Becoming Me

Sometimes you meet a person at a certain point in both of your lives where both of you need the other. You feel drawn to them for one reason or another only to figure out much later the true depth and meaning to the relationship. The love you feel for them and the strength you get from them goes much deeper than the original attraction and into a new realm of meaning. I met this person very early on in a journey that I am still undertaking and will forever be on until death. The journey of becoming me.

Back in 2012 I had just graduated university, went on a bike trip out west, and oh yeah started hormone replacement therapy in November of that year. I continued presenting as male for a little over a year to give the hormones ample time to do their work on my body. Even as early as a few weeks on HRT I was beginning to feel better as a person, more content and happy with who I am. Whether that was from the hormones themselves or just the knowledge that my journey into womanhood had started I do not know and it really doesn’t matter all that much. At the time I was working at the local climbing gym and one fateful day in January of 2013 two women came in for their first time, which meant they needed to be taken on an orientation of the gym. One of these women I was immediately struck by and thankfully she came back to the gym to keep climbing. We became fast friends and when we started hanging out outside of climbing I came out to her, telling her I am transgender and currently taking hormones her response was full of pure acceptance and free of judgment. We dated for about a year and during which time she helped me explore who Natalie was, all the while knowing that in doing so she was helping to erase the person she was in love with.

Towards the end of our dating relationship we both knew it was coming to an end, not out of lack of love but a mutual understanding that she was in love with a person who would soon not exist. We hoped that our friendship would survive. The end of our dating relationship was incredibly hard on both of us, and we both dealt with it in our own ways. I ended up in severe depression after losing the woman I loved and I was also told by my employers that they wanted me to use the men’s bathroom and not the women’s even though I was presenting as female now. Another cause of my depression was now that the old me was no more I had to figure out who Natalie was, at that time she was just a name, hollow and without the depth or meaning that a lifetime of experiences give to a person. I developed insomnia and fell further into depression. At night, lying in bed knowing that I would not get sleep and would just stare at the ceiling for hours, suicide seemed like the only way out and finally get the rest I craved. Thankfully I never succumbed to those urges.

One thing that helped keep me going were weekly walks Jess and I would take with each other every Sunday night around Saint Paul. Some weeks we talked a lot, and others we walked in silence. At times we argued a bit but we still cared deeply for each other since we both had shared and grown a lot with the others help during our time together and didn’t want to give up on a friendship that we both wanted to succeed. During the summer 2014 my depression was starting to wane and I was sleeping regularly again. I was going out, meeting new friends and slowly learning who Natalie was as a person. And as summer faded into autumn my friendship with Jess was also going through a change from the weekly Sunday walks that at times seemed like the last bond between two people into a deeper and richer connection between two people who have been through more together than the time would indicate.

The changes in me were profound. While physically my body was changing outwardly looking more and more feminine, inside my mind was transforming from a tormented soul yearning to be themselves but fearing what would happen if I was into person no longer feeling constrained by what others might think of me and just being me. I no longer was pretending to be what I thought others wanted or what they expected, for the first time in my life I wasn’t playing a role. Before Natalie was a name without meaning, now it’s a person. People often ask me how I can be so happy all of the time, or have such a positive outlook on life and my answer is when you have been to the lowest depths of self worth and manage to crawl out of it not only intact but stronger mentally and emotionally any challenge afterwards seems surmountable and not only that but not worth being angry about. When I am rock climbing one of my favorite things to do is to fall on a route I am working on, not because the sensation of falling is fun but because of what it means. I failed, and now I have something to work towards to strive for and that to me is fun.

Transitioning is not something one ever finishes in life. I will be transitioning until the moment I die changing from one minute to the next learning about myself and the world and hopefully becoming a better human in the process. It took me a long time to accept myself for who I am and love me despite my faults, nobody’s perfect and we generally focus on the bad about ourselves over the good. But as long as we are trying to better ourselves and be kind to those around us then whatever our faults are will not define you.