Sorry for all the bitching, guys.

Life is great when you’re starting out on this path, and all of this is internalized and theoretical, and you’re seeing all the changes you’re about to make and how comfortable you’re going to be with yourself and how much easier things will be, at least psychologically, in social terms when you get to the other side.  People seeing the real you and all that.

But the difficulty of this lifestyle really hits home when you start taking it out of writing and out of your head and out of your personal life and putting it on display and then sit back and watch how people gel with it.  Generally, at least at first, and at least in my experience, people DON’T.  Even the ones who say how supportive they’re going to be forget to even make an effort for a long time in the beginning, which really hurts, even when they don’t mean to hurt you.

The point of all this isn’t complaining, not for the 5th post in a row.  The point is saying that the honeymoon with this lifestyle is over for me, my head is out of the clouds and it’s all getting to be real life, down to the nitty gritty.  I can’t honestly post any more philosophical, “I think I’d be this way in this situation” bullshit.  Now I’m seeing what it’s all really like, and it’s harder than I thought it’d be.  Now I’m really going through what all the other FTM’s do, and I kinda just wanted to say, I’m sorry.

I’m sorry for being even the slightest bit pretentious and ever thinking I really knew what I was talking about, and I’m sorry for getting all emo on you guys the second it started getting real.  Looking back, it looks like I’m all  enlightened and high and mighty right up until I tried to come out to people and apply what I’ve learned to real life, and then I crumbled and pulled into my turtle shell and did nothing but bitch and moan about how hard it’s been.   It’s really time to man up, in every sense of the word, pull on my big boy pants and get through this with my head held high and my dignity intact.

So I’m gonna get back on the warpath again and start posting about things that really matter.  Like STP’s.  And drag king contests.  And youtube videos.

Ok, maybe those things don’t matter THAT much, but they’re a hell of a lot more fun and interesting to read than “OH GOD WHY ME?!”

And sometimes, I think that’s what it’s all really about, you know?  The articles and videos I’ve seen by my fellow FTM’s that really affected me and made my life better weren’t very often the ones that dragged me down and went on about how HARD something was (unless, of course, we’re talking about a certain anatomical- okay, that was just a cheap shot, sorry).  The ones that helped me along were the ones that made me smile, gave me something to laugh at, and reminded me that, hey, life isn’t really all that bad after all.  I want to be that person, the guy who encourages all the little bro’s along the way and really makes them feel better about themselves and helps them look to the future.  I wanna remind people that things’ll be better some day and we’ll all get through it, together.

(warm melty cheesy ending.  like a Kraft’s commercial.)

…

OH!  I still need to figure out what I’m doing for my coming out party.  I want to put that in the next post, I guess.  The point is, I wanted to bring a lot of the people in my life together in a light atmosphere and say, hey, guess what, this isn’t a tragedy, it’s even something to celebrate!  Follow me on my journey.  Into a land of magic and wonder, Charlie…  *wanders off to Candy Mountain*  NO! *comes back* I mean, I don’t know.  It seems like a good idea, just something to sort of mark a point of no return and gently show my friends that, yeah, this is it.

Did any of you have a coming out party for your close friends, and what did you do?  I’m looking for do’s and don’ts, even if your own personal advice in the way of “don’ts” is “Don’t have a party!”  I don’t know protocol for this sort of thing or even if there is protocol.  Oh, it’s also going to be around my 21st birthday, so that’s a whole other level to mess with.

I’m off to go look for inspiration on coming out parties!

This is now my transition AND integration journal.

EMO RANT INCOMING.

Geez, that last post was a huge chunk to handle.  I don’t think anyone even knows how to respond to it.  But I guess that’s okay, because nobody’s ever known how to respond to my DID.  It’s one of those situations that is so completely outside of the norm that people expect, so they have no internal dialogue prepared for it when it comes up, no way of figuring out even what to feel about it.

A long time ago, in my prepubescent years, when I first started to really deal with this, really be able to even talk about it, that frustrated me to no end because I thought people were just hiding from me what they were really thinking because they were afraid it would hurt me.  But I didn’t care whether they hurt me, I just wanted even the first inkling of an outside perspective.  I wanted someone to be able to tell me what to do, what was going on- I wanted for there to be even ONE person who could say, “Yeah, I know what that’s like, here’s what I did,” or even, “I knew someone who’s going through what you’re dealing with, and this is how we all dealt with it,” or EVEN this- “I can relate to you on SOME level because I read something other than fucking Batman comics with Two-Face in them, and I know that you’re not just a media-generated sensationalistic freak or a comic book villain.”  But nobody even said anything like that, one way or the other, no implication of whether they thought I was less than human, spawn of Satan, a circus freak that should die- they game me NOTHING to go on, no indication of what they thought, they just stood there with their slack-jaws and said nothing, forever.

But the fail part of it is, I finally believe that nobody’s hiding what they’re thinking about me, because they just DON’T KNOW WHAT TO THINK.  And on some level, I’ve finally come to respect that.  Some things are just so weird that you can’t expect anyone to know anything about them.

I guess I’m feeling bitter.

I just wish, for once, that I was normal.  And ironically enough, being trans brings more of a sense of normalcy than anything else in my life ever has.  (Trust me, if you think the pronoun problem sucks for transpeople, it’s a definite step down in complexity from the DID pronoun issue.  But that’s hardly the point.)  People in the trans community are some of the most intelligent, enlightened, clear-minded and realistic people I’ve ever met.  It really takes living from so many different perspectives like they have, I think, to give you such an empowered, enlightened way of thinking.  Not to mention, being among the most persecuted peoples on this planet will do that to you, too.  And you don’t get fakers and posers in the trans community, not that I’ve seen, not like in the DID community.  Ugh.  The few weeks I spent trying to relate to those people were too many.  No, in the trans community, by the time they get past learning about how daunting and how much of an undertaking transitioning is, by the time they get past learning how permanent HRT is and how expensive that and different surgeries are and how socially estranged you will be and how your family is going to reject you and how you’re going to have to leave everything behind just to be yourself…

By the time you get past all that, you’ve weeded out the posers and the curious and the people who generally think it might be “fun” or whatever to be trans.  By the time you get that far, all that’s left are the tough and the true with the hearts of gold.

Not so with the DID community.  There’s no way to prove anything, no test of character, it’s a completely speculative field, and it’s obnoxious how many people are there because they think it’s “cool” and “edgy” and “unique”.  How many people out there walk around pretending they’re insane because it’s the “in” thing nowadays?  It’s heartbreaking and disgusting how so many people will basically roleplay DID for a few months online because they think it’s fun to be weird and unique, and then be like, “okay, I’m not insane anymore,” when they’re bored with it, and inexorably leave this pockmark of… of… FAKE on the credibility of the few people out there who actually have a problem.  We are BURIED beneath the avalanche of it.  How many people do you think would still claim to be DID if it meant they had to go through anything similar to a trans experience, to be visually easy to be picked out as a freak, to be socially persecuted and in danger every day, to possibly leave their lives and jobs and friends and homes behind just to be themselves?  I postulate that so many of them would go, “whoops, I was just kidding, now wasn’t I being silly?  Ha ha…” and hightail it for the hills, and only the few people who actually HAVE this problem and can’t make it go away and have to deal with it EVERY DAY would still identify and band together, just so they could have someone to relate to.  But it’s SO hard to weed out all the fakers and actually find someone who is truly, diagnostically, mentally ill with this particular condition, so fucking hard.  I don’t think I’ve ever really met one person who could convince me they were telling the truth about this, not one person who sounded like they really knew what they were talking about.

I guess, at the end of it, I’ve always been alone in that sense.  I gave up hope looking for people like me long ago.  I hate to sound emo, because I’m not, I’ve really come to accept that I’m weird and my condition is rare and that it’s just not worth dealing with so many losers just to find one genuine person, and I deal with it the best I can.  And I know I must sound like a middle-schooler in adolescent angst, thinking the world is out to get me and I’ll always be alone and nobody in the world knows what I’m going through, but the funny thing is, after 20 years of looking for even one person of my species, it’s very easy and hardly even saddening to believe that I’m the only one of my kind out there.  In fact, it’s the only way of thinking that doesn’t kill you.  If I come across someone who truly does get it, hurray for me, but until then I choose to believe that it just ain’t gonna happen, and I don’t get hurt.

/END EMO RANT

I hate indulging in those, but sometimes you just gotta get it out.

…

IN OTHER SHIT,
Tomorrow I’m going to the gay arts and music festival “Homo a Go-Go” in San Francisco.  My biggest goal for this weekend is to use a men’s bathroom for the first time.  (Well, really, it’s the second time I’ll have used a urinal, but that hardly counted because we were camping in the off-season, there was NOBODY else in the campground when I snuck in to use it, and I wasn’t even really dressed as a guy anyway.  It was more a practice run than anything.)  This time, it’ll be in a public place somewhere that’s hopefully safe.  Honestly, my biggest fear isn’t that I’ll run into trouble with any people, because people never question my gender when I put a decent amount of effort into my appearance.  It’s that I’m going to somehow fuck up getting the STP into the right position and piss all over myself, even though I’ve been practicing for months at home and I’ve “got it down cold”, as Hudson’s Guide recommended.  I guess I’m glad I put off the STP post because this content might beef it up a little.

I doubt I’ll see anyone I know from WordPress at the festival, although one of the main events is the SF Drag King contest (which I couldn’t really get into anyway because I’m not 21 till a few months AFTERwards, which sucks.)  It seems like everyone on here isn’t really from the west coast, although if anyone was and happens to see me there, give me a shoutout.  Now I really wish I’d made a heads-up on this earlier.

…

SECONDLY, a sign from the universe that I’m doing the right thing in bringing this DID stuff out.

I don’t usually buy into the whole universal-mystical-fate bullcrap, but yesterday was pretty convincing.  Not long after finishing that post, we went to go up the hill to do an odd-job for someone. ($40 bucks for this weekend, how could we pass it up?)  At this point, Jack was in-body, which is an important point to make for reasons that will become clear soon.

Now, where I live, there’s a steep grade between our town and the next, where we had to go.  About halfway up the grade, my clunker-van decided to overheat, which is a little unusual in the evening, but anyway, Jack chose to pull over at the last gas station before the final stretch and put some water in the coolant system and let it cool off.  As he was pulling in, this lady on a motorcycle was looking at him and smiling, and all he can think is, “Is that hot milf flirting with me?”

After he put the water in, she calls out- “K——“, which made Jack flinch in disgust and also wariness.  He didn’t have a clue where she knew me from, couldn’t visually recognize her.  But weirdly enough, she told him that she was Jane, my recent and favorite therapist, who I’d told about Jack and his gender dysphoria months ago on my quest to get him a transition.  On my first appointment with her, she’d taken a serious interest in Jack and helping us on our way, and then the next time I’d gone in to make an appointment, the receptionist told me that she’d left the county and closed the case!  I had been sorely disappointed.  Turns out, she’d gotten laid off like just about everyone else in this county.

But she’d never personally met him, and when he introduced himself as Jack, she was delighted.  He told her he was working on getting gender therapy, and she said that she knew someone volunteering at a local peer help group that would probably love to meet him- a transgirl!  Finally, someone in the community who can at least relate to us that much!
They talked about other things, but more or less, it was incredibly encouraging to see someone who basically knew the whole scenario and wanted to help.  Sometimes it’s hard not to think there’s a Tranny God out there watching out for us poor sinners.