My Life is Great. . . But

The girl she never was.

My life is great. It’s the best it’s ever been. But as my journey of self-discovery continues, I realize I need to acknowledge and honor the trauma I’ve experienced and work more directly on healing.

I’m an optimist by nature. I like to look forward, not back. I think regret is largely a waste.

Despite all this, I realize I need to do a better job of acknowledging the fact that hiding an essential part of my being from the world for more than fifty years (and doing my best to hide it from myself, too) stank. It really hurt, and it still hurts to this day.

I think I’ve minimized and ignored my trauma because it didn’t seem severe enough to me. Compared to trans people who have lost families, jobs, homes, financial stability—basically, their entire pre-transition lives, mine didn’t seem that bad. Maybe it wasn’t. But it was, and still is, real for me.

I know a lot of trans people who were and are miserably depressed by gender dysphoria.

I chose a different coping strategy. I choose not to feel at all, to the extent I could get away with it.

That extracted a price too, and I’m still paying it. I now walk onto the battlefield of life without my mask, without my armor and with decades of scar tissue peeled away. I feel more acutely than I can ever remember. Sometimes it hurts. It really hurts. But much more often, it’s a thing of amazing joy and beauty.

Before I can move fully forward though, I have to do a bit more grieving and mourning for that little girl, that teen, that young woman who never got to live, except inside my head.

I wonder what she would have been like in grade school? I think she still would have loved reading; she still would have been something of a teacher’s pet; but I think she also wouldn’t have been so miserably lonely so much of the time. I don’t think she would have been the most popular girl in the class, but I think she would have had friends. A few really good friends can mean a lot.

And how would she have been influenced by her older sister, now gone more than 25 years because of a brain tumor? Big sis was smart, beautiful, the non-conformist, the free spirit, the hell raiser. I think she would have pushed her little sister to open up more, put herself out into the world, and take a few more risks.

I can never know what she would have been like for sure, but I really would have liked the chance to be her.

So I mourn and shed a tear for my past self who never was. But I also continue to celebrate the belated birth of the woman I am today. Perhaps, with time and patience, I can integrate the two into a single whole.

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Tags: featured, Transgender, Transition

Category: Transgender Body & Soul