Validate My Life

I promise it gets better.

It’s hard, too - aside from my Tragic Backstory (a tale for another time) I have to live with the acute knowledge of what’s wrong with my body, rather than the old, vague sense of foreboding. My mom still calls me my deadname. I got a Christmas card addressed to “Aunt Eli.” I’ve been wearing a binder for almost 9 years and it’s starting to hurt. I have too much blood and sweat like a hooker in church.

But it’s so much better. There is a reason I keep the date of my first T shot in my bio. I celebrate that anniversary every year, but now it’s so mundane that I often don’t realize until a week or a month later.

One of the first things that happened was that I started growing curly, luxurious leg hair. I started hearing my voice, seeing my face. I walked past a glass door in my women’s skinny jeans and went, “holy shit my legs are shaped like man legs.” I got denied service at a bar because they didn’t believe the person on my ID could be the person in front of them (it wasn’t, to be fair, but she and I looked VERY similar before I transitioned).

I have a job I love. My bosses like and appreciate me. My minions I mean undergrad workers probably think I’m annoying, but I’m funny and know more than them so they put up with me anyways. I’ve been in loving relationships with women (in a straight way) and loving relationships with men (in a gay way) (technically bisexual but you know what I mean). I live in a cute, shitty little rented house with my beautiful partner of 4.5 years, my big fat asshole cat, and his two tiny little polite ones.

Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of bad before the good. I made a lot of stupid decisions when I was young. I consistently found myself in crazy, dangerous situations because I didn’t care if I lived or died. I had a weird bad time in college. I had a WEIRD, BAD time in college. I’ve had shit jobs and I’ve always been broke. I didn’t finish my master’s degree and I’d rather cut off my foot and eat it than try THAT again. Transitioning didn’t fix any of that, but it was WAY better than all of that plus not transitioning.

And you know what? Life is boring, now. I wake up and I go to my little job, I have my little meetings and run my little machines (I’m a manufacturing engineer/machinist). I drive home to my little house in my little hoopty and I kiss my little boyfriend. We have a little argument about who has to pick out what we’re eating for dinner, we watch our little shows and play our little video games. I read my little books before we go to our little bed and lay us down to our little sleep. It’s pleasant mundanity. Gentle domesticity. And it happens to me, and I get to live it as a man. It’s just… life that I get to live.

MY life. MY mistakes. MY relationships that I cherish so dearly. MY deep(er) voice and MY hairy legs and MY flat ass and MY titties that are now really just an inconvenience til I can get top surgery. MY vagina that I made my peace with, once I could build myself a foundation from which to build peace.

I never thought I would make it to 18. I never thought I would make it to 20, when I started T. I never thought I would pass, I never thought I would make it to 21, let alone almost 30 (god, how did I get so old). I genuinely thought I was chemically incapable of happiness, that there was something wired wrong in my brain so badly that my life would be lifeless forever.

And yet.

I have found peace. I have made peace, I have built it for myself. I have forced the world to give it to me and defended it bitterly. I have beaten my rotten life into submission with my fists and my feet and I have found stability and happiness. Whatever storms may come, whatever sacrifices are still to be made and sadnesses to be endured, I am alive and I love to be alive.