Work this year was definitely a bit of a struggle – a big hunk of responsibility (with a deadline!) fell into my lap, and so I was deeply focused on making sure it was running on a clean timeline and coordinating with lots of folks. I can’t tell you how many dreams I had about work this year, and how often I had to take melatonin to try and get to sleep. It was an exhausting endeavour, and I was frequently putting in more time than required to make sure things went real smoot. They did! The team was victorious! But it was a challenging on the ol’ noggin, for sure.
What definitely didn’t help any of this was the unexpected growth in my head.
I’d felt kind of… unenergetic for a few years now – I’d always figured it was just getting older, being a little less mobile due to working from home. Hell, being a parent in general is exhausting. But this year felt different. Yes, I was being pulled in seventeen different directions at work – stretched in new and terrifying ways – but I ended almost every day entirely drained of energy and enthusiasm. After work I would go sit on the couch and just stare blankly at my laptop for an hour or so until it was dinner time. Something was definitely off.
In August, I went to the doctor for my annual check up. I mentioned some of my symptoms, and she said it’d make sense to run some blood tests and see what’s up. My testosterone was technically within the normal range, but scraping the bottom of the barrel. She ordered another set of blood tests, and then another. All the blood tests seemed to indicate that I had a prolactinoma – which is a non-cancerous tumour on the side of my pituitary gland. An MRI confirmed this a few months later. 4mm. Just a lil guy.
Prolactinomas produce a hormone called prolactin, which stimulates milk production. I wasn’t producing any milk, thankfully – but another effect of prolactin was to dramatically drop testosterone levels, which seems to have been the primary cause of me feeling so flat and lifeless this year. There’s also some indication that due to the way prolactin is moderated by the body (hypothalamus produces dopamine which signals to the pituitary to stop prolactin production – prolactinoma ignores this) that less dopamine in general is available, which also affects mood.
So there’s me – hormones all askew, dopamine all flopsy, and me trying as hard as I can to pull a rabbit out of a hat at work. Properly burned out and trying to keep it all together.
And then comes meds. A half pill of cabergoline twice a week was all that was necessary. After a few weeks of settling in, almost magically I started to feel… normal, I suppose. Happier. Back to my old self.
Awake.
It didn’t happen all in one go – there were some weeks of terrible sleep, more migraines than usual, constipation all up in tha butt. But there was a genuine feeling of the fog lifting from my brain – the world, and myself, coming back into focus. Well that’s exciting.
The Sleeper Awakes
With cabergoline working in the background, and me playing Evanescence’s “Bring Me To Life” on repeat, Liz is beginning to stir again.
Ok this is complicated to write about to write about since I’m just one person, but I’m referring to myself as two – Liz-Me and Non-Liz-Me. I’m Liz – this is Liz’s blog. But I am also Not-Liz. My main person is, by default, Not-Liz, but I’m writing as Liz. Right? Hmmmm how to explain… Ok so let’s take Catholicism’s Trinity as an example: pretend I – the Not-Liz self – am God. And Liz is Jesus… and My/Not-Liz’s endocrine system is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit’s been kind of sad lately, which really made God kind of sleepy too – doing his best to answer prayers and shit, but a few natural disasters happened when he was asleep on the job. Also probably spiders came into being. But then the the Holy Spirit took some medicine and started doing its fucking job again and yells “HEY WAKE UP, JEEZLIZ!” and now JeezLiz is out there performing miracles again in sick robes and sexy underwear, and God’s like “Nice.”
Liz… uh… I haven’t dressed up in a while – only really once this year for a photoshoot that, in hindsight, I wasn’t super excited about at the time, even though it actually turned out pretty well. But with Liz coming back from the dead (Shit, I should’ve used a “Lazarus” analogy instead of a deep-dive into St Patrick’s three-leaf-clover-explanation of the Trinity. Also “Lizarus” is RIGHT THERE. God dammit.) it felt like time again to hop back onto the horse of genderfuckery.
But here’s the thing – with Lizarus’s resurrection, so comes with it the time-honoured classic mental trauma of trying to be myself in a world that seemingly doesn’t want me to exist in the first place. Liz isn’t waking up on a flowery-mountainside, barefoot and robed, nymph-like ready to frolick. She’s waking up in a prison.
The thing I have to remember, over and over again, is that the prison is almost entirely of my own making. It’s a mental prison, the walls of which are made of what I think society expects of men; the violent prison population harbouring the imagined consequences of what could happen if I transgress societal norms. This all stems from living in, and being shackled by, The Patriarchy. As I told my eight-year-old a few days ago, The Patriarchy hurts everyone – especially if you don’t conform.
I need to unlearn all this again. I functioned relatively well in San Francisco as a fully-formed human being, and had managed to tunnel out, Andy-DuFresne-like, through a river of shit. I haven’t done that yet in the suburbs of Portland, which is arguably a very safe place for all this to happen anyway. (I haven’t done a good job of integrating myself into the community here, since… well that’s just not a thing I’m good at… but judging by the fact that some of my neighbours are following me on instagram and reacting positively… I’m probably pretty safe. (Also sidenote-in-a-sidenote, if you’re one of those folks and you’re reading this – you cannot understand how much that has meant to me, so thank you <3), whoa there, nested parentheses).
So a few days ago, I pushed through and went outside.
I spent maybe 5 mins on makeup. I wasn’t planning on going outside, I was just eager to push through the boundary of even dressing up again, but it was early in the day and I was feeling a little brave. The first time I went out, it was dark and rainy. I took a walk around the block and came back home. A baby-step. A miserable one, since it was cold and wet and windy, but a step nonetheless. I came back home as quickly as possible, did a mini photoshoot, and thought “Fuck it, let’s be brave again” with the memory of having done this A MILLION TIMES in SF. I mean, shit – I’m Liz-Fucking-Summers, I went to work frequently en-femme (as the cool kids say) and it was never a big deal. With hormone levels (probably) back to normal, a re-found cognizance of the prison of my own making, I slid open the metaphorical bars and stepped out into the real daylight of the world… and it was fine.
I mean, OK I saw 2 people and they said “Morning!” and I thought “OH NO THEY HATE ME AND ARE GOING TO REPORT ME TO THE POLICE AND POST PICTURES OF ME ON THE COMMUNITY FACEBOOK GROUP ASKING IF ANYONE HAD SEEN THIS PERVERT IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD”. But I tried to calm that that anxious demon and kept on walking.
It was nice out by the time I took those photos. Chilly, a little breezy, but it felt good. I felt good. I had broken through a barrier again that I hadn’t broken through in years, and like I’ve spoken about before – sometimes the hardest thing is that first step out the door, and the rest is easy.
2025, and previous years have been hard. But I’ve made a space for myself before. I’ll do it again.
Also. I did a mini photoshoot, so here’s all of that too. I’ve never really put the effort into doing much of a shoot at home. This was the most I’ve done in this house. I could do more. I will do more.
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably seen that dress before. I think it’s my favourite.
I’d like to think that if I was intent on doing a full photoshoot that I would’ve spent a little more time on my makeup and used my good wig, instead of this busted one. Maybe I would’ve re-painted my nails too, but here we are. Perfection is a lie not worth chasing.
Yes, we have a bright pink couch. Yes, I bought it so I could do cool photos with it. No, I have not come close to exploiting this fact to the fullest.
I bought this green dress in 2019. It’s genuinely shocking to me that I haven’t taken photos with it – I’m hoping I can slot it neatly into the rotation now.
This red and white heart dress I bought in late 2024, and. it also hasn’t made an appearance yet, but it’s dreamy – and perfect for the cold! There’s that pink couch again, thank God – by which I mean me, in reference to my previous analogy. I bought the fucking thing.
What else happened in 2025 that was hard? Oh yeah, the technofascist hellscape we seem to be hurtling towards deeper into. Fuck Trump – if you’re reading this and you’re a Trump supporter, fuck you too. Thanks a bunch of voting for a guy who doesn’t want me or my sisterhood to exist.
Looking ahead to 2026
I hope with 2026 comes joy. The joy of being alive, healthy and awake. The joy of breaking out of the self-imposed patriarchal prison I’ve put myself into, and ideally the joy of the midterms fucking things up for the bloated shitstain who currently resides in the Oval.
Peace out, bitches – stay sexy
xx
