Even beginning sometimes seems to be an odd thing at the end. I had something of a long week. The coworker with whom I share the various tasks we need to do took vacation and although I got some assistance, I largely was on my own to get the necessities done, and then try to keep the not-so-immediate from getting out of control. So I feel wiped out some, this early Saturday morning, almost unwilling to pull myself out of the bed.
I had an odd dream last night. I was in a bookstore and a young woman identified me as a transgender just beginning my steps across the bridge. She began giving advice on how to shave the hair on my arms and I said, “But you don’t understand, I’ve got these horribly thick hairs.” She said that’ll get better on estrogen, but I found myself feeling upset at the hair on my arms, which I now keep shaved, but I wish would simply fall off and disappear.
Now a couple of days ago, when working to get as closely shaved as possible up on my face, I got clumsy and nicked the edge of the lower lip somewhat badly. So the dream transitioned to where I was parking to go to a zoo and when I reached up to touch my lip, I felt blood. I ran to go into a bathroom and try to see how bad it was and if I could staunch it.
All the labels for gender on the bathroom doors were blurry and hard to read. So finally I just entered one to find a mirror, and found myself in a men’s room, but the mirrors were all dirty and at odd angles and I couldn’t see myself clearly. Finally I ran out in frustration and could feel blood pouring from lip.
And then I woke up.
Another tough part of the week arose from the family in the area making arrangements to go to take my mother’s ashes to be buried alongside my father’s ashes in the state where they grew up. My mother died suddenly almost 6 months ago now and for the most part I’ve moved through the grieving process, but this and the stress at work kind of knocked me around some. I came very close to crying a couple of times while at work, when a particularly poignant memory of my mother came to me or the sometimes how I wonder whether I should have told her about how I might not be a man, but a woman instead.
I feel rather sure that she probably would have been good with it. She was one of the most open and gentle people this world has ever known. But somehow over the past 5 years or so, as I’ve slowly made the acceptance of myself, I found myself unable to tell her. Some of that was because of knowing that her health was somewhat fragile and I often worried that some day she might just be found dead. I worried that if I told her and she wasn’t accepting of it and that she died in a state of unacceptance, I would be haunted by that. At least I knew if I didn’t tell her and she died without knowing, she always accepted me as her child, as her son.
So it’s complicated. This world has constructed a lot of sharp and rough edges that inflict nicks and cuts and worse upon those of us who are transgender and their families. So maybe that’s why I dreamed about bleeding from my lip last night. Yes, my mother loved me as her child and son, but there is still a little nick and wound from knowing she didn’t know all of me, the truth of me.
And sometimes I almost want to crawl back inside that shell again. But then I remember that I have told my oldest brother and a coworker and a psychologist. And last Saturday night I attended my first group meeting with other transgenders. I’m still thinking a lot about what I heard the others there say. It made me realize some that I’ve been quite lucky and privileged in some ways. And that some of them have been far more courageous than me. So there’s no going back. I know an essence of womanhood inside of me and if I want to know that I will have finally lived authentically, I must go forward.
Sometimes I wonder if the problem is because there is no clear binary, no simple definition of gender or masculinity or femininity. What makes a woman? It’s not clothing, it’s not the color pink, it’s not makeup. But what about breasts and vaginas? Do those make a woman a woman? It’s not that simple, is it? It’s more complex and deeper somehow. It’s something maybe in the spirit, in the essence of ourselves. Nor is that essence ever simply one or the other, is it? We might all be a mix of it somehow. For some the mixture is more heavily weighted to one side and it is clear. Then there are those of us who find a mixture with more balance and perhaps tangled together.
That’s what I’ve know and struggled to make sense of since very young. They told me I was a boy because of a penis. They told me I was a boy because I liked baseball and getting dirty while playing in the woods. I liked matchbox cars and army men. But I also liked girl dolls and fashion plates and I liked when I got a chance to see and hear how girls played with each other, how they did so. But meanwhile there was always the message from the surrounding culture that I was a boy and I abided by that because I didn’t know how to dispute that, as I accepted the idea that a penis meant I was a boy and since I was fairly accepting of science from early on, I knew there was no chance that I was going to develop a woman’s body.
Of course I didn’t know what science didn’t yet know or hadn’t really begun to gather evidence on and consider in the hypotheses by which they try to explain the world and our lives.
So it was I felt so alone and unable to really connect with those around me and because of that, I find myself here in this world. Taking the steps now to cross the bridge, scared as hell at times and sometimes feeling like the only friendly voice I have is the one in my own head and unfortunately that voice isn’t always friendly to me, but critical and harsh. But then, because of that, I plan to go to the bowling night the transgender group I met with will be having tonight. Yeah, I don’t have all that many friends, but that doesn’t mean I can’t find some and of course with transgenders, I know we share a commonality.
So forward I tell myself. Keep moving it forward, bit by bit, Izabela. You ain’t perfect and you’ve got your weaknesses, but keep it moving forward. How much you’ll cry along the way, who knows? But you know how much anguish you’ll continue to feel if you live without being fully you. Keep it going, girl, keep it moving forward. No matter how odd it ends up, you ain’t even hardly begun to live.
~~Izabela
Izabela, Mia Kara 