The reason I didn’t make it through my academic year was, as I said earlier, because I was very concerned with myself, because slowly the problems came back, despite the medication. The hypochondric fears came back. The sexual identity fears. The clothing problem, and so on. I couldn’t handle the image of me in the mirror, I looked like an alien, could no longer bear the glasses on my head, bought the craziest things to make my dry hair a bit greasier, suffered a lot from allergies, and also suffered from fatigue. In the meantime I had conversations with a nice psychologist, who I told about all these strange feelings after a number of sessions. She concluded I had one or multiple traumas, upon which she referred me to the psychiatrist Dr. Dalemans, in the hospital. The antidepressants were increased and every time I had a session with Dr. Dalemans, I was crying. It was time to take tests. I didn’t get an intelligence test, because they knew I was smart, but I did get a lot of other tests. I will never forget the afternoon when we heard the results. It was another psychiatrist who told me everything, Dr. Willemen. This one was strict and critical. In the tests I scored incredibly high on conscientiousness, incredibly high on anxiety, incredibly low on adaptability. I also scored incredibly high on female role behavior. He added that this doesn’t always have to be a problem. I also scored incredibly high on anxiety. And he asked me, “Do you always think so 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 just with some therapy or some medication,” to which I then thought again that I would have to undergo forced sex-change surgery, which, by the way, I didn’t express. I can laugh about this now, but at the time it was seriously what I was panicking about. “Have you ever thought about a clinical admission?” he said to me. And another thing I can remember was, “Please let us do the diagnosis!” because I was horrified by giving up control and thought I had Adhd, Pdd-nos (an autistic disorder) and so on, because I really needed something to identify with. These disorders gave me a kind of identity. I decided that I did not want to be admitted, but wanted to go to a part-time treatment, so that I could still live at home. I was referred to the part-time-treatment center, where I had conversations with a friendly psychotherapist, Eelco de Smet, who later on would mean a lot to me, in a negative sense. He told me that my personality had arisen because I had experienced fearful things, that I had too many escape routes to ‘escape’ from them, and that a clinical admission would be better. He referred me to specialized treatment in a psychiatric hospital in a large city. My exact diagnosis was still unclear to me, because I hadn’t asked for it and they hadn’t told me clearly, and maybe that was just better for me.When the medication was increased one more time, I was finally able to feel a little good again. I met a girl, Tanja, through a forum on the internet. We met for the first time, and it was very nice at the time. We quickly moved on to sexual acts, but I wanted full control. And it was often pure defiance. My fears were a lot better, and as a result I was no longer bothered by feelings towards men. I was then very focused on myself and there was always something holding me back, I found it exciting, but at the same time gross to be so intimate with someone. I broke off my relationship with Tanja later on during my clinical treatment, because there would be a lot of aggression released in this treatment, and that was absolutely not compatible with an intimate relationship. It was a pity, but I really had to work on myself.
©
2024
2024
Jesse Musson
