The Road Less Travelled By

Life is funny sometimes.  You know the saying I'm sure.... "Life happens while we make other plans"?  Well, it seems like even the best laid sorts of plans have a way of developing a life and direction of their own. Have you ever tried to put a plan together only to find that somewhere along the way your plan grew legs and  decided it might be more fun to take YOU on ride?  The great poet Robert Frost will probably come back to life just to torture me for rearranging his famous words, once penned, when I say....

"I took the road less travelled by..... NOW WHERE THE HELL AM I?"

Well, I do know where I am.  I just wasn't so sure I was going to get here so fast.

I'm referring to life now and the fact that whether or not this is to my schedule I am now full time as a woman.  I never declared it or held up a banner.  As Dr. Seuss'es Grinch would say,

"It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags.
And he puzzled and puzzled 'till his puzzler was sore.
Then Christen thought of something she hadn't before."

I never kept the woman I am from becoming.  She was already here. It turns out there are a LOT of pieces that were very feminine about me and I don't mean visually.  It's movement, vocal intonations, inflections and speech patterns, gesticulations and mannerisms.... all of these things used to be packaged into what at best appeared to be a not so macho looking, slight of frame, endoskeleton with a male moniker.

It wasn't convincing to anyone back then but it sure as heck works with the new outer packaging now.

So I'm here.  Everyone else seems to think so.  It's always Ms, or Ma'am when I go out, even if I don't put on any makeup and just wear non-gender-specific clothes.  It's not amazing or fantastic or glamorous or anything like that in being a woman.

It just is.

I'm comfortable.  I'm comfortable with myself.  Others find more comfort around me because I am comfortable with myself.  I'm having social experiences with the world as a woman and being  interpreted by others very affirmatively as a woman.  There's some positive to it, some negative but nothing overwhelmingly striking which puts living in one gender better than the other.  To be quite honest, it's more of a pain in the neck being a woman.

There's time involved with makeup and hair.  The lower stratification in society that by default women hold and which I am experiencing.  Ask me how many times I get weird looks when I start talking shop in a Home Depot, decide to talk about electrical wiring or drywall installation or how I do my own mechanical repairs around the house.

But the wonderful things are yet there too!  They are in the interactions and the friendships that women share with each other in connected ways.  They are the emotions I now feel that I never did before... the laughing and the crying and the ability to feel like I never did my whole life.  Estrogen is a pretty amazing thing in subtle yet not so subtle ways for that.  Sure, I've got some breast growth going.  It's a pain... literally.  I can't sleep on my stomach any more and don't even think of giving me a bear hug.  They are very sensitive.  Having to wear a bra now when I work out is yet another piece of clothing to deal with and bras generally suck I find.  It goes with the territory and it does give some great curves to my dresses so... I'll keep em.

I'm finding that the adventures are really just beginning.  I'm experiencing what it's like to have guy's asking me out.  I've got some really, really wonderful cis-women (genetically born as women) friends that are some of the closest friends I have ever had.  It's wonderful now being one of the gals and it's like at age 49, I'm just beginning to wake up from a coma I've been in my whole life and starting, finally, to feel alive and to LIVE.