Life Update

The semester finally ended on 5/8.  I managed to finish up with an A-, B+ and B-, which was pretty good as far as I was concerned.
On 5/16 I had the stones in my Right Kidney blasted into passable sand.  That was no fun, but I'm doing much better now.
Also on 5/16 things changed on my MYRadford University page (or whatever it is really called), which led me to believe that perhaps I might have gotten accepted for graduate admission for the fall, but there was no way to know for certain until I returned home and checked my mail.  The mail check on Sunday 5/20 confirmed that I have indeed been accepted.  I'm shocked, amazed, excited, frightened, and anything but ready.  I still have to figure out financial aid, hopefully it will pay for classes and then some.  It would be great if it would pay enough that I wouldn't have to work as well.  If it is less than what I need then I will have to drop down to part time admission and go from there.  It will all work out.
After finding out that the acceptance was for real, I went to church with mom, my brother and his wife.  It was the first time I'd been in church since perhaps Christmas.  This was mostly due to work, and partially due to not feeling like I wanted to be there for any other reason than to make mom happy.  Don't get me wrong, I love my church family, I have a strong faith, etc, but I don't feel the urge to be at church.  So I don't go.  Mom always taught me that I shouldn't do important things for the wrong reasons.  It was announced at church that I had been accepted to Grad school.  I got lots of congratulations from friends afterwards, but not one word from mom.  That really hurt.  I kind of expected it as we had had the talk just a few weeks before about me being/getting too old to be searching for a career.  I need to just do something and make some money to live on.  She's convinced that perhaps I should just be a convenience store clerk for the rest of my life, because I don't hate the work.  I just want to do something more meaningful with my life, and for the first time in a long time I feel that this is the right thing for me to do.  We'll see.  All I know is that I have too many student loans to payback to work at a gas station for a living.
Now that I've gotten my acceptance out of the way and I know that grad school is starting this fall, its time to make the name change legal and get my driver's license changed.  I'm a little hesitant to do it, but it seems like the right thing to do and the next step in the process.
I'll keep you posted and I'll likely make the decision and process the needed paperwork by the end of May (which doesn't give me long to decide!)

Realizations

Last night I drove home from an outing with friends and classmates in Blacksburg.  I had been listening to Sara Bareilles on the drive over and back.  The one song that kept popping up and reminding me of the ex was "Say You're Sorry".  I realized that I'm still looking for an apology that I will probably never get.
And then.....
Earlier today I had the opportunity to watch a recorded performance of my ex reading a poem she wrote.  I took advantage of the opportunity and realized a couple of things.
1.  She's not as beautiful as I remember
2.  My heart didn't go pitter patter at the sound of her voice
3.  My poems are better
4.  I'm better off without her
and (this is the best one)
5.  I'm free

I just thought I would share.  Looking forward to better things.

The Paper I Didn’t Write

It has been a semester, well perhaps a year, of true self-discovery.  I began my journey to becoming Aaron just over a year ago.  When I started I had no idea what a ride I was in for.  I had heard lots about the physical and emotional changes that going on hormones would create.  But, some of the changes that testosterone produced in me were never mentioned by other transmen, or at least were so infrequently discussed that I had never heard of them.  What I began to realize is that I am growing up, FINALLY.  I am finding my voice in this world and even though sometimes the words aren’t there, when they are the message is loud and clear.  I am finding my way, my path, and my self-actualized epiphany; in short, I’m finding myself. 

I’ve spent years in therapy, some of which was merely self-reflection, trying to figure out where things went ‘wrong’ in my life.  There was a time when I was a happy, well-adjusted, little person.  Of course, I was 5 at the time so it isn’t like I ever made it to adulthood with my idea of self intact.  Somewhere in there I lost a part of myself and I always wanted to know where and how I could find that point and start over.  I wanted to relive my life as it was meant to be lived.  But, there was a fatal flaw in my theory, I had made the assumption that I was ever on the right path.  I started life as a physical girl, but I was never really a girl.  The wrong path in my life began the moment they put that little F on my birth certificate.  From that day on I was forced by parents, convention, society, media, or whatever to be someone I was never meant to be.  I am a boy, but I have a vagina, ovaries and breasts.  I grew up and was socialized as a female.  I did everything I could to play the part of Ellen to keep the world that surrounded me happy.  But, I never felt any of it.  I was insulated and isolated from the world around me because I couldn’t allow myself to experience life the way I was meant to and I acted as though I did so that I would fit in.  Puberty was non-existent, not that the biological puberty didn’t happen, it did, but the mental aspects of it never seemed to occur.  I faked my way through it.  I dated boys.  I went to proms.  I had sex.  I got married.  I wanted to die.  Living a lie hurts to the core.

There were no words in my vocabulary that could explain to anyone what I was feeling, what I had been feeling since I was tiny.  Even if the words existed, no one would have understood.  Being transgender is not something that anyone who isn’t transgender can really ‘get’.  Those who care can empathize, but never truly understand what it is like.  I’ve spent most of the past 12 years or more trying to find an analogy that would successfully convey the feeling.  I’m not convinced that it doesn’t really exist.  Gender is something that is so much a part of each of us that it often suffices as an identity.  Because most people are born with their mental gender matching their physical sex they can’t understand how someone could be any other way.  The way you live your life fits with the functioning of your genitals, your hormones, your desires, etc.  In the case of the transgendered individual, sex and gender don’t match.  And because of that, things just don’t make sense.  Your body fits one picture, your brain fits another.  One of my girlfriends took me shopping once and put me in a dress.  Her reaction was “you look like a boy in a dress”, but when I tried on a suit it was just the opposite “you look like a girl in a suit”.  That was how I felt about everything in my life.

It still amazes me how much that discontinuity affected everything else.  Because I was living the gendered lie I somehow had no clue what my sexuality was, I had no clue what I wanted to be when I grew up, I wasn’t even certain that I would ever grow up.  I made plans and goals that could be accomplished by the time I was 20.  When I lived to 21 I wasn’t at all sure what I was supposed to do.  While there are probably many people out there that will claim that my gender identity had nothing to do with my inability to find my path and my voice at a younger age, I feel it is completely justified.  There is a way that we are socialized growing up that seems to point us in the path we are meant to go.  (That is a severe generalization and far from accurate, but it is the best I’ve got at the moment).  When your body and your brain are at odds, and completely opposite ends of the spectrum, it is impossible to figure out the details in the middle.  You can’t experience the evolution from child to adult the same way because you are too busy focusing on how to survive and make sense of this disconnect. 

When I started testosterone last April I feel that I finally entered puberty and began to grow up.  Finally the world around me started making sense (well, as much sense as a dysfunctional world can make).  It was like the light came on in a dark room and I could suddenly find the pieces of the puzzle that I had been missing for 20 years.  I suddenly had boundaries, edges that allowed me to fill in the missing aspects of my personality.  I had an image of what I could become.  Finally I had me as something to work with, a tangible piece of clay to mold and not some ethereal vision created by the world outside that I had to try to fit in to.

And it wasn’t a slow process either.  It took one shot of the essential T and I suddenly began to feel at home in my own skin.  Nothing visible had changed, but just the presence of the hormone in my system seemed to make all the difference.  That too is impossible to describe.  Unlike a lot of other transmen that I know my gender dysphoria was not centered on the physical appearance of my body.  Not that there weren’t days that I didn’t look in the mirror and shudder at the sight of me, there were plenty of those.  (I once explained it to a friend of mine as being the reason I only have one mirror in my house, and I can only see myself from the shoulders up.  It helps eliminate the dissonance and allowed me to just ignore the physical)  The only problem was that no one else could ignore the physical as well as I did.  While I maintain that I’m not transitioning so that I can have “things” or “male privilege”  I am transitioning so that the people I come into contact with will see me for who I am and treat me accordingly.  When I realized that was the case I began to wonder if perhaps I really needed to transition or if the strict gender roles supported in the pervasive dichotomy just needed to change or at least be more flexible.  But, I will never know the answer to that question.  It can’t be answered because, unfortunately, the dichotomy isn’t going to change in my lifetime and aside from that I can’t retroactively change my past in order to change my present.  I am on the path that I am on and that’s just the way it is.

In the classes that I have taken this semester there has been much discussion surrounding gender as a social construct or whether gender is biologically determined.  I think it is both.  The gender that each human chooses is likely predetermined by biology.  It isn’t as simple as what is between your legs when you are born or what your chromosomes show if you have them tested.  I’m not a biologist, but I’ve heard theories about androgen baths win utero, or not getting enough estrogen or whatever.  My guess is that is probably accurate.  Time and science with either prove or disprove that.  However, gender as we experience in our daily lives is indeed a social construct.  What is considered masculine and feminine is determined by society at large.  Whether I am within the bounds set up by society is what determines how I am socialized, stigmatized, stereotyped and sorted.  That is how we experience gender, and that is how we perform gender in relation to the world around us.  If what is going on between our ears is the same as what society tells us we should be doing then we are good.  Otherwise, we are deviant.

The future for each of us remains unwritten, I have many desires and dreams now that I have begun my journey down the path to full transition.  So many things have changed for me.  Physically, I had originally been prepared to keep the breasts, ovaries, vagina, etc.  Now I’m not so sure.  Those aspects of my physical body continue to feel incongruous to my mental awareness.  The finances still aren’t there to cover the physical transformation, if it is meant to be, it will happen.  Aside from that I have an educational path in front of me.  I want to work with kids and their families who don’t experience their gender or their sexuality in the traditional heteronormative binary.  Had that sort of resource been available when I was a child trying to figure out my life perhaps I wouldn’t have had to endure the years of pain, depression and anxiety that I went through.  But, again, you can’t change the past and I am who I am in part because of my past.  But, there is so much more.  I’m working with several friends to either piece together a book or a documentary about the trans experience and the beauty of trans bodies.  Maybe both.  I am going to work diligently on my blog site over the summer and turn it into more than just ‘my story’, but make it more of an way to come to understand gender, weave your way through the maze of transition (if desired) and just general commentary on being trans in a binary world.  I am going to become an activist.  I’m not certain how, I’m not certain when, but I know that is part of what is to come.  I’ve been silent for too long.  The words are forming.  I’m finding my voice.  And when I speak the world will hear.  They might not like what I have to say, they may misinterpret and misconstrue, but they will hear.

This is who I am, this is who I am becoming.  I am Aaron Christopher.