The juggernaut is on the move. Monday 17th October we have the 3 hr clinic counselling for donor egg, and our lawyer appointment for the traditional surrogacy agreement/application. Tuesday 18th October we all have the best part of a day taken up with clinical psych interviews (and depression scale testing) as a requirement for the TS application. Somehow, this doesn’t thrill me. I know I could be pleased we are getting this crap out of the way so soon, but the larger part of me is fighting tooth and nail that we have to do this at all. That I have to go through ALL of this again. I wish I could get past the resentment because I feel like it is eating me alive. I just feel suffocated. I feel flat and listless. I’ll have to lie through my teeth to pass the depression rating. The thought of sitting in those rooms again, saying the same old shit to the same old counsellors, makes me recoil. I know their intention is not to pick me apart, but I feel like I need to protect myself against that anyway. I feel like I need to protect myself against all of it. I feel a fugue state coming on.
I had a pretty intense dream a few nights ago, the gist of which was that every inch of me was rebelling against this process and there was a very strong, grounded sense of self that just stood up to the whole thing and said “no”. You can’t make me do this.
And yet my waking self IS doing this. Against the instinct and better (?) judgement of my subconscious. It feels incongruent. I feel conflicted. Doing this so that the future me can have no recourse for regret. How did I weigh everything (when I don’t even know what everything is?)and come up with that small part of a potential self being more important than a whole slew of parts of my current self? Is it the fear of the unknown? The desire to be a parent still so strong? I don’t know. I really don’t. I wish I did, so I could have something solid to hold on to when I’m feeling incredibly negative. I know that a positive strength is there- I catch glimpses of it, and it spurs me along. But I can’t seem to get a good view of it, a whole picture, what it is made of. Or a way back to it when I am in the hole. I feel as though I am trapped in an endless game of cat-and-mouse. Or the Red Queen’s Race*. And I can’t even trust who I might be when I wake up in the morning.
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[*Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying ‘Faster! Faster!’ but Alice felt she could not go faster, thought she had not breath left to say so.
The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. ‘I wonder if all the things move along with us?’ thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried, ‘Faster! Don’t try to talk!’
Not that Alice had any idea of doing that. She felt as if she would never be able to talk again, she was getting so much out of breath: and still the Queen cried ‘Faster! Faster!’ and dragged her along. ‘Are we nearly there?’ Alice managed to pant out at last.
‘Nearly there!’ the Queen repeated. ‘Why, we passed it ten minutes ago! Faster! And they ran on for a time in silence, with the wind whistling in Alice’s ears, and almost blowing her hair off her head, she fancied.
‘Now! Now!’ cried the Queen. ‘Faster! Faster!’ And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy.
The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, ‘You may rest a little now.’
Alice looked round her in great surprise. ‘Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!’
‘Of course it is,’ said the Queen, ‘what would you have it?’
‘Well, in our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’
‘A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’]
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