Because sometimes your brain won't let you sleep, and instead insists on another round of beating the dead horse that is your shitty emotional state.

What does your trans-ness mean to you?

For all of us, it seems to be something different. For some it's about freedom, from societal expectations or toxic masculinity. For some it's about expression. For others, it's something as simple as a fetish, or as complete as a feeling of cosmic wrongness needing made right.

For me, my trans-ness is about despair.

I know that probably sounds harsh, coming from someone who so often tries to be positive, tries to write positive, tries to go for the happy and the romantic and the supportive and the optimistic... but it is. It's that cosmic wrongness level of mis-match, combined with the utter hopelessness of knowing that nothing you can ever do can truly fix you... merely alleviate the side effects of the core problem.

I'm not simply a woman. To be a woman is an expression of a great many wonderful things, and is in and of itself a respectable goal. But that is only one small part of what my identity is.

In my heart I'm more than 'just' a girl or woman. In my heart, I am *female,* in an innate and difficult to define way that is nevertheless immutably core to my very being.

And therein lies my despair. Not just the discomfort or even pain of a failure to fit in. Not just the stress of being constrained to societal expectations that feel foreign to you. No. The absolute, utter despair inherent in absolute barren-ness, to such a degree it is impossible to ignore.

Not only am I barren, but my body mocks me in its barrenness: with every step, with every waking moment I am forced to experience the un-ignorable truth of it, the disgusting atrocity that is what my body has instead chosen to grow. Not a penis, for those are fine things, and I have no issue with them. No, what I have is a grotesque, cancerous malformation, a mockery of anything and everything core to my being. A clear and spiteful indication of how my own flesh wants to poison me and deny me all the things that, in my heart, I cannot help but hold so dear.

It's the despair of the mother who loses her child before she ever gets to know them. The despair of the girl whose first period never comes. It drains me, and drives me to depression and fugues I fight to pull myself out of.

Is it any wonder that some days it seems it takes all the effort I can muster just to make myself keep breathing? Is it any wonder that, for all I want to do more, to strive for more, I can barely find the energy to care for myself on the most basic of levels?

I try not to beg. Try not to plea. I try not to burden others with the weight of my pain... but the older I grow, the harder and harder it is to continue to bear the burden at all.

The old wisdom is that when you want something you simply have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps to get it. But I have no bootstraps to pull: my feet are filthy, bloody, and as bare as my phantom womb, that aches for the children I can never have.

I'm trying, so hard it feels, to get myself to a point where I can, if not heal the wound at the root of my pain, then at least alleviate the symptoms of it. But every step takes so much effort, the mud of life sticking to me and dragging me under even as I desperately claw my way to the surface.

And, like with the pain, every year it feels like my goals draw not closer, but ever further away from me.

I don't know what to do. I don't know where to go, or even how to get there. Everything takes so much time, so much energy, so much money... and it feels like I have none of any of those things to leverage.

And, today at least, I lack even the escape of dreams, where I simply am, in my truest form, to help cope with it all.

Melanie E.