Welcome to #TransTuesday! There’s something that drastically changed for me, from pre-transition to now. And I think it holds true for the majority of trans people, if not all of us. So let’s talk about: CONFIDENCE.
All the way back when I was a wee little Tilly who did not yet know she was Tilly, I suffered from an incredibly strong and almost painful shyness. My mom always told me I was just shy and that’s all there was to it.
But then her preferred method of dealing with things was to never really probe beneath the surface, and being transgender is allllllllll about probing beneath the surface to find what’s really underneath, and why.
Now in addition to reminding you how I do not speak for all trans people or all trans women, I want to explicitly state that a lot of people ARE shy for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with being transgender.
I’m no psychologist, but it seems pretty clear it can be caused by any number of things, and some people are probably very happy and content to be shy and that’s all wonderful. But I’m trying to figure out why I specifically was shy, which ties into my trans-ness.
My earliest memory of being shy was being in my mom’s arms… I don’t know how old I was, but I must have been small for her to be carrying me still. We were outside, I think at a relative’s house, and she was talking to the lady who lived next door.
And this lady was just ENAMORED with my eyelashes, because they were so long and she kept saying how she wished she had eyelashes like that and jokingly asked if she could steal them. And lemme tell you yes, they ARE very long, and you should be jealous 😌
But I kept turning away from her, burying my head in my mom’s shoulder. I didn’t want to look at her. I have this intense memory of just wishing she’d stop talking to me and stop looking at me. And she wasn’t being mean or cruel, I just… could not stand the attention.
And that feeling followed me my entire life, and never left. Until it did. After I transitioned.
I’m much, MUCH more open and willing to talk and not just sit in silence. Because I’m more comfortable in my own body now, and don’t have that layer of having to pretend to be someone I’m not blocking me from the world.
Which is ironic, because now that some certain men are seeing me as a woman (hooray!) they’re instantly interrupting and talking over me and/or repeating something I just said as if it were their own idea (c’mon dudes, really?).
It’s good they actually see me as a woman… enough to treat me in the sexist way they treat all other women, I guess? A mixed bag!
If you want to see my newfound confidence in action, see this Trans Tuesday’s follow-up, CONFIDENCE 2: INTO THE UNKNOWN aka A WHOLE NEW WORLD aka WHAT IS HAPPENING, when I got to truly experience the world as myself and was surprised to discover what a different experience it was.
What’s very important for you to understand at this point is how difficult it was for me to deal with not wanting to be seen for my entire life, pre-transition. High school speech class was a nightmare. Family parties were torturous. Even FRIENDS’ parties were torturous.
I WANTED to go. Because these are people I care about very much! And yet I’d get there and hide in a corner and feel mostly miserable, and I can feel it welling up inside me now, that exact same feeling. The sense memory is so strong.
As an aside, this is something that DIRECTLY shows up in The Matrix, and I wrote a whole book about those films’ trans allegories called BEGIN TRANSMISSION and you prolly already know that but I’m never gonna shut up about it. Get your copy today!
But I was constantly on edge. If someone I didn’t already know talked to me OH GOD I’d have to respond and I didn’t know how or what to say, and what if I gave something away (to both them and myself) about my true self and then I was exposed for the world to see?!
It was harrowing. And what I want you to take from this is if before I transitioned, we’ve ever met, worked together, had lunch, or even moreso, become actual friends… I had to work through ALL of that, constantly fighting dysphoria and myself because I thought you were worth it.
The first time I met Susan (in person), I drove 300 miles to where she was going to college… we met online writing Star Trek fanfiction and YES if you know us that’s probably not surprising.
When I got there, I drove around her dorm like two or three times. There was plenty of parking, mind you. But my heart was jumping out of my chest. I couldn’t even think clearly. And yes, part of this is that we’d already been talking for months and I knew I loved her.
It wasn’t even rejection I was worried about, she was very excited to see me. But I didn’t know if I could handle it in person, again because of the huge wall between me and the world around me. And I never wanted ANYONE to break through that wall as much as her.
For more on how GENDER DYSPHORIA kept me from people and the world for my entire life, see the trans tuesday thread on it.
And you can see FREEING UP MY BRAIN aka LUNCH WITH TILLY for more on how the entire world opened up to me once dysphoria dissipated.
But you can ALSO see the trans tuesday on TRANSPHOBIA IS ALWAYS WITH US (that old dysphoric feeling) for ways in which, even now, anything remotely similar to old dysphoric experiences can bring back the dysphoria sense memory and cause problems.
So after I parked at her dorm, I was shaking as I walked over. She was on her way down and I was just going to leap out of my own skin, I didn’t know what to do with myself.
But I fought through it, stabbed my flight response right in the face, because she was worth it to me. And to everyone out there I had any kind of relationship with prior to coming out, you were important enough for me to fight through the fear, too.
But there’s more to this whole not wanting to be seen thing. I had the remarkably bad luck my entire life to be the one who was always forgotten. It wasn’t really bad luck though, because that’d be a weird thing to follow me around all my life without some kind of concrete cause.
I was picked last for every game/sport/competition/ANYTHING through all of school. And listen, I certainly wasn’t the best at everything, but I was pretty damn good at a lot of things! Didn’t matter. Almost always last.
And a lot of times it wasn’t intentional, they’d just… forget I was there. Even in organized little league! (when my step-dad wasn’t the coach, anyway) “Oh, you didn’t get a team? Huh.”
When I was probably around 10 years old I went on a fishing trip with my friend’s church. The adults helped make sure every kid caught a fish. Except for one.
Guess who they forgot?
I’d be the person at restaurants that the server just forgot to ever bring food for. Once in high school I went to a fast food place with friends, and they all got their food, sat down, and finished eating before I’d even gotten mine.
I was just standing there at the counter, waiting. Everyone ignored me. EVERYONE.
Yes, I could have just spoken up and politely asked if my order was coming soon, but then the shyness would hit because THEN THEY’D BE LOOKING AT ME AND TALKING TO ME and I’d have to put the facade up and figure out how to navigate it.
And again, even something as simple as that terrified me and made me want to crawl into a hole and hide for the rest of my life.
But in my long journey of self-discovery, I realized that the reason I was always forgotten is because I’d learned to adapt to my inability to cope with being seen by finding ways to make myself as small as possible.
And I don’t mean only physically, though that was certainly part of it too. If I slouched and half-hid behind a wall, or sat alone in the corner, if I didn’t make eye contact… people would ignore me and I wouldn’t have to deal with it.
Usually I didn’t even realize I was doing it. It was a subconscious coping mechanism I’d developed to protect me from the awful feelings every interaction would bubble up inside me.
But the paradox is it KILLED me to not be seen. I WANTED to be seen, as myself, so very badly. But at the same time OH GOD DON’T LOOK AT ME OR TALK TO ME OR I HAVE TO PLAY CISGENDER MAN AGAIN.
And to not even know that that’s what the feeling was, or why I was feeling it, added an extra layer of confusion and awfulness on top of everything. I didn’t know why I was like that, and I wished so hard that I wasn’t. But had no idea what to do about it.
It was such an awful spot to find myself in, wanting people to get close but not knowing how to let them. I was actively keeping myself from forming close friendships (or making it exponentially harder on myself), and they were what I craved so much.
It’s such a lonely, isolating experience. Again, I did have friends as a kid, and I do now (and again, please know how important you are to me that I fought through all that for you). But that wall was always there, and I was alone on the inside.
It’s like there’s a void inside you, but also all around you! It’s so difficult to explain. It was horrible to experience, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
But I don’t feel afraid to talk to people anymore, because I don’t have to hide anything. I’m just… me. It actually EXCITES me. I look forward to it. A lot! And that is such a weird feeling that I don’t really know how to process.
And I noticed something else that ties in with all of this, too. It’s a small thing, but it is ABSOLUTELY a symptom of this entire thing with not wanting to be seen, and not having any confidence at all, and the ways that’s all changed now.
I never, ever signed my emails with my name if I could avoid it. I used a couple weird nicknames at first, and okay that probably makes sense, tying in to how my old name wasn’t me and gave me bad feelings.
But shortly thereafter it evolved into only this:
-j
That was it. I could live with that. ANY of you who received emails from me pre-transition, go look. 95% chance that’s at the bottom of them. I can see you nodding from here.
Once, someone asked me why I used j instead of J. Well hey, good question. Why WOULD I?
I didn’t have an answer, other than the J felt… pretentious. Why the HECK would the capitalized letter of my first name, which actually SHOULD be capitalized, feel pretentious for me to use?
Because I felt I didn’t deserve it. Because that wasn’t me. And again, not every way of making myself smaller and less noticeable in the world was physical.
So I went with the lower case version, because that felt closer to “me” than the capital.
But, uh… look, sometimes this stuff is so obvious it’s kind of embarrassing you never saw it before. And if you’d like to see an EXTRA embarrassing way this happened, check out the trans tuesday on THE SIGNS WERE ALWAYS THERE (that we were trans).
So hey friends, if you have recent emails from me, post-coming out, go see how I signed them. For the rest of you, here we go.
Are you ready? Sure you are. We all know what’s coming.
I immediately changed to signing them:
-T
That was entirely subconscious, I assure you. I didn’t INTEND to do it, it just happened. Almost immediately!
I’m taking up space in the world. You can see me.
PLEASE SEE ME.
It’s been so long alone. Hi, hello, I adore you and you mean the world to me. 💜
And I’m deserving of the space I take up in the world… and a capital first letter of my real name, just like everyone else.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com