(no subject)
You know why I stopped writing about my life in public? Because transitioning from female to male has been the equivalent of falling into the rabbit hole. Where am I reporting from? Who am I, these days? Ask me tomorrow.
I'll try to write in simple, clear language. I'm not sure if that will help.
Basically, transition has been devastating to my professional, familial, and romantic lives. That is the truth. Since transitioning, I've lost a profitable private practice. I haven't spent a Thanksgiving with my family since 2007; and I've been disowned. I haven't had a long-term monogamous relationship since pre-transition. I don't think my experience is necessarily typical; I know of transpeople whose lives have settled once they regained their footing. Why I'm still hurtling through space is a mystery to me. My parents were married for almost 50 years. Am I really such an alien that there's no place on this planet for me to land?
But not all of it is bad. Losing what I have lost has given me the luxury of making bold choices. Reckless, visceral choices. I've moved across the country, fallen into passionate love affairs, made films, and acted in films. I've traveled around the world. I've learned how to operate a camera, to the extent that it now feels like a part of my body, an appendage, a third eye. I've felt spiritually connected to the world in ways, in places, I never would have thought possible. I've floated in the Mediterranean, explored Tokyo's neon canyons, awakened on the shores of the Andaman Sea, embraced a transgender woman at a graveyard in New Delhi. I've never lived this real, or this raw. I wouldn't change it. But I wonder what it all means. Because I'm changing, too. My body is morphing along with the scenery; a flickering landscape akin to Tokyo's video panorama.
Most people think transition is about an operation, or a finite number of hormone shots. It is not. It never ends, this feeling of morphing, stretching too thin into nothingness, or becoming part of all those around me. This is why I've been unable to write about it. It's at once nothing and everything.
I'll try to write in simple, clear language. I'm not sure if that will help.
Basically, transition has been devastating to my professional, familial, and romantic lives. That is the truth. Since transitioning, I've lost a profitable private practice. I haven't spent a Thanksgiving with my family since 2007; and I've been disowned. I haven't had a long-term monogamous relationship since pre-transition. I don't think my experience is necessarily typical; I know of transpeople whose lives have settled once they regained their footing. Why I'm still hurtling through space is a mystery to me. My parents were married for almost 50 years. Am I really such an alien that there's no place on this planet for me to land?
But not all of it is bad. Losing what I have lost has given me the luxury of making bold choices. Reckless, visceral choices. I've moved across the country, fallen into passionate love affairs, made films, and acted in films. I've traveled around the world. I've learned how to operate a camera, to the extent that it now feels like a part of my body, an appendage, a third eye. I've felt spiritually connected to the world in ways, in places, I never would have thought possible. I've floated in the Mediterranean, explored Tokyo's neon canyons, awakened on the shores of the Andaman Sea, embraced a transgender woman at a graveyard in New Delhi. I've never lived this real, or this raw. I wouldn't change it. But I wonder what it all means. Because I'm changing, too. My body is morphing along with the scenery; a flickering landscape akin to Tokyo's video panorama.
Most people think transition is about an operation, or a finite number of hormone shots. It is not. It never ends, this feeling of morphing, stretching too thin into nothingness, or becoming part of all those around me. This is why I've been unable to write about it. It's at once nothing and everything.