Second attempt at a letter - trans

This is a coming out letter for people I know on another support forum in which I'm a moderator. It is a bit different, in the sense that it is written more as a story than as a carefully constructed personalized letter. It might be a bit rough but it is a step forward to me, I hope you find it interesting and I'm curious to hear what you think about it.

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I've been away for quite a long time, fighting a battle that has pushed me to the edge. Every day, I struggle anew, trying to find the strength to move forward, one more step with hope that one day I will look in the mirror and see my own reflection. Very few know what it truly means to be trans, that feeling of emptiness and numbness, always feeling as if you are lost and wearing a mask. It eats you from inside, your mind rejects your body and it creates a feeling of disconnect, as if your body is a shell and every day you wake up and try to cope with this harsh reality. For years, I went to bed, praying that I wake up and something would be different and it never happened. As a child, when I could still dream and see the world in color, I still believed that if I prayed hard enough my body could change and I would wake up as the person that I knew that I was deep inside, a girl... as the years went by, I stopped believing, stopped being able to imagine and slowly stopped caring.

I lived through other people, my body was wrong to me, I felt uncomfortable when anything caused me to view it as my own. I've always felt a sense of uneasiness when I viewed my reflection and I remember that at 22 I looked in the mirror and realized that I don't even recognize my own reflection. This is the horror that is gender dysphoria, it feels as if you are being strangled from the inside, that your body is wrong and that all you want is to be free of it. Somehow I survived for 20 years like this, since puberty, when the world became dark and everything started to unravel. I created intricate explanations for it as I didn't even know what it meant to be trans, I associated it with cross dressing. I had no reason to believe that through a very complicated process called transitioning, it is actually possible to change your physical sex. That I had a chance for my body to match who I am inside.

When I say, who I am inside, it has nothing to do with gender expression. I don't act in a stereotypical feminine fashion. I have some traits that have developed over the years but in the end, to everyone around me, I am male. It is something much more innate, as if my brain is wired differently, that I respond to the world and to others as a someone female would, that I recognize patterns in the behavior of women that allow me to predict their behavior, while at the same time feeling blind when I view men. Once I identified as a woman, suddenly the world made sense to me, I woke up from a long slumber and could see colors all around me, I felt alive for the first time in years. That's what it means to transition.

Unfortunately, after two weeks, I came out to my mother and this new life became a nightmare. My mother did everything in her power to convince me that I was wrong and in doing so broke me. Things only got worse from there as my mother outed me to my family and not a single one of them accepted me for who I really was. For years, I lived through them, lived to make them happy and all this time and as a result they never saw me for who I was. When I tried to explain to them how I really am a kind and caring person who lived for other people, they laughed and said that no, I was deluding myself. That I was self centered... again, an attempt to show me how wrong I was, that I was not really trans. Every time I talked to them, I sunk lower, became more disconnected. After the first time I talked to my mother, I felt truly suicidal for the first tie in my life. When someone trans feels suicidal, it can be unbelievably hard to resist the urge because of the disconnect from our bodies, we don't fear death and as a result around 50% of all people who are trans have attempted suicide at least once. I was completely unprepared to how hard it will be if they didn't accept me. Every week, I found myself spiraling further into the darkness, found it harder to resist the urge to end it all. I for the first time, truly understood and knew what it feels like to be depressed. That feeling of not being able to hold on, the endless abyss that eats at your thoughts and makes it impossible to remember how it feels to see the world as anything but misery and sadness.

Luckily, during all this time, I found support in new friends that I made and somehow coped. One nice side effect of transitioning was that I could at long last start writing again and I wrote endlessly, sharing everything, exploring concepts of identity, sexuality and gender and I became surprisingly social and open to others. After years, I started helping people again and this gave me the strength to cope when everything seemed so hopeless. Here I am two and a half months later, still struggling daily and doing my best to take one step at a time and move forward with transitioning. Before me lies some of the greatest challenges a person can face, coping with prejudice, breaking social boundaries and overcoming inhibitions, major operations, painful processes, learning new skills such as using makeup and taking care of my body and the terrifying uncertainty of how well I will pass once this journey is over. Hormones bring with it unique challenges as you pretty much go through a similar process as girls do during puberty. Being overly emotional and coping with other changes to your body such as hot flashes. You also rapidly start to lose muscle mass which can make you highly vulnerable to physical abuse by people who see you as nothing but an abomination. There is a period in which you can't pass as either a man or a woman as your body has not completed transitioning. Imagine the horror of being judged by others constantly, of people pointing at you and talking about you while all you want to do is be invisible and to blend in.

Luckily, transitioning is overall a positive process and the dysphoria slowly begins to lift, you feel more alive and everything becomes easier to cope with. You find a new passion for life and start to feel as if you are whole. No longer fragmented and lost. From the few steps that I have managed to take, I can only describe the feeling as euphoria and your personal growth gives you the strength to move on and face the challenges that stand in your way. The best way to see it is as a journey, a heroic quest, full of trials and hardships that you need to overcome and each such trial takes you one step closer to the great reward that lies at the end of it all, looking into the mirror and seeing your own reflection for the first time in your life...

So this is my story, I decided to share it because I've known many of you for years, I care for you and it has always hurt me that I was unable to connect with you on a deeper level because of how disconnected I felt. I can't know what the future will bring but I do know that many of you have been here for me when I needed you and have given me support when I was feeling so lost and alone. I will always be grateful for that and I hope that as I move forward, I will be in a better position to return the favor.

All the love and hugs in the world,

(*hug*)

Yael

 

Thank you so much! Both of your replies mean a lot to me. I wonder if I can change it to a coming out letter to my family... to try and help them understand what I'm going through. I would obviously need to change the part about coming out to my family somewhat.