Coming into it

Blue rooms.

This is my second blue room in a row. It's up a switchback flight of stairs and a little to the right off the landing, across from the laundry room. It's a much deeper blue than that of my last room; the difference between the shallows and the deepest part of the ocean. Fitting, considering that I'm entering unfamiliar waters. I may indeed be out of my depth.

I'm not the only person who has come out as transgender this late in life. At 53 I'm starting over...really starting over. I'm trying to figure it all out, and it's a little terrifying.

Can I tell you that I've suffered from depression for as long as I can remember?

Wait...that's not right. I've been depressed since puberty. Until then, I was a fairly happy child, despite having the misfortune to be born into a family with a violent father and a mother who knew how to push his buttons. Despite the frilly dresses I had to wear and the many expectations of a girl in the south. Somehow, I just thought I would remain in that happy, genderless state forever (as that is how we all are in the beginning; yes, maybe one can pee standing up and the other not so much, but we are all flat-chested, prepubescent little saplings). At that point in my life, I thought it would all work out alright. I thought that I would eventually get to be like my brother - driving and wearing blue jeans and riding motorcycles. I thought the world would ease off the frilly dresses.

But when puberty hit, I felt as though I'd been thrown - at 100 mph - from a motorcycle that had come to a dead stop. The total loss of control. My body was doing something it did not have my permission to do. My mind raced back to health class, when 40 or 50 giggling girls had sat in the dark, sweaty from recess, staring at a screen filled with strange images of internal organs and passing around sanitary napkins and belts. When the blood began to flow from me, my mother and older sister wanted to celebrate my becoming a woman. I went to my room and lay on the bed, facing the wall. That was when the sadness came, but I lived through it. 

Upon reaching adulthood, in addition to getting what jobs I could find and trying to make some kind of living, I did what the world expected me to do. I was a woman, so I married a man who was my best friend, and we had a beautiful family -- the two best kids anyone ever had. But I was the world's worst wife. Part of me was incredibly happy, but a larger part of me was growing uneasy and increasingly unhappy. I did some terrible things, which I'll save for another time. I can't hit you with it all at once.

In 2009, one of our beautiful children, our daughter, died of a prescription drug overdose. She was only 25 but had suffered from mental illness since she hit puberty. Apparently that's a bad time for us in my family.

Not long after her death, I packed up my car to go on vacation for a couple of weeks and ended up staying in the Blue Ridge mountains with a woman who had been a high school friend. Since childhood, I had been attracted to women and had had affairs with them. But I never wanted to divorce my husband or divide my family. In the wake of my daughter's death, however, I felt as though each moment of my life needed to mean something, and it must be savored!

That relationship fell apart within a year. The next one fell apart in a matter of months. And the last, a marriage, is dissolving. I am living in this beautiful blue room in my son's house.

I wasn't, in fact, a lesbian. Last fall, I finally admitted out loud (because I had known consciously for some time) that I was transgender. I'm not transgender just because being a lesbian didn't work out. I just finally feel safe being who I am.

The temptation, as I came to this realization, was to continue to live in this body, stick it out for the years I have left. But would I be lying on my death bed in 20...25 years and saying, "What the hell did I do? I missed out!" Yes. That propelled me toward my truth. 

Would I continue to live in that closet out of fear? Knowing that plenty of people in the world hate, maim, and kill trans people every day? Knowing that I could be attacked just for using the men's room? No, I could not. I can't be peaceful if I'm coming from a place of fear. That propelled me toward my truth. 

So here I am, learning what I should have learned during that pubescent period - how to be a man. I hope you will stick with me on this journey. I have butterflies in my stomach just thinking of what the future holds.

And you know what? I'm not suffering so much from the depression now. My low days are related to situations rather than to a black cloud hanging pointlessly over my head. I can lie in this beautiful blue room and begin to sort out my new life, with the excitement of a child jumping into the deep water for the first time. A little scared, but a lot elated!

Peace, Jude