Suddenly, I'm Not Half The Man I Used To Be..... There's A Woman Looking Back At Me...

Someone commented on a recent post asking whimsically if I was "full time" (as my true self, as a female), likely as a result of all my recent posts in the past year of seeming to just blend in within the greater world as female.  Well, that was an interesting comment because something interesting happened today.  J and I were taking a hike in the woods around Squam Lake (actually better known as the setting for the movie "On Golden Pond").  Anyway, towards the end of our multi-mile hike, we passed an older gentleman who stopped us as we passed and said, "I recognize you!"  He looked straight at Joanne when he said it.  After a brief reintroduction, we both realized that this was the gentleman who ran the coffee shop up at the Waterville Valley Town Village Shops.  We had come to know him well over the years and had chatted extensively, but our last encounter with him was about 3 years prior.  He looked right at Joanne and spoke to her but didn't as much even make the connection with me.  I was in my "guy mode" wearing a light blue T-shirt and blue jeans and he didn't as much as even make the connection that I was the same person, J's husband, that he knew so well three years ago.  It was the weirdest moment..... as if I was invisible.  It was a telling moment as well for both J and I as we parted ways with him and walked the remaining distance home through the early autumn woods.  We looked at each other and said exactly the same words to each other.... that he did not recognize me one bit.  I said to myself, that if three years ago, I would have thought that this day would come, that it could even come without going on E or blocking my T, I would have said it was crazy.  I have entered, through this and other less obviously poignant yet still very affirming experiences, into the world of "female".....and here I thought I had this all under control,   I'm getting mammed enough now in my so-called "guy mode" that this "guy mode" has become quite the facade which, apparently, only I am believing.

Well... all that came to my mind at that point was a revised version of the ending to the "Grinch Who Stole Christmas".  Something like this....

"I hadn't stopped transition from coming! It came!
Somehow or other, it came just the same!

And Christen with her eyes aglow
Stood puzzling and puzzling. "How could it be so?

It came without ribbons! It came without tags!
It came without hormones, surgeries and without any lags!"

She puzzled and puzzed till her puzzler was sore.
Then Christen thought of something she hadn't before.

Maybe transition, she thought, doesn't come in a way I thought before
Maybe transition, perhaps, comes from something much more..."