Zander's Inside Voice

I have everything I need to change my name legally now. I can feel that I am ready for it and that it needs to happen soon. There’s just a few things I worry about, like telling everyone. And changing all the documents to the correct name. And then the part where I file to change my birth certificate to this name and the gender marker. And then I will need to make more legal changes with that.

I talked to my therapist this week about how I dread telling people about this. It’s just not going to go well with some people. She said that’s their problem, that when I am ready, I deserve to live my own life the way I want and not have to worry about everyone else. That sounds reasonable in theory, but for me, it sounds impossible at times. I have grown up constantly in defensive mode, like everything I do is wrong. I lived so much of my adult life feeling like I’m in trouble. I want this to go away, this feeling of needing to defend myself constantly.

I have also heard people say that trans people are looking for attention. Yeah, no. That’s not relevant to me at all. I already attract too much attention just being me. I don’t want to do anything to attract more attention to myself. Not that kind of attention. I just want to live my life as me, the authentic me I see myself as. That’s all that matters to me. I don’t care about being super visible and out to the world. I have spent way too much time convincing myself that I deserve to be alive that I don’t want to be in any position where people can sit there and tell me I don’t deserve to be alive.

Sometimes I have these days where I feel so low because of things that have happened, things I messed up, things I couldn’t quite figure out what was the right answer. I am prone to taking on too much responsibility for things that I couldn’t control or change. I feel shame for things that were done to me by someone else. I don’t know what to say sometimes so I say nothing at all.

I think about Little Zander and how he is fearless, just like he was when I left him all those years ago. It was time to start being afraid and ashamed of him, I guess. But it’s funny how he hasn’t changed in all this time. He doesn’t care what people think and he doesn’t care about what he’s supposed to be. He just wants to be. I guess I have been patiently waiting for him to take all of me over and I can just be completely fearless again, like I used to be. But he can’t take over. Once I pushed him away from me, I created the separation that exists between us. I have to tear that down. I have to take ownership of the shame and fear that made me push him down in the first place. He’s not going to take that first step for me to finally merge into him, and him into me.

It’s all on me and that scares me so much. I know that there won’t be regret and there won’t be a feeling that I need to go back. I have dreamed about changing my name and living as who I really am for as long as I was told I wasn’t a boy. The fantasies of adult life my entire childhood were of being male, living a completely male existence, and never bowing to the pressure that I was supposedly not male. But I did give in to that pressure. I did try to be what everyone said I was. I failed. I could not force myself to be that person. So all I can be is who I am. But that means overcoming this split I created.

I can feel that the time is coming for me to do this. It will be here soon and I hope I can tell when it’s the right time.