I think taking care of myself I think I’ve been trying to like sort of eat a bit more healthily and try and leave the house a bit more often, you know, because haven’t been working the past month and I think I’ve been trying to get back into doing things that I used to do but I know for me it’s been a lot of patience just sort of weighing out mental health problems because people think they’ll go away if you do these things, you know, if you eat right, if you exercise, if you socialise if you do all these things they go away and, you know, they don’t, that’s not how it works your brain will pretty much choose when it will go away.

And sort of the past few months I think it’s been a lot of just accepting feelings as they come where like, if you suddenly feel sad you shouldn’t feel ashamed about it you can just be sad. If you’re happy for whatever reason like, I think any sort of emotions you have that come your way just accept them: ‘Well that’s how we’re feeling today but I’m still gonna try and do these things’. It’s a lot of self-motivation, it takes a lot of effort to work on but people I know who are older than me said that things do sort of settle down after a while, you learn how to be more of like, an adult in a stereotypical fashion, you learn to do these things.

When I went to see counsellors where they just sort of kept sort of trying to figure out my sexuality and there was one that I went to see where like I wanted to discuss it a little bit like you know, how I’m struggling with gender identity and I wasn’t really sure what was going on but mainly I’d been there to sort of talk about my depression and how I’d been struggling with like the course and everything. But she sort of kept wanting to go back to, you know, me potentially being like Trans or non-binary, because at the time I was living as non-binary and I find every time I went to a counselling session or a GP I had to explain what non-binary was. And there was this weird sort of like enthusiasm like I’ve never heard of non-binary before can you explain that?’ and it as like you can literally Google it like just, you get like five seconds and you’ll get a response online that will tell you what it is.

I think be patient is a massive one I think just that could be for any, for all young people as well but for young Trans people I think God you have to be so patient with things and it’s tricky because there’s some people who are just in awful environments where like they’re raised by parents who are very gender conforming who are very much like or like religious, you know, who have these principles and beliefs and their, their faith, you know. And I think it’s being patient and realising that there are other ways to get out of situations, you know, they do not have to take the drastic option like you probably are going to have to end up being stronger than you’d like to be in a short space of time. And I think you sort of have to accept the fact that you are going to experience some form of discrimination or prejudice or bullying or just unfortunately, you know, it’s the world and anything could happen I think it’s preparing yourself and just knowing what to do in those situations. And it’s annoying because you shouldn’t have to do that it’s such an annoying thing that you can’t feel safe in your environment and I think it’s realising that as horrible as this situation can seem like it will change like it, you know, nothing stays the same, nothing lasts forever and things, you know, can get better, it doesn’t mean to say that they will overnight and they will really quickly but be patient that’s what I’d say.

I think try and do your research and try and find out as much as you can online, I mean even if it’s wrong, you know, a lot of trans people won’t be that shy about correcting you just treat the patient no differently than you would anyone else, just accept that they may have some additional needs. And also just yeah take care of them in the same way that you would another patient. And if you can try and see if you can attend any sort of, because they have like weekend courses in London where they teach you things about how to like properly interact and, you know, what the right questions are to ask and, you know, also realising that because a lot of GP’s have it where they will change people’s records and put them down as male or you know, like FTM but the problem with that they then get screened in for prostate checks and it happens the same way as well for like ovarian cancer and stuff and it’s, you know, like breast screening and like But yeah so it’s sort of I guess I know that I’ve been put down as like Mx because you have to be either one or the other and like they should just create like a third term where you can just put down this person is like FTM, MTF or just, you know, anything else it would make so much more sense, it would make life so much easier for people because it’s not tricky being put either male or female particularly with passports, you know, because you’ve got to be one or the other.

Like, I know I can go in and out of stages of being like, quite like severely depressed but then sort of like, being kind of like, alright, and unfortunately it’s not really decided by me and I, I’ve learned a lot in terms of how to control my emotions and how to realise when things are getting worse or when I’m spiralling down and just try and sort of keep myself a bit more level headed, but you can only really have so much control over it. It’s sort of, more your brain sort of, chucking a bucket of like, ice water at you being like, ‘Okay we’re gonna be sad now!’ So in the past few weeks it’s been probably the best its’s been in the last few years and that could be a combination of things, you know, I couldn’t really pin it down to anything that I’ve done. I think a lot of it has just been I’ve like, a counsellor who said to me about like, when the feelings come just accept the feelings are there, don’t overthink them, don’t over-analyse and don’t dwell on them and don’t submit to them just sort of accept these feelings are coming and, you know, they’re gonna pass and that’s sort of how I think about like my mental health that, you know, I’ve been in worse places before so when it sort of comes now it almost feels a bit kind of like not as strong as it was and I think there are things that sort of can tip you over the edge.

They sort of make you realise okay like I really need to sort of like start doing things, and weirdly getting my new phone has made a massive difference because I hadn’t had a smart phone for ages and a lot of my friends use social media to sort of communicate and I wasn’t hearing back from people because people don’t really respond to a lot of texts or phone calls now because everyone hates speaking on the phone apart from me it seems. So I sort of got it into my head that a lot of people just hated me that people weren’t texting me back and it wasn’t until I got the smart phone that actually now everyone’s been in contact again but I’m sort of like oh, you know, actually I do have friends they just live miles and miles away. I think social groups are a big thing I think if you’ve got a good group of friends to help you that you can go and see, that you can talk about pretty much anything with I think that helps a hell of a lot like, so I think it’s really tricky like in terms of because a big part of depression and anxiety is just being very lonely, being kind of very lonely, very afraid, very isolated and you do sort of cut yourself off quite a lot whereas I’ve sort of found in the past few weeks that I’ve got more used to contacting people, going to see them, doing things and if someone says do you want to meet up and just saying yes and actually sometimes with friends you have to be the one to make, you know, the decision to do things, to go out and say do you want to meet up and do these things and. I think also having the motivation to do things is a massive thing, that, that’s gradually coming back, I’m still struggling to do a lot of the things that I used to do when I was younger but sort of I guess the enjoyment of it is coming back and I have no idea why, I don’t know why it’s been that way I don’t know if it’s me quitting my job that’s sort of made that because in the past month I’ve been really good but it could just be a fluke it could just be, you know, in the next month I’ll be awful, so it sort of fluctuates. But weirdly very little of it is actually caused by my dysphoria of being trans like I kind of think I’m actually learning to be quite proud and accepting of that at the moment.

I think around my second year I went to my GP about getting like referred to the gender clinic and it was, it was kind of all good because sort of I went purely for that reason to be referred and he kept sort of looking through my notes and just bringing up the fact that I had depression and he just kept trying to like prescribe anti-depressants and it took me like it took about a good, I don’t know 20 minutes for him to actually be like no I just want you to refer me to the clinic

I think like again it’s just another GP who hasn’t been trained in sort of like transgender people but it’s annoying because like as a GP the internet is right there you can just look, that’s what we’re all doing we’re all just looking stuff up, you know. We haven’t been told this by like a general like medical professional it’s all been stuff that we’ve had to go out and research ourselves. So I kind of, I guess it’s a little bit infuriating that a lot of GP’s sort of play the whole naivety card like well, you know, I don’t know about this, this is all so new and it’s like there’s been transgender people about for like hundreds of years, like, you know, there’s something you can quite easily look into yourself just get a few terms right and just learn what people sort of want to get out of that. And like 9 times out of 10 if somebody is coming to you with sort of like gender queries, you know, they’re questioning their gender you can just say to them would you like me to refer you to like to the clinic or there are trans groups about, like probably if there was more stuff in GP waiting rooms, you know, there’s loads of stuff about, you know, like ‘Oh get help’, you know, like ‘prostate checked’, you know, cancer screenings and stuff but there’s not, I didn’t see a single thing about being trans it’s all very like not like hidden but it’s not advertised, so I guess it’s sort of this idea that, you know, that you’re not gonna know a lot about it unless you research it yourself.

But I know sort of, when I was younger that I knew very much that I was female but I sort of just wished in my head that once puberty came like, evolution or whatever it was, it would realise it had like, made a mistake or something and I would just go into puberty and somehow become a boy. But like, and I kept sort of like, every night I would go to bed and just wish that I would just wake up and be like, male. And I still do it now, I started like, in my sort of childlike head I started like sleeping on my front because I thought if my chest was compressed that the breasts would never come and I, it’s still how I sleep now. I used to have, sometimes, when they did actually come, I used to wake up and I’d had like a really good dream and I’d think ‘Oh good they’re actually are gone!’ and sort of rush to the mirror and they’re still there and you’re like ‘Oh, well that sucks’. And I know when I was younger I sort of like, I used to hit my chest a lot in the hopes that if like the nerves were damaged or something again the breasts wouldn’t come and I thought well if they do come can I just like, pray they’re gonna be like, quite small and thankfully they are but I still don’t like them, I don’t want them to be there and like if I could just like tear them off that would be nice. But I think… trying to think what else I did when I was younger… Yeah I think it was just like, just general wishing that something would change and I think as I got older and like, puberty came I started to wish that I’d get some sort of like, breast cancer that I could just have them removed and it would be socially acceptable.

When I was on benefits they sort of, because like I had depression they sort of, they assign you with like a mentor sort of thing that’s meant to help you sort of apply for jobs and everything and get on with stuff like that. And I had somebody else who I saw very briefly who like they were just sort of, and there was a counsellor that I saw who kept banging on about well ‘What, what’s your sexuality then??’, you know, and I was sort of like ‘I didn’t come in here to talk about that’. And I had like another counsellor who like sort of like before I’d come out I sort of brought up like I sort of felt more male than female and he was like, ‘Oh we should talk about that’ and I was like ‘Nah I don’t want to’ and I think he was kind of annoyed that I didn’t wanna progress with it any further but I think it’s because I’d already realised at that point that my dysphoria and my depression were pretty much separate things.

Like, I’d say the dysphoria sort of aggravates the depression but, I don’t know it’s almost like you know how you have the difference between tears of joy and tears of sadness you just know the difference? Like I know when I’m crying because I’m depressed and I know when I’m crying because of the dysphoria and at the moment it’s sort of leaning more towards the dysphoria which I’m weirdly more happy about because it means I’m sort of coming to terms with myself.

I think it’s also like a big thing for me is my voice that I’ve got a lot of trouble with, there’s a Trans singer called Ryan Cassata who got top surgery but decided not to go on hormones because he valued his voice a lot and that’s a big part of his identity and I’m really struggling with that because I sing and I really, you know, singing’s always been like a constant thing, no matter how like miserable I’ve got or like how bad things have got like I’ve always been able to pick up my guitar and write a song or just write about anything and it’s really difficult because like there’s a part of me thinks what I really, if I could just click my fingers and become male overnight then I would but at the same time I think it’s accepting of things that come with that.

I think my voice is like a weird one in terms of how like dysphoria affects me because I quite like my singing voice I’ve sort of learned to sort of accept that a bit more and actually sort of take pleasure in the fact that, you know, people have told me it’s a good voice and they like seeing me perform. But at the same time I really hate performing because I’m terrified that people are viewing me and seeing me purely as just, you know, just like just a woman on stage performing and they don’t really see that actually, you know, it’s like, like a Trans person performing on stage . And for me it’s difficult because it’s my voice I’ve got used to it so I can’t really tell how feminine or masculine it sounds, I know it’s a bit, it’s not like as high pitched as some people’s voices are but it’s whether or not I actually choose to go on hormones and accept that my voice will drop and it could be that a good year where I can’t really sing properly or anything whether or not I decide to sort of be like Ryan Cassata and just have like the top surgery and just, you know, keep the voice because it’s such a big part of me and it’s really upsetting because a part of me is like if I couldn’t sing I wouldn’t have this dilemma I could just, you know, I could just go and do all these things.

I think yeah I think there’s a lot of pressure and I felt like for me there especially was there was like a moment where I was out with somebody’s family and we were going to use like these public toilets and I think my mum asked me at the time she sort of knew that I was sort of fluctuating between using the toilet and she said Are you going in the men or the women’s?’ and I was about to say oh well I might, because they were like scabby toilets so I was like I might go in the women’s because that will be nicer and somebody was like Well he’s clearly gonna go in the men’s why would you go in the women’s?’ And I was like okay so I guess the decisions been made for me. So there is like yeah I think there is this expectation that you will go on hormones, you will get surgery and there’s this whole thing about like oh fully transitioned kind of thing which isn’t really a thing, there’s not really such a thing as fully transitioned I now people like to think it’s having all the surgeries, having all the hormones but I mean a lot of people don’t even realise that you have to be on hormones for the rest of your life, my mum didn’t even realise that you know, there are a lot of things she had to sort of pick up. And I think there is a lot of pressure to conform to this standard of Transness of how, you know, you have to go in this journey, and it’s difficult as well because I know that for me that I would probably be doing a lot more if, you know, I was more male presenting, you know, I feel like I’m probably more comfortable doing more things but at the same time is that just because of how society views me like I always thought I don’t wanna transition for other people and if I do transition it will be for myself. And yeah I think it’s really difficult figuring out, you know, what you want to get out of your own transition and not be forced into, you know, having to go on hormones and stuff.

Because my whole friendship group we were sort of like I guess like the outcasts of the school, we were really, when I think about it we were really weird and I think I was sort of oblivious to how people viewed us or talked about us behind our back because we like used to sing, we used to make up songs, sing songs, we had our own language which again made us seem really weird [laughter] but we had that language purely so that we could talk about like things and people wouldn’t get funny with us. But it was like a really sort of odd friendship group and we had about two or three of my friends like are Transgender that have come out now from the school and it’s kind of funny how it was like an all-girls school but I know at least about just over a quarter of people who are identifying as male or non-binary. And I sort of got to, sort of like a year out from school because I had no idea what I wanted to do, then I went to Uni and I still like sort of went under like female pronouns and everything but I had like a different name, went under like a nickname like [nickname] because I just seemed a bit easier and I had like a whole friendship group of people who just had like all different identities, sexualities and like because it’s like a creative arts university so there was a lot of like diversity and like, you know, just accepting yourself for what you are, accepting others for what they are. So it was really nice and I’m still friends with a lot of people there and I think that definitely helped a lot.