収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

I had a pretty good day for it being the blackest day on my calendar.

Twenty years ago today my brother died. It was thanksgiving day, that year. He died in a car accident. No other cars involved, he wasn't drunk, the weather was fine, he was on familiar roads...

So there was no reason for it, no lesson to be learned from it or cause to take up because of it.

Normally I will have a wee dram for the occasion, but tonight I went to the gym instead, knowing that the rest of the week is too full to allow it and not wanting to let the good effect of actually making it to trans gym on Saturday wither away already. It was a good choice but means I got home and as usual went upstairs to a shower and bed.

It was a pretty good day. I woke up absurdly early as usual but didn't feel tired. I got up and did my morning chores (opened the curtains, emptied the dishwasher, made a pot of tea), made breakfast and started work an hour early. My manager is off all week and his manager is off today, so while I'm awaiting feedback from them on a report that's perilously close to its deadline now, it's not my problem if they don't get it to me. I didn't have many meetings either (though the two I did have were bad enough), it was much warmer than it had been at the end of last week and the sun was even out sometimes.

Most of all, what made this November good is that I wasn't fretting about my dog dying (like last year), I didn't break my ankle and need an operation (like two years ago), and a dear friend wasn't having a psychotic episode where I was the only person she'd talk to (like three years ago).

November just sucks.

But this one has been okay. Yes it's been full of work and of counterprotesting fascists, but it's also had some fun stuff and there's more happening this week: a birthday party, a wedding, a new Knives Out movie, a thanksgiving dinner that I'm not cooking...

Twenty years.

It doesn't feel long ago.

And yet I've also been so many people since then. I'm sad I didn't have the chance to find out who he would have been.

Last Monday morning I was supposed to have a voice therapy appointment but our internet was borked. I had to drag D out of bed just after 9 and make him deal with a confusing and mysterious problem. He bodged a solution really quickly but I was supposed to have a voice therapy appointment at 9:30 and I'd texted the clinician warning her that I wasn't sure I'd be able to make it. We had

Thank you for letting me know. Unfortunately as it is such late notice this will count as a missed appointment. Please let me know if you would like to re-book the session, and if there is anything we can do to support attending going forwards. If you do not reply within 7 days we will assume that you do not wish to continue voice therapy and you will be discharged.

Something about that "if you would like to re-book the session" rubbed me the wrong way -- I waited years for this referral! -- and all of a sudden I didn't want to re-book. I was put off by how the technical problems were handled at the first appointment, and even though they didn't recur and I was confident I wouldn't have them again because once she agreed to use Teams I gave her my work address where Teams works fine every day so I didn't anticipate any recurrence.

I just. Still felt weird about it, like I was doing it wrong by treating this as an investigation about something I'm curious about rather than something where I had clear and specific Transition Goals in mind. Indigo might be a little too patient-led for me, heh; I appreciate the ways it's more flexible and less judgmental than the old Gender Identity Clinic system, but this isn't the first time I've struggled with mismatched expectations: I'm expecting some kind of information that doesn't exist and even when I ask for it I'm told to look at social media websites I don't use; I'm like you're the NHS, don't you have a photocopy-burned brochure for me?

(This feeling I'm having here is like a grain of sand in comparison to the deserts-worth of the same feeling that I'm having when it comes to top surgery... I've written thousands of words about that so far and it's still not ready to share.)

It just felt like too high a hill to climb, so I've let the seven days go by and now I'm discharged from the service. I hope someone else who's chomping at the bit for their voice to sound different in some particular way is making good use of the appointment instead.

"I gotta show you something," Dad said, and got up from the sofa so disappeared from the camera. My mom was left looking boggled; she didn't know what he was doing. There didn't seem to be anything in the conversation -- about them decorating their house for Christmas, I think -- to hint even to her what he was thinking of.

He came back quickly, with a big white fuzzy teddy bear. The bear was wearing a blue knitted scarf and something I couldn't quite see on his forehead that might have been ski goggles or earmuffs. Dad was waving a white fuzzy paw at me. It was the cutest damn thing.

He explained about how he saw it in the window of the local secondhand store a few times, and that the bear was asking my dad to bring him home, so one day he just went and bought it. He said it didn't cost much.

"I'm trying to think of a name for him," Dad said. "I'm calling him Bob for now but that isn't quite right." Mom asked if I had an idea for a name, and honestly my mind had immediately gone to Bernard but I think that'd be too fancy for them. Dad mentioned Frank which I like a lot; reminds me of my old pal from a volunteering group who's retired even from that now; a lovely old blind guy called Frank with a guide dog called Ronnie.

Frank, or whatever he's going to be called, lies on what I think of as the guest bed but my parents call "my" bed because they think the guest room is my room. (For a long time, my mom was calling the basically-theoretical bedroom in the as-yet-unfinished basement "Chris's room" which...makes my head hurt just to think about. I think now that the basement is finished it's being called just "the bedroom downstairs," which is a vast improvement.) "Your dad had been wanting to get a bear for your bed for a while," Mom said, which again is a strange sentence.

But Frank is lovely. Even when Dad put him back, his black quarter-zip was covered in fuzz from the bear. It was very cute. It's really heartening that he continues, in his dad way, to just get Ideas in his head and do these little whimsical things that my mom can only humor him in; it's one of the few things my parents don't share.