A long time coming

Maybe this has been a long time coming……I am not sure, as I was unaware that it needed to come at all. All my life I have been wanting to be something other than I am, or is that was? 

The obvious one was that I wanted to transition. However, that is with hindsight. I did not know what my feelings were or that I had gender dysphoria for years. I knew I was different, told everyone “I am a girl” from an early age and soon found out that nobody believed me and it was something that was best to hide away.

It’s all more pernicious and intrusive, just not that simple. This time of reflection in isolation has given me a chance to look at different aspects of how I have been. Whether the unknown gender dysphoria was a base cause is really hard to know. 

As a lawyer, I played the role effectively to the extent that when my firm merged with another and I did not want to continue with the new firm, I was told “you have to, you are the only one of us that looks and acts like a lawyer”. When people talked about justice I explained there was no such thing as natural justice. It was a game like chess. It has rules and what you needed was someone who knew how to apply the rules. Even then there was the risk that the Judge would have got out of bed on the wrong side on the crucial day. Life was a game of chess, play by the rules.

I have done many other things since leaving the law always being the chameleon portraying what was expected of me. I played by the rules of whatever it was. I was not going to let anyone know I was anything other than who they thought I was.

I underwent therapy, spent years trying to find out how to cure my thoughts and feelings of being a girl. As usual I dived in totally immersing myself and trained to be a psychotherapist. Not surprisingly, I achieved the opposite result from the one I had been seeking and realised I was Transgender and not going to be “cured”. 

By that time I had built a structure of “normality” around me. A family, children, mortgages, responsibilities. Not that my structure was normal, dysfunctional would be the best way of describing it and I made it my responsibility to hold it all together. I knew  I was transgender now. So what. It is all too difficult.

After a while when my “normal” life broke down seemingly from non-transgender issues I started to transition, not full time, occasionally testing the water. Would the chameleon be able to deal with this challenge. After a while I was probably 60/70% of the time presenting as the woman I was becoming. I passed the tests to be recommended for hormones and surgery, I knew what was needed.

I realised by the time I had gone full time that transitioning still left you with all the other life issues to deal with and continued spinning plates. The nag, nag, nag of gender dysphoria had dissipated. It has gone now. I know who I am, a transwoman learning to be the best I can be, but that was not the life lesson I needed to learn. 

The life lesson I have needed to recognise is not that I am a transwoman something for my chameleon to act out and portray I am so much more than that, I am simply me. It has taken this time of isolation, this period of time of stopping spinning plates to recognise I do not have to be anything other than I am, I do not have not to live up to a label or portray an image to be worthy or acceptable. I am just me nothing special, other than being me as we all are,  unique and special individuals. It has been a long time coming and I am looking forward to being able to live in the future without the need to be something other than myself.