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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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
Published August 16, 2018
Danny had been on my mind lately. The reasons, like life, were a series of seemingly random events and circumstances that somehow worked together to point in a certain direction. Then, on Monday morning, I got the call telling me that he was gone.
Oof, as Danny often said. Oof, as if reacting to a body blow, a gut punch. That’s how it felt.
I’m writing this during my private candlelight vigil for Remy Daniel Miller II, whose funeral Mass is six hours (and two time zones) away as I begin this remembrance of the friend I met during our freshman year of high school. What would he think, I wonder, if he knew that my apartment building prohibits candles, forcing me to improvise with a battery-powered version and a Shutterstock image? My guess is he’d allow it.
Why had Danny been on my mind lately? For starters, two other high school friends — both of them one year my senior — visited me five weeks ago, stirring up memories that began flooding back a few weeks earlier when they told me they’d booked their flight. Flipping through yearbooks put a lot of names and faces back on my radar. And around that time, I reconnected with a classmate, the one who called me with the bad news Monday.
Published October 1, 2017
Today is my birthday. In a sense, it’s also Carly’s. Hi. I’m Carly.
I am a transgender woman, and I’d like for you to use she and her when you refer to me. Mine is a journey from trying to live as a man toward an acceptance of the authentic self that has been wanting to come out for a long time. I’m excited and relieved to be telling you a little bit about her.
It’s challenging to find the words to share how I came to this realization and turning point in my life. Much of it has been painful, and that pain came from the failed efforts to live the way I’d imagined the world expected me to live. There is joy in saying to you now that the pain is giving way to happiness, a liberation of a secret that no longer feels like it must be a secret.
This coming-out story is a collection of moments, memories that retrace parts of the narrative without necessarily sharing specifics about the work and heartache that came with mining those moments. They are threads from a tapestry.
You could stop reading here without missing the main point — that I’m trans. There is no “reveal” beyond what I’ve said. The rest is a curvy revisiting of those threads as I process an important transitional birthday the best way I know how.