Finding Comfort in your Own Skin

 

Image from Ayesha Rosley
on UnSplash.

I believe the way to finding comfort in your own skin as a transgender person is having the confidence to do it.

Just think of all the time you may have spent in front of your mirror as you gathered the courage to take on the public and work from there. Like many of you, I experienced severe gender dysphoria every time I looked in the mirror and saw a man dressed as a woman and was afraid to go out into the world and face the public. To this day, on occasion, I still suffer from my lack of confidence in who I really am when I look in the mirror in the morning. I do my best to just ignore it and move on and take on my day knowing I am doing my best with what I have to work with. Or as a transgender woman friend once told me, I pass out of sheer willpower.

My willpower was tested during the many times that I failed in public and needed to start all over again. At that time, I had very little confidence that I was doing the right thing with my life. I had to go through years of trial and even more error before I began to build the confidence I needed to succeed in the world as a transfeminine person. When it came right down to it, many times I was excited about the prospect of going through another trial to learn if I could be successful. When I was a success as a trans woman, I wanted to do more on my transgender bucket list of things to try in the new exciting world I was in.

Most the major changes for me came when I began to really look around at what all the ciswomen in the world were wearing and I needed to put away the stubborn attitude of what I thought I should look like. As I began to successfully blend in with the world at large, my confidence began to rise, and I could relax and feel more comfortable in my own skin. It was the beginning of a life-changing gender experience which I discovered I was along for during a very bumpy ride.

In many ways, the ride to being comfortable was like my favorite roller coaster ride at a big nearby amusement park. Often the ride up was slow and uncertain to the top but was made up by the rush of going down the gender hill. It did not take me long to appreciate the rush of coming down my own personal coaster. Even though I feared climbing the heights I was climbing (as well as the threat of falling) the risk was worth it as I began to carve out a small life as a trans woman. Which I always wondered if I could do at all.

I found I could do it thanks to the welcoming embrace of several ciswomen I was introduced to. It was scary yet powerful when I began to receive invitations to special girls ‘nights out. Once I figured out what I was going to wear, then I needed to figure out what I was going to add into the conversation with the other women who I had never met. I desperately did not want to act standoffish and worse yet bitchy by not joining in with the other women who I had a chance to make friends with. Looking back, I think I was successful because outside of one woman who kept glaring at me, I was treated well by everyone else. All this sudden attention led me to a newfound confidence in being in my own natural skin that I never had before in my old male life where I always needed to be on the outlook for someone trying to take away the life I had. I was always competing for what I had earned in a what you had done for me recently world.

The reverse was true in the transgender woman’s world I had found my way into. As I became more confident and successful in just being the me, I always wanted to be, the only competition I ever felt was when I needed to use the women’s room in a venue, I was not a regular in. And even that began to fade when I learned the proper etiquette to use in the typical women’s rest room. There was no thrill in doing just what came naturally, just the relief of being allowed in women only spaces to do it. Taking away any sort of a transphobe’s argument against me using the restroom of my choice.

In my case, becoming comfortable in my own skin was a constant problem which started with the way I was raised. My parents were long on material support and short on any emotional needs I may have had. Which led me to be alone with my gender dysphoria. It was a very lonely, confusing place to be and left deep scars on my internal confidence as I had no deep connection to what my true gender skin really was. The male world I was forced to live in, and the female world I wanted to be in. So, for me, the process of gaining any sense of who I really was a difficult and time-consuming process. Plus. My confidence was so fragile that the slightest problem could send me back to my cross-dressing drawing board to look for solutions.

Over the years, I flat out wore that old cross-dressing drawing board out until I began to figure out my problems were right in front of me. All I had to do was have the courage to do something about them. One of the problems was  they were so much deeper than just trying to look like a ciswoman. I was tired of thinking I was fooling anyone into thinking I was a ciswoman and settled into trying to build myself into the quality new feminine me I wanted to be as I had earned my womanhood from a difficult, unique path.

I seized the opportunity to finally be comfortable in my own skin.