The transgender pride flag

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It’s true to say that I do spend a lot of time thinking about who I am.  I think it can be hard to understand other people if you don’t, and sometimes you can’t and need to first understand yourself.  It can be honestly difficult to decide other people’s needs, wants, or what they may want or see if you if you don’t know yourself.  I am quite opinionated, and can sometimes give my opinion where it isn’t wanted, and other times be so terrified about what people will think that I am speechless.  I’d have to admit that I am writing this mainly because I was hormonal when I started it.  I am a transwoman, but more succinctly I am a human being, and a woman.  What I have, or don’t have really has no bearing on who I am.  I am just me, and that is all I have or ever will be.  I could spend my lifetime trying to be someone else and utterly fail every time.

Either right at or right after the full moon, I start this whole, irritated, hyper emotional bloat fest, of headaches, and stomach pain which is a blast. NOT!

I am strange, eccentric, and just a little different by things typically considered to be normal.  I cycle like a female, meaning I bloat, cramp, become moody, get headaches, find my reflection to be fat, eat retarded shit I know I shouldn’t, and such once a month for a week then return to normal.  I am like some sort of were-woman who goes hormonal after the full moon.  I know, I am supposed to be trans, but I do something typically reserved for natal women.  Can you say, “WTF Mate?”  It’s been like this for a very long time and I don’t know why.  I have not been tested for a genetic disorder, and honestly my body started turning long before I started taking hormones so who knows.  My body took 15 years to do the job other genetic men did in 7.  My life is strange, but it wouldn’t be my life if it weren’t.  I really can’t say what it is, but I know it all has played the role of musical undertone to my strange existence.

Right as the moon is passing into the new moon I get really depressed for a couple of days, and I cry a lot of no reason. It's not like the irritability around the full moon at all, quite the opposite. I know someone might say I am "bipolar" but it's cyclic and it just doesn't fit.

When I was 3 I realized I wasn’t a boy, but the problem was everyone thought I was.  So I just assumed this is how it was for me, though it pained me.  Like a depressed child kicking dirt clods in disgust, I dragged my feet through life dismayed and the double identity that existed in me.  The part that was okay to show, and the part that wasn’t.  I was the greatest escapist, but honestly reality was a bitter pill for a 5 – 7-year-old to take.  I did learn some helpful coping techniques through bitter repression of self based truth, but it was quite lackluster in the long run.  Chewing on moldy bread and barely potable water will keep you alive, but barely.  My life provided just enough glimmer of hope that I could continue to suffer, and just give the bare minimum of I needed to hold on.  I hated waking up, and some days wished I could sleep forever.  The world was a cold place because I was swimming in denial.  Forced to reject the most sincere and inner most sense of self I filled it with obsession and self-imposed punishment.  Everything from Legos, to cartoons and video-games, anything that allowed me minutes or hours away from the reality.  I always felt wrong when my name was called, felt a pit in my stomach when I was called “he” and “him”.  Like a joke was being played at my expense but I was not in on it.

I grew up with this secret, and though initially I felt I had keep to itself, I latter realized I was passively vigilant to addressing my discontent.  Not a person who spent any time around me failed to hear it, for I repeated it endlessly.  I knew as puberty raped my body that it felt wrong, that being male felt wrong.  I silently suffered, but my every thought and expressed dissent with life dripped with my discontent with what I was.  I spoke of how I felt, but remained oblivious to the obvious because it was simply to painful to face in our egotistical genital centric culture.  I found it sad that the world cared more about what was in my pants, than about me as a person.  I avoided intimacy as I found my body to be wrong, and such intercourse as displeasing.  Don’t get my wrong, I did feel lust but it was contorted with jealousy and grief.  I wanted to be what it seemed I could not be, or at least that is what I thought.  Tried as I might, these feelings were pervasive.  So, I raised my attacks against this feeling within me and joined the military.  It was an efficient and notable distraction from these feelings that I denied, for a while.  Slowly but surely those feelings crept back up on me, and life begin to feel like a dismal prison again.  Then my body started to play cruel tricks on me.  I started dreaming I was a female, that I had breasts, and a vagina.  I did things all women did as if it were normal for me, only to awake and realize the cold reality of it all.

I was living in a stranger’s skin that got only more stranger every day…

A video showing my transition from before to recent.

After a few years of this, my body started flipping a little.  I noticed one day that my emotions started to change, as did my body odor, and my skin.  My breast became tender periodically, and I felt as if I was changing.  Coupled with the dreams I began to wonder, what if there was more to this feeling I always held that I was really a woman under it all.  Still trapped at the time, I started escaping into female MMO characters, alcohol, and massive numbers of hours researching human genetics, sexual differentiation, and endocrine disorders.  I knew I was different, I always did, and for once I wanted answers.  Needless to say those answers progressively led me back to the same conclusion… I’m a woman.  It took a few more years before this really sunk in, and the endocrine disruptions (which still remain undiagnosed) started to really sway.  My body was telling me something and my heart already knew the answer.  I was a woman, and I couldn’t bear to keep it inside me any longer.  I felt two people inside me, one was a fake, and the other was the real me.  I’d felt over the years trying to be myself but I forced into submission by fear and self-loathing.

One of the many things I drew during my deep gender dysphoria driven depression. I drew myself as a female over and over, because I didn't feel safe really becoming one... Yet.

So I researched and learned, and eventually came to the scientific conclusion that I could either: A.  Try to repress this until I slit my wrists, or B. I could accept it and live with it for better or for worse.  Well…  obviously I chose option B.  It wasn’t an easy decision, and one rife with pain.  As this progressed though, I realized the freedom enabled something I had never before observed…  Happiness.  It made me feel alive, and revitalized my ability to deal with the other issues that once seemed impossible to bear.  So my life came to where it is now.  I have been full-time for over a year and a half, and on hormone replacement for a year.  Like I said above I was always a little different.  My mannerisms are indistinguishable from normal women, hell I even experience hormonal cycles, both a PMS like phase around the full moon, and mid-cycle depression quite to my dismay.  Really, if I was normal I’d never experience any of this, but I am not normal.  Before transition I took “in touch with your feminine side” to a whole new level, and now I am just bitchy and whiny.  This is a retrospective insight.  As a male it surprised people, as a female people are just kind of like… “EH, get over it”, sarcastically “We all have to deal with it”.  I do stop every once in a while to see if anyone has a noble pearl of wisdom, but usually just get static back.

I have learned many things in transition that I didn’t know before.  On my specific issues, the VA lacks variety in certain services.  Doctors, sometimes even female doctors have a bad tendency to not take women seriously.  When doing searches trying to understand some of these phases I am going through I find that natal women experience the same thing I do, and get blown off just the same by doctors.  Another thing I learned, emotional sensitivity is great until it’s not.  Being more emotionally sensitive makes depression and sadness really extra shitty, but I kind of always knew that.  Everything, I mean everything feels different now, my skin, my body, everything.  When my emotions are pitching and yawing in the sea of emotion, a mere touch can vary much in a month.  A touch can either felt bland and unwanted or exuberant waves of sensation, it all depends.  Another thing I have experienced is a duality of emotion that I wasn’t really fully aware of before.  I.E. mixed emotions, positive and negative emotions joined, and a seemingly dual potential in excited emotions.  For me I find emotions much more complex, rich and intense than I ever did.  Like experiencing affection, disappointment, happiness, and agitation when your partner gives an disproportional response to an emotional need, but they’re  just too cute so you’re simultaneously in the process of forgiving them, and being upset with circumstance.

Image was drawn during a time when I felt ultimately trapped before I sought help. I felt as though I was trapped in a dark room with light pouring out from a mysteriously door that was blocking something that wanted to come out.

I mean, in my life things have really changed, but I am the same person.  It’s almost a night and day difference for me, so I can only imagine what other people see.  Things have stabilized, more or less, but it still seems to take time to get used to it all.  But overall I’d say life feels pretty good now, except when it doesn’t.  Life can be a confusing mix of emotions you aren’t always going to be ready for, this is for sure.  All the changes in mind this is what I wanted, but you must always take in the good with the bad.  Being who I am comes with pros and cons, and as time progresses I get used to the slightly different ebb and flow of  life as it is now.  I am still learning and I will continue to learn, and that is just how life is.  I know many will understand this and many will not, and that is okay.  For the ups and downs I experience this is a better alternative to where my life would have gone otherwise.

I can’t really truly know anyone else, but I can know myself.  It seems a selfish process, but I realized that you can’t take care of others unless you can take care of yourself.  Life doesn’t give you easy problems, or drop solutions in your lap often.  However, I do the best I can with what I have.  I am happy with who I am, for better or worse, and that is that.  But, never mistake happiness for complacency.  I still remember the feelings of happiness and liberation I felt in transitioning, taking hormones, and the gambit of emotions of have faced since then.  Overall I can’t really complain, I am quite lucky, but I really do feel like a complete person now, and I will not let anyone take that away from me.

All in all, I started this blog when at a full moon, stopped, and finished it on the new moon. Emotion cycles seem to be my inspiration for writing and creating things, as I usually do things right around those two times.

So who am I?  I am an eccentric girl who grew up on a farm, worked behind closed doors under ground for the military, and I am trans but so much more.  I often feel I don’t fit in with the majority of the community to which I supposedly belong because I don’t believe in gender binaries, or stereotypical expressions of femininity and masculinity.  I am outspoken, and opinionated sometimes, and other trans people who do cater to stereotypes do annoy me a bit.  It’s a difficult position to be feminine, and assert it is just how you are and had nothing to do with being a woman, or a trans person.  I am sure there are political wolves on both sides of the debate about gender in society that would love to tear me apart, but I won’t let them.  I tend to find my political position puts me in between two armies in an artillery fight with only a bayonet.  I am sure more than a handful of people roll there eyes when I speak, because I agree with some of what most people say but disagree with most people’s uncritically challenged beliefs.  I am sensitive, deep and emotional, so being outspoken and opinionated is often a double-edged sword for me.  I like touch in the most exquisite way, but touching me is a highly protected privilege.  I know who I am, but so many words fall so short of defining me, and so few words are true all the time.  Complexity is to simplicity, as I am to average or normal (whatever that means).  That isn’t a bad thing; being different doesn’t cause it to be negative.  Normal is boring anyways.

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