I participate at all because I can write freely about dressing and gender. A very large portion of the membership shares a few aspects of what I experience and understands them completely. I don't have to hold back or hide. The value to simply be as you are can't be overstated. By contrast, explaining to someone who is willing to listen isn't the same, no matter how sympathetic. My God, just to belong - with a condition and identity that knows no belonging!
I write longer, more introspective posts in this forum because some of the membership has gone through terrible gender struggles and connecting to the trans community here has been invaluable in helping me find some emotional stability, if only at times from simply not feeling alone. Many of you bring experience to discussions that cuts to the heart, again and again. The longer and more personal posts elicit this and have also brought personal connections that I would never have found otherwise. My understanding of gender issues has been accelerated enormously by wrestling my way though forum discussions conducted at a depth and perspective that I find unusual on any topic, anywhere. It's one reason I hate to see any of the transitioned, TS members leave, though I understand why they do.
Writing forces me to think through issues and through motivations. Unlike speaking, writing exposes rationalization, self-contradiction, and partly-formed concepts for what they are. It helps integrate understanding, tests progression and commitment, and creates intersections of logic and emotion, sometimes transcending both. Responses test knowledge and limits of knowledge. My self-awareness refines and I find fresh direction when I breach mental and emotional barriers. I can't speak, or even to think to speak as I write. Writings are like paving stones on which I stand, each created as I write. I write, I step. Writing is an urging in me, and a very unsatisfying one at that. It's always characterized by the things I couldn't or didn't express, not those I did and which are oddly trivial and irrelevant at that point. If I write to be but am ever-becoming, how could it be otherwise?
I also consider stopping from time-to-time. As you said, it takes a lot of time to write introspectively. Sometimes I put effort into a post only to see it float away like a balloon and pop unnoticed. What I glean, even if priceless, seems disproportionate to the effort. Sometimes I feel like I'm fighting or pushing back more than contributing or learning. There have been emotionally trying times, even in the course of just a few months. And, fortunately or unfortunately, I came to the forum at a time when my gender issues were cresting. That means that despite the broad commonalities that make the forum so welcoming, sometimes they only go so deep. Lately, I find myself writing more on a narrower range of topics. A forum that initially provided palliation often rouses pain instead.
I'm here because I need to be. I write because it's part of me.
Lea
Originally Posted by Debra Russell
