My Story Part 10 – Self-awareness

My earliest memories are crying myself to sleep at night praying that I would wake up as a girl. I had always known that somehow that I was different, I cannot put it into words, it was just a feeling. Then one day when I was in seventh grade for some reason I dressed up in my mother’s clothes and when I looked in the mirror I felt complete, whole.

Many years later, I wrote this poem about what I felt…

Lady in the Mirror

Heart skips a beat.
   Stomach flutters.
      Breath is lost.
I see me.
   I am whole.
      I am one.

I had always said that all it would take for me to stop crossdressing was to find the right girl. I know now that even then I would not have stop, I know many trans-people thought the same thing. They married and had children, only to find out that being trans was part of their soul, part of their very being. They ended up divorced, some messy others cordial and some stayed together. (Its trans-community little secret, there are many same-sex marriages out there that consists of a trans-woman and a woman.) So in a way, I was lucky that I never married.

I was the only person in the whole world that crossdressed or so I thought. I heard of Christine Jorgenson, Rene Richards and others, but I never made a connection between them and myself. The media always portrayed them in a negative way. So I never had any role models and I thought very negatively about myself, that somehow what I was doing was wrong. (There are still people out there that think that transgender people and homosexuals are evil, which results in feeling of guilt and that leads to a very high suicide rates for LGBT people. Some studies have found for trans-people a 35% suicidal ideation rate with 16% actually attempting suicide.) It wasn’t until one summer day that I was washing the car when I heard on the radio, “girls will be boys and boys will be girls, it’s a mixed-up, muddle-up, shook-up world, except for Lola”. When I heard the song “Lola” by the Kinks, I dropped the sponge and sat down on the lawn, and for the first time in my life... I realized that I was not alone.