How Do YOU Spell Escape?

It seems as if my whole life I have been trying to escape reality. 

As a young teenager I had very few resources but I quickly found that losing myself in books or movies worked as a fairly good method for forgetting my own life for a little while.

As I got a bit older though I fell onto the path of least resistance:  drugs & alcohol.  Around the time I was a junior in high school I started with beer.  Eventually I found people who had access to drugs.  Marijuana mostly for a long while.  Beer and cheap wine, and marijuana seemed a decent solution.  I was able to numb my senses and dull my reality, and while under the influence it was easy to stop thinking about myself, about how wrong I was.  That kind of escape is very truly the road to destruction.  And I was definitely heading in that direction.

Eventually though, fate or karma or God intervened, and brought Sue into my life.  What a shocker that was at first.  But being with Sue seemed so good, so right.  I found that there was this thing called love in me (who would've known!) and once I let that cat out of the bag a much better escape presented itself.  I could learn how to live as a man.  No big deal.  That was what the world saw me as anyway.  So why couldn't I do it?  It sure worked for the longest time.  I was able to stumble along posing as a man, learned how to behave as expected, got my part down fairly well.  This really seemed to be the answer.  I lived the part so well I that those thoughts of gender wrongness seemed to fade far into the background, no longer needing any consideration.

Now why couldn't things have stayed that way?  Everybody seemed fairly happy.  Things seemed to be going smoothly along.  Unfortunately those feelings of gender incongruity were still festering down in the cellar of my soul.  It began reaching more & more into through my subconscious and eventually got back into my everyday thoughts.  Yikes!  Now what do I do?

I became convinced that the way I was living, and seemingly successfully, just wasn't going to keep working anymore.  I did NOT want to go back to drugs so instead I turned back to alcohol.  I learned that it was easiest to drink hard liquor.  Less input for more effect.  My poison of choice was scotch whiskey.  Big bottles of it.  A tall stiff drink (sometimes two) at night seemed to do the trick.  For a while this was helping just like when I was younger.  My reality would fade far back for awhile. 

After a longish time of this stupidity I knew it wasn't going to work.  I just knew that I could not continue in this manner without some big, bad thing happening.  And Sue didn't miss anything either.  She knew something was going on.  I was getting more & more quiet and sullen and angry.  So far nothing I had ever done with my life would make my gender dysphoria disappear.

Then I had an epiphany of sorts.  Since I couldn't make it go away, would it be possible to embrace it?  Could I accept who I really was?  Could I find some way fix myself, so that I could live the rest of my life correctly?

I began researching what being transgender is really about.  I learned that there were in fact things I could do to change myself.  And I learned that I wasn't the only one out there going through this.  I went on a mission to do whatever it would take to transition from my incorrect male life to a totally correct female one. 

My one and only concern, my biggest worry, was that I would lose Sue.  How could I expect her to remain in our relationship after she found out the truth about me?  But you know what?  Fate or karma or God were still involved in this thing.  Learning the truth about me was very traumatic for Sue as was expected.  She had so many doubts about me.  She lost so much trust in me.  But she didn't lose her love for me.  She wanted to stay with me.  Wow!

Through it all, I was always able to find momentary relief in books and movies.  Small things can sometimes work.

So my escape mechanism the past few years has been to find ways to live as my true self. 
Is that really an escape anymore?

It Hurts

It hurts when your sister never talks to you.  It hurts when your brother turns away when you are in the middle of talking to him.  It hurts when your father expresses love & affection toward your siblings, but not toward you.

It hurts when you stop and consider all the hatred in this world.

Ahhh..... this stuff hurts so very much.

The Balance

Not fair, really.  The balance of life.  Most of my anger and impatience have disappeared.  But now Sue is burdened with an overabundance of impatience.  The nightmare I used to have, the life I used to have, is gone.  But now Sue is stuck with that nightmare in reverse. 

And it all just keeps rolling along.....