Re: What does it feel like to be castrated?
Posted: Thu Oct 04, 2012 2:32 pm
TRansEunuch (imported) wrote: Thu Oct 04, 2012 1:34 am Good question and this goes wthout saying, some of us eunuchs needs to come out of the closet. I was castrated (by squezing and rubbing my scrotum with estrogen vaginal creme for some time) so I lived withour "balls" for the last 18 years and in 1999 had full penectomy and, regretfully SRS. The reason I want us to be visible is to open up for the right to modify my genitalia in a fashion I feel comfortable with.
So I really wish to start some sort of group into cherishing eunichism in all it's glorious diversity. We have allways been around and honestly, do not belive all stories about "forced castration and penectomy". In Serena Nanda book on indian eunuchs, hijras most really do surgery very willingly.
Besides, have you heard of Male to Eunuch regret cases? I'm a WPATH member and we are in a process of discussion Standards of Care for Male to Eunuchs, hopefulle we will come out of our closet some day like you did Hah.
TrasnEunuch
Kratz class of 1999
Please pardon me for writing a lengthy reply. Alas, a reply shorter than what I am about to write and post would likely be unacceptably deceptive and/or misleading for me to be willing to post it.
I have a simple way of stating what it "feels like" to me, to have been castrated.
"Perfect."
Meaning, at the limit of what is possible, with respect to my gender, sexuality, and, indeed, my entire life until now.
While I experience my life as profoundly transgendered, I experience that as being the optimal condition for my life, both personally and socially.
For those who prefer to not dig through all my prior posts, perhaps a brief summary of what may be found in them may be worthwhile.
Autism is, according to what I am told is in my medical records, is, "a proven diagnosis." I am autistic in the language-delay sense as first described in useful detail by Dr. Leo Kanner; I am an Autie and not an Aspie, for those fluent in the autism language of the profoundly autistic.
Language delay? I have never been able to learn to think in pictures (there is a book by the autistic scientist/engineer, Dr. Temple Grandin, a Colorado State University professor, "Thinking in Pictures"), nor have I ever been able to learn to think in words. Words and pictures are, to me, tools for communicating meaning among people; in my work in electrical and electronics engineering, I do not think in phase angle meters, do not think in sampling oscilloscopes, and do not think in immitance bridges. As an certified master electrician and construction contractor, I do not think in chain saws, even though I have one which is useful in trimming tree branches that might touch the wires of an overhead electrical service entrance drop.
For me to think, for example, in a chain saw, I would have to start it up and use it to put it in my brain. As I cannot imagine that not summarily killing me, I find that, no matter what effort I could possibly make, thinking in chain saws is an absolute impossiblity for me. Likewise, stuffing a dual beam 8 channel oscilloscope (such as my Tektronix 556 with two 1A4 vertical plug-ins) into my brain would terminate any useful function of my brain forever after.
I do not think in tools, I think in meanings, and use communication tools only as ways of taking in and putting out meanings.
Not having the ability to think in words has, for me, a significant effect. I can never understand anything through being told, in words alone, about it.
I experienced thought in the form of meanings before I was born, before I had the first opportunity of my whole life to hear a word and associate it with anything whatsoever. As thinking in meanings before I was born fully met the needs of my life as I experienced my needs and their being met, it never came to my awareness that a better way to think could ever be possible.
Being autistic as I am autistic, I have never been able to advance from the human social/cultural development stage that is often labeled, "infancy."
Traditional Western psychosocial personal development has the following stages, so I have come to understand:
1. In utero; becoming able to be born.
2. Infancy: collecting communication skills for interacting usefully with other people.
3. Childhood:collecting the repertoire of social coping mechanisms (psychological defenses) mandated by one's culture.
4. Adolescence: perfecting the practical use of mandated coping mechanisms
5. Adulthood: imparting mandated coping skills onto the next generation.
Please allow that I understand psychological defenses, as coping mechanisms, to be mental processes (or, mechanisms?) that distort objective reality in the service of the socially-generated sense of self that is the nature, stsructure, and function, of what, in the terms of Freudian psychology, is usually called "the ego" (which is, to me, a neurological phenomenon generated in response to socialization experiences).
The way in which I am autistic has ruled out my being capable of generating a Freudian id, a Freudian ego, and/or a Freudian superego. I continue to experience life as I have ever since I became, rather early in gestation, aware of having become aware; my life is as though an unending-to-date sequence of stimuli and responses, such that each response to a stimulus is part of the next stimulus; thus, it is impossible for me to have any responsibilities because all I ever encounter is events, which are stimuli, to which I respond as the process of learning of my actual response abilities (two words) to actual events; I never know, I am never familiar with, and I never understand, what my ability to respond to a new event in my life will be until I have responded to the event.
For me, finding that I cannot have any responsibilities (because the notion of responsibility imposes the requirement of a-priori knowledge that can actually exist only a-posteriori), because I find the notion of responsibility to be purely of the psychosis of time-corrupted learning (see the publications of psychologist Peter A. Levine and neurologist Robert C. Scaer for detailed information about time-corrupted learning), in the absence of a demonstration of an event, such as a mistake, that actually happened which can actually be demonstrated to have actually been avoidable through an unambiguous demonstration of the event (like, a mistake) not having actually happened when it was actually demonstrated to have actually happened, I shall take the notion of a person having made an avoidable mistake to be an absolutely and utterly psychotic delusion.
Thus, for example, I observe the adversarial legal system construct of tort liability to be an example of unmitigated psychosis from the view of neurology.
When social consensus beliefs violate the conscience with which I was born, I deem social consensus to be in error, and, without exception thus far in my whole life, take my inner conscience to be correct.
I have heard of more "cases of gender spectrum regret" than I could accurately count.
For myself, I have not a wisp of an iota of a jot of regret, or shame, or guilt, regarding my gender or sexuality or, for that matter, any other aspect of my life. And, I have yet to stumble upon the dollars for joining WPATH, though I am looking for them.
Because I never went through the infant-child transition, I have never had any amnesia for any aspect of my life which made it into my "permanent memory." Not only do I remember becoming aware as the earliest event I have found in my permanent memory collection, among the most vivid of my readily-accessible permanent memories was the surprise of becoming aware that I had become aware, to me, the first instant of self-awareness. I remember the first event of my "quickening" (the start of in-utero "kicking"). My arms were folded in front of my chest, my right arm farther from my chest than my left, and I became aware of my wrists bumping each other, a new awareness in my life. After a while it happened again, and, after more such bumps, I learned that I could control them. That began my exploration of what I learned to understand as my body. (Please note that I had no words for these events, only the events themselves and the meanings I could connect with the events.)
In my exploring my in-utero environment, everything I found while exploring my environment was compatible with my brain map of my possible environment until my hands stumbled upon my scrotum and testicles. Scrotum, okay, Testicles, alas, violated my brain map of what my body ought to be. Please take careful note that, when I first "discovered" my scrotum, it was empty because my testicles had not yet descended. They had descended before I was born.
The way in which I am autistic has given to me a form of eidetic memory; people have been astonished at times by the accuracy of my memory regarding past events which have been possible, often decades later, to effectively validate when true and invalidate when false.
I took having testicles as though by mistake to be a normal aspect of my life; mistakes happen rather often in my whole life experience. Only when my bioengineering-based understanding of biological pattern recognition methodologies pointing to an unconscionable (to me) risk of early death from cancer did I decide that continued normal-range male testosterone levels were posing a death threat to me did I proceed to obtain my orchiectomy. More than 26 years after my orchiectomy, it has become tragically and wonderfully clear to me that I did the biological pattern recognition cancer risk determination with astonishing accuracy. Tragically, because I did not find a way to get effective life-sparing cancer treatment for my dad and brother. Wonderful because I did find a way to get such treatment for three close family relatives, all younger than I am, such that they will not die from metastatic colon cancer as did my dad and brother, even though these three relatives and I all have been found to share the same "cancer gene" as did my dad and brother.
After my orchiectomy, I was able to come under the care of a "world-class" endocrinologist at a "world-class" major research university, who was willing to put me on a Premarin-Provera medication plan, with the usual results in terms of gynecomastia. While being flat-chested never much bothered me, being perhaps somewhat more than A-cup definitely matches the brain map of my body far more accurately than did being flat-chested. Similarly being a flat-bagger definitely matches the brain map of my body far more accurately than did having testicles, or, from about 1990 to 2011, having testicular prostheses.
Why did I bother with prostheses? Because I am very sensitive to other people, and was glad to "sacrifice" some of my comfort to minimize discomfiting "other men" in places such as public swimming pool showers. Why did I abandon the prostheses? Because, in 2011, my body developed a form of foreign body reaction to the silicone prostheses, and that was a source of serious discomfort and posed an unacceptable risk of compromised immune system function, something my cancer gene situation made absolutely intolerable to me.
Both of my grandmothers died when my parents were about age two or younger. I have a family history of people dying from in-principle-preventable conditions that for lack of understanding at the time, were pragmatically unpreventable. I decided, consciously and very deliberately, to do what my grasp of biology informed me was of the best attainable a-priori-probability-based Bayesian approach to averting my needlessly dying at an unnecessarily young age.
That objective, it now appears to me, I have met, and met with resounding success.
Part of that success, as I understand it, is never, never ever, second-guessing any decision I have ever made, while diligently attending to every unanticipated consequence of every decision I have ever made when such consequences garner my attention. In that manner, it is impossible for me to ever regret any choice or any action that has ever been an aspect of my life.
On another recent thread was mention of a coffee mug available from Cafe Press, on which is imprinted, "THANK GOD I'M CASTRATED."
I promptly ordered one, which arrived today by post.
For me, given my "autism," my "transgenderism," and my "cancerism," it seems to me that "THANK GOD I'M CASTRATED." may be as good as it gets for telling how it "feels like" to me to be castrated.
For those who cannot live without a perspective from my understanding of anthropology, a brief descriptor of my anthropology-based view of my life and my life choices may usefully illumine...
It seems to me that the human condition may be sorted into five epochs from an anthropological view.
What on earth, or elsewhere, do I know about anthropology? Enough to have diligently and effectively used the methodology of ethnography as the basis of my bioengineering field work methods. I used ethnographic methodololgies as the most effective way I could identify to extract social bias from my research approach and its findings.
During my thesis research, I inquired of a number of academic anthropologists about the known structures of human societies. I was consistently informed that there are two known structures, those of shame societies and those of guilt societies. A decent account of those two structures can probably be readily found on Wikipedia. I asked anthropologists about the existence of societies which are neither shame nor guilt based, and was consistently informed that there are no such societies now extant, and that Imperial Japan, during World War II, was an example of a modern shame society.
To dramatically oversimplify, Aboriginal Societies tend to be deemed to be shame societies, and Modern Societies tend to be deemed to be guilt societies.
My model in use has five forms, not two, in chronological (human social evolution) sequence:
1. Pre-Aboriginal: neither shame nor guilt is used as a necessary aspect of social structures; I find that many cultures have origin stories in which people lived in harmony and at parity with other animals, and humans were animals (and not distinct from other animals), and then something happened, that "something" being the invention of shame as a human social organizing principle. This pre-aboriginal, pre-shame social structure is told of as the time before the opening of Pandora's box, the time before "original sin," or the time before people came up into this world, to name a few variations on the pre-aboriginal theme.
2. Aboriginal: Shame is the basis of social organization and being shamed is a way of ostracizing people who are unable to avoid being found out for having violated a social taboo; violating such taboos is unimportant, because it is only being found out as a taboo violator that is punishable with ostracism; in shame societies, ostracism is often lethal to those ostracized. A core aspect of shame societies is the belief (which I find to be, from a neurological view, to be a catastrophically contagious, and devastatingly addictive delusion) that people make mistakes which they both should have, and could have, avoided making, and for the failure to do what should and could have been done, are properly ostracized. Authoritarianism is the core mindset of shame societies.
3. Modern: Guilt is the basis of social organization, and being found guilty is cause for punishment for violation of social conventions, among which the main one may be the (to me, terrible delusion that punishment of people for revealing the central defect of the structure of guilt societies can be cause for reversion to the most extreme of guilt society ostracism, the use of the death penalty; no greater ostracism is achievable, in my view, than murdering those whose life process is testament to the compounded delusion of guilt. The burning of Joan of Arc at the stake for alleged heresy, and the proclamation to the effect, "We have burned a saint?" may be a decent illustration of the core foibles intrinsic to, and inextricable from, guilt societies. (for myself, I find it interesting to pose the seeming conflict between fundamentalism and modernism as a conflict between "believing in shame" and "believing in guilt," with the conflict being about which delusion (shame or guilt) to impose on those who are actually innocent, so as to gather them into ether the fold of the delusionally ashamed exclusive-or the fold of the delusionally guilty. Science is the core mindset of Modernism.
4. Postmodern: The flaws found with shame and guilt are rejected without having any viable replacement for them. A classical form of postmodern notion, I once heard espoused by a very, very educated postmodernism adherent was, "As Einstein proved, everything is relative." To me, postmodernism wisely rejects superstition-based dogmas and doctrines, and foolishly, albeit unavoidably, replaces them with abject nihilism. "To Hell With It," is, to me - if to no one else - the core mindset of postmodernism.
When that super-educated postmodernist proclaimed that Einstein had proved that everything is relative, after the end of the presentation and openly asked questions, I went to the postmodernist and asked, in effect, "Did you really say that Einstein proved that everything is relative?" The postmodernist answered, "Yes." To which, I asked, "Have you done the math?"
To which the postmodernist replied, "No." To which I responded, "Well, I have; and I find that Einstein;'s Theories of relativity - there are two of them - are an interesting collection of absolutes."
To which the postmodernist apparently had nothing to say.
So far in my life experiences, postmodernists seem to get very upset when their non-existent balloons of nihilism are punctured with objective reality.
5. Holistic: Scientifically verifiable objectivity is the basis of holism; all beliefs are treated as testable hypotheses, all beliefs are subject to scientific scrutiny; there are no fixed dogmas or doctrines that are deemed infallible or otherwise outside the realm of being wisely challenged, there are no taboos and no laws which contradict other laws so as to entrap innocent people; and all people are above all laws because people are real and laws are only make-believe for so long as a law stands un-refuted in terms of validity, and, when refuted, are related to the trash collector of previously unavoidable human errors. Within holism, direct proof when attainable is the basis of social structures; and, when direct proof is not achievable, the method of indirect proof using dichotomous null and alternate hypothesis is used. Holism includes everything of pre-aboriginal, aboriginal, modern, postmodern and holistic societies that has ever existed, while sorting out and relegating to history all the identified errors of the past.
*****
My personal life is, so I observe, purely pre-aboriginal; in that I have never internalized the social delusions of shame or guilt or nihilism.
My social life is, so I observe, purely holistic, in that I have never internalized the social delusions to the effect that anything that ever happens is other than absolutely and perfectly necessary and sufficient.
Therefore, I never find fault with anything or anyone, I never blame anything or anyone, and I never believe that any event which has already happened could, a-posteriori, have happened other than as it did happen.
At the core of my bioengineering doctoral thesis is the yet-unchallenged and not-yet-refuted finding that it is impossible to demonstrate the actual existence of even one mistake actually made and demonstrate that the mistake actually made was actually avoidable. I find that the human social tradition to the effect that people actually make mistakes they actually could have avoided is a psychotic delusion which is socially so tragically contagious and addictive as to have eluded accurate human understanding for the entire realm of human history, until now.
Herewith, I put forth the text of a letter written by Irving F. Miller, Ph.D., received by me via facsimile in December, 1997. It was printed on University of Akron, Office of the Dean, College of Engineering letterhead, and is dated December 12, 1997 (observe that my "real name" is stated in the letter, which I have not changed in the interest of avoiding deception, while I am not anonymous, for Eunuch Archive purposes, my name shall be known as janekane):
{begin quoted Irving F. Miller letter}
To Whom It May Concern:
I am writing at the request of Mr. Brian Harris to to describe the circumstances under which he returned to UIC in 1993 as a doctoral student in Bioengineering. AT the time, I was Director of the Bioengineering Program, and it was my decision to readmit him.
When I met Brian in 1993, he was recovering from mental illness, and he was ready to resume his studies. Since the work he had done prior to his illness was no longer available, he had to undertake a new dissertation topic. He presented me with an idea for a dissertation that I found to be original and intriguing. I believed then, and I believe now, that it is worth pursuing. However, I warned Brian at the time that he would need to convince skeptical people of its validity. Whether or not the topic was appropriate for Bioengineering was not an issue, because the idea of modeling mental illness clearly fits, as Brian's doctoral committee agreed.
My concern about Brian's dissertation topic stemmed from the fact that it is such an original idea. Most dissertation topics are simple extensions of settled work, and would not arouse the concerns of the people who must judge the dissertation. In this case, success could be just as damaging as failure, because such success could undermine many established views.
I believed in 1993, and I believe now, that Brian should be allowed to complete his dissertation work. Although it has taken considerable time, four years is not too long for a doctoral dissertation, particularly considering that Brian has handicaps that need some accommodation.
Sincerely yours,
(signature of Irving F. Miller)
Irving F. Miller
Professor and Dean
{end quoted Irving F. Miller letter}
Over the past 15 years, I have shared my thesis work and dissertation with many people, including clergy, psychologists, psychiatrists, lawyers, and others, and no one has found a way to refute the core finding of my thesis and dissertation. For that matter, to the best of my understanding, no one has found where to start looking for a way to refute the core finding of my thesis and dissertation.
I find that the core finding of my doctoral thesis and dissertation absolutely, totally, and irretrievably, undermines the whole of the underlying philosophy of the adversarial system of law and jurisprudence, and, in the process of undermining the adversarial system of law and jurisprudence, concurrently demonstrates that the adversarial system of law and jurisprudence, as it operates in the United States of America, is actually a superstition-based, established, authoritarian religious cartel the work of which profoundly endangers public safety and which is, in both form and function a severe violation of the Amendment I of the United States Constitution:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise therof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I find that, to such extent as the Congress has passed any laws of any sort respecting the adversarial system of law and jurisprudence, it has passed inextricably unconstitutional laws respecting an establishment of religion. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
The "glitch" in the Constitution of the United States of America is that it contains no blatantly clear prohibition against lawyers and judges making law that imposes religious establishments upon the citizenry of the United States. Perhaps you have not yet read Robert Benson, Professor of Law, Emeritus, of Loyola Law School, in Los Angeles, "The Interpretation Game: How Lawyers and Judges Make the Law, Carolina Academic Press, Durham NC, 2008.
To make the law, and the practice of law, in the United States constitutional, it is merely necessary to remove from the interpretation of the law(s) the superstitious religious notion of fault and/or blame, which is a demonstrable neurobiological fallacy, that is the expression of time-corrupted learning. The adversarial system of law and jurisprudence is inextricably corrupt because its basis principle is corrupt, because it is based on time-corrupted learning that was unrecognizable for, and as, what it is, until scientific understanding of human neurobiology had developed sufficiently for the deception that is the essential substance, process, and result, of the infant-child transition to become manifestly evident to sufficiently competent research scientists.
My neurobiological-philosophical "argument" will catastrophically and eternally fail the moment someone actually and accurately demonstrates a mistake actually made that can actually and accurately be demonstrated to actually and accurately have been avoidable, by simply, accurately, and actually demonstrating that the mistake actually made was not actually made after it was actually and accurately demonstrated to have been made.
I find the actual demonstration of the actual making of an actually-avoidable mistake to be an existential impossibility, which may well account for the absolutely total absence of any actual demonstration that would refute the core finding of my doctoral thesis and dissertation. My dissertation committee included a nationally prominent psychiatrist, the late Boris Astrachan, then the head of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and a nationally prominent UIC neuropsychiatrist, Thomas Jobe. I asked them to be members of my committee because, after canvassing all the psychiatrists and neuropsychiatrists I thought might be available as committee members, their published work informed me that they were likely to be better than anyone else I could get to find a way to refute the core finding of my thesis and dissertation. From what they told me, I understand that they found the task of refuting the core finding of my thesis and dissertation to be an apparent impossibility.
What is that core finding? There are many ways, all functionally equivalent, to state it in words. A few of them are:
1. Thousands of years of established human traditional views notwithstanding, it is actually impossible for any person, or combination of persons, to ever actually tell a lie.
2. The supposed telling of lies is actually the telling of impossibilities, the telling of which contravenes aspects of cultural folkways and mores.
3. No mistake ever actually made should or could have actually been avoided, and this is true regardless of the nature of the mistake actually made or its actual consequences.
4. Punishing people for making mistakes is neurobiological abuse that induces psychotic breaks in people when the punishing is sufficiently intense and sustained.
5. No one can demonstrate the actual existence of one or more mistakes actually made and also demonstrate the actual existence of any actually achievable process or method whereby the mistake actually made could have actually been avoided.
6. Every decision ever made, in the actual context of the making of the decision, is always the best actually possible decision, and this is true regardless of the actual, subsequent consequences of the decision actually made.
7. In the total absence of any demonstration of both a decision (such as a mistake) actually made AND a demonstration of the decision having been different than it was when it was made, no decision ever made, having been made, could demonstrably have been made differently than it was made.
8. The belief in avoidable mistakes actually having been made is a form of psychotic delusion typically induced in children during the traditional socialization transition from infancy to childhood; it is a delusion so utterly traumatic as to render people who go through that transition to maximum effect functionally insensate to the trauma of the transition, said insensate state being a form of "thwarted freeze discharge" as described in the writings about trauma of psychologist Peter A. Levine and neurologist Robert C. Scaer.
9. The traumatic impact of the infant-child is so severe as to render many people consciously starkly amnestic for many of the most neurologically significant of their transition and pre-transition lived experiences.
10. However it happened, I apparently and very accurately recognized the infant-child transition as abusive, brain-damaging, delusional, and psychotic well before anyone attempted to induce me to go through it, and I resisted going through the infant-child transition with what was, and is, in retrospect, an apparently utterly unbreakable will to effectively always avoid and evade being deceived thereby.
There was a saying I heard some other children say, while I was very young, the saying, "The bogeyman will get you!"
It did not take me all that long to understand "the bogeyman" to be the belief that people make mistakes that they could have avoided making.
So, I took the saying, "The bogeyman will get you!" if "you" referred to me, so the meaning of the saying was, to use my Archive name, "The bogeyman will get janekane!" to be a testable, and therefore a refutable-if-false working hypothesis; and set out to test it through actually lived experiences.
After 73 years of living, and, as best I have been able, putting to the test in every way possible for me the working hypothesis that the bogeyman would get me, the result to date is, "Not yet, and most probably, not ever."
Perhaps this (arduously?) long post will be decently sufficient account of why it is true for me that the best way I can tell about what it "feels like" for me to be castrated is the message on that coffee mug, "THANK GOD I'M CASTRATED."
Before I became ready to be castrated, such that I knew and understood that I would never have even a momentary twinge of regret, it would have been deceptive for me to be castrated by my personal choice because I was not yet ready for castration.
After I became ready to be castrated, mainly to reduce my likely cancer risk, it would have been deceptive for me to not find a safe way to be castrated.
And I truthfully
can assure anyone and everyone, that I am truly grateful for the life gift of being transgendered as I am; it put the the decision to be castrated, once I became fully ready, at the very top of all the personally easiest and most life-affirming decisions I have ever yet made.
Yes, to me it really feels like, "THANK GOD I'M CASTRATED." to be castrated.
I am incorrigibly "pro-life," which is why I endorse unrestricted abortion availability for women whenever pregnancy will unduly impair their lives according to the individual understanding of each and every individual woman.
Cafe Press does not seem to have any "THANK GOD I GOT A SAFE ABORTION." items for sale yet. Google gave no results for the text string, "Thank God I Got a Safe Abortion."
Anyone care to end that absence? Or, make a little loose change through Cafe Press, say, with a coffee mug design?
Back in 1979, my wife and I adopted an eleven year old boy, who was available for adoption, so we were told, because his biological parents lacked the practical ability to not neglect and/or abuse him so severely that the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services decided to permanently extricate him from the care, custody, and control of his biological parents.
Sometimes, damage from parental neglect and abuse becomes so severe as to have become functionally irreparable. Such damage may sometimes lead grown children to fly airplanes into tall buildings, fire handguns in movie theaters or houses of worship, commit murders, drive motor vehicles while intoxicated, or, perhaps even enlist in the military or vaporize people in another country with a nuclear fission device.
Tell me that I have an enemy, and I will tell you, that, to the extent that you are sincere, you are comparably mistaken.
Thank God I'm castrated.
Und so weiter.
Ad infinitum.
Más o menos.
Und so wie so.
Is that a sufficient account of what if "feels like" to me regarding my being castrated?
If not, I have yet to begin to start to commence running out of words...
Wirklich.
Sorry, "und so weiter = and so forth" "ad infinitum = to infinity" "más o menos = more or less" "und so wie so = and thus, as it is so" "wirklich = really"
When I run out of English words, there are more words available for me to use.
Es tut mir leid. Nicht.
Sorry, "es tut mir leid = I'm sorry" "nicht = not"
While I was a school student, I happened to take classes in English, Latin, German, and Spanish, I do not claim to be proficient in Latin, German, Spanish; or, for that matter, in English.
I muddle through as best I can.
I am not the least bit sorry about being able to muddle through the life I am actually able to live.