(art by Natalia Lavrinenko on Pixabay)
Welcome to Trans Tuesday! This week I discuss a really important step on the journey to discovering our true selves, and who we imagined that person might be. The only way to get there is by: LETTING GO.
This is something that actually didn’t occur to me before I began my social and medical transitions, and it didn’t even hit me until I was about a year into both of them. But that’s because that’s when it sort of became an issue I had no choice but to confront.
As I got to that one year milestone, it felt really huge, which also feels a little silly, looking back now that I’m six years in. I mean it was huge for me at the time, but now I can obviously still see how new it all still was, and how much farther I still had to go.
But it made me realize that, up to that point, my transition hadn’t been everything I expected.
There were certainly some things I’d expected, but there were far more that I didn’t. Which is not to say I had even an ounce of regret about transitioning, I absolutely did not. But one of the things I had to let go of was my expectations of what transitioning was going to do for me.
And again, it had been amazing and I was truly thrilled with the way things were going. But… it’s a tough thing to explain.
One example that might be easier to approach it from is in thinking about my hair. There’s an essay all about HAIR, if you’re curious, and the way it became such an important part of transition for me.
Pre-transition, I had no idea that I had curly hair. When it came in wavy, I was like… well okay, whatever. And then the longer it got the curlier it became. And I did not in any way ever anticipate that would be the case.
So when I thought about transitioning, when I imagined actually getting to be the woman I am inside, that was never part of the picture. As a kid I had mostly straight hair, so I thought that’s what I’d have as an adult. The lady inside me, the real me, had long straight hair in my head.
At first I just didn’t know what to think about having curls. I didn’t know if I even liked it. I thought about maybe straightening it (but I’m glad I didn’t, and now I don’t think I ever will). I just so badly wanted to be the image I had of myself in my head, and in that mental picture, that was not what my hair was like. At all.
But the longer I sat with it, watched it grow, found the right products to care for it, and then finally got my first real haircut (talked about in HAIR 2), and got my ludicrous, lovely, wonderful, curly bangs… at each step, I fell more and more in love with it.
Not only just because I now feel it actually fits my personality and style, but this new curly hair? It was mine. This is my hair, and I didn’t even know it. Mine mine mine. And I adore it! But I couldn’t get to that point without letting go of the expectations I had.
And a lot of transitioning, for me, has been very much like that. In thinking about women’s clothes, I had this idea in my head of what I’d wear. Turns out I didn’t like wearing some of that!
It was complicated in ways I didn’t expect (see HEAVILY GENDERED CLOTHES AND TRANS PEOPLE). So it took me a long time to figure out (see FINDING OUR TRANS STYLE). But that makes sense, right? Cis people get their whole lives to find their style, watch it evolve as they grow and change. Trans people try to speed-run that, but often it just doesn’t work that way.
Clothes I thought I’d love, pre-transition, I found did not look the way I thought they would when I was wearing them. Or made me feel a way I didn’t want to feel. Or didn’t express who I really was. It was a process, just like my hair.
I was in the middle of learning so much about who I am, and even after all the introspection and soul searching it took to discover and accept I’m trans, there was still more to go. Which I very naively thought I would be done with once I accepted I was trans.
Ha! I was a fool, a rube, a naive yet also somehow sexy trans baby! Nothing’s that easy.
But I couldn’t have ever gotten to where I am now, in a whole bunch of ways, without letting go of those expectations I’d laid out for myself. And I feel like that very much mirrors what happened for me as I discovered, explored, and accepted my own transness.
I was assigned male at birth, and despite never once feeling like a boy or a man, I still believed I was because that’s what society told me and what I was raised to believe. Check out TRANS TRAUMA 2: SOCIETAL GASLIGHTING to learn more about that insidiousness.
And even though, even though it made me feel awful and miserable and distant and isolated and alone, (see GENDER DYSPHORIA), it was the identity I had. It wasn’t real, but I didn’t know that for a long time.
And I had to let go of my preconceived notions of who I was told I had to be, in order to become who I really am and have always been.
It also feels this is something that applies to humans across the board, regardless of gender (or lack thereof). We have all these preconceived notions of what our life will be, and how it’s going to go. Carefully laid plans that rarely go the way we think.
Which is not to say you shouldn’t plan for the future (I know I certainly do), and have goals and things you work toward. But nothing’s so cut and dry, directly on-path with no deviations. Life is chaotic and messy and beautiful.
I never set out to write a book (you know the one, because I never ever shut the hell up about it). In fact I wrote an article for Writer’s Digest about how I accidentally wrote a book, and the only way I realized that was by keeping myself open to possibilities that I’d not anticipated.
Life is constantly, constantly throwing hands, and we have to roll with those punches. We have to examine why we want the things we want, and why we feel the way we feel. It’s the only way to get to the truth about what we want out of anything.
There’s an essay on GIVING YOURSELF PERMISSION to do exactly that, and one on the COURAGE it takes to see that through.
What I’m getting at is that it’s great to dream and have goals! Vital, even. It keeps us going, motivates us to take step after step to try and get to the end of each journey.
But as you work toward your goals, whatever they may be, transition-related or not, don’t be so focused on the preconceived notion of the outcome that you miss the slight (or major!) variations that you might like even better. Or you might hate those variations! It’s certainly possible.
But you won’t know if you don’t try.
And you won’t try if you don’t push past the fear of the outcome.
Or the fear of the outcome being different than you expected.
Let. Go.
You might just like the reality of what you find on the other side.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com