I've always been Andrea

A friend reached out to me after reading my most recent blog post. She asked how I would like my friends who knew me before my transition to talk about our shared experiences prior to that time. Since she and I, along with her husband a several others, had spent a summer traveling in Europe during college, we have a lot of shared memories, along with a number of pictures to accompany them. When the two of them see those pictures, or reflect on some aspect of that trip (or other experiences we shared over the years), they find it difficult to think of me as anyone other than the person they knew at the time, even though they have been fully supportive of my journey.

Ultimately I cannot control how others speak about me outside of my presence, but I appreciate their desire to respect who I am, even when I am not present. Her question also helped me express some thoughts I have ruminated on concerning how I perceive and speak of my own past. Initially, it felt like that was someone else’s life, one disconnected from my current life. This feeling still persists at times. But the more I have thought about it, the more I’ve come to understand that everything that has happened in my past was my life, Andrea’s life. It wasn’t the life of some stranger. It was Andrea’s life, unfortunately lived without recognizing herself and unable to truly express herself. I’ve been Andrea all my life. I’ve only recently had the opportunity to acknowledge that.

When pictures enter the conversation, things become more challenging, because it’s harder to look at old pictures of myself and see Andrea. But it is Andrea in those pictures, just forced to live in a very different shell. In time that may help me look at old pictures of myself more freely. In the meantime, it helped my friends view those old pictures differently as well. They can recognize that they took that trip with Andrea. She just looked a lot different back then.

Such a simple thought, but such a powerful change in perspective: I’ve always been Andrea. I don’t have to think of my life so much as a before and after. I’m the same person. Only now I finally get to be a whole person.