I'd like to begin with a couple of trigger warnings.
This post contains a large amount of discussion of addiction and alcoholism. If that's uncomfortable for any of us, best we skip the entire post, because my recovery is actually crucial to my having found out who I am. Sorry, too, if it sounds like I get on a soapbox to preach about the subject, but wth, it's my post and my recovery, so it's my soapbox.
I also mention mental illness a few times. I do this not to inflame controversy but rather to relate how I handle my own, which, alas, is often rather poorly. I also mention it to demonstrate that I'm not ashamed of my interesting psychiatric and psychological conditions. Too often, mental illness faces ignorance, shame, and shunning. Cuts too close to the bone of the transgender experience. Neither deserves it.
...
This has been one hell of a weird year. In a lifetime full of weird years, this has easily been the weirdest.
I've been lurkposting on this site under a different handle for a while now, but after a great deal of working on finalizing who I am and who I want to be, I've come out to myself, and I'm now ready to come out to the community, and to try to participate productively. Thus am I at long last ready to file my introductory post.
And to get this weird-ass year off my chest.
Weird-ass three years off my chest, to be more precise.
I have been unduly blessed in this life. I grew up in great privilege and with amazing advantages: American, white, upper-middle class, a fairly stable home life, possessed of a creepily high intelligence that allowed me to excel academically and earn degrees from a prestigious university. I am married to a brilliant, amazing woman and am father of two brilliant, amazing, grown girls. I have a lucrative white-collar career and a sterling reputation in the industry. No two ways about it, the System was geared to work for me, and I've done everything I can to milk it.
Things aren't all sunshine and roses, though. I do suffer from some serious issues. If there actually were a fine line between madness and genius, I'd long since have scuffed it into a fuzzy, faded mess. I have a mood disorder, which I try to keep under control with meds. I fall into a cluster of personality disorders, which I try to manage with meditation and therapy. Finally, I'm an alcoholic, which I try to manage with Alcoholics Anonymous.
But onward to my three weird years.
Three years ago I was laid off from my job. This in itself isn't a big deal in my industry; it happens all the time; one just goes out and gets another gig. Yet for some reason I fell into a deep funk. I was fifty years old, and I started wondering if I wanted to keep doing what I had been doing for a career. All the same, I couldn't imagine what else I would do. I couldn't motivate myself to look for a job, but with my severance package, it wasn't all that pressing.
I began drinking more heavily than I ever had. I had ample opportunity with all the free time on my hands. It started getting to be uncomfortably much. That is, I enjoyed the drinking, but nobody around me did.
Maybe six months later, my father received a terminal diagnosis. He was a brilliant man and a functional alcoholic, but a lifetime of heavy drinking that hadn't killed him yet via kidney failure, cirrhosis, and diabetes finally got him with esophageal cancer. Took him a year to die, but there you have it.
Watching him die, and realizing I was drinking my way into the same grave, made the drinking even worse. I knew in my heart that I was following in his foolish footsteps, and it depressed me, but I wouldn't consciously imagine myself as having any kind of drinking problem. That was Dad's weakness, not mine.
And so on down the rabbit hole. A long, dark passage from which I had no coherent exit strategy. The alcohol was affecting my moods, and it was destabilizing my meds, so I was growing more and more volatile and more and more miserable by the day. Drinking to ease the pain and being pained by the drinking. No good. No goddam good at all.
I had once upon a time been a fairly cheery and chatty drunk, but over the years I had become a rather sullen and surly drunk, and in the last few months before the start of this very weird year, I turned into a mean and ornery drunk. I realized that it was time to quit drinking when walking home from a bar one night, I was using a crosswalk and a car blew through its stop sign and came to a halt directly in front of me, missing me by scant inches.
I have anger issues (see "personality disorders" above), and stopping in crosswalks instead of behind the stop sign is a pet peeve of mine. However, instead of remonstrating gently with the driver like a sensible person might, I reached in through the window and tried to twist his head off. It was with great regret that I eventually let go, but he was accelerating as he dragged me down the street, and I lost my grip.
As I picked myself up and dusted myself off, I finally admitted things weren't going so good.
Rehab (or as I not-so-affectionately think of it, "Drunk Camp") became the next stop in my journey.
And thus, just a tad more than a year ago, I enrolled in Drunk Camp.
And thus began the aforementioned weirdest year of my life.
I didn't truly like Drunk Camp very much. They tried to teach coping skills for living in the outside world, which was good, but we also endured painfully tedious three-hour group therapy sessions every morning. Plumbing the depths of the shallow isn't really my bag.
However, I did learn a fair amount about addiction, and one of them is that addiction is itself a magnificent coping skill.
Not a healthy one by any means, nor always legal, and indeed sometimes lethal, but if you want to repress your deep-seated issues, hey, addiction could be the thing for you!
See, one metaphor I took from Drunk Camp is to imagine addiction's coping skill as a boulder sitting on top of a manhole cover. Down below the manhole cover are all your demons – all the unresolved issues you've successfully managed to hold off with whatever your addictive muse happens to be. You may already be familiar with some of those demons, but there may be some you had no idea lurked beneath. Roll that boulder away, and out pop any number of hideous jacks-in-the-boxes, all grinning and giggling and glaring you straight in the eye.
Addiction sure seems to have done a hella job helping me cope. To be completely honest, I never expected that in my early fifties, having lived life as a son/brother/husband/father, I would discover I had gender issues.
Christ. I quit drinking and discovered I had gender issues. Made me wish I'd never quit drinking.
When I thought real hard about it, it seemed to me that I could sort of make it sort of make sense if I tried to shoehorn it into my life story hard enough. I could remember glimmers from as far back as childhood and all along the way, but still. Seriously? I'd managed to get by just fine for fifty years without worrying about this crap, tyvm. Surely those glimmers were the idle musings that anyone might have collected over a long enough lifetime. Fragments of a busy imagination. An undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese. Humbug, sir. Humbug!
But even so, I decided not to ignore it. As we say in AA, "we were at the turning point." I was yet unsure of where I wanted to take my career, I had realized that I needed to get sober, and it seemed like the right time in my life to make a clean breast (heh) of things. If there were ever a time to be open and honest with myself and to explore important new ideas for personal growth (no matter how far-fetched), this was the time to do it. Besides, something as wacky as questioning my gender would resolve itself pretty quickly under the stern stare of sober scrutiny, right?
Right?
Yeah.
Drunk Camp came to an end, and I started making a few inquiries on my own to find a gender therapist. I was trying to do it without telling my wife, not to be sneaky but rather because I didn't want to trouble her without having had a couple of fruitful conversations with a therapist. If there wasn't going to be anything there, I planned to just walk away from the whole silly nonsense and speak of it no more.
Fortunately (but not so fortunately from the perspective of cutting down on future weirdness), I finally found someone, and the sessions were disturbingly intriguing. With gritted teeth I admitted to myself that I wanted to keep moving forward, and with even more stoutly gritted teeth I admitted to myself that I needed to tell my wife.
When I let her know what was up, she was pretty unhappy. She insisted it couldn't be true. It was ridiculous. It had to be something else. It was because I was drying out. It was because I was manic. It was because all the drinking had given me neurological damage. It was because I was re-channeling my compulsive addictive behaviors from alcohol towards re-gendering myself. It was this, it was that. It was because she was angry and afraid and couldn't believe I had dropped this terrible, horrible bomb on her after more than twenty years of marriage, and I understood, I understood, I understood.
It wasn't that she was necessarily wrong, either. Just because you're angry and afraid doesn't mean you can't be right. At that early stage of sobriety, these were possibilities that couldn't be ignored. They would have been simple solutions to a complex problem. I'm a big fan of simple solutions. Deep down, though, I was starting to get the sense that this transgender thing might be for real and that there weren't going to be any simple solutions to the weirdness I saw myself headed into.
Guess what?
Life doesn't really have that many simple solutions, and I ended up having the weirdest year of my life.
Well? What more is there to say?
Hahahaha
Yes, I know, everything and nothing. The story up to here has taken us through March of 2018. Since then I have stayed clean and sober, even passing my first anniversary a few weeks ago.
Since March, 2018, I have also spent an immoderate amount of time with my gender therapist. For a while I saw her three times a week, and we now see each other twice a week. She has gently suggested that with my issues fairly well in hand, we might cut back to once a week, but I'm yet pretty tender in my new skin, and she is a comfort to me, so a double dose still feels pretty good.
I spent an inordinate amount of time over this last year trying to figure out where I believed I fit on the gender spectrum, from male to female to anywhere in-between. I do feel that given gender identity, gender expression, sexuality, and so many more dimensions to the transgender experience, collapsing everything onto a one-dimensional line running from male to female is pretty lame. Nonetheless, that dimension contains a great deal of the space's information, so it's not a bad place to start.
I have chosen my place on that line and will soon begin transitioning to live life as a woman. I have my first appointment with an endocrinologist in two weeks. Both my psychiatrist and therapist are in full support. My wife hates it, but two out of three ain't bad.
I have chosen my new name, as well. Please forgive me that I don't care to share it yet, but like I said, I'm still a little tender in my new skin. All in good time. My new name's symbolism is meaningful to me on so many, many levels, and the handle I'm using is a reference to it, so for now that will have to do.
And that's my story.
Life isn't as tidy as that all makes it sound. I've left out a lot. My wife is furious with me, and we'll probably split up. My kids bitterly resent all my bad behavior during the years of drinking, and we haven't even dropped The Bomb on either of them yet, so who knows how that will go. I haven't been able to work this whole weird year while I've grappled with figuring everything out. We've been living on my retirement savings. That's going to hurt later on.
But somehow I know it's all going to work out, one way or another, because there's no other way it can possibly be.
For I am the Battle Goddess.
This has been one hell of a weird year. My life is a howling mess, and I have no idea what will become of me.
But at least I have a better idea of who I am.
Thank you.
