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JJ Hart doing Trans Wellness Outreach. |
Will the second act of life be better and more successful than the first? How many people even get a second chance?
That is the question I needed to answer when I finally shed
my male life and entered a transfeminine existence. Since I did it at the age
of sixty, I have had plenty of ground to catch up with. Many times, it seemed I
never would. My internal gender clock was moving one step forward and two steps
back as I attempted to transition. I had times when the picture was clear in my
mind, and I was able to put it into motion. Such as the night I took myself out
to see a major Christmas light display in a nearby village and was warmly
accepted in my soft bulky sweater, leggings and boots. Then, as I rode the wave
of gender dysphoria, I would do something wrong such as how I was moving. I am
fond of saying, I looked like a linebacker in drag.
The problem was, if I relaxed at all going into the second
act of my life, I had the tendency to fall back into old habits. I was learning
the hard way over and over, to take nothing for granted in my new life. Many times,
I tried and failed not to be too hard on myself since I was making up for a
first act in my life which lasted so long, and I had to concentrate so much on
it just to survive. It was around this time when my male self really began to
set up roadblocks on my gender path. Suddenly, he began to see that this road I
was on was not a phase or joke and I was deadly serious. He started to ask questions such as how I was
going to live in my second act with no job and how I was prepared to do it
without the wife I dearly loved and had been married to for nearly twenty-five
years. To be sure, all very real and very scary questions.
I put off deciding my life as long as I could as I attempted
to learn if I could really live a transfeminine life at all. Were the obstacles
insurmountable or not. Through it all, the one overriding feeling which kept me
searching was the deep down feeling I was doing the right thing. I was headed
in the direction I should have been going in my life all along and I kept going
through the ups and downs of transitioning into my second act.
Once it was clear I was successfully transitioning into my
second act, I needed to make sure I was doing it correctly. It turned out I had
all the help I needed. In addition to the cisgender women I always mention,
there was one important person I don’t mention enough. That person turned out
to be very real and important to me. She was my inner feminine person who had
been waiting for all those years and decades for her chance to fully come out
into the world. Once she finally did, she knew completely what to do and what
was ahead for my second act of my life. Mainly, all the nuances of life as a
woman if I really wanted to go there. She knew the best part of my life was yet
to come.
More importantly, I had finally made it through the bleak
years when often I thought there would be no tomorrow. Or at least my dream of
living a feminine life would never be realized. Often it set off a series of insecurities
in myself which set back my life. Act one was bleeding because I could not get
to act two.
When I finally made it to my second act, it was as if I had
lifted a heavy weight off my shoulders, and I came to a point where I needed to
be more understanding and approachable in the world. I could not get away with
the old male ways of internalizing my feelings and start living again. If I did
try to hide as a transgender woman, I would never have a chance to provide myself
with a positive outlook to other women and not come off as an unfriendly transfeminine
woman which was the last thing I wanted or was.
Since I was one of the few humans who ever had the chance to
stop their life and begin again so there was no way I could mess it up. I
needed to enjoy life and live it the best I could.