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I was away for New Year's at a retreat center we go to fairly regularly. I've just started full-time, so I'm still getting used to being Allison everywhere and everywhen. I was washing up to get ready for bed in the communal bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror, and I saw -- a guy. Thin hair, male-pattern baldness, heavy, slumped shoulders, and all the other stuff I couldn't see but knew was there (not to mention what wasn't, or at least not very much.) I wasn't able to see a woman at all. I would have cried to see myself in this freakish, alien body, if I hadn't had crying burned out of me fifty-some years ago.
I ran across a passage from Bobby's Rainy Day Adventure (Heather Rose Brown) which expressed so well what I felt:
When she sat down and pulled me onto her lap, I just curled up in a ball and started sobbing. All the hopes I'd had that maybe someday, somehow, I could just be me were gone. When I was able to speak again, I asked, "Why am I like this?"
"Why are you like what?" Aunt Joan's soft words came out slowly, as if they were being chosen very carefully.
"Why am I such a freak?"
Comments
Life is a devil's deal
I transitioned in my middle twenties which is good as now in my 50s I look pretty good thanks to winning (mostly) the genetic lottery at least with regard to skin aging and overall appearance. I've had the Dorian Grey jokes thank you very much.
The devil's deal of course that I will not have genetic children, a costly struggle with transition, esteem issues, the usual. For transitioners of our generation, we did not have during transition in the late 80s/early 90s, amazing experiences, yet, like running into a young woman (20s, maybe) clerk in a comic shop who not only understood trans but was way matter of fact and cool about it (we got into a discussion as I bought 'Alters', the first ever comic title with a Transwoman protagonist (!).) And I am sure she did not read me BTW.
Point is, it is a harder thing to do physically now for you but socially it is a comparative breeze. Hopefully you have at least had the basics of having children (if desired), socked away money for the transition (would be homeless but for my partner's mother) and all the other foundational things needed that hopefully time, constructively used that will ease the way hopefully.
I don't know your circumstances but please hang in there and put your best foot forward (cosmetic surgery if necessary/affordable, voice etc) and be your most positive self as these days if you accept yourself, it is amazing where one can find allies.
K
its easy to find your own flaws
but I bet your co-workers notice much nicer things about you than you do.
huggles.
Part of me...
wants to give you a big hug and say soothing things, part of me wants to give you a slap. The reality is you can't make a genetic female out of a male body but you can learn to disguise it and thus make it more presentable and yourself more happy with yourself.
Retreats can be good in giving us space to look inside ourselves. The only problem with transgendered people is we do it all the time anyway. Once you make the decision to transition it has to be a one way trip or you'll never make it work. You've burned your bridges and moved forward just keep going. There will be days when it all goes wrong and you'll wish you'd stayed safe, there will be days when you get addressed as Sir despite wearing a skirt and makeup, just bluster on because eventually people will become used to you or perhaps you become used to you and also aware of the freedom to be who you feel to be inside.
I eventually transitioned in my early 30s but had been toying with the idea for nearly ten years and on oestrogen for much of that. I had surgery five years later mainly because of problems in the NHS with funding. I was no oil painting then and age hasn't helped. So, I'll never be a beautiful woman, but I am me, a bit of a tomboy who is as much at home doing fieldwork in jeans and anorak as she is in a dress and heels. Today, I'm wearing makeup for the first time in ages, to cheer myself up - I've been struggling with my next university assignment and got given a cold for Christmas. I have the freedom to present how I like wherever and whenever I want. So I'll never be able to wear a bikini but then at 64 would anyone really want to.
Take the blows, most of which will come from yourself, stand up straight, dust yourself off and face the world. Be the best you there can be and be proud of it. Most people couldn't do what you're doing, you're special, enjoy it. Oh and here comes the hug. :)
Angharad
Slap all you want
Slap all you want. It's how I got myself through most of my life. Whenever I felt hurt and unable to go on, I would slap myself and tell myself "nobody wants to hear your whinging, least of all me," and I'd grit my teeth and keep marching. Eventually you stop noticing the grinding of your teeth and you start to really believe that the grimace on your face is actually a smile.
But around 15 years ago, I discovered something.
Each time I slapped myself and told my hurt to shut up and go away, I was really cutting out a piece of my soul and burying it in the cellar, Arsenic and Old Lace-style, and pouring a layer of concrete over it. And if you keep it up, sooner or later, you run out of soul and are nothing but a walking corpse, just killing time waiting to be put in a box and buried.
And so I've started breaking up the concrete and digging up the hurts, one by one, and trying to nurse them back to life and, if they're not completely dead, graft them back onto my soul. Okay, my soul still looks like something out of Dr. Frankenstein's lab and you'll always be able to see the scars and stitches, but it's beginning to look halfway human again. And maybe someday they'll start to heal.
Just remember...
...to Breathe.
It's the best advice I've ever gotten.
I try not to bury my hurts, and as much as possible avoid dwelling on them (that way lies a dark, dark place...). If I've enough presence of mind when struck by something, and have enough space to do so, I've found that meditation helps: emptying the mind and focusing on the precise HERE and NOW, and especially disconnecting from spiraling, darkening thoughts, helps me to find my emotional footing a bit, and not get swept away by the pain. I don't know if that would work for you (it only works when I have that presence and space, and those can be rare commodities, betimes...), but it might be worth a go if you can. If not, no worries; you will find something that does if you keep looking (like your "slap" thing, f'rex). So, *hugs!* and hoping you can find your path through this one (and all the others after!) Feel free to PM me if you'd like to talk. :-)
By-the-by, congrats on finally taking steps forward! Lots of people here never are able to, or haven't gotten to do yet. :-D The first few
hundredthousandmillion steps can be fraught, but for me, at least, they've been worth it.-Liz
Successor to the LToC
Formerly known as "momonoimoto"
This is my life
In case anyone is worried about what this says about my plans or my (external) progress:
I am already "out" as Allison at work, which was the Final Frontier, so to speak. I expect to go into the office this week as Allison, suitably dressed, and I expect my work will go on as it has in the past, aside from a new name (and pronouns) and a somewhat different style of dress. Going backwards was never an option, neither was staying in one place. I have many decades of experience of going ahead with my life, making plans and carrying them out, even while going through Hell inside or being tossed around by emotional avalanches. And, assuming I don't get hit by a bus or flee the country with nothing more than the clothes on my back to avoid getting put into a concentration camp by the Trump/Pence administration, I plan to get SRS in 2018. Whatever my life as Allison brings, it won't be as painful as some of the things I've already gone through. This is my life.
But I don't expect the pain to end all that suddenly, either. For one thing, most of the trans women I've talked to report that they still see a guy in the mirror on occasion even after all the surgeries the medical profession offers and after years of being full-time and passing. For another, I have my own non-trans demons that will probably take years of work to really deal with (yes, I'm seeing a trauma specialist.) And I would like to feel that I do not have to hide or deny my pain as if it were a dirty little secret, the way trans people were expected to hide their transness in decades past. My pain is not a "problem" to be solved. It, too, is my life.