Are You Really Someone Else as a Trans Person?

 

Image from Kevin Laminto 
on UnSplash

For the longest time, I considered the idea I was two separate people.

On one hand, I was living the male life I was entrenched in and on the other, I was attempting to carve out the precious time I needed to explore my cross dressing self in front of the mirror. Trying to live a life on the gender border between male and female as very difficult to say the least. When I was in male mode, I spent every spare moment wanting to cross dress again at the least and trying to imagine what living as a girl would be like the rest of the time. To make matters worse, I even dreamed of being a pretty girl when I was asleep. Then I had to wake up confused and bitter when I found out life really hadn't changed and I was still a male after all. I needed to go again and challenge an unwanted world. 

Through it all, I often wondered why me? It took years for me to embrace who I really was and know the answer. I was just me and it would have to be good enough. However, the family upbringing I went through made it so difficult. During my youth, I was taught nothing was good enough. When I brought home any "B's: in my studies, they were not good enough. Where were the expected "A's." The never good enough attitude carried with me into my cross dressing life, all the way to when I became a novice transgender woman. In other words, when I acquired a new dress, when its newness wore off, I always felt I could look better in another dress, It led me to being a thrift store shop-a -holic. I couldn't wait until I could take what I had set aside money wise from my wife and use what time I could set aside to locate the next great outfit. 

My problem became especially bad when I was able to afford shopping for new wigs. I went through what I called my clown era of wigs before I settled into one or two wigs I wore all the time. By doing so, I was able to finally begin to build myself as a stable transgender woman in the world. I was beginning to learn I was someone else and that person was not a guy. 

As I was doing all of this  and as I lived a new and exciting world as a trans woman, I found I was taking all the stress off my mental health. The new authentic me enabled me to feel more confident on the gender path I was taking. I was fortunate also to have had a good therapist at the time to help me talk my way through it with her. Since I had previously been diagnosed as being Bi-Polar, both of us were careful to keep my gender issues separate. Plus, no mention was ever made of me being two people. I set the idea aside as being yet another mistaken idea from my youth. It could have been my male self attempting yet another move to survive the onslaught of life changing ideas which threatened his very existence. 

My life today proves I was always only one person and that was my feminine side. It is so sad I needed to fight so long to feminize my entire life as a transgender woman. The only true person I needed to be.