Resolution Revolution 2012

Greetings, friends; I have a half dozen other posts started and waiting for my attention, but I wanted to share this with you today.  New Year’s resolutions have never really been part of my life plan.  I have tried them a few times, and I have experienced that ever-predictable outcome.  We all know the drill: make a list of things to get done in 2012, set rigid time lines, and aggressive goals, and immediately start blowing it only to shrug off the entire exercise by the end of January.  I am taking a slightly different approach to the process this year, and I think it may interest some of you.

The primary difference this year is that I will not set specific targets.  I do not intend to actually reach an end point with either of my focuses for the year.  I wish only to improve in certain parts of my life, not to reach any particular milestone.  The other change is that I am no longer including gender issues as part of my quest, and this is for two reasons.  The first is that I am on a course, and the momentum is already there.  I do not need to push toward an end game – I feel that I will achieve those particular goals already (YAY!!!).  The other reason I am not focusing on gender issues is that my gender is not the source of my unhappiness.

Sit down, please do not panic.  There are no broad political or philosophical statements happening here.  No one needs to cry heresy or blow up the blogosphere with even more trans-political drama.  I am not suggesting that correcting my gender is unnecessary; on the contrary, I have to do it.  I am saying that if I could have those operations and make the final switch tomorrow, I would still be the same unhappy person; I would just be an unhappy person in the correct body.  Knowing that I will achieve my gender goal, I am free to focus on my mental / emotional wellbeing in the rest of my life.  After all, what is the point of reaching my goal if I cannot be happy when I get there?

There are two issues that I feel a need to work on this year.  I am not sure which is the larger or more difficult to address, but each adds a fair amount of negative energy to my life.  In fact, I believe they are two of the major sources of my unhappiness.  One problem I see in myself is that I carry a lot of regrets.  I spend significant amounts of time looking back over my life, analyzing, considering, and lamenting the various events in time and mistakes I have made.  2012 Focus #1: I want to work on looking back less – living in the present and toward the future.  The other issue will be a little more difficult, I think.

I have always been a very repressed person, and I think it is a lot of what drives both my terrible mood swings and my anger issues.  I bottle things up.  When something bothers me, rather than address it and risk an uncomfortable situation (and my own relief), I hold onto the emotion and let whatever issue caused it slip away.  The problem is the feelings never slip away.  I constantly carry with me a well of pent up emotions and hurt.  Those feelings build with each new event, until all the negativity bursts out of me in fits of anger and tears.  The worst part is that the various events are usually minor, and ultimately so too is the issue that tips the scale; but by the time the balloon pops, I have the emotions from countless previous issues that pile onto the one that finally pushes me to act on my feelings.  The result is ugly… and often ridiculous.  Not to mention carrying all that negative emotion around is just depressing, and it shows.

So, (drum roll please) 2012 Focus #2: I need to stop carrying an emotional cache.  Rather than concern myself with appearing unreasonable or being a bitch, I simply need to express the emotions that occur when they occur.  I need to stream my response to life, not buffer it.  I started working on this yesterday, and I quickly realized that I have a bit of a well to drain before I get it right and can express myself openly and appropriately in a moment.  Right now, my intensity level is still a little off pace with the nature of events that upset me.  The molehills did not quite become mountains, but they certainly would house some big moles!  Regardless, it is progress.  I do not think I will get it perfect, and I am not going to try.  I just want to do a better job of letting go of the things that upset me, and I think that starts with not trying to contain the emotions those events create.

There you have it, my plan for the New Year – leave the past in the past and my cards on the table.  No looking back, and no holding back.  Let it go, and let it fly.  Weigh anchor and weigh in.  I think you get the idea.

Ciao babes!

Kate

World's Most Amazing Friendships

I must take a moment to share with you all what a truly amazing group of friends my wife and I have.  We gather every Thursday night at our favorite club for "Family Night," and I am regularly left with a feeling of encouragement, love, and pride for this group of people.  It is a rag-tag bunch of lesbians, gays, straights, drag queens, and trans folks (well, I am still the only one of those, so I guess that makes me special - jk), but they are good and loving people, every one.

I have never before enjoyed such unbridled and limitless friendship and love from a group of people.  There is a reason it is called "Family Night," and I am proud to consider our friends my family.  It is better than any family I could ever hope for!  Whether it is open arms and hugs, or tough love; our friends always seem to be right there with just the words I need to hear in that moment.  We encourage each other, we support each other, and we educate each other.  I could not ask for more.

One of our closest friends in the group shared this little tidbit with me today, and I was so touched, I just had to share it with you.  I did not create it, and I do not know for sure who I did, or I would give proper credit.  Suffice to say that I whoever wrote these words was a very wise woman, and I am absolutely going to try to take her advice!

Love you all, and will write more soon.
Take care,
Kate

The Truth

I expressed recently my struggle with life by announcing the end, at least temporarily, of my writing efforts.  By way of explanation, I had begun to feel that the writing was not actually helping, but that I was just perpetuating more of my own bullshit.  I have struggled with anger and depression most of my life, and a lot of that anger and depression stems from elements of my life about which I have not been completely honest.  I was not being honest with myself; and in my writing, I was not being honest with my readers.  That is not to say that what I wrote was untrue – far from that.  But, in truth, what I wrote was generally an optimized version of my reality.

I pretended that I had it figured out; that despite the hardships I have endured, I was on a path to enlightenment.  The truth is that I was just hiding behind fancy words – sugarcoating depression with prose.  It is time that I deal with the stark reality of my mental state.  And so, I am going to share some uncomfortable truths with you, my friends.  You may want to avert your eyes (I would not blame you).  Understand I am not being sensationalistic; I am trying to clear the air, and I am trying to give myself a solid foundation from which to build a future.  I hope you will bear with me.

The Truth:

I am unhappy most of the time.  My outlook is bleak, and my attitude is burdened by the utter shame and disappointment I feel over the many failures in my life.  I am ashamed of my lack of conviction and my fear of confrontation.  I am embarrassed to admit that I am afraid to upset people, and that I feel an overwhelming need to be liked and appreciated.  I try over and over to break the chains and patterns into which my life falls, but I continue to repeat the behaviors that cause the problems in my life.  I am haunted by unvanquished demons from my past, and they invade even my happiest moments. 

I feel guilt and hurt and pain over things I should long ago have released.  I need to let go.  I need to get past all the barriers that keep me from finding my true happiness.  It is such a long list, but I must address it all and let it go:

• I have lived most of my life in the wrong body.  I am afraid (maybe irrationally so) I will never fully be able to resolve the problem.
• I feel the crushing weight of the hardships I have forced upon my children.  I robbed them of the things they held dear – an intact family, a loving father – and I cannot ever give those back.  Every time I see that their smiles do not quite reach their eyes, I die a little inside.  I have stolen my children’s happiness.
• I resent that I am now expected to provide the very things I failed to give my own daughters to another child.
• I feel guilty that I resent the expectations placed upon me, because I know they are reasonable.  At the same time, I am so afraid that giving over to those expectations will hurt or diminish my relationship with my daughters, I just cannot bring myself to embrace the situation.  That, too, makes me feel guilty.
• I continually feel like I am playing a part in someone else’s life story, and that mine will never stand on its own.
• I am afraid of personal confrontation and am embarrassed by that.  And despite the more and more extreme ways in which my inability to “disappoint” others’ expectations of me puts me in worse and worse situations; I cannot seem to stop myself from playing my part in their versions of my life.
• I know that I was and am a disappointment to my genetic family, despite a lifetime of trying to make them proud of me. And I feel like no matter what I do, that will never change.
• I never had an authentic conversation with my mother or father about anything.  They never cared to know me, and I never tried to know them.  My father is gone, and I miss him very much, even though he would probably disown me if he were still here to see what I am doing in my life.
• I regret that I cannot have the kind of relationship with my family that I have always dreamed of, but the fact that my dream includes my place in the family as daughter, sister, granddaughter, and niece seems to negate the possibility of ever having that relationship.  Still, I miss having a relationship with those parts of my past.
• I want people to like me.  Even when I do not like someone, I so want the person to like me that I am not true to my own feelings toward him or her.  On the very rare (practically nonexistent) occasions when I have been true to my feelings, I feel so terribly about it that I immediately reverse course.
•  I resent my genetic family’s intentional exclusion of me from family events and efforts.  This has always been a problem.  It has reached new levels; however, since my coming out.  What does it say, when someone would include you in a family email just to insure you knew that you were being excluded from the family?
• And most recently, I feel completely betrayed by the one person I should trust with every element of my life.  I know that she was trying to help me, but I was so emotionally devastated and embarrassed by the events that arose out of her help, that I am still struggling to get past those feelings of… well… hurt, I guess.

There are so many more little demons, but I think this captures the big ones.  You can see that there is a lot on my mind.  The rub is that I understand the irrationality of most of this.  I also know that much of it will resolve itself over time, and that I too have the power to resolve many of these on my own.  Some may never really get better (my family, for example), but I have to find a way to move beyond them in my own life.

That is my goal for the new year – my early 2012 resolution.  I must find ways to deal with and finally move past the demons from my past.  This is going to be hard, but I think what we can take away from all this is… that…

Katey is back!  Katey is back, and she is as healthy as ever (and she will get better).  

Thank you.

I Will Be Ba..

I have so much more to say.  There is so much more that needs to be said.  I will be back.

Please bear with me.  Please.  I will be back.

Saying Goodbye

It is with an empty heart that I type this final post.  I used to dream of being a writer.  I used to dream of a lot of things.  I think, though, I have reached a point in life when I must finally realize that those dreams will never be anything more.  I regret that I never made the effort, never took the risks.  I never lived.  I suppose it was fear that kept me from putting myself out there.  Whatever the case, my dreams have done nothing but create emptiness in my life, and pain in the lives of those around me.

So, yes, I am giving up.  I am putting away the "pen and paper," and I am giving up.  What I have written may have helped some people, and for that I am grateful; but the truth is I cannot continue to maintain this front.  I cannot continue to pretend that I am in a position to share wisdom, humor, insights, or anything else, when my life and my head/heart are such a complete and utter mess.  I do not have it together.  I am not okay.  Writing was supposed to help me work through that.  The truth is, I don't even know what I'm trying to work through.

I hope those of you who have followed me so faithfully can find your inspiration, wisdom, humor, data, or whatever it was you found here somewhere else.  I wish you all the best.  Ciao for now.

I am sorry.
Kate

Never Quite Good Enough

[Author’s note:  Sorry… it’s going up without revision, which means you get to read all the bile that came out on paper.  I did remove some names that I originally included, because I at first wanted those who hurt me to know that I remember them.  I later decided it would be better not to give them that satisfaction.  But I do remember every one of you who were involved in the incidents detailed below.  Be warned.]

I am so angry.  I have been angry for most of my life.  I have felt hurt, and rejection, and anger, and betrayal… betrayal by my family, by my friends, by my own body.  Think about it.  How would you feel if as a Kindergartner, you felt something that you instinctively knew would make people hate you?  What would it be like to know from your earliest memory that if you didn’t stifle the feelings that were inside you and instead color inside the lines that others defined for you, that you would never belong anywhere?  How would it feel to know that you had fiercely protected a secret, making yourself miserable and sick inside, only to be reviled, ridiculed, and hated anyway?  What would it be like to know that the lie you had to tell was just as much the reason you spent your childhood running, hiding, and being afraid, as was the truth that would have bred the same?

Imagine that life.  Imagine feeling so starved for that one sympathetic heart, that you would call your tormentors friends, that you would laugh with them as they mocked you, that you would walk the halls of a school feigning collusion with your classmates – the perpetrators of your misery – all the while dying inside; because the people who tormented you didn’t even have the right story.  But oh, they told stories.  They wrote them down.  They read them to me over the phone.  When that didn’t cause enough pain, they read them to whoever would answer the phone at my house.  They spread them.  They shared them in classes in front of everyone.  They laughed.  They writhed with pleasure in my pain.  I remember them.  I remember the worst of them… the stories about a girl named Tiffany.

I don’t know which was worse – that they wrote filthy rancid sexually charged stories about my fixation with a girl named Tiffany, or that they didn’t even write them about the correct girl named Tiffany.  But I remember the stories, and I remember the readings.  And I remember the revulsion on the face of the wrong Tiffany, the unfortunate pawn in a terrible game, and on the faces of her friends.  I remember the laughter as the football playing double bassist read the stories aloud for Tiffany and an entire room full of musicians – the one group of people among whom I thought I might be safe.  I remember the pain as if the quill still protruded from my back.

I hope it felt good.  I hope you all [names removed] enjoyed the laugh.  I hope the phone calls, and the locker inserts, and the handouts were all worth it.  You succeeded in making an already broken and miserable person hate her existence even more.  You made me want to die.  Oh, and my “loving” family… thank you for all the support.  Thank you for putting the blame for it all where it really belonged… on me.  After all, wasn’t it my idea to be born in the wrong damn body?  And wasn’t it my responsibility to keep such an embarrassing truth from being known?  And wasn’t it my idea to take all the cobbled and disjointed justifications for the lie I was living, and turn them into weapons for my own humiliation?

You know the worst part?  None of you even got the story right.  You took I lie I told to cover a lie (a lie that was supposed to protect me from the shame of being a freak), and turned it into a work of pornographic art.  Here’s the truth.  I was Tiffany.  The girl on whom I fixated was the person who was trapped inside me.  I called her Tiffany – I called myself Tiffany, because I remembered once being told that it was the name my dad wanted for me.  I guess I thought… I hoped that if I took the name my dad wanted for me, maybe he wouldn’t hate who I was quite so much.  I called myself Tiffany.  I wrote my name in my notebooks, so that I could see it, so that it would be more real.  I used the hope that seeing my name inspired to convince myself not to use the bullet that I carried with me.

You wonder why I am angry?  I hurt.  I was broken.  I needed help.  I needed someone to recognize me for who I really was (who I am) and love me for it.  Instead, you wrote stories about a perverted little violinist who loved a girl named Tiffany – a girl whose primary misfortune was sharing my first name.  That is, until you included the perversion of her in your twisted stories about me.

You know what though?  I survived.  Every day I live is a statement.  Every word I breathe is the product of all I had to overcome – all that you put upon me.  Your torture was the fertilizer in which I grew into a beautiful, strong, talented, and intelligent woman.  I am proud of who I am.  I am proud of the life I live.  No one else has to love me.  I love me.  And yes, I forgive the rest.  I forgive it, but I will NEVER forget it, and I hope that you won’t either.  I hope you remember whom you almost killed.  I hope you remember that the problem does not lie with those of us who fall outside the boundaries.  The problem lies with those of you who are building those boundaries in the first place.

I am a woman.  I am gay.  And I am proud of whom I am and of everyone else who finds the strength to stand up for who they are.

I love you all, and that doesn’t make me gay… just happy.

Peace,

Kate

Facing Unspoken Rejection

One of my big challenges in this transition so far has been weighing the very elusive balance between giving support to those who are working through this change with me, and fulfilling my own need for support.  It is a very complicated situation.  I know that my loved ones have struggles too.  I am not the only one changing, and I am not the only one for whom my changes carry hardships.  I recognize that, and I know that I need to allow space for those around me to adjust and figure things out.  It is a process, and it takes time.  But what do we do about those around us who seem not to be progressing?  What do we do when someone’s resistance to change begins to look more like rejection?

I know that different people will set a different pace in the course of processing new information and adjusting to change, but absolute lack of movement is not a pace, and it is not progress.  In fact, when that lack of movement happens amid waves of progress on the very same issue, that lack of movement begins to look very much like – and may truly be – opposition.  Okay, I know what you are thinking, “enough with this jibber jabber… what the hell is she talking about?”  So here is the situation.

I have two wonderful daughters.  They along with my partner’s other son converge on our home every other weekend.  Three of our four children have made great strides in embracing and accepting our evolving situation.  My daughters, in fact, are nearly pronoun perfect in their references to me… even when I am not around.  One of the four, however, has steadfastly clung to male pronouns and my old name.  This is most notable, because these references continue in an environment where everyone else is using correct language.  So the question then, is can I continue to buy the notion that this is just a part of his process, or is it, as I am coming to believe, really opposition to the change and/or to me?

I have faced a lot of rejection in the last few months.  It has come in many forms – professional, personal, societal, maternal.  Some has come kindly, some hatefully, and still more has come in some intermediate form – not quite hate, but not quite a quiet dismissal.  This is a type I have not encountered elsewhere (though I am sure there is more of it out there); this clinging to notions of the world that are no longer true does not make sense to me, especially in this situation.  One thing is for certain; I cannot continue to try to ignore the situation.

The fact is that I am on already fragile ground.  I struggle every day to keep my head above water - fighting to just keep fighting – walking a tightrope between tears and psychotic screams.  In this world, I have only one sanctuary – my home.  How do I keep it?  How do I maintain my one safe place, the one place where I do not have to be confronted with negative views of me... of reminders of my former self?  I would appreciate hearing how others of you have dealt with similar situations.

Thanks in advance, and peace!

Kate