If I Had Known Then

Image from Hc Digital 
on UnSplash. 

The age-old question is, if I had known then what I know now, what would I have done differently.

Realistically, since I don’t have some sort of a magical time travel machine, I could not do anything differently. But if I had it all to do over again, I would have tried to come out of my male gender closet much earlier in life. I would have taken advantage of the youth I had and invested it in progressing to being a transgender woman. Even though I was well into my thirties before the term “transgender” was even invented or discussed. The truth of the matter is, I wasted too much time between Halloween parties when I could safely cross dress as a woman. Finally, once a year just wasn’t enough and I needed to open my closet door a little more and explore the world as a transgender woman.

If I had known then, I would have realized there would be no shortcut towards my ultimate goal of living as a trans woman. I would have to find my own unique path to being a woman that any other female has to do. For years, my second wife tried to tell me the truth, but my male ego stood in the way, and I refused to listen. I thought just looking the part of a woman was enough until getting out into the world proved me wrong. I needed to pay my dues just like any other cis woman before I was allowed to play in the girls only sandbox. It was a difficult struggle to get there, full of many setbacks, but somehow, I persevered and kept moving forward, often at the expense of my marriage and my male life. Primarily, my marriage since I was very close to my wife and she was my best friend. If I could go back, I would have tried even harder to be closer to her before she suddenly passed away at the age of fifty.

I would tell her she was my role model and all I really wanted to do was to have her like my feminine self, which she obviously did not. Instead, we fought like cats and dogs until she would tell me to go away and be a woman and spare her the pain. As much as I secretly knew she was right, I was still determined to hold the marriage together and pursue my transfeminine dreams the best I could. It all turned out to be the wrong plan and I suffered. There was not enough therapy in the world to help me through such a cut and dried situation. Sooner or later, I would have to make a decision in my life and choose between my two strong women…my wife and my inner feminine self who was becoming stronger and stronger by the day.

If I had it all to do over again, I would have set my male self aside and det out to build a new life as the transgender woman I was always meant to be. In the short term, it would have been difficult, but in the long term I would have been happier, and my mental health would have been better with the gender pressure off. Also, I need to bring up my excessive use of alcohol to mask my pain. Somehow when I drank, I felt more like a man and less like the woman I wanted to be. It was not until I was well into my male to female transition that I could decrease my addiction to alcohol and now I am lucky if I have two drinks a month.

Even If it is impossible to go back, I wonder how my life would have been if I had pulled the plug on my male life earlier. I certainly would not have missed all the time I was daydreaming my life away about how it would be to live a feminine life. How much better and productive could I have been. On the other side of the coin, I know I would have lost valuable time learning all I needed to learn to survive in such a new radical feminine world. Time seems to always erase the negatives and accentuates the positives.

Even still, knowing how successful I was able to be in my gender transition, it is impossible for me to not think what could have been possible if I had made the move earlier.  Even though my path was difficult enough, I may have had a smoother path if I had done then what I know now.