In the course of one's life she sometimes has to think and try to put down in words how she goes about thinking and reacting, most especially, in this case, to the things she reads on boards, blogs, the internet. Sometimes the best thinking and feeling seems to come to me when someone I care about asks a question, or a set of questions, privately.
I feel a responsibility to be as clear and open to them as I can be. They are important. How I say things, what I say to them, matters a great deal. For, often, when they ask they are in pain and doubt and they are hopeful for something, I think, beyond just a cast-away cliche, a party-line. They want something for their life, something that might in some way help them to find ways to heal.
This morning I had to do that again. I've been corresponding with a woman who has some baggage she wants to be rid of, or at least store away in a safe place so she doesn't have to lift and carry it constantly, some worries and doubts about herself.
In answering I felt I had to be both open and real, at least about myself. She deserves more than some ideological BS that I might feel justifies me and the ways I live and have lived my life. What follows is an excerpt from what I sent her. I think it has a bearing on this thread.
tekla, as ever you make good, if sometimes "crisp," points. 
O, btw, Stacy Brahm, your thoughts and feelings are impressive, girl. They have the solid chime of "truth," or at least the solid chime of "truth" as best we can know it. Thank you for your posts.
What follows is the edited letter. One thing about GID, I think, is that we learn early and well how to "hide" ourselves. I mean, it becomes first nature to distract people from the real and send them haring off in some other direction. For me, I have found that the tactic is a bad one.
We spend years in deception and lying and self-denigration and it's all too easy to keep doing that post-transition. Afterall, for most of us it is what we know best. It's become part-and-parcel of our psychic (when I say "psychic" I usually mean a fairly literal ancient Greek meaning of "soul") habits. Why change that? I mean it is "me" isn't it?
Well, perhaps, but it's similar to the way your body-configuration was "you" but not quite the "you" you felt it was. Even so, your habits of mind, the neural pathways you've worn deep into yourself, are indeed "you," but they are also, often enough, overlays you've crafted through years and years of protecting yourself.
One of the things I know as well as I know my own name is that such "protections" are very often not protections at all. They are attempts at self-soothing that work out poorly over time for those who use them.
I am convinced that when she does that (denies that she was ever configured as male) the girl doesn't grow. She just firms up a very old and well-worn pathway she's been walking for years anyhow. I mean, the point is to "be myself," no? Well, continuing to cringe and cower behind one's GID and allowing it to continue unabated afterwards just seems self-defeating to me.
No, everyone needn't know. One doesn't have to trumpet her life all around to overcome that sense of having to somehow lead a double life. But, owning that I am all of my parts, from the foundation up and all I continue to add on as annexes, just seems and proves in my life much healthier for me. And from what I have seen, proves out as well in the lives of others who have and did struggle with GID.
Of course I am a woman, just as at one time I was a girl. But, through all of that I had a male-body and was raised and taught a lot of male-behaviors and all of that overlaid and burrowed into how I expressed "me." It doesn't just magically disappear because I start walking around with a neo-vagina, breasts and a dose of estrogen in me. To think that it does is some of the most magical of magical thinking.
I think that anyone who believes that and acts "as if" she has somehow managed to "leave the old me behind" is asking for psychic and emotional problems on a huge scale. That she'll never get to where she thinks she's going.
Kate Grimaldi (don't know if you were ever acquainted with her on TS boards) had her "6 levels of transformation in a TS." The last was "now you are gg." I believe that she was right. However, Kate seemed to think that SRS was a requirement that had to be met before that could occur. I am not and lots of folks I greatly respect and who've been at this transition-thingie and this living after thingy (post-ops) for a very long time agree.
I also believe that at the same time one knows and builds on her past and that all of that is a gg who used to have a set of balls and still has a penis but it's become an internal sheath. No one escapes her life.
I think, strangely, for those of us who experienced childhood abuse or sexual abuse as adolescents or as young adults, or even as full-adults, that we have the proof of that. We can hide it, deny it, avoid it, but dammit it does keep coming back. Until you find ways to incorporate it and live with it and never forget that it's there and that it makes you in part what you are.
It doesn't paralyze you anymore, the memories. It doesn't take hold of you as though you were living the events themselves again and again like it once did. But, you know quite well that it's part of you and like any other part of you it continues to have an effect on "who I am."
Trying to avoid it just brings more intense symptomatology to the person who tries to "forgidaboudid." It won't be forgotten. It will not just lie there on one side while I traipse on as if it was never there.
My body recalls. My mind recalls. My emotions recall. If I ignore all those recalls then I pay the price with fear, doubt, pain (physical and psychic,) dissociation, night-terrors, fear of crowds, fear of going out, shame and, eventually a full-blown and intractable mental illness if I don't work through it and incorporate it in a way quite differently than I had been incorporating it, or exiling it. *sigh*
My observations about GID are that there are similarites, huge ones, overwhelming ones, with PTSD. In fact, GID sometimes is the root of someone's PTSD.
I'm a good reader. I've worked with language most of my life. It was my first and longest love of human subjects for study and holding in one's heart. I was reading at age four! By the time I was seven I had read the entire 20 or whatever volumes there were of
The World Book Encyclopedia my parents had bought "so Nikki will be able to do well in school." Then I started on
Brittanica and finished it by age ten.
Latter in life I worked as a linguist. Not a poly-glot, but as someone who parsed and examined language and broke it down and studied its constituent parts and tried to work out how communication and language worked.
*What follows is a "how does Nichole do it" thing. When I use "you" in it I am not talking about "you" personally. Rather, it's that generalized "you" that means anyone and everyone I pay attention to on any board or blog, meeting with, etc. I pay a lot of attention.
*
I've written for years and have learned that (regardless of what some of the people on boards write) found that, people DO express their deepest selves in the things they write. "You don't know me!" Well, yes, I haven't spent time with your person in the flesh. I don't live in your town. Nor have I followed your trajectory through life.
But, au contraire, I do k-n-o-w you, because I can read you, see the ways you express yourself, how you express yourself, feel and read the things that trouble you and that you are always on about because they hurt you and whether they cause you doubt or fear. There's a lot that a person who knows a lot about language and style can get from even the most rudimentary writing.
And, I'm a therapist. I watch and pay attention to nuance (even in writing.) I see and remember the things that make you angry and hurt and fearful and how you try to hide yourself. I see and take in the things that make you happy, defensive, doubtful. I do know you to a large degree, regardless of what you think.
How? Because, like it or not, you reveal yourself in everything you write or say or express and I have watched and paid close attention and understand what I have seen and observed and taken in about you. I make notes. It's what I do. Hope that doesn't sound too brash or too braggart-y. It's just what's there. What I see and do and how often, like around 100%, it's true and my judgements are usually pretty "on-target" as well. It's a gift, I suppose.
But it's no more "gifted" than a wood-carver who's been at the work for years can make wondrous and beautiful things with wood and knife or chisels. No more "gifted" than Yo-Yo Ma plays his cello, or than a computer-engineer through experience can trouble-shoot without usually making many mistakes in doing so. We do, we learn. The more we learn the better we do what we do. Same for most everyone. *shrug*
Actually, it's more like a craft, something learned through long practice, repetition and time and listening and hours and hours and hours and years of practice and failure and working it out again. It's hard work and doesn't come "naturally." The bent may be natural, but as Ezra Pound said about writing poetry: "It's 98% sweat and hard work and learning and about 2% talent."
So, no, no one
has to own her life in it's totality. No one
must follow me. Perhaps some will be fine continuing to deny and hide, make it through forever by denying their lives were as they were and that what went before always builds what comes latter. But, without exception, unless, perhaps, someone is truly and materially, born-again at age 25, 30, 40, 50, 60 whatever, then past builds the present and the future. But, some folk possibly also believe that space-aliens are frequent visitors to their lives and that Moses actually was responsible for the tidal wave in the Red Sea that "overwhelmed Pharoah's army."
Perhaps it's all true. Perhaps myths don't find the point in a different way but are totally historical in every detail.
Perhaps.
As a survivor I can attest from personal experience that it doesn't go away by shoving it away from me. It doesn't shove. And though it may relent for some period of time, it never actually goes away. What happened, happened. Period. What happened has current effects regardless of whether I have them healed or not. Even scars have an effect.
Same with GID. It was real and very much a part of my life. Like the PTSD, though, GID no longer rules and controls all of my life. It is in the past; but, just like the layer of calcium that laid down on my bones when I was fourteen is still there (best I know) GID and PTSD have also left their marks.
It's just that that layer is no longer the covering of my bones. But, it's down there somewhere, and all the layers above it have it as a foundation for their existence. So too with GID and PTSD in our lives, in our souls.
So too with a cold cone of an extinct volcano. It's there. It marks the past, but to pretend it is no longer there and never was there and that the geography of the place wasn't and isn't affected in some way by it is to simply ignore the truth of geography.
The soul's geography, the body's geography, is no different.
Nichole
