I haven’t posted in a bit, due mostly to the fact that I’ve been keeping myself quite busy, or at least quite anxious. Things are going well, however! I think that, overall, I haven’t quite felt this good in a while, except for a few things, and I’m not sure how much they are entangled with the fact that I’m really messing with my hormones, or if they’re totally unrelated.
The first is anxiety. Over the last couple of weeks, the anxiety has taken on a new tenor, which is why I suspect this project. It’s not that the amount of anxiety has changed, it’s that the anxiety has started to become more physical and emotional than its previously intellectual bent. It’s not that I was worried about intellectual things, so much as I was worried in an intellectual fashion. I would cycle over things and think them through as logically as I could as some sort of defense.
Now, though, it has turned toward more ‘common’ anxiety, as a raw, emotional feeling of panic and impending doom. Additionally, I’ve had some trouble with physical symptoms of anxiety, such as fist-clenching, teeth-grinding, facial ticks, and muscle tenseness, all alongside the standard chest pains, tunnel vision, and difficulty breathing.
The reason that I’m unsure of this being a part of this experiment is that I’ve also been having some troubles with the medication that I am currently on for anxiety, Lorazepam. It has such a short half-life in the body (it’s used for breakthrough anxiety – read: panic attacks) that there’s a very real possibility that I am, in fact, experiencing interdose withdrawal symptoms. These include all of the physical symptoms I mentioned, plus additional anxiety. In order to help alleviate this, I’m currently tapering off Lorazepam. Benzos are scary, and I really would rather be quit of them.
The other aspect is gender. I’m sure I mentioned a while ago that I was a little disappointed as to how much gender appeared to be expressed through sexuality – namely, that nullifying sexuality appeared to have made me feel more genderless (which is awesome, by the way) than anything. However, that precipitous drop in my libido seems to have leveled out at somewhere around 5-10% of normal, and even with that, I feel pretty much genderless. If I try to get aroused, or even get off (both of which are certainly still possible!), it just feels like pleasure, I don’t feel ‘virile’ or anything. However, I have been having weirdly intense downswings in mood that feel related to the whole gender thing, and they don’t always center around sexuality.
On the one hand, this is good – I feel better about myself that gender is not so shallow an issue as to totally revolve around sex, for me – and on the other hand, I’d really rather not feel bad. The reason that I’m unsure of whether it has anything to do with chemical castration is that my situations have been pretty fluid in the last few weeks. I’ve been finding myself in more situations where gender comes up, and surrounded by more people – due to the convention – for whom gender is important. The most obvious one, of course, being wearing sarongs at the con; one of which, lets face it, is basically a skirt. I was called a ‘metrosexual hyena’, oddly enough, which is weird considering wearing skirts is less a metrosexual thing than a crossdresser thing. Either way, it came up plenty.
I should reiterate that I have little desire to transition to female. I would not make a good woman, and I really don’t even want to be one. I just want to be comfortable, and gender is one of those things that has me constantly uncomfortable. I spent a lot of time, recently, being introspective about furry, being introspective about suicide, and even being introspective about this experiment, but not necessarily being introspective about gender. I think that’s probably what I should do, and see if I can find out what’s got me all in a tizzy.