Adulthood - 29 Years of Angst
After graduating from public high school, I attended the University of Texas at Austin, and here again I found myself in deep water, as my education from the blinky was proving even more inadequate. I worked even harder, but this time there was no escaping the consequences of that meager education. I was quickly on academic probation, and then I flunked out completely. I kept on again, and yet again, and I failed twice more. OK, so I was a bit slow on the uptake then. I realized that I had to do something pretty drastic if I was going to be able to live up to my potential and be able to learn all the things that I wanted to know. I began to educate myself by reading hundreds of books, and paying attention not only to content but also to vocabulary and style. I also had to go to night school and take some correspondence courses to get my GPA back to 2.0 so that I could return to school. This paid off, because in the spring of 1973 I returned to UT and started making mostly A's. The only area where I had difficulty educating myself properly was mathematics. I had made it through differential and integral calculus before I flunked out, but I knew that higher math was not in my future unless I found another approach. I decided to accept that, and changed my major from physics (specifically astrophysics) to geology, and I excelled. Unfortunately, the professors in the department believed that one must have perfect vision in order to do geology, so each semester they would tell me that I could take something but that I wouldn't be able to do the work. HA! I settled into a pattern that I was to keep throughout the rest of my academic pursuits: if I really liked a course, I made an A; if I found it anything less than completely intriguing, I made a B.
Nevertheless, the department was to have the upper hand in determining what degree I was to attain. For the BS, there were two field courses required, one two weeks long, and one six week course. These were run like boot camp, with students literally running all over the Central Texas hill country while taking samples and making mapping notes. There was simply no feasible way for me to perform the required tasks in the allotted time. I asked the department to allow me to substitute other courses or to allow me to do an independent field study course supervised by a faculty member in lieu of each of the standard courses. They flatly refused to do it for the six week course, but they allowed me to substitute other courses for the shorter field course. That meant, however, that I had to take the BA degree, even though I had already taken the more difficult math and physics courses required for the BS. I knew it was unfair, but I felt beaten down by the intransigence and insensitivity of the department. Furthermore, I felt unvalued by them, and I let their opinions get the better of me. I would eventually understand that I had internalized feelings of incompetence, and I would have to work hard to build up my self esteem. I didn't know about section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (which they were clearly violating), and even had I known, I would have been reluctant to make a formal challenge. This was The University of Texas after all, and they chewed up students for breakfast. You were a number there, and I could see that even though I was number 13 out of a department of 425 students, I was not going to be respected for my work, so I took the BA with Honors in 1979, and tried to get a job. That was another joke. It seemed that oil companies, and state and local agencies shared the views of the Geology department regarding whether a visually impaired person could do the work. I should probably note here that while I had been in school, I was always sought out when students needed help with their assignments. I did a considerable amount of tutoring in crystallography, structural geology, stratigraphy, well log analysis, and subsurface mapping, and several students told me that they would not have gotten through their course work had it not been for my help. Today, they are working for oil companies. Am I bitter? Just a little, but I have realized that this period was simply a necessary part of my growth. I had been interested in physics and geology because I wanted to know how the world worked. That may seem a bit odd, but as someone without good vision, I had no other good way to find out about many of the processes which other might simply observe. That part of my strategy was successful, however, and so I was content with my knowledge about the physical world, although I still follow scientific developments closely, especially where astronomy and geology are concerned.
I decided that the time was right for me to not only learn more about myself and other people, but also to train for a career which was "acceptable" for blind people, so I entered the doctoral program in Counseling Psychology at UT Austin. I did very well there, but by the third year of the program I knew that I could not ethically continue, for I was still living a lie; I was not being myself. How could I possibly hold myself out to help others with their issues when I had not dealt with my own concerns, ie., my gender identity incongruity? Obviously, I couldn't, so sadly, I left the program, as I did not feel that I could really do anything about my problem. I will get back to this a bit later, but for now, just know that I had good reason for my belief. I went to work for a succession of small businesses, always underpaid for they knew how much blind people needed work (there is a 70-80% unemployment rate for blind people in the US), and they knew that I was quite competent and a hard worker. I designed and wrote software, supervised a programmer, bought and sold real estate, managed a mechanical contracting firm, and eventually became a general contractor building homes. In 1986 I had a partial detachment of the retina in the one eye which works, and I lost a little vision. As part of my business, I was required to inspect a lot of work performed by subcontractors, and I had barely been able to do it, but now even that became unworkable. The real estate market in central Texas was crashing, so I sold out to my partner, took what I could and moved with my parents who were retiring to Colorado. I traded stocks and options for a while, but eventually I just read books, operated amateur radio, studied the ionosphere, and became increasingly depressed. I knew that I must once again become proactive or I would surely not survive, and I knew that I needed something about which I felt passion, so I started evaluating several possible career options. I settled on law, for I had developed a low tolerance for injustice, and I still wanted to be able to help others. I took the LSAT and scored in the 95th percentile. What a shock! The next problem was where to go to school. After looking at several schools on paper and talking to them on the phone, I prepared to make the rounds of several in KS, AR, and TX. I settled on the very first one: Washburn School of Law in Topeka, KS. They treated me like I was a real person, and like they cared about me! I had never before been treated this way, and it felt like heaven. I moved to Topeka, and began in the spring of 1993. Much to my surprise, I did very well and was the top student that semester. The first year went wonderfully, but things changed in 1994. I will discuss what happened and why in the next major section.
Now things will get a little complicated as we try to begin to weave the other threads of our life into this basic chronology. With few exceptions, Ray was the only one really out during this time, so he has written this section up until now. During this period, the rest of us had gone so far inside that Ray had no sure knowledge that we existed, although he had a sense that he was concealing someone inside, and that there was something wrong because he was having to live as a man. He had no real idea how limited his understanding was, or what had gone on in childhood. He had been passing a lot through to the rest of us in a mechanistic manner. Very gradually he began to develop more of a distinct personality. He worked very hard to learn how boys and then men were supposed to behave, and he tried to model that behavior. For the most part he was successful, as no one ever guessed, but when he was with males who were discussing women in derogatory terms he became uncomfortable and frightened since he knew that our identity was not male. Although we were biologically male, we had little in the way of male secondary sex characteristics.
We still know little about how we actually functioned as a system during this period. During our recovery we have attempted to reconstruct what went on with our system, but few in the system have memories coherent enough for us to know with a high degree of certainty exactly how our internal processes worked. In addition, we know that not all of the alters have shared all their memories, and we suspect that there are still other alters whom we have not yet found. Even when we think we have had some integration, we continue to find that the process has actually been a blending, and that not all memories are accessible, even with co-consciousness. This is what we believe happened:
Although we had experienced many, many splits during childhood and adolescence, there was no one healthy and strong enough to administer our life. Except for Katie, our core person who is five years old, everyone in the system was severely damaged. Even our Protector and Guardians had problems, and they would often shut down the system with alarming suddenness. Everyone had been seriously hurt by abuse in an effort to protect Katie. No one had had the opportunity to develop an attachment solid enough to form a secure base. No one had developed much maturity because of the harsh and oppressive conditions at home and at the blinky. Everyone had severe anxiety issues, fears of abandonment, somatic problems, difficulty with relationships, major depression, and constant suicidal ideation. In other words, virtually everyone had PTSD. In addition, there was little internal communication, and what discussion there was consisted of fear, anger, and often psychotic outbursts. No one was able to consistently control our life through the shell person of Ray, and this resulted in his life reflecting the same chaos and problems as the people inside. Everyone, including Ray, was in survival mode, and since even surviving felt so precarious, anyone who could make a decision for our overall life made it as they thought best, and this was often at odds with previous decisions made by someone else. Only the most vague plans could be implemented. The need to find out how the world worked, for example, grew directly out of the common need to survive (even with suicidal ideation), but no one really knew what had to be done or how much had to be accomplished in order to meet that need. There was a great deal of flailing about, changing direction, and general disorganization. The din was often chaotic, and Ray was almost clueless about why his head was filled with the clamor. He was afraid that he was losing his mind, and it was this fear which caused him to become proactive, and which eventually resulted in a more complete personality formation.
As a defensive measure, Ray began trying to make more of the decisions, even though this initially resulted in even more fear and chaos on the inside. Eventually he had acquired enough control to act fairly independently of insiders' wishes, but he was still unknowingly influenced by their needs and fears. Another of Ray's defensive actions was to distract himself from what was happening on the inside as well as the feelings he was beginning to experience. He accomplished this distraction by throwing himself into any activity which seemed interesting and challenging. Finally, he started using denial more and more to distance himself from us, finally convincing himself that we did not exist, and eventually actually forgetting about us. These were terrible times for those of us who were inside. We were trapped, cut off, often unable to even track what was going on outside. Once in a while Ray's control would slip, and we would be able to get another snapshot of the outside and what was happening in the life of the body. These snippets were so infrequent that no one could figure out our actual history. Those of us on the inside became more disoriented, more disconnected to any reality, more afraid, more lonely, more out of control, and more psychotic. Ray may have been keeping his mind, but we were losing ours. As adulthood wore on, more and more of us slipped into depression, fugue, catatonia, psychosis, and darkness. It was the Middle Ages all over again. Somewhere the flame of life still burned in each of us, but the light was so weak as to be inconsequential. We would not have our Renaissance until transition, and when we eventually began to come alive again, our sad ordeal would cause us to erupt into the body's life with immense power and chaotic disruptions. Before this happened, however, Ray just carried on as best he could, which was actually pretty well given that he was trying to build a life and personality almost from scratch years after others had done so, and at a time in the body's life that he was expected to have much more maturity, autonomy, and self-assurance than he possessed. While we wish that we had been more able to organize and develop our system so that Ray didn't feel that he had to take over, and the rest of us didn't feel that we had been put in an awful fix, we have accepted that the course our lives have followed has been the best it could be under all the circumstances. Now we will return to our adult history.
We had dated some during high school, and we continued to date occasionally during college, but we were always conflicted about just how sexually involved we wanted to be. Eventually, Ray decided that he was going to take what pleasure he could and begin getting more involved with women. He had no interest in men. In 1970 he married J., and a period of increasing turmoil began; a period which was to last almost nine years. J. was the first woman he loved really deeply, but he was unprepared for the maturity which marriage requires. He had lived most of his life in the highly protected and socially distorted environment of the blinky, and he was socially awkward but J. seemed willing to accept this and love him anyway. Marrying J. was Ray's best effort to establish the secure attachment which had been lacking in childhood, although he could not have formulated that understanding at the time. Eventually, J. betrayed him, however. One night she simply didn't come home. He was beside himself with worry and feelings of abandonment. When she returned the next morning and told him that she had spent the night with an old boyfriend, his life, and indeed all our lives, underwent one of the most devastating shifts we have experienced. We simply could not process this, as it was a crushing loss of the innocence we had tried to hold on to up until then. We had a major split, and Barbara and Diane came into existence. J. stayed with us for several more years, however. It is a wonder that she did, as we were so unprepared to make meaningful emotional or financial contributions to the relationship, even though we tried. She could not know about anyone except Ray, and he was not in any position to really understand enough to explain to her. In a nutshell, he and we had seriously impaired social development which would take many years of work to remedy. He tried to let her know a little about the gender identity issue, but he told her so little that she never really understood. Eventually she began a relationship with a male co-worker and divorced us.
Our lives underwent another drastic change, and we were quite frankly a mess. We immediately went into counseling with a wonderful therapist at UT named Patsy. She helped Ray weather the terrible loss he was feeling, and after working with her several months, she became the very first person he ever told outright about our gender problem. She immediately responded with, "Now you make perfect sense." While in school he had done considerable research on what might be wrong with him, and narrowed it down to what was called Gender Dysphoria Syndrome at that time, later to be called Gender Identity Disorder, or more colloquially, transsexuality. What prompted his revelation, however, was an interview in the May 1979 issue of Playboy magazine with Wendy (formerly Walter) Carlos. He identified so closely with her (especially the interest and experience with music) that he just had to tell someone because she had actually made the dream come true, the dream of being free to be herself. With Patsy's support, he contacted the Gender Identity Clinic at the UT Health Science Center in Galveston, and transitioned very quickly without hormones or electrolysis. He had no trouble being accepted as a woman, and took the name Robyn. We eventually found that Robyn was one of our alters, and she has now integrated into Ray. The Clinic sent a lot of material, but it frightened Ray. He felt like he would be treated like a lab rat, and that loss of control was too much to bear. After a few months he transitioned back and erected very strong defenses around that whole time. Patsy worked closely with him to assist him in processing his inability to continue transition, and by being there for him she saved his life.
Eventually, during graduate school, Ray married M., another doctoral student. M. had her own issues and fell into a serious depressive phase and essentially excluded him from her life. He realized that he should not have married her in the first place, and that he had done so because someone seemed to need him and he had been so needy. He realized that need was not enough, and that there must be love as a foundation. He divorced her a year and a half after they were married. He had few other intimate relationships until he transitioned twelve years later.
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