…a reconciliation…finding .me.

Tuesday, October 6th 12:41 am

Good morning everyone!

It is late at night and I can’t sleep so I thought I would write something in my journal to get my feelings out of my head and down somewhere where I can deal with them.

I am having friendship difficulties again.

A close friend and I had an argument last night.

I am not sure that I have ever even had a friendship / relationship that I haven’t ruined because I  imagined some sort of unreasonable obligation or had impossible expectations.

My friendships / relationships begin promisingly enough.  I know I am a good listener, patient and generous with my time.

I see the best qualities in people because that is what I want to see and I am willfully blind of my own faults.

I want to make people happy so very often I see obligations or impose expectations on myself and others where they don’t exist.

I tried to make my parents happy by being what they wanted me to be. They had expectations that I knew I could never meet.

False family relations based on expectations that have been shattered by my transition.

I tried to make all the girls I ever knew happy by being what they wanted me to be. Even though I knew, deep down, those relationships would never progress beyond friendship.

False friendships based on the expectation of something I couldn’t provide.

I tried to convince all my male friends that I was just as ‘manly’ as they were by drinking too much and trying to fit in even though I was never very comfortable around them. What if they ever found out who / what I really was?

False friendships based on a comic book characterization of the man that I tried to be.

I went into counselling over five years ago to understand myself better. All I have ever wanted was to be a girl so my counselling sessions focussed on understanding that better and trying to convince myself that it wasn’t a deviant / horrible thing. Once I had accepted myself, I tried to save my existing relationships (marriage, job, etc…) so I put off going on hormones for years. Once I went on hormones my marriage dissolved and I was on my own.

A false marriage based on me trying to be a ‘husband’ that, deep down I knew I could never be.

For the first time in my life I am finally discovering who I was and who I really am but, aside from about five blissful years that I didn’t know I shouldn’t be the person I am, I don’t have much practice actually being me.

And I am making so many mistakes.

Everyone says that going through transition is like being a teenaged girl.

Except that for me, I so forcefully repressed who I was from such a young age, transition is like going from age six to age forty-one in less than a year.

I left my ex-wife just under a year ago to live on my own as a transsexual woman.

To say that this past year has been a colossal learning curve for me is a huge understatement.

I have made so many mistakes.

I am learning what it is like to be me – the real me.

What kind of a person am I?

What kind of a sister, daughter, friend, lover, colleague am I or might I be?

It has been an extremely blissful and extremely harrowing year for me.

I have confided in people I shouldn’t have.

I have betrayed confidences I shouldn’t have.

I have leaned on people to the point they have broken because I was/am so unsure of myself.

How does a forty-one year old woman explain to people that she has the mindset of a schoolgirl because she is dealing with her emotions for the first time in her life and they are so, so overwhelming?!!

I still don’t know the answer to that one.

I am running, stumbling as well as I can through elementary school, junior high and high school.

I stare at my body and wish that it would fill out.

I try so hard to fit in.

I care so much.

I care too much.

I have made so many mistakes.

I lie in bed at night, awake, wondering what I did wrong yesterday.

I have come such a long way since I moved into my apartment all those months ago but I still have so many more years to go to fully become the person I am – the girl, the woman I tried to extinguish for so, so many years.

I want to be the best sister, daughter, friend, colleague I can be!!

But maybe that is the nub of the problem?

I can’t be ‘anything’ to anybody.

I can only be true to myself.

‘God grant me the serenity….’

 And please forgive me for all the mistakes that I know I have made and will continue to make along the way…

Love,

Marybeth