Published October 4, 2019
One of the highlights of my week was spending time with my therapist and celebrating my two years of living openly as a transgender woman. The session was one of several in which we revisited the day when she met Carly, when I let Carly into the safe space my therapist had created for me over several years.
(As aware as I am of how off-putting it could be to some readers for me to refer to myself in the third person, and of the risk of having it sound like a multiple-personality type of thing, I do it in writing where I lack the facility to express something any other way. I hope it is not too great an obstacle.)
On that day, Carly had finally felt safe to come out and to say hello. Carly — inside a body that presented as male, with her given male name still her legal and everyday name — did so organically, without prodding or encouragement. There was a bit of a preface, but the context for it has vanished into the ether. Soon, though, I was talking, in voice and rhythm new to us.
The air in the room changed. We both felt it, I later confirmed. If a moment can have a “wow” factor that’s off the charts, yet be tranquil while also powerfully transforming, this was it. My therapist sat across from me, still — except for when her hands touched her neckline and near her face. My amateur-psychologist interpretation was that she was steadying herself, getting a grip on the moment, or maybe checking to see that she and what was happening were present and real. (She could have just had an itch!)
And I talked and talked, one palm anchored on a knee as a finger made circles, my own steadying and am-I-still-here device, I suppose, but one with layers of meaning. And I’m sure it soothed my nerves.
After I left, as I was driving to that evening’s obligations, one of the overriding feelings reminded me of how I’d felt months earlier after a cuddling session with Sam Hess, whose Portland practice Cuddle Up To Me was in its infancy. In a piece I wrote under an anonymous byline for Psychology Tomorrow, I described the post-cuddle afterglow, before what evolved into something that I soon called “the unbearable lightness of lightness.” I was calm, even in the kind of traffic that had always heightened my anxiety level. I was at peace, no longer in a default state of readiness for battle. I later felt an unexpected empathy for someone I had perceived as my opponent, someone to guard against. It was a revelation. It was liberating.
There was a lot left to process, but it was a big step toward knowing in my core that Carly was my best self, my true self.
The feeling I floated on had only one other precedent that I could recall: a peace that had found and stabilized me a couple of years earlier. I was in tears trying to assemble a sofa bed, and from nowhere, the thought of being in a therapist’s office and being free enough to dress as a woman stilled troubled waters.
Nearly a year after coming out, I told two girlfriends these stories, and about how the newfound freedom from dis-ease became a clear signal to me as I linked the three separate moments in time. One of the friends didn’t understand my point, saying that it didn’t prove gender dysphoria. I could have experienced the liberating empathy, for example, without thinking I was a woman and not a man, she said. Then the other friend spoke up.
“The calm, the empathy, the peace,” she said, “were what told her that she was finally her true self.”
Yes, I said. That’s it. She understood the point I was having difficulty getting across. I hope I have conveyed it to you, with her help, in a clearer way.
Embracing my true self unlocked a tranquility I hadn’t known. Thinking back on how I had described no longer having to feel ready for war, peace continues to be the perfect word for the core of that new state of being I was experiencing. One of the definitions for peace is: a state or period in which there is no war or a war has ended.
No need for war with others. No need for war with myself.
That day when Carly said hello to her therapist was probably the biggest turning point. Later, when I asked my therapist if it seemed real to her, and not some delusion, she quickly replied, “This has been coming on for some time, right?”
This week, she tapped into her memories of that day to again reflect on it with me.
“The feelings that come back to me,” she said, “are: pride, in you, for your vulnerability and your authenticity and your openness to really be present to the complexity of those feelings and that realization; relief, of having that understanding and awareness, like a deep feeling of alignment — that ‘Oh, yeah, this is it! This is right!’ — and just sort of sitting with the silence and the power of making that connection and how right it felt.”
The prevailing feeling she had, she told me this week, was “just really positive, a lot of joy and excitement.”
As for her not being surprised …
“What I’m thinking now is that there was a need for me, that I was feeling, to not push you to any kind of realization or understanding or decision or commitment, and to sort of allow it to unfold and evolve in a way that made more sense for you,” she said. “I remember feeling some sort of fear or doubt within myself of like, ‘Should I have reached this conclusion sooner, should I have helped her understand or realize this or make this connection earlier? Is there anything that I missed, that I could have helped her see or understand so that the process wouldn’t have felt so challenging?’ ”
The questions went unanswered, at least in this conversation. But she seemed at peace — there’s that word again — with her role in my eventual coming home to myself.
“For as long as I had known you, and for all the work that we did around understanding both (your) sexuality and gender,” she said, “it felt to me like the pieces of the puzzle came together and that, like, prior to that, it had been a long time coming. We had been sort of looking at the pieces more closely, having them come into focus, rearranging them in different ways and then it’s like, finally it all clicked and made sense and created this cohesive picture.”
This conversation took place in a different office than the one where I said hello as Carly, but I felt just as grounded in the reality of what transpired in her previous office. More so, really, after living openly as Carly these past two years.
I am so grateful for both spaces, the past and present, for the freedom to be me.
Picture of woman talking with her therapist by wavebreakmedia/via Shutterstock.
Transgender silhouette concept/illustration by taa22/via Shutterstock.