Sometime ago I discovered I walk alone on an empty road. My life has been one where I have had to face the crushing defeat of having little to no support from others around me. All the different pieces of my past; bullying, moving, gender dysphoria, being in special ed, not having friends, therapists trying to fix me; all these things culminated in a shell of a person I thought I knew.
This past week that shell was hollowed out. I had a mental health physician conduct an exam of my faculties. I had expected to be diagnosed with Bipolar disorder, social anxiety, ADHD and maybe dyspraxia or something similar. All the piece of my life would finally make sense once I had a concrete explanation for why I was so terrible at functioning normally. Instead what I got was far more eye opening than I ever imagined.
I won’t share the full results. I still have a lot to process and much of it will need to remain private. What I can say is the doctors findings are incompatible with what I believed. I am beyond words. But why? Why was it so important to get diagnosed with a mental or cognitive disability? Because it would make sense of my issues. To discover my brain works fine, there are no impairments preventing me from functioning normally, aside from the harsh reality I now face. It was me all along.
I have no excuse. I was diagnosed, among others with cPTSD, chronic. This tells me, along with the doctors words in the report, the reason I am incapable of operating normally is simply because I just don’t. For whatever reason stress, anxiety, fear and anger control me. Her prognoses basically blamed my emotional distress on all my problems. In a roundabout way she tried to make it sound like my hormone replacement therapy, a product of the “transsexualism” she branded me in the report, were to blame. The report reads like Stephanie is a grown adult who acts like a child because she can’t handle her emotions. She is also taking hormones that elevate her emotional distress so she needs to just grow up.
There in so many words a medical professional determining that what is wrong with me is my inability to act like an adult. My functional deficiencies are a direct result of my child like emotional states, basically she said I suck at life because I am a big kid throwing a temper tantrum. That blew out my self esteem. She shifted all the blame squarely on my shoulders.
I am the problem. I can’t blame my parents, past, environment or some learning disability. What it amounts to is I am lazy, childish, emotionally unstable and beyond selfish. None of those were words I would use to describe myself. Yet here they are black and white on a legally binding medical document for all my healthcare providers to see. I am a big baby pretending to be a girl. That is the diagnosis. I can’t deal with it. I can’t move past it. I don’t know if I can ever recover from this. Therein lies the problem. If I am a brat who refuses to grow up then why should I bother?
Stephanie Bri 