And I'm a Woman

AND I’M A WOMAN!!¹

28 January 2013

            I’ve spent most of my life trying to convince myself of certain things.  Among these are that I am, in fact, female, a girl, a chick, and eventually a woman.  For the vast majority of my life I truly believed that inseparable from this was a strict adherence to heterosexuality.  And so I put a great deal of effort into trying to mold, pound, force myself into a role that I was never meant to fill.  I made a very conscious effort to slip hetero sentiments into conversations, with everyone that I knew.  In fact, I got quite adept at these comments which were almost all centered on the attractive nature of the male form or heterosexual sex.  Of course these were all lies.  I’ve never in my life felt compelled of my own accord, and for myself only, to ogle any of the male sex, but I am by my very nature a student of life and a people watcher.  With these tools in my box I made an extensive study of heterosexual women and their comments and hoped beyond hope that if I imitated enough, I would one day become a real girl, a real woman.  The real crux of the matter in all of this is that after awhile it became something so far back in the recesses of my conscious mind that I didn’t even notice I was doing it anymore.  It had become mental muscle memory, simply repeating over and over again what I had trained it to do. 

            My world of dissolution came crashing down around me several years ago when I had reached a mental breaking point, and could no longer deny, at least to myself, that I am not in fact heterosexual.  One small, three lettered word, would end my fragile existence that I had spent decades building.  GAY.  Oh my god, can this really be?!  It was earth shattering, mind blowing, unthinkable, disgusting, sinful, and wrong….. wasn’t it?  Well of course it HAD to be.  It made me something that I hated most of all, a liar, and a hypocrite.  Or that’s how I felt at the time.  I refused to believe that from birth I was inundated with homophobic rants and slurs from nearly everyone whom I held in high esteem, and that those years of brainwashing could have anything to do with the self-loathing that I was now experiencing.  Hadn’t I prayed hard enough?!  Hadn’t I read my scriptures religiously and with fervor, doing everything “right”.  Hadn’t I married in the “right place” and to the “right” gender?  Hadn’t I done everything that I knew to make this horrific thing just go away?! 

            My resolve was then doubled that I would stay the course.  I had CHOSEN to marry a man, and to have children.  I had known my options; hadn’t I?  I had made conscious choices about the kind of life that I wanted to live, and the end result of exaltation that I wanted with my “eternal family”.  That had to be the end of the internal discussion I was agonizing over…. But the problem with this new conviction is that my brain is inherently intractable.  I lack the basic ability to cling to ideas and not be swayed by a good argument and supporting evidence.  Perhaps even more significant is the fact that with as much of a scholar as I am, and with as much reason as I labor to employ, I am just as much moved by my gut, my feelings, my conscience, my…whatever it is that you choose to call it.  Intuition perhaps is an adequate form.  As much as my head was convinced that I could overcome my nature, my gut was not completely swayed. 

            It was at this impasse that my brain and intuition came to rest for several more years.  It should perhaps be noted that I was not terribly happy with the conscious choices that I had made so many years ago.  My marriage had never been a happy or healthy one.  I had married a man whose nature was so contrary to my own that we could never come to a peace on anything.  To his credit, he had no clue what my nature was.  I had hidden it so well from everyone, myself included.  After years of combat, both in the army and in my own perverse psyche, I had come to believe that I was just an angry person.  This moniker was something that I wore like a badge of courage, something that I had earned in the war.  Once the PTSD label was added it all seemed to finally make sense, or so I thought.  I was crazy.  What a simple explanation to a lifetime of inner struggle! 

            Counseling was the beginning of the end of this life for me.  God, what a cliché!  “I found myself in counseling”.  Well, this was only partly true.  What I found was a very scared little girl who had never forgiven herself for things far beyond her control or capacity to understand, and who had never allowed herself to move from the tiny corner where she had huddled for twenty plus years.  For the first time in longer than I could remember, I was learning to own that word.  “Scared”.  In that instance I was no longer angry.  In that instance I realized that I had been living my entire life out of petrifying fear.  I was afraid.  I was scared.  I was terrified.  And all of those things were perfectly acceptable emotions!  Acceptance, this was another word that I learned to use, and to love.  I didn’t have to hold on, or fight off anymore.  I could simply accept that things had happened beyond my own control, and that I had continually made decisions that served to propagate this vicious cycle that had become my prison.  I didn’t have to regret these decisions.  I didn’t have to be angry anymore, at people, at my life.  After all, it was MY LIFE!  I didn’t owe anything to anyone, and nobody owed me anything either.  In these realizations I found a freedom and redemption that came without a single string or covenant attached. 

            After an immense upheaval and chain of events that included a divorce and a major move with my children, I found myself at a crossroads.  Once again, I could choose to stay the course, find another good Mormon man and marry and hope for the best, or I could finally shed the last remnant of shame that I had been carrying and finally admit to myself and to everyone else that I was never made for the standard mold, that I was gay.  The first time that I committed that word to paper in my long-neglected journal it was genuinely painful; agonizing even.  The first time that I said it aloud was even worse.  So with my newfound self awareness in hand, I constrained myself to writing it again, and then to saying it again.  Once I had done this enough to finally find some amount of comfort with it, I made myself tell others.  I mumbled my way through this process several times, dozens of times, before I could say it with a sense of pride and ownership. It wasn’t long before I could say it with fervor, unapologetically, and joyfully. 

            Perhaps most surprising to me in this whole journey was the vast outpouring of love and support that I received from friends and family.  This was not everyone’s reaction of course, but even those with the most ardent objections have begun to come around and see that I am no longer going through the motions of life, miserable but steadfast in my resolve to stick it out.   Even my harshest critics have begun to see merit in that.  It was very recently that my dear sister mentioned to me that I appear to be much more feminine than I ever had before, and upon reflection I realized that she was right.  I was finally FEELING like a woman.  I wasn’t just a mechanic, a mom, a hard worker, a good NCO.  I can finally happily own that I am all of these things, AND I’M A WOMAN!

1. Johnson, Kasey.  I stole this title.  No regrets because now I've cited my source and in academia that makes everything ok.