Woulda shoulda coulda...
I sat and thought about this for a while, especially the aspect of starting earlier. No matter how I looked at it, it always came down to this question: would living 50 years as my true gender have given me more joy and contentment than discovering the most amazing person in my life has?
It's an unanswerable question. The past is immutable. Maybe my personality would be different than the melancholy that's been my constant companion and that colored everything in my life - my self-confidence, my ambition, my constant fear. I settled for so many things. Who knows what I could have accomplished without that elephant on my back?
Yet trying to transition was no piece of cake in the past. I've read your stories and talked with those of you who transitioned back then, and society, and specifically my family, would have erected barriers that may have been too much for me. I suspect many aspects of my personality would have remained the same regardless of my gender, and having to deal with transitioning in those times on top of my other deficiencies would very likely had led to either failure, or more likely, my death, by my own hand or other's.
So this is for me an essentially futile thought process. If transition could have gone smoothly then maybe yes, living authentically for the last half century would have produced enough cumulative happiness to offset that which I find with my special person now. On the other hand, suspecting the way it would actually have gone, it might not have been worth it in the long run. After all, I did accomplish a few things, I did have the advantage of male privilege (to a small extent), and there were flashes of joy occasionally. And since transitioning now is what actually led to meeting this new light in my life, I have to think that maybe it's working out for the best.
I can't change the past, so I'll do my best to enjoy the future.
Stephanie
