Hi all, I literally just could'nt resist posting a little something in this particular forum once it became available. As i have already actually posted quite a bit of my actual biography in the introductions forum quite awhile back, I will ask that you all defer to that for additional past personal and current history if you would like to do so.
I will most likely be assume my complete and newly "rediscovered" gender identity under the name:
Maryanne Annamarie Arnow.
If all goes well, within the next couple of years of what will hopefully be a successful transition, i will have the pleasure and honor of claiming this name, or at very least, one that is quite similar to it, when i am finally ready to make the appropriate legal changes.
I have been greatly blessed in my life with good communication abilities, and been given very strong reason to believe that writing is an essential part of how i will need to express myself, and help many others, for as long as i am able to do so.
I will share a little about my writing and my great love for it, as an extension of the most deeply inspired parts of my self-being as it now stands.
I began writing creatively by age 8, and found that i had a quite an adult flair for it, even at that age, to the point that some of my teachers were in questioning disbelief that a child my age could've actually written some of the things that i had.
I was an utterly voracious reader, & absorbed literally everything that i could possibly get ahold of to read. My favorites ranged greatly from humor, poetry, science fiction(Asimov, Heinlein, Spider Robinson, Ray Bradbury, Jules Verne, & countless others in that genre) fantasy (Tolkien, Stephen R. Donaldson, etc.), lots of horror - of course to include Bram Stoker, almost all of Stephen King and Clive Barker, to "gentle" fiction & drama such as "Lad, a Dog", "Watership Down" (Douglas Adams), and many, many others.
I also deeply loved nonfiction stories & autobios and bios, other world history, natural history, paleontolgy, geology, vulcanology, all ocean sciences, sealife, and fishes and sharks of all kinds. Jacques Cousteau was one of my greatest idols as a child and i had collected the major books of his works and thoroughly read them by age 10 or so. I read everything in the National Geographic, Time-Life libraries, Reader's Digest Stories, & was completely addicted to the Sunday comics for the first few years of my childhood.
By age 11, I was reading & writing on above a 12th grade level, and spelling was like second nature to me. This, as well, invariably widened the already years-deep chasm between myself and all of the other kids at the schools i attended (typical middle & lower-middle class suburbia), and unfortunately contributed to my general "oddness" amongst all of my peers, especially in my use of language and verbal expression at that age, as well as general context of how i looked at and related to the world around me.
Around this time, my parents ended what had become an extremely negative and deeply traumatic marriage. I had already become so socially & behaviorally dysfunctional, that by the end of my first semester in junior high school, i ended up with a whoppingly memorable "6 E's and a "D" on my report card. By thirteen, i discovered the joys of drugs and alcohol, and lost most of my connection with mathematics (i was nearly as advanced in math by that age as i was in english)... but, i had still retained my good writing and language skills, and continued reading sci-fi, fantasy, & various fiction and horror works into my teen years, until I was sent to a long-term rehab program/adventure school, by the ripe old age of 16. It saved my life and gave me back my opportunity to get my H.S. diploma, and while there, i rediscovered my creative writing skills and began to really work with some attempts at brutal and emotionally expressive poetry, most was really dark and deeply introspective stuff. While there i regained much love of the natural environment, as this program included many types of outdoor activites and long "Venture" trips, such as backpacking, long distance biking, white water canoeing and rafting, climbing, caving, and skiing - Yes i actually learned to ski while i was there...It was intense...
As well, as part of the program's requirements, all "students" were required to write a complete autobiograhy (mine, of course, was the longest ever written in all of the progam's history to that point) to be read to the rest of the group.
I was able to complete my high school cirriculum in this program, and had an utterly amazing English teacher with a deeply passionate love for all the classical works of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Carrol, and many other legendary classic writers, which also gave me the love and educational awareness of that style and genre of writng for the first time in my life.
I actually had seriously entertained thoughts of journalism school before graduating, but i never followed up on that particular inspiration. I graduated that program, rejoined (parts of) my family at age 18, and began working in a little foodservice (not the first time - did some fast food during ages 13-15), and security work, as well as other odd jobs here and there, but I left my writing largely alone for quite awhile at that point.
I Got back into drugs again (mostly always only M.J.) by my early 20's, and began the instability curve once again - losing jobs, being late, and beginning the long and painful slide backwards to the need for still deeper self-healing once again. I wrote occasionally but hardly with any level of seriousness at that point. Got into a deep long-term relationship with a very special and extremely beautiful and intelligent girl that i loved madly by my mid 20's, and it ended very traumatically for me after almost 4 years and living together for a couple of those years. I had totally self-destructed once again at that point, and was huting more deeply as an adult than i ever had since childhood - i needed much deeper help and healing of my personal issues and was definitely gonna die or totally explode if i didnt get there.
I began a long and very tortuous process of several years of cleaning myself out once again, of most of the rest of my still long-buried personal baggage, and lifelong state of physical, mental, emotional, and total spiritual bankruptcy. I approached it from a very holistic viewpoint this time, and knew with all of my being that it was really "do or die" time, once again, in order to get happy and have a chance of living anything like a "normal", or at least, remotely functional life.
I was very fortuitously blessed to have connected with some very special people in my life at that time, some of which became deeply close friends, and I recieved an overwhelming abundance of support in terms of finding different ways of dealing with my pain and my many many self-destructive issues. I discovered truly healthful eating and physical cleansing. I participated in very progressive healing circles and privately sponsored psychotherapy groups and began a very long-term process of deep personal healing and true spiritual awakening for the first time in my life. As well, I began to explore and be exposed to others' cultures, and discovered meditation for the first time in my life. I began writing again as my spirit began to open up more fully from the years of pain and rage and anger i had surrounded myself in. I wanted and needed desperately to know the 'why's' and 'how's' about all of my (and invariably, other's) patterns of pain, unawareness, and selfish destructiveness that had kept me repeating the same terribly traumatic cycles of loss in my life since childhood. I began to become aware of deeply synchronous events and occurrences which I was finally able to recognize as being well beyond "coincidence", due to the utterly startling nature of many such occurences i was now experienceing on a nearly daily basis.
Life became truly magical again and i rediscovered the bewildered, abandoned, and desperately hurting child still buried deep within my consciousness. I began seriously journaling for the first time really in my life, and as i got deeper and deeper into my healing processes, my writing flowed more than it had in years upon years. I worked intensely in group healing environments with people of every age group, income level, background, culture, and belief systems, broadly deepening my perspective and experience of the world, and my own, as well as all others', source of life pain, and disempoweringly destructive and limiting issues. I began to become much more mystically oriented in my thinking and beliefs and began reading again by Authors like Deepak Chopra, who deeply advocate a very conscious means of self-actualizing personal empowerment on every possible level. I became involved in alternative thinking about health and healing, and deeply studied nutrition, herbalism, natural supplements, and the healing and cleansing properties of foods of all kinds. I began a distributorship for a high-end natural nutritonal products line, and this again helped increase my cultural and social exposure to all types of people.
I Lost 60 pounds in a 2 year period, and began intensely excercising my body as well as my mind.
I attended Native American "sweat lodges", and began to break free of all the fear and related physical, mental, and emotional limitations that i had been led to believe in, my whole life. I began taking huge risks of personal exposure and began to understand living in a truly unconditional state of openness and expression as regards to other people and myself. In a huge flash of pain and overwhelmingly intense culmination of effort, after months of deep work in a holistic group forum that used a combination of several cultures' ancient mysticism to facilitate powerful cleansing processes for people, i finally got back in touch with my feminine self-being for the first time in years, and learned what it was to dance freely and fearlessly like a whirlwind in front of other people, even while crying out in overpoweringly deep expression of repressed anguish. And i wrote -I wrote and filled hundreds of pages with deeply personal experiences, amazing self-healing revelations, eerily deep and awesome synchonous events, poems, and journaling - for about a 4 or 5 year period of time.
I met and became a close friend with the woman that is still now my spouse, then after a year or so, best of friends, and we traveled and adventured, shared all the incredible pain and loss of my healing and most deeply held personal experiences, helped her come out of a generations-old rural background-shell, and then fell in love with her - and became married after actually sharing a particular deja-vu one day, that occurred between the both of us, and that lasted for minutes and took me back literally thousands of years in the awareness of our deep soul connection.
And i still continued my writing, which was becoming ever-more revelational in nature, the deeper i still continued to go through my pain and healing. We became psychically involved with people that changed the nature of our awareness and lives together forever, and the experience became so brutally intense and frightening around the time of our marriage, that it created deep social problems within my family as well as all of my recently developed healing and social circles. Almost every person in my life had their personal agendas exposed to the deepest extent, and i found out that i was once again, just as in my childhood, because of my deeply expressive and unconditionally intense self-expression, not nearly as well-liked and respected as i had thought i was becoming, and broke away from all of it. People that i had deeply trusted with all of my secrets and pain and that had invariably helped facilitate my very healing process, were exposed as liars and pretentious two-faced little game players with hidden agendas of all kinds, including where myself and my wife to-be were concerned. I had only barely touched the surface of my gender issues during these years and had not come fully back to myself at that point, even with all of the deep personal healing i had experienced on many other levels by that time. I was still hiding and running and completely denying myself of that.
I gained the insights that the deepest healing, true miraculous awareness, and actualization in my/our lives wasn't going to come from books or groups or supplements or anything else any longer - it had to come directly from the personal power of God directly in our own lives and spirits. I literally went to the edge and back again on several occasions and then, i completely shut it all down within a year or two, as it became totally traumatic to myself and my wife both, as well because of some critically terrible mistakes i made karmically, that deeply hurt my real true spiritual friends and family, and turned her completely away from it all any longer.
I became deeply afraid of unconditional living once again, and completely stopped writing on any kind of personal levels whatsoever.
I left my nutrtuional distributorship because i didnt believe in it anymore, and a good personal Chef job i had, and went to work in a family transportation business - A high-level executive transportation service, and began dealing with all kinds of major media players from every background and from all around the world. We both met and drove almost everybody that you could ever list or imagine had ever worked in or around the White House, radio and televsion, the newspapers, international journalism, science and technology, historical studies, and the Pentagon, only to list a few categories, that had ever been in the limelight in the last 40 years. The list of adventure and personalities, & amazing experience is so incredible that it's truly mind-boggling. As far as our marriage was concerned, it had always been in contention in the family opinion from thje very beginning, because of our age(13 years apart) and family background differences, and my past history, and family politics were once again brutal and traumatically invalidating, and being made ever more increasingly difficult by both my temper, and my determination to refuse to take bullsh-- from anyone, especially fellow family members. I left or was fired more than once, and was, at one time, invited to participate in an international/overseas business venture in Namibia, South Africa, which would utilize my expertise in this particular business and trade on my family's good name and reputation.
I wrote my first feasbility study and international business proposal even though i had never attended college - it took me 6 months to set up a potential multi-million dollar transportation services program proposal for that country's developing infrastructure, & was told by a very well-educated friend that reviewed it for me, that it was as good as anything he had ever seen come from a Harvard Graduate. I traveled overseas for the first time in my life, met with the Prime-Minister of that country, all of the heads of travel, transportation, and tourism-related industries, and was even invited to a dinner at the PM's residence to talk with many of his closest advisors and friends...I soon found that it was difficult to trust my potential business partner, became aware of the depth of intrigue and politics i would have to become involved with, ran out of money, and eventually abandoned that project.
I went back to work for the family once again, got tired, conflicted, and fried, and fired again..
I finally decided to take the good heartfelt advice from several clients whose opinions really affected me, as well as my own heart, and go back to school at age 34, to get my degrees in Culinary education, one of my greatest lifelong loves and creative working inspirations.
More than 10 years earlier, even before getting married, I had already dreamed up writen out a full restaurant plan, but wasn't able to make it work due to too much personal conflict, and lack of money. I'd always been too arrogant to admit i would ever need to go back to school, even though i always thought about it in the back of my mind, and wondered.....
So, i finally went - and it was one of the best experiences in my entire adult life - I fell deeply in love with my school, my instructors, my Chefs, and the completely real & amazing adventure of finally putting my nose to the grindstone and getting real about actually making a committment to develop a real career, and a specific skill set for myself after struggling in total instability for all of my life up until that point. I was in college - yayyyyyyyyyy - and it was incredible - it was like getting my chance to really succeed in my schooling after i had almost completely and miserably failed in my entire childhood to do so, in so many ways...
I had an instantaneous rapport with most all of my instructors and took an insane credit load to complete my degrees in as short a time as possible. I had to fulfill all of my basic-level college cirriculum requirements since i had never been before, on top of a full culinary studies load and working externship.
I struggled deeply and loved every single hellish moment of it. I made Dean's List my first semester (with 17 credit hours) and eventually made President's list after carrying up to as many as 20 full credit hours, and I hadnt been in school in almost 20 years. I was forced to hone my skills, learn and re-learn how to write in a much more formal professional style, do extensive research papers by the dozen in the usual college standards, & then still write more and more than i ever had before in my life - to squeeze every drop out of that schooling that i could. I drove 3 hours commute a day, with an average of about 18 credit hours/semester & at least two part time jobs for about 2 years, and finally graduated with my full Associates Degree, with honors, in Professional Cooking and Foodservice, Sanitation, Classical Pastry and Baking, back in 03', & ive been successfully working as a real, honest to goodness, classicly trained Chef(in the making) ever since...
Fast forward to last year and my real reawakening of myself as directly pertains to gender issues. A lot of deeply traumatic loss among family and friends, & some other deeply painful and very overwhelming personal experiences over the last couple of years such as major accidents and nearly disabling back & neck surgeries, & i finally came back to myself and re-awoke last year in a literal flood of incredible pain and passion unlike anything i have ever felt before since i was extremely young in my childhood - to all of the rest of the issues i had ever hidden from, run from, and avoided as far as my life, my gender, my sexuality, and the rest of a very deeply & painfully repressed emotionality and truer state of self-being as far my entire childhood (and life in general)was concerned.
Since then, I've written more on a personal level in less than one year than I had in the previous 10 or more - & there's a lot more still to come from this point onward....Sorry to take so long to finish all of this, but a LOT has happened to me in my life, and i feel its difficult to give a real honest context for all others to understand who I am, and where I've been, without having to give a lot of additional details as i have.
Eventually, I hope to write and publish some very deeply inspiring and easily controversial books and novels about love, ethics, human nature, & spirituality, that will hopefully become bigger than anything else that has ever been published before.
I am,
Sincerely,
becoming Myself,
Maryanne "ChefAnnagirl" Arnow
