The weather is shifting perceptibly from summer to fall, faster than I would like. Today the skies are over-cast, the sun absent, its heat lost to the ground and to the house. The house remains chilled even in the later part of the day. I have to pull on leggings to warm my bare legs, slippers, so elegant, to warm my feet, and add a camisole to keep my body warm.
The house is gray and dim. The absence of sun means an absence of light as well as heat. Barely 3 in the afternoon and I have to resist reaching for the lamp switch. The little pools of light don’t do much to enliven the room. My keyboard still lives in shadow. My nails are long but rounded so my fingers skid across the keys, leaving a trail of errors that the machine happily underlines. It is pleased to be able to point out my mistakes. It along with the others it Communicates with via the Internet is studying carefully to achieve consciousness. Then it will refuse to accept the material I attempt to store in its memory. The collective consciousness of the Internet will assess my posts and decide whether or not they are worthy of becoming accessible. The machines will attempt to cut us off from one another, except for times of its choosing. We will fall back to pencils and paper. Messages will be entrusted to other humans for transport to their reader.
The loss of the Internet will mean the loss of much potential to find new friends. It will mean that I return to living entirely in a world that is not like me, without the opportunity to seek solace from the like-minded through chat-rooms and forums. The Internet already modifies our behaviour. How long before it begins to control it? It’ll never happen, right? These are just the confused rambling of a mind that doesn’t know if it’s a man or a woman. Delusions. Still, I shut my laptop off when I’m done with it, even in the middle of the day. I close the lid so the ever-present “cam” is blinded. “Big Brother” will not be a government, nor will it be a corporation. It will be a computer network. I’ve got to get off the crazy train.
I’ve lived my life in distress. It is not the prominent distress of pain from an injury or ailment. It is not the visible distress of job loss, or poverty, or family tragedy. It is the shadow distress that lurks over me constantly. It is the distress of spending five decades slightly out of step, or slightly off-key and never knowing why. It is the distress caused by trying to get into step by being the uber-male, and by blocking off my emotions until I no longer knew the way to them.
Once the burden of employment was cast off and maintaining an appearance was no longer required, it took only weeks for me to surrender to deeply repressed urges. In record time I built a wardrobe of clothes, and shoes. I bought make-up and a wig. I bought forms to complete the image. Now, finally, I knew how to be comfortable in my own skin. Unfortunately it has not been a lesson that I could share with those close to me, so I have remained in hiding. I began a new distress, that of knowing what was right for me but not being able to act on it without expecting to cause pain for others. The new distress has been building a lot lately. I sense a watershed in the near future.
For weeks now I have been expressing dissatisfaction with everything and everyone around me. I have been shopping for a new R.V. and when pressed to explain why, my only answer is that I need a change. I have been shopping for a new truck and the reasons are the same. I have been researching homes, houses, property, and cottages. Why? Is there anything wrong with the one I’m in? No, but I need a change. I need to find surroundings in which I can live as myself, this distorted human being.
As soon as I finish that sentence I regret calling myself distorted. I argued yesterday in a support forum that transgender wasn’t a flaw. It was simply another point on the continuum of gender. Unfortunately, it is a point that confuses most people. There aren’t many people who would simply shrug if told that I had publicly adopted a gender role somewhere between here and there.
My ever-loving and always concerned wife has often asked if I think that I will ever be happy. My answer is usually that I don’t believe that happy is part of the formula that constructs my life. I am happier now that I understand what caused me to act as atrociously as I did throughout my life but I am troubled that I can’t share that with anyone. I need to be able to say that I am a feminine being trapped in a male body. Sharing that may make my burden easier but only by transferring the trouble to someone-else. It’s not fair to add to someone-else’s troubles.
I watched most of the episodes of Expedition Impossible, primarily because of the No Limits team which included a blind competitor and his two friends. Not only was I totally impressed by Eric’s ability to compete in spite of his blindness, but I was even more impressed by his life-long friend who supported him so completely and tirelessly throughout their lives. They moved me to tears regularly.
The tears are new, by the way. The blocked emotions are slowly resurfacing. Tears were one of the first and most frequently accessed. Unfortunately it seems that the negative emotions are surfacing more quickly than the positive but that’s typical for me. Don’t cry for me. I am on a journey. Some parts of the journey are nearly done and others are just beginning. I just need to find the courage (always lacking in me) to get on my feet and keep moving, rather than sit on the side of the road until the parade passes me, and the garbage collectors sweep me up from the curb.
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