Feelings, nothing more than feelings (?)

I want a new drug…

One that won’t make me feel too bad

One that won’t make me feel too good.

Huey Lewis may well have captured our American psyche when he sang this song, even if unwittingly. Accepting who I am, beginning to live wholeheartedly, has enabled me to feel more deeply and intensely than most any time in my life. I have cried more in the past twelve months than I probably cried in the preceding forty-plus years. Heck, I may have cried more in the past month than in the previous forty years. It’s not just about crying though. It’s about allowing myself to experience the fullness of my emotions. It’s about vulnerability. (There’s that word again.)

When I was hiding from myself, denying my true identity, I couldn’t risk vulnerability. To protect myself from that I learned, among other defenses, to numb myself. Brené Brown addresses this in her book Daring Greatly. She emphasizes that numbing isn’t necessarily about addiction to pain-killers, or drugs, or alcohol, though it can include any or all of those.  It’s about trying not to feel too much of something that we don’t want to feel. It’s about disconnecting from our emotions because our emotions are too dangerous. They make us vulnerable. “We’re desperate to fell less or more of something – to make something go away or to have more of something else,” she writes. We want that drug Huey sang about.

Now most of us, myself included, would be happy to feel all the joy and pleasant feelings we can. That’s what we want more of. But we can’t, because life doesn’t work that way. As I’ve embraced the fullness of my life in the past year, I’ve had days of great emotional highs, but I’ve also had some really deep lows. I’ve had days where I was barely holding myself together, and days where I felt like I was walking on sunshine (cue Katrina and the Waves). If I numb myself to try to experience less of the low points, I’m going to lose the high points as well. “Numbing vulnerability also dulls our experiences of love, joy, belonging, creativity, and empathy,” writes Brown. You can’t have the joy without accepting the potential (likely?) pain as well. It just doesn’t work that way.

Brown links our numbing behaviors to fear of inadequacy. We fear that if we reveal our true feelings, our “weak” emotions, people will pounce on us and destroy us, or shun us, leaving us isolated and alone. Our culture emphasizes those who are successful and strong. Emotions are for the weak. We feel inadequate because if we were only more ___________, we wouldn’t feel this way. We’d be able to handle anything that came our way.

What I am discovering as I embrace my true self and live in the light is that I am enough as I am. I am worthy; worthy of love, of belonging, of equal treatment. I am learning to accept myself with all the messy incompleteness that is me. Are there areas I want to grow and improve in? Certainly. But that does not mean I am not enough. It doesn’t mean I am unworthy. It just means I’m human. Accepting myself as I am has freed me to accept my emotions as they come, to feel them fully, to breathe them in and exhale them, without feeling like I have to hide, deny or suppress them. I try to be aware of the context and express myself within measure, but I don’t want to hide my feelings from my friends. More than once I have walked into my dance studio and broken into tears, because I know that’s a safe place to do so, a place where no one is going to judge me, laugh at me, or find me inadequate. We all need those places.

Tears don’t necessarily equate with sadness either. The other day I was driving to pick up a friend, listening to a beautiful piece of music on my car stereo and looking at the bright white clouds against the brilliant blue sky and I started crying because it was a moment of such poignant beauty. And I drank the moment in, not trying to hold it forever, just savoring its sweetness. Another day I was crying to a song on the radio because it awoke feelings of grief and sadness. I let the tears flow.

Sometimes I still want that pill. I want to not feel so deeply, to not hurt so much. But really I don’t. I don’t want to numb myself to life anymore. I want to live it in all its fullness, confident that through it all I am enough and I am worthy.

We Belong

In exploring new music recently I found this song by Namoli Brennet. I had heard of her before, as she is well-known in the local transgender community, having once lived in my current home town. But I had not listened to any of her songs until yesterday. I like this simple song because it communicates a powerful and important message. Take a moment and listen to it.

This song resonates with me as a member of a marginalized group in our society. I speak up because the transgender community belongs in this society, in this world, as full and equal members of humanity. I also speak up because efforts to discriminate against us, to push us out of the social sphere and back into the closet, are directed not just at us, but reflect a desire by various elements in society to exclude anyone who doesn’t fit a narrow definition of normal and acceptable. It’s not just about transgender people. It’s about gay, lesbian, bisexual and asexual people and others with atypical sexual orientations. It’s about women, who continued to be viewed and treated as less than men. It’s about various ethnic groups who are viewed and treated as less than whites. It’s about excluding those who practice a different religion (though religion itself generally promotes an attitude and atmosphere of exclusion).

 Anytime we exclude a person or a group of people because they don’t fit our own narrow definition of normal, whatever that definition may be, we diminish ourselves, we rob them of their humanity, their dignity, their worth. And I will stand against that and shout “We belong.” We belong in society. We have inherent and fundamental worth and dignity. I will not continue to run away and hide. For me standing up for the equal treatment of transgender people is also about standing up for the equality of all other marginalized and excluded groups and for all those who have felt like or been pressured to run away. We belong.

Contentment

The other morning I got up, had breakfast, showered and got dressed for my day. I had a job interview that afternoon (my first one in all my weeks of searching!) and had promised to help a friend with an issue in the morning. Since I didn’t know how long that would take and wanted to be prepared should it take me right up to the interview time I put on the outfit I had recently purchased for job interviews: a cute white and black top and a straight black pencil skirt. I had a little time before I had to depart to pick up my friend so I turned my attention to a few household tasks, the kind that always need attention but can be ignored when more pressing things call. Nothing particularly interesting, not even worth writing about really. Except that as I did them, I felt this great sense of contentment. In the midst of boring, domestic activities, dressed to head out for a job interview, I realized that this was the life I had been looking for because I am finally living authentically.

I looked out the kitchen window at the morning sun and rested into the calm assurance of being true to myself, of not having anything hidden that I needed to be ashamed of, of simply being me. Perhaps you experience this feeling all the time. I certainly hope you do. I have had moments of being content in my life, but for the first time in all my years that contentment went soul-deep; nothing hidden, no fear of someone discovering my secrets, at peace with who I am and who I am becoming, a solid, simple peace. Sometimes I look at the lives other people lead. I see them sharing about their vacations and adventures and I envy them, because at present I’m doing well to keep my bills paid. There’s nothing wrong with having vacations or other great adventures. But where I’m at right now I am learning to find joy and contentment in my little world, in my simple life, in the amazing, wonderful friends who surround me, in the crisp clear sunlight on the mountains in the morning, on simply being alive and being myself. I hope that you also can experience that joy today. 

A Reminder of Why I Share My Story

Yesterday I had a reminder of why I share my story so publicly. An old acquaintance shared a link to a satirical article posted by the website babylonbee. (I won't link to it here. It doesn't deserve the dignity of further views.) This website satires a number of behaviors from a Christian slant and has previously published other pieces that were derogatory and demeaning of transgender people. In the past I have shied away from responding to such provocations, not wanting to feed the trolls. But this time I felt the need to respond, in part because being silent contributes to our continued marginalization and in part because this is someone I've known for fifteen years and whom I would hope for more respect from because of that.

This person made a point of stating that the article was satirical, even joking that readers should look the term up on Google if they didn't know what it meant. While I'm quite familiar with satire, I went ahead and looked it up anyway just to be very clear in my response.

My acquaintance responded with this:

To which I responded:

At this point another acquaintance of my acquaintance, a man I do not know and have no connection with, jumped in with some juvenile remarks. Apparently he has since withdrawn them as they are no longer in the conversation thread on Facebook. Perhaps he realized how asinine his comments were. I don't know. But he essentially explained gender as directly tied to anatomy using rather crass terminology, then informed me that a swift kick in my genitals would make my gender clear to me. I told him that I really appreciated his clarification of the issue and suggested that he could learn something from hearing the stories of others who were not like him, but that he probably was not willing to think beyond resorting to abuse and violence. I coined the term (? maybe. I haven't seen it used elsewhere but am not claiming exclusive rights to originating it!) "cisplaining" to describe the dismissive, demeaning tone he took toward me. Mansplaining also describes an aspect of his attitude.

My acquaintance came back with this statement of how I could not understand his perspective and how my worldview needed to accommodate his own. (I like the way he starts with "Dear friend" which he probably intends to communicate a certain bond between us but which came across as dismissive, like a parent trying to dismiss a child).

To which I responded:

He has not taken me up on my offer for personal conversation on the issue.

This acquaintance is a reasonable, educated person; someone whom you would think of as a "nice guy" if you met him. He's a good husband for all I know, respected in his profession, a leader in his church. And he would dismiss my very identity with a few simple words and a piece of cheap satire. This is on the one hand relatively mild. At least he doesn't threaten violence against me as his other acquaintance did. But by dismissing the very identity of transgender people (and probably others outside of his acceptable worldview), he makes it acceptable to dismiss us, to exclude us from the rights, privileges and opportunities of society. He marginalizes us which allows us to be abused, victimized, dismissed and discriminated against. It's not a small matter. By accepting us as human beings like himself with full rights to dignity, worth and equality in society he would not lose anything of his own ability to participate in that society. But by insisting on his narrow perspective as the only acceptable one he would exclude me and others like me. And that is not acceptable.

So I will keep telling my story because I want people like this man to know that I am a human being with as much worth and value as any other, and I will continue to expect that society treats me accordingly.

My body and my identity

Last week I shared some thoughts on the struggle transgender women (in particular, though transgender men and gender fluid people probably face similar issues) in finding the balance between trying to appear in a way that society will accept them more readily as women while not subscribing to or perpetuating restrictive ideas of what it means to be a woman. Today I want to look at this from a different angle, specifically the intersection of transgender identity and body image.

I have heard from others and read some accounts of transgender people who grew up with such a profound dislike for their physical bodies that it was almost unbearable. I didn’t have the strong of a feeling. But neither can I say that I was ever fully at home in my skin. I never could match the ideal male image, but never particularly wanted to except in those awkward youth years when I thought I was a cisgendered male and was jealous of all the attention the good-looking, athletic boys got from girls. As I matured I developed a functional relationship with my body and appreciate that I had a spouse who was very non-judgmental about my appearance, by which I mean that she loved and accepted me as I was, whether I fit some ideal image of manliness or not. But I didn’t really like my appearance. I hated that I was rather hairy. I grew a beard for a period of time and really HATED it. The same with mustaches.  I dreamed of having long hair but never had the courage to actually try to grow it out. In the social circles I ran in most of my life such an act would not necessarily have been scandalous but it certainly would have been very unusual and looked upon with some serious questioning.

At the same time I knew that I admired the female form, not in some lustful, lascivious way. I wasn’t a peeping tom. I wasn’t a voyeur, striving to get a forbidden peep. I loved the feminine appearance because it was feminine. I liked smooth skin, long hair (though I would not say that a woman must have long hair to be a woman, nor to be beautiful), and various other attributes that are more associated with femininity than masculinity. I’m sure I was to some extent more in love with some ideal of feminine beauty than the actual diverse reality, though as I’ve come to understand and accept myself and as I’ve embraced feminism I have made great strides in affirming that women come in all shapes and sizes and this does not define them as women nor does it establish their value as people.

When I began to transition I finally had the freedom to begin to shape my outward appearance to match the person I was inside. I could find the outward image that best reflected me. This required making changes to the body. I wanted to reduce body hair. Hormone therapy is very helpful in this regard, though it doesn’t entirely eliminate it and does very little at all for facial hair (dang it!). I started with shaving my legs. Later I began having my chest and back waxed regularly (much easier than trying to shave them all the time!) and eventually started shaving my arms as well (though eventually I would like to try waxing those as well.) I often shave my face more than once a day. I still feel most self-conscious about that, but have had girl friends tell me that I look just fine and not to worry about it. After several months of working on various aspects of body hair I’m pretty happy with the result. I will need to continue to maintain it but don’t foresee any radical changes in this area.

I began growing my hair out early in my transition. Now, several months later, it still isn’t anywhere near the length I’d like it to be, but it is slowly getting longer. Thankfully early on my mother took me to her salon where I was introduced to a fantastic stylist who has worked with me since then to shape the look of my hair as it grows out. Beginning in the summer I started coloring it and really love the result.  I will continue to work on the length and will definitely keep coloring it, but I’m very happy with this part of my appearance now as well.

In terms of body shape, I did not have a particularly strong felt need to reshape myself. Early on I experimented with bras to create the appearance of breasts but after a short time decided that I would rather be my natural self in this regard. I have allowed the hormones to do their work which has definitely created some growth in this area and I am happy with the more feminine look it has given me. Some of the transgender women I know really want to have pronounced breasts, and that’s fine for them. I recognize that women have a wide variety of breast sizes and don’t feel I need to fit any particular image in this regard. Perhaps I’m fortunate in that I know many women in the dance community whose lean, muscular bodies often come with smaller breasts, so I am very comfortable with the idea that being a woman does not require clearly pronounced breasts. I’ll let the hormones continue to do their work but don’t foresee myself doing any other augmentation in this area.

Another area that many transgender women want to address is voice and speech patterns. I determined early on that this was of no concern to me. My voice is my own. It’s not particularly feminine and I will still be mistaken on the phone for a man, but I don’t want to change it. I like my voice. I guess I wish I could sing in a more female range, but that might take more than simple voice therapy and I’m certainly not ready to do any surgical alterations.

The big step of course for many transgender women is to have sexual reassignment surgery (SRS) in which one’s male organs are removed/transformed into female. I’m not going to detail the process here. You can look it up online if you’re curious. From what I have heard and read it is a very intense procedure, not particularly pleasant in the recovery process and incredibly expensive. Since most insurance plans do not cover this, it remains out of reach for many transgender people, whether they want to pursue it or not. That would certainly be the case for me. But the transgender community also recognizes and affirms that this step is not necessary to be transgender either. In fact none of the changes I’ve talked about today are necessary, because being transgender is not about your appearance. It’s about your identity. The appearance is only a reflection of that identity and varies for each individual. At this point on my journey I don’t feel the need for SRS and don’t expect to pursue it. Sometimes I think it would be nice to change that physical attribute, but I don’t feel a deep necessity to do so in order to be whole. That may still change, but even if it does SRS will remain out of reach without some significant changes in health insurance requirements.

My outward appearance continues to change as I grow into my identity. I like what it has become and feel a far greater contentment with my body than I ever did before. I can look at myself in the mirror and feel good about my appearance. It’s an expression of who I am inside, not of who someone else thinks I should be, nor of my own perception of what someone else thinks I should look like. And really I hope that’s true for all of us, whether cis- or transgender.

This is me after my most recent visit to the hair salon.

Thoughts on Affirming My Transness

I came across an interesting article today that gave four key affirmations for trans women who are learning to love their transness. If you haven’t done so, I encourage you to read the whole article here before proceeding, as I want to share my thoughts in response to this helpful article.

I strongly resonated with her opening questions to herself:  “Will I be loved if I transition? Will I have a community of support? Will people want to date, be friends, or hire me if I don’t look cis?”  As I have shared, the answers I have found are yes, yes, maybe (still haven’t really explored that), yes and…. well hopefully yes though at the moment no. These are very real, very personal and very poignant questions every transgender person faces as she or he (or they, or whatever pronoun they choose) makes the decision to embrace their identity. The question of acceptance ties very directly to our outward appearance, and in this the author explores some very pertinent issues.

We do live in the tension between rejecting false patriarchal visions of what it means to be a woman and the increased threat to our own safety and acceptance if we don’t. Most transgender women are not blessed with outward appearances that are going to get them on the cover of Vogue, or any other magazine for that matter. We are often painfully aware of how we don’t fit a feminine image, because our own minds remind us and even more society, both men and women, regularly reminds us. People reject us because we are clearly not “real” women nor “real” men (I speak at this point only from my own experience as a transgender woman, though I expect that transgender men face similar issues.) At the same time, many transgender women don’t want to fit into a particular mold of what it means to look like a woman. What it means for each of us to be a woman varies greatly, but the pressure is there to conform as much as possible to some social ideal of womanhood so that we might, hopefully, find acceptance and safety. It’s a terrible place to be.

However, on the positive side, we have the opportunity to help redefine society’s understanding of what it means to be a woman. Because we did not grow up as women (depending on how early we were able to accept our identity) we did not necessarily imbibe cultural expectations of womanhood. We have the potential freedom to express our womanhood in the way that best reflects who we are, and in this we join with cisgender women who are also fighting to liberate themselves from restrictive ideas of womanness. I personally like to appear more traditionally feminine. I like having my nails nicely done and my hair styled. I like to wear a dress or skirt and blouse, though I’m quite comfortable in my dance wear and at times a t-shirt and shorts. I’m quite fond of leggings! But I would never say to another woman, trans- or cisgender, that she has to follow my pattern if she is going to be a real woman. Nor do I accept other women or men dictating to me what I must or must not look like.

As I reflect on my own situation in light of this article I realize how very fortunate I am. I have the support of a strong community of people who accept and affirm me as I am. Most of my friends at this point are cisgender women who express their womanhood in a variety of ways. I appreciate the support and feedback many of them give me in choosing my attire, developing my facial look and in general fitting into a feminine image I am comfortable with. I also appreciate that none of them tell me I “must” look a certain way in order to be acceptable. They’ll tell me if an outfit doesn’t look good on me, and I appreciate that. But they won’t say that wearing it would make me less of a woman. In fact, I most appreciate my friends because they all accept me as a woman. The additional label transgender is not an essential part of how they perceive me or treat me. I recognize that not every transgender woman has this opportunity. In my ideal world, the label transgender would become unnecessary, because we would simply accept one another for who we are. We’re not there yet unfortunately. But I’m so thankful that my little corner of the world doesn’t choose to define me by a label.

So I will continue to define and understand for myself what being a woman means to me. And I will continue to welcome and cherish the other women in my life, both trans- and cisgender, for their open and unwavering acceptance and affirmation of me as a woman. I cannot adequately express how liberating this is. Thank you to all my dear friends!! And for those who are reading this who have transgender friends, be they male, female or fluid, I hope that you can offer them your full and unwavering support for who they are, regardless of what that looks like and how much or little that corresponds to the image others have of what they should be.

Sometimes it hurts

Since we’ve been talking about vulnerability, I want to continue to practice it with you here. I’ve been having a really difficult time lately. Just getting out of bed to face the day takes a lot of willpower. Tears flow regularly and freely.

There, I said it. I have hesitated to do so with you all. After all, I don’t know who is reading this, nor how you’ll respond. You may think that my confession demonstrates my weakness. You may think that a person who is strong doesn’t have, or at least doesn’t admit to having vulnerabilities. But in fact I make my confession out of strength and courage. I want to own where I’m at, own the vulnerability, own the struggle, even as I want to move beyond it. And I hope that by owning it before you, I may just offer encouragement to any of you who are having a difficult time for whatever reason.

My current struggle springs from several issues in my life, but the one weighing most heavily on me is my employment situation, or more accurately, lack of employment. I mentioned in my narrative about my journey that I had lost my previous job. That happened about a month ago. Since then I’ve submitted so many resumes and applications, written so many cover letters – and nothing. Not a single hint of interest. It’s crushing my soul. Every day that passes without a response I feel more and more worthless, inadequate, unwanted. In my better moments I recognize that no one is specifically saying this, but in our society, where so much of our worth is determined by our job, not having one really leaves you feeling worthless. When you have advanced college degrees and twenty plus years of work experience and no one even wants to talk to you, it can cause you to question the value of your very existence. I didn’t expect that I would find work instantly. I knew it would take time, but to have not even a single interested response to all my applications, not a single interview, leaves me wondering what it is I lack.

As I wrestle with these feelings, I keep trying to apply what I’ve learned from Brené Brown. In her latest book Rising Strong, she talks about rumbling with the stories we tell ourselves when we’re down. I’m doing a lot of rumbling these days, trying to get beyond this tape in my head that wants to tell me how worthless and inadequate I am and recover the core message that I am worthy and I am enough. When I hold on to these truths I can find the inner strength to work through the struggles, work through the silence, indifference and even rejection of others. It helps so much that I have a safe place where I can go regularly and receive the message verbally and non-verbally that I am welcome, I am wanted, I am worthy and I am enough. I also have the fortune to have a good network of friends who affirm this message to me regularly. I long for every one of us, whether trans- or cisgender, to experience that, because it helps so much to find wholeness, to live wholeheartedly, to connect with oneself and with others.

I recognize that my struggle with finding employment is not unique to me as a transgender woman. Many people face this struggle, especially if, like me, you are middle-aged and female. My former spouse went through a similar struggle a couple years ago and I didn’t fully appreciate how hard it was for her at that time, presenting still at the time as an employed, cisgender white male. Being transgender though does add to the mix. I worry about how potential employers will respond when they encounter me in person. I have yet to face this, since no one has actually interviewed me. Although in my city it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender identity (which is not the case across the board nationally, in case you didn’t know), that doesn’t mean a potential employer can’t find other reasons to not hire me if they don’t want to deal with my gender identity. I hope that will not prove to be an issue, because so far businesses in my city have not had issues with me. Having me as an employee may be a different issue. I have to deal with the fact that most of my work history was under my former identity. I’ve been making some former supervisors aware of my transition and asking them if they will continue to serve as references for me. Some have been willing. Others have responded with cold, indifferent silence, which means I have parts of my work history where I cannot provide a good reference, despite the quality of my work for them.

Being transgender further contributes to my situation because my gender identity is the reason I find myself unemployed. When my previous employer became aware of my transition they made it clear to me that I didn’t fit with their program. They were VERY careful to avoid using any language that implied they would not continue to employ me because of my gender identity, but at the same time the consistent underlying message I received was that I really wasn’t welcome either. In the end I chose to walk away because the stress of arguing with them about my identity and my job were harming my health and well-being, and I saw that it was not an argument I was likely to win unless I could find some significant legal support, which I couldn’t. But the simple fact remains that if I had not made my transition, I would still be employed, and that makes me very angry and very bitter. I was very good at what I did and I enjoyed it. I am very unhappy that accepting who I am resulted in losing that, but despite the pain it has brought, I don’t regret the choice. I just think it is very wrong that transgender people must make the choice between hiding who they are and keeping their jobs, or being true to themselves and potentially losing them. Cisgender people do not face this dilemma.

I’ve got a plan that I’m pursuing to get myself back in the game. Thankfully I also still have my basic needs met, thanks largely to family and friends. I know I’m not alone in this. I know that many people love me, care for me and believe in me, which really, really helps, especially in those moments when I’m feeling really down. I’m going to continue to rumble with my feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness. I’m going to keep coming back to the basic truths that I am worthy and I am enough.

The Risk and Reward of Vulnerability

Just the other day I was working at the local wine shop where I currently have a part-time job. As I was serving a group of guests I began to realize that one of the women in the group seemed quite familiar. After some time I became fairly certain that I knew her from the church I used to attend. People from my old Christian life cause me the greatest anxiety, because unfortunately Christians are often the most judgmental of all towards transgender people. Nonetheless I felt that I needed to say something to her, because if she had also recognized me I didn’t want to leave her with the feeling that I was too embarrassed or ashamed to talk to her. I approached her as her group left and inquired if she was indeed S_.  She affirmed that she was and then said she thought she had recognized me as well. I told her that she had known me in my former identity and that I had been on a personal journey since we had last spoken. We had only a brief moment as her group was leaving, but she spoke kind, affirming words and embraced me before departing. It was another in a seemingly endless moments of vulnerability. The old me would have chosen to avoid taking the risk. Why bother, since we weren’t exactly close friends anyway? But avoiding the risk would also have meant choosing to let shame and fear dictate my behavior, and I do not want to do that any longer.

I spent my life to this point hiding from myself and from others. I guarded myself from the possibility of vulnerability, because I feared what that might reveal about myself, or others. At the same time I longed for the deeper connection that comes only through making oneself vulnerable. Most of us protect ourselves from vulnerability to some extent, but when you harbor a secret identity that you cannot imagine anyone accepting, that you cannot even accept yourself, you protect yourself even more. And in the process you cut yourself off from real relationship. I see now how I starved my marriage of life in part because of this fear of vulnerability.

Wrestling with the ideas presented by Brené Brown released me to face the barriers that I had erected against vulnerability. By guarding myself against it I stifled my emotional life, my creativity and, ultimately, my own self-acceptance. “Vulnerability,” she writes, "is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity.” As I walked through my journey to self-acceptance, I had to come to terms with this fear in order to release myself to live fully and freely. As I’ve written, dance helped immensely in this, because it was the first place I ever really allowed myself to openly acknowledge my imperfections, to undertake something knowing that I couldn’t ace it. Because I had the good fortune to find the studio I did, I danced in an environment where being vulnerable did not lead to people wounding me. No one ever shamed me for my imperfections. No one ever said I was not enough (well, except for myself – and I still at times struggle to get that message out of my mind.) Instead I found that I was enough, that simply showing up and doing my best was rewarded with affirmation and encouragement, which provides amazing motivation to keep pushing on.

I’ve mentioned in an earlier post how I literally trembled with fear when I first opened my inner secret to another person. I made myself vulnerable and with it took a huge risk that she would wound me. Every single time I open up to another person after that it still takes a huge amount of courage, because each new revelation is a moment of great vulnerability. I never know how people will respond. Over time I have become more comfortable and confident, especially now that I’m not really revealing anything that is not already apparent on the surface, but there is still usually a moment of anxiety when I move beyond an initial introduction with a new friend, or especially when I meet someone who knew me in my former identity and has not been aware of the journey I’ve been on.  Perhaps we all feel a bit of this when we meet someone new, but when your core identity is such that society still has very mixed, even hostile feelings about you, the level of anxiety is much greater. In the end whether you are trans- or cisgender, opening yourself to another person is a risk, an act of vulnerability. It’s a risk worth taking though.

I wonder now how many opportunities for connection I have missed in life because I lacked the courage to be vulnerable. I don’t think it means that we have to open everything about ourselves to everyone we meet. For me it means that when I meet someone I don’t hide myself. I don’t shy away from the fact that I am a transgender woman. I don’t let shame determine my actions or my words. If I find that I want to build a deeper, stronger connection with a person, then I invite them into my life by sharing more about who I am, about the journey I am on, about the emotions I experience – all of them. This is what living authentically means to me. If you’re my friend, I’m not going to hide from you. I’m not going to pretend that everything is okay when it’s not. If you ask how I’m doing, you’ll hear more than “fine.” I’m going to let you inside because that’s the real me. It’s a risk, because you may choose to reject me. You may use what you learn about me to wound me. I choose to take that risk, because the deep, powerful bond of connection with others is worth the risk. I only wish I had learned this so much earlier in life. And to the extent that my friends allow me, I choose to enter into their lives wholeheartedly, accepting who they are in all its imperfect glory. I’m not going to be the perfect friend, but I’m going to be there for my friends, because the risk of being vulnerable with one another is worth the reward of the connection we can make.

Shame, Vulnerability and Self-Worth

In the process of expanding my understanding and expression of myself through dance, I encountered an author whose work would come to significantly influence my development. I first came across Brené Brown in a TED presentation she gave on vulnerability. I’ll insert it here in case you’ve never seen it.

On the one hand what she said seems so straightforward as to be self-apparent, yet at the same time for me it was as if a curtain was lifted from my mind and I could finally begin to understand some things that had never made sense. The connection between vulnerability and shame fit my life situation very accurately.

Many months after watching that first video, someone shared with me a copy of Brown’s book Daring Greatly. Subtitled How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead, this book proved truly transformational. I’m not usually one to read books like this, but I found it so powerful that after returning the copy that had been loaned to me, I went and bought my own and read it again, this time making tons of marks and notes as I read.

As in her TED presentation, Brown draws the connection between shame, vulnerability and weakness. I had never thought of shame before I began to explore my identity, but her discussion of it resonated with my own experience in life. Why had I never shared this aspect of myself with anyone before?  Because I was ashamed of myself and afraid of what people would think of me. “Shame,” she writes, “is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”  That describes very well how I perceived myself most of my life. I’m not going to unpack for you all the ways that this impacted my development as a person and my actions throughout my life, but it most certainly kept me from developing confidence in myself, from taking risks and from revealing my deepest thoughts and struggles. I believed in my heart that I was not enough. As she writes elsewhere, “If we don’t come to terms with our shame, our struggles, we start believing that there’s something wrong with us—that we’re bad, flawed, not good enough—and even worse, we start acting on those beliefs.”

I believe now that part of the reason I chose to become a missionary was in the unspoken, unrecognized belief that if somehow I could do enough good as a missionary it would make me worthy, acceptable, good and specifically that I could be loved by God. Naturally when that all fell apart it left me feeling only more worthless and flawed. I think that the Christian church often communicates this very message. Even as Christians speak of God’s unconditional love for people, they also insist on emphasizing that we’re so fundamentally flawed that there’s no hope for us. So we inculcate in people, at least people like me, a sense of shame so deep that it cannot ever be erased. And if, like me, your identity lies outside of traditional understandings of gender, that only makes you even more flawed. Since you cannot talk about it, your sense of shame becomes ever deeper.

Brown argues that we must learn to take off the armor we put on to protect ourselves from being wounded, from revealing our shame, from being vulnerable, if we are going to live full and authentic lives. This challenge, coming at a time when I was beginning to reach an understanding of myself, provided an open window to my dark internal prison. All of my life shame, the belief that I was unworthy of love, had kept me from loving myself, from opening myself fully to others, from embracing who I am. I robbed myself and others of the richer experience of a full and authentic me. As I read and processed Brown’s book I began to reorient my thinking from “I’m not enough. I’m unworthy” to “I am enough. I am worthy of love.” It’s a message I had to tell myself over and over (and still do!) but like water dripping on a stone it began to have an effect. I began to find the courage to love and be myself and to open myself to others, ever so slowly and hesitantly, but the door had finally opened a crack.