Saturday, January 26, 2013

Seeing myself on video.

So I had decided to set some priorities and delete a few things from my ever hectic schedule. One of the things I had decided to stop doing is the BodyBalance. This has various reasons, one very important one being that it costs me more energy then I get from it. When something is draining you, you shouldn't do it. I do still have to turn in my video to get my official permanent certificate and I was curious if I would actually get it. Recently I had filmed my class for that purpose but I hadn't send it in yet. I decided to take a look at it and see if it was good enough and if it would be worth it to put it on a DVD and send it in.


It's always strange to see yourself on video. You have this idea in your head of who you are and what you look like. For most people this doesn't match the outside 100%. Possibly it doesn't match completely for anyone. For someone like me, a transgender, it's even worse. I hate the way I look. The narrow waist, the wide hips. The boobs. And that's just my body itself. When I teach BodyBalance I go girly. I move different. I move like a girl. I even do the broken wing wrists. It's this thing most animals do to indicate they need help. They pretend a wing or paw, or in a human case hand, is broken, holding it up, showing the limp limb so others can see they need someone to rescue them. Women do it a lot. Gay men tend to do it as well, but they wave that broken wing around showing they are harmless and approachable. I'm not saying they are aware of what they are doing. It's a basic animalistic instinct we all have. When I teach BodyBalance, I do it a lot, with both hands. *shudder*


So I've come to realize this is one of the main reasons why teaching this program is costing me so much energy. Because it forces me back into the role of a woman. It doesn't have to. There are other men who teach BodyBalance. Most of them are gay. Right now, where I am in my process, it just doesn't feel right. This is a part of me that I don't want to be reminded of all the time because I need to focus on becoming whole, or at least more whole, more myself, and need space to let my masculine side develop. And suddenly it makes perfect sense.


There is another thing that really bothered me about the video. My voice. I sounds horrible. I sound even worse then I sound to myself when I am talking. You always sound different in your own head because of the resonance with your skull. I know that I probably sound even girlier then usual during the BodyBalance, but still. My voice really bothers me. The voice you hear yourself speak with is the voice you use inside your head as well to form your thoughts. It's a huge part of your inner world, of your identity. Because my voice still sounds very female, the voice inside my head still sounds female most of the time. And because of that it is hard to feel like a real man. I try to think in a more manly voice sometimes but it always becomes someone else's voice. I have no idea what I will sound like once I start testosterone. I really, really can't wait. Maybe I should get some sort of cold in the mean time, or drink more whiskey.


Follow me on tumblr and Facebook.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

It's not easy being trans.


When I first came to the conclusion I would be better off being a dude I didn't realize what it all meant. The statement in itself is simple: I identify as male. But it has huge consequences. It impacts your life on every level. One of the things it affects, that most people don't realize, is the past. Suddenly everything you have done in the past has a different light on it. A friend of mine once told me, ages ago, that her boyfriend thought I had anorexia because I wanted to be a boy. It freaked me out because I felt caught. Back then wanting to be a boy was my deepest darkest secret. But it also pissed me off because he was wrong. Wrong in the way that I didn't have anorexia because I wanted to be a boy, but because I was trying to be like a girl. And clearly I failed at it. I started dawning on me a few days ago how much of my past has been determined by the fact that I am a transgender. I hated my body and tried very hard to destroy it. But I didn't want to die. I never wanted to die. I just wanted to pain to stop and this horrible thing that seemed to decide my life for me that I was stuck with, would go away. Looking back I'm amazed how little damage is left from that period, call it a life time. My teeth are bad but some people have that without throwing up all the time. The nerve damage is pretty much gone these days. Healthy diet helped a lot with that. And I have a bunch of scars on my arms, legs and torso that most people don't even notice anymore. Not bad for over 20 years of self-destructive coping devices. But that's just my body.


The mind is a totally different thing. So is time. I can't turn back time and undo those bad things and replace them with events I wish had happened instead. I can't erase that pain, the feeling of loss. Looking back it seems like it was a different person all together who did those things, who lived that life. It wasn't me. It was some sort of alter ego that I created to survive in this world that would judge me for what I seemed to be but was not. When I look back I see this scared little girl, hurting and lonely, and there is nothing I can do to help her, because she isn't real. She never had a chance. And now she is gone and I am here. But I am left with her pain, her trauma, her memories of blood filled nights and the cold hard floor underneath her knees in front of the toilet bowl. I can not make that go away. I thought I had put it behind me, that I had moved on and in a way I have. I just hadn't looked at it from a trans perspective yet and that makes a lot of difference. It all makes a lot more sense now. It also feels more useless. If only... But no such thing. I missed out on most of my childhood because of this, my puberty and adolescence. My early adulthood is overshadowed by my transition process. And what will happen after that? Right now I'm afraid I'll never be a real man, even though I know I already am, boobs and all. But I will never have been a boy growing up, I will not have a past as a man. I will have to start from scratch from here on, as if I was a foreigner moving to a different country. The Land of Man. And I can try to fit in as much as I want but I will always be different. I will always be castrated, no matter what.


So right now I am trying to deal with this. I am mourning. Mourning for my past self who never had a chance at all, and for my future self, for I will never be truly whole.



Follow me on tumblr and Facebook.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Getting to know myself: give and take.

This whole transition thing stimulates a lot of soul searching, which was to be expected. It's very interesting to see what happens. Things I had set up only about a year ago with the idea that this would be a long term thing are already looking different in the light of my new life. And compared to how things were 5 or even 10 years ago, you wouldn't recognize me anymore. The results of my psychological tests are in a way obvious but also surprising. Like the diagonal line going from rigid: not at all, to confident: very. It used to be the other way around, even only 5 years ago. I have grown so much in the past 5 years, I sometimes find it hard to believe. Mostly it amazes me that it was actually the same person who did all those things.


For 25 years I spent most of my time thinking about other people. What will they think. What will the do to me. Is it okay for them that I exist. I spent a lot of time trying to not exist and to destroy my body. But I don't think I ever really wanted to be dead. At that point, I wasn't sure. I didn't know what I wanted because I was unable to be myself. I had lost connection to myself. All I had was the ideas I had about what other people wanted me to be and how I was failing to live up to them, except for the expectation of failure. I was walking a tightrope, trying to disappear, proving I was a failure and didn't belong here, and desperately holding on to life. It was not easy.


In the last 5 years I have learned to care for myself. Even to love myself though it's still not always easy. I've learned it's okay for me to be who I am. And I am slowly getting to know this person, this me who is surfacing. Turns out, I'm actually a really nice guy people like to be around. This also means I end up in the friend zone all the time but at least I have friends and that's a good start. I actually have some amazing friends and feel very blessed to have so many lovely people in my life. I'm learning a lot from my friends, in all kinds of ways. One friend who currently inspires me a lot is going to go to Australia and NZ for a year. Maybe longer. She is following a dream. The time is now. You never know if you'll get another chance than the one you create for yourself right now. I made a bucket list last month and am working on it, slowly but surely. And yes, travel is on that list as well. I'd prefer to change my passport before then though but that also gives me time to save up some money. I've come to the conclusion there are so many things I want to do, I wonder if I have enough time. That means I have to get started as soon as possible.


Getting to know myself also means learning what I don't want and making the choice to stop doing those things so I have more time to do the things I do want to do. Sounds simple, but is a bit tricky. I don't want people to think I'm giving up or giving in. I'm just changing my mind because I have more information. That should be okay. It's my life after all and hadn't I decided I was going to be in charge from now on? Yes I had. I want to do the things that feel good to me, not just what looks good to other people. A lot of the things that are supposed to look good to other people seem odd to me anyway. There is a huge focus on money while it's nothing but a tool to get the things you want. And then it comes right down to it, there aren't that many things we really really want to have, other then experiences. There is even a commercial by a credit card company that states the experience is priceless. That's what it is all about. Those memories, those experiences, those things you have learned, they will stay with you for ever. And that's what I want right now, to learn and to grow. But for that I need time to practice certain things. And energy. Which I don't seem to have. I'm not sleeping well. Something is bothering me. There is a ball and chain draining my energy and keeping me up that I need to cut loose. I know this feeling. There is a change coming and I have a feeling I know what it is. All I need to do is find a way that will give me some closure as well. Simply dropping it doesn't work for me. I don't like loose ends. I'll let you know when I cross that bridge how it works out.


Follow me on tumblr, and Facebook.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Three generations.


A friend of mine got a text today from her mother, stating she was in distress and needed help. Of course my friend went. This is not the first time I have heard about something like this: a parent asking a child for help because they were in emotional distress. Somehow I always get slightly mad about it. A parent should not have to ask their child for help in that way, no matter how old the child is. But it happens, more then you'd think. So I started wondering why.

Why is it that such a large chunk of the previous generation has such trouble dealing with their emotions? Why have they never learned how? So I looked at the generation before them, our grandparents. And there it is. The Second World War. We tend to forget our grandparents were survivors. They saw horrible things and survived them. Concentration camps, the horrible winter, living in constant fear. We forget these things. In times of peace, war seems so far away. No, we are not living in total peace, there is a war going on somewhere every single second. But we don't feel it. We don't see it. Most of us don't anyway. We shy away from the soldiers that come back from fighting wars in countries a lot of people can't even locate on a map. It's not OUR war. We know nothing of war. And we certainly don't notice how quite a few of us, more then we think, are still battling the results of that great war over 50 years ago.

Our parents were taught not to be vulnerable. Showing how you feel, or talking about it, made you vulnerable. At the camps, such things could mean instant death. For fear of losing their children the survivors taught their children what they had done to make it out alive: keep your head down, keep everything locked inside. A very effective survival strategy in the camps, but now the war is over it backfires. A lot of people don't know how to react to how they feel. Sometimes they don't even know what they feel at all. But humans are emotional creatures and not being able to express what they feel is not healthy. So they get confused and sad. I once read somewhere it takes about 3 generations to get over a war trauma. Yes, I believe it really does takes that long. I see it happening all around me; people my generation giving in to the confusion and sadness, allowing it to be present and working through all the emotions to come out more complete, more alive. And then they end up seeing the pain their parents still carry, not resenting them, but feeling sorry for them that they were not able to recover. They still have time. They can still claim their own lives and make something more out of it then sheer survival. I hope they will.

 
Having thought about this I came to realize I'm not mad at those parents. I'm mad at the war and the lack of help for that entire generation. That sure puts things in a different perspective. Seeing the bigger picture might help some people to let go of some of the anger and move towards a more healing attitude. Good luck to all of you.


https://www.facebook.com/TylerFokker