Empty Houses

Photo from the Jessie Hart
Archives

 As I grew up in a male world, I naturally adopted many male dominated activities and hobbies which I stored away in my house I had to build as a guy. 

Mainly because I was frantically chasing
my desire to be feminine, I sometimes jumped from activity to activity rapidly. Plus none of this was accounting for the traditional male things I was doing such as building a family and trying my best to provide as good of a house I could. As far as actual house goes, I was trying to follow in my Dad's shadow and come as close as I could to either remodel or build my own house. He built his own house while I worked hard to renovate an 1860's era brick tavern in the town I was from. I came close but I don't think he understood why I did it. 

Bu it wasn't easy. I needed to teach myself the basic's of plumbing and electricity among other important things associated with remodeling an old structure. The end result was my second wife and I were able to live comfortably there in the years before her death. Then, I was all alone with a couple dogs and a cat in this huge empty house. At that point, I needed to decide which direction my life would take physically and mentally. What I mean was, was I going to continue to try to live in the house I remodeled with all it's memories or try to move on. With all the animals of course. What I decided to do was make the house even emptier by selling all my wife and I's vintage collections on line and using the money to augment my Social Security money I was making. In doing so, I managed to keep the house going for awhile as I sought out the possibility of taking an early retirement. Eventually, years later, I was able to move us all in with my current wife Liz in nearby Cincinnati, Ohio. 

As it turned out, the physical aspect of having an empty house was much easier than the mental part. Since during my life, even though I started out shy, I became a rather social person with deep ties to my home town. Sadly, those ties had nothing to do with my increasingly dominant feminine self. With no one to stand in my way, I was actually able to pursue if I was indeed transgender or not. Or just a serious crossdresser who wanted to their best to look like a woman. Since I had the options and inspirations to discover my true self further, I finally gave in to my inner female and set out to attempt to build a new life.   

Surprisingly, leaving behind my old male life was easier than I anticipated. Destiny (and effort) led me to meeting a new group of cis-gendered women friends I could be social with and learn about a new house at the same time. Plus, all the years I dreamed about decorating a new empty gender house came to pass as I adopted relatively easy to my new gender affirming hormones and life as a fulltime transgender woman. Then my relationship with Liz, who I met on line flourished, and we were married years later after my daughter suggested we finally do it. She made sense, we married and moved on to a new chapter of building my feminine house and making it much less empty.

I am sure, when one discusses genders, not many humans get the chance to empty one house and start all over again in a new one. It is a scary yet exciting journey.