Bonding with Yourself

 

Club Diversity Image. Columbus, Ohio

As strange as it may seem, it took me many years for me to fully bond with myself as a transgender woman.

For years I wondered if I was a woman or a man. Everyday was like groundhog day when I woke up in the morning. Some mornings I felt more like a girl and others as a boy before the reality of my existence set in. No matter how gender fluid I felt that day, I needed to be ready to compete in my unwanted male world. I wish I could say the competition just made me stronger as a male but it never did. Most of the time, the competition just made me want to head home and cross dress as a girl. Plus, I was put into an even deeper frustration place when my brother was home and I didn't have any privacy to try on my feminine wardrobe. 

Bonding was difficult when I was not allowed into the feminine world at all and was destined not to until much later in life. In the meantime, I struggled from one gender struggle to another, All the time, hiding my authentic self from everyone in the world. I suffered so much, I needed all the help I could get to maintain my life as a man and still have any sense of stable mental health. Especially when I was diagnosed with having Bi-polar depression. If you are not familiar, I suffered from terrible highs and lows. When I was up I could do anything. Including transform myself into an attractive woman and when I was down, all I wanted to do was lay in bed and sleep and try to drown out my gender issues with alcohol. Finally I was diagnosed by a therapist and was prescribed medications to help me out.

As we all know, the medication has not yet been invented to relieve the pain and tension of having gender dysphoria. Even now I suffer from dysphoria when I wake up in the morning and look at myself in the mirror. After all these years, I have learned to take the good along with the bad and take the middle road. It has been a good coping mechanism for me. Along with those mechanisms, I learned other ways to structure my life so I could finally bond with my myself. When I did, I found I was a stronger human because I had the chance to experience life from both sides of the binary gender spectrum. Since it is the rare individual who can claim to be all male or all female in the gender spectrum, I was able to find my special place where I could exist in society. The question always was, was society ready for me or any other transgender woman or trans man.

I quickly discovered most of the world did not care if I was trans or not. They had lives to live and were busy doing it. On the rare occasions I did encounter a negative transphobe, my strong personal bonds gave me the confidence to survive. 

Again, bonding my unwanted male self with my stronger, more natural female self took me years to complete. Mainly because I did not have the courage to admit who I was to my true self. Once I did close the gap, my long awaited bond was complete and I could move on in life as a total person as a transgender woman but never forgetting the man who helped get me here. A topic for another blog post. 

Planned or Evolved

 

Image from UnSplash

Completing a gender change is a difficult experience, to say the least. 

Sometimes I think my path to a transgender life was planned, sometimes I think I just evolved. I think that because the more I planned, the less I accomplished. There were literally years which went by without much change at all, or so I thought. Those were the days when I thought I had perfected my wardrobe and makeup but then failed miserably when I went out in the public's eye and found out I still had a long way to go. In other words, putting the feminine image in motion was the plan but I found I needed to evolve into it. I needed to walk the feminine walk more than I had ever had. The mirror had to take a back seat to reality.

Along the way, I was able to plan on carving out precious time in my male life to explore the possibility if I could further explore a transgender life as a woman. I went to many mixers in nearby Columbus, Ohio which were attended by everyone from transsexuals to transvestites to male "admirers:. Somewhere in the middle of all those people was me. I guess I could have been described as a questioner who was just observing all the others to see where I fit. Through it all, there was no way I could plan my next gender move, I needed to evolve into it. 

It wasn't until much later in life until I tried to plan my future. Fairly quickly after taking my time in my MtF gender transition, the time was quickly approaching to pick up the pace. For one, I wasn't getting any younger and if I was ever going to try, I better do it. Plus another major issue was I was becoming better and better existing in public as a transgender woman. If in any way I was receiving negative feedback perhaps I would have felt differently about transitioning but it was different because I felt so natural the more I did it. The more I communicated and existed in the world as a trans woman, the less I needed to plan my next move. I could just sit back, relax and evolve who I was. 

Evolution eventually led me to beginning hormone replacement therapy and never formulating any plans to ever go back to my old unwanted male life. The hormones I was fortunate enough to be approved for helped me to evolve much further into a feminine life I wasn't prepared for. I learned quickly there was no way anything I had accomplished in life HRT opened pathways in my life I could have never planned for, I needed to evolve into as a new human being. 

Once I evolved I was able to be a better person as the stress of attempting to live between two of the main binary genders drained off of me. Even my long bout with having a prescribed Bi-Polar depression disorder became better. Probably because my consumption of alcohol went way down also,  All because I quit planning to change my gender and evolved into a transgender woman I could be happy with.    

Time in a Bottle

 

Photo Courtesy Nickolas Horn
on UnSplash

With all due respects to Jim Croce who wrote the song "Time in a Bottle", I decided to title this post by the same name.

The bottle I am referring to is the alcoholic one. I grew up in a home where my Dad used alcohol regularly so it wasn't much of a surprise when I became of age I started to drink alcohol also. Along the way, I developed the habit of being able to hold my liquor well. If my friends and I could somehow get around the age limits to buy it. As with any other potential vices, we found ways to do it. 

By the time I got to college I was well versed in drinking with everyone else. Even if I was still underage due to Ohio's liquor laws. I guess you could say I was ahead of the curve when it came to alcohol.

Then came the military. Of course my time in basic training took me away from any drinking activities as did my time in Thailand. Due to the lack of drinkable beer. But then came the exact opposite when I was sent to Germany who really take pride in their quality beer and wines. Very quickly I acquired a taste for our locally produced beer and a few wines.

Fast forward to what any of this had to do with being transgender. As most of you probably know, alcohol often brings out the best or the worst in a person. People often become braver in many areas of their lives. Ultimately liquor enabled me the courage to first come out as a transvestite to my friends after a Halloween party. Which could have gotten me into any number of problems in the pre "Don't ask-Don't tell" era of the military. Here I was coming out in plain view to a few of my friends and risking a less than honorable discharge. All because of alcoholic infused bravery.

All of this turned out to be just the beginning. I tried to come out to my Mom after a night of drinking and was soundly rejected. But I kept trying. 

When I first started to try out the world as a feminine person, the bottle proved to play a major role in the process. When I gathered the courage to stop for lunch, I would always order a beer to steady my nerves and later give me the courage to try out new and exciting venues. Of course the further I went, the further I wanted to go. 

As I went further and further into the feminine world, I chose large sports venues and small lesbian bars as my favorite places to go. It was very difficult for me to conquer the fear of rejection I was feeling and my use of alcohol helped me. Even though it was only beer I was drinking, I was emboldened to continue. After a period of time, it was difficult for me to separate my desire to become a transgender woman with my desire to drink.

Finally I came to the point I didn't need it. About that time I had a scare concerning my liver so anymore recreational drinking was over. Without hesitation, my time in a bottle was over. Plus, I didn't need to find the courage to live the way I had always dreamed of, as a woman. I had arrived and now my alcoholic consumption is approximately two beers a month.