Sorrow

As I watched TV tonight (the show “Cops”), I felt a momentarily sharp pang of sorrow.  Regret.

I watched as the police placed a guy in the back of their car; as they talked to him, I started to wonder why I couldn’t be a man.  Oh how I wish that I could have been the man that everyone thought and expected I was.

It was only a moment.  It made me sad, but … hey, I’m not a man.  That doesn’t mean I can’t do “manly” things, it just means I’m not fit to play the male role.  I don’t belong in the “man” category.  In fact, just what in the hell is this category?  Is it the sum total of the nursery rhyme about how boys are made of puppy dog’s tails and .. whatever?  No.  That’s a cute little rhyme.

This is real life.  I don’t know if I was born wrong or what .. all I know is that I don’t fit into the “man” side of the puzzle.  I fit better in the “woman” side, despite 53+ years on the wrong side.  You’d think all the experience I’d gained through those years would have held me in good stead, that I could continue being what others thought I was.  Nope.

I was just too tired.  Too tired of hoping to die; too tired of the gray days in the sun; exhausted of energy to expend.  I think that I could have gone on for probably a half-year more, or maybe even nine months, but the desperation in my head, thinking of bashing myself into a highway underpass, that was going to get me sooner or later, and if it didn’t, the outright exhausted depression I was in was going to take me as surely as it took Robin Williams in 2014.

I could see no hope.  My mind wanted one of two things:  death of body, or transition.  My body, on the other hand, wanted to live.  I knew that mind over matter would only go so far, and I had to make a real effort to make that therapy appointment, to gradually over a month to allow myself to ease my burden just enough to stay alive.  It’s not therapy that saved me, it’s the fact that I went to therapy.  Therapy gave me the hope that I could get better, see the better side.  Hope saved me.