Deanna's Quest

No, I am not a soap opera fan, but the tagline from Days of Our Lives (Like sands through an hourglass… These are the Days of Our Lives) bears for me a significant substantiality these days. I had never really given thought to those words before, they were but a quirky way to start off a Soap. Thinking about it now, there appears to be much deeper and more profound meaning for me, and perhaps many other transitioners, in that most actions we take leads us closer to our final objective – feeling whole and complete and happy.

I grew up observing everything I could about girls and their socializations, envying them the ease with which they flow through their days and their routines. All the while I’m struggling to manage some semblance of who I am/was and whom I was supposed to be. Now that I am working my way towards that goal of just flowing through my days, my routines, I still need to think about almost every step I take, every action I do, every word I say, it has yet to become natural for me. I still have many firsts to experience and I look forward to each and every one of them.

Yesterday marked the beginning of my twentieth month on Spironolactone (an anti-androgen, aka testosterone blocker), initially prescribed to control my high blood pressure and partly because of the ‘side effects’ (read: WHOOOTTT!!!). I am also three and a half weeks into my tenth month taking Estrogen and the changes I have noticed are substantial thusfar. Five months ago, I began living full time as the woman that I should always have been. I have seen a great many grains of sand pass from the top of my hourglass to the bottom and the remaining grains are slipping away quickly. I want my remaining granules to make a difference. I want them to count for something. I know that it is impossible to plug the flow and keep what life remains, but then if I were to do that, I would not be living.

“You gotta pay to play”

These past five months have proven to be quite a thrill ride. I have never felt such joy, happiness, so full of life and yet, I have also felt the lows, the loneliness and the depression with greater emotional tactility than ever before in my life. I have frequently felt both of these extremes simultaneously, which to me seems such an irrational and impossible feat, yet, there they are all intertwined supporting and enforcing each others existence.

For much of my life every time I saw a couple embracing, holding hands, kissing, looking into their eyes with all of the signs of love, I would always feel a tug of pain, envy and even loathing for what I had always longed for and have yet to experience. Now, I still long for those feelings, those experiences, I still feel a twinge when I see the beautiful expression of love between two people, I envy those feelings, but I am no longer loathe to see this, I no longer wish ill on the lovebirds. I am now at a point where I can at least relate to how it might feel to be in love. I can now feel like maybe some day I might too experience this new emotion. Yet, I am always reminded of my situation, being somewhere stuck in the middle between who I was supposed to have been and all of the energies I invested in being the empty shell of a person that I used to be and the healthy and complete woman that I am trying desperately to become. I still have a very long way to go before reaching that goal. I have an awful lot of work to do between now and then. I need to make an enormous amount of money to reach that goal. All the while my passion for what I do seems to wane. I feel less and less motivated each day to get up and create something wonderful and get paid for it. I just don’t know how to get myself out of this and even though I have gotten a great deal of advice and help and a bit of pushing I still, for some unknown reason, am reluctant or ignorant of how to move forward. I have never had a problem with doing work before, I have always gone above and beyond the call to get something accomplished. Perhaps it is the fact that I am now allowing myself to feel, to think, to express myself as a person and at the same time devoting a great expenditure of energy (grains of my life) into really discovering who I am and who I want to be.

It has not all been bad, to be honest none of it has been bad, and I have made far more friends than ever before in my life. I am closer to my family than I have probably ever been (in my memory that is). I am far more outgoing than I thought possible and I freely share my story and my experience with anyone who asks (respectfully). In the five months that I have been living full time, I have become closer to my mom than I have been in a very long time. While we lived together (for nearly fifty years) during the few years since discovering that I am trans, things had become very strained between her and I, our infrequent communications dwindled further and further and I freely admit that it was at least 90% my own fault. I was the one with the medical condition, I was the one that was caring for myself and I did not feel free to open up to her and express what I was feeling and going through. We have both been raised to keep our feelings tightly under wraps, not expose our weaknesses and our vulnerabilities to others, perhaps out of fear that they will take advantage of these weak points and we aren’t strong enough to withstand such an attack. At least that is how I see it. Now that mom and I are living apart, she has come to a much greater understanding of why I am doing what I am doing and what I have been feeling for so much of my life. I’m not sure if she accepts what I am doing but she does want to remain a significant part of my life and she is acknowledging me as me. That is so very important to me. She has also been showing a great effort to call me by my chosen name and trying to use the correct gender pronouns. I understand that this is a very difficult step for her, I had been ‘him’ for half a century, my old name was the one she chose for me. [note to self: ask mom what she would have named me if I had been born a girl.]

I have also begun a relationship with my sister – which I have never really had before. I had come out to her as kind of a test subject when preparing my coming out letter to my family. You see, my sister and mom have been estranged for many years and even before that, my own introversion, shyness and social awkwardness prevented me from having a relationship with her (or my brother, well anyone really). I figured I had the very least to lose from coming out to her, what was the worse that could happen, we never speak again? It had already been two decades, what’s a few more? I sent her my letter and she welcomed me with open arms and has been a great supporter. I know that this will sit uncomfortably with my mom, and likely already does, but I do wish that we could all just emerge from our isolation chambers and embrace one another and become something of a family once again. I have a lot of work for my own part and pray that we can soon tear down the fences that have been built. I know I have been taking the wrecking ball to the walls that I have built up over the years and I am starting to see the daylight and am getting closer to being able to open up and share, but I still have a ways to go and as long as those on the other side are willing to extend a hand, then I will emerge a far better woman – the butterfly will be free.

Dear Dad,

It feels so odd for me to refer to someone with that moniker, after nearly forty years. I only wish that I had the chance to share this letter with you while you were still alive. But, alas, many of life’s wishes go unheeded.

I want to share some news with you about my life now. I don’t know how much of my life you could remember before the Alzheimer’s took over, but you may well remember how painfully shy I was. Remember my first year in Kindergarten, refusing to utter a single word in school? Perhaps my standing in the corner of the kitchen, near the back door, whenever company came over? I’m sure you would remember all of the times we went to someones house and I would sit off to the side by myself and not talk to anyone. Well, I tried to overcome that painful shyness as much as I could over the decades since you left. I had always known that there was something drastically different about me, I was not like anyone else and I was very uncomfortable about that fact. I was never able to put my finger on what those differences were specifically. Oh well. Time will work it out, right?

I may have had the good fortune of being able to share this with you while you were alive, had I been able to figure it out ten, twenty or even thirty years ago. However, I didn’t and by the time I did, I was still carrying a strong resentment towards you for who I understood you to be. I have no idea if my feelings were correct or not and will never really know for sure. But, I still want to share this.

After living in denial of my deepest and darkest secrets, secrets that I could not bear to share with even myself, I was finally faced with having to come to terms with them once and for all. About three years ago, after losing my last job, I sank into an even deeper depression than I had ever been in before. I became even more suicidal than I had ever been in my life. I have spent the majority of my life in depression and have contemplated ending my life probably an average of several times a day for the past thirty plus years. So why didn’t I kill myself any of those thousands of times I seriously considered it? [Is there really a non-serious time to consider killing yourself?] Well, there were probably several reasons. 1) I was a coward. 2) I couldn’t bear to do that to my mom. 3) What if I failed? I could not bear to be crippled or a vegetable for the rest of my life. 4) I was never able to come up with a way to kill myself without endangering others or hurting someone. 5) The second most important reason was that I knew it was wrong to take my life. A sin if you wish. 6) I think the one thing that really kept me from ending my life had to do with my propensity to know an answer that eluded me. I knew that there was a reason why I was the way I was, but I just did not know why. I needed to stick around to find out. I knew that there was a very important reason I needed to go through what I went through, to suffer as I did. For years I assumed (at least convinced myself) it had to do with Karma. I even tried to rationalize that it was the balance of nature, Yin Yang if you will. In order for someone else to be truly happy, someone else needs to be bloody miserable. I got the miserable straw. I had to remain strong enough to withstand my misery to keep someone else happy.

Did you really think that?

Okay, so I don’t know if that was really a reason, but I had to rationalize it some way that would keep me alive. It didn’t work that well for me thinking that God had a higher purpose for me. I really wanted to end my suffering.

Getting back to three years ago. When I found myself out of work and without the eighty to one hundred and twenty hour work weeks for twenty or thirty years, everything that I had tucked away and locked up within me came bursting out all at once. I had to face myself once and for all, or die trying. I’m pretty sure you were gone from our lives by the time I first became ‘intrigued’ by women’s clothing. You had, I’m sure, missed out on the episode of my wearing a pair of red cotton panties (not sure if they were Donna’s or mom’s) and mom came home early. I rushed to cover them up and only got as far as putting my white briefs over them when she got to my doorway. I’m sure you can imagine how upset she was to see me standing there the way I was. The one piece of advice she gave me that day (though I’m sure it was meant to be a threat) was to never let her catch me doing that again. She added that if she did she would send me to that place that you went. The mental hospital. I never did let her catch me again. But, I also did not stop. At times the urges got worse, other times my self hatred for what I was doing took over and I had to purge everything and swear I would never do it again. That never lasted more than a month. I have thrown away a lot of clothes in the past forty years. Now I don’t need to. I did finally figure out what it was that was hiding inside me, or rather who was hiding inside me. It was just me, but not the man that the world chose me to be. I am a transsexual woman. I was born with a female brain, and with male genitalia. The fact that I have these sex characteristics meant that as I grew older, my body conformed into that of a man’s. My inner feelings about who I was supposed to be conflicted with what I saw in the mirror and what society dictated I act like. I never really knew how to be a man. I could only assimilate what I perceived to be idealist male traits. There were many that I could not fathom for the life of me. They just seemed so irrational and illogical, so alien, they did not make sense or feel natural. I knew that other guys had no problem with being guys – that was who they were. But, not me.

I found myself a therapist who has led me to the point I am at now. I am now living my life full time as a woman and I could not be happier about that. I began taking hormones to block the effects of testosterone on my body and brain seventeen months ago. I am also now taking estrogen to further feminize my body and reverse the effects of the androgens. I am now more than seven months into this treatment and I am so happy with the changes I have seen. The changes run so much deeper than just external cosmetic differences. The biggest change for me is internally. Once starting on the hormones, I felt clear in my mind. I became aware of how I should have felt for the previous forty eight years of my life. I was finally free of the conflict.

Over the course of the past year, I have made great strides toward building my self-confidence, becoming more comfortable with myself, and most importantly really beginning to love who I am. I am finally free to express my feelings, my hopes, my dreams, and my joy at discovering myself.

Is life perfect now?

No. Life is never perfect. I am, however very happy. I know things could be far better, I need a good steady job with a good income. I need be able to support myself and be even more outgoing. But, that will come when the time is right. I still have some body image issues, though the things I hated about myself for so long are slowly diminishing. I am really beginning to like who I see staring back at me in mirrors. I have a long way to go. There is much pain and expense ahead of me, but I eagerly await it and yearn for its quick arrival and completion.

I do wish I had the opportunity to share this news with you, to let you meet your… other… daughter. I have no idea how you would have reacted to these changes and I’m sure they would have had different meanings if our lives were other than what they were. I know that it would be a difficult thing for you to understand, as it is for anyone who does not also walk this path. I would like to imagine that you could have learned to accept me as mom is trying to do even now. I understand that acceptance and understanding comes at different speeds for different people and those who are closest to me have the greatest degree of change to accept. I’m pretty certain that some will read this and gain a little better insight into my feelings and some may not. I only wish I could have shared this with my dad.

Two thousand and eleven is no more and we all just recently welcomed in two thousand and twelve. Some have predicted that the world will end before this year retires. Some believe that life as we know it will undergo some kind of grand shift. For me, two thousand and eleven was the beginning of such a dramatic and life altering shift that will forever change who I am, not only externally to the world, but internally as well. I have seen and felt so many amazing things this past year that I would never have expected to be possible way back in two thousand and ten. I have had so many wonderful and beautiful people crowd around me, embrace me, love me and welcome me into the world that has always seemed to be so alien to me. I am amazed that so many of these people have been standing by the wayside waiting for me to open my eyes and truly see what a wonder it is to be genuinely myself. Whether they have waited for days, months, a few short years, or since my earliest childhood, they have been there. Some had temporarily drifted away, assuming me to be lost to them. Perhaps there was some hope in their hearts that I would someday break out of the internal prison that I had built for myself, perhaps my reaching out to them after many parted years with my deepest secret finally revealed and curiosity to discover who I am becoming pulled them back. For what ever your reasons for being here to share in my quest to discover myself and the world around me, I truly love that you are here.

I find myself counting my blessings every day. But what holds for two thousand and twelve? What new wonders and adventures await me? We shall certainly discover them as they come. One thing I can be certain of, I will not be alone. The year has already shown me an enormous range of emotions that have taken me throughout a vast canvas that had, in the past been composed of muted shades of gray, and are now composed of a vibrant rainbow from deep and mournful and painful to vast pinnacles of elation. Such range had always escaped my narrow range of emotions in the past.

I am entering this new phase of my life with excitement and wonder and a wholly renewed sense of enthusiasm and energy. It is the year for my business to finally flourish and blossom – yes, my creativity is feeling newly kindled. I feel that opportunities are about to be presented to me that have previously eluded my attention – very little to do with economic anemia, but almost entirely to do with personal apathy and distraction. I still need to share so much of what has gone on in my life these past several months of absence. And I will promise to make an effort to create some semblance of a timeline, or sequence of events (what I can remember). There has been much goings on, a good bit of comings as well. Ups and downs have often made me wonder at this new roller coaster I have found myself on.

Just wanted y’all to know that I am still around. Be back after this short commercial break…

This past week has been very eventful and emotional for me – in both really good and really heartbreaking and maybe a bit in between. One of the biggest things that has happened for me was that I finally got my name change done. This past tuesday I had my hearing and in spite of the people meandering in up to an hour late for the hearing and all of the various drama bits, my part went amazingly smooth and reasonably uneventful. I can now honestly and truthfully and legally say my name is Deanna. That old name will be fading away into the distant past of my life, like highway roadkill in the rear-view mirror. Bye bye, you have served me reasonably/acceptably well all these years, but now it is time to go. As a result of the bozo dramas and a temperamental and indecisive GPS, I got to my therapy appointment more than 45 minutes late. Fortunately, Kristine had kept her schedule open for me. I was so happy and so happy that she is my therapist. I can’t say enough about her, she has helped me come so much further than I think would be otherwise possible.

Well, I ended up having a great session and beamed and bubbled and glowed all through the hour. Brought up a lot of stuff. Not anywhere near as much as will be talked about in the coming weeks and months – more on that. Therapy was followed up with a trip to the DDS. No, not the dentist. Here in Georgia it is the Department of Driver Services (DMV in most places). They do a great job of hiding this stupid building. Took me a few minutes of driving up and down the street looking for a building other than the hotel across the street. Once I finally found it and walked in, told them I was there for a name change, they gave me the form to fill out and a number and not an eyelash was batted. Filled the forms out. For the question: Sex:  Male or Female? I of course checked Female (yes I still have that S*&T dangling between my legs, but I am Female) and hoped they would just go with it. Wishful thinking. I heard the wait was 45 minutes to an hour, so I settled in with my usual people watching. I was only there about 15 minutes when I see my number flashing for window #7. WOW that was fast! The young lady probably took a look at me and said to herself, ‘here comes another one’. Hey, if I can’t laugh at myself, then why is life worthwhile?  She looked everything over, typed in all of the information, scribbled out the Female and put a firm check next to Male (biiitch). Oh well. Picture taken – a little less poofy and frizzy than the pictures I got a few days earlier. Now the license part is done and for some reason GA has regressed over the years since I moved here. In the past they took your picture and everything, printed out the license – the real one – and you were on your way. Now, they take your picture, make you wait another 15 minutes, while they print out a paper temporary license and tell you to wait about 2 weeks for the new one to arrive. WTF‽

I had some time to kill after getting my license and my support group meeting, so I decided to reply to my [big] sister’s email. She hadn’t heard from me in a bit and was checking in on me. Twenty years of no communication and since I came out to her a few weeks ago, now she is checking up on me. LOL So, I replied back that I had just gotten the name change and license taken care of and a few bits about what else has been happening. Since Tuesday (2 days ago) we have exchanged about 15 pages worth of emails back and forth. WOW! She has been doing an awesome job of filling a LOT of blanks in my life that I was clueless of or just have no memories of. So much of what she has written has had me in tears and feeling so bad for her and my brother both. I haven’t mentioned this before, but in the past month or so, my therapist and I have been talking a lot about my quite likelihood of having some form/degree of Asperger’s Syndrome, an Autistic Spectrum Disorder. This has resulted in my having had a very hard time with social interactions and understand people as well as myself to a large degree. Telling my sister about this, cleared up and explained so much about my life to her. She has filled in so many details of my youth that I had only heard stories about – highly edited stories. I guess she is younger than I always thought she was. I had always thought she was 5 or 6 years older than me, but I just found out this afternoon that she is less than 4 years older. Way to go Donna, shattering my entire perspective on history. LOL

I now have so much stuff to process and see if I can piece together, or extract some distantly mislaid memories and see if can’t construct some kind of identity with my youth. I had mentioned to Donna that my memories of my first 10 years are just made up of tiny little fragments and snippets, there is no real timeline, there are no happy memories, I have almost no recall of her in my life. Evidently, she played a much bigger role than I ever knew and I am so sorry that I can’t remember any of that. From the memories that I do have of her, I can recall admiring her, she was always very pretty in my eyes, she was so much older than I and seemed to be so much more ummm… a person, than I was or could ever hope to be. I can remember as she was entering her teen years, puberty and such, and starting to blossom I was wishing so much that I could  be like her. I guess my highly sterilized and narrow viewpoint of who my sister was was far less perfect than I had ever known. But in my eyes, she was and still is, my big sister and a woman I can only hope to someday look half as good as or be half as wonderful. I can not wait until I get to see her in person, after many, many years and give her a big hug. I also can’t wait to see my brother again and maybe finally after all of these years the 3D’s can become a family. So much time has been lost.

A Picture Says a Thousand Words…

Or maybe a thousand words leads to a picture. Since I started thinking about starting this journal I had struggled with whether to post pictures of my transition or not. I also struggled with whether to make it more an accounting and documenting of my transition, i.e. today I went to the park and saw a bird. Then I… or if I wanted it to be something deeper than that, more experiential and maybe philosophical, a journal of my thoughts and feelings and my perceptions of this process that we call transitioning. I have never really settled on an answer to that and have still contemplated it. I have pretty much just stuck with the more cerebral approach and trying to keep it from becoming personal – putting a face to it. Maybe a big part of that had to do with my low self image and self esteem. That must be fading as I am getting more and more comfortable with being out and being my self. With that in mind, I am going to post a picture of myself, now that I am talking more about specific experiences and more personal emotions, it only seems fitting to place a face to the evolving personality.

This is me relaxing in a park in Atlanta on a hot summer day

This is me relaxing in the park in Atlanta on a hot summer day

Thanks to my wonderful friend Anni for taking the picture and for making me smile. There are so few pictures that have been taken of me over the years that I don’t totally hate, just looking at myself. Perhaps that is because I hate seeing the guy in the frame and know that it just is not me and I hate that. This is one of the only pictures I have that I can actually look at and not see HIM in it. I’m still not passing worth a damn, I get male pronouns more than the female, but I am feeling so much more comfortable and confident, so I just ignore the references. And in the defense of others, most people honestly don’t know how to respond to transsexuals. They perceive a guy in a dress and know that they are trans or cross-dresser or transvestite or a freak or drag queen or something, but they don’t know the proper terminology, because they were never told, we aren’t that common – yet – that people generally know how to respond. So they respond as natural. Who they see first is usually how they will respond, or not use any gender title. You can usually tell if someone is deliberately and viciously using the wrong pronoun or a more derogatory term and if it is just out of ignorance or by mistake, I will usually forgive or overlook it and just move on. That is usually my experience and have yet to get any negative reactions. I’m lucky I guess.

That is about where I am today. I am just so grateful that I have my siblings back in my life and so happy that they have not abandoned me. Now after almost 50 years I can finally get to know them and love them. That makes me happy.