I am often congratulated on my bravery or courage about coming out and transitioning. I’m afraid I’m always terrified about how to respond, and usually end up either muttering a robotic “thank you” or try to laugh it off and say that “oh, I’m not brave. It was more like a necessity.” I always worry that the second kind of response will somehow minimize the other person, but the truth of the matter is that I don’t feel like any of this journey has been brave. And trying to bottle my experience down into a single word like that makes me feel as if my experiences are being taken away from me and commoditized in an easy-to-consume package. I’m 100% sure that it’s never meant that way, so I don’t ever take or hold offense. But there’s a part of me that hates that I can’t just take the compliment and move on with my life. I can’t stand people getting the wrong impression of me, though, and I think that is a side effect from having lied to so many people about my existence for as long as I did.
I’m not brave. I’ve done some brave things in my life, but I don’t think it’s courageous to unshackle weights from your legs when you’re drowning; that’s self-preservation. Bravery assumes that somewhere along this journey I made a choice, and the only thing that I’ve chosen is to live rather than to face oblivion. Perhaps that is a kind of bravery, but it’s the kind of bravery that each person demonstrates every day that they are alive. It’s the kind of ordinary bravery that we call waking up, getting dressed, and eating a healthy breakfast – and I never skip breakfast.
My life is full of fears. I am a battlefield – my body is basically fighting against itself. My endocrine system, when left to its own devices, ravages my body, physically twisting it in ways that feel unnatural and agitating my brain chemistry enough that I want to shut down and remove myself from my physical form. I spent more than a decade of my existence warring with those feelings (both physical and mental), and I assure you that experiencing all levels of hell simultaneously would be preferable to going through that kind of experience again. So I fear that at some point I might have some trouble with my HRT prescription. I don’t know what it would be – money problems, access to healthcare problems, legal reforms that further discriminate against me; take your pick – but the threat of returning to how things were looms on the horizon. It is the darkness sneaking around the edge of my field of bliss, a memory that I don’t think I could ever erase.
Growing up, dreams were my escape from that darkness. I’ve been a lucid dreamer since I was very little. I don’t remember ever specifically working on the skill, but I am in complete control and completely aware in every dream, and I can remember all my dreams upon waking. I have never dreamed of myself as male. Sometimes in my dreams I am just female, with no indication of being cis or trans, in others I’m clearly cis, while in others I’m clearly trans. Sometimes I’m not an active participant in the dream, but rather an outside observer, and during these times the dream’s protagonist might be of any gender. But my dreams have always been a refuge into which I could retreat. I don’t know if it’s because of the control I have over my dreaming or due to the amount of fear my waking life had to deal with, but I also don’t have nightmares. I’ve only had two different nightmares in my life, one of which was repeated a total of seven times. Both of them happened before I turned twelve.
The first one was the one that recurred seven times. I first had this dream when I was around five, and the final time was around when I was eleven. In the nightmare, my family and I are vacationing on a mountain. There’s a lodge/gift store kind of place about halfway up, and the upper reaches of the mountain are green and forested. We set out for the day to explore the mountain, and very quickly I find myself alone, my family nowhere in sight. I search all day on the mountain, with no luck at finding them. Finally, I return to the lodge/gift shop, only they’re not there. The lodge is crowded with people, but I somehow know that they’re not there, either, and that they didn’t abandon me, but that they just disappeared from existence. A sinking feeling in my stomach, I continue to search the mountain in vain hope of finding them, only giving up when I’ve used up every ounce of energy. I can’t stop crying, and that crying lasts until I wake up. None of the details changed any time it repeated.
The other nightmare I had happened when I was nine. I had just watched an episode of something on the history channel that was talking about aliens (no, this was before “Ancient Aliens,” but it was the same kind of content), and as I went to bed I was suddenly completely freaked out that aliens were going to abduct me. Determined to be strong and to not call for parents to help (I knew they’d start to censor what I watched if I showed them that something had made me so scared), I closed my eyes and tried for sleep. Well, I dreamed about the abduction and woke up in a very cold sweat sometime in the middle of the night. The fact that it had been a dream immediately calmed me down. Taking a deep breath, I fell back into sleep, purposefully repeating the dream, only this time when the aliens abducted me I was ready for them. I escaped from their ship, leaving it to blow up as I returned to earth. And I never had problems from aliens ever again.
It was the same kind of attitude that I tried to take to every part of life. I was scared of the water before I learned how to swim, but I still jumped in the deep end (and had to be rescued). I was terrified of heights, so I chose to climb the tallest trees and hang out on top of the monkey bars at every opportunity I got. And as I conquered each of these fears, I felt more powerful and in control of my life. I was a very brave little daredevil, but this was before puberty and depression.
As I was told less and less to be me and more and more to be something that I wasn’t, I became less and less brave. The accomplishments of my youth slowed and ground to a halt. No more was I the daredevil. No more was I the risk taker. Gone was my confidence, but there was still the expectation of everyone for me to be confident. So I acted confident. I talked a big talk, and I learned how to mislead people into believing things about me that weren’t true, without ever saying anything that was technically a lie. This behavior became my armor to shield my existence. People were going to believe I was a boy, even if I knew I wasn’t, and even if I really didn’t want them to believe I was a boy.
And every night I would dream of myself without any of the pretention. I could just be me in my dreams. And every morning I would hope that somehow I would wake up and the outside of me would magically look like how I imagined I was supposed to look. And everyone would just accept that I was female and had always been female, and I wouldn’t ever have to mention to anyone that I remembered a part of it differently.
Two conflicting fears dominated my life at this point: the fear that someone would find out that I was really a girl in disguise (and hate me for it); and the fear that I would always be in disguise and never be allowed to be myself. I worked through years of problems with anorexia. I came close to taking my own life on three separate occasions. I would go through cycles of engaging with people in my life and disengaging, leaving me mostly friendless, with almost nobody knowing me very well.
And I spent years living with that fear. I was too cowardly to face any of them head on – I wasn’t brave like I had been when I was little. I knew that oblivion was my fate. At some point I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from taking my own life, and a part of me couldn’t wait. I was just biding my time until the end.
I’m still not sure what changed or what spawned my interest, but one day while I was on a break at work, I decided to do a google search to try and find out if there was some way to describe how I felt, how I was. I wondered if there were others who were struggling like me, and I longed to have the words to talk about my experience. I somehow found curiosity at a time in my life when I rarely found anything worthwhile, and it led me to understand that what I thought I knew about trans people was, in fact, terribly flawed. And as I read about HRT for the first time, I saw a ray of hope. What was being described was exactly what I had dreamed about, what I had always wanted but had never dared to believe could actually come true. Maybe oblivion wasn’t the only possibility.
And even though it was about thirteen years later than I had hoped, my body finally began to match my dreams. No more were dreams just a refuge from life, now they started becoming an extension of it. And that is why I don’t feel worthy of being called brave for coming out and transitioning – because it was the simplest, easiest choice to make. It was the only option. Who wouldn’t walk away from oblivion?
a trans-parent perspective 