On Tuesday, August 12, 2014, I had the first major stroke of my gender revelation. It was basically the first domino falling, followed by about two weeks of brain-melting self-realization. That was about three and a half weeks ago.
Prior to the epiphany, I had spent my entire life (or at least life after the start of puberty, before which I remember virtually nothing) hating myself, or at best, not liking myself. My lows were crippling depressive states where I could barely get out of bed. My highs were a sort of bittersweet melancholy that approached true happiness, but never quite got there.
After the epiphany, everything basically inverted, like the upside-down castle areas in Symphony of the Night. There was some crossover, but the old highs became the new lows, and everything went up from there. The first time I experienced sadness after the epiphany was about a week or so along, and instead of being an event that sent me spiraling into a depressive state for a day or two, as minor things like that used to do, it was a melancholy state, not even a truly sad state, that faded away after about an hour, maybe two.
Coming through that was enormously positive, as it had been my first real test of my true capacity to experience emotions that are commonly perceived as negative, but not let them experience me, so to speak. I remained my true self throughout, and experienced a range of emotion, after spending years experiencing no real emotion at all.
The sad state was triggered by a sense of feeling not very feminine, after having felt extremely feminine during the preceding week or so. As the sadness crept up on me, I considered it from the new perspective of liking who I was, and loving and caring about myself. I supposed that having lived as male for roughly thirty years, it seemed unreasonable to expect that that persona, which I now call “the Jason construct,” would just disintegrate completely and immediately. Recalling the disastrous US move of forcibly disbanding Iraqi military and police after invasion, I thought that simply willing long-time structures into nothingness does not typically result in positive things, and so it wasn’t abnormal or bad to feel as I was feeling.
I concluded that it was okay to be a little disappointed that I was not instantly and completely changed, and that it was also natural and normal to feel some back-and-forth tug as the Jason construct began coming apart, when his sole purpose upon creation was to keep Sera, the real me, safe; like many other childhood psychological defense constructs, he just overstayed his welcome long past the point of usefulness. And upon realizing that, the sadness peaked and began to recede, and it was gone shortly thereafter.
Not long after that, I was reading some articles by a doctor who has dealt with many patients going through gender transition. He wrote:
When our gender Self Map does not match our Physical Gender (genitals), along with our society providing no niche or role (although most other societies do) for this varied gender expression, a conflict usually develops. Although gender folk’s combination of the five gender factors is just as natural as any other, it is not perceived as “normal” (what you are supposed to be or do) in our society.
Because a child’s greatest desire is to be normal (like everybody else), they create an artificial self which meets this goal. They are often so successful at this that they not only fool everyone else but themselves as well — at least part of the time, in some way.
I have gradually come to the conclusion that for most physically male gender folk, the male persona is an artificial construction produced by the early adolescent individual (ages 12 to 15) in order to fit in and be like everybody else…
Once created, physically male gender folk live in this role — a 3-D personality with its own goals, likes and dislikes, values, hobbies, etc. Although indistinguishable from the “real thing,” it isn’t themselves. It is an artificial creation for them to be able to fit in.
(Source, emphasis added.)
I was overjoyed. I had come to essentially the same conclusion (though less eloquent and specific) on my own. It was a very affirming thing, a validation of many aspects of who I was, all at once. Female, self-loving, intelligent, human. I had previously only been one of those.
One of the things I then wondered was when (or even if) and how my dreams would shift. Although I had had this conscious breakthrough realizing my actual gender and recognizing who I really was — which was, in theory, an unearthing of my natural subconscious — in my dreams, I continued to exist as my male self, as some expression of the Jason construct.
I thought of a number of possibilities; maybe I would alternate genders in my dream as different sequences came and went, for example. Ultimately, I just let it all go because whatever would happen would happen, and there was nothing to be gained by stressing out over it. (This was also something I could not really do before.) But last night, a little over three weeks after the epiphany, the first dream change happened.
I was wholly female in all dream sequences that I could remember upon waking. It had been a sort of media-before-bed-driven thing, with shades of Orange is the New Black (which I’ve never watched, but have seen gifsets of on my tumblr, which I browsed before bed), and League of Legends (which I played a bit not long before bed). I was in some sort of women’s prison, there were classes that were taught by people possessed of a vast stupidity (as one might expect), and at some point, I was teaming up with someone else to have some kind of League-style battle with another duo, in which I took on the role of Talon, but a female version of him. Naturally, I was kicking a lot of ass, but I was also doing so while (or maybe by) shaking out cans of Coca-cola on my enemies, in addition to doing all of Talon’s actual moves. (I have no idea what that was about. Maybe my healthier eating habits that have developed as part of all this? Maybe a subconscious Pepsi ad?)
So, I don’t know what my next dreams will be like in terms of subconscious gender self-perception, but I do know that when I woke up today, I felt even better than I did when I usually wake up (nowadays). (I used to wake up feeling groggy and exhausted no matter what.) Knowing that the Jason construct was starting to unravel at that level created a very happy feeling in me.
I told my friend, and then tried to do my morning stretch routine while cats tried to lie down on me over and over. All smiles.
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