Mourning

I had therapy today. Every other wednesday, more or less, I’ve had therapy. It’s a different therapist now, and I actually think we’re a better fit. She certainly makes me work a lot – and it’s been really useful. And shocking, at times.

I’ve been struggling on-and-off for a while. I have managed to subject myself to a lot of stress (oh hey, starting a business, ending a career I’ve had for a decade, all while the US and UK governments repeatedly tell me they’d prefer it if I’d just die already, along with all the people like me).

Also, y’know, along with the ADHD comes an “overdeveloped sense of justice” – apparently that’s super common. It’s probably why equity is such a foundational part of my character. Why I find inequality so upsetting. Even, why I do stupid things like count out the slices of sausage to make sure my wife and I both get equal numbers.

Anyway. My therapist would like me to journal more, which y’know, I used to do. A lot. Probably an oversharing amount. And so I’ve been meaning to get back to it. It’s hard, though, because I also write for fun and so finding time in between playing bass, running a business, working as a nurse – more now, to make up the loss from not working as a journalist – and trying to finish the house? Well it’s hard.

But there’s definitely value to it. To journaling. For me. It gets things out of my head. It also helps because my memory is not good – and today I spent about an hour or two transferring as many of my ancient journal entries from the wayback archive of my website to here. I’d like to have transferred more, but not every page got scraped, sadly. Anyhow, while I was doing it I poked at some of the entries and well. Yeah.

Experiences I’d forgotten. Moments in time from early in my transition. All that stuff is there. And yeah, this journal is probably one of the most prosaic pieces of writing in the universe. It’s public only because it keeps me a bit honest about writing it. Clearly not very, though, because sporadic hardly describes it.

But this has been a rough few weeks. An insurance decline for some gender affirming surgery that I had planned. I’m appealing, but expecting to have to go through an external appeal and still not expecting success. Fuck them, though. Absolute fucking bullshit excuse for the decline.

And on top of that two weeks ago I found out that my lost falsetto and uneven passagio aren’t something I’ll be able to fix with practice and exercises. They’re a problem likely caused by my trach shave. One of my vocal cords is unable to get fully taught, so my high pitches are… Gone.

Last week I had the utterly miserable experience of (while awake) having an endoscope passed through my nose to just above my vocal cords. They then drip local anaesthetic on the cords to numb them, you’ve got local anaesthetic injected into the front of your neck, and then they pass a needle through to the cords first from below, then – in theory – from above. Through that needle they inject filler to temporarily plump up the cord which might fix it. Or it might not. If it does fix it, the next step is to have a fat graft onto the cord to permanently plump it up.

If that doesn’t work then we’re into “can we shorten the ligament on just that side” which is…a possibility but also might properly fuck my range.

Anyhow, after the first injection my body went, “I’m sorry, no.” and I had a bit of a lie down to avoid fainting, which meant that they stopped the procedure and, if the vocal therapy which they’d already scheduled to follow the filler injection doesn’t work (which seems unlikely, but might indicate whether or not it could work?), then it’s nap time for Kate for injection of temporary filler while I’m not there to faint.

So after we couldn’t complete the procedure, I…have been a mess. The first couple of days properly a mess; I was actually fine at the weekend. But I’ve paused my singing lessons because, well, I find it horribly distressing. During warm ups we always go up to my passagio and try and get to my falsetto and knowing that’s just not happening, and may never? That’s really fucking upsetting.

Talking to my therapist today she pointed out that it’s fair for me to mourn the loss of what I was hoping to do. What I wanted to do. What I’ve wanted to be able to return to since I was a kid. What seemed, shockingly, feasible, when I started singing.

And so I’m trying to work through that, at the same time as maintaining some optimism that we might manage to fix it. And that’s really hard to do.