The price we pay

There's a price for denying identity and I have paid it in full. For many years you deny and bottle up using pressure relief valves to manage. Distractions like work and children take care of the rest.

If you are like me, your reasons for not honoring identity fall away with time and eventually there is nowhere else to go. I may be one of the most stubborn transgender people you will ever encounter because even as the barriers to authenticity dropped I still resisted.

Being overly analytical both helped and deterred me. While I avoided falling into traps, I also stopped myself from simply feeling and succumbing to instinct by rationalizing away my authenticity as somehow not being native to me despite my feelings dating to earliest memory. That I have no regrets it is because, after enormous amount of introspection, I was finally able to steer a steady course towards a more than viable solution.

Belonging to 1% of the population is not remotely obvious but I got over it as I found my identity outside the judgement of a world that increasingly made less sense as I aged.

Thus I decided to become fully myself.