Truth

I asked myself the question last night "What happened, or what was there in my life that made me finally make the decision to change genders?". I also made certain it was *my* answer. Too often I give an easier answer, or one that I think makes sense for a transgender person to answer with. This time I thought deeper, and what I came up with started a chain of thoughts, emotions, and understanding.

I let myself truly accept this one fact. Every chapter of my life has one thing in common. They would all start with me in the mental state of mind of hiding away from fantasizing about becoming a woman, and would end with me being obsessed with fantasizing about becoming a woman.

That is the bare truth of it all. If I wasn't spending time trying to run away from wanting to be a woman I was spending time running toward wanting to be a woman. All of my life. Everything else I did was based on that constant back and forth. Either things to keep my mind off of it, or my mind being dedicated to it. There was always a building process, I didn't go back to being obsessed instantly, but it was always inevitable.

Understanding that truth about me then started to make other things make sense. The best example was today at work. As I said I started thinking about this last night, when I woke up this morning, I wasn't done thinking about it. It was on my mind when I got up and didn't go away before work, it still hasn't gone away. I was at work for a while, maybe 45 min and I started to realize "I need this day off to deal with this." I told my manager I wasn't feeling well and I will probably go home early. About an hour and a half later I caught myself with my hand in a bowl of lettuce staring off into space recollecting about how I use to so desperately want to do so many of the things I am now doing, and how much I would want to be a woman, live how I am now living. I seen one of the female servers talking to a male server and I was captivated by how she was "just a woman" I don't know how to describe it, but how she was just being her and what was "her" was just "female" and I envied her. I started to see how true the dysphoria really was. How I am forced sometimes to really try and figure out what gender I would like to be because I want to be like her, not like I am, and certainly not like I was. I started to see how the dysphoria is what causes that. My body getting completely in the way of my mind being able to calm down, in a very real sense. Someone said something loud in the kitchen and it snapped me back to reality. 20 minutes later I went to my manager and said "I need to go." and just walked out.

I have a different perspective on this now then I usually do. Instead of thinking I did something like that, something out of my nature because I work hard and very rarely take time off, as a reason to see that I'm transgender. I see it now as something I did because I am transgender. Me being transgender is the only thing that makes sense out of why I would leave work to search myself and think hard about what my gender is. Cis people don't feel the need to do that. If I wasn't transgender, maybe I would be leaving work to take care of my car, or my kids or something but that wasn't what this person was doing. I left work to try and make sense of my gender.

A friend picked me up and we drove around for a while. She knows what to expect from me when I'm like this and we barely spoke, she just let me sit and think for the most of it. After a while we decided to stop for something to eat and she asked me if I wanted to sit in the car a bit. I was visibly shaken and even though I hadn't said much she could tell I needed to relax. What I was asking myself was this "What if I really let go of all the doubt? What if I really let myself believe I am transgender just like I believe I can play guitar. Not just believe, but know I am." It was that question that made me panic. For the first time in my life I had a legitimate panic attack. I started breathing heavy, I started feeling scared. I couldn't really take it.

Then sitting there, I let the fear go. I started thinking again, "If I can just accept this, it explains so much of my life, it explains everything." The truth washed over me eventually and suddenly all I could do was cry. I cried like I haven't cried since... well I don't remember. I cried like a child cries when it learns something it cannot undo. I wasn't taking it badly, I was relieved by the sudden acceptance. The truth of it then hit me harder then anything else I have ever thought about myself. Unlike my ability to play guitar which I just accepted, have never once given it any thought, my being transgender is something I have fought with all of my life. To let that struggle go, to just accept it. To accept the fact that I *AM* different, I *AM* transgender. No more need to fight, or doubt myself because it is just who I am. The whole thing was more then I could really handle, really. My friend pulled away from the restaurant and drove some more.

I'm home now, and I have been for a few hours. This isn't consuming me as much as it was in the car and that is a good thing. I'm not sure my emotions and mind could handle thinking like that for a long time. It is all still on my mind and I am still clearly shaken by today's events. I'm not "myself" here at home right now, normally I'm fairly on the go, watching a show, or chatting with people online or doing something with the house, something. All I've done this evening is lay down and think, and write this and think.  I'm actually at the point right now that I'm considering what to do about work tomorrow. For me, again, that's very out of character for me. One thing I have accepted about myself today as well is how much I need to make decisions for me. Accepting being transgender like I am right now has given myself the permission to do things in life that I need. My fantasizes have started to become reality. My reality has started to become truth and I find myself starting to not want to compromise on what I want or need at all.

Instead of going to work and pushing this off for another time in some way to make the people I work with happy. I see now that  I'm transgender, I'm going to have needs that others do not, right now I need this time off to take care of my mental health. It may be a mundane example, but it speaks so loudly to how I have lived my life, I have put others needs and happiness before mine.

I have seen this coming for a while now. I started to see things in my life, and patterns in my thinking that were going to lead me to this massive acceptance. A few weeks ago I started dedicating time to just thinking about me, about how I feel about being transgender, how the things in my life that I have done have all related to being transgender. I wanted to confront the doubt I have been having. I have come up with a lot of "Well this proves it's true." moments, but this is the first time I started thinking "This is true, and it proves everything else."

I hope I was mostly clear in what I have written here. All of this makes sense to me as quickly as thought moves, and I'm afraid I can't type that fast. I feel like this is a very important part of my story. My time with my friend today is a big part of my life. As I said to her, if I were to make a movie or write a book about my life this would be one of the scenes in it. Me sitting with her, first in the car, then in the restaurant we finally went to, and my emotional acceptance being the theme of the entire scene.