Well, I’m pregnant again. The hormones are hitting me harder than they have in the past. Normally, I spend the first semester nauseous but excited. This time, when I found out I was pregnant, I decided I definitely want another baby and moved directly to feeling like absolute hell.

Very quickly, I noticed I was having trouble functioning. My energy is low. It’s hard to move around. I lie in bed far more often than normal. In the space of a couple weeks, I put on ten pounds.

I think about killing myself every day. Don’t worry, I won’t do it. I just think about it constantly. And then I tell myself, “It’s gonna be a long nine months.”

I mentioned it to my husband, and I feel bad talking about it, because where I grew up, talking about suicidal ideation was just “a cry for attention”. You’re just trying to get attention. You don’t really mean it. You won’t really kill yourself. You just want attention.

Since everything else I did was also labelled “a cry for attention”, I really hated this.

My tendency to wear different clothes was “a cry for attention”. I’m sorry, I don’t care about fashion the way I’m supposed to. And I wear whatever makes me comfortable. And I’m socially tone deaf, so I don’t know what kind of “message I’m sending to people” with my clothes. I try not to wear anything that can be construed as sexy, because I think people will think I’m trying to be sexy, and again, it’s all a language that I don’t speak. So everyone else is talking, and I’m not a part of the conversation. But if I don’t do it the way I’m supposed to, that’s “a cry for attention.”

And then there’s the hair. My rule has always been, “Hair is the one area of my life where I can YOLO all over the place.” It grows back! If I try something, and I don’t like it, it will undo itself in a matter of months without any effort on my part. It’s remarkably liberating. I’ve had long hair, and short hair, and I’ve shaved myself bald on a few occasions. One time I chopped off 19 inches of hair and donated it to a charity on a whim. Hair is where I can just be free.

And when I worked at Walmart, I started experimenting with faux hawks and mohawks, and shaving the sides of my head. Because it was hot in the truck, and I wanted to be comfortable. Similar to my clothes, my choices were utilitarian in nature. But then I got pulled over by a cop and treated horribly, probably because he saw my hair and figured I was a drug addict or a punk or something. And I just… I hate people so much. Why should I wear my hair to look good for other people? Can’t I just wear my hair for me? And if I do anything too drastic with it, even if I really like it, suddenly, it’s another “cry for attention.”

And then there’s the self harm. I don’t cut my skin so that people will pay attention to me. I cut my skin because it makes me feel better, and it doesn’t fuck with my body chemistry the way drugs do. I figure it’s the smarter option, but somehow drinking until I have blood poisoning is not labelled “a cry for attention” but cutting my skin is. It’s all self-destructive behavior. I just have different preferences.

And that’s just a few things. Where I grew up, my tendency to write was “a cry for attention”. My eccentric behavior (sorry, I can’t help it) was also “a cry for attention”. Everything was a fucking cry for attention. And if I want so much damn attention, then why the fuck am I avoiding people like the plague and saying I wish people would just leave me the fuck alone?

So, yeah, I want to kill myself. I want to do a lot of things I shouldn’t do. This is just another one of them. I really want to each an entire box of chocolate frosted donuts. I don’t do that. I want to slit my wrists with a razor blade. I don’t do that.

But, it made me think.

People don’t understand suicide very well.

I want you to imagine that you’re in a high rise building. Way up there. You can see an entire city stretching out beneath you. It’s a pretty view, but you’re only thinking about jumping out the window to the very not-soft concrete far, far below you. And you’re thinking about that because the building is on fire.

The exits are blocked off. There’s no way out. The smoke is choking you, and it’s hard to see. You cough and feel the heat of the flames baking your skin like you’re out on the hottest sunny day you can imagine.

It’s getting pretty unbearable, and the only way out that you have left is that fucking window.

You might say, “A sane rational person doesn’t jump out of a high rise window.” And you’d be right, unless that sane, rational person is trapped in a high rise that’s on fire. And suddenly, jumping out of a window to certain death below makes all the sense in the world.

Suicide is like that. You’re standing in front of the window, and behind you the flames have gotten so bad, that you don’t see any other way out.

Suicidal people don’t want to die. They just don’t want to be trapped in the flames anymore.

So, for me, the first thing I do when I start thinking about killing myself is identifying the flames. What’s on fire, so I can put the fire out.

As they say, “suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” The window is the most obvious way out of the fire, but putting out the fire is the real solution that a suicidal person needs, and ultimately wants.

Now, some fires are bigger than others. Sometimes you can’t put out your own fires. You need help. You need to call a suicide hotline, or maybe check yourself into a mental institution. Get some help. Firefighters exist because some fires are just too big for one person to handle.

For me, right now, I don’t think I need help. At least not yet. For all I know, by the time this pregnancy’s over, I’ll be checked in somewhere with padded walls and grippy socks. But I’m not there yet.

I’m looking at my life and trying to identify the parts that burn. I’m trying to find active solutions to those problems. They don’t even have to be good solutions. Just anything pro-active that starts moving me forward.

I asked my husband if I can go to church with him. I’m Wiccan. He doesn’t understand why I want to go to church. But I’m depressed. Like many depressed people, I self-isolate. It started when I quit my job, and it’s just been getting steadily worse, month after month. I’ve isolated myself enough now, at this point, that I struggle talking to people. It’s difficult. And between that, and the depression itself, and the pregnancy hormones, I feel like I’m struggling with basic communication. It’s like I’ve lost myself inside my own head.

So, there’s one thing that’s clearly burning away. I need to get that under control. I don’t know how I’ll handle being in a church with a bunch of folks I have to hid everything about myself from (abortion, former stripper, sex-focused youtube channel, autoandrophilia… just everything about me, really). But anything is better than sitting alone at the house feeling myself burn.

Actually, that’s not true. Anything is better than letting myself jump out the metaphorical window.

I don’t know if this helps anyone. I hope it does. In the end, it really doesn’t matter. I’m too tired to care.

I need to write this down. I have too many ideas bouncing around in my head. One leads to another, and if I lose one, the entire chain begins to unravel. I want to make a video about this eventually, but I’m afraid I’ll forget half of it if I don’t have it organized somewhere first.

Welcome to my confused, disorganized mind lol.

So, where was I? I was listening to this video, and about halfway through, the thought occurred to me that, because of the unusually high percentage of people in the trans community who are diagnosably suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, a person who cares about trans people would naturally want to start educating the entire trans community about how to recognize narcissistic behavior and protect themselves from narcissistic influence– because if you’re trans you’re almost inevitably going to bump into a narcissist in the community. (In fact, I’m not done reading the Italian study he references, but it’s safe to assume that any trans person interacting with the community will probably bump into several, and they might even be travelling in packs. Yikes.)

Anyway, no sooner did this thought cross my mind, than the man who was being interviewed said something to that effect. So, that settled it. When I finished watching the interview, I started reading up on narcissism so that I could start making videos cautioning people who identify as transgender that they need to take precautions to be on their guard against narcissists.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know much about narcissists. I know narcissism is part of the dark triad, but I always found it to be one of the least interesting parts. The other two parts, Machiavellianism and psychopathy were always more fun. (I recently saw one scholar suggesting that the dark triad be renamed the dark quartet to include sadism. I grew up around a sadist. Fascinating individual. I was one of his favorite toys. There’s a reason I’m warped, folks.)

So, anyway, there I was looking up narcissism. Now, one term that stood out to me in particular was “narcissistic amnesia”. According to Google, that means that narcissistic people have a tendency to conveniently forget anything about their past actions that doesn’t align with their grandiose self-perception. (I forget how Google worded it, but that’s the gist.)

Now, that sounded strikingly familiar.

I’ve been on r/raisedbynarcissists before. (If you haven’t been, and you like watching train wrecks, you’re welcome.) And I know the kinds of stories that appear there. Parents super abusive. Beat the kids. Yelled at the kids. Burned cigarettes on the kids. Killed the kid’s pet because it was noisy one day. You get the idea.

My parents weren’t like that, so I assumed “Okay. They were crappy parents, but they weren’t narcissists. Right?” But narcissistic amnesia sounds like a perfect description of something my dad does, and has been doing since I was little. Any time I think I’ve cornered him in an argument, or caught him contradicting himself, he’s like, “Well, I don’t recall that conversation.”

In fact, when my husband and I were prepping for our abortion because our unborn son was terminally ill, he cussed out my husband over the phone, and we cut off contact for about a year. When we started talking to them again, I asked that my father apologize to my husband. (By my logic, he can treat me like shit, he’s done that for decades. But he’d damn well better show some respect for other people who didn’t have to grow up around him.) Well, when I asked for an apology, he sent me a long letter talking about how my husband and I both remembered the incident incorrectly. According to his letter, he’s been carefully keeping track of all our interactions (because I’m so volatile, in his opinion) and he has no recorded interaction on the day in question.

And that’s just one example. I can’t begin to count all the times he’s explained to me that I remembered things wrong. It always starts out, “Well, Oak Leaves, memory is a funny thing.” And then, he proceeds to tell me how the thing I remember couldn’t possibly have happened. You know, even if there were other people in the room who literally saw it happen right along with me. We’re all just remembering it incorrectly, and nothing even remotely close to what we’re describing ever happened.

Now, every parent has little moments like this. I remember my daughter getting her pet birds for Christmas, but she remembers getting them for her birthday. We go back through the family photo album, and sure enough there’s a happy birthday girl gazing lovingly into a brand new bird cage.

With my parents, it’s more of a constant issue. They cannot ever be wrong, and so I can only be right as long as I agree with them about everything. I thought they were just quirky, but it turns out that’s a narcissistic trait.

Okay. So, my parents…. had narcissistic tendencies. Everyone’s a little flawed, right? They’re still not as bad as the folks on r/raisedbynarcissists.

But then, I started looking into narcissistic parents. Because most of my research starts out as “me-search”. Because, half the time I’m scratching my own mental itch, and if I find anything worthwhile, then I try to share it.

Apparently there are different types of narcissistic parent. Yeah, there are the loud, explosive, violent types you see on r/raisedbynarcissists. But there are also negligent narcissists.

And that’s what clicked it all into place.

I remember when I was about ten, my mother walked into the classroom and found my crying at my desk because the teacher had been mistreating me. My mother was outraged. She fumed about it during the entire car ride home. She was so angry, I was afraid some of that anger was going to find its way onto me, and I gave her a wide berth. She still complains about that horrible teacher even to this day. Multiple sclerosis has bored holes all over her brain. She can’t remember what she’s talking about from one minute to the next. But that teacher? Oh, she remembers that. Viciously.

So, one day, I asked her. “What did you do about that, anyway?” Because surely, she did something, right? Mom had a temper. She replied, “I didn’t do anything. I was too mad.” “You were too mad?” “Yes,” was her prim response. “I was just too mad.” Fair enough. She might have been overcome with emotion. Maybe she wisely decided to take some time and calm down before addressing the issue. “So, did you do anything later on?” “No.” “So, you saw me being mistreated in school, and you didn’t do anything about it?” “Yes.”

Okay, well, that explains why everyone seemed to know that no one would stand up for me. I mean, I knew it. Even as a kid, I understood that I was all I had to rely on. I didn’t know why I thought that, though. It was just the way things were.

But, now, it makes sense. A narcissist would be enraged that her daughter (in her mind, an extension of herself) was being mistreated. But she would also stop caring once the sting of the indignity to her person had faded a little. She’d always hate the teacher for disrespecting her, but she’d never have enough genuine concern for her child’s well-being that she’d do anything too drastic about it.

I started thinking about it more. One of the reasons I don’t hang out on r/raisedbynarcissists, is that so many people seem to think their parent is just the most horrible, reprehensible humans on earth. And, yeah, some of them clearly are pretty reprehensible. But, I find myself wondering how many of these “children of narcissists” are actually narcissists themselves, and their constant recounting of their parents’ many crimes is colored by their own need to always see themselves as flawless, innocent lambs.

So, I don’t want to be in a hurry to say, “My parents were narcissists! I’m just an innocent, perfect victim, and they were the horriblest, most terrible parents ever.” Because they weren’t. My father was an excellent teacher. Being a clinical psychologist, he was always telling me about psychological concepts, and explaining to me how the human mind works. He used to take us out on hikes and show us the beauty of nature. When my brother and I were grown, he took us out backpacking in the woods for days at a time. He taught us using the Socratic method– something that takes time and patience, and something I wish I understood how to do better so that I could teach my own children in the same way.

But, at the same time, he also cared far more about his work than he did about his daughter’s steady decline in physical and mental health in the school system. When I came to my parents and tried to tell them about my problems, my complaints never seemed to properly communicate how bad my problems were. I always figured that my parents simply weren’t aware of how badly and dangerously mistreated I was inside the public schools. But what if they had enough evidence to put the pieces together, and they just didn’t care enough to try?

I can only remember one occasion in the three and a half decades that I’ve known my father that he ever admitted to making a mistake. One. And even then, he doesn’t “remember” that incident, but if he did do what I said, well, then he was mistaken.

I remember, after graduating high school, I used to lie in bed for hours, just reliving the things that had happened to me. The near death experience. The stairwell where I collapsed. The agonizing slog toward my locker. Collapsing again. The way my lungs seized up entirely, and I knew I was going to die, and just wanted it all to be over, because I was tired of suffering.

I went to my dad, the clinical psychologist, and I told him, “Hey, I’m kind of experiencing some really PTSD-like sort of things. Like, I really can’t get over some bad things that happened to me. Does that mean anything?” My father looked me in the eye and said, sounding completely exhasperated, “Oak Leaves, you need to just get over it.”

A narcissist wouldn’t be bothered that his child was potentially traumatized. He’d be bothered that his child (as an extension of his grandiose self) was experiencing psychological distress when she really needed to just cut the crap.

Okay. So, my parents are narcissists. I mean, I call them assholes every other week. Goddamn, fucking assholes. And I love those assholes. They’re my assholes. I can’t rely on them for a single damn thing. But, they raised me, so what are you gonna do?

When I got old enough, I became a stripper, and saved up enough stripper money to travel to the other end of the country, where I now live happily with my husband and children. I only talk to my parents when I call them on the phone, and I only see them once a year for a couple days at a time. And during those days, everyone is always on their best behavior, so I get to see the glowy perfect happy family picture they like to project to the world around them, and they leave before the illusion has a chance to slip.

And I have PTSD. If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck… you get the idea.

So, here’s the part where things get interesting again. I am the child of two narcissists, which means I grew up having a myriad of narcissistic behaviors modeled in front of me. I’d like to think I managed not to pick up most of them– but it’s quite possible I missed a few.

And an alarmingly high percentage of the trans people in the Italian study had personality disorders, with narcissistic personality disorder (a dark triad disorder) being the most dangerous. So, it is only wise for me to ask: do I have any narcissistic tendencies fueling my autoandrophilia?

Also, and I still need to read the book on Tavistock, but apparently many of the trans people coming there had autism. (Or ADHD, and I definitely have that– I’m writing this down because my brain misplaces thoughts.)

Now, autism itself is interesting because I met a very well-read trans woman online. (She had an intersex condition and transitioned for health reasons.) She penned a series of articles regarding her own research on her condition. I need to learn more about brain function, but one of the things she mentioned is that the hypothalamus (I think it was the hypothalamus… I really do need to learn more about brain function) can affect gendered behavior and self-perception. This part of the brain can be affected by intersex conditions. It can also be affected by autism. And PTSD.

So, how much of my ADHD is actually just brain damage from growing up with PTSD-inducing shit happening to me? (I’ve wondered this. Other people have asked me this. I still don’t have any good information, so it’s all a big question mark for now.)

But also, how much of my desire to be male is also a result of brain damage from growing up with PTSD-inducing shit?

I always looked at it as a conscious logical process. “I need to be tough, independent, strong, and fearless in order to stay alive.” Shorthand that, and you get, “I need to be a man in order to stay alive.”

But what if changes inside my brain also pushed me in this direction as well? I don’t experience fear the way I should. I’m not afraid of dying anymore. I ultimately did become tough, independent, strong and fearless.

So, if we broaden that out. A lot of people say girls who say they’re trans after experiencing trauma only “think” they’re trans. But what if some percentage of them, post trauma, actually experience changes on a cognitive level that make them feel internally more masculine? In that case they’re not just “being told by society” that they’re trans, they’re claiming to be trans based off of things they’re genuinely experiencing.

And all of this is fine. Today’s definition of transgender, in most cases (my own included) basically just means “gender nonconforming”. There’s nothing wrong with being gender nonconforming. The problem begins when the affirmative care model takes over, and people who have no business transitioning are urged to try on some new pronouns and take hormones that can have lifelong effects on their health and appearance. And, hey, why not get a double mastectomy while you’re at it? Those surgeons need their yachts. Buy! Buy! Buy!

When we expanded the definition of what it means to be “transgender”, people like me suddenly fit into it. But, with this change in definition, we need to realize that “transness” is caused by a myriad of different things, and requires a myriad of different treatments.

In the interest of being responsible, I filmed the video for the next part of the 12 Rules for Life book review. And I started editing it. I haven’t finished yet.

I fucked up.

I went off my antidepressants because I was having unprotected “adult activities” with my husband, and I was worried I might get pregnant. And I’d been on them for a couple months already, and I felt fine.

And that was a very stupid mistake.

There’s a tall bridge near where I live that’s a popular spot for jumpers. They put up fences and barbed wire to stop people. And signs with crisis call lines on them. I went up there and looked at it. I have a few good ideas how to get past that fence.

And when I think about those that’s my red warning light.

Right now, I’m cuddling on the couch with the toddler and watching Bluey. And that’s really helping.

I have problems I can’t talk to anyone about. I need to fix that. I’ve had them for years now. They don’t get better, but the weight gets heavier.

The antidepressants were helping, but the problem still hasn’t gone away.

I need to find a solution. But therapy really didn’t help. I just got told I’m bipolar. I never knew “bipolar” meant becoming depressed because things happen in your life that are depressing.

I sometimes think I’ll never find a way to not be so sad. Which is typical of depression.

I applied for a new job today. It will help our family financially, and I really hope the exercise will help with my mental health. At the very least, I hope it helps keep my mind off my problems.

I’ve watched several episodes of Bluey now. All while cuddling a toddler who grins every time he notices me looking at him. I have so much to be grateful for.

If I just don’t think about my problems, I can pretend they don’t exist for days or even weeks at a time.

The problems never go away. But I pretend them away as often as I can.

Sometimes I tell myself that maybe they’ll just resolve themselves if I wait long enough. Or maybe if I live with them long enough I’ll learn not to care anymore.

Except I’ve lived with them for more than half a decade.

Sometimes I tell myself I’m a bad person for feeling the way I do. It doesn’t change anything, though.

Writing about it helps. I don’t have anyone I can talk to, but if I write it down at least the words exist somewhere.

I need to remember that the antidepressants helped. I started taking them again within a few days, but so far they haven’t helped me get back to baseline. If this goes on for much longer I’ll call the doctor and ask to up my dose.

That won’t solve my problems, either. But at least it will make it so they don’t hurt so bad. That’s what I’m aiming for right now.