Was your life really 'Living a Lie'?

[Emmaleigh]

I'm 60+, headed fast for 61. Not quite 2 months ago, a path appeared, a door opened, a cagedoor unlocked - none of these metaphors do justice to the extremity of the event that occurred. And in truth, it wasn't even definable as an 'event', it just was what it was.

As they say, hindsight is 20/20. And over the past several weeks, I have been daily, even hourly, amazed by new insights into the word 'denial'. It sure aint the way we use the word in very-day pop-psych slang. No, I haven't spent my life living a lie, at least not an open one. Ive been seeing so many moments throughout my life when a little window into my dysphoria would pop open and in the very same instant would immediately be slammed closed - so quickly, I never even saw it happen at the time. I always assumed that my unhappiness, my depression (and I did a pretty good job of denying even that), my 'failure to launch', my inability to fit in anywhere, was just innately me. I see now that I adopted my 'lone wolf' persona as an acceptable way to embrace my loneness, but over the years it just became who I am, and I denied the deep hurt that went with it.

I often had underlying thoughts that "I" was wrong, and even had moments of insight in which I said to myself I was in the wrong body, or in which I begged some higher-power to let me wake up tomorrow in my 'correct life'. But I always attributed this to other crap in my life, or as a sign of my self-diagnosed mental instability that I needed to keep hidden.

I am daunted by how tangled a web I have woven over the years, between depression, generic dysphoria, gender dysphoria, self-hatred, lack of self-belief... with no real explanation for any of it. I almost envy those who've spent their lives knowing why they felt so miserable.

I am in therapy for perhaps the 6th or maybe 10th time in my life. I want to believe that this time it will not fail, because this time I am on that couch for the right reason, and without the inherent dishonesty & lack of trust I always carried into that room in the past.

[Felix]

For me it was only living a lie once I had the language to deal with who I was. Before learning about trans identities and transition options I was just making do as best I could, and dishonesty was not a part of the equation.

[alexbb]

Yep, from 14 to 32 felt like I was acting, badly, i felt cut off from my family friends girlfriends and achievements and was carrying a huge millstone around my neck.
a month since coming out, i love it, nothing much has changed except im much happier, my family and friends seem to like the difference and dont mind me
dressing as a girl. work is going great,  its awesome. i wish id done it when i was 22.

[Eveline]

The phrase "living a lie" seems to imply that you know the "truth", but you are lying about it to yourself or others.

This may be true for some, but for me, getting to the truth took a very long time.

I spent many years trying to understand who I was and what I needed, and then more trying to accept that I was OK, and then even more before I began transitioning.

For me, "Through a glass, darkly" is a better description of the experience...

[LoriLorenz]

The question has wormed its way from my eyes and brain and finally I think I can answer. I haven't been reading this thread, so whatever I touch on is pure happenstance and not influenced by the other responses here. Not an invalidation, but a validation that we share experience.

Living a lie? Not necessarily, but what I was living was a quiet paradigm of who I actually am. I'm not a loud person, despite the current bright purple on top of my head. As a kid I rarely said anything about things being too girly for me. I knew that I didn't like the pink flowers on my walls, but I never said it. Why? Because I was a GOOD kid. It wasn't my place to complain. I did ask, but one explanation that seemed logical - We can't change it, it's too expensive. Or. If you want to change it, buy the pain yourself. - I didn't have the money so there goes the complaint. I wore the dresses the first day of school and such. I was called a girl and so I was. A. Girl.

But when someone you respect and admire gets exasperated with you because "you think like a male" and you want to scream "WHY IS THAT SO BAD?". When that happened, I swallowed my arguements, because the inside and the outside matched and I assumed that the outside dictated then inside. And so I was. A. Girl.

I tolerated the pink. I made my favourite character of my favourite show be the strong female, because I thought that I Was. A. Strong. Female.

But I look back, and I did the things the girls told me to do so they'd be my friend. But I really would have preferred to wrestle. Even as a girl, I couldn't do that. Why? Because I was broken and delicate and needed to be protected. No organized sports - her vision and kidney issues make every tackle a life threatening possibility. But I was given my "own" sport - despite my desperate desire within to scream "I just want to play soccer!". I swallowed that desire unconsciously. In its place was and is the pride that it is more or less unique amongst my co-workers and friends (except the Karate friends, which is why we are unique).

In the Dojo. On the field. Climbing the trees. In the Pow Wow, dancing grass not jingle. In my mind. I have always been unconsciously male, but trying in a disjointed way to present as female, because the outer must refrlect the inner. Since the outer is female, I must be female! Logic, at its ... innocent and superficial .. apex.

Logic that is now failing as I connect the dots. The truth is that outwardly, I should present as male, because inwardly, that is who I am.

Consciously, I didn't live a lie. Sub-consciously, the world fed me a lie, which I swallowed and believed.