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Shut up. I’m just drunk.

  • Posted on December 23, 2012 at 11:08 am

I was slightly chastised this week by an old friend who has greater grief and hurt than I, in her life, and about whom I care very much. I can’t remember when we last met, but I’m glad we can still be straight and not just get miffed. It was a chastisement I have given myself too, when with other people.

The trouble is, people are curious and I am very open. I know that I have had it very easy indeed on this gender journey, and that for many it really isn’t that straightforward. So if I can be confident and normal and direct about it, then others will also find it normal, and if they then meet someone else like me, they will pass on that understanding and be supportive instead of bemused or worse. So I talk about myself. And rather too much sometimes. Am I listening as much as I want them to? Probably not, and I have to learn that. So my New Year resolution, if I am to have one (apart from getting fitter – again) is to shut up. And listen.

This Christmas required giving some explanation to The Christmas Card List. That longer list of people stretching back to where I/we studied, lived, worked. Yes, those people you largely forget about except for Christmas because you hardly ever see them anymore. But it felt important because one was my best man (definitely the better now!), and others used to be good friends when kids were all the same small age. So despite Lynn Truss’ deprecation of the ‘round robin’ newsletter, I told the story my way, of why cards were coming from me separately, and of the big change. And the breakup, and no recriminations. Maybe this was my last big shout, because that’s everyone in the know now. Except the tax man (yes, I do still think of him as a man, so I’m sorry if you work at HMRC and are a woman, especially if you are trans in the HMRC, no offence intended. HMRC alone will insist that I am male to the bitter end (my GRC) and I really do resent that.) So by now there is no-one left to inform, and just one to correct.

That should mean I can shut up, and listen more.

This week was also the Christmas meals week, and the opportunity to wear my best ever Monsoon chiffon dress. In spite of awful weather on Wednesday night I braved it, and felt amazing. Wet at first, but chiffon dries quite quickly. I had a lovely night, and yes, people were, shall we say, free to ask. I didn’t mind, I rarely do, because again I want people to know that I feel as normal as they do, if a bit more self-aware (not self-conscious) than some. It has been a huge change, and the first experience for most, of a trans* person. But we talked about a lot else besides, and I had a truly lovely night.

You know how it is at these occasions. Well you do if you’re driving, because as you stay sober, others dissolve into a happy or sad or uber-loving haze. There was quite a bit of happy-drunk, and as I came away, I realised I too was a bit drunk. But I was actually feeling drunk with happiness. I was finally ending a year in which I had started not knowing quite what lay ahead, with a great deal of unhappiness and terrible fears of consequences. In that year I had finally had to face myself, and grasped that the final choice, and the only real choice I ever had, was to be between being true to myself and keeping the love of my lifelong companion, lover and friend. It was the year, too, where I came to understand just how easy suicide can be. I looked over the edge and the wind blew back just hard enough to overcome the vertigo. It was a year in which all my fears came to meet me, and all but one were resolved. All but one.

So why should I not be drunk with happiness?

A second Christmas dinner, and I was moving around freely with 60 other people with whom I work, just being me. Being normal. And with this wonderful realisation that I have made it, that I am safe, that I am well on the way to resolving the deep need to correct my defects. And in arriving here, I can now shut up about it and get on with life. I will always have the same his-story, and I can’t escape that. I hope I will always be an advocate for trans* people of all kinds, and a help to some. But the truth about who I am is finally, and completely, out, and those who are happy with that are happy, and those who aren’t will have to catch up as best they can or be left out.

Happiness and sadness aren’t like matter and antimatter; they don’t annihilate each other, and it isn’t really a balance. It’s a cohabitation of aspects of reality. My sadness would never be there if there hadn’t been happiness, so you could argue that in sum, there must be more happiness than sadness in my life. And pain? Every week I lie under the needle of electrolysis for an hour, focussing on ‘this is just a single hair’ so the pain is made tiny. Friends passing through surgery remind me that a fair amount of pain lies ahead there too, but not for a while. And there is painful relationship surgery right up ahead as well. So I have one surgery I can’t wait for, another I simply hate to have to do. And that one will be a lot more private because it’s only half about me and must remain as amicable as possible, even though I know I will feel somewhat clinically disposed of.

So this year you can chastise me if you like. Tell me to shut up. I’m probably just drunk – on happiness.

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Content

  • Posted on October 27, 2012 at 5:06 pm

It just occurred to me since I completed rearranging all that emerged from cardboard boxes, that there is significance in what came with me here, what did not, and how I arranged it. The one piece of furniture left in this place was a shelf unit with glazed sections. Not my cup of tea quite, I thought. I have no family silver, trophies or cut glass to be illuminated from above, through the glass shelves with an air of prestige. Then I started to put things together that I had brought. What deserved display, to be seen, even picked up…

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Happiness

  • Posted on September 30, 2012 at 8:09 am

Last Friday evening I spent a lovely time with Laura Newman, whose new book A Love Less Ordinary will very soon be published with Bramley Press. It was the first time we met, after numerous emails getting the book arranged, designed and processed, and was a wonderful getting-to-know. But perhaps what I shall remember most is that once more, someone who didn’t begin this journey with me, who sees it from the outside, sees someone very positive and very happy, who has turned their life around in what is really a very short time. For me, it has been intense at times, as scary as a narrow bridge over a canyon, without the other side in sight. And it seems like ages. It was very affirming to meet Laura, and I am looking forward to meeting her and Nicci before too long.

Yesterday I went for my monthly back-rescue. Deep tissue massage includes elbows! It isn’t fun exactly, and I probably undid a lot of good by playing the trumpet all afternoon and evening. I can’t remember how many years I’ve been going, but it is a special relationship when you repeatedly allow someone to do that to you – and still feel grateful! It is also the one place where I have taken my changes, to be seen and talked over, and found complete acceptance as I’ve explained myself a little more each time. Of course, as so often, I’m not the only trans person she has known, but I could also have been met with a certain distance and caution, and I wasn’t. The reason I mention yesterday is that somehow we just fell into talking as two women together, and I no longer felt ‘trans’.

It’s been like that recently – falling onto conversation as a woman with another woman, almost as if they haven’t noticed, or if they do it counts for nothing. And I realised, as I joined the orchestra later for the rest of the day, that this was another first, in playing for them as a woman. It’s an ad hoc orchestra, and many people do know me, but not all. By now, when these firsts happen, I don’t really think about it, because it is actually quite difficult to remember how I used to be. It is so far removed, that the nice man on the trumpet is like someone else I vaguely used to remember. I remember concerts I played, because it was me alright, and it was fun, but it’s the me bit, not the presentation of self, that I recall. All sorts of people I don’t know came up to me afterwards to complement my playing, so I know that being the slightly-different-looking woman simply doesn’t get in the way any more.

So in a way this is a point of arrival, like when you are on board and the ship is under way. There is a separation, an excitement, all the big efforts to get here now taken over by a vessel with a purpose and a known destination.

And all this in the same weekend as I prepared finally to leave the person I have loved most for so very long, and still do. So why have I titled this blog ‘Happiness’?

All these touches of knowing self, of being recognised at last being as I should always have been, of a sense of the deepest integrity, of falling completely into place, leave me feeling more happy with myself, in my deepest sense of self, than I have ever been my whole life. It is very hard to express, or find adequate words, because unless you have been there, it’s as if the words don’t exist. It is a happiness so powerful that nothing is strong enough to put me back anywhere else. I face years of frustration getting my body properly adjusted, and every day it feels more and more inappropriate in certain respects. As my breasts begin to develop it feels like the restoration of a missing part of me. Like when a valuable jar has stood for many years and been admired, then finally the original lid turns up and is reunited.

This is just so completely right.

Losing love simply tears me apart, but at the same time I know this happiness. Such an irony; back to the paradoxes in many of my blog posts. But how can I explain?

I wanted to write this for all those trans* people in a similar position, for whom it is so incredibly hard to arrive at self because of the associated loss. For all those people who, unlike Nicci with her Laura and their love less ordinary, must lose love, lose family, and go alone. I want to say that the happiness of finding your self, maybe finding your soul, really does outweigh all else, and that it is yours, if you want it. Nothing in this world is worth hanging onto if it keeps you from this kind of happiness, and you will find the resources to see you through the worst of the loss, the most difficult of times, the feelings of distrust or hatred from a few, and the insecurity of a place you’ve never been before. You will find true friends, you will find acceptance and understanding, and you can hope, with me, that you will find love that is as deep and as shared and as committed as you will ever need.

And in case anyone accuses you of selfishness, look back on my earlier musings: Selfish. Self(ish). Self.

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