Never having a solid and secure sense of self-identity.
Years and years of chronic and sometimes life-threatening depression and anxiety.
Enough money spent on therapy to have purchased a house, at least in some parts of the country.
Always feeling like an outsider, not fitting in any kind of ordinary way with either women or men.
Acute discomfort with my physical self, self-loathing of my body to the point of not being able to look in the mirror.
Feeling ugly, unacceptable, and just wrong.
Extreme social isolation during huge chunks of my life.
A pervasive sense of having been dropped on the wrong planet, not belonging anywhere.
Extreme and unpleasant self-consciousness of myself in relation to or comparison with other people.
Despite all that, I have managed to have an interesting if often painful life, to raise two amazing kids, and to have survived. Do I wish there'd been a way for me to have dealt with all this much earlier? Absolutely. Why didn't I? I don't know, exactly, and I simply have to trust that for whatever reasons, I wasn't ready, but now I am.
But I'm just past fifty and in good health and expect to have a good long chunk of life left yet, so I'm going for it now, and just having made the decision has resolved so much tension and anxiety and unhappiness in me that my life feels transformed already. The sense of coming into myself is very profound, and very wonderful, and I don't have any doubts that it is the right thing for me.
I don't expect that transitioning will magically make all of my "issues" just go away--there is always continuing work and growth to be done, and I'll continue to do it--and I can't say how I'll feel about it all years hence, but it feels as if a missing and critical piece of the puzzle of myself has finally fallen into place, and I can only think that is, and will be, a good thing.
