disability claim – Amy George – 3/27/10

I have been receiving disability benefits since 2001. Though cases are supposed to be reviewed bi-yearly, this is my first review, for reasons unknown to me. After filling out the form, I wrote up this addendum to ensure that the review board understands my disabilities. This is the unpleasant truth – sans the pleasant truth, which I try to live from. In this context, there was no reason to say anything positive, so this is not a happy piece, but I wanted to post it for the record:

I am genetically male and as a child identified as a boy in every way – except at the age of seven, I started to fantasize about being feminized and punished by dominant female figures – a fantasy that haunted me nearly daily until I was 30. The mortifying shame I carried because of it was an incredible weight.

My family was as normal as can be, but I was too sensitive to be normal. As a child I was timid, fearful, always stressed, and preoccupied with Jesus and Satan - though my family was only nominally religious. The only times I felt okay were when I was alone. I have spent a lot of my life in solitude, including the past 12 years; up until 10/2009, when I relocated to California to be near my partner, whom I met on the Internet in 1/09. She is becoming certified as a psychotherapist.

Another factor that has made me unusually withdrawn is my incorrectible eyesight. Because of it, I have never driven a car, and I get lost easily. My eyesight problem was crucial in causing my internal world to drown out the external world. I have always felt locked out of the external world, into my own internal world. I have always been marginal – a misfit. I have never had a credit card – never made more than $6,000 in a year.

My teens were very hard. I was severely depressed, suicidal, a cutter, had dissociative episodes, had explosive diarrhea every day, met Satan when I was 14, and in therapy from age 13 - 22. At college I failed to make any friends until my third year. I have thought of suicide at least half the days of my life.

As a male, I was so inhibited and tense that I could hardly do anything at all. Everything was difficult – just walking out of my front door could be daunting. When a male is inhibited for too long and too deeply, it emasculates and feminizes him – which happened to me. Becoming female was a kind of inadvertent suicide for my male self.

In 1997 my male self broke down, into depression and anxiety. The next spring I went on what turned out to be a spiritual odyssey, with encounters with Christ and the Holy Spirit. The quest led to a week during which I had about two hours of black, dreamless sleep a night. I didn’t need to dream because my dreams had merged with waking life. During the week, poems, paintings, music and dance blew around me like wind, all of them interconnected on an unbreakable web of being. Wild animals gathered round me. When I passed babies, they gazed at me adoringly…I was using no drugs.

On the dark side, during the quest, I suffered demonic attack daily; was possessed by a being named The Stooge; would hear the heartbeat of the world and the growling of the Beast; people fuming with darkness threw things at me and shouted at me; I took all my clothes off in the middle of the night and got down on all fours on the floor to wait for Satan to rape me, because I thought this would end the world; on an airplane there was a kind of spiritual battle, which I responded to by playing dead, which landed me in an emergency room.

My quest rent me open and I couldn’t close myself back up. My only hope was to follow Christ – alone – which I did. I spent the next two years (98 – 00) in solitude exercising, meditating, contemplating, praying, not masturbating or fantasizing about being dominated by a woman, recording 10 to 15 dreams a night. I was suffering deeply – sometimes swooning into unconsciousness in the afternoon. I was unwittingly bringing consciousness to my unconscious female self. When I finally did identify as her, it was sudden, and cataclysmic.

The cornerstone dream of the 4,500 I recorded was that Jesus marries his mother. I saw myself as post-apocalyptic avatar of Christ’s mother – and I still do.

Dreams gave me a spirit name: Rose Mary Pillowwater, which I understood as the name of the woman I was to magically become. I lost my male identity to a sea of psychosis. My first year self-identified as female, I had a love-relationship with a divine lion, who violated me; I was raped by aliens; I was twice picked up by police because I was naked in public; I believed the world was ending about 50 different times; was twice in the psych ward; Rose Mary would surge into me as if she was going to steal my body away – like a body snatcher; I would appear in the distant future for a few moments at a time; spirit presences good and bad invaded my body (for example, one time the world’s hatred, especially of women, channeled through me. Men were inside my body trying to strangle me from within); I was at brink of death often, many times believing my duty was to commit suicide. I felt as if I was disappearing and appearing, which eventually led to a state where I lost my name and became a group of selves dialoging to put me back together. I thought of myself as “We” for years, and still do sometimes.

My ordeal from 1998 – 2000 is recounted in four 250-page books, if you need to see them.

After the psychoses peaked I was left practically bedridden from 2000 – 2004, with a feeling of an ocean roaring through me, dazed, with tremors, no continuity in my thinking – just enduring, coping, in solitude. I received a diagnosis of “schizo-affective disorder.”

In 2004 I accepted that I was not going to magically turn into Rose Mary, as I had believed. I started hormone replacement therapy. In 2005 I had an orchiectomy. I had to quit hormones sooner than I wanted to because they made my blood clot. I still have a partial occlusion of the subclavian vein in my left arm, which makes the veins in my upper-left quadrant stand out, and my arm swells when I do anything too physical – e.g. scrubbing – because of the circulatory imbalance.

While becoming physically female was necessary, it was not a magic pill. As I said, I remained in solitude until last October, and still need a lot of down time, still hearing voices, still coping. I am certain to have PTSD. The traumas replay over and over. I keep reliving them. I endured so much dread that it became a part of me.

Also, I have become as much like the main character of my dreams – Rose Mary Pillowwater – as possible. While this has helped me, it has done little to change my basic orientation, which is that waking-life is like a dream to me. Every moment for me is informed by metaphor.

You know how in a dream you can’t really control anything – it just kind of happens. The only way I feel ok in waking-life is to let it happen like a dream. This is Rose Mary’s way. If I do anything against her nature, she shuts down, withdraws, is miserable, has to lie down, so of course I do, too. I do whatever she wants. She is the ‘dominatrix’ I used to fantasize about. Perhaps someday I will have dominion over myself.

People have the effect of making withdraw, too. I find them – especially in groups – overwhelming. After I spend time in a group, that night, when I lie down to sleep I feel as if people are moving through my body. Sometimes I feel as if people I pass on the street are in my body.

I don’t watch movies or TV or play games. I don’t do things “for fun” like other people, because Rose Mary sees this as distraction from being self-aware and present. I work all the time at maintaining my balance. Just being is a full time job for me. My feeling when I lay down to sleep is that I am going to work. I probably spend 40 hours a week working with dream material of one kind or another. Everything I do is effected by my dreams – what I eat, what I wear, where I go.

I have taken a test online that showed I am autistic. However, if you spoke with me one-on-one, you would probably find me personable. Situations outside of one-on-one, I do not handle well.

In the past three weekly-rental summer seasons I did housecleaning for a neighbor, for the “change over.” This amounted to three hours of work weekly that I needed the rest of the day to recover from, emotionally and physically. It was not good for me – but doable in that I did not have to deal with any people, the season was finite, and the place was next door – I find travel very difficult.

In the 90s, my multiple scleroses began as weakness and pain. It was formally diagnosed until March 2009. It hinders me physically a great deal, inflicting my right side with pain, numbness, weakness, headaches, swelling. I use a cane for balance. I have MS related fatigue, incontinence, fibromyalgia, eye-ache and GI difficulty. There has been MS related blurred vision, and dizziness. I rest a lot.

I do not have the type of MS that attacks and remits. Mine has progressed very slowly. I was advised by the Brigham and Women’s Multiple Scleroses Center – a leading research facility – that there is no effective medicine for my type of MS.

If you wish to corroborate the reasons for and severity of my disability, I encourage you contact anyone who knows me well – my physician, therapist, parents, brothers, partner.

Amy George's other blog, Ask the Dream Queen, is updated Monday, Wednesday and Friday.