melissacd
02-24-2006, 11:07 AM
This is not the best piece of prose that I have written, however, it comes straight from the heart and straight from my fingers to the keyboard with little or no editing. I did not want to spoil my train of thought by fixing spelling or grammar. Please accept my apologies for the writing style. Hopefully I have communicated something of value to others:
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I, as many of you here, have been travelling down a long relationship road fraught with painful obstacles. This road has been the road to acceptance. Life is a bell curve and some of us are lucky enough to have total acceptance of cross dressing early in life. Others never get there at all. For the rest of us it lies somewhere in between.
This past few years have been an extraordinary learning process. The most important lesson that I have learned is that acceptance starts at home. By that I mean that the first step to gaining acceptance as a cross dresser is to accept it within yourself.
I, as I know many others, have spent much of our lives hiding, hiding from and oftentimes attempting to kill off this side of ourselves. We have hidden or tried to destroy this aspect of who we are because we have felt or been led to believe through bad experiences that this is some sort of abomination that we must be cured of. Cross dressing has been associated with so many negative feelings (guilt, sadness, anger, self condemnation, embarassment) and experiences (the angry reaction of others to discovering your secret, harrassment by those who do not, cannot understand) that we learn experientially that this is a bad thing, something we must be rid of.
We travel along this bumpy road, trying to run away from it and yet always drawn back. We get mad at ourselves and wish that it could all just go away so that we can get back to living a normal life, whatever that may be. We go through such personal pain and we cause such pain in the ones that we hold dearest to our hearts. If someone were to step back and look at all that we have put ourselves through they would think we were mad men to go down this path and yet we do. Something compells us on, something we cannot explain.
We suffer the slings and arrows of so many things and yet we persist. It is that persistence coupled with self reflection that starts to awaken something in us. As we struggle to learn more about cross dressing and the experiences of others we begin to learn something about ourselves. We start to learn that there is a place within ourselves, a part of who we are, that is trying to get out, trying to bring us back to wholeness, trying to reclaim our humanity. We, if we let ourselves, begin to understand that this thing that we have been hiding, that we have been trying to repress, is an integral part of who we are. We see that the act of repression is creating a distortion of our real personality and that we are robbing the world of the gift of the real us.
I suppose that is why I read so often that when a cross dresser finally reaches a level of internal and external acceptance that they suddenly feel like they are themselves for the first time in their lives and it feels good.
So on this long journey to acceptance, the first hurdle that we have to jump over is the acceptance of ourselves, of all of our glorious being. The acceptance of others cannot begin until we accept ourselves. If we accept ourselves, really accept ourselves, then I believe that we will carry ourselves with a new level of confidence and others will begin to accept as well.
This I believe is the reason that we read about others who have been out in the world dressed en femme, but perhaps not passable and yet others for the most part are okay with it. Yes there can be instances of bad experiences as in all things, however, my observation has been that those who accept themselves, who walk in the world with confidence, who do not have an agenda other than to be themselves are generally tolerated.
The long road to acceptance then is not so much about the society that we live in but rather it is more about ourselves, our belief in who we feel we are and our willingness to live that truth.
The sad part of this non-acceptance and this lack of self confidence and self esteem in who we really are is that through this process of denial we do things that ultimately are unfair to and hurt others. The biggest hurt and the one that I have personally caused is a hurt to the person I love most in my life, my significant other, my wife.
Through my lack of self acceptance, I lacked the courage to acknowledge who I am and therefore I pretended that I did not need cross dressing in my life. It was only after many years of being married that I realized that I could not not be a cross dresser, however, I was still too weak in my self acceptance to admit that to my wife so I cross dressed in secret. It is no wonder that when she finally found out that she went into a rage that has lasted for almost 9 years. It was a broken trust, a trust she bestowed on me. She had every right to feel hurt, betrayed, angry, resentful. My lack of belief in myself allowed me to hurt her in ways that should never happen in a relationship.
Why I did not tell her before we became a married couple: because I loved her, because I was afraid she would leave if she knew about that part of me, because I did not have enough faith in the strength of our love to survive such a revelation, because I thought that I was done with cross dressing forever, because I believed that love could overcome my need to express my feminine side, but mostly because I did not accept this as a part of who I am.
Many years have been wasted in pain over all of this and my wife and I are beginning to try and resolve this issue between us. I have now reached a point in my life that I do accept that I am a cross dresser, I do know that it is perfectly normal and nothing to be ashamed of and I know that that acceptance will help me going forward in my life. It has taken a long time to get to this place and I am glad that I have arrived. I still have many obstacles to overcome, however, my new found acceptance will help me to bring my whole personality into alignment and will bring the real me to the forefront. It will help me to be a more authentic person.
The biggest obstacle that I will have to overcome in the immediate to short term future is to take that new found acceptance and use that as a tool to, in a loving, caring, patient way show my wife that I am still the person that she fell in love with, that I still love her dearly and that I want to find a path to a future that satisfies both our needs in a way that we can both be happy together. There has been much pain and a broken trust is hard to rebuild, however, I maintain hope that our ability to stay together these past 9 years since the matter came in to the open is a testament to our love for each other and a sign that in time we will be able to heal this wound and be happy once more.
I appreciate all of the support and acceptance that I have received here and credit this forum with in large measure helping me to achieve my new found acceptance.
Huggs
Melissa
================================================== ==================================
I, as many of you here, have been travelling down a long relationship road fraught with painful obstacles. This road has been the road to acceptance. Life is a bell curve and some of us are lucky enough to have total acceptance of cross dressing early in life. Others never get there at all. For the rest of us it lies somewhere in between.
This past few years have been an extraordinary learning process. The most important lesson that I have learned is that acceptance starts at home. By that I mean that the first step to gaining acceptance as a cross dresser is to accept it within yourself.
I, as I know many others, have spent much of our lives hiding, hiding from and oftentimes attempting to kill off this side of ourselves. We have hidden or tried to destroy this aspect of who we are because we have felt or been led to believe through bad experiences that this is some sort of abomination that we must be cured of. Cross dressing has been associated with so many negative feelings (guilt, sadness, anger, self condemnation, embarassment) and experiences (the angry reaction of others to discovering your secret, harrassment by those who do not, cannot understand) that we learn experientially that this is a bad thing, something we must be rid of.
We travel along this bumpy road, trying to run away from it and yet always drawn back. We get mad at ourselves and wish that it could all just go away so that we can get back to living a normal life, whatever that may be. We go through such personal pain and we cause such pain in the ones that we hold dearest to our hearts. If someone were to step back and look at all that we have put ourselves through they would think we were mad men to go down this path and yet we do. Something compells us on, something we cannot explain.
We suffer the slings and arrows of so many things and yet we persist. It is that persistence coupled with self reflection that starts to awaken something in us. As we struggle to learn more about cross dressing and the experiences of others we begin to learn something about ourselves. We start to learn that there is a place within ourselves, a part of who we are, that is trying to get out, trying to bring us back to wholeness, trying to reclaim our humanity. We, if we let ourselves, begin to understand that this thing that we have been hiding, that we have been trying to repress, is an integral part of who we are. We see that the act of repression is creating a distortion of our real personality and that we are robbing the world of the gift of the real us.
I suppose that is why I read so often that when a cross dresser finally reaches a level of internal and external acceptance that they suddenly feel like they are themselves for the first time in their lives and it feels good.
So on this long journey to acceptance, the first hurdle that we have to jump over is the acceptance of ourselves, of all of our glorious being. The acceptance of others cannot begin until we accept ourselves. If we accept ourselves, really accept ourselves, then I believe that we will carry ourselves with a new level of confidence and others will begin to accept as well.
This I believe is the reason that we read about others who have been out in the world dressed en femme, but perhaps not passable and yet others for the most part are okay with it. Yes there can be instances of bad experiences as in all things, however, my observation has been that those who accept themselves, who walk in the world with confidence, who do not have an agenda other than to be themselves are generally tolerated.
The long road to acceptance then is not so much about the society that we live in but rather it is more about ourselves, our belief in who we feel we are and our willingness to live that truth.
The sad part of this non-acceptance and this lack of self confidence and self esteem in who we really are is that through this process of denial we do things that ultimately are unfair to and hurt others. The biggest hurt and the one that I have personally caused is a hurt to the person I love most in my life, my significant other, my wife.
Through my lack of self acceptance, I lacked the courage to acknowledge who I am and therefore I pretended that I did not need cross dressing in my life. It was only after many years of being married that I realized that I could not not be a cross dresser, however, I was still too weak in my self acceptance to admit that to my wife so I cross dressed in secret. It is no wonder that when she finally found out that she went into a rage that has lasted for almost 9 years. It was a broken trust, a trust she bestowed on me. She had every right to feel hurt, betrayed, angry, resentful. My lack of belief in myself allowed me to hurt her in ways that should never happen in a relationship.
Why I did not tell her before we became a married couple: because I loved her, because I was afraid she would leave if she knew about that part of me, because I did not have enough faith in the strength of our love to survive such a revelation, because I thought that I was done with cross dressing forever, because I believed that love could overcome my need to express my feminine side, but mostly because I did not accept this as a part of who I am.
Many years have been wasted in pain over all of this and my wife and I are beginning to try and resolve this issue between us. I have now reached a point in my life that I do accept that I am a cross dresser, I do know that it is perfectly normal and nothing to be ashamed of and I know that that acceptance will help me going forward in my life. It has taken a long time to get to this place and I am glad that I have arrived. I still have many obstacles to overcome, however, my new found acceptance will help me to bring my whole personality into alignment and will bring the real me to the forefront. It will help me to be a more authentic person.
The biggest obstacle that I will have to overcome in the immediate to short term future is to take that new found acceptance and use that as a tool to, in a loving, caring, patient way show my wife that I am still the person that she fell in love with, that I still love her dearly and that I want to find a path to a future that satisfies both our needs in a way that we can both be happy together. There has been much pain and a broken trust is hard to rebuild, however, I maintain hope that our ability to stay together these past 9 years since the matter came in to the open is a testament to our love for each other and a sign that in time we will be able to heal this wound and be happy once more.
I appreciate all of the support and acceptance that I have received here and credit this forum with in large measure helping me to achieve my new found acceptance.
Huggs
Melissa