…a reconciliation…finding .me.

Saturday, May 31st 10:04 am

Good morning everyone! It is a rainy thunderstorming day here in the Gatineau hills of Quebec so I am pleasantly ensconced in my favourite armchair with a hot cup of Mexican hot chocolate to warm and (hopefully) inspire me.

I was up early this morning but I wasn’t in the mood to write for some reason so I delayed my turn at the keyboard until after breakfast and after my wife left for a meeting in town. Let’s see what I can come up with…

It was a relatively eventful week life-wise and transition-wise as well. I happily managed to get over my poison ivy by Thursday night and just as I was sitting down to celebrate with a piping hot cup of peppermint tea, I promptly spilled it onto my left thigh causing first and second degree burns to a relatively large expanse of my upper left thigh. I cursed and cried for about a half-hour while I ran water over it prior to my wife arriving home from a dinner with friends and driving me to the emergency room. It didn’t turn out to be as bad as it looked and is now healing quite well. That said it does seem to be another setback of sorts as I will have to wait a few weeks before I can start my exercise routine again. I guess I will have just have to starve myself to lose the weight I need to before I transition at work this fall!

As I screamed and cried on Thursday night at the seeming unfairness of my misfortune I gradually came to realize that I really needed to get on with my transition and get even more serious about moving forward with it. I realized that my poison ivy adventure and then my close encounter with boiling hot tea were physical manifestations of the mental anguish that I am going through as I find yet another (really good!) reason to delay living full-time by another month or so. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this recent delaying behaviour was just a continuation of the same behaviour that I have exhibited my whole life.

The reasons I have come up with not to transition have at various times included:

(…by the way, you can play along and see if you can tally the same number of self-defeating behaviours that I have exhibited at various times in my life…)

In my teens I didn’t transition because I thought that all trans-whatevers were freaks and I didn’t want to admit I was a freak. So I went to military college and almost went crazy trying to fit in. It turned out that despite my best efforts I didn’t fool them and eight years later the army and I mutually decided to end our association.

In my twenties I postponed my transition because I wanted to get a good education so I went back to school and earned my MBA. Then I thought, it is a tough job market out there, I really should land a solid job before I transition. By the time I accomplished that I was already twenty-nine years old.

When I was thirty I met a good friend that I had dated while doing my MBA. We hit it off again like we had never broken up. Even though it had been almost three years since we had seen each other last, it seemed like it had just been that previous evening – I had fallen in love. Love seemed like a good reason to get married and since I was getting married I didn’t need to transition, love conquers all – right? I found out the hard way that while it is conceivable that love might conquer all, I don’t think the poet that conceived that line was transgendered, otherwise he/she would have added the transsexual clause. We are still together and the last ten years have been amazing but we have recently and painfully come to the mutual understanding that as soon I go full-time I will be living by myself in my apartment – end of story.

In my forties (ie. for the last month) despite my unequivocal understanding that the only way I can live sanely is to live authentically as a woman, I have kept finding ‘really good reasons’ to delay going full-time. They have included ensuring a secure position at work before I come out, staying with my wife for as long as I can, getting scalp advancement surgery to hide my receding hairline and on and on and on … I have used these justifications to procrastinate doing the things that I know I must do before I go full-time – coming out to my boss at work being chief among them.

The epiphany that I reached after I calmed down a bit from the burn on my thigh was that there will always be something that is ‘not quite right’ and that I will never ‘quite’ be ready to go full-time.

‘If you dwell upon limitations you will meet them’
-from the Tao Te Ching (I think…)

I realized that my health (mental, physical and spiritual) is that most important thing that I have – everything else I can accommodate. My skills are the most important thing at work, my love for my wife is the most important thing in my marriage and my authenticity is the most important thing in my gender presentation. Once I go full-time everything will either fall into place or it wasn’t very solid to begin with.

How do I know this? I know this because of an experience I had yesterday that catalysed a number of seemingly disparate incidents over the past few years into an understanding of how being authentically myself, being honestly female, is so fundamentally empowering and fulfilling for me. It turned a mundane (and quite painful!) event into an extraordinary experience.

I have gone to the same dermatologist for my laser electrolysis for the past three years and over that time I have become quite friendly with many of the staff. Yesterday was my ninth laser electrolysis session with them and, as my skin had softened quite a bit since my last session due to my increased estrogen dose, I told them that I was transitioning. They weren’t surprised in the least. My dermatologist actually smiled widely, congratulated me and asked if she should change my records to reflect my new gender! The staff were all very interested in my revelation. One of the nurses told me that her friend had transitioned from female to male and that he was much happier now, and in her view, made much more sense as a man than he ever had as a woman. Another complimented me on my hair! It was the first time that I had come out to relative strangers and, while I admit I was afraid of what their reactions might be (after all the laser is scary instrument of extreme pain!!), it felt really empowering once I told them. After that I felt more comfortable, more at ease, and the laser session went very smoothly. Needless to say I was very very happy for the rest of the day despite the pain and the swelling!!!

It then occurred to me that every time that I have been allowed, and allowed myself, to be authentic with other people I have always felt a kind ‘pressure’ come off a bit. This usually happens when I am with my parents – especially my mom (who both know about my transition and accept me), my brother and cousins (who know and accept me), my therapist (who knows and accepts (and encourages) me), my trans friends (who know and accept me), etc… When I leave these situations I feel ‘the pressure’ come back. I even feel more comfortable when I am around people who know about me but don’t necessarily accept me, like my wife. Every one of the situations I described is a ‘safe’ situation so I guess I just expected that being honest with them would feel good and it did. What really blew me away was how good it felt when I revealed myself in a potentially ‘unsafe’ situation. I suppose I would have felt relief that my ‘secret’ was out but the icing on the case was that I was accepted – and even supported!! It felt like I was walking on air!! I felt no ‘pressure’ at all.

How can I describe the ‘pressure’ to someone who isn’t transgendered? It is like a kind of constraining sieve that every thought, every word, every action and every feeling has to go through before it can be released into the world. Now I understand that everyone has to censor these things to some degree so that we can live together in a ‘civilized’ society, but imagine how it feels to censor the natural tendencies of your gender. I learned at a very early age that my instinctual body language, thoughts, words, actions, reactions and feelings might be thought to be ‘unusual’ coming from a ‘boy’ and could even be dangerous depending on the situation, so I began to filter everything according to what I believed was ‘acceptable’ for a male. That is how I would describe ‘the pressure’. I have to spend so much of my energy monitoring and filtering everything that I have stayed away from people and relationships for the most part because it is so exhausting! You can only imagine the relief I feel when people perceive and accept me as female. Every filter comes off (except for the ‘civil society’ filter of course!) and I experience a sense of freedom and empowerment that I haven’t known since I was a little girl – since before I learned that I couldn’t be what I felt inside.

That’s how I know that when I go full-time everything will either fall into place or it wasn’t very solid to begin with. The ‘pressure’ will be gone. I won’t have to expend so much energy censoring myself anymore. I will finally be able to devote all my energy to being myself, being a good daughter, being a supportive partner (if she’ll let me stay), being a true friend, being a productive employee and being an upstanding citizen. If the sole justification for me being in any of those relationships was that I was good at pretending to be male, then I will be happy that the association and the pretense is finally over.

I guess I always knew how much better I felt when I was able to be authentically myself in ‘safe’ situations, I just never realized how good it might feel to be myself everywhere I go – even if it is just to get my electrolysis done! And now I can’t wait to go full-time as soon as possible so that I don’t have to experience that feeling in ‘instalments’.

Once again I will state my extreme envy for all those non-gender dysphoric people out there who never questioned their gender and were able to fully express themselves from day one.

<Green-Eyed Glare of Envy!!!>

When I got poison ivy and then burned myself I never thought that these two annoying and somewhat painful events would lead me to the conclusion that the sooner I transition the better. When I went to my laser electrolysis appointment yesterday (an experience I don’t look forward too believe me…) I never imagined how good I would feel after revealing to them that I was transitioning.

I wish that it didn’t take the pain of those three events to make me realize the very real mental and physical consequences of remaining in the illusory safety of my male facade. I now realize that the limitations I manufactured for myself to stay ‘safe’ only served to prolong my suffering.

I know that I can no longer sacrifice my health just so I can ‘fit in’.

‘And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom’
- Anaïs Nin

The painful lessons of the past month have led me to the wondrous, but in retrospect somewhat obvious, revelation that I need to be what I know I am inside to be healthy – mentally, physically and spiritually.

‘What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.’
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

I have to overcome my fears and my self defeating limitations, I know that if I don’t go full time I won’t really be living.

‘Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.’
- Anaïs Nin

I just need to be honestly, authentically, .me. !!!

Love,

Marybeth Allison

ps If you made it this far thank-you, I was kind of long-winded today but it felt right somehow.