Published September 29, 2019
In the aftermath of my coming out as a transgender woman, people sometimes asked me, “When did you know?” A series of blog posts this week, celebrating the second anniversary of my public announcement, is my attempt to answer that question for a wider group. The answer, though, is complicated — and doesn’t follow a straight line. For some, my answers will fall short of being satisfying or convincing, and that’s OK. The telling, ultimately, is not for them.
Also, retracing my steps from childhood to adulthood to womanhood is not like doing math. It’s not 2 + 2 = 4. It’s more like dancing a two-step that turns into a pratfall that becomes a slow walk that picks up the pace until it’s a jog, and then 2 + 2 = purple, and what are these jumping jacks for, and eight more burpees and omg pretty pink Slurpees, and then a tuck and roll, and the air is lavender, and baby steps, and left, a left, a left-right-left, and why does nothing I wear ever feel right, why am I marching this way, and also whose face is that in the mirror, and why does my hurt flutter when that relative calls me Carly-o, and of course my favorite color is pink blue, and can we go home now because … existing is exhausting.
There will be more to say about all that, this week and beyond, but I want to talk about something that happened in spring 2013, when I moved from the Willamette Valley in Oregon across the Columbia River to Southwest Washington.
It’s helpful to know that as I got ready for the move, I was “in crisis,” a term that a therapist used to describe my urgent need for help, and that I was juggling the stresses of moving with the unrelenting forces that drove me to look for a sex therapist around the same time. I’d seen one regularly giving relationship and sex advice on a Portland station, and I scheduled an introductory session with her for a few weeks later.
Some of my possessions wouldn’t make the move with me. I went to Goodwill to donate a couch that I knew wouldn’t fit in my new apartment. I also left a few items in the community laundry room at the apartment complex I was leaving, including an iron, an ironing board and a container I used to hold distilled water. I left them on a countertop with a note that read: If you can use these, take them.
After spending the next few days packing, I returned to the laundry room to see if they were still there. They were gone, but the note remained — and next to it was a pair of what I would later call “Bourbon Street panties.” A girlfriend would refer to them as bordello panties. They were St. Eve, crimson, poly/cotton for every day — with black lace, ruffles and bows to give them a saucy attitude, another girlfriend would later say — and perfumed, and “ooh la la” came to mind, even though they were hipsters and not French cut. They were the only thing in the laundry room other than the washers and dryers, and they were right next to the sheet of paper that said “If you can use these, take them.” It seemed like the universe was trying to tell me something, even if someone was just being funny, so I did. I took them.
There were other signs that the cosmos was leading me in a certain direction, but I gave them little thought as I managed the logistics of my move and began unpacking. After a few days in my new place, it was time to go to Ikea to shop for a love seat or sofa. I settled on the Hagalund sofa bed you see in the photo above, and also bought a matching ottoman. Things got interesting when I began trying to assemble them.
Soon I was having so much trouble getting it all to come together. I was on the verge of tears, so frustrated, and my hands were hurting. I thought I would never finish. Soon, I was crying. And then, something amazing happened that I still don’t totally understand. Not knowing anything about how therapy would work with the woman I had made the appointment with, or what her approach would be like, I suddenly had this image of being in a room with a woman and playing dress-up — with her telling me that it was OK, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She helped me put on everything — panties, bra, and an entire outfit, and then lipstick, and I allowed her to be in control of that experience for me, like a mentor or guide (in reality, this would never happen in a therapy session). Suddenly, a calm like I had never experienced came over me, so peaceful, and I was able to finish putting together the furniture. It was so unexpected, and yet, so amazingly transforming of my mood. I went from sobbing to serene, and with an assembled sofa bed to sit on.
The next time that I would feel that much at peace, so free from my default state of anxiety, was about a year later when — still a stranger in a strange land — I cuddled with Sam Hess, and described the post-cuddle feeling as the unbearable lightness of lightness.
For reasons I can’t remember, I had to cancel the first-time therapy appointment, and when I went to reschedule, she was no longer accepting new clients. I looked around and eventually found the therapist I am still seeing (my next appointment is Wednesday, the day after my second Carly birthday, and we will celebrate and laugh and cry together!). A few sessions in, I said, “I have a story to tell you. I don’t know how it might connect to the reasons why I am here, but it feels important, and I want to tell you so we can bookmark it and come back to it when it feels like the right time.”
And I told her what you now know.
It would be a while before we talked about it again, a while before I “knew,” but the table — or, rather, the Ikea furniture — was set. When I later introduced her to Carly, she was not in the least bit surprised, and this story helped build that foundation. At the time, though, I wasn’t sure what was going on. Unlike for the sofa bed and ottoman I had put together, there were no assembly instructions for what my heart was building inside me.
Whenever I hear people talking about how worked up and frustrated they’ve been while trying to put together something they bought at Ikea, I smile and say, “I get it.”
