#i know you mean trad as in traditional materials but my mind went to trad wife and i was v confused for a sec

[kivaqblog-blog]

It’s Never Too Late, or, Wishing Upon a Star

This one isn’t literature or memoir, it’s something for people who may be landing here for the first time, especially if you’re trans and you think it’s too late to start. (Hi!) Or even if you’ve been here before. (You know who you are.)

It’s never too late. I thought it was, but it wasn’t. That doesn’t mean it won’t feel that way sometimes. There are days, like a lot of you, when I literally cannot leave the house. This was one of them. A day wasted inside, writing and crying, or neither, or playing with my new tarot deck.

I try to imagine what I’d wear if I went out: it certainly wouldn’t be this shirt, white cotton marled in purple. Or this bracelet I made myself, from those big European glass beads, I’m afraid to go out alone with that on. Just because I don’t want to attract attention. Last week I went to see my shrink wearing a black turtleneck and black workout pants. I go again in two days and I have a feeling it may be a sleeveless version of the same basic idea. I’m not afraid of not passing, because I’m not trying. I fucking hate makeup, so I don’t wear any. (I know, I’m lucky I live in New York City, sometimes I forget. Not for long, though.) 

I’ll bring the bracelet. I’ll wear it during therapy.

I’m looking out the window, it’s warm, it’s sunny, my old birthday is in a week….

I don’t feel old, exactly, just sore. I’ve felt more alive than in years since I started HRT last June 28th. Which turns out to be Stonewall Anniversary Day as well—it can be easy to forget since the day of the march is always Sunday and moves around the end of June—and my wife calls it my birthday. (Yes, I’m ridiculously lucky in love. Once I found her, of course; and that took years. But we’ve been together nearly 26 years. We have a wonderful son who’s in college now. I realize only lately, looking back over it all, how much Goddess has blessed me.) 

It was only lately that I was sure she really saw me, or at least that her followers did. Thirty years ago I was taking a course that changed my life, Women and Religion, at Hunter College. From Dr. Serinity Young, she’s at Queens College now. (She is awesome, btw.) While in that class, I learned just exactly how badly I wanted to find Goddess, to follow the Dianic tradition. And I found out how badly the Dianics, the only trad I was interested in -- because no men, and no gods -- that they hated women like me, back then. Trans women, I mean. Transsexuals, we were called then. It was 1987, and I decided that if I had to wait, I would wait. 

I finally attended a Dianic open circle for women last month. I can be awfully patient, if I have to be. 

So I’ll be 59, in June. One year of HRT. Woot.

But when my birthday was in April, about now is when I’d start to get really depressed. Which is happening this year, too.

I literally don’t know how to ask for help. I don’t know if you’re the same way, maybe just because you’re afraid you won’t get it. I don’t know if you’re a survivor of any kind of abuse, although a lot of us are; I am.

I have PTSD. This may be something I should mention at the top of the blog. I don’t even like writing it in upper case, lower case is safer: ptsd. See? But it’s as important as anything else in understanding what’s happened to me, and to a lot of us. It’s part of why I’m afraid to leave the house even if I want to; beyond violence and cruelty, it’s everyday, minor-league humiliation that terrifies me. 

I hate being laughed at. I don’t want to be on display. I’m not in the sideshow. I want to go out, I just want to not be so fucking noticed. That won’t ever happen. 

Unless I don’t go out.

___________

My wife Kathleen’s bff is in town, they went to lunch and for a long walk. They don’t get to see each other often, her bff lives in Wellesley, Mass. The last time I saw one of my besties was after Thanksgiving last year, she happened to come through town. She lives in Greenfield, Mass. My other bff lives in Medford, which is near Boston. I’m at least four hours away, on a good day, from either of them. Five, more like.

They dropped by, and I chatted with her for like five minutes. But she’s staying with her family in Williamsburg, which takes nearly an hour to get to on the subway from here even though it’s in Brooklyn, technically. It’s easier to get to Newark from here, and that’s in another state. So Kathleen drove her back there.

And I felt irrationally, or maybe rationally, jealous that her best friend was here, and I haven’t seen one of mine in months either, and I’m afraid to go out alone on days like this and I’m afraid to cry. For some reason I can’t tell her this. The brutal conditioning of everyday life as a boy, I suppose. It reminds me of Leslie Feinberg, who wrote Stone Butch Blues, although I’m not like that. Because I’m not butch, much less made of stone, I can cry; but I don’t want anyone to know. I hide. That’s bad, I know, but I do it anyway. Some kind of half-assed defense mechanism. Because we came from cultures where big boys don’t cry, didn’t we?

I wish I could tell you it was happy times every day, but it’s only on some days. I mean, there are wonderful days, I had some last week. Let me be clear: I’m so much happier now. A low bar to clear, but I so am happier. Then there are days like this, too, where it’s just fucking unrelenting sad and awful, and I don’t know how to ask for help even though Kathleen is in the living room. So I ordered Indian food instead.

But before I resumed my transition (first one was 1995-2001, had to pause my transition but I have a lot of material to write about, at least), there were weeks on end where I was unrelentingly depressed, just as depressed and a lot angrier, just losing it at random shit like a MetroCard dispenser that won’t take my card. Estrogen saved my life, I’ll tell anyone who asks. Taking estrogen, for me, is like finally taking my finger out of a live light socket after having it stuck there for years, so long I forgot (or never knew) that it isn’t normal to feel a constant electric current running through you. Taking spironolactone finally got the testosterone out of the way -- spiro is a miracle, we didn’t have it in the 90s and I can tell the difference -- and after a few months I started having feelings, even difficult ones. It didn’t kill me. And finally I was able to be happy, too, ffs. Sometimes. Now and again. Used to be, it just didn’t happen. I felt spent, consumed with anger, and kind of waiting to die. Not so long ago, either.

Since I started HRT I feel like I have the emotional energy, and emotional vulnerability, of a teenager, to be specific of the most unpopular, geekiest girl in her high school grade. “Even if I’d been born cis” is a game I try not to play with myself; but I have a feeling that even if I had been, some things would still be problems. I’m a nerdy recluse who likes to meet people travel, an introvert who can’t shut up once she gets going, the girl who can’t dance, the girl who didn’t get invited to the party everyone else in tenth grade went to anyway so who cares if you can dance or not? Some things never change.

There are lots of days I am able to reach out to people. I just have to open Facebook, right? Some days are like this one, though. I have this button pinned to my calendar of physical changes, what should happen and by when. It has the trans flag colors behind the words: “Sometimes, courage is the little voice that says I will try again tomorrow.” When I feel like I’m stuck, I look back at where I was this time a year ago, in astonishment, and try to keep in mind that I’m human. I can’t do five things at once, I’ve tried. But I can do a lot more than I thought was possible.

Because a year ago, we’d just gotten back from a conference that happened to be in Anaheim. I wished I could go to Disneyland when I was seven, more or less, but I grew up in Texas. That was that, I figured. And it didn’t happen until I was 57; but it happened. We stood there and watched the fireworks behind Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, like I’d always wanted, and I just kept thinking: It’s never too late. 

So, I’ll post this now.

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