Stuck in the mud

I feel pretty pathetic for not having posted anything here in so long; I’d planned at one point to have three new blogs up by now—and, indeed, I have half of each written—but sometimes life gets in the way (or some analogous cliché). The past week has been…no. The past three years have been obscured. It’s like driving around at night in a dense fog, my brain feels clouded, as though all my intellectual faculties have become this nebulous mess that I’m trying to see through. I don’t know what happened: in high school I spent 100% of my time completely devoted to academic success, and I was pretty damn brilliant—and that’s not me bragging; really, I was amazing and fabulous—second in my class only because the valedictorian had one or two more AP classes than I did. I had this intense affinity for mathematics and biological science; it was as though I breathed them. I suppose this momentum continued into my first semester of university. That fall I took second semester chemistry, second semester biology, French film, and an art history class, and I pretty much rocked the world of every class. I passed biology with a 100%--a 98% in chemistry. I wrote French as though I were fluent in the language, and art…well, any buffoon could excel in that class with their eyes closed. I had a 4.0 GPA, just like in high school, so what happened after that first semester?

Beginning in 2006 I felt my powers slowly slipping into this haze, just under the surface where I could not get at them. You might be able to guess, but the dimming of my academic brilliance (or, rather, what I perceive to be a dimming of such) coincided with the beginning of my transition. It started out slow: that second semester I only had one A- (that was organic chemistry), but every step thereafter I felt as though I was performing well below my potential. I got (gasp!) more A-‘s, even a couple of B’s! The horror! But joking aside, I know damn well I was capable of graduating with a 4.0, even with the student groups and “social activities” I had going on. And now, over a year after graduation, I feel so stagnant, as though all my powers have not been exercised in four years. They’re begging to be brought back to the level they were in high school. Problem is I don’t know if that’s possible.

It’s at this point I really want to make a joke about this all being a symptom of woman’s intellectual inferiority, but I don’t know who reads this, and I don’t know if you’d appreciate my twisted sense of ironic humor. There is that fear, however, that somehow my transition has diminished my intellectual abilities in some way—or rather clouded my mind. I’m passive to these complex ideas that float around me all day. I’m not engaging Queer Theory at the levels I should be, and I’m not delving into my biological studies the way I used to. It’s as though all that raw power is just out of reach. I can see it, but not tap into it. It’s like being chained back behind a translucent curtain. And I’m not sure if that makes any sense to anyone—I don’t know if you’ve felt this strange combination of stagnation and dimming and clouding of the mind. And I know this doesn’t really have much to do with transgender anything—it’s really more my long drawn-out excuse as to why I haven’t been writing real blogs posts…and why I don’t feel like I’ve made any intellectual achievements in three years. I used to sit around and think that maybe this was a symptom of redirecting my energies from academia to personal issues—that’s in some ways what I did when I began my transition, and anyone who has made the dramatic switch to estrogen can probably attest to the fact that it makes you confront emotions on a more intensive level than testosterone does. But now I’m not so sure that excuse holds.

I guess this is when Sisyphus watched the rock roll back down the mountain. It's a moment of brief clarity (if you can call it that). I'm feeling a huge disconnect between me and my intellect, between me and my own academic future, and between me and this activism that just two months ago was so important to me. I feel like I've somewhat slipped away from my own life--or at least from some major aspects of my person. I need to wake up and somehow figure out how to get myself back.