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So it's been a little bit more than one year now since I went full-time living as Michelle. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that it's only been a year. I have gone back and read some of my posts from the beginning of this blog and it almost seems tough to remember who that person was that used to write in here.
When I was transitioning, my biggest fear was that I wasn't passing. It used to absolutely kill me to go out and wonder if people were talking behind my back, joking about "what the hell gender is that person?". Or to wonder every time I told someone what I was going to be doing if I would never see that person again. Basically, a lot of my fears existed because I put too much power to make me happy in the hands of other people.
Eventually, time passed, confidence grew, and I stopped doing this. As I've said in the past, the only way to get past a fear is to charge forward into it head on, and that's what I did. Somewhere along the way, it stopped being a big deal for people to find out, and I became a much happier person for it. Over the winter, I started discovering the power of live music and in that found a really viable way to meet new people with whom I could start fresh, introducing myself as a woman and not looking back.
These days, things are going pretty great. I have a job that I think is a pretty good fit for me, even if it occasionally drives me crazy. I have gone from being totally afraid to approach new people to actually looking forward to it. I am happier with my appearance than I have ever been. I have always tried to live life by the principle that I should always be enjoying myself, and although that goal is impossible, I think I've been doing the best that I can.
The problem with living life as a woman is that the bar for my happiness now feels like it has been set really high. When I was living as a male, nobody really questioned my gender or behaviors (even though, by most standards, I was a pretty weird kid). When I was in transition, I would be genuinely ecstatic every time I got "ma'am"ed or received some confirmation that I was passing. Yeah, it would suck when people slipped on my name/pronoun or otherwise treated me like a guy, but I had accepted those mistakes from others as things that would happen and eventually figured out how not to let it bother me. These days, it's actually pretty rare that people slip up and use my male name, and that's something I'm really thankful for.
Unfortunately, as a woman, the bar has been set a lot higher. I have two sets of issues that cause me stress these days - problems related to being transgender, and problems related to being a woman. I think I optimistically assumed that the second group of stresses would replace the first, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
The first group of issues is characterized by questions like "how am I going to find a guy who is comfortable with my past?", "how am I going to arrange everything I need to do for surgery?", "does this person who I just met suspect that I'm transgendered and is there any perceived awkwardness?", "at what point, if at all, do I bring up my past?", "are my mannerisms and dialogue too 'male'?", "how do I talk about my past?", and "how do I deal with having body dimensions that just aren't the same as a biological woman's?". These are always going to be there, and I pretty much knew when I transitioned that these would be things that I'd have to deal with for the rest of my life.
The second group of issues is interesting, though, because I don't think I ever would have realized this stuff if I had not transitioned. The second group has questions like, "are people judging me on my looks first and my personality second?", "are people listening to/respecting my opinions in the same way that they did when I was perceived to be male?", "are people more inclined to take advantage of my trusting nature now that I am perceived as female?", "since I'm not a 'stunner', how do I attract the interest of guys?", "how the hell do I interact with guys that are actually showing an interest in me?", and "am I being careful enough when putting myself in situations that could potentially end badly?". Two things that I can say with absolute certainty: more people have called me "naive" in the last year of my life than they have the first 28, and I have noticed a tendency for people who used to listen to me to now talk over me or dismiss my ideas as they come up. I suppose that these are the things that most women face, and while they are very real issues in my life, there is a part of me that feels 'right' that I get to experience these sorts of trials and tribulations.
Oh well! I suppose it's time to move on with life - the one thing that hasn't changed is that I recognize that the way to solve these problems is to go out and live a bit, so that's what I'm going to do. On that note, I'm going to end this post.
