My name is Andrew, I’m manifesting the life that I want, and I need to tell my story. I’m a 38 year old trans dude from Michigan, but that’s not where it starts.
I was born in 1983 to a working class family, assigned female at birth, an only child. I was the first grandchild, and spoiled as such. I was cute and was frequently made up to be a living doll to show off. I was treated as a tiny adult and not coddled in any way. My parents divorced when I was 9, entering puberty, and things got… dark. Alcoholic father and emotionally distant mother, I was frequently on my own. Diagnosed with depression at 18, I lived in my head for years, not sure why I was so unhappy, unliked, and hating my body.
I buried everything inside, and covered it with as much food as I could find. I became a people pleaser and sacrificed my own thoughts and opinions, lest I lose someone. I ate my way to 475 pounds of self-hatred. I did manage a relationship, and eventually a marriage of two years, but I was living in a state of fear of loss. I didn’t know who I was, but I was clear on the fact that I was unhappy with my body, and I hated being a woman.
It wasn’t until September 4th, 2017 that my life began to change.
I was house sitting for a friend and wasn’t feeling well. They say you have a sense of dread when something is really wrong, and I certainly felt it. I went to the Emergency Room with no pain, only shortness of breath. I was diagnosed with a massive blood clot behind my right knee, that had broken into pieces and traveled to both of my lungs causing dual pulmonary embolisms. I was immediately put on blood thinners and admitted to the hospital. I didn’t realize how serious it was at first (the staff are good at hiding panic) but it was very much life threatening. Laying in that bed, trying not to think about the fact that at any time, another piece could break off and travel to my heart or brain and kill me instantly created a lot of anxiety and panic. For months after being released and starting a blood thinner, I was scared to do things, to just exist.
I spent a lot of the next year driving and bawling to music in my car. Music is such a release and mood changer for me. For months all I did was cry and panic at the thought of losing everyone I love, but I had been forced to face my mortality. Did I really want to end life feeling like I never really lived it? I had feelings of hating myself for as long as I could remember. Being misgendered as a child in public by a stranger, and it making my father angry. Never picturing myself as an old woman, hell, not picturing myself in the future at all. No future = you won’t be alive to care.
I had to finally face my own fear. I knew when I learned the term transgender years ago, that’s what I was. I should have been born as a boy, it all made sense. But, my immediate reaction?
“Oh no, I can’t be that”.
Well you can’t hide anymore. You’ve got to face this, even if it means losing everyone.
I still tried to ease into it, talking with my doctors and exploring options to achieve what I wanted, but not “fully transition”. In the end, I realized that I was just scared, but I needed to do it. It’s alarming how quickly your brain can change due to hormones. Within a day or two of my first injection of testosterone, I immediately knew I didn’t make a mistake. I felt like I woke up for the first time and could see there wasn’t a haze over the world anymore.
Something amazing began to happen when I participated in life, instead of just existing. I started to feel happy, and once I stopped eating to cover the pain deep inside, the weight began to fall off. I was also diagnosed with a severe case of ADHD and began treatment with a team of medical professionals to help me, including my therapist (hereafter H). I started to figure out things that I liked to do by being active and doing them. Hiking, camping, paddling, it’s like a whole new world was available to me and I had the curiosity of a child. That’s exactly what transition is, beginning life again from puberty; the correct way. Hyper-speed growing up, in middle age.
There were so many things I didn’t know, and didn’t even have the right direction figured out. I wanted a dad. I wanted someone to go to with questions, ideas about cool stuff, and someone I didn’t have to worry about feeling stupid with. It didn’t take me long, but I remembered that I didn’t have that kind of dad. Mine was an alcoholic whose decisions pulled me into every shitty situation he ever faced himself with. I would take it all on as my own, and felt he had absolute power over me. With my therapist’s help, I began to realize that I had things to explore, and I needed space to do that.
I have struggled with my own history and what I learned about how men behave while growing up. I had been raised as a girl in the 1980s, a living doll until I was old enough to start making decisions for myself. Once I did, and became more gender nonconforming as a result, I felt more alienated from everyone. I had stopped living with my father when I was 8 years old, so I had no consistent model of masculinity other than television. We now know how toxic some or most of those representations were. What exactly were my values and expectations of what men are and how did that fit in with the person I was building myself to be?
The phrase popped into my head and it stuck: manhood without a map
This is a blog of my experiences, and how I’m learning to be the kind of man I want to be…
Without a map.
-A