Nightmare Me

I had a dream last night; one of those half-day dreams that happen near the edge of sleep, when you're not sure which parts you crafted yourself and which parts are from dreamland.   I was invisible.. just a watcher.  My wife stood on an empty sidewalk, peering down at the figure of a man, walking slowly toward us.   She choked back a sob as she realized who it was, unbelieving that it could be true.

The man was me, only, not me, but the person I've tried to be for so much of my life. He was everything everyone thought I was until I told them otherwise, now a complete person; and I was gone.  In dreams, you often know things that are known, somehow, to everyone.  In this dream, he, and she, and I all knew that this man was real, and that no part of me or my gender was left in him.

He walked slowly up, smiling gently.  "I'm back," he said.  In two words, all her fears and horrors were dispelled, and all her most earnest hopes and dreams returned. They embraced and cried.  She held him so tightly, clinging to every future hope that he represents, knowing that her own nightmare had finally ended.


...


And as I stood there, watching, alone and unseen, I was at once, so very happy, and so very sad.  What I would do to buy that moment for her, to grant the girl I love the dearest dream and hope... one that had been promised, but falsely, long ago, and to which we've worked and laboured together for so long.  Our Future. Our Life.  But in that moment, knowing, and more so, feeling so keenly what relief had swept over her cut such sharp contrast over reality.  That man doesn't exist.  He's never existed, and I can't give him to her.  The only person here is me, and as I walk up a sidewalk, there are no tears of joy... I am, in a terrible way, "half the man I used to be," or likely a bit less.   A compromise solution.

So I pause here, keyboard awash in tears, wondering what it is I've done wrong.   I've carried this storm with me my entire life, and now that it's out, it's reeking exactly the chaos I always feared it would.  How happy my dearest loves would be if I didn't exist, but some other person.  But I can't give them what they want, and they must tolerate, rather than love, who is left... my bare heart, aching and yearning for love...  just a girl asking to be loved...

Feeling very awesomely girl today

I didn’t have nightmares or even bad dreams all last night, which is first in a long while. I actually had some sort of good dream (even rarer) in which I was my real gender. All my good dreams are like that… they just don’t happen very often… a couple times a year. Hey, it’s only the second week of this year… so either I’m going to have a great dream-year, or I’ve already used one up. =)

I wore a pretty scarf on my bike ride to work. My hair is long enough now that all these little curls are peaking out from under my bike helmet and I LOVE them. I lost too much weight over break due to stress, not eating, throwing up because of stress, and not eating because of stress… and I was pretty stressed… but, now that I’m eating again, and feeling somewhat healthier, I decided to take a look. Here’s the thing, I’ve got pretty thighs. (Nicole knows how embarrassed I am to say such a thing out loud). Apparently I passed some corner there with the whole bikeriding thing.

I’m not sure just why I’m having such an up day. I think its because of the genetics research they just announced (even if the article version called me a transsexual man…). I don’t mind the idea of having developed a female mind because of unknown, rare environmental triggers, but if they are right, it means my genes need to be in place too. There is more to it than just genetics, but the genetics look like they have to be there. What does that mean, you ask? It means that I am not just a psychological girl; I am a genetic female. We think of XX and XY being the whole story, but they are just the typical patterns that are followed. There are, it seems, other pathways. Certainly, all my other T related genes are NOT what I’d like them to be, but, with a bit of gene sequencing, they’ve shown me that it was part of my design all along to be a girl… not a mistake… not just circumstance… but from a biological perspective, what I was designed to be (given the correct triggers). And thank God for that, because without those little gene sequences, I might have been a boy…

Christmas Dreams

The following is a short excerpt from the book of Hebrews (in the Bible):

¹³ All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. ¹⁴ People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. ¹⁵ If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. ¹⁶ Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one.Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

I watched Avatar again last night, for the first time in a long time.  I'd forgotten just how much the story and imagery move me... and how much dysphoria is the inevitable result.  How well I relate to living in a body not my own... of wanting my love to finally hold me in her arms and say, "I see you."  Of wandering through the dream, yearning for the world as it should have been, yet is not.

The author of Hebrews probably didn't have much notion of aliens, and certainly would never have dreamed of such a thing as cinema, but the thought in the passage above is the same heart of both dreams.  There has to be something better than this...  We yearn for it... feel it... need it... some of us breath it... Our deepest dreams and longings are wrapped in cords of beauty, wonder, flight, and kinship.  To be free of these fleshly bodies, our minds loosed to live the dreams we have always had, no longer bound by the flesh which so often is mistaken for our definition.

And yet... here I am...  This is not my body, and this is not my home...  I know that I am designed for something different, for something far more perfect.  My humanity makes me want to order and construct.. to design and engineer, to break the world into pieces I can understand and control... but that is not who I really am.  But even this creation, marred as it is by our ingenuity, need, and greed, is an amazing place... it just can't be all.

It is Christmas in a few days.  For me, a Christian (one who takes it seriously), the season brings nearer a sense of wonder, fear, and immense hope which is present in Jesus' coming.  I don't know how I could survive myself, in this half-truth of a body, without the hope Christ has brought to us.  "Those who wander in darkness have seen a great light."  God with us, dreaming with us, and drawing us on, through this dream (more often a nightmare for so many) to the day when we finally awake, in the country we WERE designed for... His country... floating mountains and beautiful creatures on whose backs we soar through the clouds will be forgotten in the far-surpassing wonder of that place... and I will be free.  Free of this schism of my soul.. of the tears and aching.. of waiting, thirsting, and starving for real life, real water, and real kinship.

So this Christmas, awkwardly sitting amongst by beloved relations, still not talking about what they know about me, making merry for the superficial things, and some, for the real things Christmas is about, I will lift my eyes to something greater than my dark clouds of dysphoria, of the real pain caused by this lifelong inundation of testosterone, and dream of what may yet be...  This Christmas I will remember that Christ, too, endured a body not His own, and was killed for telling the world who He truly was, and that He did that precisely because He means yet to free us, to free me, His sister, His daughter, from the nightmare.  He entered our dream so that one day, we might finally awake, and hear, and say, "I see you."