“You have to find the courage to be who and what you are and walk in that – yet if you cannot muster that courage – you must walk anyway . . . and keep walking whether you find it or not”.
I processed an imperative – given me by nature, the Universe,
(G)od . . . whatever – not sought by me – certainly not welcome as it came entirely unbidden . Yet what I choose to do about it was mine, I own it – and everything that followed.
She asked “do you now regret your transition”?
I pondered that for a moment, “that’s a difficult question to answer. Perhaps as difficult to answer as I now imagine it is for you to ask . . . “
“I feel now a profound completeness that only comes with a perceived bodily and psychological integrity. I would not now experience that without having transitioned gender. Yet for many years to quell the riot within me, I walled myself off emotionally from you and the children and to a slightly lesser degree my parents and close friends”. It was wrong, it was grossly unfair, but not feeling those emotions didn’t mean that they were gone, dispersed harmlessly into the ether. The irony is that they have been waiting for me like a collage of echoes, locked away in a kind of existential bank account. I may not have experienced them then, but I’m not off the hook and they’ve all been saved up for me now. It’s a kind of post-traumatic shock I think. I am free now to feel, to emotionally engage, and magnified by the passage of time, each monstrous act of selfishness, and its impact on you, has returned to indict and torment me . . . and I deserve it . . . all of it”.
"For I love you still” I said to her.
“My penitence, my contrition to you, inasmuch as I did not die”.
© 2009 Renée Thomas all rights reserved
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