To someday, somehow, just be me ....

I was away for New Year's at a retreat center we go to fairly regularly. I've just started full-time, so I'm still getting used to being Allison everywhere and everywhen. I was washing up to get ready for bed in the communal bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror, and I saw -- a guy. Thin hair, male-pattern baldness, heavy, slumped shoulders, and all the other stuff I couldn't see but knew was there (not to mention what wasn't, or at least not very much.) I wasn't able to see a woman at all. I would have cried to see myself in this freakish, alien body, if I hadn't had crying burned out of me fifty-some years ago.

I ran across a passage from Bobby's Rainy Day Adventure (Heather Rose Brown) which expressed so well what I felt:

When she sat down and pulled me onto her lap, I just curled up in a ball and started sobbing. All the hopes I'd had that maybe someday, somehow, I could just be me were gone. When I was able to speak again, I asked, "Why am I like this?"

 

"Why are you like what?" Aunt Joan's soft words came out slowly, as if they were being chosen very carefully.

 

"Why am I such a freak?"