'Thomas Tobias' is also known as Sarah Wheeler, the Founder Director of the Mental Fight Club.    Why two names?  Well its a long and rather tortuous story of unusual sexual/gender identity problems which have lain at the heart of a lifelong bipolar depersonalisation disorder. 

Up until the age of five, Sarah Wheeler identified fully and unquestioningly with the role of being a boy.   She liked cap guns, cowboy hats, bows and arrows, bicyles, climbing trees, wearing shorts, all that kind of thing.  She was happy. 

Between the age of five and fifteen, environmental pressures being what they are Sarah Wheeler gradually morphed into the feminine identity, albeit of an idiosyncratic, somewhat boffinish kind.   She became during this time strangely unhappy, with the first depersonalised symptoms emerging in her mind, inexplicably, when she was about ten.

During her childhood, Sarah Wheeler always knew that if she had been born a boy she would have been called Thomas Tobias.  It always struck her, even as a child, and kind of subconsciouly, that this name indicated a very strong, clear identity. 

It wasn't until Sarah Wheeler was about thirty something, and after several years in therapy, that she suddenly remembered the boy she was in early childhood.  And a very big therapeutic penny dropped.   Everybody had forgotten, she had forgotten, her parents had forgotten, her brother and sister had forgotten.  She called this boychild part of her identity 'Thomas Tobias'.

Written 2 February 2005.  Not finished but.....to be continued.