There’s nothing new in seeing life as a journey, but there is a lot more to it than regarding cradle and grave as the beginning and the end, the only two stops. Between the helpless bawling and the helpless dribbling from which we all prefer to dissociate, there are the familiar way-markers and rites of passage. Not that we are very good in these times of seeing them as such. Rites like growing up are smudged and fudged. There is no coming of age any more, and key events like leaving home can be a bit of a delayed coming and going. Weddings can very easily become an event rather than a transition, a product rather than a commitment (which is separate, not necessarily absent). But over all, we still hold a view of what a ‘successful’ life looks like. Yes: we call it ‘normal’.
Normal lives, in their great variety, are full of the very ordinary – of triumphs, elation, sadness, love, loss and grief. But they also have this background notion of the roller-coaster – that for all the ups and downs, there are rails, and the wheels don’t come off. Only in a fantasy children’s story do the cars lift away into the blue and take on a freedom of their own. For the rest of us, leaving the rails means a disastrous crash, an end of journey, a not-belonging.
Some of my friends and family might regard me as having come off the rails, but if so, I’m finding the ride a lot smoother. One doesn’t become transgender, one is transgender. It just takes some of us a long time to work it out, because we lacked the markers that younger people know now.
As far as my journey is concerned, and the periodic comments I leave here, this is normal. Unusual to you maybe, but normal. And with much thanks to all the friends, associates and colleagues who thus far have embraced the now visible female me, I continue, happier, daunted a little, but daring to enjoy the scenery.