Quote from: meganjames2 on October 02, 2016, 05:12:42 PM
The root of all my uncertainty is a lifetime spent imagining a different destiny makes it very hard for me to see any other.
I suppose my earlier answer, above, was overly Zen. Whichever path we choose leads us to our destiny. I, too, struggled a great deal and asked myself if there was any way at all out of transition? I then pictured myself (perhaps overly dramatically) drawing my last breaths of life before I expired. I pictured myself feeling great horror as in this imagining I would realize: I lived for
them and not for
me. Where are they now, as I took my last gasps? Had I flushed my life down the drain so they would not have to deal with ambiguity--so that their world construct would not be upset?
That's what I started to realize. I told a cis woman, a girlfriend, but not romantic, about my struggle. I would be letting all sorts of people down and guilt welled up in me along with shame and heavy doses of fear. She listened as I confessed my pain and ambivalence. We talked, but one thing she said still rings in my ears all these years later: Remember, your primary contract is with yourself.
This liberated me enough to seek therapy from a non-hospital-based gender clinic. My therapist said that trying out living in role, even for a day-trip or a weekend would not be the end of the world nor would I be making a permanent commitment. He acknowledged it was an imprecise analogy, but if I took a car out on a test drive, it didn't mean I had to buy it. I did take some forays out in broad daylight, my heart beating as fast as a sewing machine. I went to movies with a friend. I went out and had lunch and angry patrons did not suddenly mob me or laugh or scream or do anything except to go about their own business.
It was not a bed of roses and there were setbacks and misgenderings. I would compare it to hammering a nail in. I kept hitting it over and over until I drove home. At any time if it did not fit, I could back out. I could take a break from my forays. It was no sin to stop or even decide it was not for me. The transworld would not collapse if I decided needed to take it slower or just become a CD or completely stop. My primary contract was to myself.
The worst would be, should I remain a boy, was that my face would be cleared of some hair and my breasts would be slightly larger and I'd have gained some humility about womanhood. Maybe I was blithe, but it was estrogen, not heroin, that I was taking. People meet, get engaged, marry, and get divorced faster than the required RLE , or crossliving as it was called back then.
It is during this time of experimentation that I began to "know." I liked estrogen and how it made me feel. I liked looking pretty, even though many times I felt like an elephant in drag. And speaking of elephants: an elephant is eaten a bite at a time. I explored. I learned who I was. I had many sleepless nights. I gained self-knowledge. I lost a lot of people who I thought were friends--good I didn't have to wait until my deathbed to see their true colors.
I always had to remember one central thing about the so-called Real Life Test. It wasn't that the world was testing me. It was
I who was testing the world.
Live long and prosper.
