Me, Robin

And if I find what I’m looking for, by the way. If I do, will I know that I found it? And will I know what to do with it?

Those are silly questions. You can only go by assumptions, some high quality guesses. Even if people tell me they love me, do I always believe it? That’s what I mean by the above being silly questions. Because I wouldn’t dare to believe it. I want to, but I’m afraid to, because love found is love to lose.

Pathetic. Sorry. What can I do that will help me to not worry about things that haven’t happened? How can I live in the moment, focus more on the feelings of the now, of the last hour with you on my side, of the past two months with you seeking me out as much as I have sought you out? For my part, I’m not taking any pills about it, but I’m doing a few things. I’m a little embarrassed to admit these next few ❝mental health tricks❞, because it does feel like I should have known these would work, at my ripe age of 36. But I know it now, and that’s something.

1: Meditation

I’m meditating again. I used to do it daily for about a year and a half, some fifteen years ago, and I should have considered it sooner. I get into the groove relatively easily – even if some days are harder than others – and afterwards I do feel fresh and a little cleaner. That’s what it always did for me, help me sort thoughts by, paradoxically, not engaging with any of them. Every thought that occurs as I sit there and focus slowly and steadily on my breathing, I dismiss as I exhale. And with every day I do it, I find it easier to get to the state where I can dismiss a thought I really don’t need in that moment. If it’s important, I tend to know the difference.

2: Gratitude journaling

Almost daily, I try to write down or photograph or otherwise intentionally remember something that was nice, perhaps even the nicest thing of the day. At the very least, it’s good to look back and see that, really, there’s always something nice in a day, even if it’s just a magpie doing a little strut in the neighbourhood, or the moon shining through the trees. But at its best, I’m also looking for the nice things. I’m intentionally keeping my ears and eyes open to kind words, pretty sights, and of course local birds.

3: Routine hygiene

I think everyone has daily habits that they have gotten used to that, if we’re being honest, have decayed a little. Maybe your medicine cabinet needs a bit of sorting. My purse definitely has things in it that I do not need daily, or worse, like a used chapstick or an empty pen. The habit is a good one – like the chapstick, during the cold and dry Norwegian winter – but in practice I could do with an upgrade. So I sort the cabinet out, I go through my purse, I inspect my habits every now and then and make sure that I like how I do them. It helps me to keep connected to things that are good for me, but also keeps me in control of them. So I’m not all autopilot: I’m doing good for myself.

Corny huh. I hate to admit that it works. It has helped me settle the seeking mind. Not control, not certainty, not constant affirmation, but centring myself, reminding myself of the good things, and doing good on purpose. No, I don’t do all of it every day. I’m great but I’m not perfect. But I try.

Can the curious mind settle on an answer? It may well try. But some questions are so scary to ask. Why? Why would I be afraid to ask, explicitly, do you like me too? It seems almost comical, how afraid I can feel about that, when every other part of me is pretty sure that she likes me back. And she has said so. Of course she has said so, before I even needed to ask. Lucky break.

But you don’t really want to ask. It’s more romantic if you somehow already know how the other person feels. But that’s called mind reading, and it doesn’t exist.

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Let’s take an analogy. It can be easy to forget compliments when you also receive harassment. The negativity can build up, even if it was only one instance on one day of that week, and you get so angry thinking about it. And that one awful thing overshadows the many compliments you received – from friends, partners, acquaintances – compliments with way more intent, way more love and insight, compliments that show you that someone cares. And somehow you linger on the catcalling, on the harassment, on the rudeness. One bad thing overpowers twenty good things, stuff like that. But you can unlearn that, by intentionally spending more time with the compliments. We remember best what we remember most, so maybe write down the compliments and re-read them every now and then.

Try to write down the nice things, the gestures of love, the smiles and the kisses, and re-read them every now and then. It will help you forget the insecurity. It will take time, and the insecurity will still be there, but maybe you can lower its voice, reduce its power over you. It’s worth a try.

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So I sit here and remember when I was the pillow for your naps, when you came to visit in spite of other plans, when you made me something so special and personal, when you messaged me the last thing before I fell asleep, when you trusted me and when you shared with me and when you laughed and laughed and laughed. And of course when you told me that you liked me back. Because you did also tell me that. So I will sit here and remember.

There are questions that the curious mind will forever trip on. Curiosity is a cruel thing, demanding satisfaction with no regard for your well-being. An insecure thought, sneaking in through the back door while you fall in love in the living room, will seek answers from the curious mind, and the curious mind will have no recourse but to wonder.

A second pair of legs in bed, and you seek them out. A thigh you can grab, dare grab? But yes, you grab it. The legs seek you out, too. There’s nothing to be curious about. That’s a kind of answer. You search for me in a crowded room and I see you first, or you see me first, as I was searching for you. And that’s enough to answer curiosity for a moment. But it’s not enough for insecurity to be satisfied. It wants answers impossible to formulate. It is hungering.

A curious mind must learn a few things, throughout its life. Chief among them, a lesson relearned all the time, until the day you die and forget all you knew: some questions are not worth asking.

So you seek out the other legs, and you try to take comfort in that. An answer for a while.

I’ll start this in a horribly direct way: my dog is dying. She just turned 17 on Saturday, which should make me feel better about it. A long life, lived well, right? But I’m not a stoic. I’m a romantic and I love her.

She started going deaf many years ago now, I forget when. It was a little scary at the time, but we decided to teach her sign language. She knew signs for going for a walk, getting food, coming closer, and going to her nest (such as when she begs for food in the kitchen). I also tried to teach her ‘I love you’, but I’m not sure that she ever understood that in spoken words either.

Then, two and a half years ago, she started getting night blindness, which has since slowly progressed into a varying 80–100% blindness. The signs didn’t work as reliably anymore, but at least her sense of smell is good, she was still an optimist, and she loved cuddles. Deaf and blind is fine, as long as she’s happy. It wasn’t always easy, but she was worth taking care of. She’d be confused, sometimes clearly anxious about the things she couldn’t hear or see anymore.

The vet inspected her half a year ago, and I had two concerns we discussed. The first was a ticking clock: her teeth have always been bad, and she’d likely need a new inspection. But for the dental work, they’d need to put her under anaesthetic, and at this age, that could kill her. When we did that a year prior, she got extremely cold and the recovery took most of a week. Without the dental work, there’s the risk she can get an infection, or generally be in pain. That was a line I wanted to draw, for her wellbeing. But I’d also noticed her confusion. Her distractedness. How sometimes she’d be startled from nothing – something we last saw when she had joint pain, which we resolved many years ago. We figured it could be dog dementia, and from some basic trials we believed that it was.

That day, in spring, I knew that we were in her last year. Dementia slows down for nobody, and becomes crueller and crueller as time goes on. I made a deal with the vet, and with Hedda: when it gets hard for her to walk, or she’s in regular pain, we have to let her go.

And over the summer, even during the nicest weather, she began walking like the frost was in her bones. She began avoiding pressure on her hips, and now, the past month or two, she hasn’t wanted anyone to touch her on her back or hips any longer. She hasn’t taken the stairs in a long time, and when I put her down after walking down twenty steps, she doesn’t always know where she is. She knows her route, but we only take one route anymore. She knows my lap, but not always my touch. Last night, she woke me up every half hour, unsure of what time it was, unhappy with her position in bed, or just generally confused.

So it’s time. Wikkie has to go soon. She’s been my best friend for thirteen years and I don’t know who I will be without her. She has to go soon, and I’m going to miss her horribly. I would give anything to have her here longer, to hold her and play with her and kiss her grey old forehead and watch her make a terrible nest out of an unyielding pillow and let her eat long grass and ignore all the dogs that have ever wanted her attention. But that would be egoistic of me. It’s time for her to go.

I have some thoughts nobody asked for. It’s about AI, because of course it is. Maybe you feel like you’re missing out if you don’t use it. Maybe you want to just play along to trends. Maybe you think it’s practical and saves you time.

Maybe you should trust your own skills more, your own critical reflections, your own adeptness for growth. These tools, in particular the generative ones, will limit all of those things for you.

I want better than that. I want real things by real people. I don’t want more things averaged out by a language model that can only make likely sentences. I don’t want more creepy images directly sourced from thousands of copyrighted works. I want you to put yourself on the page. If you can’t, no problem! But let’s not pretend that we’re doing the same thing here. With everything I make, I hope to put my heart on the table.

I hope to make something that could only exist because I made it. Something that is the one thing that it is. Not an average sentence. Not a visual approximation of other people’s work. Not a stolen concept that boils lakes and uses more electricity than anything in my household.

I want to make the thing that I made, that is the one thing that it is. Is that vague? Maybe try it yourself then. You’ll be shocked at what you can get good at.

About a month ago I said that love does not need to be mirrored for it to be worth giving. That it isn’t something you can measure as a transaction. And that I don’t know how to justify myself receiving any in return. That was obviously a bad day, and I have those, of course. Of course I do. But maybe it’s a good idea to talk about mirrors then.

We can do better than measure love as something you give and receive in return – it turns love into interchangeable components, one currency of bills you break into coins as you spend it. But I believe almost nothing in the world works like that, and I got onto this deluded, labyrinthine trail only because I don’t always know in what currencies others spend their love, and it worried me that the coins looked nothing like mine.

But that’s the point, then. What I put in isn’t what comes out. That’s the entire point. If you gave me back my money it would be a terrible trade. You give me something else in return, and that will be in something foreign at first, and perhaps something curious for a while, and then familiar, and that will be understood as their way of expressing love. This isn’t radical.

But what is radical for me, and is beating me down like a heavy storm, is slowly learning to see myself in others. If I’m spending my love wisely at all, it will come back to me. It will reflect in the faces of my friends. I will tell them I love them because I see that I am part of them. The crashing humility of seeing someone love you back in a way you have shown them love before. Not that it’s about me, of course. Not really. It’s about how loveable and wonderful my friends are. But my friends all own a handful of cash in a currency I love to spend.

I spoke some half year ago about showing up for myself, and I talked about deserving. Well, I’m embarrassed to report that the question I asked myself, Have we not established that love is never deserved?, is still painfully relevant. I don’t believe it yet. Still. Always.

I hate the conflict between knowing that “deserving” is nothing, that we all deserve everything and, logically, therefore nothing, and the very important, very self-loving thought that I deserve things too. When it comes to fairness, it seems I don’t include myself in the list of people who deserve, a concept I don’t even believe in.

For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.

—Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

Can you feel my agony? The vise that has long ago taken hold of my two parts – my thoughts and my feelings – and is squeezing them to a pulp, trying to make them fit together, trying to force them together despite all the resistance and all the pain. No, Ursula, I will not punish anyone else for eating when starved. I am punishing only myself. Don’t ask me why. The vise is tightening and I don’t know the answer.

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I said some half year ago that I stood up for myself, as if it was a kind of novelty. The truth is that it was. It still is. Because for as often as I still get misgendered, I actually rarely speak up. I freeze, or I dissociate and walk away. Somewhere in me is a voice that says, “that’s what you get for wanting something you can’t have”. I am so cruel to myself. When I look in the mirror, when I walk through the city, when I see my friends, I know I am a woman. Simply a woman. Maybe a woman with a footnote, but not an important one. But when people speak about me as if I’m a man – a man, one assumes, with a lot of footnotes – I let them say that, let them think that, let them treat me like that. How unfair! And how angry it makes me at myself. As if I wasn’t already hurting enough. What do you do with a train of thought like this? And where can I get off?

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I am not hopeless. I think I’m funny and cute. I think I give a lot, and I also show what I want. I try to give love and hope to receive it in return. I say hello to the birds, to the insects, I say hello to the moon. I don’t expect love to be mirrored directly, because none of this has to be a transaction – I’m trying to put into the world what I want to see more of. I do hope to receive more love, but I know that that will not solve the problem. Receiving more love will not automatically make me think I deserve it. I will just believe I get lucky. And I am often lucky. And I still talk about deserving. And how I’m not. And is “luck” meaningfully different? Love is probably like the weather, just out there for anyone to experience. Some days are wonderful, and some are terrible, but that’s just the weather. Nobody deserves rain – rain simply happens. Everybody deserves rain – rain simply happens. But I struggle to shake the feeling that I’ve been getting awfully bad weather for a while now.

And I think, somewhere, despite all I have said, that I deserve the bad weather. That I don’t deserve sunshine. And that I don’t even know how I could become deserving – something that, by all measurements, isn’t even a thing. And here we still are.

Showing up for yourself is a phrase I used to think was corny. I think a lot of things around self-love still feel corny to me. In my eyes it’s always sounded a little embarrassing – to make caring for yourself something atypical. Which, to be honest with myself, it has been. And now I’m trying to look ahead and see which new things have become visible in my future.

I went to a party (a great opening line for any blog post) and had a fantastic time. A romp. A hoot and a half. I felt loved, I felt seen, and I also felt like I deserved it. Whatever that means – love isn’t earned, only received – but I did feel like I did everything right. So let’s stay there. I did everything right. I loved, and I was loved. It’s enough to make you sit and think, days later. Enough to make you want to write it down.

But an important reason I’m writing it down is that I also loved myself. Because I showed up for myself, and made a big demand to others for the respect that I deserve.

May the bridges I burn light the way

— some wise people¹

It’s a good feeling to think you may have made new friends. So when, on the way home, you get misgendered and ignored by one of those people, it throws you off. Because you wonder what went wrong, and where. I always assume, in a situation of conflict, that I may be wrong (for which I’m in therapy). In a case of being misgendered by someone who seemed fully on board all this time, it points a bright sharp spotlight at everything I’ve done to, perhaps, deserve this.

So I go quiet, and I sit back, and I am stormy-headed.

And I am pestered, some time later, as to why I stopped engaging. And is there, internet friend, invader of my public notebook, diary enthusiast, a way in which I can respond to someone else’s disrespect without showing my disappointment? Maybe for you. Maybe you’re better than me. I can’t hide that sort of thing (for which I am not in therapy). So I show my disappointment, my frustration, and perhaps even my anger. I tell the person I thought could be a new friend exactly how she made me feel, how this always makes me feel, how this always is my problem, and how it always falls on me to somehow fix their mistake. And I worry that I lost a potential new friend. And I worry that I did the wrong thing. And I worry that I burned a bridge.

But perhaps that is what I need to be there for myself. Perhaps the bridges I burn can light the way. Perhaps the way I stand up for myself can be a lesson for how I love.

If I’m standing anyway,

What will I stand for? For myself. For love. For what love? How much love do I embody? How much love dare I give, and how much dare I expect? Dare I expect it in return? Dare I think I deserve it? Have we not established that love is never deserved? That will remain in the dark for me. But perhaps I will find another bridge to cross.

The other day, I received a message that, at first glance, seemed like a great opportunity. From the quick preview that popped up on my phone, all I gathered was that a journalist wanted to feature me for something. That’s not too shocking; Oslo is a small town, and I’m a visible queer here. I work with the local Pride, I organise queer events (but only in non-plague times, of course), and I get around, socially. I think it’s safe for me to call myself a Known Quantity. Not famous, but known by people across town.

Not only that, I received the message a few days after some Instagram activity: one, a post for Trans Day of Visibility, promoting queer charities; and another, a much more personal effort to describe the feeling of not seeing a future with yourself in it. I also paired that with a photo shoot in which I replicated a portrait of Cate Blanchett, because, that’s the sort of antidote that one needs sometimes, okay?

Anyway, that was my media week that week: a loud TDoV post and a photo shoot where I compare myself to a beautiful woman. It made for a pretty obvious stream of information, I would think. A very readable bunch of posts, where my transness and my womanhood are emphasised. But reading, I’ve found, is not something all journalists are capable of.

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The full message I received from that journalist was confusing, to say it kindly. I want to make a lovely story about how we express ourselves, and I’m currently looking for men who wear makeup. I saw your Instagram profile, and I’m wondering if I could have a chat with you?

Charming. Good opener. You have to be sloppy to look at my profile and not see the photos, and really bad at reading to not read that I’m a woman.¹

Now, this is just a blip in my life. A low-effort attempt at getting some ❝human interest❞ subjects for your newspaper. But what a fucking effort, y’all. To see an Instagram profile and have the ability to see nothing but the ‘Message’ button. To not read – for want or for ability – the word ‘trans’ on the second-to-last photo in my profile. To not even read my bio. I’ve long known to treat journalists just like everyone else: generally as clueless as the rest of us. But the blatant inability to read a profile, especially when you’re looking for people who, in some way, have anything to do with (very superficial ideas of) gender expression, really does lower my esteem a little more. It was a low bar, and this journalist limboed right under it.

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Queer readability is a whole thing. I know that. I live it. I’m visibly, legibly queer, and there are many more words to write about that. For example, every single stranger that I’ve met in the past year has misgendered me. Every single one. And that hurts every time. But I also know they’re all being colossal dipshits. It’s the twenties, baby! Get with it. If you meet someone and you don’t want to ask for pronouns, the best gamble is usually in their expression, not your assumption. If you struggle to read me, please, please refrain from trying to write your own version instead.

So the good news is that I’ve been on hormones for about a year. The bad news is that the official medical instance gives everyone the exact same dosage of the medication, no matter your weight, metabolism, current hormone levels, age, or any other factor that may introduce meaningful variance. All this is to say that, for some months in 2020, in the middle of pandemic isolation, I was also being chemically depressed.

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I’m on a mix of testosterone blockers and estrogen supplements. This makes sense: it is intended to bring my hormone levels closer to that of an average cis woman. And the package works. My blood levels have changed. But they changed a bit too radically.

After very few months, my energy levels were at an all-time low. My concentration was shot, and my mood was bad. Very bad. I mean: when I’m in a bad mood, I’m grumpy but energised. What was happening here was new to me. I was empty. That’s bad. I never feel empty, for better or for worse. But now I did. Horribly so. I was, for the first time in years, beginning to feel suicidal.

And I remembered something about Alan Turing. A fun little distraction, the man who won the war and who was hated by his country for loving men. What the government did to him after the war is one of those despicable things so horrible that the government officially apologised for his treatment. Posthumously, of course. It was so bad that Queen Elizabeth II pardoned him 59 years after his death. I’d be more impressed if he hadn’t died during her reign. She could have been a little quicker on the call there.

What the government did to him was, well, first of all to consider him a criminal, but also to give him chemical castration treatment. If that sounds spooky, it is. It’s a medical program that is intended to lower one’s testosterone levels, with the hopes of reducing their libido to zero. And, because Alan Turing was Criminally Gay, he needed to have his libido slashed, so that he wouldn’t gay so much anymore. It was that, see, or incarceration.

Now, one of the side effects of testosterone reduction is that, if done at too great of an effect, you also become depressed. Horribly, horribly depressed. A prominent theory about Alan Turing’s death is that depression took him really low, and he died by suicide. And this brings us to my 2020 realisation.

On a rough day with a lot of introspection, I stood in a corner of my apartment, and I realised that I was also being chemically depressed. It struck me that my misery was being induced. When I finally got my blood levels tested, the results indicated no measurable testosterone. The dosage was up to four times too high.

We adjusted my dosage, and I learned that every patient, no matter their medical information, gets the same treatment. I learned that all my trans friends have been through the same process, with the same doctors at the helm. And we all improved measurably upon changing the dosage. I stopped being suicidal, for example. Pretty good improvement in my book.

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There’s a story the doctors tell every patient at our clinic: We’re just looking out for you. We’re helping you make the right choice. We’re just here to provide guidance. But it’s hard to take that seriously when nobody looks at the data, when nobody considers the impact of a mistake, and when even my primary psychologist routinely forgets my pronouns. The only bitter consolation is that at least in this way I am being treated as a woman: having my medical concerns ignored by men.