For as long as I can remember, I have always felt different from others, different from family and from everyone else around me. I have never been able to understand that difference until recently. For many years, actually for most of my life, I only knew that I was very lonely, increasingly depressed, and ashamed of my sexual fantasies. I would like to share with you a poem which I wrote not too long ago and which can serve as a basis for my sharing with you what a life of being different has been like and what sense, if any, I can make of it all. My poem is called, "I Disappeared:"
Let us look, first, at the sense of self which this poem
describes. To be more accurate, let us look at the suppression of my
sense of self, for it was as if I were being raised to hide my true
feelings. Aside from the gender confusion which I began to experience
in my teenage years and which, as my poem depicts, I also proceeded
to hide, I lived my whole life in an emotional closet. I am reminded
of one of those large, oversized walk-in closets which are sometimes
the size of a small room and which can seemingly contain tons of
things. Similarly, my emotional closet was large and
all-encompassing. Into it I packed my feelings about family members,
my hopes and dreams, my frustrations and anger, and, of course, my
gender confusion. In a very real sense, I packed it all in.Without
even realizing it at the time, I was giving up on my true sense of
self by going into a closet that contained not just my gender issue
but all of me.
A psychiatrist once remarked that I came by my personal difficulties
honestly, in that my parents were unwilling, or more likely unable,
to attend to my feelings. My mother did spend some time with me,
though she never expressed love. I have no recollection of ever being
hugged by her except, perhaps, as a form of greeting. In fact, what
started out as at least some measure of attentiveness by her when I
was a child turned into emotional oppressiveness by the time I became
a teenager. Her own insecurities, anger, and general neediness left
very little room for the expression of my own feelings.
My father expressed even less affection than did my mother. But
rather than engulf me with his feelings, whatever they were, he kept
everything inside and so excluded me completely from his inner life.
At the same time he bombarded me with his goals and purposes for my
life. He was also punitive towards me, involving both verbal and
physical abuse. The point is that neither my mother nor my father
really listened to me, and so I felt invisible as a person.
Not surprisingly, home was never home for me, at least not in an
emotionally satisfying way. I thus developed some interests which
served to create an imaginary world in which I could live, at least
temporarily, with some degree of sanity. For example, I never wanted
to leave movie theaters, for it meant returning to a place - to a
world - where I did not belong. At least in the movie theater I felt
alive for two hours at a time. Aterwards I would reluctantly return
to a private holocaust where I was a walking dead person. I did what
I was told, perhaps hoping that my obedience would be rewarded with
love. I also developed an interest in Lionel trains, especially since
my first name was Lionel. I thus felt special, if only symbolically,
as the trains responded to my commands within a world of my own
design and construction. But outside of that little world I was the
train with the name "Lionel" obeying someone else's commands on
someone else's track at someone else's speed.
The lack of meaningful inclusion and love in a cold parental world
also brought about a variety of personal behaviors as symptoms of my
inner unrest. I blinked my eyes, clucked my throat, and dragged my
feet. I sucked my thumb till I was eight years old and wet my bed
till I was thirteen. I bit my nails till there was nothing left for
my teeth to grab. I was always seen as a day dreamer, someone who was
always far away and whose inner clock always ran behind the clocks of
the world. If real trains ran like I did, they would always be
running late. I think one of the factors in my development as a
fairly good teenage cross-country runner was my daily sprint to
school to avoid being late.
As a teenager I also secretly embarked on a masturbatory voyage as I
explored a private world of sexual fantasy. I became my own movie
theater. I suppose any one of these behaviors can be explained in
itself as simply being quirky and as being nothing greatly out of the
ordinary, but in the aggregate they suggest a high degree of inner
unrest. In my particular case, they represented the outer edge of
great inner pain. No one really sensed my inner pain, and its
outcroppings were simply seen as behaviors that would supposedly be
outgrown. But my teenage years were especially unhappy and
lonely.
In the midst of this deeply rooted and painful self-suppression, and
in addition to the desperate movie-going and train-collecting, I was
still part of life's daily activities, at least on the surface.
Participation in my childhood and teenage years meant going to
school, joining the Cub Scouts (but not the Boy Scouts), taking music
lessons for the piano and then the trumpet, and participating in
sports, especially individual ones, like tennis, swimming, and, of
course, running. I was always interested in girls, though I was
confused and troubled as a teenager when I began to wish I were one
of them. As an adult I bought a motorcycle, grew a beard, and earned
a doctor's degree, though not necessarily in that order. I was
married, had three children, divorced, and then remarried. For twenty
years I was a teacher, primarily in higher education, and then for
ten years I sold high-priced European automobiles.
My so-called "participation" in these activities, as my poem points
out, was more of a charade, more of a performance, than a genuine
involvement. I was never my true self, though I did not know what
that true self entailed. Instead, I always felt like a pretender,
like I was simply going through the motions of participating but was
not really present. I sought psychiatric help for many years but
continued to feel lost and detached, both personally and
interpersonally. It was as if my parents had written a script for me
which I had been faithfully following since the day I was born but
which somehow did not reflect the way I wanted to feel about myself.
Actually, I knew less how I wanted to feel and more how I did not
want to feel. In other words, I was more familiar with what felt bad
than with what felt good. Even now, though my parents have been dead
for several years, their scripts are not easy to bury. I may have
forgotten most of what I learned intellectually in school, but what I
learned emotionally as a child is not as easily forgotten. And yet,
as I have finally realized, one has to face one's inner life in order
to enjoy one's outer existence.
Complicating my inner life and therefore my enjoyment of life as a
whole was a gradual but steady increase in my confusion about my own
gender. My feminine wishes would not leave me alone. No matter where
I went or what I did, they went with me and intruded upon my
consciousness. They were with me at home, at work, on my motorcycle,
on vacations, even on my honeymoon with my second spouse, and
especially in my sexual fantasies. They simply would not go away.
Moreover, I was ashamed of my feminine wishes, for they did not match
my body and my social position and responsibilities. I felt like an
inner freak, though on the outside I was seen as a more or less
typical American male.
By the time I was fifty-five years old, thoughts of suicide became a
daily occurrence. I was telling myself that, in one decisive moment,
I could put an end to my double inner torment. Then I would no longer
have to live with my buried sense of self nor with my buried
femininity which was only complicating my development of a sense of
self. I just wanted to die and be done with it all. A few years
earlier I had had an actual head-on car accident, the most serious of
four car accidents within a matter of months. Miraculously, I escaped
unscathed in each instance. But still I was not convinced that I
needed help or that there was really any help available, for I had
given up on psychiatry in general.
It was my current spouse's near-fatal stroke and brief but
frightening coma which, ironically, served to wake me up from my own
deep emotional and spiritual sleep. In the emergency room, where she
was convulsing and vomiting and facing the possibility of death
without ever waking up, I suddenly felt what it means to be alive.
Out of my love for her, I began to sense my own heart, my own pain,
my own existence. By reaching out to her from the depths of my soul,
I suddenly realized that I, too, had a soul, that I had feelings,
that I wanted to be alive for her. I also wanted to be alive for me.
I wanted to be visible. It was the trauma of this event that at last
shocked me into seeking help, for at last I could not bear the
thought of myself dying without ever becoming visible as a person in
my own right. And so, as my poem says, "I found my way to helping
hands, to hearts that hugged my soul."
Two major factors in my background made it possible for me finally to
seek help. As we have seen, my parents certainly did not help me to
develop emotional strength, but they did provide me with good
schooling and an appreciation of the arts, especially written
expression. For example, I have kept a personal journal for forty
years, which has helped me to express and to handle my innermost
thoughts and feelings, so that they have become objectified enough to
exist outside of me where I can more readily keep an eye on them, if
you will. And for over a year now, in the Transgender
Forum on the World Wide Web, I have been writing a monthly
column called, "Making Sense of It All," in which I have continued to
do what I have been doing in my journal and what I am doing right
now, namely, speaking about my own life, especially about the
development of a sense of self and about deep, dark secrets like
gender confusion. Even though I have been severely depressed at
times, it is my interest in writing which has helped me to face my
inner difficulties, both to control and to understand them rather
than succumb to them.
Another major factor contributing to my decision to seek help was the
genuine love I had received from Mildred, originally my baby-sitter
and who, beginning when I was two years old, became a substitute
mother for me for over forty years. It was Mildred who gave me the
emotional and spiritual strength to face life's difficulties. With
her I felt alive. My parents let me stay with Mildred and her family
a great deal, perhaps because I was not an easy child for my parents
to handle. (Of course, as I have indicated, my parents were not easy
for a child to handle.) But on that northern Maine farm with Mildred
and her family, I was at peace, even if only on selected weekends.
Those moments of inner peace have been a beacon of hope for me
throughout my life. Mildred is no longer physically alive, but her
spirit, her love, and her soul remain a treasure that has enriched my
own life beyond any words.
And so it was that, encouraged by the soul-deep memory of Mildred's
love and supported by the written glimpses of my own soul, I finally
saw, in the threat of physical death to my spouse, the ongoing threat
of my own living death. At last I saw my own lost humanity, for in
the stark reality of that traumatic moment, I felt the impact of the
living present. A hospital emergency room had suddenly become a
delivery room from which each of us would emerge in search of rebirth
as a human being. Since then my own rebirth has involved gender
therapy, active membership in Renaissance, and participation in a
variety of gender-related activities, as well as a more genuine
involvement in life as a whole.
Looking back on all of this, I am led to the conclusion that,
transgendered or not, my life is fundamentally no different from
anyone else's. When each of us emerges from the womb, we are suddenly
thrust into a world which does not guarantee social acceptance nor a
meaningful existence. In a very real sense we all face the threat of
loneliness and meaninglessness and thus a world of uncertainty. It is
true, of course, that we each encounter different circumstances in
terms of which we face this uncertainty. Our culture, family,
religion, economic background, genetic traits, and the general risk
of just living all vary for each of us. Nevertheless, just by being
human we ultimately choose what to do with these various factors and
thus what to do with our lives. The choices may involve outright
acceptance of life as it is presented to us, or radical change, or a
combination of the two. The point is that, when we are born, we all
appear and then, whether we realize it or not, we automatically
disappear. We then spend the rest of our lives in search of
ourselves, our true selves, until some of us are reborn more fully
human. So I feel that, fundamentally speaking, I am no different from
anyone else in my search for a fulfilled life.
This search for fulfillment is often thought of as a concern for
one's soul, for one's innermost being, usually in the context of
one's body. Most people are able to take their physical existence for
granted and are free to explore what it means to have a soul in
relation to the body they inhabit. In my case, however, I have never
really been happy with my body, let alone comfortable with my soul.
For most of my life I have felt disembodied, detached from myself, so
that I was never able to develop a real sense of self and to feel
confident and glad to be alive. I also felt detached from all that
was around me, so that, even in the midst of a noisy social
situation, I was invisibly and silently floating in space. I felt I
had no real body with which to anchor myself in the physical world
and in terms of which to develop a real sense of self. I am
describing what might be regarded as a severe form of mental illness,
in that a person who is not connected to the outside world and who is
also disconnected from himself is not someone we usually think of as
being in a healthy state of mind. And yet that is precisely how I
felt for many years. I always thought I was mentally ill. Now I
believe I was simply, and deeply, unhappy in both body and soul.
Much to my own surprise, the way to my soul has been through my body.
My gender change has complicated my search for meaning and
involvement in life, but it has also become the key to my soul and
thus to the development of a workable sense of self. My emergence as
a more fully functioning human being following my gender change has
helped me to realize that my gender struggle has been a significant
factor in my more general struggle to develop as a person. At last I
feel physically alive, and, as if magically, I feel spiritually more
alive. I feel freer and more confident to explore other aspects of
myself, such as my writing and my music, and to tackle the everyday
problems of living. The invisibility I once experienced has been
replaced by the ability to see myself as part of the ongoing struggle
of all human beings to find some measure of happiness in the context
of a lived life. As my poem concludes:
Lee Etscovitz, Ed.D.
P.O.Box 471 Willow Grove, PA 19090
Tel. (215) 657-1560
Fax. (215) 659-1331
E-Mail: hmdm@voicenet.com