I Made Nothing

 

Image from Camillo 
Contreras on UnSplash.

Several of my earliest memories of success as a cross dresser came during the Halloween parties I went to. 

When I wore my very short mini dresses, showing off my freshly shaven legs, I found I had several women come up to me and say, I "made" a good-looking woman. Years later, when I began to understand "woman speak" better, what they probably meant was I "made" a good-looking woman, for a man dressed as one. 

Furthermore, I soon came to realize, I was not making anything. I was simply being who I was. In order to learn that simple fact, I needed to live decades of life as a parttime cross dresser or novice transgender woman. Or I needed to live my gender truth before I could claim it. I needed to get out of the mirror and into the world to learn if I really belonged there. Those were the days when no one in the world around me would give me a break. The public was laughing at me (rightfully so) because for the most part, I was dressed like a clown in drag. Plus, my old male self, my second wife and my mirror did not want to let go of me. Making my life miserable and destroying what I had left of my mental health.

Juggling two genders at once was a tremendous challenge when I caught myself practicing living one gender when I should not have been. Being called "Ma'am" at my macho management job was certainly not cool or good but somehow, I survived to live on to the next day when I was determined to do better.  What happened was, I did keep getting better at my feminine side and increasingly began to leave my male side behind, which scared him.

Fear, as they say, is a powerful motivator and instead of giving up, my male side and my second wife grew increasingly close and forced a battle of the wills. In other words, neither one of them wanted to lose their place in the world. Which included my universe. It turns out, I did make something...a huge mental mess for myself. It is one of the excuses I make for taking nearly fifty years to break out of my gender bonds and flourish out of my closet and mirror. I just had to make sure I was making the right choice and there was so much pressure on me. 

As I grew out of the mental gender mess, I had made for myself, I gained the critical confidence I needed to establish myself as a secure transgender woman. Not just a femininized man. Since I had spent a lifetime getting there, the personal coming out was extra special to me. It was as if my feminine self was telling me what took so long. As it turned out, I shared her belief in wondering why I took so much time and wasted so much nervous energy I wish I had back. As we all know, worrying over what we did in the past is a waste of time, unless we are learning from our mistakes.

I felt better when I realized I did not make anything, when it came to my gender issues. Rather, I inherited them from some unknown source which made life a challenge. A challenge I needed to finally accept before the pressure I put on myself had grown too heavy to carry and I had to put it down and go with the life which made me feel natural and alive. When my transgender womanhood became secure thanks to friends I had, I felt so much better as I built a new life.