Ch 6: Year 2 of college, the transfer and a discussion on making decisions out of fear

Good Evening, afternoon, morning ;),

        Going to start today by letting you all know as a disclaimer that everything said in this story is opinion based and based off of my individual experience and how I remember events.  While things may be out of order and small details may not be remembered exactly as they happened those small differences are really immaterial to the story and experience of how I discovered the person I am today.

        After the summer at home, I applied to colleges closer to home and got early acceptance to a college in Vermont.  Of course I went to orientation as a sophomore only to find out that when I arrived they had removed sports management as a major from their curriculum.  At this point I decided to go with general business management, I ended up having focuses in Finance and Human Recourses.  I was mad at the world after my experience in Michigan and listened to a lot of heavy rock, Disturbed, Metallica, etc.

       It was only later that I realized being mad at everyone and everything hurt me more than it would ever hurt anyone else.  I kind of removed myself from the world, focusing on my school and work, I was working about thirty two hours a week while taking five or six courses a semester.  I took summer courses as well as I lost credit for some of the classes I had taken because the credits didn't transfer and I didn't want to have to finish my bachelors in five years instead of four because of the setback.  One thing I have to tell anyone who is looking for colleges out of high school, it's better to do a good job making sure you find a school you want to stay at because the scholarships you are offered right out of high school are a lot better than any packages transfer students get.

      In essence I had very little time for anything other than work and school.  I played some internet games and got really sucked into playing fantasy characters in fantasy worlds where I could be whoever I wanted to be.  I tended to play female characters, and what was better no one in the game knew any different so I was able to live out my female life as if it was an 'alter-ego' and at this point I felt that I really was probably two separate identities in one body.  With the female self mostly being locked away to allow the other part of myself deal with the outside world.  By focusing on myself and being secluded and playing a fantasy character I was able to look within myself and take the time needed to do some soul searching to figure out who I am.

    Now, to start the discussion of what I was beginning to try to figure out within myself I want to take a minute to talk about fear.  Fear is a great motivator and for a lot of people the reason they take certain actions.  We are afraid of making a bad impression, afraid our friends won't like us, afraid of the horrors in the world and the injustices and possible discrimination we may face.  But in the end if we are confident in who we are we should be able to be more successful, more productive, better workers, and happier with ourselves if we can be true to who the real 'Us' is.

    Looking back at the workplace, I found another staggering statistic tonight: "Studies show that anywhere from fifteen percent to forty-three percent of gay people have experienced some form of discrimination and harassment at the workplace.  Moreover, a staggering ninety percent of transgender workers report some form of harassment or mistreatment on the job.  These workplace abuses pose a real and immediate threat to the economic security of gay and transgender workers," (http://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2011/06/pdf/workplace_discrimination.pdf).  So now applying this with the suicidal numbers that have occurred, we look at modern day workplace 'bullying.'  In elementary school what we have come to know as bullying is a real issue for younger transgender individuals as well.  The driver behind these mistreatments usually has something to do with the others insecurity more so than our (transgendered individuals) strength to stand up for themselves. 

   Those few who still will paint 'gay' or 'fag' or other derogatory remarks on someone's locker, or yell the same comment out of a window when they see someone they view as male wearing pink walking down the street are likely themselves questioning and not secure in their own sexuality.  A lot of times we find out later in life that those people who are the biggest homophobes are in fact gay themselves and working through a period of denial and self-doubt that they have yet to realize who they are and instead have to take out their frustrations on others.  It is really sad that people like this exist to have to prop oneself up by the misfortunes of others, but by understanding and looking at why these issues occur in the first place perhaps we can work towards reducing their frequency.


to be continued...

Ch 5: Suicide Statistics and the Hardships faced by the Trans Community

       Good afternoon, evening, morning,


      So, I have left you with a lot to think about after yesterday.  Today I will give you some statistics to back up my own personal experience. "There is no group with a higher suicide rate then the transgendered. It stands at 31%. In a survey of our users here 50% of Transsexuals have had at least one suicide attempt by their 20th birthday. Many have had multiple attempts from ages as young as 7. In the UK a ten year old transgender child committed suicide. This means that transgender teens are the most vulnerable. Often Puberty can plunge them into a nightmare they may never wake up from. Followed by being forced to live someone else's life, homo or Transphobic Parents often don't get Transgendered children the therapy they need early enough. It is often dismissed as just a phase, (http://www.lauras-playground.com/transgender_suicide.htm).

    I will let you know any transgendered members, family or friends of who are struggling with issues Laura's Playground is a good place to ask questions attend online support group meetings etc. 
A second source of similar information to give credibility to the information: "Ninety percent of transgender and gender nonconforming people report harassment, discrimination and mistreatment on the job, and the injustices they face have devastating economic and personal consequences, according to a new survey.  A 'staggering' 41 percent of the more than 6,400 respondents said they had attempted suicide, compared to a rate of 1.6 percent for the general population, according to the survey (PDF) by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality," (http://www.thetaskforce.org/static_html/downloads/reports/reports/ntds_full.pdf). 

   So at least half our population has attempted suicide at one point or another and about a third succeed.  I'm not going to lie and say that being transgendered is easy, but perhaps we don't hear a lot of the 'success' stories because after transition many individuals whether male to female or female to male are simply referred to as their current gender after transition.  So the ultimate goal is not to be transitioning anymore and to be considered female by all of society.  The problem period is the transition itself as many of us are not considered 'passable' until we have had extensive surgery, hair removal and other procedures done.  Yet at the same time society and the current rules, with good reason I might add require transgendered or gender dysphoric individuals to do a year in the life of trial before major surgery can be completed. 

   This year, is the period in when a lot of discrimination, hurtful words and in rare instances rape and hate crimes can occur.  The rape situation brings us to an interesting discussion about bathroom use.  Now for employers the simplest answer is to have single occupancy use facilities that allow for either gender to use the rest-room.  But in public rest rooms if a transitioning individual is forced to use male bathrooms they are put in a situation that they are likely to get ridiculed, people will likely know exactly what they are and if seen again who they are based on the history of this given experience.  On the other hand the argument against allowing transitioning individuals to use the female bathroom is that parents and females don't want 'perverts' peeking through the stalls and cross-dressing just to be able to have access to the female bathrooms.  So how do we determine the difference, well the common policies currently are that the transitioning individuals as identifying as female should use the female restrooms, the other employees who may have an issue with it may be able to use a bathroom on another floor of a building etc.  Either way it is highly unlikely that a rapist is going to go through the trouble of dressing up to gain access to the women's bathroom.  Rape is a crime and treated as such, and those individuals who do such heinous acts are punished accordingly, also it is just as likely for a lesbian to be peeking through the stall cracks or doing some inappropriate activity as it is for a cross-dresser who is pretending to transition.  But no one would deny the rights of a female lesbian because of her sexual preference on which bathroom she should use.

   In a separate discussion many employers and some public spaces are starting to go to a one bathroom facility, which may have multiple toilets but is used by both genders.

   So now that we know the information and situations that are high risk, current groups are working towards ways to make the bathroom issue safer for everyone involved.  As gay and lesbian individuals have moved more and more to 'main-stream,' the current movements for equal rights and marriage that is being fought over can be compared to the women's rights movement.  Gender Dysphoria, Transgenderism and many of the other varying degrees are still not widely understood.  So, here we are, the forefront of the grounds for the next movement.  We don't have the same issues surrounding marriage, because in most states the marriage certificate is issued with your current gender, so i.e. as a male I married my wife, so our marriage is legal and certified by the IRS and the country of the United States of America.  Now if I transition as I am currently after our marriage, well our marriage is still legal because we got married before I transitioned.  Guess it's a loophole, but on the other hand if I was considered 'gay' as a guy who was attracted to other guys, after transition I would be a female and allowed to marry a male and there would be no issues.

   Interesting enough though Transgender individuals are not allowed to serve in the military, and there are a number of other ways beyond that where our rights are different than anyone else in the country.  So, the whole point of this argument is that we are all people, we all live different lives, as long as we aren't hurting anyone then we should all have equal rights under the law.  Now that said, as a minority, we also have some protections and benefits that the rest of the population doesn't have.  These protections unfortunately are needed because of the above prevalence in hate crimes and suicide and prejudice and discrimination.

   Either way, a lot of talk about the issues facing us as a 'people.'  The other funny thing is that transgender individuals often will discriminate and pick on each other, and even gay and lesbian individuals don't always accept transgender individuals either.  So while the thought of the LGBTS is good in theory, the group is mostly compromised of gay and lesbian individuals and their straight allies. 

    So, we have an uphill battle, and this is why it is sooo important and I can't stress this enough but in starting and going through transition having a good counselor and a good set of friends and family to support you in your efforts is very important.  There are likely going to be really rough days where you are going to need someone there to cry to or just to tell you that everything is going to be alright.  They are not going to be able to understand what your going through, but just by being there for you they show their love and support.

    Now, we left off after the suicide attempt and that got me talking about the current rules and regulations.  But to get back to our story, I was on the floor crying, and someone finally came to my dorm room door and could hear me sobbing and nocked.  I managed to get myself to the door and let them in, I admitted to what I had done, and they immediately got the school counselor to come over.  She talked to me, and I grabbed the phone and called my mom, pleading with her to not let them take me to a mental institution.  In the end I went for suicide watch, got to the facility and signed myself in so there wasn't any complications, not that I had much of a choice but they were going to involuntarily admit me if I didn't sign myself in.

   Have to say for anyone who hasn't been in one of these facilities I think they make you go even crazier.  Being around some people who have major issues, and talking and interacting with the other 'inmates' is though.  My roommate was a schizophrenic, the nurses and doctors have to watch you as you shave, and your not allowed to have shoes, and the bathrooms don't have doors.  All in all no privacy is allowed, I have to say though I was very thankful for an intern who was working at the facility who became attached to me, she made it her project to come and see me, get me out of bed and was able to give me some connection to the outside world to keep me sane.  Group was somewhat helpful if you actually put effort into it and answered honestly.  But in the end I was in the facility for about a week, the doctors determined that it was an isolated incident due to alcohol and that I wasn't a risk to myself, they did require my mother to come out and pick me up to be released to a family member.

   After that, I was able to finish a couple of my courses online, but I withdrew from the Michigan college and packed my stuff up and went home with my mother back to New England.  I spent the summer not doing much at all, went to a lot of individual one on one therapy.  Had some success with creating spaces in my mind to create safe zones, and the first therapist I saw started teaching me meditation and techniques to try to create my own positive male role model in my imagination.  i.e. create a room, closing your eyes, and seeing the 'ideal' father, then having them give you advice, in essence your listening to your own conscious and it can't really replace the real thing, but it helps calm you down when your in critical situations or dark places.

to be continued... 

Ch 4: First Year of College - lesson learned be happy and love yourself others can still love you if they disagree with your decisions

     It's the weekend! Always a good thing,


       This weekend we should all take some time to enjoy the sun, relax and recharge our batteries.  I want to start today's blog with a positive note and say that my mother has been sober for a number of years now and ever since I have told her about my intentions to change from M to F she has been nothing but supportive and is probably my #1 fan.  By that I mean that she is very proud of me and my accomplishments is proud that I am strong enough to come out and stand on my own to be true to myself.  That on the journey known as life I have at least made a step towards self-discovery in the life-long journey that many die still asking themselves the question 'who am I?'

     Ok, now I have to backup a little bit there are some important piece I left out when I was writing yesterday.  To start I will go back to when I was in elementary school I had my first kiss, which I do not remember as a pleasant experience but I thought it was relevant to talk about.  This girl who was a couple years younger than me had a crush on me, she had some not so flattering nicknames, though all in all she wasn't 'unattractive' I was just still in the mode of 'girls have cooties.'  Anyway, the day occurred and we were sitting in the back of the bus, she came over and sat next to me, and somehow she pinned me to the seat of the bus and kissed me.  Took the kiss from me more than anything, I remember trying to push her off of me, and when I look back at it I remember it fondly more than hateful, because the idea that this girl was so infatuated with me that she just had to kiss me is kind of a romantic ideal.

      Right before my parents split up as I hit puberty I had started stealing my mothers clothes to wear them in private.  My parents eventually found out and scolded me, not really understanding why I would do something like this.  Honestly, I developed a method of self-inflicted punishment, again going back to the idea that at this point in my life I had a very hard time going against the wishes of others and holding onto the belief that I was still loved.  So, the outside world was telling me I shouldn't want to wear those types of clothes, I was telling myself I shouldn't want to wear those types of clothes yet I did it, and punished myself for it.  Then in a conversation I'm sure all parents dread I talked to my father about masturbation, and the thought after all the boys in school were calling me gay and other derogatory terms that I might actually be gay.  My father looked at me, laughed and said what I was asking him about was ludicrous and while I didn't understand what I was asking and not being able to truly explain what I was feeling, I shrugged it off.

      I'm going to kind of sidetrack for a minute, to talk about this idea of going against someone's wishes and still feeling love.  The general feeling is that upon birth we learn association through facial expressions and every time we get a happy face we tend to want to recreate those emotions.  Well there is a point in our lives were as we grow we are supposed to be able to realize that we can do something that others don't agree with and they can still love us all the same.  It took me a long time to figure this out, when I was young I was constantly what people called a 'people-pleaser' I always wanted to be everyone's friend, and didn't want anyone to dislike me.  But in the end you can't make everyone happy, and I almost found that it was like having multiple personalities, not really, but close because everyone I interacted with had a different set of rules that I had to memorize, operate in and fit myself to the 'mold' of what they thought I should be to keep them happy.  This was a terrible idea, and becoming fragmented and lost within yourself takes time to come back from, and the reality is that if you try to make everyone happy you end up making no one happy because your constantly trying to compromise to find something that fits all the different 'molds' when really there probably isn't a good answer.

       Then right at the end of high-school before the summer I spent my father I had my first sexual experience, again like the kiss it wasn't particularly enjoyable.  The story of the experience though starts with me getting invited out to hang out with some of my co-workers, I get to the event and they are all girls, and I'm the only 'guy' there.  I go into the living room where a couple of them are watching something on the television to find that there are three girls sitting around watching porn.  So, I am floored, and did not expect this at all, but being shy and not confident at all I basically hid in the corner and tried to make myself as small as possible.  Then after a while one of the girls starts razzing me about having sex, and starts saying things like 'your too good, you would never do anything, I bet  you wouldn't do anything so much that you could use my bedroom if you were going to do something.'   Then the others started 'ganging' up on me and I was kind of forced into the room by peer pressure.  So I proceeded to have sex with one of the girls who was not one of the ones making fun of me, but was the one they were suggesting I do it with.  I had no idea what I was doing, it wasn't pleasurable, and afterwards I just went home and cried.  I didn't have sex again until I met my current wife.

       Back to the current storyline we left off with my summer with my father and while it didn't help my opinion of him I am ultimately glad that I did it and at least gave the opportunity to my father to get to know him and spend some time with him.  Because regardless of what he has done he is still my father.  So, the summer came and went, lots of sitting around, had one time where we saw a swat unit next door with shotguns and larger weapons, I just got on the floor and staid there, didn't want someone to start shooting and get hit in the crossfire.  They didn't have to use their weapons and the person they were looking for wasn't there, so not a big deal, but it was still scary.  Other than that, I had a couple of experiences with my father were at eighteen we were drinking together, somehow I naively thought this might bring me closer to him, but really we just drank and watched some movies so it wasn't a big deal, other than the underage drinking. 

     In the fall I went back to Michigan to start my first year of college.  First mistake, it was a catholic college named after a saint.  But when I went on the tours and met the upper-classmen I had a ball and got along great with them, when I got to campus I kept in touch and remained friends with most of them, the campus was beautiful, and they were pushing the idea that you didn't have to be catholic to come to the school.  So once again I was quite naïve, to believe that most of the students would be like me and unaffiliated where the opposite is true and while it's not required, a majority of the students are catholic and come from catholic upbringings.  Not to say this is a bad thing in and of itself, however, similar to high school in the dorms there was a lot of teasing about the possibility of me being 'gay' when in reality they were probably using the term as a derogatory statement and not as actually thinking I was 'gay.'  But this time I played the stereotype to my advantage, played along a little to get an advantage while playing basketball and other things, it made some of the other guys uncomfortable and they would make mistakes without me having to do anything. 

   I made a few great friends who were my classmates, I had two friends, my roommate and another friend who I considered to be my best friend in college who would watch my back and kind of squash the name calling if they were around.  So things were going well, I was majoring in Sports Management with the dream of becoming Jerry McGuire and being able to make a living negotiating high priced sports athletes contracts with teams.  One can dream, but I soon found out that the industry is largely about who you know not what you know, a lot of the players use their friends from high-school as their managers and agents so that they can 'share their wealth.'  So I went along getting A's again in most of my classes, sleeping through pre-calculus and getting an A- which resulted in the nun who was teaching the class to say I should switch my major to be a math major, though I didn't have any interest in that at the time.  I should have prefaced that statement by explaining I had taken pre-calculus and calculus in high-school but did not take trigonometry so when I took the placement exam I didn't do as well as I should have because I had to answer all the questions using just paper and pencil and no calculators.  I struggled for the first time in Honors English and ended with a C+, but it was the first time ever I had gotten a paper back and seen the grade of a 'D' at the top of a paper.  I studied really hard, used peer-readers and spent a lot longer on these papers than I ever had before and still ended with a bad grade.  Again I think this had to do a lot with the quality of my grammar and not the content, creativity or ideas I was writing about.  Oh well, the professional world has editors and people who are specifically trained to take the ideas and format them into concise and well versed sentences.
  
      I never have gotten points off for grammar in my math, management or other courses as I guess for a business paper the quality of my writing was high enough quality.  Even my history classes I didn't have an issue with.  Like I said, oh well, lol again a bit of a sidetrack but it frames who I am and the qualifications I have.  I was homesick in Michigan and really missed my mother and my brothers, I had a girlfriend who was from Minnesota for a short period of time, think I scared her off when I cried in her dorm.  I guess she had her own issues as I found out that she left school a few months before I did because of a suicide attempt.  I still talk to her every once in a while to say hello, and check in, she moved back to Minnesota and is doing very well from what I can tell.  Anyway, the real story of my freshman year goes to my own suicide attempt.

     So I made it through the first half of the  year, started the second semester, got sick with mono or something for a short period of time and was doing well in all my classes.  March came, I went to see my father for spring break which again wasn't very heartening, but no one else was staying around campus so I went to Wisconsin because it was closer than 'home' in New England.  I got back to campus and my best friend and my roommate were gone for the weekend a couple weeks after spring break.  Some of the other guys in the dorm where getting alcohol and asked me if I wanted anything, so again not wanting to be a prude I said, 'sure' and got a six pack of Bacardi.  Now any time I had drank before on campus it was with my best friend present and we were generally playing video games or went down to shoot pool or something afterwards.  So this was my first time without him present.  After a little while they came back with the order, I gave them the money for the six pack, and sat in my dorm, after which someone came to my room and told me to hurry up and drink the rest because you don't want to get caught with the bottles in your room and they wanted to go out to get some hotdogs or something.  So I drank all six in about an hour, maybe an hour-and-a-half, I was obviously impaired, but wasn't puking or blacked out or anything, it almost felt like someone else was in control of my body.  So the other guys came back and said 'are you coming' meaning for the hotdogs, to which at this point I say no, because I really didn't want to walk around and go out in public.  But then they come back from eating, and I've been sitting in my room watching Television, and one of my 'suite-mates' came in and the teasing about being 'gay' started.  Now a 'suite-mate' is the two guys who lived next-door to me and my roommate and we had an adjoining bathroom so sometimes we would open the doors through the bathroom and all hangout.  Regardless this teasing and making fun of in retrospect made me realize who my true friends were. 

**WARNING - NEXT PARAGRAPH CAN BE CONSIDERED GRAPHIC AND EXPLAINS THE SUICIDE - IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO HEAR ABOUT IT, SKIP THIS LAST PARAGRAPH.

    So finally I had had enough of the teasing, so I got up on my bed, stuck my butt up and said here it is, if you really want it, come and get it.  So then the suite-mate ran out of the room to tell some other boys what was happening.  At this point I shut my doors and climbed up into bed, I lay there thinking about the homework and stuff I had to do the next day.  I rolled over, looked down at my PlayStation two and then something possessed me to get up take a controller cord and string myself up in the bathroom.  I got up and stood on the toilet, and used the exposed water pipes to loop the controller around, using the controller to hold the cord in place when I tied it to the pipe.  Tied the other end around my neck and stepped off of the toilet.  I remember spinning, passing out, and seeing the proverbial 'white light.'  I woke up crying on the bathroom floor.  The cord had not snapped, it did not untie itself and if you know anything about PlayStation controllers the input part is larger than the cord and would have a very hard time untangling by itself.  So, either one of two things happened, either someone or something was watching over me and determined I had a greater purpose to serve on this earth, or I don't remember it but my survival instinct kicked in and I somehow found my footing on the toilet and untied myself.

to be continued...

Ch 3: My teenage Years

   Another beautiful day out today, hope everyone is doing well,


       Well, day 2 after my treatment, I look like my beard is growing faster than normal, I hope this is my skin pushing the dead hair out.  I have to say it feels quite strange, like I can tell the difference between my skin 'pushing' the hair out from when it's normally growing, I guess this makes sense as the body is sensing a foreign object and trying to reject or get rid of it.  Hopefully tomorrow morning I don't wake up with a pillow full of hair, lol, though if I do I guess it's not that big of a deal I'll just have to wash the sheets.

      Ok, back to our story, so we left off after I was 14 and my parents were divorced, now looking at the period from 14-18 I spent a lot of time worrying and doing things for other people.  I started working at 14 in the lumber yard as I said before, then moved on and got a job at the local grocery store when I was 16, started as a stock boy, eventually was the first 'guy' in the store to be trained on registers, and then when I turned 18 was trained in the 'office' or customer service desk where we sold tobacco and lottery tickets.  My senior year in high school I worked two jobs, my second job other than the grocery store I worked part time with a local lawyer to try to learn some things about law, he worked mostly in real estate and honestly I sat in the basement most of the time going through old files to pull out documents that could be purged.  Terribly boring job, but at least I saw what the legal documents looked like was able to identify which were important to keep and did get to go with the lawyer a couple times to do title searches.  All in all pretty accomplished for an 18 year old.  Have to say as well I was glad my mother made me save 50% of all my earnings towards college, because I was able to pay for my freshman year tuition, room and board and all with no student loans.  So what's all this have to do with transgender, well I was breaking gender roles, taking jobs that were typically dominated by females in a small town, and had very little time on my hands to look inward at myself.

     In addition to all the work my school had a sliding scale that went up to 5.0 GPA, so for an honors class A+ you could get 5.0, for a 'phase 4' class you could get a 4.0 for an A+, and for a 'phase 3' class you could get either a 3.0 or 3.5 for an A+.  I maintained a 4.2 GPA, ran cross country on the varsity team, and played on the basketball team.  All of the cross country guys I got along with pretty well, they tended to be the geekier guys who did well in school and wanted to stay active but weren't athletic enough to play the other sports.  Then on the basketball team is probably the place I faced the most bullying and name calling, because at this point I really didn't 'fit-in' with the 'cool' kids.  They were the same group of kids who didn't do very good in class, and played on the Basketball, Soccer and Baseball teams.  So they all hung out together, and would call me 'gay,' 'fag,' etc. hurtful words just to be jerks really and at this point in my life I was actually very homophobic so I tended to get riled up about these kinds of comments very easily.  Though looking back on it it probably said more about the other boys insecurities, and they probably kept doing it because they were trying to get me riled up.  I came close a few times to beating the best 3pt shooter on the team in practice in the 3pt shooting contests, but when it came to the games I sat on the bench most of the time and really was just there because I loved the game.  So I put up with there crap and sucked it up to be a part of the team and game I loved.  My senior year I was running sprints and on my last few 400 meters I was in excruciating pain, but at the time we as runners are taught to run through the cramps and the pain and it generally goes away.  Come to find out the next morning I had torn most of the muscles in my lower back and then had to come up and down stairs sideways and prefered to walk backwards when ever I could until it healed.  Needless to say I didn't play basketball my senior year.

      Now back to my family, all these events and things that were going on made my life very busy, I think both of my brothers looked up to me as a pillar of strength.  However I wasn't as strong inside as I pretended to be on the outside.  I was terribly disappointed in my father for his bad decisions surrounding his first girlfriend, the drugs, drinking and we had to see him once in the hospital with a tube coming out of his chest because he had a collapsed lung.  Of course this didn't stop him from smoking, and of course he never showed up to any of my games or cross country meets.  And after years of watching him slowly kill himself, today when you talk to him he says 'Honestly, I didn't expect to live this long.'  Great mentor? Not!  I guess he lived life like it was one long party, and probably hated himself so much that he would have rather drowned his sorrows in the numbness of the drugs and alcohol.  I guess that is his choice on how to live life, but unfortunate for him he is missing out on a lot of the important things.  I also get the feeling that he's a bit conceted as he never will call me or my brothers, and always has had an attitude of 'if they want to talk to me they will call me.'  Again, his loss, not mine.

      So, high school graduation came, and my father was moving to Wisconsin, so I decided to give him one last chance to connect with me on some level and went with him to stay for the summer before I started college.  We had quite the adventure driving half way across the country, we stopped in Michigan so I could go to a one day orientation before school started on our way out, so we spent the night there.  But we had left at 10pm at night and I remember driving on the New York freeway watching the sun come up, it was quite the sight.  We spent the night in a hotel in Michigan, I went to orientation and then we finished our trip to Wisconsin.  We got there and my father was unemployed so I did get to spend a decent amount of time with him, but he tended to talk about himself all the time and how he thought things should be.  Granted he had some good ideas, and was pretty smart, but if you look at the body of his life he wasted his opportunities and did not use his full potential.  So, that summer made my father a little more human, but at the same time I just felt sad for him.  My half-brother I spent a lot of time with, he looked up to me as well, though he was a brat for a while, mostly I think because his mother would cave and give him what he wanted.  But from what I see of his decisions now, he seems to be growing up alright, and seems like a decent human being, my half-brother that is.  Of course I haven't visited for a long time, and what I see of my half-brother is mostly through facebook.  My father proposed to his girlfriend that summer, she said yes, but honestly I don't know that they have ever actually gotten married.  They still live together, but I don't get the impression that it is a happy existance.  So once again I am left feeling sorry for my father, who can't find happiness, who regrets his mistakes, but in the end who is either so self-centered or depressed that he doesn't do anything to try to make things right.

to be continued ...

Ch 2: Laser Hair Removal and My Childhood years

         Good morning, evening, afternoon blogger followers,


          I intend to try to make a post once a day, if for some reason I miss a day it is possible I was busy or had something going on, but for those who are new to the blog it is an ongoing narrative and will flow more like a story or book than some of your typical blogs.  Perhaps someday I will get a book deal and be able to use the notes I have written here  ;).  I'll start today by saying I've started taking a few moments for myself again, which I believe is important, a couple years ago I went to a Buddhism class on Meditation and Pacifism.  Great teachings to deal with stress, the old adage our parents used of 'count to ten' when we were mad or upset really does help, it's about focusing inward, shutting out your surroundings and finding your connection with the world by focusing on your breathing to be more in tune with the world.  Now granted I know monks and others who meditate for half an hour or hour or a longer period of time, but for me I take the five to ten minutes I can get sometimes and go through the practice to clear my mind and try to keep myself in a positive attitude.  Overall everyone is going to have their own coping mechanisms but it's an important reminder that these be in place along with family and friends who will support you because sadly there are many in the world who will not support you and who may even make your life miserable just because of who and what you are.  So across religions the general attitude tends to be to be able to turn the other cheek, forgive those who have done you harm because holding onto that anger does nothing but hurts yourself.

           The second thing I want to touch on while it's fresh in my mind was last night I went for my first hair removal treatment, I'm going to laser hair removal.  And I have to say OMG it was one of the most painful things I have ever done, and I walked out of there and was like I'm paying another person to inflict all this pain on me? why? Then I think about it and am like, 'well once every 6-10 weeks isn't so bad, and hopefully the results will be permanent once we finish with a few treatments.' And the reality is women do 'crazy' things for beauty all the time that inflict self pain on themselves, I mean even corset training can be painful though I have yet to start doing this and some of the shoes women fit into for the sake of fashion.  Not to scare you away from the process, but more to make you aware that there are major gender differences that many people don't think about.  But I'll keep you posted on how the process works and what my results are. 

             For those of you who are curious about the process, I had just my face done for now, it takes about ten minutes and if you can withstand the higher strength of laser your supposed to be able to get better results.  Now when it's over the pain does not linger too bad, and I had very little redness in my face, though these results vary depending on your skin tone and how dark / fair your hair is.  Now after the treatment it still looks like you just shaved and have some stubble, I was told that the dead 'burnt' follicles are in the skin and should naturally get pushed out and fall off within a couple days.  Again I'll keep you posted when this happens.

           So, when I last left off we were discussing my upbringing, my family life and my vivid childhood memories.  Now moving forward a bit in time as I said other than a few incidents my younger childhood was pretty uneventful.  Granted there were birthday parties where I asked my parents if I could only invite just the 'girls' and there were small identifiers that were passed over not just by outsiders but by myself as well.  I mean I had the equipment, I was built as a boy, so I was supposed to be a boy right? Lots of societal and peer pressure to act and behave a certain way is developed at these young ages, and if we convince ourselves that the others in our lives are correct then we have a hard time getting negative reactions from the outside world with still knowing that we are loved and ok on the inside.  So, we move forward to Middle School, I'm about fourteen, my brothers are ten, there's still just the three of us, but now my parents are fighting more often and one day my mom packs us up and tells us we are going to stay at Grams for a while.  Still young and naïve, didn't really think anything of it at the time, but then we got to Grams, stayed a couple nights and then when it got to be almost a week, we started asking when we are going home again.  My mother wanted my father to move out of the house and didn't want us in the house around him anymore, shortly after they were separated and went through the divorce proceedings.  They had joint custody, we did the every other weekend thing going from one parents to the next. 

         My mother was still depressed and removed, by this point we were cooking a lot of our own meals, washing the dishes and doing most of the household chores.  She was working two jobs for a short period of time, so that did affect her availability, but we still didn't have a lot of quality family time.  I kind of took on the role of 'father' to my two brothers, I was working in a lumber yard myself for a few hours after school each day, and the responsibility to make sure my brothers finished their homework, ate something nutritious and were generally looked after kind of fell to me.  In a lot of ways this forced me to grow up too quickly, mature and deal with things that I wasn't ready for, but I went along and did the best I knew how.  When my mother started dating again, I had some run ins with the law, once I refused to help shovel our driveway, and then I felt guilty and went outside to help at which point my mother didn't want me to help anymore, so I yelled and swore at her, she called the police, and I hid in my closet with a baseball bat.  Of course I was hiding out of fear more than anything, and when the police officer got there and peered into the closet with his flashlight, I folded, put the bat down and went to apologize to my mother.  I had a fight with my step-father to be in a car, and got out of the car at almost midnight to try to run the rest of the way home, of course they were following me slowly in the car to make sure I was ok, and I got picked up by the police and spent the night at my fathers place even though he wasn't there.  My friends and I had the police called on us because we decided to go for a walk at one in the morning and my friends parents got freaked out and worried for where we were, so we all had to go home, of course I think they thought we were out doing drugs or something, but we were being teenagers out walking through the woods trying to scare each other in the middle of the night.

         All in all, no serious incidents.  Now when we spent time with my father, he had a new girlfriend who was not good for him at all.  We would go and stay at her apartment, which she was getting social assistance or something and living off of the system with her own kid, who was a little terror.  But they were doing more and more drugs, drinking and popping pills, smoking marijuana, most of the time at least it was out of our site, but still when they came out to interact with us we knew what was going on.  I guess my father in a way wanted to 'save' this girlfriend, but in the process just got sucked down into her hole with her.  I would say these incidents had more negative impact on me than any of the run ins with the police.  Finally my father broke up with this girlfriend, and began dating this girl he had met online, she came out from Wisconsin and stayed with him for a while.  She was fun to be around, though she was closer to my age than my fathers which was strange, but still she was a positive influence on us and my father.  Not really sure what exactly happened and why she went away, but she decided to go back to Wisconsin and according to my father later called to tell him she was pregnant and wanted to keep the child.  My guess is that my father may have known before she left, and they had some arguments about whether or not to abort the child, and she left to protect herself and keep the child.  Current Day, my father eventually moved out to Wisconsin to be with her and try to raise this half-brother I have better than he did us.  Whether he is being success full or not I have no idea, I rarely talk to my father anymore, and really have to say that even to this day at twenty-eight would love to have a positive male role model in my life. 


to be continued...

Ch 1: An Introduction to Me

  Hello World,

           First time blogging, guess I should start by introducing myself and letting you know who I am and why I am writing here for the world to see.  I understand that there are probably others out there like me, many afraid to come out of the proverbial 'closet,' and understand through my own searches that there is no clear cut nor great location to find all of the information you need.  I began my journey about six years ago now, from self-discovery to my eventual journey in my MtF transition.  I am currently four months into my hormone treatments and have found through sharing that many others out there are confused, unsure and don't really know what the 'process' is to start on your own journeys.  So, I was told by some friends and people in the community, "You are strong for what you are doing, and your strength has influenced more people than you know." I was also told that our generation now that it is more acceptable to be gay or lesbian as they fight for their rights to marriage, it's now our turn as the 'forgotten child.'

        So where do I start?  Starting from the beginning, I have to say I knew something was different about me even when I was very little.  Now for some at this age I'm told they already know they are a girl in a boys body, but for me I don't think I had the mental capacity to wrap my head around that idea.  Of course it probably didn't help that the boys on the playground would say girls have cooties and generally from a young age we are taught that to some degree girls are 'less than' boys.  So, part of my journey today from a social standpoint looks at the fact that as a white male I was typically at the top of the food chain so to speak so why would I want to lose this?  I guess the end answer is that it's more important to be true to yourself than to 'fake' it and go on lying to the world, the guilt and secrets and not being able to talk about dresses and dancing and pretty things just wasn't worth it anymore.  But I believe you see my point, that this generation there are typically a lot of stereotypes about 'trans' individuals and honestly FtM have at least an easier time being 'presentable' and accepted by the rest of the world, where as MtF have a different process and tend to look far 'stranger' by United States social standards wearing makeup, dresses, etc. Especially if facial hair and other masculine features are present and hard to get rid of without laser or electrolysis treatments.  Which of course cost time and money.

      Regardless, I guess I got a bit off track from my story, but the overall picture is just as important to understand and for me these writings are a journal of sorts to be able to process what I have gone through and better understand my own self in the process.  So, as a boy growing up in a primarily white male dominated world and having some physical attraction to the opposite sex, I really wasn't very in tune with myself at that time, other than knowing that looking back on the experience it was almost like I had a part of myself that was locked away that it wasn't 'safe' to share with others.  I dealt with bullying in school growing up, was never great at sports but was very competitive and enjoyed playing the games.  I was driven to win, played to the best of my abilities and excelled in math and history.  Strange combination, I know, usually it's English and History or Math and Science, but for some reason the science piece of memorization was never my forte and while I can write fairly well I am still no expert in grammar.  Either way, my vivid memories and first truly MtF bullying experience that I remember was in the 2nd grade when a bunch of the 'cool' kids started making fun of me and making bets that they thought I wore Barbie underwear.  So being a child, and seeing nothing wrong with it, and not wanting to be bullied I stood up in the lunchroom and pulled my pants down to show them that I was not wearing Barbie underwear.  Regardless this memory has stuck with me and I was of course sent to the school counselor to talk to him, though I don't think any of the counselors I talked to when I was younger were very good as I don't think any of them got me to talk about the actual issues. 

     Now at this point, my parents were together, I had two younger brothers born when I was four years old, and I had a rather 'normal' life.  My father and mother were alcoholic's, my father physically abusive, more so when drunk, my mother emotionally abusive by being distant and ignoring our needs to focus on herself.  My father smoked cigarettes around us growing up, and I have to say that I was a bad kid sometimes, I would swear at my mother, act out, and generally do things that would get me in trouble, from a social standpoint I was probably looking for attention even if it was negative.  Either way not a very healthy home life, though don't get me wrong I don't want you to think that my parents were awful monsters, they had good qualities too, it's just that these abuses even when far apart and few tend to stick with you a lot longer than the good memories.  Sad though it is, it's the same way with word of mouth through business, one negative review gets far more attention than ten positive reviews. 

to be continued...