A pause on my Monday morning to post a foreword of sorts to what I plan to be a series of blog posts celebrating and processing the first anniversary of my coming out as transgender.
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A year ago today, I gave a presentation on beat writing and reporting to a class at Linfield College. My handout for the students was a collection of advice from dozens of newspaper/journalism pros. It’s a terrific resource for any nonfiction writer, so feel free to pass it along to anyone who might be interested.
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Coming full circle with my long-ago desire to be like Cher in one particular scene in “Moonstruck.”
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Published September 1, 2018
Peace has too often eluded me, but I woke up from a powerful dream this morning with an unprecedented calm that feels like how I’m guessing a person at peace must feel.
All I remember about the start of the dream was that I was at the house that our family moved into when I was a teenager. My parents, both of whom are gone now, were younger versions of themselves in the dream than they ever were when we lived in that house. They were complaining that I had broken a part of a doorway leading to the back patio. I had not.
“Let’s just blame Carly,” I said, angrily. “Everyone will believe she did it. Let’s blame her.”
That seemed to satisfy my dad, who got a beer out of the refrigerator and tilted the top of the unopened bottle in my direction as if air-clinking glasses with me for a virtual toast.
I’m laughing after typing all of that, because of course I am. I did my share of things as a child that resulted in reprimand or punishment, and anyway, who knows why the author of my dreams scripted this one this way. I’m also smiling, because upon waking up rested and energized after only a few hours of sleep, I immediately knew that the point of the dream was not to be found in the particulars of what I had or hadn’t done.
That was just context, a setting. What has me at peace is that I referred to myself in the dream as Carly, and with female pronouns, to a mom and dad who gave me a different name that was put on a birth certificate that calls me a boy. I remember the spirit of my dad’s words better than I do the specifics, and taken together with his beer-bottle salute, it said, “OK.”
With me being well into my transition and life as a transgender woman, it felt like acceptance that I cannot get from him in the three-dimensional world I live and communicate in while awake. I have a new name, and a new gender identity, and I am beyond happy that my subconscious mind used them in a seemingly unrelated conversation with my parents.
I also have a new feeling, and a new tag on my growing list of blog post tags.
Peace.
Photo by lzf via Shutterstock