What have I done?

 

[title to be read in a tone of horrified realisation]

I had a memory tonight and I want to scream.

It's about the end of the world. I was remembering the week of the zombie apocalypse. Sometime not long before I had actually 'come out' the deputy head (or possibly by that point he was the head?) of the library program I was enrolled in, advised that I was going to start presenting as female or something like that. I don't know how I did it.

And I think it was the day itself. Maybe I am conflating two separate days in my memory now? But I think it was the day.

I don't know how I did it, that day in November - must have been - wearing a skirt to class while I could feel the world about to end. Managing to sit and get my work done when I expected at any moment to see people running past the door, a smear of blood on its window and some monster pressing to get in and devour us all.

Maybe it was a different day? Research says it was a different day. The terror was late October and early November, whereas that time I went out in a skirt was mid-November. But closely timed, and when I was making a psych appointment because I knew I needed something to protect me against killing myself if my mind were to continue conjuring up such dreadful imagery and beliefs.

My point is that then I had many of the same fears and concerns, but I was still fighting through for happiness and bold enough back then to try wearing a skirt out in public. Bold enough to 'come out' to an administrator and attempt something like a public transition. And now we are seven years later and I have no courage to do the same in my workplace, nor out and about in general.

I keep feeling like that year end was a turning point where I was pushed back by my mother being unsupportive and pushed back by a spike in mental illness and my response was to retreat from myself and go back into timid hiding. Only this year am I making a push to get new clothes again and to update my presentation. And I still, still do not have the courage to confront anyone about it. Still do not have any certainty of myself to know what I should declare. I wish I had gone differently, I think so.