21 years
Oh, LJ. You'll always be here.
I don't know where my head is going right now. It's been 18 months of a great deal of change. At the end of 2021 - the end of lockdown - I wanted some change in my life. So I lost some weight, started exercising, and began the process of getting some gender affirming surgery. Then in 2022 I had the surgery, decided that I really needed to get out of my job, applied for Masters. And now I've left the job, I'm in the Masters, and ...
And I don't know where my head is at. I'll be 54 in a few months, and I feel like I'm coming out again. Or still. I feel like I've been locked in a cage for a decade and I'm rattling at the bars trying to get out. A lot of thinking has gone on in this here walnut atop my shoulders. I've begun to think in terms of grief. I think a lot of transfolk grieve. We grieve for the life that we couldn't have, that we wanted to have. And it's an imaginary life. It's a life created by fantasy and what ifs that are always somehow rosier than the what was. What if I was cis female? My imagined life never includes the abused, the teasing, the shitty boyfriends. It chops out all the bad bits of my life and replaces it with something out of a teen fantasy novel. I know that. But I still feel I'd trade it in. Cis women tell me I'm lucky not to have had to deal with All That Stuff. They're wrong. I wanted it and I want it, warts and all. And I grieve, even if I'm grieving for something imaginary.
When I came out I didn't have a lot of trans role models to look to. I'd met a couple of trans women, but it was pretty much just me finding my own place in the world. I had great friends and got a lot of support, but I didn't get advice and guidance. Because when you come out in your 30s you try to make up for the life you didn't have. You go nuts, you go teenage, you try to make up for lost time. But no one tells you how to buy a bra, or how to put on makeup, or how to wear a skirt, or how to choose a hair style, and you don't even know that you get to ask that stuff. It's more than 20 years later and I'm still learning some things that I never learned when I was 10. I'm learning stuff about my body, and my sexuality that I feel I clamped down on because I didn't know what the options were back then. Things are kinda shitty right now with the shouty fascists and all, but man, it'd be a fucking cakewalk to come out now. There was no Facebook, or Twitter, or Reddit, or fucking anything or anyone to ask about Stuff when I came out. Kids of today, oo whippersnappers, don't know how easy they've got it, dagnabbit etc.
Anyway. Part of this is middle aged. Part of this is being terrified about what becoming a psychologist actually means. Part of it is wistful longing. Part of it is wishing I was still in my 20s and going through this.
Part of it is the fact that holy shit I've been goddam horny lately.
But I don't know where my head is at right now. I do know that I wanna go out and meet people and do things again. I'm sick of rattling at the bars. I want go out to bars and ... um ... rattle. I don't even know if that works. Let me get back to you when I've had more time to work on my material.
I don't know where my head is going right now. It's been 18 months of a great deal of change. At the end of 2021 - the end of lockdown - I wanted some change in my life. So I lost some weight, started exercising, and began the process of getting some gender affirming surgery. Then in 2022 I had the surgery, decided that I really needed to get out of my job, applied for Masters. And now I've left the job, I'm in the Masters, and ...
And I don't know where my head is at. I'll be 54 in a few months, and I feel like I'm coming out again. Or still. I feel like I've been locked in a cage for a decade and I'm rattling at the bars trying to get out. A lot of thinking has gone on in this here walnut atop my shoulders. I've begun to think in terms of grief. I think a lot of transfolk grieve. We grieve for the life that we couldn't have, that we wanted to have. And it's an imaginary life. It's a life created by fantasy and what ifs that are always somehow rosier than the what was. What if I was cis female? My imagined life never includes the abused, the teasing, the shitty boyfriends. It chops out all the bad bits of my life and replaces it with something out of a teen fantasy novel. I know that. But I still feel I'd trade it in. Cis women tell me I'm lucky not to have had to deal with All That Stuff. They're wrong. I wanted it and I want it, warts and all. And I grieve, even if I'm grieving for something imaginary.
When I came out I didn't have a lot of trans role models to look to. I'd met a couple of trans women, but it was pretty much just me finding my own place in the world. I had great friends and got a lot of support, but I didn't get advice and guidance. Because when you come out in your 30s you try to make up for the life you didn't have. You go nuts, you go teenage, you try to make up for lost time. But no one tells you how to buy a bra, or how to put on makeup, or how to wear a skirt, or how to choose a hair style, and you don't even know that you get to ask that stuff. It's more than 20 years later and I'm still learning some things that I never learned when I was 10. I'm learning stuff about my body, and my sexuality that I feel I clamped down on because I didn't know what the options were back then. Things are kinda shitty right now with the shouty fascists and all, but man, it'd be a fucking cakewalk to come out now. There was no Facebook, or Twitter, or Reddit, or fucking anything or anyone to ask about Stuff when I came out. Kids of today, oo whippersnappers, don't know how easy they've got it, dagnabbit etc.
Anyway. Part of this is middle aged. Part of this is being terrified about what becoming a psychologist actually means. Part of it is wistful longing. Part of it is wishing I was still in my 20s and going through this.
Part of it is the fact that holy shit I've been goddam horny lately.
But I don't know where my head is at right now. I do know that I wanna go out and meet people and do things again. I'm sick of rattling at the bars. I want go out to bars and ... um ... rattle. I don't even know if that works. Let me get back to you when I've had more time to work on my material.