You Never Know until You Try

 

Image from Leo Visions
on UnSplash.

You never know until you try was drilled into me as a kid by my WWII generation parents whenever I was facing a potential difficult situation. Little did they know, their insistence on me trying to do the improbable would come back to haunt them in a very different way. Back in those days (in the 1950’s) gender issues were referred to as mental illness and any reference to their eldest son being mentally ill would have been frowned on, so I was stuck wondering if I was really a boy who wanted to be a girl.

The only thing I knew to do was to keep cross-dressing in front of the family’s full length hallway mirror. Imagining I was one of the pretty girls I desperately wanted to be. At the time, I had no idea my gender issues would last the better part of fifty years and take up huge portions of my life. Not that I could have done anything about it if I had tried which I did a number of times when I purged nearly all my feminine belongings swearing never to pick them up again. I was stuck being a male and somehow, I needed to make the best of it. Like so many people I knew with gender issues, purging never worked. The pressure built until I could take it no longer and again, I was accumulating women’s clothes again and wearing them.

At the least I tried to go back to mentally being male full-time and failed miserably at it. All I knew was when I was not thinking about getting out of my dark, lonely gender closet, I was not happy at all and when I at least tried to be me in the mirror it took the pressure off. Even if it was only for a while. At the same time, I was acutely aware that I was doing the best I could to see if I could improve my appearance as a pretty girl. How I never got caught doing all of this, I will never know, and I even resorted to taking plastic bags of clothes and makeup into the neighboring woods so I could escape the prying eyes of my slightly younger brother and family.

My mentality of never knowing you could do something until you try really came to the forefront when I was drafted into the Army during the Vietnam War. Instead of taking the two-year plan with a ticket to Southeast Asia, I took a chance and signed up to try to get a job I wanted in the American Forces Radio and Television Service. With a lot of luck and the help of a congressman whose radio station I worked for, against all odds, I got one of the sixty job slots in the Army for AFRTS. It turned out the whole process turned my life around and taught me that anything could be possible. If you went out of your way to try. Probably the most valuable lesson that I could have ever learned as I looked ahead at my path to becoming a successful transfeminine person. If it had worked for me once, why couldn’t it do it again.

As I set out to leave my gender closet behind and improve my life, I know I took on a journey I would not readily recommend to others. When I started to leave the mirror and join the world as a trans woman, I used a tool that I had already used effectively as a man in my previous life. It was alcohol, and I knew I could use it to build up much needed courage to be in the world as a transgender woman and not get myself into more trouble as I was presenting as a single woman in an establishment which served alcohol. Gay, straight or lesbian, it did not matter. I found I could get by if I stayed out of the redneck leaning venues. I was also well schooled in the artform of driving while buzzed from all my days in the Army when I did all the driving. More than anything else, this was back in the days before the major crackdowns on drunken drivers, so I was safer, and in NO WAY do I recommend what I did.

Also, what I think is tougher these days than when I was intensely lonely and looking for companionship is the world of on-line dating. When I was seeking a date, I played both sides of the gender coin, because I was in the unique position of being a transgender woman who favored lesbians. Looking back, I think I got the most attention from men seeking men dating sites. But just knowing that the amount of trash I would receive was at its best humorous and at its worst, a disaster because I refused to meet anyone in a public place which was not of my choosing. I was stood up more times than I would care to count or remember because my life was destined to change forever when I met my future wife Liz on a woman seeking woman dating site.

Liz responded to my picture saying I had sad eyes which was entirely possible at that time of my life. Amazingly, she lived relatively close to me in a town (Cincinnati) that I had always admired. From there, I began to become involved in her friend’s girl’s nights out and I was able to do more to learn what was behind the gender curtain than I had ever thought possible. The entire on-line dating world for me proved again you never know what you are going to get until you try.

These days again it is more problematic to find someone online with all the scammers out there, but destiny can never find you if you never venture out of your dark lonely closet and light up your path to a brighter future.

I wonder what my deceased parents would think now of what they taught me so long ago.