For months now since having moved to Colorado I’ve often felt that I’ve been given, and that I’m living, a “golden moment”. A wonderful “second opportunity” in so many aspects of my life, both professionally and personally.
The words “golden moment” and the quote “Life isn’t about finding ourselves; Life is about creating ourselves” keep coming into my mind, in tandem. This second (or third?) opportunity I’ve been given feels like “my golden moment to create myself”.
For many aspects of my masculinization process and my career, I feel like I got this second opportunity “just in the nick of time”: and for this reason I want to make the best of it even more.
I’m getting my second puberty & my second youth, two decades after the “original” one, but in the “correct gender” for me now, and maybe also with the consciousness and awareness of those two decades of life experiences which make this phase feel even more wonderful and precious. Within this context, the relationships I’m building with guys (cis-men, mostly in their twenties & thirties) are extremely precious and meaningful to me now. All friendships are precious to me, I’ve always given a lot of meaning to friendship and I have often had many close male friends, many of whom are still good friends to this day. But I have changed, I am different now — or, at least, I feel different now because I have come into my non-binary/trans-masculine gender identity more fully, consciously and more explicitly even to the outside world. My feeling, and thus somehow or sometimes presenting, differently is affecting the dynamics in the interactions in new relationships with men around me now (at least those with whom I interact more regularly). I already got glimpses and tastes of these dynamics many years ago, in my “first puberty & youth”, with some buddies in high-school, with my beloved sailing buddy in college and with my good friends in grad school. And indeed, I missed those interactions, those feelings, when they were gone from my daily life. Having them back now, finding them again now so many years later (and in a completely different corner of the world) feels so lovely, so wonderful, almost unexpected, and therefore even more precious. Moreover, given many experiences of “flakiness” in California (which probably triggered or compounded childhood experiences of “abandonment” for me), I’m still partly in disbelief of these close, comfortable relationships now and almost always in some fear of “losing” them.
The main feelings now, however, are of wonder, of joy, of learning, and of creating or building: I’m building new types of relationships while also creating myself anew. Maybe this is the feeling lots of trans persons have when they talk about the “phoenix”… I’m creating myself and relating to the world, and thus experiencing myself and the world, in an almost completely new way, presenting myself as the “boy” that I feel I am and not as the “woman” that the world around might might expect. It often feels weird to myself, too, because doing it so explicitly is so new to me. I can feel, see, hear myself behaving in ways that are more markedly different from the past or from what might be expected of the way I was socialized: this is a little strange to me, too, and definitely pushing my comfort zone, but it feels good.
On the one hand, it feels good because I feel that I’m finally allowing myself to create myself as I really want to be — a boy, a climber & athlete, a professional scientist, embracing my transgender identity and my neurodivergence without hiding.
On the other hand, it also feels good because I’m finding acceptance and affirmations from the pockets of world around me, and especially from all the males I’m around and whose acceptance and affirmation mean so much to me now.
The Little Prince and the Fox 