We often ask of the world, ‘What has life given me?’ This is my answer. It isn’t especially poetic and it isn’t particularly dramatic. It’s just life. My life.

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The Legal Stuff: Where is My Gift?  ©2009 SuZie
 
All Rights Reserved. These documents (including, without limitation, all articles, text, logos, compilation design) may printed for personal use only. No portion of these documents may be stored electronically, distributed electronically, or otherwise made available without express written consent of the copyright holder.
 
The image used for this story is used under royalty-free license* and fair-use policy from 3D Desktops UK
 

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Where is my gift? Where is my joy? What is the purpose of life if it is so unfair? So much hate and strife! So much pain…

 

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My parents had dreadful arguments when I was young. They made no sense to me at the time, though perhaps I have lied to myself all these years. Perhaps I knew all along that the words they used were simply a cover to “protect” us children, that my father’s infidelities were somehow known to us despite the terrible rage diverted towards minor faults, rather than confronted head on.
 
All I know is that I lived in dread that my parents would eventually divorce over…something…
 
In those days, I hid my head under a pillow, an ostrich hiding in the sand. I escaped into science fiction and fantasy. I fled from everyday details and memories. The arguments grew worse and my home life seemed to lose any cause and effect chronology. I have little recollection of those years.
 
There was, however, one thing I definitely knew in those days. My father treasured my sisters. He loved us all, but I knew deep down in my bones that I was not a treasure. I was a boy and I would never grow breasts.
 
I cried myself to sleep many a night over that fact, yet I never connected the dots. I thought I was weird and perverted. I dressed on occasion, but almost always for my budding sexual gratification. It was only after many years of denial that I realized that a large part of me wanted to be truly female. It was not just a perversion brought on by my father’s favoritism of the girls.
 
Sometimes I wonder how I might have reacted if given the magical opportunity to become a woman, rather than grow into a tall and gawky man who could not possibly pass for a woman. It would have taken a great deal of courage on my part, for I was very attracted to women. I had yet to explore the tender feelings I have on my feminine side, ones that just might welcome a strong and caring nurturer, whatever the sex.
 
In that day and age, to become a woman attracted to other women would have been a double hardship, and I was seldom one for accepting hardship. No, I experienced my father’s disappointment in me on an almost daily basis, but the ordinary failures of daily life paled before the failure to be a gift my father could treasure. And if I could never succeed at that most important endeavor, why bother at all?
 
As I neared adulthood I clung to various fragments of religion and philosophy to give meaning to my life. I needed purpose, or I just could not go on. I was throwing up barriers against the uncertain world I felt all around me. It was violent and irrational, just as my experience of home life had seemed to me.
 
And one by one, those barriers crumbled before the onslaught of reality.
 
The world wasn’t rational and it wasn’t serene and what people said was almost always a smokescreen for what they wished to hide.
 
I didn’t understand my reactions in the words I now use. I didn’t understand those reactions at all. They were visceral emotions to world and life events that seemed as incomprehensible to me as my parents’ fights in my youth.
 
This was not to say that my life was one only of pain. Far from it. The majority of humanity has experienced more hardship than I, and I knew it. How pathetic, I thought, to feel so badly about a life that was not all that terrible.
 
With my fragile barriers weakening, I lost the small amount of resiliency that I had. I began to sink into self-pity. I realized that fact, and despised myself all the more for it. Drinking, which had once been a rare social activity, gradually turned into a daily necessity.
 
Even then, I never fell as far as many I have met. I did not go to jail, nor did my wife leave me. I found AA before any of that could occur. Now, you might think that I will tell you of God about now, and how He/She saved me.
 
I will not.
 
I did find purpose in life, however.
 
It was in recovery that I discovered just how my younger years had shaped me. And it was only after several years of sobriety that I realized my transgender side. I won’t go into details here. Let it suffice that I learned much and have accepted that I will live that side of my personality primarily through my imagination.
 
I could tell you of all the gifts I have received in sobriety. I could talk of how I learned that I could thrive while working on the road to support my family. I could speak of all the great people who sincerely wish to help those in need, or of the new-born baby that came into our lives the very day I returned from those years on the road. I could speak in terms of religion and providence.
 
But I will not.
 
I will say only this: if you ask “Where is my gift?” you are asking the wrong question. You are doomed to disillusionment and despair. But if you ask what you can give to others you will know joy and happiness beyond what even the richest men in the world have experienced. I learned this lesson, and now practice it in my life, however imperfectly. Whenever I grow discontented I invariably discover that I’ve been thinking selfishly. And when I grow frightened over an irrational and destructive world, I remember that I am not in charge of making life fair. My job is to give of myself to others.
 
It is the only path to happiness that I have discovered.