Back in February, when it really fully hit me that I'm trans, I felt suddenly overcome with a feeling that was completely unfamiliar to me. It was so foreign and so disorienting that I had to examine it closely just to figure out what I was experiencing. It was fear. I've never been a fearful person. People have called me things like "intrepid," and I've never understood why. I've always just done what I thought made the most sense for me.
Realizing that I was feeling fear, I wanted to understand where it was coming from. The obvious first source was the discovery that I was suddenly, firmly in very uncharted territory. I'd just come to accept that I am someone I hadn't previously realized I was. That was enough to lead me to wonder if maybe I'd lost touch with reality or was otherwise incapable of managing my own life. Secondly, I didn't have the first clue where to go from there - especially as the person I was just realizing that I am. I didn't even *know* this "new" person, and I was going to entrust her with this big, full life I'd spent 60+ years building?
That night and over the days that followed, I talked a lot about these feelings with my wife. She was great about asking me probing questions that forced me to identify what I was feeling and where it came from. From those conversations, I became aware that I felt more like a young girl - a literal child - than I did a woman. I felt immature, unprepared, and completely shocked to find myself inhabiting the body of a 61-year-old man. I cried about it often, not so much because I felt like a victim but because I felt so ill-equipped to move forward from what felt like a bizarrely improbable situation.
I apologized to my wife many times, telling her I was sorry that I was such a mess, that I felt like I didn't know who I was or even how to navigate my way to clarifying my identity. A huge part of it for me was that I didn't want to feel or behave like a child. I wanted to be a competent adult who was an equal partner in my marriage. I told her, "I feel fragile, and I absolutely do not want to be fragile." I happily embrace being sensitive and delicate, but I also want to be strong and confident - not fragile. I also felt a sense of shame, some combination of feeling like I was insulting women by representing femininity as fragile and just plain being weak and unworthy of considering myself a woman. My wife was very understanding. She knew that this phase of my transition would take time to settle out and that it was necessary for me to go through this process of observing and feeling and sorting through these emotions. The therapist I was seeing at the time made the great point that "confidence is probably too much to ask at this stage."
I am grateful that those feelings of fear and fragility faded quickly, even though I still don't know where this all will take me. I have a new therapist lined up to help focus on my gender identity. I've been increasingly able to relax into feeling and expressing my female self, which may be more than anything a matter of simply dropping learned male behaviors. With the progress I've made, I do now feel confident, mature, and capable of handling whatever comes next.
I have no doubt that the combination of caring support and light-hearted joyfulness of this community have contributed to my growth over these months. I see others of you who have confronted your own barriers to authentic self-expression and found ways to overcome them. Many have walked paths that were and still are much more difficult than mine. I figure if you can work through your circumstances, I must be able to craft something worthwhile from mine.
I don't see us as fragile. I see us as resilient.
