It was over 10 years ago that I first met her. Of course, she wasn’t Crystal back then, and neither was I Laura. It’s funny the twists and turns my life takes sometimes. Travel 400km to a new job and become friends with another transsexual, only neither of you lets on about it! But that’s what happened. I’d admired Crystal’s work from afar (she did comix and fanzines, so did I) and so when I moved to the same town, I introduced myself.
We became good friends and when he came out to being a she, I wasn’t a bit surprised. If only I’d admitted the same feelings myself at that time, life would be different now. But I didn’t, I was still wrestling with my inner demons, still denying an essential part of my personality. But I supported Crystal 100% in what she was doing, encouraged her to find herself as the new woman she was.
And then I left that town. I had a new job back in the big city where I’d lived for most of my life, and moved in to live with my then girlfriend Lee. And that was the big mistake. Up until that time, we’d barely seen anything of each over, traveling between houses at the opposite ends of a major highway, cities apart. I’d been overwhelmed by having a new job, a new home, and a girlfriend all at once. It was all "proof" that I was OK, that I didn’t have to face myself. And of course, it didn’t last.
At the ending of one relationship, I entered another. Crystal was now living in the big city too, and making a go of things the best way she could. I felt close to her and we shared a number of interests, and I fell in love with her. I understood her needs better than she knew. And yet, she too "validated" me as an OK guy. I must be OK if I have a girlfriend, right? Wrong. But I loved her, and supporting her filled up the immense hole I felt to be within my soul. I didn’t have to examine my feelings too closely if I looked to her.
And I loved her.
When the time came, I helped to finance her operation. She had become more and more upset about not yet having her surgery. I came back one night from my StarTrek club and found a note from the Police saying that she had been taken to the emergency ward of the local hospital, after taking an overdose of tablets. We had been jointly saving up for her operation, and I decided to get a personal loan to make up the difference.
Surgery
We traveled to "Emerald City" and she went under the knife of the man himself, and then we returned back to where we’d come from. And that’s when the bottom started to fall out from under us. No one had told us about the complications and post-operative problems. Crystal had necrosis and granulation, which basically means that the skin graft had rejected.
Part of the problem was that we'd travelled at least a couple of thousand kilometers for her operation. She had a one year's "warrenty" on the results, but we would have to get back for it to be fixed. We'd run out of money to do so. There was a local solution, but it involved going through a urologist who only used a particular public hospital to work from. This meant that Crystal had to get a bed in that hospital so that she could get corrective surgery.
This is where the real trouble started. On numerous occassions we received admissions forms from the hospital only to later have them cancelled. The worst time this happened, an admission form arrived, and on the very same day by express delivery, there arrived the cancellation! Crystal was getting more and more upset every time this happened, and all the while things were getting worse.
Crystal was becoming more and more upset and paranoid -- she was convinced that it was a conspiracy against her. The trouble was, that the more the cancelations happened, the harder it was for me to disagree with her. I phone teh hospital for an explanation, and they claimed that the urologist had gone to a seminar and was away for two weeks. I phoned the urologist and found that this was untrue!
Looking back, it is most likely that the hospital always booked more beds than it had, and sent out such cancellations as routine. But at the time, well it was just one dissappointment after the next.
Finally Crystal couldn't take it any more. A friend helped her to a psych ward while I was at work, where she admitted herself as feeling suicidal. The irony was that it was a psych ward in the same hospital that the urologist worked through, so she could now have her corrective surgery. But it was too late for this to work, and Crystal went back to the psych ward.
I visited her every day until she was discharged. The problems were just beginning though. I supported Crystal as much and as well as I could, but it just didn't seem to be enough. She lost her faith, she almost lost her mind, with all the stress and pain that she underwent, and much as I tried to stand by her, it wasn’t enough. I couldn't watch her 24 hours a day, and She tried suicide several times more, and went into the psych wards on a regular basis. I wrestled with her over kitchen knives when she was suicidal, visited her in psych wards and took her to films when things got too much. But it wasn’t enough.
One way or another she was changing, and I was changing too. In a way, the final coffin in the relationship was her meeting an old friend who had now started her own gender transition. She knew were Crystal was at, because she’d been there herself, and I hadn’t even started. And as the months moved on, they grew closer, and I relied on her friend for help and support.
It was then that I realized that this couldn't go on. One day Crystal would either be dead or put away, and I'd be alone and angry and empty. It was time to change. We had the biggest argument ever, with Crystal coming out as being lesbian, and me coming out to being a transsexual woman. And that was the end of the relationship. She went off with the friend, and I went off with my future.
Since then I've kept in contact with both Crystal and her lover -- I like them both. I know that Crystal has been suicidal at least once since then, because I visited her in hospital afterwards. But she's still alive, coping, and slowly recovering.
The Point
Until my experiences with Crystal, I'd never had close contact with anyone who'd been suicidal. I used to believe all the myths about how it was all a way of "manipulating other people", or a "cry for help". In a way, I was angry at Crystal -- how dare she mess up my life! I'd done "the right thing" by her and it hadn't been enough.
Talk about wrapped up in my own world! Looking back, I can see that the situation played up to my codependency. I felt useful and important when Crystal needed me. But "failing her" broke that cycle. For years I carried guilt about all of this, thinking that if only...
...I hadn't financed the surgery, she wouldn't have got that way!
But I think this is nonsense. Perhaps Crystal had expected a lot more from the reassignment surgery than she got, and then with the complications everything fell apart. And the truth is that as I can't think or feel for someone else, that I really couldn't change that. If I hadn't have financed the surgery she might have got suicidal anyway -- I'll never know.
But later I realised that the real culprit in this story was neither Crystal nor myself -- it was stress. Stress is what drives one to suicide, and attempting it is a "stress reaction". What's this mean? It means that if you can survive the moment, thaen you can get better. But if you off yourself, then there's no chance.
And situations which cause stress, and our own feelings for that matter, change whether we want them to or not. So:
hang in,
get help,
and let the moment pass...