The Beauty Board

Two days ago, I was talking to a girlfriend of mine through texting. I got onto the subject that while my face was by no means ready, the various things that I owned at least made my body look ok. So, I decided to send her as well as a few others a pic of just my body in women’s clothes but not my face. I don’t care how many different angles I tried. I could not get the angle right without showing the face. So, I took the picture with the face and sent it out to about four people. I will not be re-posting it here. One was the girlfriend I mentioned. As she usually does, she pointed out the whiskers on my face as a bit jarring. She also mentioned my eyebrows in a previous picture. Really, I value this type of feedback because I would not honestly know. The eyebrow discussion to me was like the old game you would pay while driving on the road called ‘slug bug.’ In the case of ‘Slug Bug,’ you would look at the road for a certain type of vehicle and then point and yell ‘slug bug.’

Usually that vehicle was a Volkswagon Beetle. For the next few days, it would seem like everyone was driving a Volkswagon Beetle even far after the game was over. Why? Because, you are looking for it. Since the eyebrow thing was mentioned, I now notice eyebrows everywhere. I heard my daughters talking about eyebrows the other day. As far as I know, they had not been made aware of my own eyebrow discussion, but once you learn to look for it all of the sudden, you start to see it everywhere. This would be just like the ‘Slug Bug’ game. Another woman that I sent the picture too started talking about the right way to wax your face and the materials needed.  A transitioning woman that I sent it too offered helpful hints as well. I realized that these women were talking to me as they would a fellow woman whom they were trying to give beauty advice too in advance of any type of public showing. I did not take this as criticism. I took it as something deeper as well as more profound. I took it as acceptance. Every night seemingly, I message back and forth with a psychiatrist who is a friend of mine. She wants to make sure that I am ok and wants to know what progress I have made in that particular day. This is not something that she actually has to do on any level. She does it any way because she is my friend and she wants to see me succeed. These women know that I worry about how one day I will present myself in public and they want to make that as easy a thing as possible for me.

In the town that I live in, I am a member of an online transitioning group. However,  I have yet to go to an actual meeting for that group. I know that they are there to be supportive but I am just kind of nervous about going. I am not generally a very public person (other than writing) and the texting back and forth or messaging with supportive women really seems to be helping even if it occasionally critical. It is done from a place of acceptance and support. They don’t have too. When I started this blog last Fourth of July, it came from a point of just having to talk about it all. I am just really kind of curious as to where everything will be when we hit the one year mark in a couple of month. Honestly, I was going to just come out as myself with the original blog but something told me to keep it more anonymous and just kind of build. Building is kind of the way that I have done everything in my life. I have just kind of built and then by time I announce to the world, it is really already done. I think that all of the sudden just announcing and living can be kind of jarring for people. It is not just about sex or gender. If you got a job tomorrow in Antartica, then there would be people reacting and going out of their mind all over the place. If I was to just start walking out in a dress, then all people might see at the moment is a man in a dress. I guess I can deal with them seeing a potentially ugly woman later as long as they do on some level acknowledge that they are looking at a woman to begin with. One day, I will wake up and being a woman will simply be a fact. How much of the day will that cover at that point? The waking up. When you think about it, every major decision in your life is reminded of you in the first couple hours after you wake up. Who you wake up with. Whether you have kids. Where you wake up. Where and if you go to work. All of it was once decisions of the most importance at one point and now they are simply part of your daily routine.

One day, I will wake up and may very well go to the bathroom and have a beauty routine. Believe it or not, that is not actually a natural thing. It will be the result of decisions that I have made as well as advice that I have been given along the way. The women that I am friends with and the places that I wake up in will all factor in. These days, I pay more attention to people that know my secret than people that do not. Is that right? Probably not, however it is slowly repainting my entire social landscape. Goals will change and manage to become more as well as less important throughout the course of my life. Right now, I am grateful to these women who choose to accept and treat me as a woman and talk to me about things which would probably never be openly discussed with a man. It is also teaching me how to interact with women on a regular basis. There is a big difference between feeling like a woman inside and knowing that you are and actually being a woman. It is learned even by those who are born biologically female. Now, I have a group that is willing to help me throughout the process based on years of experience and I think that that is a much healthier place to begin…

Without The Rope

As you tend to think about the relative journey that you are on, you can get inspiration from pretty strange places. I knew a trans girl that would load about twelve or thirteen versions of the 1980s ‘ain’t nobody going to break my stride’ song into her ipod and run with it every day. I guess that the most interesting point of inspiration that I receive is from the movie The Dark Knight Rises last year. Yeah, I am not terribly deep. Mostly, I was not actually a fan of the film. However, there was one part of it that truly validated the whole movie to me.  There was a way to escape from the prison that Bruce Wayne found himself in.

 

You could climb up a wall and make a long jump and climb again to freedom. Of course, people often missed the jump. Missing the jump would have been fatal so they would tie  a rope to the person’s waist in order to pull them back should they fail. Repeatedly, Wayne makes the climb. Repeatedly, Wayne jumps. Repeatedly, Wayne does not make it and the rope pulls him back. The only one who ever made the jump was a child. Finally, Wayne asks one of the prisoners who saw the child jump several years previous about what happened on that fateful day. The prisoner gives an answer that ended up having a whole lot of meaning to me at the very least.

“Jump… as the child did… without the rope.”

On the surface, it seems insane. If you miss the jump, then you die or at the very minimum you are not making any jumps again. If you make it, then you are free. It actually makes a lot more sense to keep trying on the possibility that the rope will make it and then you can untie the rope. But, what are you really saying? You are saying that you will only take a chance for freedom if indeed you can still comfortably go back to prison if you fail. I have talked to people about life changing decisions for years. People do not want to make them and certainly do not want to risk anything. What do people want? First, they want an assurance that the next situation will be better than the one in which they are in already. Second, they want an absolute assurance that it is the right decision. Third, they want the transition from one situation to the other to be as smooth as humanly possible and not actually lose anything in the making of the decision.

 

Only with every possible given assurance and guarantee will they actually even contemplate it. They actually want the universe to drag them kicking and screaming into their own betterment and then assure them that everything is going to be better once they get there. In short, they want the comfort of the rope. It is like the Genie which I have mentioned in an post. Why do people consider the Genie to be a tricky devil? The Genie by an large only grants wishes. The Genie does not provide active customer service maintaining every facet of the wish being better than their previous life to infinity. The Genie will grant your wish and then assume that you have responsibility for whatever you may have wished for. I work in customer service. No matter how remotely connected your service is to a device, then they will absolutely assume that you are completely responsible for it. If the computer won’t start up and you provide internet service, then you are somehow responsible for the computer booting and getting to a webpage.

When the rich man approached Jesus, Jesus said to the rich man to give up his wealth and follow Jesus. Was Jesus asking for money from the rich man? No. Jesus was not actually interested in the rich man’s wealth. Then why would he be asked to give it up? The riches to the rich man was the rope that was tethering the rich man to a prison. The riches were comfortable. That comfort was getting in the way of the rich man following his heart’s desires. Was there an absolute and total guarantee that giving up the riches would give the man a better life if he followed his heart and followed Jesus? No. There was an excellent chance that the future lay in prison, torture, or death. It may not have been a better life, but it was a chance. Essentially, Jesus was telling the man the same thing that the prisoner told Bruce Wayne “Jump…as the child did…without the rope.”

In the movie The Dark Knight Rises, you get a glimpse of what ‘freedom’ looks like. It is not pretty. The movie also kind of fails in that they do not show Batman going through it. If you make your way out of the hole of the prison, congratulations, you are now in a desolate wasteland. You have nothing but what is on you. You only have what you can jump with. There are no markers and there seems to be no life for miles. But, it is freedom. How many people would stay in the prison purely on the basis that freedom is a comfortable idea but not really a comfortable place?

Years ago, a good friend of mine was laid off. He had a few job offers in his chosen profession but actually kept turning them down. The reason? Essentially, they were not as good as jobs or paying as much money as his last job. Some of the jobs actually offered more responsibility in which in theory he could have advanced in his profession by taking a proverbial step back. He was having none of it. He knew what his ‘worth’ and ‘value’ were and was not about to accept any less than that. Somehow, he actually did get offered everything that he wanted out of his next job. It worked for a time and then they actually laid him off as well. After that, there was not another job. He wound up doing several menial jobs for either minimum wage or barely over it. Today? He has had to build a career in a completely different industry and only revisits the idea of the other industry by trying to prank people on April Fool’s about going back. Maybe one of those jobs would have been less money. Maybe it was a worse situation. However, maybe he would still be doing what he loved if he had taken one of them and just been willing to give up something. Even if it was a wasteland, it was a wasteland where you are free.

I think that that is a trap that we as t-girls can often fall into and do often fall into or at least in the ones that I have talked to and been friends with. We want to retain the best about what our lives are and then want it enhanced by our decisions. We want an assurance that life will actually be better once we have crossed over or in some ways, it just seems not worth it. There is also a whole world out there who is absolutely comfortable with who you are and will encourage you at every point to simply just give it up and be who you are. They remind you that as bad as the prison you are in may be, at the very least it is not that desert up there in which you may not survive. Look around the prison. Prisoners have lived for decades down there. It is not a great life but it is life. Who knows what is out there and up there in freedom?

People want the promise of better. They want an assurance that every day after the decision will be better than every day before or that or it is just not worth it to them. They want that Genie who will answer a customer service call every day to tweak a dream to their satisfaction. They want the comfort that even if they jump, the rope is right there to pull them back comfortably into the life and prison that they had enjoyed. If all that is true, then just go ahead and admit that you are satisfied with who you are as the rest of the world is and be done with it. You just want the exact same life you have now, only better. So, keep doing exactly what you are doing. Eventually, you will get more money. You may even get promoted and there is nothing wrong with an active fantasy life getting you through the hum drum mundaneness. As a matter of fact, it is even encouraged to do such. Women have just as many problems (if not more) than men. The only problem that you are solving by going through this is an internal one. Beyond that, it will not solve anything. There is no guarantee that your life will be better after it is all over than it is now. The only guarantee is that the world will see you as you see yourself. Life might actually get worse. Once you are in the desert, the prison might start to look really good. You don’t know. I don’t know.

Here is what I do know. Every single time, the rope will let you get tantalizingly close and then snap you back just like everyone your probably know wants. The only way you are every going to know is the following without any assurances of what is on the other side.

“Jump…as the child did… without the rope.”

Hardly Seems Real

I think that I have been denied the idea of transitioning for so long that I somehow invent ideas in my head that it is not actually happening even though it really is. For instance, my counselor told me that there should be no problem with me going on hormone replacement therapy in under three months.  I even got the name of someone to see so I could get examined for the proper levels to get put on. Yet, I was making the appointment today and I thought for some reason that they would say that they could not make the appointment or that every thing was not in order. Then I start to think that it was not that big of a deal because they were just going to examine me but that did not really mean I was going to get the hormones. I am sitting there later thinking “Well that was insane.” I mean, I have been in counseling for months now. The therapist agrees that it is at least a proper or allowed way to go and I still don’t believe that it is all happening.

At any rate, my appointment to get the work done for the hormones in on the 19th of June (which is almost like a year since I started talking about all of this on my blog here). I feel like I have made a lot of progress and it has been a rather painful year preparing me for all of this. I don’t suspect that much will get much easier. I have recently though taken some inspiration from a rather unlikely source. I will back up and say that I have hated gardening as long as I can remember. It was in a lot of ways like Church for me. It was something that we always seemed to be doing and it always seemed to be this incredibly uncomfortable experience. Other than hard labor, I never got anything about working in a garden or on a farm and I have done it my whole life until I got on my own. So, at work, which I was really angry at over insurance issues has a committee that tries to improve your working experience. For spring, they handed me a cup with dirt in it. They had put seeds in the dirt and said to it sun, love, and water to let it grow. So I poured water in the cup.

My boss came through and she said that I had drowned my seeds and that they would never grow. I figured, what the hell. why not keep giving it love, water and sun anyway. One day, I came into work really not wanting to go in at all. I watered the dirt and looked down at it. There was a little sprout in the dirt. I had not drowned my seed after all. So I took a picture of it. I started taking a picture of it and watering it everyday. Now, it almost has a whole leaf coming out. You can see the green leaf on the top. Now, I want to at least go there and see the growth. Also, my boss and her boss both helped me out in the recent week. I felt myself being not as mad anymore. Now you can actually see the plant come up out of the cup. the plant did not give up. I can’t give up now. I have to go in to take my silly picture and water the plant. Somehow that is as much or more important than whatever money I make there. In short, that committee actually made work better by giving me something that needed me.

in an odd way, that makes me feel as much or more like a woman than I have ever felt in my entire life. in the coming months, I plan to grow right along with my little plant.

All love

Sherry