What to do?

Sometimes it really is just super hard to know what to do. What options to take, what to respond to, how to respond, when to respond. Life is confusing. It really is.

Coming out transgender and then transition, of course, throws a wheelbarrow shit full of complexity on where to go from here. Well it certainly has in my case.

By the time I was unable to repress and deny the truth of my gender identity, I had travelled 40 plus years of life. I guess I was a slow to realise, or just dam good at pretending it wasn’t real. Those 40 years of life mean I had accumulated a fair bit of accumulated stuff. Important stuff and not important stuff, and some stuff that to live without would be devastating.

I really love seeing the stories where relationships could weather the turmoil and complexity of a coming out and transition. I love to see how those relationships were strong enough, where love was love, and love was strong enough to get through the rocky ground and make it through.

Unfortunately, for every one of these stories there is a story of a relationship that failed. Of pain on both sides, of loss on both sides. I wish it weren’t that way but that’s the way it is.

For transgender people, it is a massive risk coming out. It is a fundamental mind shift for their families and loved ones to make, and, unfortunately many families won’t deal with it, instead they run away and hide, or push the person away.

I have friends who lost everything. Especially the biggest loss, the people. Sometimes they come back in time, but it’s a huge thing, for some it’s really fucking nasty, for some it’s civil. But in the end it amounts to the same. A huge loss. A massive pile of pain that sits like a massive knot in the core of your soul.

My personal story is one of those that didn’t work out like the fairy tale. I lost all that family connection over a long period of time. My immediate family were nasty, I cut off any contact with them a long time ago and it was in a sense relief, but it’s still a loss.

My relationship with my partner, I thought, hoped, dreamed I guess, that it would survive. I thought that we would have a tough rocky road but that we would in fact manage to be one of those stories that weathered the storm. It was not to be.

My former partner, characterised this as one day I had a husband and then I didn’t. For me the story is somewhat different. For me, I wanted it to work, I felt we tried to talk, and we did, in a variety of mediums, face to face and text based discussions. But in the end, it was definitively her choice to say she couldn’t do it.

There could sure be much too and fro about the details. I am sure I fucked it up royally in many ways. I don’t deny that, but I can’t abide a pretence that one day I was a partner and the next I wasn’t. Well I guess it is true in actuality, but it was not true by my choice.

The really messy stuff happens from there. The dissolution of a relationship partnership is one thing. The working it out from there is the hard thing. It’s messy and confusing, for all parties involved.

My former partner, in many ways, respects my pronouns, my new name and so on. She states she would like to remain friends. She even describes our relationship as friendly. I simply can’t characterise it in such a way. Civil, perhaps, but friendly not so much.

I don’t want to go in to a litany of mistakes and wrongdoings on either my side of the equation or theirs. It remains a reality though, that what we have, can’t at this time be called a friendship. It hurts like fuck to say it, but it is the truth.

Maybe one day, maybe sometime in the future, a friendship can be salvaged from the pain and hurt on both sides. It’s hard to see it at this point. I do hope it does. It’s hard, though, to move past some things. I don’t know whether I can or not.

The question of what to do, how to handle things, and so on is a hard one. There are the mutual friends of course that choose to support both people in such a situation, and that’s a wonderful, if sometimes hard to navigate thing. There are social media connections that you kind of think need to be maintained in order to maintain a connection with children and communication.

Those connections though, sometimes, get used as a forum to air grievances for all the world to see.

What I am pretty sure of, is if you maintain those social media connections for those purposes of communicating about household stuff, what you don’t do is go shitting on each other’s posts.

Pretty sure that’s a thing you don’t do. Pretty sure what you should do is just scroll on past.