The reason I failed my academic year was, as I said before, because I was very preoccupied with myself, because the problems were slowly returning, despite the medication. The fears of illnesses returned. The sexual fears. The clothing problem, and so on. I saw myself distorted in the mirror, like an alien. I could no longer bear wearing glasses. I bought the craziest things to make my dry hair a bit more oily. I suffered from many allergies and was also very tired. Meanwhile, I had been seeing a nice primary care psychologist, and after a number of sessions, I told her about all these strange feelings. She concluded that I had suffered a trauma, and referred me to the psychiatrist Dr. Dalemans at the hospital. The antidepressants were increased and every time I saw Dr. Dalemans, I was crying. It was time to take tests. I did not get an intelligence test, because I was fine in that regard, but I did get a lot of other tests. I will not soon forget the afternoon we were told the results. It was another psychiatrist, Dr. Willemen, who told me everything. He was strict and critical. I arrived there with my mother, and he immediately became angry with her for having the nerve to come along. I told him she hadn’t forced herself on me and that it was fine that she was there. Later I realized that he was being so critical so that I would feel my anger more, because I was suppressing that quite a bit, but I didn’t know that at the time.
I scored extremely high on conscientiousness and extremely low on adaptability in the tests. I also scored extremely high on feminine role behavior. He added that this does not always have to be a problem. I also scored extremely high on anxiety. And he asked me: “Do you always think this deeply?” At one point I broke down again and was crying, and so was my mother. He said: “These problems often come out at this age.” He also said: “You won’t get rid of this with just some therapy or some medication,” which made me think again that I would be forced to undergo gender reassignment surgery, which I did not say out loud. I can laugh about it now, but at the time it was something I was seriously and panically afraid of. “Have you ever considered hospitalization?” he asked me. And something else I can remember was: “Let us do the diagnosis!” because I was so involved and thought I had ADHD, PDDNOS (pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified) and so on, because I recognized myself in them so much. These disorders also gave me a piece of my identity. I decided that I did not want to be hospitalized, but rather undergo part-time treatment so that I could continue to live at home. I was referred to the part-time therapy program, where I had conversations with a friendly psychotherapist, Eelco de Smet, who would later mean a lot to me, in a negative sense. He told me that my personality had developed as a result of the frightening things I had experienced, that I had too many escape routes to ‘escape’ from ‘it’, and that hospitalization would be better. He referred me to a specialized treatment program at a psychiatric hospital in a large city. My exact diagnosis was still unclear to me because I had not asked for it and they had not told me, and that was probably for the best.
When the medication was increased again, I was finally able to feel a little better again. I met a girl, Tanja, through an internet forum. We arranged to meet for the first time at a place exactly halfway between our villages, which we both cycled to. That was a lot of fun at the time. We moved on to sexual acts fairly quickly, but I wanted to be in full control. And it was often purely a matter of testing whether I was functioning and how I was put together in that area. My fears were gone, and because of that I no longer suffered from intrusive compulsions towards men. I was very focused on myself back then and there was always something that stopped me from being so intimate with someone, even though I was functioning fine in this area at that point in my life, thankfully. I ended my relationship with Tanja later during my clinical treatment because the treatment would release a lot of aggression, and that was absolutely incompatible with an intimate relationship. Moreover, the therapy changed the type of woman I fell for, although that is painful. Still, I have often wondered how Tanja’s life turned out.
