The Journey Continues

[melissacd]

It has been a while since I have made any posts regarding my femme journey. I am in Corpus Christi Texas, a long long way away from my hometown of Cambridge Ontario Canada and I am reflecting on where things are at right now.

I have taken the whole month of March off because I have reached a point of physical, intellectual and emotional burnout related to my job, my separation and may other events that have happened over 2007 and into the new year.

There have been many changes in my life over the past few years, however, none have been so in my face as those of the past year. I have gone through a lot of things, some good but many not so good and while I can be thankful that I have my health, a roof over my head, food in my belly and clothes on my back I still get lost in all of the confusion of this journey and all of the mistakes I have made along the way.

I have enjoyed the freedom to dress that I have in my new place, however, there is great confusion in terms of what next. As I work through the details of breaking away from my old structured life I have yet to really embrace that I have a new freedom and opportunity in front of me to define my life on my own terms and in whatever configuration I want. I understand this intellectually, yet I have not quite grasped it emotionally. All I can feel is a great sense of loss of my old life, being with my family on a day to day basis, being a part of something that was my life for 25 years.

I know that this is a process that will take a long time and I know that in my desperation over the non-acceptance of my dressing and the loss of my old life as a result of that that I have made choices that unfortunately hurt others.

This trip has been a great opportunity to reflect on these things and gain some new perspective. While I am not expecting to go back with all the answers I am hoping that at least I will have gained enough emotional and physical distance to start understanding better what the real questions are that need to be asked and then answered in this new context.

I do understand, as should have been so obvious to me before, that when we lose something (like a long term relationship) that we reach out in every direction to find someone else to help us not feel so lonely, when what we really need to do is embrace that loneliness, dig deep within ourselves and truly understand who we really are and where we really need to go next. It has been a rude awakening and one fraught with sad events and I am ashamed to say, hurtful regretful actions and yet it has also provided new insights. I cannot undo what I have done, I can only do my best, as can we all, to learn a lesson from all of this.

The journey continues and to a large extent it is less about dressing or gender issues than it is about finding out who we really are deep down inside and what it is that gives our life meaning, purpose and joy. After all, in the end, when our life is coming to a close, I believe that we all want to feel that we mattered, were loved and contributed in positive ways to the lives around us. When we deny ourselves who we are, when we deny the transgender side of ourselves, we struggle with these simple joys of life.

Huggs
Melissa

[deja true]

Oh, Liss, your post is so sad, yet so hopeful, too.

I'm too new here to know your story but I'm going to go back and seach your threads to read your story. I get the feeling that there are a lot of lessons there in how to deal and how not to deal.

Thanks for your openness and trust in us.

I pray that your new life is easier than your past.

respect & love ( for the courageous voyagers among us)

deja

[Kate Simmons]

The journey can have many twists and turns and is really a test of character. Our positive accomplishments are our legacy for those who follow.:)

[Angie G]

Melissa I'm sorry you have had such A bad year hun you know you can talk to us anytime you need to talk be it in a post or PM.
I hope this year is a better one for you Keep you chin up and walk tall things will workout :hugs:
Angie

[Sandi jo]

hope everything gets better and better

[gennee]

Figuring where we fit in can be a lonely and arduous task but it's something that transgender people will go through. Once we bottom out there's nowhere to go but up. I'm so sorry about the tough year you have had,Melissa. Look at it as a new beginning. I can sympathize with you about all the confusion that's there because I experienced them initially. Eventually, I came to be a content and completed person. I believe you will discover some wonderful things in your life.

Gennee

:hugs:

[melissacd]

I appreciate all of your thoughts. Here are some more of mine, I know that they are not strictly speaking, discussions about cross dressing, but in fact they do tie in and I hope that my sharing these thoughts are of some value to others.

I am sitting in a trailer in an RV Park in Corpus Christi Texas. I have been here since March 9 visiting my friends. They have gone away for a few weeks and I am here alone and with my own private thoughts.

It has been a whirlwind tour over the past couple of years since my father died. I never thought in my wildest dreams that I would be in the situation that I find myself in now.

I am at the end of a 25 year relationship that ended in part because of my cross dressing needs and in part because of failures in the relationship that were probably in large measure due to not acknowledging those needs. I feel a great sense of sadness for what has been lost and what will not be and a great sense of guilt for the pain and anguish that this has caused my family.

I am at a cross roads, a place where I have to do lots of soul searching to figure out what to do with the rest of my life, hell what to do with the next day. I had always thought that I would build a comfortable life, get my kids off to their own lives and then retire with my ex wife to enjoy time together and travel. I assumed that it would be the normal white picket fence life and in large measure we had achieved that and yet under the covers there was always a simmering set of problems that were creating tension, anger and a lack of fulfillment. I suppose that it was inevitable that it would end this way.

I certainly appreciate that there are others who have had much more devastating lives and so I guess that I can be thankful that I have my health, a job to get by on and healthy children. In spite of all of that it feels so devastating to me. I can only speak in the context of my life and from the vantage point of my experiences to date.

If I were a fatalist then I guess that I could say that everything that has happened in my life has happened for some sort of reason, no matter how twisted the universe's sense of logic may be. But at this moment in time I just feel lost. I have reached the end of one rail line and yet there does not appear to be any other rail line in sight, no other form of transportation awaiting to take me on to the next destination. All I can see is a vast expanse of possibility around me.

It is funny that we follow an objective, settle in to a life, almost set ourselves on a sort of auto pilot. We find a job, a mate, buy a house, raise kids, move up the ladder in our career, attempt to accumulate wealth to retire on and then the train falls off the tracks and you are no longer sure what all of this was about. You are not quite sure why you started this journey other than you were born, you did things that were followed by other things. The things that you did you thought were the results of free will and some level of planning, but mostly they were randomly connected points joined by the flow of the river of societal expectation. The moment that you recognize this and realize that you have desires that are different than what you thought you were supposed to desire and the moment that you realize that they are also outside of the scope of what society finds acceptable - then the trouble starts.

There is no map for this and so you make tentative steps this way and that. You step into goo, you try things, you knock things over, you break things, you feel a lot of fear, anxiety and pain. In spite of all of this you also start to make interesting and wonderful discoveries. Perhaps what I had before was not life at all, perhaps this is what life is really supposed to be all about.

I have moments, like now, when I am dressed in something femme, in this case a pair of pink pajama bottoms and a matching camisole and I feel a sense of rightness that to me
seems totally bizarre and out of context. When the world is crashing and burning around me, how silly is it that wearing these clothes can make me feel anything positive and yet
they do. They feel like home to me. I am going through a process where I have established a new physical home and yet I feel like I have been tossed into a sea adrift with no land in sight and yet these clothes, these femme clothes, they ground me. They help to keep me from losing it completely. I know that that sounds silly and yet it is the way that I feel.

I have lost what I thought was the most important relationship that I had in my life and yet I realize that that relationship was masking the most important relationship that I should have established a long time ago and that is the relationship with myself. That is the thing that I now see that I did not do and that has caused me so much pain and confusion through all these decades. By connecting and developing a relationship with myself, by understanding my needs, wants, desires, goals and not living by what is expected of me I will attain that stability that I never had. I will be able to withstand the winds of this world.

I see now that a very big part of who I am is that feminine component. This is not to say that I want to be a woman or that I have any notion of what it is to be a woman, because I don't. What I do realize though is that there is this soft, tender, emotional component of myself that finds wearing feminine clothes helps make it feel real and alive. The logical rational part of me says that this is dumb, silly, self indulgent and wrong. The other part of me, the feminine part of me says that this is the only path to salvation, the only way to wholeness, the only way to be complete. It is not just about the clothes, however, the clothes are an important aspect of connecting, creating and expressing that part of who I am.

In as much as I have lost a great deal, in as much as I have made mistakes and through those mistakes sorrowfully hurt others, I feel that I am for the first time in my life I am starting to regain my soul, connect with that great inner spirit that links me to the universe, to the great intelligence, to the real reason that we are here.

[Kate Simmons]

It's not just you Melissa, we are all feeling it. Things they are a changin' and there are some big ones coming. The old models will no longer work and our way of life as it is now will be a thing of the past. This year was just a taste of things to come and though they will seem to settle out by year end, it will start all over again in 2009.

Actually, it's really the best time to get a handle on who we are because it will soon become a paramount issue. How well we embrace our feelings for ourselves and others may be well be one of the keys to survival because when all of the facades are finally stripped away, that which remains is the real truth. I wish you continued success with your journey my friend.:hugs: