Lady in red

I am watching television and a commercial comes on that features a woman in a beautiful red dress.  I begin to feel a pull in my stomach, and I realize how sad I have become.  I struggle to find the right word for what I am feeling, but one word seems to recur most often.  Longing.  A longing that is less about looking like this specific woman, but a longing for what I am not.  What I will never be.

Intellectually, I don't want to be a woman.  If I had my choice, I would be a cis male; it seems so much easier, there are less hassles, less to worry about, and life seems so much less complicated.  But emotionally, spiritually, menatally, I want to be a woman.  I am a woman.

I am trying to describe this feeling, and I can only think of one poor example.  Imagine that you are born left handed.  The second that you were born, however, your family, friends, society as a whole, identified you as right handed.  That is who you are.  That is how everyone sees you.  So you struggle through life, always feeling wrong, always feeling off.  But the realization hits you at some point, when you are a teen, or younger, or older (33 years for some of us), you are left handed!

I don't like using the word feeling, because it is not a good enough discripter.  It goes beyond just a feeling, it is an innate, defining characteristic of who I am.  When I say that I feel like a woman, or I am a woman, it is only because of the limitations of my knowledge of the English language.  I'm not even sure there is a word, because it is more of a defining understanding of who I am.  I AM left handed.  I AM female.

I think this is one of the reasons I did not feel like I had an identity throughout my life.  It is impossible to understand who you are if the basic framework of an identity is missing.  Trying to define myself without this framework caused any notion of who I was to collapse upon itself.  It is an interesting experience constricting something this late in life, when it was supposed to be formed in childhood.

My identity is forming, slowly.  I now have a basic understanding of who I am, and also what I am feeling.  This will be a long journey, and I thank you for walking a small portion of it with me.  God bless