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| My Hair. Beaded Trans Hair Clip by Liz T Designs on Etsy |
If you are still in your gender closet, tentatively looking out, what is holding you back is a big question.
By now you are thinking there are very many big variables holding you back from leaving your closet behind and living as your authentic self. Examples include the possibility of losing spouses and or family, jobs and finances and even your home. Any way you cut it all the chances are major losses which can become lifetime setbacks. Been there, done it.
The worry concerning all of the variables I mentioned kept me in the closet for over a half a century so I am no stranger to having one foot in my closet for years. It is the one big regret in life I have is I spent so much time and energy on my gender issues. In addition to losing portions of my life I could never get back, the whole time I was engaged in a terrible struggle with my mental health which I attempted to resolve with medication and therapy. Not to mention the time and money I spent trying to over medicate myself with alcohol. Many times when I was drinking, I felt over confident with how I was appearing to the public when I flipped my cross dressing script (in reality I was a woman cross dressing as a man) and went out in public thinking I was a man cross dressed as a woman. It took me years to figure it all out.
My excuse was I was still experiencing some sort of benefits from keeping one foot planted firmly in my male life. I had a good marriage, a loving daughter and a job with increased potential. In other words, I was living a very good example of the ideal male dream. The problem was becoming the more I gained, the less I liked the idea of what I was doing. But, even still, it was enough to hold me back as I dreamed of the possibility of someday living a life as a fulltime transgender woman.
As with any thing else, success often comes with pressure and I was feeling it from several different sources. At the time my second wife was against any idea of me beginning a transgender path on gender affirming hormones, my job was adding pressure to do better continually and make the company more money. At the time, the pressure became so much I couldn't take it anymore and I tried the suicide I write so much about. I tried to take an overdose of my bi-polar medication and it luckily didn't work.
From there I tried to retreat and live again totally as a man and bought my own restaurant. Both ideas turned out to be a total failure as my close friends and my spouse all died around me. All of a sudden, with nothing to lose, I found myself with nothing holding me back from my transgender dreams. I had reached the age of sixty and really was at a crossroads again in my life. I could go on living an unhappy male existence or begin a life I always wanted.
For once I took the right path and started hormones so there would be no turning back in my decision. Plus, I wasn't getting any younger, so the time was right for me to make the jump off my gender cliff and see what happened. It turned out, the only thing holding me back was myself and the fear I head of rebuilding a new life as a transgender woman. Even though I thought I had completely thought out all the possibilities of such a move, it turned out there were many I didn't consider which is a topic for another post I will be writing soon.
