A ton of bricks....

[terry-terrible.livejournal.com]

An epiphany, a realization as pure as and translucent as a cliff of crystal came to me last Friday night while, innocently enough, watching a TV show. Though this realization came to me as a possibly of a tangible reality upon which I might find a solution too many of my depression-related problems as of last week, it also hit me like a ton of bricks in its seriousness.

I was watching In the Life, a kind of a queer news and features program that runs on my local PBS station. You know the kind of token show that PBS programming directors who are hip on political correctness feel are perfect for maligned minorities such as yours truly.

The show featured the story of a transitioned Puerto Rican trans women in her mid-thirties who had been kicked out of her home a teenager and who had to turn to prostitution to finance for transition and GRS. She is now a successful GLBT activist with a bunch of charities in New York and finally finding acceptance after years of struggle
While watching this Trans Haratio Alger story, a wide variety of emotions sprung in to my soul. I was rocked by Jealousy, anger, sadness, anxiety and pain. I thought:

Man, she passes so well; why couldn’t I do that?.

Thinking about being a woman feels just so right.

I feel so disconnected form myself..

I realized it right there, that I had never really, truly be happy as man or comfortable with my masculinity. In fact, I hated it. I hate much of it down to my deepest fiber. Sure, some attributes of the traditional construct of masculinity are good values and things we should praise. But masculinity to me has always been like an ill fitting outfit. Like a sweater three times to large with a collar that slides around the neck, or similar pair of pants that keeps sliding around your ankles and tripping you up.

Let me tell you about some of my gender history for background.

At 12 I started pulling my mom's discarded fashion catalogs out of the trash after she threw them away. I stared at them often lusting after the clothes in them, all the while telling myself that it was women not the clothes. I often used the pictures in sexual fantasies, but the clothes were on me in these forbidden escapades, sometimes as a girl with a vagina, but mostly male bodied. Sometimes my attraction to some my high school crushes was based on their sense of style and dress. Looking back, it’s possible for me to think that I longed for their experience of being girls, not for their personalities or anything like that.

But at sixteen, I finally tried dressing. It didn't really feel all that explicating, so I gave it up.

But when I was twenty-two, I started visiting cross-dressing and transsexual porn sites, moving on cross-dressing message boards and a floodgate on pent-up and repressed emotions and compulsions opened. I start dressing earnestly, going so far to come out to a couple of close friends about it. But I have yet to go out in public.

At first I referred to myself as a cross dresser. But later on, not feeling it descriptive enough I started identifying as transgender. By now I'd realized it just wasn't about dress-up and being pretty, it was more about core identity.

I had thought hard about the possibility of being transsexual, but after hard thinking I concluded it wasn't me. But knowing that there were legions of cross dresser and transgender people who had previously come to that same conclusion and ended up transitioning, I kept an open mind that it might in the cards for me some day.

It just didn’t fit, never has and never will. All my life I’ve felt like I’ve a double life, an inner life, and an outside life (for lack of better term). The outer personality that I’ve always presented to the world has been a serious, shy, bookish, and emotionally closed (even emotional unavailable at times).

I am always all-business, talking about intellectual pursuits, current events, and other things, never really anything communicative of substantive emotions or an inner emotional life. I get nervous in crowds of more than five and always a take a back seat to the conversation in groups. I treat most of my co-workers (who are junior to my) as a drill sergeant would, for its how my step-dad treated me and the only real way I know how to motivate people. They probably resent me for this, but want can I say? When I look at myself on the outside, I see one who is self-loathing, vindictive, hostile, and angry at the world and who is stuck in one state of stasis, never going forward, always backsliding.

And that does reflect my inner personality and my frustration overall with my life.

But there is another me, someone who I hardly reveal to the outside world. One that is really outgoing, bubbly, charismatic, very emotional, expressive, passionate and caring. Yet this person I hide deep down inside, smothering him (her?) with hatred for myself and for the existence in general.

And…….I thinks this person might be female. When I look in the mirror, I see a stranger. I always have, though I never really knew why. The outer physical manifestation of me never matched the inner manifestation of myself. In my inner identity I consider myself more of female than a male. When I think of myself as an older person, maybe even growing old and dying as a man, I really cringe. That kind of……um….well terrifies me right down to the bone.

I’ve never really considered myself transsexual before. I had questioned it as possibility but always written it off after careful consideration, especially when I haven’t dressed feel really dysphoric about my gender. But this is really scaring the shot of me since it’s the most dysphoric I think I’ve ever felt.

The last week has been a roller coaster for me. One minute I’m thinking about eventually going fulltime and later in the day I’m thinking that living as a really androgynous crossdressing man will cure what ills me.

The strange thing is, I’m not all that scared of concept of transitioning. I’ve know enough people who’ve done it that I know the struggles it entails. But I’ve decided that if it what I have to do to get out of hell, then that is it. But I’m scared it’s a big mistake and not for me.

What I’m really scared of is that all of this is just the product of mitigating circumstances, I’ve been in a severe depression for two years and have lived with Dysthymia (continuous low grade depression) with instances of Major Depressive Disorder since I was 13 or so. Though I’ve had my ups and downs, I’ve never been happy in my life, almost, but never quite so.

I find myself asking myself all the time if this transgender complex in my personality is just a coping mechanism, if thoughts of transitioning are just a quick fix, an escape.

But I feel that causes depression in transgender persons can often a “chicken or the egg” sort of proposition. GID is often a source of depression, but the depression could also be totally unrelated.

Well, this post was supposed to be well thought out, but it’s pretty much begun to reflect the thought’s in my head, a confused and muddled mess. So I’ll end it here.

I plan on getting my problems with depression sorted out before I really tackle this head on so I can have a clear head when I do face it. Until then, I’m just going try and change my life incrementally, trying to be more my outside personality expression to fit my inner personality, try to be more andro and try dressing and presenting female in public.

I know that I can only find the right answers and the path for myself, but I just wonder if anyone here has ha a similar experience, the answers they found and what they did about I guess, just some people to talk too.