It's All in the Eyes

Sad Eyes
Image from
the Archives.

Over the years, my eyes have helped me out in many ways.

Of course there is the obvious reason such as the blessing of eyesight but then, life steps in- very importantly for a cross dresser or transgender woman trying her best to improve her makeup art. For me at least, the hardest part of conquering the mystery of makeup  involved making up my eyes. At the time, I equated it with applying paint to the plastic model  cars I was fond of building because I struggled with both. Ironically, at the age I was at, I am fairly sure my Mom would have did her best to forbid any use of makeup at all by the daughter she never knew she had. 

Still I persisted and grew more proficient with buying then applying my eye makeup, The availability of all the colors fascinated me. Along with the chance to match colors up with my limited fashion choices I was capable of finding. It was close as I could come to all the girls around me who I admired so much. 

Fast forwarding many years, my eyes continued to be a focal point in my makeup art. I had learned along the way women communicate through the eyes in many ways. Much more than men who rely on vocal cues. I knew as I transitioned into transgender woman, I was on the right path with my makeup techniques. All the years I put into my art was worth it.

Perhaps the most rewarding feedback I received from my eyes came from my wife Liz. For all the wrong reasons. We met on line when she responded to a post I listed as woman seeking woman. Keep in mind I immediately pointed out I was a transgender woman. Thankfully, none of my gender issue mattered to Liz and she said she was attracted to me because I had sad eyes. If the truth be known, during that part of my life, I did have sad eyes. Over the past two or three years before the picture, I had just gone through very dark portions of my life. Primarily due to death of my second wife and four of my closest friends, mainly to cancer. Along with the loss of my business, I had lost nearly all the self confidence I had ever had in myself. In fact, the only concrete thing I had to grasp onto was my identity as a trans woman. 

Regardless of my sad eyes, my girl self became my deepest passion. In many ways, just to get by, I needed to become a deeper researcher of women. Instead of becoming my father's son which I had chased for many years, I became my mother's daughter she never wanted, to my knowledge. The gender guilt I felt was only grief with no where to go. 

Led by my eyes when I communicated with other women, I found my way out of the darkness of life I was in and regained my confidence. Even though it was a different confidence than I had ever felt before. My confidence as a transgender woman was a hard earned quality which went all the way back to the days when I was struggling with makeup and shaving my legs when I was a kid. Living and learning was always an exciting experience. Even in the days when I was a dismal failure in the world. Somehow, deep down, I knew I was doing the right thing by pursuing a life as a trans woman. 

It was always in the eyes, I just had to learn how to use mine. They were such an important part of my life when it came to communicating with other women. Perhaps it is true when it is said your eyes are the window to the soul.

Bonding with Yourself

 

Club Diversity Image. Columbus, Ohio

As strange as it may seem, it took me many years for me to fully bond with myself as a transgender woman.

For years I wondered if I was a woman or a man. Everyday was like groundhog day when I woke up in the morning. Some mornings I felt more like a girl and others as a boy before the reality of my existence set in. No matter how gender fluid I felt that day, I needed to be ready to compete in my unwanted male world. I wish I could say the competition just made me stronger as a male but it never did. Most of the time, the competition just made me want to head home and cross dress as a girl. Plus, I was put into an even deeper frustration place when my brother was home and I didn't have any privacy to try on my feminine wardrobe. 

Bonding was difficult when I was not allowed into the feminine world at all and was destined not to until much later in life. In the meantime, I struggled from one gender struggle to another, All the time, hiding my authentic self from everyone in the world. I suffered so much, I needed all the help I could get to maintain my life as a man and still have any sense of stable mental health. Especially when I was diagnosed with having Bi-polar depression. If you are not familiar, I suffered from terrible highs and lows. When I was up I could do anything. Including transform myself into an attractive woman and when I was down, all I wanted to do was lay in bed and sleep and try to drown out my gender issues with alcohol. Finally I was diagnosed by a therapist and was prescribed medications to help me out.

As we all know, the medication has not yet been invented to relieve the pain and tension of having gender dysphoria. Even now I suffer from dysphoria when I wake up in the morning and look at myself in the mirror. After all these years, I have learned to take the good along with the bad and take the middle road. It has been a good coping mechanism for me. Along with those mechanisms, I learned other ways to structure my life so I could finally bond with my myself. When I did, I found I was a stronger human because I had the chance to experience life from both sides of the binary gender spectrum. Since it is the rare individual who can claim to be all male or all female in the gender spectrum, I was able to find my special place where I could exist in society. The question always was, was society ready for me or any other transgender woman or trans man.

I quickly discovered most of the world did not care if I was trans or not. They had lives to live and were busy doing it. On the rare occasions I did encounter a negative transphobe, my strong personal bonds gave me the confidence to survive. 

Again, bonding my unwanted male self with my stronger, more natural female self took me years to complete. Mainly because I did not have the courage to admit who I was to my true self. Once I did close the gap, my long awaited bond was complete and I could move on in life as a total person as a transgender woman but never forgetting the man who helped get me here. A topic for another blog post. 

Ditching Good with Better as a Trans Girl

 

Archive Image
from Witches Ball
Tom on Left.

Ditching good with better has always been a difficult obstacle in my life. 

I always blame my parents for my feelings on doing the best I could on anything I tried. Nothing I did was good enough. If I got B's they should have been A's was a prime example. Even though I was an above average student, I don't remember ever being told I was doing a good job. I think now, their influence carried on with me in every facet of my life, including when I was a novice cross dresser and budding transgender woman. 

It all started with my appearance as a girl. When I was younger and before I went through any testosterone poisoning at puberty, it was much easier to look like a girl. But just looking like a girl was never good enough, I wanted to be a girl and enjoy their life. Or at least as I perceived it to be. I guess my parents attitude was rubbing off on me. At the time, all I could really do to further my looks was to over achieve with my meager allowance and take on a rural newspaper route. Between the two, I could sneak out to the store and buy the occasional wardrobe item or makeup I could experiment with. I was doing my best to ditch my good with better as a trans girl during my early age. If I had given the same effort to everything else I tried during that time, at the least I could have received better grades and my parents would have been pleased. 

On the other hand, my parents in no way would have been pleased if they had known I had issues with my gender. I shudder to think what would have happen to me if they had discovered me dressed in my feminine wardrobe and makeup. At the least, I know I would have been sent to a therapist during a time when even being a cross dresser was considered a mental illness. I never wanted to even consider what the worst could be. Perhaps since we were not particularly religious, Christian conversion therapy would not have been in my future. The only thing I know for sure is, I would not have had any understanding at all. All along I did the best I could and was able to hide my cross dressing with the world. How I don't really know.

The older I became, good certainly did not become enough. A prime example would be the Halloween parties I went to when I was first testing the world  I started with just trying to be a sexy sleaze of a woman thinking I would receive some sort of a validation. Several parties later, I grew more bold and wanted to see if I could be mistaken for a real woman, so I wore my business attire and then waited for reactions. Overall I was received well with strangers who did not know me mistaking me for a woman who did not have a chance to dress up for the party. I was discovering better was always best when it came to how I presented as a transgender woman in the world, under the cover of Halloween or not. 

All of my experiences led me to establishing myself in a new feminine world. I needed to try very hard to do away with all my old values to do it. My whole world became a concentration of new friends and life. In my own way, I needed to be better than the world to succeed in chasing my dream of living full time as a transgender woman. Sure I needed to look the part but suddenly I needed to be the part which meant moving and communicating as a woman. 

Ditching good for better in my transgender world was one of the best moves I ever made. By the time I was medically cleared to begin taking gender affirming hormones or HRT, I was more than ready for the results. Almost instantly I knew I made the right decision.  Since my parents have long since passed away, there is no possible way for me to communicate to them they were right. For all the wrong reasons. Their resistance  to giving me any positive feedback early in life made it easier for me to find my own path in the world as a trans woman. A place where good was never enough for me.