cw: transphobia, sexual violence, COVID-19
Hey,
Every so often, but in particular around big milestones or anniversaries, I try to check in with myself around my transition and how I’m feeling about things. Among the questions I ask myself:
Would you go back, if you could?
This month was… a lot.
My birthday was at the beginning of March. It was my 37th since being alive but my first as Bridget. My birthday this year felt… freeing, in a way I’m not used to with my birthday. It’s hard to explain.
That birthday came at the end of my first week at the new job. So, of course, I was buzzing by the time the weekend rolled around.
The difficult stuff came soon after.
The following week, while coming home from work, I survived an attempted sexual assault. I won’t go into details, except to say that I managed to get away, and I was thankfully not physically hurt. But it shook me, and I’m still struggling to process it.
In the coming days, awareness of the scale of the COVID-19 outbreak started reaching critical mass. By that weekend, people were starting to voluntarily quarantine at home. A week later, it became a government order.
At work, my new-hire training wrapped up a week and a half ahead of schedule. They needed me to be able to do my job un-observed and without hand-holding immediately. While I was glad to be useful, being in a patient-facing role at a primary care clinic in the middle of a public health crisis while everyone is scared and angry has been hell.
I’ve had to carry a lot this month, and I’m not doing it nearly as well as I’ve let on.
I’m writing this on March 29th. It’s the one-year anniversary of one of the biggest days of my life. In a single evening, in the span of four hours, I made my change of name and pronouns “official” and also confessed my feelings to my now-partner.
In many ways they’re bound up together by more than just proximity. It took me a long time to get to where I needed to be— for transition, for figuring out who I was. And for a while I wasn’t sure I would ever make it. (I’ve said it before, but: I never even thought I’d live this long.) But I made it, and she was the first person I saw on the other side. That has to mean something.
A year ago we had to have that mutual confessional over Facebook messenger, and even after everything that happened and was happening, all I wanted in the world was to be in the same space with her. This year we laid in bed and cuddled and watched Steven Universe.
I spent a long time trying to figure out if I was really trans. Like, if I could just solve this puzzle then everything would work itself out. And that cost me years of my life.
At some point the question stopped being “am I a girl” or “am I something that is not a boy.” The question became, “what kind of life do I want for myself?” Once that clarified, things became simpler, if not exactly easier.
It turned out the life I wanted for myself included being a girl, but it was more than that. I wanted to have the kind of life where I wasn’t afraid to tell my friends that I loved them. I wanted to have the kind of life where I didn’t beat myself up for crying at the movies. I wanted to have the kind of life where I was present and honest. I wanted to have the kind of life where I stopped being afraid of everything.
So really, “would I go back” is two questions. The answer to both is No, but the inflections are different. If I’m asking, “would I go back to being a guy,” it’s a No with an eyeroll and an exasperated sigh. Ugh. Must we?
If I’m asking, “would I go back to being James,” the No is much more immediate and visceral. I can’t imagine going back to that now.
I don’t really believe in Happily Ever After. I think there’s always more to do and more bad days to get through. This past month highlighted that.
But the good days now feel better than I ever could’ve imagined. And the bad days feel more survivable. It’s the only reason I’m able to look at everything happening now, everything that’s already happened, and believe that maybe I can get through it.
And the first step is going to work tomorrow.
Take care,
Bridget