I Think I Can Take It

Mostly. I had a bad day today. I got a couple of emails from editors saying that my work needed just a little more re-tooling. I was low on money. I got to work and seemed to have gotten yelled at a bit more that I was used to. It just seemed like everywhere I turned around, things were piling on against me. Then I walked up to one of the supervisors and they mentioned a call that I took on Monday. It was a horrible call and a bad memory. The woman I was talking too was pretty obviously either drunk or mentally unbalanced and she just could not stop cursing. She cursed at the company. She cursed at me. She threatened me. Every other word was either F this or F that or F you. She just could not stop cursing and being ugly.

The call lasted upwards of forty minutes. I did not break. I did not come back on her. I did not even return what I was getting in any way. When the supervisor called her back, she had been so wasted she had no idea what she had said. When she started to hear it, she apologized profusely and wondered what she could do to make it up. I was congratulated for my poise in taking the call. I was congratulated for keeping my composure. When I walked out of the building into the parking lot, another supervisor congratulated me for keeping it all together. They said that they did not feel like anyone could have withstood all of that and not given any of it back.

Its true. I have seen people walk out of call centers and never come back in for less. I have seen calls that reduced agents to broken and crying. This one worse than any number of those. I know a lot of people that cannot even listen to criticism even if it is not directed at them. How did I do it? Easy. I had an advantage. I worked with my father for nearly a decade. My father was a diabetic who self medicated his doses of insulin. When Dad was a but off the meds, he started cursing almost uncontrollably. I was the only one around. So, he would curse at me repeatedly. Eventually, it just became part of the working day. Wait for Dad to take the meds and get something into his system and he would normal off. Years. Decades. From your own Dad who knew how to say things to make things hurt. Once I understood that no matter how personal it got, it was the disease and not the man (even if I was pretty sure he meant it) I could start to take it. After a few years, I grew to silently chuckle at some of the things that he said.

This woman threatened my job. She threatened my health. She did her absolute dead level best to break me. She did not even start to come close. As this screeching harpy was going through all of her histrionics, I started to think about what exactly I was worried about on discussing the decision to transition in public. I am worried about the reaction. It starts to make me think. I took what my Dad had to say and did not break. I took what this random woman had to say and did not break. Why do I think that I will suddenly turn into glass over this one?

Because memories kind of die hard, I remember when I was 23 and had to tell my parents as well as hers that we were getting a divorce. Revealing anything about myself nearly killed me. Listening to all of the calls asking for an explanation really wore me out. I never wanted to go through any thing like that again. Of course, that was when I was living the good life having never taken a customer service call. Now, I have literally taken thousands of them. I have talked to people in every conceivable level of upset or understanding. I talked to a few of them today. You just can’t do it as long as I have and not be a little bit affected by it all. I have. I learned something.

I can take it. I can take it with an extraordinary amount of poise and understanding. I do not break on the phone. I just figure eventually the call will end and no one can continue forever. It takes a lot to shake me to the point where I even mention work. It honestly takes a lot for me to even notice people are affected. I have seen and taken almost all of it. So, what makes me think that I could not take a reaction that I have preparing for as the worst my entire life? I don’t know. I wish I could be defiant about it and say something like “It doesn’t bother me. I’m tough. Its their problem. Whatever.” I would probably get a thousand likes for that one.

However, I will say this. I think I can take it. I think if I can take it from my Dad and from strangers, I can probably take it from every one else as well. We live in a day and age when bubble thin skin is almost praised. There is also a sense of moral relativism in which no one is actually doing anything wrong. I believe that there is a very definite right and wrong. It is something that I struggle with. I have learned the lessons of the last fourteen years since calling parents to tell them about a divorce. I have learned and endured a lot.

I think I can endure this.

I think I can endure a lot.

I will not know until I try.

Till tomorrow.

A Pretty Girl

If and when I go out in public one day as a woman, I would not necessarily be worried about being called an ugly woman. I would worry primarily about being called a man. I have been following a friend on face book who has been overly public about transitioning and their progress. For the record, I have not really mentioned anything on face book yet. However, when I looked at older pictures of them, I could not really see the girl. Then again, they are kind of on a different track than me in a lot of ways.

I did not say that I thought that they would be ugly. I just did not see how they would look as a girl. Recently, they posted a picture that was shaved, made up, and had lightened hair. From their own admission, they have been on hormone treatment for a couple of months. So, for the first time, I saw a girl. Made up a little bit, this was a pretty girl. This sort of heartened me a little bit. When I look into the mirror (and I really hate to that) , I have trouble seeing it. I know that others would have trouble seeing it. I want to see it. I know that it needs a lot of work before attaining it, but I have a bit of trouble seeing it.

The person that I am following currently has a few different circumstances. I do not believe that they currently have a job. I know that they are not married. I have never heard about them having any kids. Even before they became public about anything, they were pretty violently left wing. They had piercing, tattoos, and everything else down those lines. There is probably a fairly big ‘emo culture’ around them to begin with.

On a lot of levels, beyond this, we have very little in common. I have also never actually had a conversation with them down these lines. However, the interesting part is that they seem to gravitate towards me. They have nearly 800 friends on their face book yet they seem to pay attention to what I say as well as I what I do. Keep in mind that I have never actually come out publicly to really much of anyone on there. To my knowledge (and this could be simply because I am ignorant) no one outside my family (meaning the people that live directly in my household) even know about this blog on there.

There is a possibility that it is a very badly kept secret. It could be like if someone is cheating on you and the entire audience knows what is going on except for you. Then all of the sudden when you find out, every one says “Oh, I have known about that for months.” They just did not be the one to tell you. This might be heating up messages, texts, and phone calls every day. All I would take is one to let it slip and then just tell one person that they could ‘trust.’ Then, it could go to a person that could have never met you and go on from there.

You used to have to pick up a phone and call. Now, all you have to do is update a status. There was a point and time where you waited on pins and needles for someone to open up a letter. Now, everything to spread like wildfire is at your fingertips and right there. I remember when I was in junior high. There was an entire group of guys playing around and they knocked together slamming me into a concrete wall in a lunchroom. There was a girl, who was a cheerleader, who helped me up. She was wearing a flowered dress. I could have sworn I was in love. I called her at least twice. I told her sister that I liked her. Her sister even told one other person that I know of in a whispered tone “He likes my sister.”

The girl in the flowered dress? Never once admitted that she knew anything. She went to another school and it all became a convenient way to not pay attention to other girls. I had this ‘great love’ that was too pure for this woman who had never really admitted I was a human being. After high school, I even called her mother and had a long conversation with her. Before I turned 19, I called this girl again and she acted like she had never in her life heard who I was. At that point, I just gave up. I knew that she knew who I was. I was just pretty tired of trying to get her to admit it.

The point? Every step of the way I am sure now (having two girls in my household) that it was discussed, poured over, torn apart, put back together, and rehashed. The story is probably still being talked about in that household to this day. If there was something that was going to go somewhere, it would have. The thing is that the subject of even the hottest rumors can be expertly shielded from anyone even knowing that they are talking about it.

That would lead back to going outside. People will, may, and quite possibly whisper something like “That’s a guy.” You may never hear it. When I was in college, I did everything possible to get people talking about me. I am sure I did. I never managed to actually hear any of it. Right now, there are probably people wondering how I will look as a girl as much as I am. I did not have an accurate picture in my mind of my friend until now. I do not have an accurate picture of myself now until I actually do it.

I know that I am a girl. I know that I need a lot of work. It is kind of fun to think that some day someone might think I am actually a pretty girl. You know, on the outside.

Till Tomorrow.

“Bad” Decisions? I have A Lot of Good Examples

I got to thinking today about all of the people today who would might one day tell me that I am wrong for even considering any of this. They might tell me to think of all that I might be losing or to re-consider. It kind of makes me chuckle. The joke of it all is that everything that I would stand to lose that they love me having so much is a result of a decision that they did not actually agree with at the time. When I told people about my divorce, they literally thought that the sky would fall in and that I would personally burn in hell. My mom said that if there was any way to hold us together, she would. She said that her heart was torn apart by the whole thing.

About three years before that little announcement, there was a lot of discussion that I was too young to get married in the first place. Everything went from ‘Don’t get married to don’t get divorced.’ Later on, people told me how wonderful my next marriage was. These were the same people who did not want me to get married and did not want me to get divorced. Nothing about the second marriage would have been possible if the first two decisions had not been made. This would be especially true to the decision to get divorced. So, people have managed to constantly defend a status quo without ever actually managing to admit that their advice about the last decision may have been entirely false.

I think about my former mother in law taking my ex-wife’s daughter to her college that she raised with the child’s biological mother and lesbian wife. Yes, that entire sentence is an interesting footnote to my life. My mother in law was not happy about the divorce. Her daughter exploring her lesbian side was not exactly the happiest news to her either. When her daughter decided to move in with and help raise the children of her lesbian lover, this was not a happy watcher of Fox News. In short, there was not a single decision that led to the child that she now lovingly accepts as her grandchild that she actually wanted in any way. And this led to one of the happiest days of her life?

So, its like this. Every decision I make seems to have the potential to ‘completely ruin my life.’ I am pretty sure being transgendered will not change that trend in the slightest. After all of these disagreeable decision, you are either watching with morbid curiosity a life of pure wreckage move from one garbage scow to another or you have to really buckle down and admit you might have been wrong about a few of my decisions that now look rather good and savvy by comparison later.

There is a certain power when you realize that you really can make decisions on your own. No one will ever hand you a card saying “Here, you are now an adult and there is nothing I can do about it.” No one is going to do that one at all. It happens when you make a decision that clearly no one really around you agrees with and there is not much and (as a matter of fact less than nothing that they can do about it) Trust me, no one wants you to have this knowledge. They don’t want you know that at all. But, it is true.

Look, ruination of your existence is really hard to do even when you are completely committed to the concept. People come together and work for the best. You see that every time that a baby falls asleep on a loving grandparent’s arm while the child’s mother tries to pass a class to graduate from high school. Most of the time, there will be some sort of safety net there for you. That safety net may not be your family. It may come from places that you never believed or expected but it will be there.

I remember when I wrote my first novel. I remember trying to sell it to my friends and family. A lot of them did not bother to buy it. They all thought since they ‘knew the author’ that they would be given a free copy/ I did actually hand out five free copies. Three of them told me how much they happened to hate that particular novel. Life is full of lessons and some of them are hard to swallow. One thing I learned was that my friends and family are not necessarily my audience. An audience is people that connect with your work. If those people also happen to be your friends and family then all the happier everyone can be about it. But, do not count on it. I have fifty likes on this blog and five followers I feel almost bad that those people do not even know what is supposed to be my real name. Honestly, I don’t want them to know. I don’t want them to be the last on the last life.

I want them to be the first on the new. If I should die, I want them to mourn Sherry. I want the name that I was born with to be some sort of interesting trivia. I am assuming that beyond the people that live under my roof, no one else will be taking this journey with me. As a matter of fact, any that do will be a pleasant surprise. That is why I am building support now amongst the random people that happen to stop by and read this blog. That will be very necessary later.

Douglas Adams once said that he may not have ended up where he intended but where he needed to be. I think that is true for me as well. If I had gotten what I wanted earlier in life, I would not have all of the support that I have around me now. All things in their own time. Don’t worry about whether the decisions you make will be accepted. Just wait until you make the next disagreeable one to hear all of the good results from the last one. Listen to your self quietly chuckle.

Till Tomorrow.

The Shock Troops of Conformity.

Last night I wrote about the horrific stories that seem to proliferate the web about the lives of transsexuals. Keep in mind, I believe that every single one of them are absolutely true. I believe that they serve an important way to find out about the plight of transsexual youth and the transgender community as a whole. However, I cannot help but think that there is also another purpose to spreading these stories. It serves to underscore the feeling that once you enter into something like this, you are entering in exclusively at your own great peril. In short, it serves the same purpose as any other fairy tale, urban legend, or horror story.

Have you ever noticed how many of Grimm Fairy Tales focused on the inherent dangers of going out into the woods or striking out on your own? In the times that they were written, families were tied to the land for generations. The importance of having children was in no small part to have people to tend to your farm when you were old as well as take care of you. There was a vested interest in keeping children close to home and not wondering what was out there. Or if they did, making them absolutely sure that leaving home was a life absolutely fraught with peril. A few steps away from your house in to the woods and literally no one could guarantee your safety.

During the industrial revolution in England, all evil centered around cities. You had the reality of Jack the Ripper as well as the stalking maniacal fiction of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. Dracula came to a city in Victorian England. The plants were monstrous and there were true horrors in London at the time. Naturally, the horror gravitated where the fear was. In the 1950s, the world was besought by aliens as well as giant monsters. The fears associated with man taking trips into space as well as the nuclear age were in full view. The modern killers of our horror fantasies today are all a result of the Pill and the sexual revolution. Unprotected sex while you are young leads to nothing good. Specifically, coitus is the most perfect time for you to be too distracted to notice you are about to die a horrible death. Your only true salvation lies in the path of virtue, especially if you are female. The religious reasons for chasity had faded away so it was rather best to rely on not being skinned alive.

Now, the message is “Well, you can be transgendered I guess, but only if you are truly prepared to destroy your life and everything about it. Your family will leave you. Your friends will desert you. You will be immediately fired and wind up on the street. Welcome to drug addiction, prostitution, violence and death. But, yeah go ahead and put on the dress or the tux. Go ahead. Just know that you are choosing the worst of all possible existences. But you know… go ahead.

It reads like my high school guidance counselor. She did not want me to take the ACT when I was sophomore because she told me it would cripple my development as a human being. In the end, she could not legally stop me and I took it anyway. All the crippled me emotionally was finding out which sophomores were her favorites and the seniors on their last legs who had failed it so many times they were looking for one last gasp at a scholarship. I have discovered in my life that if a lot of people older than you are patting you on the back for making a decision, you just decided to stay the status quo and not interfere with their lives to much. Also, you happened upon something that they could not stop you from doing that scared the living hell out of them.

I literally walked out of that counselor’s office with her screaming after me “You are ruining your life.” I got to hear the same line when I got married at 21. I heard the same line when I moved my family across country. Yet, part of me still believes I will ‘ruin my life.’ If you have made any ground, believe me you will receive every opportunity to forgive and especially forget what you have done. There are always cautionary tales. There is always the smart way to go. Generally, people giving you advice will base it through the lens of their own stakes. Also, when you tell them your problems, an almost reflexive action is for them to tell you about theirs. I know. I listen to problems all day. I hear arguments all day. I always approach from the point of view of the company. I had a woman tonight curse me out for twenty minutes because one tv in one room did not work while two others in two other rooms did. You would think that she was telling a 911 operator about bleeding out.

I remember being told by my father to drop the idea of going to Notre Dame because of the dangers of living in northern Indiana. He made it sound like South Bend was a cesspool of crime. I did not end up going but I could not help but think that it just sounded ridiculous. Furthermore, it seemed like every time my parents heard I might be thinking about moving somewhere, all of the sudden that was the craziest place on the planet. This would be one of the reason why I am so reticent all of the time to ask for advice. Fairy Tales, Urban Legends, and Horror Stories. They are the shock troops of conformity as well as morality tales that try to keep you walking in life.

Transgender will destroy my life? According to some, I have made those decisions so consistently that I don’t really think one more will matter at this point in my life.

Till Tomorrow.

Human Horror Stories

I am not immune to hearing horror stories. Horror stories about being transgendered have scared me my whole life. There are stories of being ostracized by everyone you know. There are stories about loss of jobs as well as income. There are stories about living on the streets and having to turn to prostitution just to finance anything about your life. Stories about everyone turning on you as well as being the victim of violence and murder. Those horror stories are out there. I have heard and read them all. They have scared me to death nearly my whole life.

Over time, I have learned why I should not be as afraid. I am still scared to death (keep that in mind) but I am less scared than I have been. Many of the horror stories deal with transgender youth. It is hard to let go of youth. It is hard to not see yourself as young or having the same perils. Transgender youth face a lot of difficulties. I have come to learn that there are a lot of increased risks if they are young and part of an ethnic minorities. Without significant work experience or an education, there is even more risk. That is when I have to remind myself that as bad as I think I have it most of the time, I do possess a few advantages.

To review, I have a college education. I have a college degree. I have worked in my field continuously for the last decade plus. I have not been without a job for more than three months since I was 12. Given a final paycheck as well as my 401k, I can make it at least a month without a job. Furthermore, in today’s environment, workplace discrimination for being transgender opens the company up to a lawsuit. A McDonald’s manager might not be all that concerned about it, but the HR department at my work would certainly have to bend over backwards for my right to go into work if I had a legitimate diagnosis. I don’t go to bars. I would not buy illegal hormones from a ‘dealer.’ The only way I would take hormones is if they were prescribed by a Doctor. It may mean I may never take hormones, however it will also mean that I will not end up with a gnarled gastric system like a trans that I knew years ago. When you get to the point where castration is the only solution for warring hormones in your body and it takes forever for your colon to pass anything, then illegal hormones look like a pretty terrible idea.

I watched my Dad self medicate insulin of all things. I was scared to take morphine after surgery. A legal path is expensive and may not be attainable for me, but that would just mean that I did not do it. That is preferable for me to going to Thailand to have to circumvent rules just to get what I want. I have also made sure that my job was not my sole means of income. There is a large part of this that is necessity and a large part of it something that I learned painfully as a freshman in high school. I was basically told at band camp before my freshman year that being in band was all of the friends I would need in high school. This would be my group. I would finally have acceptance among a group of people. For a child that was bullied by girls into a near post traumatic stress disorder and had to change schools just to stop the crying, this meant the world to me.

I ‘bought in.’ When time came for auditions for symphonic band in the spring, I wasn’t good enough. Band was still on my schedule so I was put in a practice room for a semester while the seniors had study hall in the regular band room. I was given a test once a week in front of the band director. I found out that my family had a contingency to it. You had to be in the band to be part of the family. I got back in my sophomore year, but it was never the same. I had learned my lesson. I made one friend the second semester of my freshman year. He was gone for the last month of it because of a suicide attempt. Never put all of your eggs in one basket. That band had the actually ability to pull the plug on my entire life. I vowed at 15 that no one and no group was ever going to get that option ever again.

So even with a forty hour a week job, I still actively pursue other means of income. This is mostly through writing online articles. I would love to be able to sit at home all day and do nothing but type articles for different websites and get paid. I really feel like it was what I was meant to do. I also feel like if work became too hostile, all it is taking calls over a computer. It would be absolutely easy (and some have) done the job completely from home. Or I could find a way easily to do it from home with another company as well as type. All I do when I go to work is go to a cubicle, jack in, and take calls. I have done this for a half dozen companies over the course of a decade in more than one country.

I once went from nothing to set up in a state I had only visited once in the space of under a month. Once in a desperate plea, my friends paid for all of my bills for a month. I am not alone. I have people in my own house who not only support me emotionally but can also support if need be. We are a family. We are my family. No one can really evict me from the residence while I am paying for it. I have Wile E. Coyotied myself through a number of scrapes. People always say that you are one lost check away from the streets. That is not actually true.

I have lived my family with my parents. I have lived my family out of a hotel. I have spent three months with out a job. I have received mail at a hotel as my residence. I have been completely screwed before. It is all memories. Somehow, we always make it to the next pay check. I have never had to do anything illegal. So, I am fairly sure that you have to be without a paycheck and without any type of support system. I cannot imagine a fate in which I was in a flophouse in San Francisco catering to transsexuals because that is the only place on Earth that will give me a place to sleep. You can never say never to anything but I do not see a reality in which that would be me. I do feel sad for everyone who has gone through it. I have read the stories. People that had industrial silicone implants in their breasts and hips until they turned into rocks and calcified right in their bodies. It is sad that so much of it is seen as ‘optional’ or basically being told that these are medical luxury items. Its sad but it is true. Its hard to conceive but for many transgender youth, this is life.

Being young is hard. You have so little control over your life. This is the reason why people tend to want you to make all of your decisions while you are young. They want you to do it while they still have a lot of influence over it. No reasonable person would have told me that quitting a job that made twenty dollars an hour during the height of a recession would be a good idea for nothing more than an interview without a place to live was in anyway a ‘good idea.’ But I did, and I lived. That taught me a lot about myself and my family. It also taught a lot of others about me.

It doesn’t stop me from getting scared by online horror stories. It does give me confidence that I could walk out of the residence tomorrow in a dress and never look back and somehow in some way it would work, and it would be wonderful.

Till tomorrow.

Cat’s In The Cradle

I was watching a re-run of Family Ties the other day (as if there was going to be any new episodes) and Stephen visited his father’s grave some time after his father had died. He had come home to deal with his brother as well as selling their Mom’s house (which they grew up in). He stood at the grave and talked to it. That kind of weighs heavily on me. When I was a child, Family Ties was one of my absolutely favorite shows. I saw it through the eyes of a child and identified with the children on the show. Now, I watch it through the eyes of an adult and suddenly Steve and Elise are real people to me. They are people that could be me. They talk about being forty and parent their children.

They talk to graves.

My father died four years ago. In a week, it will be four years ago exactly. I delivered the eulogy at my father’s funeral. I did not actually let anyone else speak. It was a speech that I had been practicing, editing, and going over in my mind since he had a massive heart attack when I was younger. Dad was cremated and his remains were buried in state hundreds of miles away from where he died and where the funeral was. As such, when he died, he was not immediately buried. I still have a few of the ashes in a small urn that I take with me on special events.

Last year, fully three years after my father died, I stood in front of his grave. It was over Thanksgiving. In front of his grave, I did not talk to him. I talked to my eldest daughter about him. My Dad always said “Don’t visit me when I am dead, visit me when I am living.” I knew that he would not mind it taking a few\ years. I was not visiting for him anyway. I was visiting for me. Even standing in front of his grave, I don’t think that I could find the words to tell him. I never had the courage to in life. I wanted to. I wanted to tell both my parents. I was scared because they had financial control over me. I was scared of disappointing them. Next year, my Mom will get married again. I don’t care as much about disappointing her. Her life is moving on. She lives about five minutes away from my brother. She lives hundreds of miles away from me.

After Dad died, I had a lot of dreams in which he would appear back alive. I don’t know what I think about ghosts. I don’t know what I think about dreams in which you talk to the dead. Even in dreams, I have never told him what I hold to be my most secret and deep seeded desires and wish. I know that he would not understand anyway. This is the same man who once stood in front of a heart doctor and demanded that I leave because he did not feel like I really had any problems. Literally, the man thought that he could order away a heart murmur. I had also passed out at school and had trouble getting up. Dad just said that I was fine and moved on.

I was never allowed to be really sick around him. Sick was his territory. My Dad had a laundry list of medical problems. I just did not seemed to be allowed to him to have major medical issues. You don’t even want to get me started on what particular type of voodoo magic the man thought psychology was. Counseling? Dad would just order me to be a boy and be done with it. The issue would just be settled in his mind so he would figure it should be settled in front of everybody. My parents were constantly talking about how they did not scar me. To this day, my Mom will get defensive about arguments or things that happened twenty years ago.

As the years went on, the dreams of my father got less frequent. I don’t know if I am growing or just forgetting. I honestly don’t know. Going to see his grave had been so important to me. Now that I have done it, I don’t know exactly when or if I will ever do it again. To this day, my family has no idea what to make of me. I am pretty sure after they know, they will have even less ability to know what to make of me. The one dream which seemed all too real was one in which I was talking to my Dad on the phone.

I asked him where he was. It was one of the few dreams I have had of him in which I knew for certain he was dead. Usually when I remember he is dead, I either start screaming or wake up. But that time, I knew that he was dead. I asked him where he was. He said “I don’t know. I just don’t know. Its dark.” For some reason, that sounded real. That sounded like his voice. It sounded like he was lost as he would frequently do when he had improper medicine. It scared me and worried me. My Mom has a sister that fancies her self to be some sort of mystic.

My mom’s sister told my mom that my Dad’s spirit had contacted her to let her know he was in Heaven and He loved her. I was immediately doubtful of the whole story for three reasons. First of all, my Dad could not stand his sister in law. If he contacted her for any reason at all, it was for money that she owed him going back twenty years. Second, she did not mention my Dad using any foul language. That man’s cursing could weave a tapestry that they could hang in the Sistine Chapel. Third, my aunt sent an incredibly rude email after my Dad died stating that she was proud of my mom for taking her vows so seriously through many many years all throughout my Dad’s life. The rough translation was that this Saint of a woman had stayed married to an almost complete jackass for decades. A jackass any right minded woman would have left a long time ago.

I have often asked my Mom what my Dad thought of me. She always talks about how proud he was of me and how much he grieved when I moved my family away. This is basically her accusation of saying that me moving away two months before he died helped him right into the grave. Again, there was no possibility that the only thing that my father ever said about me was positive. That man could not begin to stay eternally positive about anything. I have come to the conclusion that most of the people around him have to act like they never actually met him.

I loved my Dad. I really did. I do not pretend that he even began to understand me a single day that both of us walked on this planet. My family is completely terrified of how I respond to anything. My Dad tried to sell a few cows when I was younger. He did not involve in the decision. I saw the men taking the cows away. I believed that they were thieves. So, I bit one of them in the leg. A few years later, Dad wanted to sell a sports car that we owned. The prospective buyer was my youth pastor. I confronted the pastor and not my Dad about how he had no right to buy what I felt one day should be my car. The pastor withdrew his bid. My Dad got a lot more responsive about letting me know before hand what was going on.

When I asked my Dad for money to help move from a bug infested apartment, he told me know and offered to send a bug cleaner. I took over the credit card that he had been paying on (which was in my name) and moved with a cash advance off of it. The move destroyed my credit for a solid decade, but my family did manage to get out of that place. I moved my family half way across the country on the basis of an interview (not even a job) and some how I successfully quit my job at the height of the Great Recession, moved my family across country, lived out of a hotel and have made it work for four years. I and my family just needed to get out of that place.

When I was 21, I told my Dad that was getting married and did. When I was 23, I told him that I was getting a divorce and did. My Dad never knew what was on the other side of the phone when I called him. Yet, when I talked to my daughter about the possibility of my being transgendered, I was scared. I was honestly terrified. I was terrified that she would figure out that I was not normal. I was terrified that I would scar her youth. Her reaction was that things made so much more sense now. Being around me is apparently so weird that being transgendered ifs the first thing about me that even begins to make sense.

It’s a conversation I will now never have with my Dad. Not in this life anyway. I often think about Heaven. I think about God’s promise that in Heaven you get a new body. I have often thought that when I get to Heaven, I will finally have completely the body I always wanted. The body I thought I would be comfortable in … for eternity. That would mean on some level that God understood. I don’t know why I have lived the life I lived. I don’t know why I was destined to go through the things that I have done. When my Dad was 38, something happened to where he would be set for life financially. I turn 38 next year. I am pretty doubtful that I will enjoy similar success. My mom would always talk about how smart my Dad was with money. That has never been me. I have always spent what I had and over extended myself at every opportunity.

My Dad did not trust me with money. He certainly did not manage to leave me any of it. When I moved away, he cancelled his life insurance policy. He always told me that I was spending my inheritance and he was right. Had I known, I would have spent it on transitioning rather than frivolous things like Bills and groceries. Its ok. So few people leave this world with every thing resolved. My Dad for instance left this earth without seeing his last fat girl porn that was delivered shortly after he died. My brother took a crowbar to Dad’s filing cabinent to open it. My sister in law is an accountant. None of them had a financial conversation with me. The only thing that I got out of anything was a life insurance policy cashed out on me if I had died. My mom had even offered to keep it going not to cash it out and give it to me. My brother scoffed at his saying “What is it? Five grand? Don’t worry about it.” This was my severance pay for being a child to my father. Course, Dad borrowed against it… twice.

This is the same man who worked me relentlessly in fields and a tire shop growing up until I was too tired to stand. Don’t ask me why. I never understood it and was never given an explanation. The last thing in the world I ever wanted was my kids working for me. I was just glad I never had a son. I have no idea what I would have done to mess up that poor child. A lot ended with my Dad. There was a lot that will not carry on because I will not allow it too. I don’t know exactly what my Dad thought of me. I do know that saying that it was all positive is an almost complete lie. It wasn’t him. He wasn’t completely positive about anything. He laughed at me. He mocked me. He did not understand how he ever raised a child like me. He also supported me and he loved me.

I was the one who talked fifteen minutes at his funeral and did not have one bad thing to say. The pews that I spoke too were almost completely empty. The ones that were filled were mostly my Mom’s family. Keep in mind that my own uncle (and my Dad’s only brother did not make it down to see him pass on). I was his biggest supporter. I was arguably his best friend. We talked all the time about world issues and history and everything else. What he loved, I loved. There are many of his loves that I attempt to pass on to my own children. It’s complicated. It doesn’t make any sense. My Dad was proud of my brother’s success and my brother never stepped foot in the last state that my Dad lived in until it was time to put him in the ground.

Its fitting that one of my Dad’s favorite songs was Cat’s In The Cradle. When I was twelve, I was literally throwing a baseball up in the air to myself. Dad came out back to get me and I tossed him the ball. He threw it back to me. That’s important. That is the only time I ever me and my Dad throwing a ball in the backyard. His oldest son was permanently too busy to see him.

Now, I get to spend the next week honoring him. I do honor him, but its really a lot more complicated than that. It really is for me at least.

“And The Cat’s In The Cradle and the Silver Spoon, Little Boy Blue and the Man on the Moon. When you comin’ home son? I don’t know Dad. But we’ll get together then, Dad You know well have a a good time then…”

Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall

I think a lot about magical mirrors. I don’t know. Just call it a hobby. I think about what the mirrors mean and what they will tell you. There are three that I would like to touch upon tonight. The first one is the Mirror of Erised from the Harry Potter books.

The Mirror of Erised will show you you as you want to be. As long as you understand the purpose of the Mirror, that is a very important thing to have. A physical and mental image of the person you actually want to be would be very helpful in me seeing how far I am from the person I am to the person that I want to be. In the right mindset, especially for me, that could be very important. In the wrong mindset, you can get pretty eternally lost.

I remember when I went to Asia. I was seen as an American who had money. This made me more popular than I have ever been in my entire life. There was always people around who quite frankly seemed like they loved me. That can get addictive very quickly. You feel special and start to think that everyone else thinks that you are special as well. After a few months, I had to come home. I was back to being simply me. I was no longer this inflated version of me. I knew in my mind that if I ever go back, then I would not have all of the free cash and their love would dry up as well. Still, for a bout a year or so afterwards, it was a very hard thing to let go of. I started to notice that when I was home, not many of them contacted me anymore. I was not there. I did not have my apartment there. I did not let them sleep in it. I did not share food and drink with them.

This brought me down to the level in which they actually thought of me. This means that one or two of them keep in contact with me and the rest moved on to people that could meet their needs. At one point I thought of leaving my home country and living out my life there, reality would have hit down pretty quick. That is the Mirror of Erised. When you stop seeing it as a tool or a guide, then you would give anything for another look rather than focusing on how to make yourself the person that you see in the Mirror.

The second is the Mirror in the Never Ending Story. In that movie, you are shown who you really are. That is also a scary mirror. What if I saw a person that I did not believe I was? What if I saw my father? What if I saw something that basically said my whole quest was ridiculous. It shows brave men that they are cowards. It shows people not only who they are but how they are really seen. Unless that mirror had the answer you had already discovered, then the results could be shattering for years. You want to see the same thing in this mirror that you see in the Mirror of Erised and that is truly frightening. The thing that you must remember is that this is a mirror that shows you who you are right now. It does not show you who might be. It is a simple seerring reflection of you at the moment. You could leave for a day and having been thoroughly destroyed by that particular visit, then you might see some one completely different.

The third mirror is the Magic Mirror in Snow White. This Mirror tells you the truth. It is like the Sith. This Mirror enjoys telling you truths that you do not want to hear. This Mirror tells you the truth but like everyone there are probably lies that I tell myself that I do not want to be shattered. Maybe some of them quite frankly need to be shattered. Maybe in time the Mirror telling me “You are not now and never were and will never be a girl” is something that I could take comfort in and learn from however it would also make me feel like I had not only wasted my life but severely affected in a negative manner every single life around me. The Queen in Snow White was more than happy to kill just to change the Mirror’s answer. Rather than deal with the truth, she strove to make the world into a place where that truth was no long apparent. You always think “well that is shallow. That is not me.”

However, you also probably drank when you were not supposed to, had sex before marriage, lied and did a million things that you swore that you would never do or swore that you were ‘better’ than. You were not then and you probably would not be in front of the Mirror. Notice, Snow White never went in front of the Mirror. It may be important but you can’t say that you would not have the same murderous reaction to the absolute unvarnished truth.

The fourth Mirror is one of my own theory. I think that every person is like a peddler with a big bag of glass from a Mirror. The Mirror has your image embedded into it but it was shattered into a thousand pieces. You compulsively hand a piece of the mirror to everyone you meet. If they ever got together, then they could piece it all together and get an accurate picture of who you are. The trick is that most everyone is so self centered that they would never take the time to reach out to all of the people necessary to jigsaw another person together.

The people that read this blog I tend to give them the most personal part of me. I give them my thoughts, my hopes, my dreams, and what I want to become. The thing that I do not tend to give them is my real name or more than just clues to who I am really. It can be figured out. It can be told. I just want someone on some level to figure it out. I want them to piece together the Mirror pieces that I have handed to a ton of different people. Otherwise, I just keep handing out more and more pieces to who ever I happen to come across.

Just a few thoughts.

Till Tomorrow.

The 1000 Day Wheel And 5000 Hours to Success

I wrote a long time ago to a woman in a letter that I gathered in my mind that life changed about 1 tenth or one percent per day. Given that arbitrary number, I figured that your entire life changed at a rate of one full revolution every thousand days. This means that every thousand days, you can expect that your entire life will completely change as far as your daily routine. You might not even really notice the changes as they happen. The changes might be happening to someone else and change your overall life one tenth of one percent per day.

My alternate theory is that if you dedicate 5000 hours to anything, then you will have a complete answer. Say that you want to get in shape. Say that you just want to walk an hour a day. I would tend to suggest a couple of days off a week. So you walk five hours a week. In order to walk for five thousand hours under that scenario, you would have to do it for roughly 19 years. I would imagine that after 19 years of a morning hour walk a week, you should definitely notice a change in your level of fitness. The trick is to only subtract hours that are dedicated to the progress on the issue.

For instance, lets say that I started with 5000 hours. Two hours of counseling cost, lets say for giggles, 250 dollars. It takes three hours to get to the counselor and three hours back. The day itself would be 8 hours. It would take an additional 17 hours in order to work to get the money to pay for the visit. There would be gas to get up and back. Lets say that 50 dollars would do it, and throw in another 50 for food throughout the course of the day. To get the money for gas and food is about another 6.5 hours of work. So the actual trip would be a total of 8 hours and the money for the trip as well as counseling would be 23.5 hours. A two hour appointment would be a total deduction of dedicated hours to a cause to 31.5. You need at least twelve hours of counseling to get hormone replacement therapy. So every twelve hours of therapy would equal out for me 189 hours of work and time. So, I look at the number of hours that I am down in order to get the hormone therapy as opposed to how long I have been working at this. It is all in how you calculate things. You see where you are after 5000 hours of dedication to the issues. Generally, you get a really good idea.

Lets say that you are in a relationship that is serious. Lets say between actual contact as well as getting money for contact and other relationship related things averages out to 6 hours a day. It would take 833 days in that relationship to make the determination of whether or not it is something that should continue. Lets say that those days are not in a leap year. That means that after two and one third years, you should have a pretty good handle on whether or not the relation ship needs to advance or not.

Lets say I wanted to write a rather epic novel and wanted to have a thousand dollars in order to promote the work as well as possibly print it when I was done. I am writing 500 words a day five times a week for one year as well as saving money in order to self publish as well as publicize. Lets that the marketing / publishing costs a thousand dollars. So in order to work the necessary time in order to get the publication is going to be about 67 hours (your figures will probably vary.) It would take me about 2 well thought out hours to get to 500 words. After a year, I would have about 130000 words and would have worked one year on it. The time I would have spent on the writing would have equaled about 520. Tack on the work to get money and in theory writing a novel would take about 617. I am no where near the 5000 hour limit and I have another novel to my name. All it took was a dedicated time frame to do a relatively manageable amount of work and you have completed the novel you never thought you would ‘get around too.’

Life is going to change anyway. It is all in how much time and effort you are going to invest on a daily basis in order to make something a reality. The other night I talked to my daughter for about three hours, but that was some of my best progress so it is 3 hours deducted off of the transition goal. That way you see how much time you really are dedicating to it and how much empty dead time you have not putting forth any effort at all. Every hour I spend on this blog also would be critical to my goals.

With all of this in mind, believe me I get a fair bit done.

Till Tomorrow.

How Does it Feel?

A few years ago, I was talking regularly to some one who went through sexual re-assignment surgery and when they returned home, I was curious about how it felt between physically being one and the other. They kind of misunderstood the question and wrote this entire blog entry on the difference between being a man and a woman. They never actually addressed in any way how it actually just physically felt between having one set of sexual organs and another. It was something that I had been curious about for some time. I could just never get a good answer to it.

That would be until I happened to run across I girl that was very country and I believe at the time to be just very drunk and got to talking about a wide range of subjects. At one point, she had to go to the bathroom and made the statement “Its all just ass anyway.” That is when I started to kind of think about it in a different way. Unless something specifically was happening, there is no reason to think that part of the anatomy would actually feel different than the colon. After that, it would be just the imagination of an absence of what was already there. I still have no idea what the difference would actually feel like, but it was the only thing that made sense as to what the frame of mind might be.

A lot of what I tend to do is visualization and imagination. I have this image in my mind of where my life is going as well as where things might all end up. The truth of the matter is that I have no idea how everything is going to end up there, but if I don’t at least know what the goals are – then there is no hope of getting anywhere. Often, we can get overwhelmed by life. We see where we want to be and where we are. People then get worked up because they have no idea how there goals will ever be met. They see the end and not the journey. The question really has to become not ‘How can I get there?’ It should really be. What step can I take today to get to where I want to be?

It is not every day that you get one step closer to your goals but it can be. I talk to people all of the time about things like writing. They will tell me that they have been working on their book fro years now. When they are asked how far along they are on their book, then they manage to say something like 10 or 12 pages.
This would mean that they started the book years ago but only actually worked on it a few hours or a few days. One of the important things about writing or anything else in life is not that it gets done well but that it gets done at all. Nothing really has to be Shakespeare. Ernest Hemmingway would wake up every morning and type about five pages. Some days it was just constructing a story around pigeon hunting or some other thing. The important thing was to simply be in the practice of writing it.

Sometimes it seems ridiculous. I tend to plan out things that I do not need to do at all and feel bad when I don’t actually do them. A lot of it (even when it gets recognized or published) is not exactly great, but there is something of a daily feeling of satisfaction that it is done. I tend to take on a lot of long term projects that require a little bit of consistent effort every day. Every day, we wake up and go through a schedule. That schedule is based entirely on all of the decisions that we made up until that point in our lives. The people we wake up. The jobs we go to. The times in which we do thing. It is all a result of decisions that were made in the past. That means that the decisions that we make every day will have long lasting effects and determine our daily routine. On some level it seems, all we have to do is really decide where we are going and put a little effort into it every day. Nothing can stay denied forever.

It is like the example of the novel. Usually, a novel is about 75,000 words. That seems like an awful lot. But think about it, an average letter is about 500 words or so and a blog usually runs about a thousand. Take two days off a week. Write 500 words a day. That gives you 2500 words a week. That is 30 weeks to a 75000 word novel. You could go back and edit for an additional 22 weeks just to get everything just right and you still have completed a novel with really somewhat minimal consistent effort in one year.

Life is going to change anyway. Every day, there is some small imperceptible change to your life, your daily routine something. Your schedule at work changes. The kids go to school. Sometimes you make a little more money. If you look back at your routine last year, then your routine next year is almost completely different completely through just a matter of change and inertia. We don’t even want to change most of the time. We just do as everything changes all around us. It just seems that since we are never really inclined to try and take control of the process in our favor. It is always just letting life and the world kind of happen to us.

That is one of the reasons why I write this. I can not always donate money to the cause or make a change or make progress. However, I can write this. On some level, I can remind myself every day what my overall goals are. In time they will happen. Either that or there will be a pretty extensive record of the failure of the attempt.

Till tomorrow and all the best.

The Complexity of Being A Transgender Identifying WIth The Religious Right

A lot of people ask why I believe in the existence of God. It is kind of a funny question on some level to me. I do customer service. I wish I could just poof everyone I disagreed with out of existence because they disagreed with me. It would be nice. A lot of people will tell you that the Bible and God are contradictory. Guess what? I agree. That is how I know that we are dealing with a real being. We are dealing with one who loves, and hates, and had to learn how to have a relationship with His creation. That process involved destroying the world in a flood as well as confounding a scientific achievement out of jealousy and reign fire and brimstone down on a disagreeable people. He also learned that people could see miracles and craft a false God as soon as he was turned away. It makes sense because it doesn’t. It is real not because it is a higher philosophy. It is real because it is in many way a contradiction.

I know a lot about contradictions. I stand as a rather shining example of one. There is a lot that seems incredibly cliché about trans people. One of the major ones is that some sort of activism or liberal bent is required. Make no mistake on this one. I need counseling. After counseling, my hope is to some how move on to hormone replacement therapy and then on to surgery. One day, my greatest desire in life is to wake up as a woman both emotionally, mentally, and physically. This has nothing to do with my core values or the fact that I will probably vote Republican in the next election. It is does not change the fact that I am pro-life or that I am generally against more taxes as well as increased government spending. It may change what God feels about me, but does not change what I feel about God.

In short, there is such a thing as conservative women out there who vote Republican. I fully intend to be one. I have never been an activist type. I don’t like parades. I could not stand them when I was in a marching band. I would not march in them now. I think there is an expectation that when you go through a transition that you will all of the sudden start having a desire to do overly feminine things. I know one person that suddenly developed a love for Sex and the City. They join groups. They post their face book statuses as commitments to liberal causes. They all of the sudden have all these different rules on how to address them as well as how to view them. Not just trans, but anyone who suddenly takes on so many behaviors that are new are going to have a real shift in the people around them. I also tend to think that there is some sort of expectation of instant acceptance of all of the changes or just kind of a get the hell out of my life mentality. Of course, these are fully grown people that took a life time to understand themselves now all of the sudden expecting acceptance after writing a letter as well as being offended by nearly every associated question.

Of course, the Republican party as well as a conservative point of view as well as a religious bent has never been especially friendly towards the idea of changing your sex even if you happen to see it as merely a correction of your sex. But the point is not to concentrate on the attention and curiosity that your transitioning phase is. The point is actually to concentrate on the person that you will become. The surprise is that this will merely be an enhancement of the person you already are as well as the person that you were raised to be. Think about national stories like Columbine or the Batman shootings. Think how quickly the media moved on from those to where the victims are simply a ‘where are they now.’ Think about elderly men that you can run across who may have actually ran for President at some point. After the initial rush of attention, people will move on to the next story. If they mention you it will be boiled down to a sentence like “Yeah, that was before he became a girl.” Welcome to their entire nut shelling of your entire life.

For decades, I thought about the morning in which I would wake up and be female. Then I started to realize that there would be days, months, and years after that. All of them as a woman. That is why people tend to fall into depression. Their objective is not simply to be normal. They like being a curiosity, They don’t have a follow up. They don’t have a second act. They drift away from their transitioning community. Not because they really want to but because that is a time of their life that they have now moved on from. I was in my college town as an employee for four years after college. The minute that I graduated, I was treated different by the students. I saw all my friends move on until I was kind of the one to put the light out at the end. That is just the way that things go. In any situation, you are only ever going to take one or two people from it.

I am prepared to make friends and close relations from all of this. I also know that the end of the day, the goal is me to be me as a woman. I will not like to clean any more than I do now. I will probably never like romantic comedies. I will not go out of my way to be something that I am not. I firmly believe that I have spent more than enough of my life attempting to do that one already.

Femininity to me will be whatever I make of it. That is the same to be said for femininity of anyone. Let the effect come naturally. Let you be you. I am a Christian. I was raised as a Baptist. My parents made sure that I would vote Republican. I don’t anticipate any of that changing. I do however anticipate that they did not realize they were imparting those values onto a daughter rather than onto a son.

It was probably a fairly easy mistake to make. It is one that I have learned to forgive them for.

Till tomorrow.