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| Image from Zac Ong on UnSplash. |
Running more and more over the years described my life on so many levels. Most all because of my desire to be a woman. Over the years, I have moved many times, mostly because of a search for better jobs along with cross-dressing opportunities. I thought moving from my conservative smallish Ohio town to the huge metro New York City area would provide me with a more liberal base of people to work with. Which just wasn’t true, I found for the most part, I was still hiding my desire to go public in my skirts and makeup most of the time.
Mainly, it was a learning experience until I began to get
older and all of a sudden saw time was moving away from me. Maybe you could
call it my transgender biological clock. No one lives forever, and I still
needed a chance to live out a chance to live life as a transfeminine person
before I died. My new attitude added a certain importance into learning what I
could about living as a woman. Or what I like to call, slipping behind the gender
curtain to see how the other half really lived alongside a world of men who
thought they ran the show. After several attempts of running straight ahead into
failure in the public’s eye, I began to get it right with my presentation.
Allowing me to explore more the true world of ciswomen who had carved out
successful lives for themselves.
When I did all of that, I ran directly into communication
problems. I will forever remember the first night when I attempted to add my
thoughts to a group of men, I somehow found myself a part of. Suddenly, I found
myself being totally ignored in the conversation and I needed to leave. There
were pros and cons to what happened I found because the positive was I had
presented as a woman well enough to be ignored but the negative was the whole
affair marked the first time; I felt a major part of my intelligence along with
my male privilege was being taken away from me. For the longest time, I felt
the impact of running directly into a gender wall.
Happily, I did not receive any black eyes I needed to cover
up with makeup from the running collisions I was having with the public as I
set my high heels in motion to conquer my little part of the world. The
personal stubbornness I had to succeed came back to hurt and help me when I
moved forward in the feminine world of ciswomen. It hurt me when what was left
of my old male self-tried his best to dictate how I should look for the world,
which led to many fashion disasters. It helped me when I needed to pick myself up
after getting knocked down again and again as I was trying to see what I would
have to do to be a successful transgender woman. When I was able to put all my
old self behind me was when I was able to finally see my future and run to it
successfully.
The whole process of male to female gender transition was
very exhausting as I tried to live in both major gender binary worlds for a short
while. I always mention it to pass along a warning to all you who are thinking
of trying it too. In the short term, painting yourself into a gender corner you
cannot get out of is no fun unless for some reason you want it to be. For me,
all it did was wreck my already fragile mental health situation. Since I
already had been diagnosed as being Bi-Polar, I was already trying to keep one
clinical depression controlled when I had another creeping up on me when I
could not express my feminine self. I needed a lot of good therapy to separate
the two potential huge problems. When I was doing it, I was still running as
fast as I could to continue to chase my dream of living as a successful trans
woman. Which would ultimately lead me back to just being me.
The frustrating part was the running target I was aiming for
kept moving on me. Once I thought I had all I needed to play in the girl’s
sandbox safely, I discovered another aspect of a woman’s life I never considered.
Mainly because I was naïve and knew a woman’s life was different than a man’s,
but I was not prepared to find out exactly how different. All the varying
layers of a ciswoman’s life really got to me for a while until I began to get
my gender workbook filled with relevant new ideas on how I was supposed to
live. In other words, all the doodling in my workbook started to make sense and
I could see all the running I was doing to catch up coming to an end.
Either way I was getting into shape from all the running I
was doing, or I just began to give it all up as I began to become much more
successful in the world as a transgender woman. At this point too, the HRT or
gender affirming hormones I was approved to take helped to calm me down and
sync up my internal and external selves. Internally I began to feel emotions I
never knew I had and externally I was helped along by softer skin, longer hair
and my own breasts. Among all the other changes the hormones brought about. I
just wished I could have started HRT earlier in my life because the changes
felt so natural and I would not have to spend my whole life running from an
invisible foe, myself.
Now in my advanced senior years, I am finishing out my
workbook on its final pages. My final transition is just being the true me I
always was meant to be. Deep down, I was never meant to be a runner after all.
