Today I did something I have been meaning to do for weeks: I handed in some forms to my GP. These forms were self-assessment questionnaires used in the diagnosis of autism and Attention Deficit Disorder. I was advised to fill them out by a professional I've been working with as part of my ongoing attempt to try and find my way into some kind of employment which won't be sabotaged by my tendency to have violent meltdowns and damage company property in noisy work environments. As I had expected (see the last clause of the preceding sentence) I scored a positive, though only a mild one, on the questionnaire for autism. What surprised me, however, was that I scored very high on the measure for ADD.
Of course, the very fact it took me weeks to complete the simple act of handing these forms in to my GP is itself a pretty good indicator that I have some problems with my executive function. And not the only one. I have had, I am now seeing, a tendency to not address things that other people would have dealt with almost instantly. When the heating in my flat went out two years ago it seemed, somehow, easier to buy a small portable heater, put it in my bedroom, and stay in there when things got too cold, rather than report the problems with the heating to my letting agents. It is only recently - again, with some prompting from the person who urged me to fill out the forms I handed in today - that I have addressed this problem. Just as it is only in recent weeks, again thanks to outside intervention, that my flat has ceased to be a minefield of clutter resembling the floor of Francis Bacon's studio.
Why did I let things get this bad? To say it was because it just seemed easier is to undersell the situation. Say, rather, that to do otherwise seemed impossible. I felt as if in some way I would not survive handing in the forms, or telling the letting agents about the heating, or seeking help to get the untidiness of my flat sorted out. They were things I might one day be up to addressing, but today was not the day. And so it seemed better to deploy my resources towards something that could be accomplished, and to tackle these issues another day.
But every day these things went unaddressed they seemed to only gain in power while I grew less capable of accomplishing them, not least because now the sense of the futility of doing these things was joined by a sense of shame in not having accomplished them yet. A shame which I also didn't want to have to face. Here is a shame that I have not wanted to face for years now: my passport has been out of date for a decade, and I have not updated it because doing so, as a trans woman, is a complicated process involving getting letters from psychology professionals and then presenting these alongside the original expired passport and one's deed of change of name. Only by providing all these ingredients in the correct combination can one be assured of both the name on the passport and the relevant gender marker being updated.
And at one point I had all of these, yet still delayed because of this fear that I would in some way be found to have somehow completed the process wrongly, fear that in some way I would be questioned or undermined or have to have an encounter I did not feel comfortable having, and in doing so, somewhere, along the line, while I still have my old passport and I still have my deed poll and they, together, are enough for most things, at some point, due to having had to move house so much in the years during which I came out and due to my chronic inability to remain organised and tidy I, shame of all shames, lost the letter, and I cannot find it and even if I could I do not know if the psychologist who wrote it is still practising and what effect this would have, and at the same time I fear starting the process again because of the shame of not having got it done properly the first time. And because, in today's much more hostile environment towards trans people, I fear that the process will be much harder this time around, and that my failure to see to it quickly the first time will go, in some obscure way, against me.
And really, it doesn't need to be said that this is not a great time to be a trans woman whose papers aren't in order. My inability to see things like this through really could get me killed.
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