No Days Off

 Yesterday I took a rare day off from all my blogging activities. It was one of the few days I couldn't come up with anything to write about in the cluttered transgender universe which is my mind. Today as I retrieved and turned on the old lap top (I knock on wood every morning when it comes on.) and proceeded to come up with a new post. 

Cluttered Office=Cluttered Mind?

Writing for me is either a labor of love or a real chore. I compare the whole process to the early days when I was exploring the world as my true feminine self. Many days I would feel so confident and good. Other days, the process was not so seamless. It felt like everytime I turned around something was going wrong. An example was the day I was (in my mind) proudly negotiating a mall in my dress, heels and hose when I promptly stepped into a crack in the sidewalk. Needless to say I didn't feel very feminine as I almost fell and had to retrieve my shoe. Fortunately no one else seemed to notice and I learned another valuable lesson. Watch where I am going and not so much on the publics' reaction to me. 

Another discovery I made was learning I could never take a day off from the feminization process I was slowly but surely going through. Unfortunately, the whole process made me a very difficult person to live with or work for during what I called my "down" days when I couldn't cross dress as my true self. Between battling my bi-polar behavior and gender dysphoria, life was no fun. Still I kept going spurred on by working way to hard all the way to changing jobs and moving to different places. Another prime example was when my wife and I moved from one part of Ohio to metro NYC then back again, only to move to  a very rural area of Southeastern Ohio to open restaurants. I learned the hard way no amount of frenetic moving and changing could solve my basic problems. Plus, I won't even m mention the amount of heavy drinking I did to self medicate my problem.

Along the way, I always considered myself to be a competent but deeply flawed person. Looking back now I see taking any days off from my issues would be impossible until I "manned up" and faced them like a woman. Which is exactly what my wife told me to do. Instead I blundered ahead until I tried suicide. It turned out I even screwed that up and went to work the next day like nothing happened. Looking back of course, I am glad self harm didn't work for me. 

What did work was finally realizing my inner feminine self was the dominate portion of my being. Once I let her live was when I could relax, build a new life as a transgender woman and take a day off...from myself.  

Dreams

 I have been curious, as I add to the years I have lived as my authentic self , how long would/will it take for my dreams to switch over to being exclusively feminine in nature.  Right now nearly all of my dreams are from my male past.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

I guess living nearly sixty years struggling to live in a male world completely imprinted my subconscious. As much as I dislike it, I seem to bypass the times I spent with my first wife (seven years) and current partner of ten years and go straight to my deceased wife of twenty five years. 

As much as I feel frustrated my dreams are still masculine in nature, obviously it seems there is nothing I can do to flip the switch and be feminine. Perhaps as time goes by and I compile more experiences as a transgender woman, all of this will change. 

I also know in the scope of life, dreams are less of a priority. Just getting by in the world is just more important. 

For example, today Liz and I have several errands to run including her getting a booster vaccine.  It would be a poor time to get harassed over living as my authentic gender. Since I will be wearing a mask, chances are slim. 

Speaking or writing about Liz, she is more of a believer in the power of dreams. So I asked her what she thought of my dreams. She said several things. The first suggestion was did I have specific dreams of being a guy or was I dreaming of being in a male environment. An example would be the time I spent in Army basic training. I rarely if ever dream of being back in basic, instead I dream of re-enlisting. Over and over again.

The second point she brought up was how early in life we become gender objects. In other words, the time our parents begin to make sure they pound us into gender stereotypes. Transgender women and men are unlucky enough to be round pegs pounded into square holes. This process can affect us for life. Including our dreams. 

Finally Liz said I could shape my dreams by training my mind before I went to sleep by thinking feminine thoughts. Of course, as she told me all of this, she couldn't help but tell me when I sleep with the television on (which I do) does me no good. She didn't think I had anything to worry about.

Now I can focus on the present, not the past.

The Long Wait

 As I mentioned in a recent post, often I regret waiting so long to cross the transgender frontier and live as my authentic self. 

Most of you regulars probably know I am seventy two years old, considered myself to be a crossdresser for over a half a century and did not start to transition seriously until I was in my early sixties. At that point in time I started hormone replacement therapy (HRT). 

As many of you know, especially of the same age bracket, the world we grew up in has changed drastically for the best in the transgender community. The biggest changes came with the advent and advancement of the internet. I remember vividly the first time I made contact with another like minded person on our home computer. I also remember the pain and suffering I went through when my wife found out. I had no idea the computer kept track of where I went to but she did. As always I tried to ride out the problem and rearrange our life once again. I reestablished myself and set my next goal, to  make an excuse to buy a combination printer/copier/fax machine so I could send pictures.

By this time in my life, I did know and had met other transvestites at mixers I had went to, so the computer was just another tool to advance my knowledge. All of a sudden, there were chat rooms and search engines which could further my research into who I was as I walked the fine line hiding my info from my wife. Which didn't work forever of course.

Keep in mind also, the whole word "transgender" was a new term. For the most part, there was the "transvestite" word which roughly aligned with cross dresser  and then "transsexual" which meant you were planning to pursue sex change surgery (as it was known as) then move away never to be seen again. The problem with that was as a transgender generation we lost most all of our potential role models.

Looking back now, these years were a blur for me. I spent most of my life trying to outrun my gender dysphoria. Taking what opportunity I could to see if I could truly understand what a woman went through in her life and seeing if I could do it too. Even though I was a good student of the feminine  binary gender, I felt like an outsider looking in, and was. 

It wasn't until the 1980's  when I started to seriously explore an everyday life as a woman. I would jump at any opportunity to do errands such as the grocery shopping while my wife was at work. The more I was able to do,  The more I did, the more natural I felt and for the first time began to consider I was much more than a cross dresser. 

The next milestone I reached in my gender transition was when I had to begin to communicate with the public as a woman. Of course I was paranoid about my voice but then I learned the keys to gender communication I write about so much. During the whole process I was slowly aligning my inner feminine self with the person the public interacted with. 

Once I did it, the long wait was worth it. In no way was I waiting lessening my standing as a transgender woman. I was making the best of life's situations as they presented themselves. I totally dislike it when a trans person attempts to say they are more trans than another.  As a community we have all the layers as society does and we need each other.

My fondest desire is the younger transgender persons of today have the freedom to explore themselves  and don't have to wait as long as I did to live as their authentic selves.