In the time that followed, I gradually discovered what I liked and what I didn’t like. This was because I was becoming calmer and less angry and because I was starting to feel more at ease at the RIC. I no longer felt as controlled as I had before because they didn’t demand anything of me at the RIC and treated me well. And I started to develop my own identity again. I started doing more things again. For example, I spent a whole year taking photos at all kinds of festivities celebrating the anniversary of my village. I had also done a lot of photography in the past, and it was nice to be able to do something with it here. And from that time on, people knew where to find me when they needed a photographer. I also took a beginners course in Spanish. I met someone here who told me that she had a friend from my hometown named Suzan. I saw them together once in my hometown, and when I ran into her on the bus later, I spoke to her. Suzan had also had periods in her life when things were not going well. But by the time I got to know her, she had been doing very well for a while. I had given up hope of ever having a girlfriend again, but Suzan became my girlfriend. Those were good times, although I didn’t always feel completely at ease at her house. I always felt very inhibited and couldn’t really be myself because I was afraid of her parents’ reaction. It felt like some kind of exam, to be around your girlfriend’s parents; as if you were constantly being judged. I never dared to say this out loud.
After we had been going out for a month, Suzan changed a lot. She started getting all sorts of complaints again, and she seemed like a different person. But I supported her, even though I sometimes thought: what am I doing? Fortunately, that passed after a while. After a few months, I started spending the weekend at her place, which was certainly an unusual experience and I liked it. At the start of the relationship, I had already indicated that I was a sexual wreck, but we decided to give it a try anyway. But it soon became clear that it wasn’t going to work. The doctor gave me some erection pills, but to be honest they didn’t help much. The defective part of my personality simply worked against me, and no pill can fix that. I also focused on her the whole time and couldn’t get in touch with my own feelings. I could do it on my own, but not when connected. The intimate contact made me impotent, even though I found her very attractive. And this can all be easily explained by what I have experienced. A person needs aggression to be able to get excited, it is your passion, and for most people it is allowed in a controlled form, in the form of your sexuality. But since the part-time therapy, I have had to do without those feelings, and I am paralyzed by that incredibly great ability to become fearful. I was not afraid of sexuality or anything in the world around me at that moment, but the intensity was inside me, directed at myself. And it kept getting triggered. I had been brought into contact with it in the part-time therapy, because they had not expected what I had been subjected to in my youth to be so intense.
From time to time, Suzan expressed doubts about the relationship. She did not know if she liked me enough, and she wanted me to see a sexologist. I felt so attacked when she said something about this, and I was so convinced that I could not change anything about this by going to a sexologist (and I still believe that, because I have never seen a sexologist cure a psychiatric patient), that I honestly told her so. It went on for a while and then she said that my passivity also bothered her (while she was also very passive herself). I said that it would always be like that because of my great fears, and then she broke up with me. This was not a fun experience, but I had remained true to myself, and it took a while to get over it, but it didn’t damage me. It was better that way. It had only lasted 7 months. And I realized more than ever how sexually warped and torn I was.
I also came to greatly dislike the role I was expected to play in that relationship. I felt like I had to be Suzan’s entertainer. That I always had to be fun. That I should never be annoyed. She dared to say such things to me. Not with her previous boyfriends. I was walking on eggshells a lot of the time, and then every time I did, the words came again: “Jesse, I want to talk to you…” Sigh. So I don’t look back on it so positively. It was as if she had a relationship with a fantasy character, and the more she got to know me, the less she wanted me.
I did realize then how dissatisfied I was with my sexual identity. Of course, I have talked about my identity delusion before (before I started therapy). That it was as if I had a woman’s body. This was hell, because I was not happy with this, nor with the rest of my personality. When I had done the clinical therapy and I had many aggressive fantasies (which, as you now know, kept me going), I finally felt like a man, and I was 100% attracted to women, even though the fantasies I had were quite aggressive, which is nothing more than an intense charge, which I had learned to handle very well, and which actually only came out somewhat destructively with my parents. But I did feel great then and was finally content with myself. And now, after the part-time therapy, I felt terrible again, and on top of that it sometimes seemed as if ‘I’ had a woman’s body again. And sometimes it even felt as if ‘I’ was only ‘allowed’ to have sex with men. I deliberately put ‘I’ in quotation marks because it never felt like I (without quotation marks, and with capital letters: the real Jesse) was the one having those feelings. I always felt like these feelings were forced upon me, first by how my parents reacted to me, and later again in part-time therapy, by how the therapists reacted to me. I had to be someone I am not and do not want to be. They were ‘compulsions’ for me. Compare it to some men who have the compulsion to wear women’s clothing and have great difficulty with this. It’s terrible. Fortunately, I don’t have that specific example. But from time to time, compulsions do arise. And it’s always against my will!
I do make contact with my true self (the real Jesse). I only want to be friends with men! I only want to make love to women. That’s how I was when I left the clinic. Then I was the real Jesse. I feel like I am now ‘a wrong spirit in the right body’. Or ‘a heterosexual trapped in the personality of a homosexual’. This is really awful! I feel as if I have been stripped of my male instincts with much disapproval and under very heavy duress, and as a result also made impotent, and the only way to keep standing under so much violence is to blow yourself up with your own strength, your aggression, the only authentic feeling I had, the feeling that made me Jesse! But anyway, I could no longer do that.
