*cough* Sorry. I couldn't resist a wacky title for what is going to be, I'll be honest, something I should probably be posting on a generic blog somewhere.

But as I've expressed in the past, I feel safe here. Erin is such a sweetheart, and I trust others to be as respectful as I try to be.

This is going to be long, boring, rantish, and dramatic. I can't help that. So if you don't care, please, please, please stop reading now because this is more for me to get some things off my chest than anything, and again, I apologize for that.

This is and has been for a very long time (Going at least 2 1/2 years, now) a safe haven for me. I only first made my presence known just over a year ago at Christmas. I was feeling uncharacteristically chatty, so I just started writing.

I find myself in a similar mood tonight, so... here goes.

I've been in a kind of funk for the last week now. It's not a bad kind, though. It's more of a contemplative kind. I go through these stages about every couple of months, but this one was particularly intriguing for me because I started to realize a lot of things about my life, and how miserable I really have been for the last ten years.

I spent the last 45 minutes just standing in the shower with my eyes closed, thinking about a lot of things, like what "Zoe Taylor" means to me, where my life went wrong, and what would've happened differently if I'd never told anyone about my gender issues.

Honestly in retrospect, I feel like the more I tried to talk to people, the worse it always made things.

When I was 16 I told my female cousin, who had told me a year earlier that she "became a lesbian" at girl scout camp (Laugh if you want at that, by the way. It didn't last through the summer before she was boy crazy again ;-)). She proceeded to spread it around school, which I didn't find out about until I went to accept the Silver Crown and Pace Maker awards for our yearbook staff my senior year, and noticed there was a lot of pointing and snickering among certain girls whom were friends of friends...

I followed up on it later and found out that my suspicions were dead-on, but that's getting off-topic. Noone ever gave me grief over it, privately or publically, so... Anyway.

My childhood was riddled with incidents of arguing over this. At one point I can vividly remember this one incident, when I was about seven, my mom thought my step brother was the one that had been getting into her things. She asked me first, and I panicked, lying to her.

After watching her chew his butt up one side and down the other for over an hour, I knew I did NOT want to tell her I was afraid and lying.

That actually compounded problems for me later. My 'brother' has always been a troubled kid, and I know she felt guilty about that incident later when, after he had long moved out, I'd slipped up and left some things out when I was 12. The proverbial crap hit. The. Fan.

We argued about it for well over two hours, her screaming at me, me screaming back lies because I just didn't want to talk about it.

Don't get me wrong. My mother thought she was doing the right thing. She's just very... very conservative, and I'll be honest here, I haven't trusted her since. We used to be close when I was little. Even then, I was mistaken for being a girl almost daily until she started practically shaving my head (My barber came to call it "The Regular" after years of getting that 1950's super-short 1-inch sheer =P), which helped a little.

Probably didn't help though, that my afforementioned cousin was only 9 months younger than me, and growing up we were practically twins, so we spent a looot of time together.

I'm also reminded of another point in time where I don't even know how the conversation started, but my mom hinted that she felt like it was her fault. She wouldn't elaborate, and I sure as hell wasn't going to press the matter because we'd been enjoying a relative cease fire for a good few months.

But she said something that really hurt me, and it's stuck with me all these years, too.

"If there's some treatment that could get you fixed..."

Frankly, I didn't want to be "fixed". Not in the way she intended, anyway. I knew exactly what she meant. She wanted me to be a rough-and-tumble hang-out-with-the-boys and fix cars "normal" boy, while I was perfectly content spending my time reading, writing poetry, practicing my trumpet for the school marching band, or what-have-you.

I'm going to say at this point, that I've never experienced any "Ah hah!" moment like you read in the stories or in the very real lives of some of our authors here.

My entire life has been one big old ball of "WTF" for as long as I can remember, but I've discussed all of that in my very first blog entry over a year ago.

That's part of what makes dealing with all of this so confusing for me though. I don't know. Every time I think I do, I find myself going through "The Cycle" again.

The Cycle is something I've discussed in private with one or two folks here, but I've never gone indepth about it before, that I can recall.

Basically what happens is I start to have these nagging feelings again, I let myself get comfortable feeling them, and then something will happen to snap me back the other way. I used to purge after that, get rid of anything and everything that is "Zoe", and convince myself that it's all just sexual impulse, that I just need to get a girlfriend.

That much I'll admit to. I miss dating, but my last serious girlfriend saw to ruining my trust in humankind quite thoroughly, but again, that's another rant I believe I've beaten to death in the past so I'll leave it alone for at least a second or two.

What bothers me most is that there are certain things I was terrified of, that would always snap me back to the purge phase in the past.

For one, I was scared my family would disown me. I was also afraid that if I changed my mind, it would be too late, emotionally, to repair those bridges with said family.

And, finally, my parents, as I've said, are good people. They're just very conservative. And I was always afraid of damaging their reputation in the community. I just couldn't do that to them.

You know what the irony of all this is, though? It all goes back to my unusually long shower earlier. I started to realize that the things I had been so scared of were already the case, only... backwards.

With the exception of my gram's funeral, I haven't seen or spoken to most of my family since high school graduation.

We all just kind of drifted apart, and in a lot of ways I think I alienated them just by not wanting to be associated with most of them - one uncle was a brutal alcoholic and an absolutely terrifying drunk, with two kids on some pretty hard drugs while my aunt just looked the other way, and I've never had a good relationship with the other aunt and uncle.

My third and fourth sets of aunt and uncle - the fourth from my mom's side, both live in Oklahoma so I just never saw them enough to maintain anything.

As far as the community? Well, I'd say this town's got enough dirty laundry that I can't possibly add much more to it.

The big thing for me - the big realization though, and this is the hardest thing in the world for me to admit to anyone, is that I've been leading a self-destructive lifestyle for a long time now.

I'm not an alcoholic, and I don't do drugs. I don't even smoke cigarettes, but I'm also not active, at all. I don't exercise, I overeat, I don't go out unless I have to, and I don't take care of my body. I never finished college, dropping out two credits shy of my Associate's partly because of a big falling out with yet another friend, and partly because my instructor that year had no business teaching math.

Last night, I chipped a tooth eating a bite of pizza. It didn't hurt at all, but it got my attention like nothing else because it was warmed over heat-and-eat that had already been softened up by the microave re-heating.

It was like God threw a bucket of water on my head and said "Hey, people telling you you need to take better care of yourself were right!"

It gets more complicated from there, though. I find that the only time I actually feel like being accomplishing is when I let myself think more favorably about things like my gender identity issues, when I'm not just saying "Okay, it's this and only this, I can let this drop with peace now."

It's a subconscious thing, I guess. I just feel like taking better care of myself when... Honestly, I can't even bring myself to type it. You get the idea; I'll leave it at that.

I've had many times in my life where I wished, and prayed to God that I'd wake up and be a girl, and there are times when I wonder if my doubt is more fear of the consequences of going down that road - or as one of my ex-best friends once put it, "That dark road to hell you're on".

*sigh* Friggen hate the south.

I honestly don't know what I should do anymore. Part of me really wants to seek help, but I'm absolutely terrified. I know the horror stories of quack doctors and therapists who think they know best, and I've had more than enough of that BS from "professionals" to last me a lifetime courtesy of my bad eyesight (Eight surgeries and counting - ten if you count outpatient laser surgeries).

I'm absofreakinglutely terrified of needles, you know? And I don't mean squeamish. I mean when I was in seventh grade, I broke my knee to a point where my kneecap was a free-floating object inside a blob of swollen flesh the size of a watermelon.

I had it x-rayed by a quack doctor who told me it was just a sprain, and that Monday, I found out I had, in addition to the kneecap thing, a hairline fracture on the growth plate. It's a miracle I didn't grow up unevenly, according to the orthepedic surgeon I saw.

The secondary x-rays hurt a lot, while they twisted my knee this way and that, but the worst was having it drained - and this is the part of the story that's important to the afforementioned needle phobia.

When he told me what he was going to do, I freaking bawled. I was so absolutely out of my wits scared that my mother very nearly had to restrain me, and during previous eye surgeries, I think they actually did at one point.

HATE needles, and I'm not afraid to admit that I am an absolute little girl about them either.

Alright, now that the internet has enough information about me to ridicule me for the rest of my natural life, I'm going to stop typing, go find some kleenex, and curl up with a bad movie, but I just... like I said, I needed to vent.

I apologize again for doing this. I can't bring myself to write fiction because every time I do sit down to write, I see so much of myself in my characters that it feels wrong somehow, so I stop. That's one of the reasons I was so upset by the situation with my friend and her girlfriend ending so terribly. I had finally begun working on a character I was really proud of, who wasn't just a personal demons novel.

Err, anyway... Best wishes and my deepest, heartfelt thanks to anyone who actually made it through all this. I feel a little better. No less confused, but at least now I can come back to this as I have with past blog posts, and try and sort through my feelings.

~ Zoe

Edit: Slight edit to change the intro. I didn't mean to sound snarky, I swear :(

Edit 2: Oh, something I'd like to add, but completely forgot to touch on.

The last time I had gone through this, I talke dto Holly quite extensively. I made up my mind that I was finally going to talk to my mother about all this.

I tried. I really, really tried, but she started accusing me of living in my own little world, and that was the end of that conversation right then and there.

Later, we went shopping. As I stood there amid aisle after aisle of women's shoes, waiting for her to try on a pair of walking shoes, I couldn't help feeling unbelievably uncomfortable, and totally out of my element.

I don't know if I should have or not, but I pretty much took that as a sign that she was right all along, and left it at that. I don't know anymore. ANYway. I'm really finished now. Thank you for letting me rant, again.