Maiden’s Journey

For the past few weeks I have been feeling pretty down and trapped in my life which has felt both unfulfilling and without hope of change for the better.  I’m wondering if that was part of the appeal of transitioning and starting a new life as Nicola. It is a very clear and obvious break with the past, but even with the many risks and downsides, it would create some kind of freedom.  I might lose my marriage, but I would be free to live on my terms without having to compromise and accommodate the needs of another.  I might lose my family, but I would be freed from their expectations of me and who I should be.  I might lose my career, but that would free me to try something new.  For all that these fears of losing everything are terrifying and reasons not to transition and to hide firmly in the back of my closet, they are also secretly attractive to me.  In some ways I think this attraction is related to the way I have been feeling since the university visit...

I have missed a few days and given that nothing is happening vis a vis transition, there is probably not much to say anymore, and certainly not enough of interest to warrant a daily blog. So I shall switch to weekly and see how that goes.  Maybe things could change in the future and I will have more to share, but for that to work, I would need to be actually doing something.  I have been continuing to grapple with understanding why any time I visit a university campus, I am plunged into weeks of despair and feelings of hopelessness.  A huge part of it is looking back on the past and remembering the happier times. Not that I probably was that happy in truth, just the benefit of rose-tinted memory, but the clear implication is that however real it was, it was still better than how I feel now. The thing is though, most of the time, I don’t notice that much whether I’m happy or not, life is so busy that I’m just doing all the time and have limited time to evaluate. Campus tou...

Maybe this crisis had been coming for a while but the trigger that tipped me over the edge was visiting a university campus open day with the teenager. We had been to a couple some time last year and it had the same effect on me then.  Why is this?  Why does going to a campus cause me to collapse into a depression that it takes me weeks to recover from and which also seems to kill off any hope around my gender? I think the gender part is the easiest to explain. Being around young women confronts me with what I’m not. It is not something that I have ever really been consciously aware of, but the picture of me (Nicola) in my mind is about twenty. And that is long gone. So I see a young woman looking how I imagine I want to be and I think that could be me and then (particularly when this really hit me last year as I saw a reflection of myself at the same time) I am hit with the realisation that this is not the case at all. It is more than just feelings of leaving it too late or s...

Not sure why, but I chose some female underwear today, having reverted to male for the past week.   Maybe I thought it might re-ignite my trans feelings or desire to do something.  Short answer: no. I just didn't really feel anything.  Well, less comfortable, but that's not a positive.   Whatever it was that I was feeling and which was driving me on to want to take steps and radically change my life has somehow gone. I tried putting on a bra too and that didn't feel affirming either.   What has happened to me?   This is an interesting thing to ponder.   Does it mean that I was never really trans at all, and having had a revelation that it is unlikely to make me happy (likely the contrary) has broken the spell?  Was I jut kidding myself all along?  Lying to myself?  Being selective with what I choose to believe (and write about) to fit a narrative? I don't know.  Perhaps? Not consciously of course, I haven't ...

Maybe work helps to distract me, as I don't feel quite as low today.  Or maybe just differently sad.  Work has annoyed me, but it's different to despairing about not having the life I want and giving up on everything.  So that makes a pleasant change.   It was the final of a TV quiz show today and one of the team captains is non-binary.  In earlier rounds of the series they've had a female look. with make-up and earrings but ambiguous clothing.  For the final, they really went to town though, with a nice dress.  It was great to see some representation on mainstream TV and for it not to be a thing, they just were wearing a dress and that was fine.   Surprisingly, my wife didn't comment.  I'm sure she thought it was odd but I think maybe she was more accepting of someone being obviously male but dressing, rather than someone who is trying to be female, which she doesn't accept.  I suppose I could have asked her but that seems lik...

I would have hoped to be starting to recover some sort of equilibrium by now but today I've felt worse if anything. Probably not helped by packing away all my female clothing and removing the last of my 'small steps', the nail polish on my toes.  I didn't know, but I now discover that leaving your nails painted for a prolonged period must be bad for them, as now I've taken the polish off, many of them have brown patches.  Hopefully, that will go away, or at least grow out.  The things you learn about being a woman!   After a week of being miserable, my wife finally noticed.  Not in a supportive way.  More that me being down is annoying her.  That is as much support as I can ever hope for there.   All things considered, another bad day.  Trouble is, I can't see any prospect of good days on the horizon.  I need something to look forward to and I just don't have anything right now.      

Today I have just felt really low all day.  Maybe, as it is the weekend, not having the distraction of work has allowed me to feel what I have been able to push aside during the week.  Mostly it is coming to me as questions.  Big unproductive questions like ‘what is the point’ which can’t be answered and aren’t very helpful.  Also more pertinent but equally unanswerable questions such as how should I think of and relate to women if I take away the wish to emulate them?  And how can I hope to be one of the girls when I’m ostensibly a man, without coming across wrong?  It has occurred to me that maybe I should just come out and tell the world that I am trans, although I’m not transitioning so that I can then be the person I want to be. And somehow that kind of coming out feels much less scary than saying I am transitioning, maybe because it is just information with no impact on the recipients, whereas I am transitioning does bring change. I’m sure it’s a bad ...

Considering the loss of all my dreams, I am surprised that I am not feeling a great deal sadder than I actually am. That’s not say that I’m happy. I am in fact really quite sad. Just not as miserable as I might have expected.  Partly I think it’s because I have been busy at work this week and have been able to distract myself from thinking about things, except when writing this blog of course.  When I do try to figure what kind of life I might have if I’m not going to have the life I have been dreaming of, then pretty much all I can come up with so far is to do more work and lose myself in that. I guess that would be fine but it doesn’t really sound fulfilling.  I think the other part of why I am not quite as unhappy as I might be, is that I do feel some sense of relief. I had built up in my head this idea of coming out being this big scary thing, and had all these fears of what I would lose and how bad everything would be for me if I did. Perhaps it isn’t surprising then...

Having come to some sort of conclusion, or perhaps a better word would be resignation, that my transitioning to Nicola is impossible, what do I do now? I have given up on what little that I was doing, and that much is simple.  I can hide my female clothing away and let my body hair grow back (which it already is with annoying rapidity!).   That changes something, but doesn't change who or what I am.  I am still trans and still a woman, whether I pursue that openly or hide it away.  This is a permanent feature of me and isn't going to change.   Giving up on transitioning (at least for the time being) will not make that go away, and at some point, this might become a problem.  Best case scenario is some level of regret in the future.  Worst case, I don't know.   My other concern is a lack of dreams.   I am very much a person who exists today on the basis that the future will be better, or different at least.  I don't re...

 Today is International Women's Day and the firm was doing various events related to that.   To be honest, I don't really approve of the corporate (mis)appropriation of IWD.  For one thing, it seems somewhat hypocritical when the rest of the year many organisations do nothing and the gender pay gap and glass ceilings remain intact.  Moreso though, whilst these are problems, they are very much first-world problems. I think the corporatisation of IWD ignores the international part, which is surely the point of the event, to highlight to appalling ways in which women and girls have to live in some parts of the world.  I didn't see any corporate events talking about that.   I had two meetings today which showed IWD in contrast.  The first was with a female leader of a business, runs a female entrepreneurship network.  One of the things we touched on was how little private equity investment goes to female founders (depending on your source, i...