This is not a fun story, in fact it is downright painful about why I grew the "Goatee."
For obvious reasons, I never wore much facial hair because I knew sooner more than later it would have to come off in some sort of "ultimate purge." Fortunately too, my beard growth basically stops from the corners of my mouth over to my ears.
I have written in length here in Cyrsti's Condo, and even more so in my book "
Stilettos on Thin Ice" about how I tried to balance my awakening knowledge I was transgender with a desire to stay with my wife of 25 years. She always accepted the knowledge I was a cross dresser but never would embrace thoughts of me being trans.
Bottom line was, the more I explored my gender, the clearer it became I was trans.
Sounds easy, right? The problem was, I began getting caught up in lies about where I was and what I was doing on a greater scale. I became harder and harder to live with. To the point on one occasion, when she told me "be man enough to go become a woman, we both will be better off." I didn't and continued down a road where I essentially was cheating on her-with myself.
Finally, on yet another occasion when she came home early and caught me coming through the door, I had had enough. I wasn't being honest with myself, her or the world and dishonesty in a person I felt was one of the nastiest attributes ever. Someone could call me stupid-just not a liar. So here I was lying. What did I do? Once again I tried to take the easy way out by taking a whole bottle of whatever bi-polar medicine I had at the time and curled up downstairs on the couch. I'm writing this, so you can guess the pills didn't kill me (I never told her.) so I went to "plan B."
I am a firm believer in whatever spirit you worship giving you a strong hint of what you should do in life. I am not the sharpest tack in the box and I chose to ignore my spiritual gender guideposts but for some reason, "plan B" was looking better.
The plan was going to be utterly difficult and in many ways I thought would be tossing all of my feminine learning experiences in the trash. The
only way though I knew to stop what I was doing was to grow a beard. A voice deep inside was screaming at me, "Just Do It!" The picture of me with a goatee here on the blog shows the result.
The saddest part of the story is approximately two years into me doing the wrong thing for the right reason-one night my wife of 25 years went to work and never came home. She suffered a fatal heart attack on the job. Absolutely and positively I
never thought I would outlive her. That was eight years ago this Thanksgiving and the mental trauma took me five years to work my way through.
The night was the reason I try to tell everyone how literally paper thin, life really is and everything you think is permanent is merely an illusion.
Now though, I am proud of the fact now, I was able to live up to what I said I was going to do during the last two years of her life. Selfishly, I do listen to those who say she was wrong to expect me to be someone I wasn't (like her sister, my daughter and my partner). I know they are right but I loved my wife deeply and she was my best friend too, so as in most other things, there was so much more than meets the eye.
In the picture, I had ballooned up to 275+ pounds. After her passing, I went back to my inner soul for survival.
She helped me to lick my wounds and slowly get back in the game and within a week, the goatee was gone.
Should I say, the rest is history?
