The Woman Within

I hear it asked a lot.... mostly by people who are not dealing with Gender Identity Dysphoria. I should clarify it a little, since I do hear or see the reference in passing on multiple occasions.... It's the verb " want " as in " why someone would want to be a female ". I see the vernacular a lot and I really do believe that from the vantage of one who is not dealing with GID, understanding the difference between "want" and "am" are really almost impossible to extrapolate out or differentiate. The "am" part is not visible to anyone else but the person dealing with the GID....so it looks to everyone else like "want". When I speak of "am" - I speak to the fact that I am a woman. I happened to inhabit a body that is male. Without meeting me or having known me, it is another impossibility to see that either. It would make perfect sense if you did. you would have seen prior, a person who looked effeminat...

I saw my therapist yesterday.  It seems I see her between every six months and a year.  I unloaded a LOT on her. Like a soap opera where you miss a half season and then tune in only to be inundated with a whole new set of issues, so this session was yesterday.  There have been some huge changes: a lot of personal growth, some major paradigm shifts in my own sense of being as a woman and some discussions about what lays ahead. The occasional thoughts of even considering the notion of going "back" to being who I was is so completely ludicrous in perspective from where I am now.  Realizing I was a person playing an actor in my own "play of life" and being completely miserable at both intense and subtle levels throughout the past 45 or so years has been a revelation only visible from where I stand as a woman now. As if a puzzle assembled incorrectly, so the pieces are falling into place to see the entire picture of the puzzle of my life manifest before me now.  At t...

We all have those mornings where we wake up, after a long stretch of horrible sleep nights, to a day of clarity and calmness, feeling refreshed and anew.  Those moments, as we all know, do not last very long and become consumed by the minutiae and general stresses of reality and life.  When they do happen however, they can be an opportunity to see what has been plainly hidden in sight all along, yet unseen.  Today was just one of a handful of those days. I've been very stressed lately.  I haven't been fully forthcoming of the level of that stress to anyone and, instead, have been denying it's existence to myself.  Apparently, the adage I oft quip and only half believe, "IGNORE THE PROBLEM, IT WILL GO AWAY" was my downfall that would catch up from behind my back and consume me. It was this past Saturday Evening that J and I were out to a local T-Bones Steak House.  The restaurant was packed to the gills and the wait for a table was told to us to be a ha...

I was up early this past Sunday morning.  I haven't been sleeping all that well through most nights, my mind racing with so many thoughts, emotions and fears.  The sun was shining brightly on this early September Morning, and with the passage during the night of a strong cold front, fall was now unofficially here.  I ambled over to the kitchen and soon found myself standing over the sink as I washed and scoured the dishes, pots and pans that lay there from the night's dinner before. As I stood in silence, with the only other sound being that of the water running from the faucet, a vision of my mom in that moment arose.  There were many times that, as a child, I would awaken early on a weekend to find her in the kitchen doing the same thing as I was doing now.  I would ask her, "Why are you up so early doing dishes?". Her response to me was always the same.  "This is my time to myself." I understood, in the moment I was in now, just what she meant when...

I don't really know how to start some of my posts sometimes, so perhaps I should just cut to the subject straight away and go from there....... So with that...."I've come to talk with you again" I've been in something of a "dark place" of late, at least until recently.  There have been more than a handful of days that I wonder about why it is I bother to get up in the morning.  I shrug those thoughts off as I fight to dispel them over a cup of coffee and an array of busy-work to keep myself occupied.  It's hard to explain and a lot of it, I am quite sure, has much to do with the nature of who I am and the emotive states I entertain as part of the embodiment of who I am "Because a vision softly creeping Left its seeds while I was sleeping And the vision that was planted in my brain Still remains" I know that I am quite fortunate for many things and that in comparative terms, there are many who would simply scoff at what wou...

An affirming day yesterday.  I "thought" I was in my guy mode with my natural hair and no makeup and just a  collared shirt and Jeans.  I was up in the White Mountains of NH playing "tourist" at the Flume Gorge.  Along the walking trip, there was a point where one could diverge through a small jumble of rocks that made for a tight, dark, one way passage through to the other side.  A mother and young daughter saw me turn around and signal to J to try it, but alas, this was not her cup of tea.  On my way through, I used a pocket LED flashlight to light my way and then turned around to help the little girl, just ahead of her mother, to find her way through the cavernous rock jumble.  The mother thanked me and reassured her daughter by telling her to "follow the nice lady with the flashlight". The Flume Gorge and Walkway Later, while taking close-up pictures of butterflies that were alighting on a wooden safety railing to catch some rest and some ...

Sometimes we never fully appreciate the dysfunctionality of our families until we are much older.  By then, many years and decades of our lives have passed and we come to look back at our childhood with eyes anew, as if we were looking upon our lives as a different person than we were.  My very wise 17 year old nephew once said to me that we each live multiple lives over the course of our lifetime.  As we grow to learn about ourselves, we grow internally, both spiritually and intellectually.  Our desires, goals and perspectives evolve as we become ever more aware and self conscious of the lives we have lived, the lives around us we have touched or that have touched us in some way, and as we evolve within ourselves. In looking back on my own childhood, I can sense it all anew from the perspective of having lived through it and grown into a person who has become self-aware of her own identity and the world around her.  I can eerily look back upon my youth and trul...