The Year of Forgiveness

 

Content warning: Discussion of suicidal ideation

There’s a two-wolves-fighting meme for trans people like me, who didn’t show much gender nonconformity as young children. “There were no signs!” Shouts the first wolf, eroding baby trans’s confidence in themself.

“Well,” says the second wolf, “I have a story for you.” She then describes events shrugged off as nothing special at the time that now seem ludicrously out of sorts with the cis experience of life. The two wolves are well at work in my own head.

When I was in middle school I started having these dreams. It was the first time in my life that I had dreams on a consistent theme night after night. The details would change, but the substance each time was that my parents would sit me down around the time I turned 18 (in that distant future year of 2007) and explain that there was some kind of rare genetic abnormality in my body. By rights I should be female, but my body expressed as male, they would tell me. Because of this condition, they’d continue, there was a treatment that would allow me to become female again, if I wanted to. I’d nod and accept it. I see now the transfeminine part of my core gasping for breath here.

I’d wake up, and I’d know it wasn’t normal to have these thoughts. I was embarrassed by them, felt I couldn't forgive myself for having them. I couldn’t dismiss it all by saying “Well, dreams are weird, I guess,” because it triggered something in me. Some deep pang of longing and envy and a nauseated sense that something in my life wasn’t right. It was easy enough to write off those feelings though. I was getting a handle on what sexual attraction felt like during this time. I was told that people my age lacked impulse control, common sense, and good decision-making ability. I daydreamed in class, supposing that the other kids were thinking about leather or rape fantasies or whatever, while my embarrassing fetish was wondering what life in a girl’s body would be like and getting giddy and hot at the idea. Unsure what to do, my mind began putting together coping mechanisms to keep this secret longing under control.

The coping mechanisms compounded over time. I built an understanding of myself, one layer of oblivious denial at a time, as someone interested in but separate from whatever this funny gender stuff was. I latched on to any details I could find about how I was different from the small number of trans people in my life, all of whom were conveniently far enough from reach that I knew virtually nothing about them. My scouring of the internet for transformation stories and erotica, my equating of self-hate of my body with attraction to women, the unshakable sense of self-loathing and disgust at myself, well it’s not like any of that was gender dysphoria, right? The first wolf’s argument convinced me for many years.

Where does 2021 come into this? Looking back, the first few months of the year feel like the cruelest hour of a long dark night. Several times since 2016 I’ve felt like I’d had it with life, and this time it felt like I really meant it. I quit my job, walking away from a childhood dream I worked for over a decade to achieve because I just felt numb toward it. I was snapping at my kids too much. I felt like I’d given life my best shot and had failed. I’m a rational person. The way I responded to this self-assessment was rational.

Between March and July of 2021 I can clearly identify at least three times where I seriously and coolly considered suicide. Numb, numb, numb. That was how I felt toward it at the time. “It’s not like I was going to do, anything,” I’d think the day after. Suicide was something other people did. I was too duty-bound to my family and too chickenshit to do it, I thought. I have a better understanding now of how wide the range of things I can do is. These memories terrify me, because I was tickling the tail of a dragon that could’ve killed me.

I have lived nearly my whole life in the absence of love, compassion, and forgiveness for myself. These things I offer as readily as I can to everyone in my life. Not just the people I love. I extend a lot even to people who I kinda hate. But I was never capable of extending them to myself. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. I couldn’t. Contemplating forgiveness of myself felt like trying to contemplate a square circle. My mind would divide by zero, and I’d give up.

There is a specific day when this changed: August 5, 2021. That was the day it clicked. I’d been unconsciously building defense and denial and coping mechanisms to block myself from realizing who I am for 20 years. I’d leaned on them, and they felt sturdy. That was the day they broke, and I fell through, and saw myself as a trans woman for the first time.

The memory’s not that old, but details get corrupted so quickly. I don’t know exactly how long I stood looking at myself in the mirror, in that nice blue dress, before I realized how my thinking had changed. It was more than a few seconds and less than 15 minutes when I realized “Oh. This is what it feels like to not hate yourself. This is what it feels like to be happy with who you are.” I smiled, and I liked the person I saw smiling in the mirror for the first time.

It’s awkward enough that I’m telling you about this. You are not seeing man-in-a-dress pictures of me until I’m much more secure in my transition (and if you’re interested in stats, I took six selfies that day). I’m still a baby trans and need some time to deal with all this. But this is what happened. It was big. It was important. It changed the trajectory of my life. And I want to share some of that with you, even if we’ll never really grok each other.

I don’t mean to make this all about me. I spent way too much time talking about myself in the family Christmas letter this year. The start of my gender transition is a huge, important story, one of the critical chapters of my life, but it’s only one thing that happened this year. There are other big things. The goodness of Sarah starting her first job as a full practicing neurologist. The new beginnings of Isaac starting kindergarten and Mira starting preschool. Writing flowing from me, not yet useful and publishable (and not necessarily good), but flowing nonetheless.

Then there are the small things. The lovely flashes of flavor that life is made of. Snow in Seattle on my birthday. Discovering Formula 1 while watching the wildest race in years with my brother and parents. Eating barbeque with Sarah and looking longingly across Elliot Bay, knowing we’d be moving soon. Finding that our new house was one that we can make a home and love. Walking house to house on a warm Halloween evening (me in a marvelous pink dress), the children giddy in their costumes. Mira shouting with delight, gazing at the mouse we caught after a month and a half of trying. My writing instructor raving about a piece I wrote. Snow again, blanketing the beautiful Willamette countryside as we journeyed home from Christmas. It’s enough to take the edge off the bad times. I don’t even mind so much that December was full of the pain of torn muscles and sprained tendons in my arm.

In all of it, I have labored to be the best spouse and the best parent I could be. I grew up thinking I’d be a husband and father. That’s not the case anymore. I don’t quite know how to be a wife and a mother, but I’m working on it, every day. And when I falter, I find that I can forgive myself and move on. I’m slowly getting out of a terrible jail, liberated not just to feel myself but to be the best version of myself.

And, in a lovely way, this extends backwards, too. The second wolf snuggles up to the first wolf as he pants in rage and fatigue. “It’s okay,” she says. “I know why you did this. You had to. It was wrong. We know that now. But you had to. And it’s okay.”

I can’t isolate any one thing and say, “This is why I’m transitioning.” It’s all related in a complex way that only my intuition really seems to understand. But this is the most salient single bit I can show you. By going through this process, by easing my body into softness and letting go of masculinity so I can carry myself through the world as a woman, I find it in me to forgive, and to love. If there was nothing else in it, that would be enough.

2021 has been a year that I’ve cherished. I hope you have a good 2022.