CW: Anatomy, family problems, suicide, self-harm, genital self-harm

There’s a lot of things I love about myself. I have two jobs that contributes to the community and helps kids, I’m a damn good artist, and I am one of the kindest people you’ll ever meet. I am so loved by so many people.

I stay alive for them. I would leave such a ghost behind in the community I care about the most. My part-time job is at the performing arts school I went to a teenager. I can’t put the people there through walking down the main hallway and having no hope of seeing me because I am dead. What I hate about myself is that I have so many good things in my life, yet I don’t want it.

I’m 42 days away from the first stage of bottom surgery. One of the biggest things I hate about myself, my genitals, is about to be wildly different. It is a full vaginectomy. It’s not being closed/mucosal ablation, the whole damn tube is being taken out on Feb 6. Honestly, I’m nervous for the surgery because it’s pretty risky (you know when a surgeon says ”it’s a bloody surgery” that you’re in for an experience) and because some of my earliest memories are about having a vagina. In one way or another, it’s always been a central part of who I am. I’ll be eligible for 2nd stage (metoidioplasty w UL) on May 6 (my birthday is May 8, how nice it’d be to have it that day). I’d prefer to wait until after the school year ends (the full-time job is in public elementary school) to finish up the year, not abandon my students more that I already will be for my vnectomy recovery, and because I had to take that same timeframe off this past school year because I needed a partial psych hospitalisation. I have extremely bad dysphoria around my genitals. I have a history of self-harm and I’ve even done it there. I don’t even regret it, in fact I wish I had cut off more and I literally have piercings from one side of my outer labia to the other to keep the damn thing closed. Yes, I put them in myself.

I recently posted a question about flags in r slash ftm men. All I wanted to know is if there’s a flag specifically for trans men. I didn’t say anything about trans women, but I woke up to like 20 comments and most of them saying I’m transphobic because I was wondering if there’s a flag that represents my identity but doesn’t have pink in it. I have a countdown widget on my phone with days until my surgery, and I just wanted to give it a photo background.

I don’t have a relationship with my biological father (he’s still married to my mom and I live with him, I just can’t honestly call him my dad). My mom and I used to have a good relationship, but this year it’s really gone downhill. I know she loves me, but I don’t really…want her love anymore? She’s said some pretty nasty things about my mental illness (recurrent severe major depressive disorder with anxiety), like that I cut to manipulate people and use it as an excuse to get out of things. Also, just general negativeness about my surgeries. I had my hysterectomy over the summer, and I think it really bothered her that I won’t be having kids (and now certainly not biological). Literally she was half the reason I kept one gonad, so that she’d believe that I could do in vitro with a surrogate. I’m now planning to get it out with the vnectomy. I described how I feel about it to a friend, and she said it reminded her of how someone she knew who had cancer talked about having tumors.

So the reasons I’m not killing myself is that it’d damage my community/the people I love very dearly (I’m not just telling myself that; the idea of my father figure/primary male role model mourning me makes me cry), and that hopefully my genital dysphoria is alleviated by the upcoming reconstruction. I’m not sure I can stay alive for others people, but I need to at least make it to being fully healed from my final stage of surgery (prosthetic testicle implantation, 6 mos after the main meta, so late 2023/early 2024). But right now? Right now I’m in hell. I wish I could go to sleep and just wake up once my reconstruction is all done.