Tag Archive | Losses

Looking Back at 2015

Jan17

The year 2015 will be a pretty important year for me in numerous respects. A lot happened and I learned a lot along the way. 2015 was the first year I lived as myself full time. My legal paperwork was done in September 2014 and I was full time thereafter, no looking back.

In January of 2015, I decided to make things happen and stop waiting for them to happen. I have one life to live and I decided I wasn’t sacrificing that life for my spouse’s retirement, especially since she no longer plans to be with me. So I cashed out one of my IRAs and put that money to work.

In February I scurried about getting paperwork submitted for my passport, which I paid extra for “express” handling and I got it just a few weeks later. My name, photo, and a nice big “F” in the gender box made me smile. March became a waiting game, basically waiting for April, and also further realigning myself at work as my colleagues continued to become accustomed to my new presentation.

I underwent FFS in April with Dr. Cardenas, in Guadalajara, Mexico, where I also met the amazing Anne Kelley. We shared a particularly powerful moment during both our recoveries that was bonding, and was a revelation. It was about Anne so if people want to know the details, they should ask her, but for me it was emotionally powerful to see someone coming to terms with themselves in such a beautiful and loving manner.

May was recovery. Let me tell you right now that FFS was far worse and harder in terms of recovery than my GCS, which came later in 2015. FFS was so worth it, but it was a bear in terms of recovery for the first few weeks. I’m happy with my appearance though and I’ve gotten compliments on it, and most importantly, it helped me to stop seeing “him” in the mirror anymore.

June was more waiting and continued recover. Friends and I began planning for Ren Fest in November. We always try to plan several months in advance to give people time to plan for a specific weekend. There were also details to complete, medical tests and exams before my GCS surgery, all of which had to be submitted to Dr. Chettawut’s staff in Bangkok before I even left.

July came and a good friend, Ashley Wilson headed to Thailand ahead of me by about two weeks. I did get to see her while I was there later, before she flew back to the US. And after seeing her, it was my turn. I awoke from GCS and really wasn’t in much pain at all, mainly just uncomfortable. They kept me pretty well controlled with pain meds and such. And my dear, dear friend, Julie Jeznach, had traveled to Thailand with me and was there to visit while I was in the hospital and to help me with my recovery for the three weeks afterwards. We had a lot of fun for the month we were there. I over stressed myself once, got scolded for it, then spent a day and a half recovering from it. Fortunately, no permanent damage. And I learned the tedium and the joys of dilating! And yet we saw things, ate fascinating food, met people, and Julie got to see the Tiger Temple!

In mid-August we flew back home. It seemed almost surreal, Julie and I going our separate ways. I also know that Thailand had been good for Julie too. Good food, regular exercise, walking (for us both as little as I could do) all contributed to Bangkok being a positive experience for us. But then it was over. I rested another week then returned to work while working from home. Working from home was a blessing. As circumstances turned out, and as the changes on our team at work developed, it would arise that I wouldn’t need to actually go back into the office until some time in January, 2016. The rest of 2015 was 100% from home, which gave me time to adapt to my dilation schedule, take breaks as needed, etc. Often my work day the rest of the year went past 6 pm, but that included time for breaks and medical necessities throughout the day as well.

September and October were much the same, except the reminder and the ongoing lesson that I don’t really have family anymore.  I know there are some who might disagree, but being ignored, having things said behind your back, pretending you don’t exist on important family days (birthdays and holiday), does not constitute “love” except in some sort of deranged “religious” mind. I won’t comment further about that except that their behavior reveals a lot more about them than it does about anything else.

Out of that comes a lesson, for me at least. We’re repeatedly told to remove toxic people from our lives. I subscribe to that idea, but implementing it in practice is complicated and is often a process, not a single decision. It’s a process because our hearts don’t always listen to what our heads tell us, and vice-versa. In this case, my head knows I don’t have family and I need to let go and treat them like I treated my father, someone to whom I was biologically related but who are anything except family, based on their behavior. But the heart takes time to let go, often not wanting to accept what the mind otherwise knows to be true.

The last few years have been that process for me and I think I hit rock bottom and was finally able to put this behind me in December of 2015. And no, there was no danger of self harm, just a great sadness and listlessness as my heart realized what my mind has been telling me for a number of years now – you have no blood family.

I also began an online dating experiment in autumn of 2015, and discovered that clearly stating that I am a post-op transgender woman, up front, is a sure way to not get responses from anyone except thoughtless men, who in turn blocked me when they did find out, or from identity thieves, whom I seem to be getting better at identifying, especially since some of them are so pathetic. Out of nearly 400 messages received thus far, only 4 read my profile and realized I was trans, and only 2 of those were really interested in some sort of friendship or relationship. Unfortunately, both of them were very far away and both they and I were looking for someone closer.

November was fun, with time at Ren Fest spent with my friend Elizabeth and myself both dressed up in garish costumes. But I think I want to modify mine more for next year. Maybe replace the heavy leather shoulder pauldrons with fur ones and a few other changes. There were also minor outings, manicure and pedicure, buying some new clothes, and otherwise enjoying myself.

November blended into December, and for the most part, I ignored the Christmas season. Dwelling on it too much was painful. And my mind and heart had to work that out in their own way, as I described earlier.

2015 ended and I was in a sense, relieved. It was over. Time marches on and 2016 is before us. I’m hoping to carve out time for at least one trip this year, perhaps back to Memphis. And maybe, if I can financially swing it, a trip elsewhere. We’ll see.

Choosing to be myself has had a cost, a saddening cost but one which I would still pay, because the alternative was no longer being able to live with myself. Despite rejection from those I’ve loved and to whom I’ve literally given my heart, my life, and even my finances for over thirty years, I still would make the same choice. My choice was to live and I am content with that choice, despite the costs.

September 7th, A Day To Remember

Sep7

Selfie_20150906-resized

It was 19 years ago today, September 7th, that I was wheeled into surgery to remove the remains of a tumor that had been destroyed by months of chemotherapy. Prior to that chemotherapy, I had been about 195 pounds. By the end I was around 140, and honestly probably more in the 130s. By the end of chemotherapy, most days were enough time awake to eat, maybe watch a single TV show or two, and then sleep, 20-22 hours per day. And then I was told the tumor was dead.

Chemotherapy was over in mid-July of 1996. I was given basically 6 weeks to gain a little strength, then the surgery would ensure that the remains of that tumor were gone.

What was supposed to be a 4 hour surgery became 10. The tumor had apparently been wrapped around my aorta and in dying to the chemo, it had become this rock hard substance. My surgeon visited me later and apologized for the extra time but said he was literally chipping that stuff off my aorta, like flakes of cement.

The tumor had also been wrapped around the nerve to the left vocal cord. That nerve is a bit weird and shows how evolution does things, not always in the most sensible way. That nerve comes from the spine, over to the heart first, then back up to the left vocal cord. There was no way to separate the remains of the tumor from that nerve so it got cut.

This left me unable to speak since the left vocal cord was flaccid and unable to flex to meet the right cord, since no neural signals could now reach it. To correct that, a plastic implant was inserted in that vocal cord in another surgery in early November of 1996. I still have slight numbness in my hands and feet from chemotherapy. My scalp was ravaged by chemotherapy and never really recovered. And my hearing, already a 20 decibel loss in my good right ear, became a 50+ decibel loss and I finally admitted that I needed a hearing aid.

Despite all this, I survived. But this all also made me think very hard about myself, who I was, what I’d done to myself emotionally and psychologically to get to where I was then. I also got to see my children graduate from high school, get married, go to college, have children of their own. It took me another 8 years, to about 2004, to really learn about and understand the words transsexual and transgender but I’d bought into another lie – that if I hadn’t transitioned early, I couldn’t transition at all. It was six more years after that, 2010, that the mother of all dysphoria episodes began that simply would not relent and which drove me to the brink of suicide, before I finally admitted I needed help, and with prodding from Julie Jeznach, I finally sought that help.

The rest, as they say, is “herstory”. People to whom I gave my life, my time, my love, my earnings, have rejected me. That’s their choice and I have to accept that, but it’s still bitter. And knowing what I know today, I can honestly say that I do have regrets. We’re not supposed to have regrets and I know that I can’t change the past so I don’t plan to wallow in these regrets at all. But I do acknowledge them. And if I’d known 30 years ago what I know now, I would have just walked away instead of worrying about other people’s emotions and opinions.

So I write this today with my younger trans friends in mind. Being trans can suck. People can be ugly, cruel, callous, hateful. But we’re trans and we can’t escape that truth. My advice to you, to each of you, is make your decisions for yourself first. Anyone who can’t handle the decisions that you need to make for you neither loved you nor is your friend so is not worthy of your consideration of their opinions.

While I am very happy with where I am in life right now, in one sense, I write this today to my younger trans friends to say “Don’t be me.” Don’t put others ahead of yourself. Don’t defer what you need to be happy to make others happy first. Most of the time they won’t care about you. Not really. And those that do care? They’ll have your back and be there for you.

Have a good September 7th, a good Labor Day, and a good day for yourself first and foremost.

It wasn’t easy

Dec20

I’m a bit angry tonight. Over at another forum where I am a moderator, people tell me that I don’t understand their pain, that I had it “easy”, that their situation is “different”. Bullshit. Let me explain a little bit of what I went through in reaching the point where I had to transition and what happened afterwards.

My wife never respected me for years and years, until 2009 when I outmaneuvered the stock market the prior two years and avoided the big crash because I had been paying attention. That was 32 years of marriage where my opinions were always treated dismissively. She wouldn’t have cared about that either, except when her father discovered what I’d done and in his eyes suddenly I went from that annoying son-in-law to some financial intellectual heavyweight whose opinion now mattered, because where he had lost large sums of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars, I had increased my 401K pool by 25% by placing my bets smartly right before the big Lehman crash. Suddenly my opinion finally mattered to him and therefore finally mattered to my spouse.

Of course, a few years later I came out as trans and that was the end of that brief period of respect.

Through all the other years of marriage, I convinced myself that my spouse loved me, etc. Once I came out though, the gloves came off. I was nothing more than “a penis and a paycheck”. I already knew she’d had affairs because we had intimacy issues (because of me – I fully take the blame for that) and I caught her in at least one affair (and suspect others), but she only stayed with me to keep up appearances to her parents. If it weren’t for them, I’m sure that she’d have left years ago. And I found myself almost wishing she had. Because the first affair that I discovered was the year I went from 29 to 30, a long time ago in my life. And if she had left, I would have transitioned then, I think, or shortly thereafter.

A great deal of my first year of therapy was with dealing with my sense of rejection, of my sense of worthlessness, and coming to understand myself, to love myself unconditionally, to realize that I do deserve to be happy, not miserable, and that I should not stay in a relationship that was ultimately abusive and destructive of me as a human being.

I would be divorcing her right now anyway even if I had not chosen to transition. I’ve learned too much. There’s too much water under the bridge. Her real feelings for me have been revealed though she later tried to walk her original statements back. But you can’t take back what you say. The best you can do is apologize and try to prove you’ve changed. But she hasn’t changed. We’ve had discussions that prove that. I’m still an embarrassment. She still wants nothing really to do with me.

None of us who transition had necessarily easy roads. When people say to me “Oh you just decided and did it!” that’s not at all true! I agonized over this for years and years. I fought it for decades. And do you know what? My own fighting this was stupid. My own fighting this was dumb. It was one of the worst things I ever did to myself. And I definitely did it to myself. Nobody else did. I convinced myself to be miserable for everyone else’s sake and when I couldn’t take it anymore, after 35 years of marriage and came out to my spouse and my adult children, I suddenly discovered that all the sacrifices I had made were stupid and nobody cared. Nobody. My eldest son flatly told me that I should have gone ahead and killed myself because “that would have been easier on the rest of us.”

Look at that statement. My son told me to go die because it would be convenient for him. His wife, upon hearing me coming out, was reported to have said “My god, what will the neighbors think?” That’s all she cared about. Not one bit about me as a human being. Nothing about the years I had worked, that I had put my son through college, that I had spent hours and hours playing with him as a child, coaching him youth sports, that I had helped him get his first job after college, that I had helped keep him and his family financially afloat for a year when he was laid off from another position… none of that mattered. What mattered was that I was an “embarrassment” who should have killed myself because “that would have been easier on the rest of us.”

I get upset when I see people saying it was “easy” for me. They haven’t walked in my shoes. There’s a certain transwoman who seems to love to wallow in her misery and thinks I had it easy. They (and she specifically) haven’t experienced my losses… because I don’t whine about them on that forum the way some of them do. I work through them with my friends, my therapist, and those who’ve come to be close to me.

So when I tell people they can do this, through all the pain, through all the loss, and that they can come out the other side happier, healthier and more in control of their own lives, I have a real basis from which to speak. It’s not frivolous. I’ve been through it. I’ve cried myself to sleep for two solid months over a marriage ending that intellectually I knew was a worthless dead marriage but that my heart was still broken over seeing it die.

The greatest regret of old people as they approach death is almost universally regretting what they failed to do, rather than what they actually did. I do not regret my decision to transition. I’ve learned so much about myself, and I’ve gained real friends who love me no matter what. Friends who’ve been there every step of the way and who’ve picked me up and carried me when I needed it. And those friends are who I consider to be my “real” family now – not blood, but love defines my real family, my soul sisters (and my daughter – my only adult child who has accepted me and supported me).

So to those who say I don’t understand their years of intellectual agonizing over the decision to face ourselves, I do. To those who think that I had it easy, I did not. To those who are agonizing over this for months or years now, I agonized over it for years and decades. And when I tell you to stop chasing your intellectual tail, it’s because I had to stop chasing my own intellectual tail too! When I tell you that there is life, and love, and hope after a marriage dies, it’s because I had to face that too and I found those things also.

So don’t tell me I had it easy and just dismiss my opinion. You don’t know me. And maybe if you did, you’d realize the advice I gave you was not “easy” advice at all, but given because I care and don’t want you to make the same mistakes that I made for as long as I made them.

–Cara Elizabeth.

Transgender Day of Remembrance 2014 – The Day After

Nov21

TDOR-2014And… not a word from the official Republican side of the aisle. The number of Republicans speaking about TDOR was small – like an aide to Christie Whitman read a letter from her at a TDOR event.

I tire of hearing that there are “good people” in the GOP. Where are they? Why do almost none speak out even on TDOR? Why do they remain silent in the face of blatant hateful bigotry that celebrates our deaths?

The Republican Party is a moral monstrosity. A hate machine dedicated to subjugation and demeaning of human beings who do not fit their white Republican Protestant middle class ideals. Blacks know this, Hispanics know this, Asian-Americans know this, gays and lesbians know this, and transgender people ought to know this though it seems a few of my brothers and sisters have their heads buried deeply in the sands.

Todd Kincannon, former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party, says “There are people who respect transgender rights. And there are people who think you should all be put in a camp. That’s me.”

Where were the Republicans when that statement was made by a former high ranking GOP official? They were silently applauding in the background and promising to gut ENDA if any transgender protections were included. That’s where they were.

Meanwhile, in the past we’ve had statements like this from Republicans in Iowa on 2010 when the governor recognized TDOR that year:

IFPC Action President Chuck Hurley commented on the Governor’s proclamation by saying, “Governor Culver not only failed to keep his promise to the people of Iowa concerning the defense of marriage, but now is using the power of his office and the dignity of the state of Iowa to promote sexual confusion and deviant behavior.”

Hurley added, “Iowans know that Governor Culver does not share their values. As if the Governor’s unwillingness to exercise the influence of his office in the defense of marriage wasn’t evidence enough, we now know that he is spending his time creating special days celebrating sexual disorientation. The question that Iowans ought to be asking is why Governor Culver wasn’t proud enough of his work to make his actions public?”

So if you tell me again that there are “good” Republicans in office out there, I’d like to ask you to point them out to me. And if you do, you will find that their numbers are astonishingly small.

I leave you with this thought on the day after TDOR:

“The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.” — MLK, Jr.

The silence of the GOP shines with a bright heat and I know from whence that heat comes.

I Had A Wonderful Ren Fest

Nov18

For the weekend of November 7-10 (Friday through Monday), a large number of friends came into town for the Texas Renaissance Festival. It’s always good to see these particular faces and this time was no different, though seeing me may have been a little different for all concerned.

We had another great dinner Friday evening at Vero’s Italian Kitchen. Saturday at the Fest was interesting, as it always is, and led to all sorts of fun discussions among us. Saturday evening we all got together at Willie’s Hamburger place. My only real regret that evening was a friend who had wanted to come this year had passed away a few months previously and was no longer among us.

We did, however, discuss all manner of things, as we seemingly always do and just about nothing was off limits, including my own recent eye opening experiences, at which the other women present said “Welcome to the sisterhood” and “Now you see what it’s really like!” Let me assure anyone who doubts in the least, at all, there very definitely is such a thing as male privilege and I’m experiencing not having it anymore at all and it’s both amusing and annoying. And further, too many men in our culture do treat women as sexual objects instead of people. Believe me, I’m seeing that too, up close and personal.

I also am having trouble getting my head around men either coming on to me or men just looking at me in a clearly sexual manner. It comes with the territory, I know. And intellectually, I was ready for this and even had experienced it in limited ways in the past. But now, since I’d gone full time back in September, it was actually getting common. I understand the annoyance of that woman in the video that went viral and believe me, being a lot older, I don’t look near as pretty as she does, but those comments, leers, whistles, and other things are definitely out there. One fellow at the Ren Fest even looked me in the eye before giving me the “appraisal” look from head to toe, even while he was holding his wife’s hand as she had their baby on her shoulder. I just shook my head at that.

Part of the problem is also realizing what my friends keep telling me – I look very good for an older woman. Now I don’t have a full length mirror at home but there was one at the hotel and seeing myself in that and ready for the day’s activities at Ren Fest, I realized my friends were telling me the truth. I have a pretty nice figure. Of course, it’s one thing to hear certain words intellectually. It’s another thing to really feel them in your heart.

And Monday was some obligatory thrift shop hopping, this time mostly at the Salvation Army store in the next town over from where I live. We discovered that me being over 50 meant half off every Monday on everything for the 50+ crowd and there was also a half off Saturday for everyone in case I wanted to return for that. I’m planning to take my daughter with me there and perhaps a few other people as well. It should be fun.

Work continues to go very smoothly. I work for an awesome company and I appreciate that very much. They’ve made this process easier than I ever expected it to be. I am completely accepted at work and thoroughly supported on any issues I have had thus far.

There are other things I considered writing about here but I’ve abstained because there is someone who stalks me through this blog. I’ll just let her wonder at my early and unexpected Christmas gift. 🙂