Person is Not a Rude Word

Got a memory shock this week – as I searched through my old diaries – to discover that I had stopped diary journalling for 10 years, rather than the 5 or 6 years in my recall…  So, decided to plump for the return-to-journalling diary after the big gap: the year is 2004, the diary an A5ish size beauty: the gorgeous Blue Dog art of George Rodrigue. (Do see his New Orleans gallery link below!)

So, on to the diary enquiry: this 13th July 2004 entry affords a few clues to my then ‘subdued’ trans nature.  The week preceeding that date, is also familiar in other ways to my experience now: then I was low and having to keep a record of my broken sleeping; now I’m coming down from hyper and having adrenalised-broken nights…  These days are Rosy Dog (if barking…) days, but back then the ‘K9’ mood was more of the Black Dog variety… (see Glossary for canine refs)

http://georgerodrigue.com/

With hindsight reflections, I realise that I was writing differently in that ‘lost’ 10 year period; that was the time when I embarked upon creative prose/poetry/proems writing with various groups.  But in June 2004 I was concentrating on visual art creativity and had just completed a year-long, part-time art course where text was featuring in my graphics.

diary entry: 13.07.04

On that Tuesday of minimal journalling in 2004, it seems that I volunteered myself, at a Steering Committee Meeting to support women with as-then-known Manic Depression (I had only had my own bi-polar diagnosis for 11 months at that point), to perform some creative writing word at an upcoming event.  Perhaps a clue to my androgyne / transintersexual nature then is in the fact that I became increasingly anxious about my proems performance at a women’s celebratory event and backed out of both appearing and attending close to the date…  This was yet another example of my finding myself shying away from and retiring from women-only happenings – but without an obvious notion of why… (most dramatic in my mind was my inability to get myself to Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the 1980s).

More interestingly to me… on the art course I had painted (a rare medium for me) a ‘self portrait’ based on the Mayan Tzolkin numbering system and featuring an image of myself with my twin as foetus.  Perhaps in the summer 2004 a year had passed since I finally realised that I had ‘lost’ my twin – a brother – at foetal stage (after many hints over 15 years or so from varied therapeutic bodyworkers of ‘traces’ of foetal trauma evident in my physionomy – plus a few clues in my own behaviour and thinking).

Since being ‘out’ as andro and chatting with other Trans* folk, we have discussed the possibility of ‘foetal lone twin syndrome’ being a cause of transgenderism ideation.  I had certainly not known before 2003 that it was quite common for two eggs to be fertilised in the uterus but for only one to survive, and the other to be not miscarried but absorbed into the uterus – and, presumably, also into the other surviving and developing foetus… Back in those early Noughties then I was thinking that my sense of dual genderedness was due (merely) to a conscious grieving (at last) of my ‘long lost twin brother’…

More anon: another diary, another date…