Still jobless, Baby sleeping better

Well, I sure am rotten at this regular-posting thing, don't I?

I'm kicking this job search thing into a much higher gear than I thought I was capable of. It's not the "50 to 100 a week" that the somewhat arrogantly entrepreneurial founder of Rapleaf endorses, but it's much better than I was doing. And no, despite initial attraction, this passionate language-design, open-source-contributing, distributed-IR veteran developer will not be applying for work there; Mr. Hoffman's selection techniques are really quite effective. Meh.

The downside, of course, to all this company-surfing and cover letter writing is the occasional brush with, as my spouse likes to say, SRSLY SKEEVY recruiter types -- the sort that latches-onto your résumé and won't stop representing you to companies until you issue a cease-and-desist letter. I understand that the world at large does not universally share my conception of professionalism, nor should I expect it to. This doesn't mean I have to like it, though. Why can't these people understand that I have good reasons for selecting specific companies -- benefits and HRC Corporate Equality Index scores being big ones -- that I do not intend either to justify or even to share? Seriously, people. "Skeevy" is right.

The good news is that I'm starting to get over some of my fear and loathing of interviews. Well, not really. I still hate them. But I'm dealing. I seem to be better at writing cover letters than I had expected, too, which is heartening. And now, back to the grueling self-promotion.

me = very very very tired

So. Time to chatter to my diary about how I'm doing.

AGH.

Baby is not sleeping.

Correction: baby is sleeping. Baby is sleeping quite a lot, in fact. However, baby is not sleeping when I need him to be sleeping, namely between 2am and 6am. Well, okay; more accurately, he's not allowing me to sleep during those hours. He gets plenty of sleep.

General stress kept me from unwinding until, oh, 2:30 this morning. At which point, like clockwork, the little angel woke up, hungry. Long story short, we were up, we were down, we were up again, we tried the bassinet (he was having none of that), we tried co-sleeping (he loved it, but I couldn't fall asleep -- I haven't co-slept with an infant enough to really relax, much as I otherwise enjoyed it), and hey, look, it was 6am, time to remedicate and start another day. For the record, "we" refers to me and my baby; my dear wife was fortunate enough, this time, to remain asleep for nearly all of the drama.

So. I am physically incapable of staying angry at this child. He is an angel boy. He is beyond sweet-tempered -- he's just in a near-permanent good mood. And no, that's not just his parent's perspective; all who encounter him remark (generally in tones of disbelief) at his unshakably happy disposition. I shouted at him deliriously a couple of times around 6am when he refused to stop squealing happily and thumping the walls of his bassinet, but then picked him up and laid him down next to me, and when next I opened my eyes there was his tiny cherubic face beaming awe and delight into mine, clearly transfixed with wonder at being in mama's bed. What was I supposed to do in the face of that? I melted. And so I laughed it all off as best I could, remedicated, and went about waking-up [the rest of] my family.

Dear Diary

In the interest of capturing some of the fog of reflection that's settled over me during my lengthy hiatus from employment, I'm now going to attempt to commit to at least one entry a day until such time as I either thoroughly exhaust my supply of novel insights or am once again gainfully employed. This ought to prove interesting.

To what end?

Why is it that I write these posts, these public journal entries? It's not that they have an audience, or that I'm trying to reach anyone. I don't promote myself anywhere; this really can only be described as a diary with neither cover nor lock.

Something in Jenny Boylan's She's Not There helps me to an answer. Like the putative misguided participant in a creative writing workshop, my stories and remarks swell with angst and banal detail where they lack in charm and intrigue. Unlike the aspiring author, though, charm and intrigue -- the amusement and enlightenment of a reading audience -- are not my aims. I may someday feel like writing a memoir -- heaven knows, my family has given me enough lunatic excitement over the years to make a good read -- and at that juncture I shall commence the process of editing and selection. Until such time, however, I use this page as a means to clarity.

As so much of this course I've set is clouded and hidden, the more memory I maintain of whence I've come the better. I am, therefore, aiming to capture for myself moments of insight and of emotion. As a diarist, I'm documenting me whenever and wherever I become momentarily lucid. As a reader, I am hoping to come to a deeper and broader understanding of myself. For the present, any other uses really must remain secondary.

Aaand this still needs editing. Oh well. In due course.

visiting the old home

Standing in the hallway for hours, looking at pictures in old photo albums, I notice things. I am so unhappy-looking, so serious, in these pictures. They date from eight to eighteen years of age.

There are a few exceptions. A few images from the end of my senior year of high school have smiles—what I remember of the time is that my future was an open book, full of the promise of adventure. I’d been accepted to a marvelous school, I had shaved my beard and begun to think more honestly about my gender. I had reason to be optimistic.

The other systematic exception is in pictures from my teens in which I am interacting with children. I am happy, there. I don’t look calculating. I don’t look reserved. I look like I feel genuine.

The only other time I have seen that genuine look is as a little child, in even earlier pictures, and only when I’m expressing excitement or distaste. When I’m calm … I look thoughtful. I look wistful. I don’t look present. I’m not there.

And then … then I see a picture of myself in a swimming pool, and there’s a stab of pain. I should have been in a one-piece, with narrower shoulders, a small but defined chest, a too-high forehead and longer limbs than I knew what to do with, spending a mid-teens summer vacation trying to come to terms with young womanhood in America in the early nineties. Instead, I’m in swim trunks, baffled and uncertain about developing chest and facial hair, completely failing to come to terms with an even more oppressed and confusing status.

I cry. All those years of isolation in rich company, gilded imprisonment in privilege. I never stopped trying to understand—not once—who and what I was, but I only rarely paused in my desperate flight from the answer. Rachel. A trans girl. Me.

I cry because I remember the moment so well. I remember feeling, clearly, what I just wrote, above: every…single…thought. I don’t remember what I was thinking—the words, the meanings I attached to them, the boxes in my head into which I finally shoved them at a loss for options. I could probably reconstruct them, now, if I tried, but I have no desire to do so. I have options, now. I have words for these feelings. Loneliness, isolation, and fear. Heartache. Regret; longing. Grief. Deep wells of grief. Such sorrow, over what I feared to do, what I was too afraid to assert, to claim, to demand. Womanhood. My body. My name. My self.

It’s funny how in times of emotion, it’s just words—“woman”, “mother”, “dreamer”, “gamer”—that I fall back upon. It’s simple, powerful words—the right words, hard-won over many years—that are the foundation-stones of my redoubt. They are my spell, my name, my Polaris. I don’t so much write about these feelings or articulate them as—using an embarrassingly awkward analogy which I nevertheless cannot seem to shake—instead toss words onto a Pollock canvas and mutely ponder the wreckage. It paints a map, in adolescent, stuttering cadences, to authenticity.

booooring / good news / whinyriffic

So. Attractive Job Prospect apparently wants me to go and visit them to interview some more, and is still interested. I appear to be unable to read these things. *sigh*.

Well, anyhow, thank goodness. The mechanics are charging us two paychecks. Feh. At least the baby had a wonderful time at daycare.

Looking at pretty much all of my posts tagged "interviewing" or "grumbling", I am forced to conclude that it is impossible, at this point, even to pretend to an air of stoic grace. Honestly, I didn't know I could be this whiny at this age and stage. It's a little disheartening. And hey, there I go again.

Hey, wait, isn't this supposed to be a transition blog?

Images, Bodies, Memories

A comment, elsewhere, got me started thinking at length about self-image. I suppose you could say that this is what this blog is named after—the fact that I rarely, if ever, see myself when I look in a mirror; I see a familiar person, someone who "plays me on TV", actually. Except the "TV" is the waking world, and the casting really sucked.

Anyhow, I've been reflecting [hah; at my punniest when not even trying] on my feelings of detachment from the images of myself which I see in photographs. Something struck me—the pictures from my earliest childhood, after my memories began to crystallize, but only barely, don't suffer from this. The little boygirl I see in them is me. I remember the tableaux, I remember watching the camera, I remember the feel of my body, I was there. And I remember looking as I do in the photographs. That's not somebody else, standing where I stood.

What was it that took this from me? Yes, I'm trans. Yes, my brain has structures conditioned prenatally to be part of a female body. Never mind any of that. What I want to know is "what can I remember of this loss? What did it feel like?"

There are some curious sides to this. So, the pictures I've been contemplating most are a pair of me at 2½ years, snuggling with my favorite blanket. I've another picture taken at approximately the same time, showing me in our garden wearing a straw hat borrowed from my mother. I remember the blanket pictures being taken, and I do not remember the hat picture being taken. But I do remember the hat. And what I remember most strongly about the hat is this: it was gendered.

Certainly I didn't have that term for it, but the idea is quite precisely that. The hat was my mother's. It was a woman's hat. I liked it: it felt comfortable, in a way most clothing did not. But I knew, somehow, that getting to wear it out in the yard, there, was a special treat, not something to take for granted, because it was girl clothing, and I wore boy clothing. I regretted this, I remember that much, but there's no pain. And this is the same me I can recall being, there in the blanket pictures. I may have understood gendering of identities, but I'm still authentic, then; I'm still just me, and haven't yet been carved-up.

When did my face stop being mine?

I can remember, in kindergarten, I was terrified by a fairy tale story assigned to us for reading homework. In the tale, a savage dragon was terrorizing a kingdom, and a pair of knights and a squire of sorts had been tasked with eliminating the threat. The knights sought-out a powerful wizard for aid against the magical beast, and the wizard helpfully provided them with a potion that would transform them into dragons—operating, I suppose, on the theory that anything less would be unable to best the beast in combat. Unfortunately, the enchantment made dragons of them in mind, as well, and they joined the first dragon in harassing the populace. And that's all I can tell you of the story, as I could not bring myself to read any more. Something terrified me about the thought of losing oneself—losing one's sense of self—inside an unfamiliar body.

It was early in the school year, so I cannot have been much past my fifth birthday. This is the first memory I have of being insecure about my own identity. I know I puzzled over earlier photographs of myself, that year and the next few, and watched my face in the mirror as I changed expressions, trying to figure out just what this person—whom I seemed to be—looked like. I recall wondering what, and where, I was—where was my self? I wondered if there was a point somewhere inside my head, a tiny spot in my brain, that was "me", that looked-out through the eyes in my face, that controlled my limbs and fingers and mouth. I think the only given was that "I" was not this body which housed me. I was something different from it, somehow. I don't know if that's a normal perspective for a five-year-old. I sort of doubt it.

I'm presently stymied by lack of images. I have an album from birth to three years of age, but nothing else until nine—by which point there's only an awkward boy in the photographs, my erstwhile stand-in. My parents are moving, this month, but when they've settled and unpacked, I need to dig further and collect more images to consider.

Somewhere between two and five, perhaps later, something fell apart. Something in my head drew away from my form, rejecting it. I want to know what it felt like. I want to know what happened to Rachel. What did it feel like to be broken apart? Did it hurt? Did I even notice, at the time? Was there a trauma that shook me and forced me to examine things that were too delicate to withstand scrutiny? Did I just notice, one day, that something didn't feel right?

I want to know.