I had a dream last night, it's a reacquiring dream , I was a little girl playing with dolls with my girlfriends. Sometimes I dream. I am a teenager at a slumber party playing with make up or hairstyles or giggling about boys until the wee hours. Then at other times, I am the bell of the Ball in a beautiful gown at my Senior Prom. Then I wake up. You would think waking up to reality would put me in a funk, but no, I lie there and bask in what should have been.
I can't help the fact that I was born in 1949 into a Irish Catholic environment. My family was very loving. and my childhood was ideal, The problem was with me. I always knew I was different, I wasn't like other boys, but I did not know why I was jealous of my sister because she got to wear pretty dresses and I was stuck with dumb boys clothes.
There was no information available to me about alternate lifestyles and what I was taught in Catholic school was that there was only one available acceptable way to live.
By the time I was 15 I had lost faith in Catholicism and had embarked on a study of world wide religious cultures witch I continue to the present day .
It took me fifty years however to figure out myself. The internet opened my eye to the fact that I wasn't unique, there were other people like me and there were resources to help us. I learned there was a name for my condition, I was transgendered. A whole new world opened for me. I went to see a lady who would become one of my best friends and she gave me my first makeover and dressed me up and took me out to a nightclub, suddenly a whole new world opened up before my eyes and I realized this person is the real me.
I have never looked back, I jumped into this new world with both feet and I was truly happy for the first time in my life.
That was twelve years ago and I am now living as the woman I was always meant to be.I have no regrets, what is past is past and it is a waste of precious time to dwell on it. I rejoice in the fact that many transgendered children born today do not have to go through the years of anguish that was my life for far too long. My hope is that all children who are somewhat different from society's norm are given the chance to achieve their full potential.
In parting, I would like to quote a wise old lady who once told me that, normal, is a setting on your clothes dryer.
