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| Image from Josh Withers on UnSplash. |
According to Wikipedia, down low is basically an African American term for gay cruising of other men. For this post, I am going to use it in another sense.
First of all, I need to take you all back to when I first
considered my down low to be as I cheated on my wife. But I was doing it by
cheating on her with another woman, which happened to be me. Of course, nothing
made what I was doing right but I could not stop doing it as it had a powerful
draw on me. Those were the exciting days of leaving the gay bar scene behind me
and begin exploring the world of straight bars as well as lesbian venues.
Very soon, my success turned to failure as I began to feel
guilty about lying to my wife about what I was doing. I tried my best to
rationalize my thoughts because after all, I was having no physical contact
with anyone. Male or female so I could not be accused of cheating, but I still
was. The reason was, I had made an agreement with her that I could go out in
public several days a week. Providing I never left the house cross-dressed. It
was a sacred promise she never forgot and one I could not keep once I began to
develop a transfeminine life.
Very soon, I felt as if I was still on the down low every
time I snuck out of the house dressed as a woman. As I was basically doing as much
as possible. The reason was, I was learning so much about the feminine world I
had always dreamed about, I could never turn around and go back to my male
life.
It was more exciting to stay on the down low
until I could figure out what to do about the life I was leading. In fact, I because the more I experienced the new world,
the more natural I began to feel as I was able to put the image I always saw in
the mirror into motion. In many ways, I began to feel so natural as a
transgender woman, it was difficult to ever return to being a man at all. I
had to consciously tell myself I still was a part time man when I worked. So
much so, I was beginning to be called ma’am when sir would have worked for the
occasion. Still, I was secretly overjoyed when it happened.
Sadly, through it all, my marriage really suffered. Mostly
because I was and am a very honest person and hated lying to my wife about what
was really going on with me. Often, I learned when I lied one small time, I
would have to lie more often to make up for it. An example was one year when we
took a week for vacation and headed north to try to escape the heat. About two
days into the vacation, I became increasingly mean and irritable because I
really wanted to be spending my time traveling as a woman. Finally, my
poor wife had had enough and asked me what was wrong. I lied again and internalized
my feelings enough to get by, and we could eventually enjoy ourselves. Deep
down, I hated myself for it.
Life began to finally slow down for me as I reached certain
milestones in my transfeminine life. I was beginning to communicate with the
world and started to feel much better about myself and at the same time my down
low activities slowed down also. At least to a point where I could control
them. It was around this time too, when my wife’s health began to really
decline. It did not know it then, but she only had approximately six months to
live. For some reason, I decided to go on a major purge and throw most of my
feminine things away and went all the way to growing my version of a beard. It
turned out, I did the best I could for the remainder of her life.
When she passed, of course I was tragically shocked and lonely,
so I reached inward. The beard went away quickly, and I was able to restock my
clothes and makeup. In no time at all, my inner feminine self was coming to my
rescue. I began to retrace my steps I had taken as a novice transgender woman,
and reestablished myself fairly quickly in the venues I was a regular in.
I was totally freed from the down low experiences from my
past and could concentrate on going out to being alone. In other words, I
wanted to be around other people. I just did not want them approaching me.
It worked in the short term until I began to socialize with
and started to build a small circle of friends who knew nothing of my previous
self. I never had had to go on the down low again.
