Joie de Vivre

Transitioning is a funny thing. If you're like me, you spend a lot of time fantasizing about what it might be like -- years, in fact -- with very little realization of what it will actually be like to live as the person you always wished you could be on a day-to-day basis. The initial excitement wears off after a while. Things become mundane, ordinary. There aren't any highs to be had from conquering a fear, because there are no fears anymore. You get used to it.

Transforming yourself from male to female once used to be a small taste of what could be, and it was like taking a step into a new and thrilling world. Now that you're immersed in that world all the time, it's not new anymore. Hiding your vestigial masculinity becomes a chore. The thrill is gone, and you're left with an obsession over the things you wish you could change about yourself. If only...

I've grown a bit tired of this being the central focus of my life. Transgender is a thing that I am. I'm proud of myself for accepting this about myself. I'm happy with who I am now. I was actually pretty happy with who I was before, too, but I'm even happier with the new me. But being transgender doesn't define me completely. It doesn't even come close.

I don't try to hide it. I don't want to hide it. I also don't want to hide behind it, like this is all that I am.

Last night at softball, my teammate's daughters cheered me on with chants of "go miss Suzanne!" These adorable little tykes will never know me as anything but Suzanne, as a woman. They don't know there was ever another me.

It makes me feel really good sometimes, just little moments where I'm not thinking about the transition or being transgender. I'm just me. And I looked in the mirror this morning as I was getting ready to leave for work, and I thought, "hey, you look cute today." And maybe I don't get a thrill from dressing as a woman or wearing makeup, but I still like it. And I wasn't scrutinizing every little thing about myself that needs to be fixed or changed, because I'm pretty happy with how I am today.

I hope it lasts. I could feel this way forever and never get bored with it.

Ennui

I haven't really felt like posting anything here in a while. I haven't felt like doing much of anything. I've been wasting time, which is something I need to stop doing; there's plenty I need to do. I'm not exactly sure what I want to do now, but I do feel like a big part of my journey is now complete.

In Phase 1, I tore apart my life and reinvented myself. I feel mostly settled in that now. Everything I'm doing now -- everything that I am now -- feels more or less natural and routine, and even though I can't pretend that being transsexual makes my life any easier, there's nothing particularly noteworthy I have to say about it that I haven't already said three or four times already. This is just me, and I don't have much in the way of internal conflict about who I am or who I want to be anymore. Or external conflict either, for that matter. I feel pretty well accepted in society.

So maybe I'm just taking a break before starting on Phase 2: getting my life in order. I've said it before that as I made this transition, somehow my whole world has managed to come crashing down around me. The things that I'm not satisfied with now are more to do with my career and my love life (and, I suppose, my advancing age and the state of the world economy, but there's not much I can do about those) than who I am.

I'm not making any promises about whether I'll keep going with this blog with any regularity or not. Frankly, it was important for me to get some things out there early in my transition. Posting it in a public forum was, I suppose, some kind of way of forcing myself to come out to the world. Now it feels more just like exhibitionism. My private life should probably be more private. I've held back remarkably little in the past two years, which may have made this blog interesting, but my life is for me to live, not for others to find fascination in.

So, I'll probably be changing gears some here. I'm not exactly sure how, but I know some of the things I won't be doing:

• Posting mundane details of what I'm doing from day to day. There's a whole service (Twitter) devoted to that, if you want to see how dull people's lives really are.
• Posting links to trans-related news stories and other things. God, there's a million people doing that already, too. The world doesn't need another.
• Posting just for the sake of posting something, since I haven't done it in a while (this post excepted, naturally).

Aside from that, I guess I'll just see what I feel like writing about, if anything. Maybe people will want to read it, and maybe they won't. Either way.

Anyhow, the vicodin I popped 20 minutes ago is about to start kicking in, so I'm going to finish my glass of red wine then epilate my legs. Hey, did you happen to see that news story about the DJs who said those awful things about transgender kids? I'll find the link and post it here for you in my nightly update later on...