My Story Part 135 – The Quite One

At parties I always was the quite one, just sitting there watching others have fun. Why? Because I had this terrible secret that if anyone found about it I would be shunned, I would be an outcast. The secret was I crossdressed. So I never let anyone see the real me and I never got close to anyone because they might find out.

I think women sensed that I was keeping something back and I never really developed and deep relationships. When I came out to my cousins a couple of years ago I wrote,

However, that was not the only changes that were taking place in my life. I was always the quite one, at parties or family gatherings. Well there was a reason for that.  You see all through my life I was deeply troubled. I knew I was different…

Now that I am out, I am no longer hiding a part of my life and it has made a big difference in the way people see me and how I see people. And people have noticed that difference. After my coming out letter, one of my cousins wrote back to saying,

The last time we saw you was at your father's funeral. It was actually the first time in my memory that we had spent any real time together. I remarked to [my husband] as we were leaving what a warm and charming host you were and how sorry I was that I never knew you well. Now I understand better why. (At the time of my father’s death I was out to my brother and his wife and I was also taking hormones. I was living my life as Diana all the time except for work.)

Before I came out to my brother he saw a change in me, he didn’t know why that change happened until I came out to him. I use to answers the phone on one ring, then he started getting my voice mail and he also noticed that I sounded happier.

I am still a shy person and I still find it hard to develop true relationships and I’m working on coming out of my shell. But I think you can see the difference if you look at all my Staycation blog entries you can see that I am doing things I never did before and doing it with friends. You know for over fifties years of my life my world was just the town I lived. I could count on one hand the number of times I drove in to Hartford and the only place that traveled to was to the cottage or to a relative’s house. I think that was one of the things that my brother noticed that I was traveling and doing things outside of town.

I still struggle with “people skills” if you look at my intern evaluations you will see that both supervisors made comments about improving my people skills. A few of my professors made comments about how they could see my engineering background in my thought process, I was more analytical. I think their comments were true and I believe that in part my lack of people skills was due to keeping my “horrible” secret. I withdrew from people because of the fear of being found out.

This November I will be a guest lecturer for a class on multi-cultural education at UConn in Storrs and one of the topics that I plan on covering in class is how being in the closet affects students. When they are closeted they become isolated from other students in school and the grades suffer. But if they come out, then they are bullied and stigmatized.

Last month I had another health scare and each crisis has brought introspection. The last one was in 1999 when I thought I was having a heart attack and as a result of that self-examination I came out of the closet. Where will this one lead? I do not know, I think towards a healthier lifestyle. I eating better and I am also getting out and walking more, I even thinking about getting a bicycle. There is a whole lot of living that I missed to catch up on.

I am also still working on cracking my shell and it is a hard nut to crack. There is a lifetime of conditioning to overcome.