Negotiation

One of the most unfortunate qualities of most transgender people is that we have at some point felt that we don't deserve much. When you don't properly fit in, life will do that to you unless you either blend sufficiently well into the binary after transition, your dysphoria was somehow managed within the confines of a conventional life or your gender variance almost bordered on a "hobby".

No life is an easy one which is why I decided to stop feeling sorry for myself and take ownership. Sure, I still fall into little traps but I know I will burn them off within a few hours because human psychology is a very complex and fragile thing which seems to crave subsisting on existential angst.

What we deserve is what we create for ourselves and morphing into pretzels to fit into someone else's vision of what your life should be is one of the most depressing things I can now imagine.

Many years ago I communicated with someone online who lived a life of quiet desperation. He was married to an aggressively disapproving spouse and lived for the occasional business trip where he could express himself somewhat freely. The emails were often sad and full of resignation even as I myself lived within a very restricted box. Since childhood I had no idea how I was going to properly manage a situation that, in my mid 40's, was increasingly coming to a boiling point.

Years later I came to the realization that one cannot truly be happy with the suppression of one's essence. Certainly there are many compromises to be made in life, except that an essential core cannot be so easily negotiated away; at least not without some consequences.