I just wanted to write something about my transition story, over the past two years of my life. Some might look at this as weird or strange and some may say, even bizarre. I wanted to express what the last two years have felt like to me as a trans person as I transition from Male to Female.
First and foremost, let’s discuss me actually admitting to myself that I was transgender.
I know some of you will be thinking that I just woke up one morning and said to myself “I am trans, I want to be a woman”. <shakes head>
Nope, This isn’t how it happened at all!
I’ve known pretty much all my life that the body I inhabit on this metaphysical plane isn’t right.
Every day I look at myself in the mirror and what I see, not only do I not like, but also I don’t feel comfortable inside. On some days I actually detest what I see and I can’t look at myself. Sometimes this feeling lasts for days, even weeks and in the past has caused me major mental anguish, anxiety, and depression.
After lots of psychotherapy, I was diagnosed with gender dysphoria. I’m not going to explain what this is but the link above will give you a lot of information about what you need to know. This diagnosis sent me into a tailspin initially and took me over 6 months to get my head around and I basically shut my life down to help me make sense of what I’d been told.
In November 2019, I started to identify more as a woman than as a man and what prevented me from taking a giant leap at that stage was this nagging doubt in the back of my mind, “what will everybody else think!” Plus I don’t think I was ready to suddenly wake up and change my life in one fell swoop.
However, what also stopped me was that I am at the crossroads of the biggest moment of my life and I’m still thinking about others!!!
If there is one thing I’ve learned in my life is don’t be a people pleaser. Just don’t. Be yourself, speak your mind, no matter how upset others get, and most of all be honest with yourself. *
Anyway, I digress.
I have this nagging doubt about coming out. This wasn’t to do with my friends but was more to do with, “what will my customers think?”.
Being self-employed I rely on my customers to make a living, and I honestly had real anxiety about telling my clients about the real me.
This was more a rampant fear about losing my livelihood than what anybody else would think about me as a person.
This really did screw with my head until March 2020 when I outed myself to one of my biggest clients, whom I bumped into on a night out in Manchester. I could see he kept looking at me in the club and eventually I got up and went over and said “hi”. He was very shocked but also confused so I left him and his friends for their evening out.
A few days later I got a call asking me to go and see him and half expected to be sacked as a contractor because of the sensitive nature of their work. What actually happened was the exact opposite.
First of all, he asked me why I hadn’t told him before but he was also incredibly supportive and we had a very long chat about not only my sexuality but his and also how this wouldn’t affect our business relationship. He then gave me quite a bit of work.
Jump forward to the end of March 2020 and COVID happening along with lockdown.
This insular isolation, imposed upon us by the government actually did send me a bit crazy because I was no longer able to express who I was in a manner I had got accustomed to.
Not being able to separate my home life from my leisure life made me realise that I needed to identify as the real me more and more in my own home. The line between past and future became less and less blurred and I only saw the future.
My housemate already knew about me identifying as female as we’d talked about this long before we’d become housemates and got a house together. She has been very supportive right from the start. Her mantra of “Your life, you need to live it as you see fit and do what makes you happy”.
From April to June of 2020 I no longer identified as male. Coupled with during the lockdown, I did continue to work in empty offices so was able to express myself but ultimately I had to face coming out to all my customers.
Cue the dramatic cut scene movie music. Dun Dun Duuuuur!
When things started to reopen fully in July I started going to offices again. At this point, I actually had a massive conflict within myself because I’d now gone from being who I wasn’t to who I am. This made me think and ask myself, “do I take a step back just to appease others in my appearance?”
After much heartache, worry, and discussions with my very close friends I decided the I couldn’t take that backward step no matter what the consequences. No matter how bad things got I couldn’t step backward.
On that day after I went to five client’s offices and walked in there in my best heels and dress, head held high and proudly proclaimed “Hi, this is the real me”. This had mixed reactions.
Most people said, “Oh! Ok”. A few people were shocked and one of the five, I’ve never seen again!
The ones who said “Oh! OK”, I still deal with them to this day as well as having a much better relationship with them than before and we’ve talked lots about my transition. Some view my journey with interest and others are just happy that I am happy.
Everyone in my life now knows and not to put too fine a point on this, I don’t care what they or others think because ultimately this is my life and I will live it as I see fit.
Took me 50 years to work that out!
It’s taken a shit tonne of courage* for me to get to this point in my life and to get to the point where I also don’t care what your think about me. From someone who was quite critical of their life and what other thought about themselves, to get to the point where I now don’t care what others think has also taken a huge amount of courage, ala a shit tonne!
Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but ultimately do I care what that opinion is? No!
Think what you think, I’ll still live my life as I see fit and I am happy.
* Prior to starting my transition, I was never truly happy and I used to try to please others to make myself feel better. This never made me happy and there’s also a downside to trying to make other people happy, in that other people are never happy no matter what you do for them. Which ultimately did make me more unhappy.
** a shit ton is a measurement of un-quantifiable amounts of something.
