious memes about things that I couldn't do because of Covid, and it hurt deeply. Someone in the local support group was talking about poly and trans relationships and it literally feel like an icy dagger in my chest, thinking that I could never have that.

I'd wanted these experiences my entire life, but eventually concluded that I just couldn't have them because they wouldn't work for me, and had gone terribly and traumatically wrong when I tried. Eventually, I found the term demisexual and decided that that must be me.

But I'm *really* not demi; I just didn't know how to relate to people that way as a boy. I'm nearly certain it would be different now. The thought of this entire array of experiences finally being accessible to me in one way but being closed in another, possibly for the rest of my life, really made me despair for my future. If the kind of life I'd wanted for decades would forever be teased in front of my face, just out of reach because of Covid, I really felt like the only thing in my life that made my future feel worth having was Miriam, whose presence in my life was simultaneously the thing keeping me from what I wanted.

As I've expressed to her months before, Covid and isolation is the first thing in our ten-plus years together that's made me think about whether I want to continue to be with her. I really, really do, but for the first time, I thought seriously and consciously about it. (For her part, Miriam was pleased to hear that I was thinking of and prioritizing myself in that way. We both think it's healthy for a relationship to be a continuing choice.)

I do want to stay, but having to make the choice of Miriam vs. trying to have the kind of social and sexual life I've always wanted sucks so much.

And my father's death and other losses lately have made me keenly aware of two relevant things. I have a limited amount of time left to me, and if I don't find more connections in my life, I'm eventually going to end up pretty alone, as as my mother seems and some of my parents' friends and connections seem to be. The thing I want to pursue most in my life right now is connections with other human beings. Friends, lovers, and whatever else is in between and beyond those things. And honestly, I worry that the state of the world is going to degrade in such a way that the kinds of community and relationships I want may become much more difficult. Shit's scary out there.

So Miriam understands now that it's not that I won't want to be social while wearing a big ugly elastomeric mask. In fact, I really *do* want to be social in any way I can be, and I look forward to those masks getting here so I can do *something, anything* with other people again. She also understands why those masks weren't resolving one of my fundamental sources of despair.

We're going to figure out how this can happen for me. Probably something like a schedule where I can do something risky and follow that up with days of wearing an elastomeric mask in the house and staying in the spare room. I'm building a Corsi-Rosenthal box that should provide something like 7 changes of air per hour in our condo. I have ethernet in that bedroom now so I can move my computer there if necessary. We're putting a small daybed in that room too so I can sleep there if necessary. Once all these things come together, we can think and talk more about how I want to proceed. This is really hard and scary for her because of long Covid, but she empathizes and really wants this for me too and I appreciate her so much.

I have hope for the future in ways that I haven't for a long time now, and have been feeling a lot more functional these past couple days because of it. The sense I've sometimes had that I'd have been better off I hadn't figured out I'm a girl because at least then I didn't know what I wanted, could have, and was missing, is reduced tremendously.

I think that maybe, soon, I'll be able to start being a part of those FB groups and the local support group again. They've given me so much pain, seeing other people doing things I can't, that I've self-isolated from the first places that have ever made me feel like I'd truly found my people.

I dreamed about being at a party at someone's house or apartment, and the isolation is hurting a lot today.

I keep thinking about writing on the local trans Discord that I'm looking for people to go walking with, or to visit dog parks or go biking with. But every time I look there, people are talking about doing things I can't do and it hurts too much to want to be in that conversation. Before my dad died, I had just that very week been in the online trans support group meeting after a long absence. I felt like maybe my brain was together enough to enjoy seeing and talking to people without feeling crushed by not being able to do most of the things they do. But after my dad, I don't again.

There's so much I'm trying to deal with on top of that, too. I have a 15 minute consultation/intake with a therapist on the 14th, thanks to Miriam helping me with that process. I wasn't really up to it on my own.

There's a trans woman who lives in Regina who I've been talking to regularly on Facebook. I first saw her on a big FB group, and when I noticed she lived in Regina I asked her if she was aware of the local community. It turns out we have a ton of interests in common; trains, slide rules, fixing vintage things. Even more coincidental, she knows the Kenosha/Racine area really well, having dated a woman who was from that area, and having traveled there a lot with her dad who was a long-haul trucker and frequently had loads to bring to or from JI Case in Racine. At this point, we've also had two 3-hour-long phone calls! And in a continuing string of coincidence, she lives very, very close to the temporary apartment Miriam and I are in while our condo is rebuilt.

She also has serious chronic pain like Miriam, so the two of them have talked about that and gotten to know each other too. I really like her, and in fact am kind of crushing on her a bit. In a comment on Facebook, I told her that if it were not for the combination of Covid and, even more so, her being in a closed long-distance relationship, I would quite likely ask her out. And yet, because of Covid, her chronic and unpredictable pain, and my unpredictable mental state, we still have not gotten together in person.

That's only the second time in my life I have expressed romantic/sexual interest in someone who didn't ask me first, and the first time it was with Lisa who I'd known for nearly 10 years. (I'm so glad I asked Lisa!) I think this has a lot to do with transitioning. When I thought I was a boy, I didn't really know how to relate to people that way. As a girl, I think I do. I used to think I was demisexual; now I think I was just scared and confused. I've told Miriam that (again, if not for Covid) if there was a hookup app for trans people, I would seriously consider trying it out. I was *terrified* of hookup apps for the longest time, and I'm so frustrated that as I'm finally figuring myself out Covid is keeping me from exploring these things.

And yeah, that's still the biggest stressor in my life. Isolation due to Covid. I hate it so much.

Someone in a Facebook group I'm in just discovered the concept of professional cuddlers and was excited by the idea. I was excited by their excitement and told them about cuddle parties and pointed them at the website for the movement/organization.

Then I cried. I miss things like that so much. I miss being able to talk to and touch and hold other people. I went to a cuddle party in Racine and a few more in Chicago and they were wonderful experiences, and I don't know when or if I'll be able to do that again.

There's nothing to really be done about it. I'm just feeling it a lot, from time to time.

Long Covid is the primary reason Miriam and I are continuing to isolate every bit as much as we have for the last nearly three years. Going to a restaurant or a social meetup isn't worth the risk of long term, potentially permanent, disability. Even more so with Miriam's potentially greater vulnerability. This is shaping nearly every aspect of our lives. Even our search for housing was informed by Covid: we ruled out any condo that didn't have its own private entrance to avoid being in an indoor shared space. In fact, one of the reasons we looked into buying instead was the difficulty in finding a rental that had it's own private entrance.

And I'm so tired of this. I had a dream last night where people were asking me to come out and do social things and potentially go on a trip together, and I had to say no. I keep telling myself it won't always be like this. But maybe it will. How will I manage that?

People are talking about things like Gen-Con and, I'm sorry, I feel a little bitter about this stuff. I try not to let that feeling out too much.

Here's info about a currently pre-press paper on long Covid that suggests 7% of the US adult population has long Covid effects right now.

https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-cures/3586890-long-covid-comes-in-three-forms-study/