I always wanted to be valued for my sensitivity and kindness. I wanted to be the kind of man who was free with his love and emotions, who could be tender and affectionate. I worked hard, through therapy, mindfulness practice, life coaching, and pure determination. By all exterior validation, I was that man.
Why was I still so damn angry?
It was eating me alive. Insomnia, anxiety, depression. I was kind, I was loving, I was miserable. I knew my heart was clear on how I needed to behave, but why did I feel so empty?
I’ve always been sensitive and emotional and craved affection. I was harassed and bullied for sitting too close to other boys, for not being tough, for not wanting to fight, for thinking misogyny was gross, even just among ‘us guys’.
Is the only way a man can be sensitive and sweet is to exist in a self hating misery?
No, there was more to this story.
When I was five, it started. I’d get teased for my clothes. The crop tops or vivid colors were babyish, or worse ‘girly’. I Stopped wearing them, except in private, eventually, not at all. When my parents weren’t around I’d ashamedly put on my Mom’s makeup, clothes and jewelry and admire myself in her dresser top mirror. I loathed getting my hair cut, I wanted long flowy hair, but glam rock wasn’t in vogue yet, and my parents were adamant. Short hair. I desperately longed to do ballet and gymnastics and figure skating like my next door neighbor J., but boys played hockey and baseball. I knew that. I was a pretty good goalie.
I wanted to play with them, the girls, not rough and tumble sports with the boys. But, I was a boy. I had cooties or something. A strange longing filled me around girls, J. and the neighbor across the street and so many others. I thought it was love. It hurt. It hurt so bad. I figured if they LOVED me, I would feel better, it would fix me. I’d been fed stories my whole life about how perfect the love was between my parents, and grandparents and great grandparents (fairy tale romances, quite literally as I know now and struggle though my own co-dependency issues).
So, I would fall for every pretty girl I met. Some of them fell in love with me. For a few weeks that would be great, but then the pain, the longing, just got worse and worse. I liked to wear their cloth when they weren’t around. I pretended I was them when we made love. I savored the touch and affection, but I was still longing after every girl I saw.
I had weird sensations when around a couple male friends who showed me kindness and praise and the kind of awkward affection guys do. Not the hurt longing with girls, but warm, pleasant. A light sweetness of heart and body. it made me horribly uncomfortable. I wasn’t gay, but I was horribly jealous of their girlfriends. Obviously, I was just some sort of transvestite , bi sexual freak. Better to ignore it. Follow the pain. Find the perfect ‘one’ to complete me. If I'm bi-sexual, I can chose, right? Follow the pain.
Never satisfied, that was me. Always angry and hurting and hungry. I got married, a beautiful kind dancer, I had kids. The daughters I’d always wanted. I got worse. I got so sick I started getting horribly suicidal like I had in my teen years.
It would take eight years in therapy before I would admit most of this. I skirted around it all like a prize winning fighter. There were plenty of crises to occupy my hour every other week with my therapist. Mommy issues, Daddy issues, self esteem, codependency, generalized anxiety disorder, PTSD, antidepressants, insomnia, addiction. I learned coping strategies, adjusted my life to manage the stress and pain better. When I wasn’t completely emotionally numb, I still wanted to die. I wrote and drew beautiful and horrible graphic novels about brave tortured girls surviving trauma and isolation and finding peace through self acceptance. It would take one more year for me to face the truth.
I wanted to be the kind of man that I felt the world needed, and those men are out there. My father is one of them, my brother, as are many of my male friends. There are many happy, sensitive, gentle men in the world, and I am profoundly grateful.
Last year I ‘fell in love’ with a woman again. REALLY bad. Drunk poet bad. it all became clear. I loved everything about her. Her hazel eyes (like mine), the way she moved, her ‘look’, her self absorbed melancholic artsiness. She was a train wreck. She was so much like me and my Mom. Like some weird hybrid with a cute waist and adorable button nose, the squashed petite kind, like Mom. Like my cousin M. She'd kill me if she loved me back. It would destroy my marriage, my career, my whole life, and yet I felt like I couldn’t live without her... an old refrain. I knew that. I finally looked deeper.
I didn’t want her, I wanted to be her.
The moment I accepted it, that I am a woman, that I need to be seen and treated as one, the attraction disappeared completely. I was obsessed in love with her for over a year. I had painted her face a hundred times. I knew every millimeter of it. It was gone, without a trace., never to return.
She’s a nice kid, but she has a lot of growing up to do.
In its place is a deep deep well of pain and longing, a gnawing suffering that I now see has colored my experience since I was too little to know the truth could be other than what I was told. Without an object to pin it on, a human being outside myself, the spell is broken. The delusion cast by society was pierced and I know the truth. A truth that cannot be unlearned, but can only be accepted. Change or die. I either have to let the world destroy me for what I am, or I will destroy myself.
My wife wishes it were a delusion that could be treated by therapy. She’s accepted that for the last ten years as her lot in life, to be married to an emotionally broken man. It’s funny, but now that I am healing, now that I am finally feeling joy again, she still misses that man, broken as he was. He was a good guy. He tried SO hard. He nearly killed himself trying.
He was a good actor. He deserves a fucking posthumous academy award.
I can’t prove to you that I am a woman. I can only share my experience, and the fact that since I have come out, and begun transition I am happy again. The gender dysphoria is lifting like springtime after a long harsh winter. I can’t explain it, except through my story. I can't confirm it under a microscope or in a double blind study. When I accept it, I am happy. When I fear it, or deny it, I get morbidly anxious and depressed.
Transition is an imperfect cure. Maybe I will still behave codependently and needy and get suicidal sometimes... maybe, mostly when it all just feels too hard, too unfair, too overwhelming. I have lots of old bad habits to unwind. There are a lot of people who HATE me and wish I were dead, just because I am what I am. I’ve traded one curse for another, or so it feels sometimes.
I don’t think I’ll ever be happy with my body 100%. Will I always want to be prettier?
I am very sensitive and emotional. I’ve been abused. I still get abused, by the media, by the TERFs and other bigots in the world. By our culture of toxic masculinity where-in the WORST thing a man can ever be called is a ‘pussy’. I am a symbol and embodiment of one the deepest, darkest fears or our society. A man in woman’s skin. The tortured villain of ‘Silence of the Lambs’. An evil predator, the wolf in the woods, the goblin that gobbles up children in the night.
It irks me that I’m going from the top 80% of social privilege, from:middle class, married, white male to the bottom 30% middle class, divorced, transgender, woman (I took an online quiz). I’m the same person, but just the perception of who I am, their projection of what I am, changes everything. Our world is really really unfair. I just have to accept that too and be the best person I can be. At least I am alive. It was a very close thing.
I still wish that I could be a good example for other men struggling with acceptance in a culture of toxic masculinity, but that was never my real calling. My purpose is to be myself. A kind, sensitive, emotional, affectionate transgender woman. I can still try to be an embodiment of love.
It all started with learning to love myself, rather than the projection of who I was supposed to be.
Sometimes all it takes is one wrong assumption to bury ourselves alive, to bury life, and to bury truth.
I haven’t had any surgery yet, I have only been on hormones two months, but for the first time since I was five years old I can look in the mirror and smile at myself, and be smiling back on the inside.
I know who I am, what I am, and what I am is beautiful, complicated and true.
I don’t want to die anymore, but if I did, I would be at peace. Finally, I am alive, and I am free.
The stoic suffering man is dying, and the girl he protected is finally starting to shine.
#perspective #outlook #newlife#transgender#coming out#self acceptance#limerence