I identify with a lot of what's been said here. I was much more the young James Joyce than Hemingway, as a kid, and always off in my own head somewhere. I liked to climb trees as long as I had a book in my back pocket; I wore ratty old cutoffs down my shins and waded around in the creek behind my house, pretending to be Tom Sawyer; I waited up late into the night for my "real parents," (likely royalty, imprisoned by some evil, usurping tyrant) to show up and collect me. Being in academia, though, (arguably,
especially in the English dept.) my childhood narrative doesn't differ too terribly much from most of my male colleagues', most of whom also felt mislabeled/misunderstood as children.
I didn't really have any friends until the 8th or 9th grade. From what I can recall, my biological family took my "idiosyncrasies" pretty well--I remember my mother going out and buying a miniture pants suit for a school trip to the opera in the second or third grade, because the thought of wearing a dress was so humiliating. I do know that I did the whole, "but look at me, I'm a boy!" think quite young, but don't remember anything really coming of it. I mean, it was the 80's, and my parents were high all of the time, anyway. They probably just laughed it over with their friends and forgot about it. I'm not even sure what I would have meant, exactly, with that statement...that's something that I still struggle to understand.
I was also a member of that last generation to grow up without readily available internet, and computers never really interested me, anyway. Until I was well into my twenties, if you said "computer," I thought, "Oregon Trail--so what?" you know? So, looking back, I do wonder if I would have understood myself better, had the appropriate paradigm been available to me.
Around puberty I began to suffer from prosopagnosia (inability to recognize faces), though I didn't know what it was until it was featured during a show on NPR a few years ago. I just know that one day I looked up across the room to notice a pretty young girl staring at me; I had walked towards her to introduce myself before realizing that I was looking into a mirror. I do wonder how that has affected my being trans*, or it taking me so long to put the pieces together. Also around puberty I began a pretty standard program of self-destruction..certainly nothing atypical about that, I suppose.
I was taken in for an "exorcism" around this time by a foster parent who read my journals and came under the impression that I was a budding lesbian. That really threw me, I think, and I spent a lot of years trying to be a lesbian just to get back at them, lol.
I had two children pretty young, that's difficult to explain to people at times. My body was pretty miserable at being pregnant, and there were complications all the way through, but now that my guys are 10 and 12 I feel so incredibly honored to have them in my life. My partner has taken great delight in teasing me:
aww, you guys can all go through puberty together! (Yeah...) Because I was in such a precarious place, emotionally, it was a struggle, early on, to read the often strongly-worded opinions of other men, regarding pregnancy.
I've caused myself a pretty hefty substance abuse problem. Somehow don't read a lot about that on these kinds of forums. I suspect that everyone's trying really hard to seem really mentally stable? Or maybe it is just me
I'm working on that one, still.
All in all it's been messy, sure. But that's how I know something's real. I don't wonder that the narratives which seem to get told the loudest are those that could be construed as fitting some "ideal" situation. We've all spent years looking for our tribe, right? The thought of being rejected now is scary.
-Jake
