 |
| Image from Peter Boccia on UnSplash. |
In my life, I have rarely ever had to run any distance at all. The only times when I did was when I played football and was in the Army. So, I was never a sprinter until I discovered my love of cross dressing as close as I could to a pretty girl. I could not wait until I came home from football practice, and no one was home so I could put on a short skirt like the cheerleaders I admired so much, were wearing.
I wonder now, if I knew how long it would take me and all
the trials and tribulations I went through to arrive where I am today, would I
have given up on my journey. I doubt it because along the way, my gender feelings
ran so deep and I felt so natural as my feminine self, I could have ever turned
back. I needed to settle in for the gender marathon I was facing because
sprints (which I compare with brief moments of gender euphoria) were hard to
come by. It is a good thing, because I was always better at marathons anyway.
I can blame my marital situation on the fact that I was
still trying to run gender sprints. Rather than face up to the truth of who I
was, for years I tried to maintain the delicate balance of a stable marriage
and a rapidly growing love of public living as a transgender woman. All my
sprints did were cause problems at home when I was caught and put a tremendous
strain on my twenty-year -plus marriage. On occasion, life between us became so
bad my wife on several occasions simply told me to be man enough to be a woman.
I hadn’t been yet, but I was working on it. She did not know it, but her challenges
kept me going during my gender marathon. I just needed time to get it through
my old unwanted male head that being a woman (transgender or not) meant more
than looking like one.
I receive many comments from those individuals who are just
wondering where their gender path will take them. When I do, I try my best to
point out I did not magically appear where I am now. It took me a lot of work
and disappointment to realize I needed to be better than the average ciswoman
to survive in their world. They had a head start on me in the race to womanhood
and I needed to work hard to catch up. Along the way too, I found some ciswomen
were eager to help me into their world, and some were not. Maybe they had their
own marathons they were running in life.
Another thing I learned from running a gender marathon was I
had the time to relax and enjoy the journey on occasion. I felt much different
than the fast pace of fleeting gender euphoria when I was involved in a gender sprint. Then, it was back again to living in the present as a transfeminine person, rather
than living in the future and missing most of the enjoyment. Slowing down also
gave me time to research who I really was and who I was, was on the right path
in my life. Because I had huge decisions to make. Family, marriage, jobs and
friends could have been all on the line. At times I was crushed under the
pressure of it all and had to put it down for a different day. Something I
could have never done as a gender sprinter.
The moral to the story was that slowing down helped me to
determine my own pace. The problem was that I wasted valuable time coming out
of my male closet longer than I should of. I finally came to the conclusion
that I could not have it both ways. I ended up doing what was right for me keeping
in mind that your story you are writing in life could be totally different.
Either way, what you consider is a gender sprint or a marathon
is a personal matter and has a lot to do with how old you are. Even though I
have read about male to female transitions well after the age of sixty (when I
did it) I think it is rarer because those who think they can put it off longer
because they have put it off as long as they could. But then, on the other
hand, there are people like me who realized their gender truth and could not
put off making a move any longer. Before I had to sprint for the finish line of
life itself.
