The Woman Within

I've come to learn yet another facet of myself this past week.  It's been both affirming yet so very starkly frightening, altogether at once.  It is not something that anyone told me to expect nor is it something I would have suspected.   Even if I did suspect what I saw and what I have come to learn of myself, it would have been denied, like I did for much of my life;  denied, ignored and placed in a box like so many of the other piece of my life had been hidden. It was a crisp winter's day this week and the snow, brightly shining under a warming late January Sun beckoned for a bit of playtime.  I grabbed my cross country skis and headed out into the backyard to do some laps.  I was not dressed or made up as Christen, save for a set of small earrings I often wear at home in my male mode.  After a couple of laps around the yard, I stopped and decided, in the stunning sunlight and with a contrast of green trees and blue sky, that a picture was wa...

Two years ago, if you asked me as I took those first steps out the door, if that would be enough.... enough to just occasionally be allowed to present as the woman within.... I would have said.... "YES!" Two years have gone by.... and in that time of those two years, I have carefully kept close track of my own sense of being.  I've allowed myself to be myself for the first time in over 40 years of my life.  I've expressed as I feel natural and without the constraints I had unconsciously engrained into my own psyche over the years of self repression.  And with my allowing myself to be myself, I have come to shed the shyness I once had.  The panic attacks and anxiety which resembled some horrific cross between complete catatonia and a heart attack disappeared, as did the nervous cold sweats and involuntary twitches and spasms which had become a sullenly accepted facet of who I was. In expression of the feminine, I became aware, for the first time in my life, that...

Each of us has to come to the point upon which we stand in our lives in a unique way... following a unique path which is ours alone. Decisions we have made, paths we have chosen, decisions made for us by others, situations not of our control which have guided us.... guided or confined us... to walk the paths which have brought us to this exact place where no other stands. As humans we are similar in many ways, and many share similar paths, but no two are the same. In the parting mists, a self-awareness of my own place in the universe has come to unfold. It is as if, with clarity, I can see the cruise control I have been on for much of my life in chasing an ideal which was solely my own, but one contrived and built by others... parents, societal, and peer expectations. As a young child, I so wanted to fit in, that I created a goal at a young age... plans... to achieve specific positions and tangibles in life to that end. In so doing, I created a sense of uniformity and normalcy t...