Yes, we will soon. Let's connect on some options in early November.
OK, maybe I should have said within the next week or two.
Thanks for the reminder Veronica. And once this is done I'll have to get back to the rest of your comments within the next day...I mean week or two!!!
This is a very interesting tangent Raquel. Yes, he is one of my best friends. I have known him for at least 25 years. The motivation for disclosure is important for discussion no matter how the individual identifies. There are way too many tales in these pages about those who become obsessive about their TG nature and the next thing you know, they're blabbing it to others, seemingly without forethought about the fact you cannot put the genie back in the bottle once she is out. In these cases I often wonder about the motivation. Is it an effort to get that elephant off their chest, to be able to share with someone, with anyone, this part of them which they deem so important to continue harboring such a crushing secret? My motivation to (potentially) share comes from an entirely different place. Let's keep it in context with this particular friend. I've kept mine hidden for this entire time. I have no real desire to get this off my chest for the sake of hanging out with him while presenting as a female. Fact of the matter is that he is getting closer to that proverbial bullseye and I have expressed a desire to be honest should he actually hit it. Might I say he doesn't have the balls to come right out and ask the question? He may be saying the exact same thing about me, that I am being evasive in the face of his little jabs. But at the end of the day, I think your perspective is certainly one to keep in mind for anyone disclosing to their guy friends but part of it comes across as a little bit Freudian in that it implies some sort of sexual tension being inherent, being perhaps inevitable. Interesting point but I'm not so sure I agree with it's applicability to my situation but again, I do think it was an important tangent to bring up.
Thank you Raquel. You see it just as my transitioning/transitioned friends IRL see it. And that I do appreciate.
Yep, I'm pushing pretty hard. I've said before that my goal is to get as close to that "line" as possible without going over. The problem is that I have in fact crossed it, hence the existence of my elephant.
Interesting point about sanity and I think you really hit the essence of where I'm coming from. There was a comment made elsewhere that said something along the lines that sacrificing one's true being by trying to stay on a middle path is a profoundly masculine thing to do. Of course I took great exception to this notion that striving to stay on a middle path is somehow akin to laying one's body on a live land mine to save the other troops from destruction. This is where an important facet of a middle path comes into play, that at the root of it there is love.
Why is it less authentic to choose love over transition? These things do not have to be mutually exclusive but in my case they most certainly are (more below on that).
Sometime in the next several weeks I am going to write of a friend who should have stayed on a middle path. She gambled that love would somehow find the way and apparently didn't fully understand that the odds were against this notion on so many levels. While being witness to what she went through gave me a mysterious resolve to go further down the transition path, eschewing the middle path I had already committed to. Yet at the same exact time she helps me to understand how the love in my own life is in fact good for my sanity which supports staying put on a middle path, the precise point you are making.
This one is easy. And not to lessen the validity of what you are talking about (after all, it's a major theme in the mhB books) but this doesn't apply to my situation in any way. My wife has made it crystal clear, transition = divorce.
This is certainly something to consider as part of a transition plan, digging deep to know exactly where one is coming from in terms of their own sexuality. At this point, it's not something that I'm overly concerned with other than remembering what my friend mentioned above said to me, that she felt she needed to keep an open mind when it came to her own sexuality because she didn't want to be alone.
Veronica does a good job keeping me in check when it comes to the woman thing. Fact of the matter is that I accept myself to a great degree and what resides in my heart and soul is not trans, she is a woman. For better or worse, I am still seen by most, if not all people as being trans which in all likelihood would remain the case even should I ever transition (short of pure stealth). When it comes to this thing of ours, it is what it is. I guess my goal is for those who know me to think of me as their friend, perhaps their woman friend and less so their trans friend.
Mine hates the things these changes represent which is in fact the killing off of the guy she married.
Of all the heartfelt advice I have received, the one thing which I intend to do is to share with her emphatically what the endgame is, that I desire to remain on this middle path with her, that transition is not an inevitable conclusion to this whole thing. Despite our efforts though, we just haven't been able to make the time to actually talk at length about this. The good news is that we're getting along which is not only a testament to her ability to compartmentalize things but also that my elephant is safely back in her cage right now.