The quiet girl.... Loneliness.

It is a very natural human need to desire understanding and to want for someone who can relate to and empathise with you.

Being able to understand someone and being able to relate to them are different things entirely but both are reliant upon each other.

In order to understand someone on any level, you must first be able to relate to them through (at least SOME) common life experience, something about your life and their own that has been similar, even if you’ve not ever met each other, you must both share a common perspective on some aspectof life as you have each lived it, if you are to understand each other on some level and both get “on the same page” as it were.

Once you’ve found one way in which you can relate to someone, if you can then think outside your own personal “sphere” if you canl ook past your own experiences and contemplate different circumstances to those you’ve experienced personally and contemplate how those other circumstances may have affected you differently, shaped your personality, your perspective; differently, then soon your ability to understand others starts to grow.

There is one reason alone in this world; why one person can’t relate to someone else, one reason why there is “conflict”. It is that ONE factor, that causes most of humanity’s problems.

Ego.

Over estimation of one’s personal opinions, the value of their own personal life experiences, the importance of their own needs or any other factor they might consider personally important.

What is this post about?

This post is about a perpetual cycle I find myself in in my life.

The reason I’m still here on the internet in this arena.

The two reasons in fact.

The first is the basic human need I wrote about above. Like all humans, part of me needs someone to relate to, who can understand me, understand who I AM in essence, my nature, and (possibly) the factors of my life that have seen me become that person.

The other reason?

I try to help people.

In my own ways and ways that aren’t necessarily apparent to the people who only know and see me for what I write under the handle “Van Buren”. I do my best to help people and their families so they DON’T have to know (from personal experience) what I’ve experienced in my life.

Stupid huh?

I’m here to try and find someone who understands, but at the same, time I work towards helping people NOT have to understand.

The only people who MIGHT someday have a CHANCE at understanding me and my perspective, and I work to make it so they NEVER have to have that.

I badly need to find someone “like” me but I also don’t want anyone to ever have to end up “like” me, and that’s strange and sad to me, because I personally feel I’m a beautiful person, a person who would give just about anything for just about anyone if she thought they needed it and that it might help. A person more worthy of trust than your mother, than your father, than the person you consider to be closest to you in your life.

I guess it’s MORE important to me that people DON’T have to know what my life has been like, and the hurt from that (that has made me who Iam), than it is to find someone who DOES understand (fully) that hurt personally and can relate.

There are some people who I correspond with (and some I don’t) who I sense share SOME common experiences in relation to my motivations for having changed sex, and some of them, I sense, can relate in many ways to the struggle I endured in order to do that. But not yet have I found or corresponded with a single person who I feel truly understands the full impact my/our shared birth condition has truly had on me and my life.

Why?

In even those who come the closest, I sense a level of ego. I understand much about them and how (and) the factors of their lives (from what they recount of them) that have likely lead to them having their perspective, and I don’t judge them for that, BUT! I (personally), I have NO ego.

None at all.

I don’t truly think myself or my life story to be better or more valid than anyone else’s, however I also cannot agree that others (so far) could truly be deemed the same as mine. Their choices and actions were different to mine and part of me has to believe that is due mostly to different personal motivations for their actions.

So I face a personal dilemma.

You see, I consider myself to have been born female but transsexual, and the fact that I was born and experienced early life under those circumstances, HEAVILY influenced the decisions I made in life and the actions I was able and required to undertake.

Yet everywhere I look, I see people who also claim/consider themselves to be (born) transsexual, and the decisions they have made and the actions they were able to undertake in life, were the very same things that being born transsexual PREVENTED me from.

It’s not uncommon for people to think of or say that those who write the things I write and take the stance I take on most issues are “separatists”or think ourselves to be better "purer" or more valid than others.

Personally, it is NOT my INTENT to appear/be that way, but by life circumstance/experience and how it has shaped my perspective differently to most, it simply happens as a matter of natural progression, it is THEIR interpretation based on THEIR own insecurities, not MY intention.

So my dilemma is how and who to apply the word “Transsexual” to accurately.

To me personally, it can’t be both ways, transsexual cannot simultaneously describe two different life experiences.

IE the life experiences I have, and at the same time, the experiences of those who WERE able to do those things that I consider Transsexualism to have prevented me from doing.

It can’t possibly be both ways in my opinion.

And so that leads us back to who's experience is accurately described by that word.

If I were to say mine is and the other experience is not, I would be called a separatist, possibly an “elitist” the implication being that I think I’m better or more valid than those who DON’T share my life experiences.

So what happens then when all that is left for me to do is surrender that term so that others can use it for themselves to describe THEIR (different) life experience? Where then does that leave me? What can I use to describe my life experience to others if not that word?

The only words left that truly fit in any way and that do not conflict with the claims of others are simply woman and female.

YET! If I claim those things, if I use those to describe myself, even though they are my only remaining option, all that I have left without having to surrender and lie about my own history, then I’m told I’m in denial of who and what I REALLY am, and again, told I think I’m better or more valid than others and “elitist”.

What would people have me do?

The minute I question THEIR lived experiences, I’m disparaged and shouted down, yet they deny me the right to my own on ANY possible level and again; disparage me if I refuse to do what they themselves refuse to do (and get so up in arms about at merely the suggestion they do) and relinquish my own history/validity.

I am prepared to accept their history and still see them (mostly) as valid for/as who and what they say they are, provided they are living their life right for who and what the world and society considers what they claim they are to be , yet it is impossible for them to accept that my stated history might be the exact truth of my lived experience.

Their ego prevents them from looking outside their own square long and far enough to consider my life a possibility.

So who am I?

Who is this person no-one (it seems) can or WANTS to understand?

I don’t think myself better or more worthy of anything than any other human being on the planet, be they gay, straight, Transsexual, Transgender, "cis" or whatever else you can come up with, but I also don’t think myself to be THE SAME as all (or any) others.

I was finally forced to seek treatment for my condition in my 20’s, 100% alone and without ANY support what-so-ever.

You want to know how much better I think I am than others? How much more a woman or a female than anyone else I think I am (personally)?

I paid for my treatment by driving a truck. I worked 14 hours a day, much of it dirty hard and physical.

Hardly the epitome of what most people would consider to be a woman or female, but I needed the money and as all women would do, I did what I had to.

I was 5’11”, balding and 280lbs with the build of a brick shit-house when I started.

Better than others? You’d have to think I think so wouldn’t you?

I lived in solitude, socially isolated in life in just about every respect except my employment, for three years, not by choice but by circumstantial neccessity.

I sold everything I owned except my car in order to pay to do what I needed to do.

I’ve rebuilt my life completely from scratch, the only things that remain of old now, are my car and my job, and soon enough they will be gone too.

Better?

Do you think so?

I don't!

But who has done the same that you know of?

Different?

Can you honestly say NO(?) and believe yourself to be being honest (in every respect) about the life YOU have lived?

What can be said (acurately) about me now?

I am a twenty something year old woman, who would consider it acurate to state I was born transsexual, IF (that is) it weren’t for the fact that my life (due to that fact), has been so different to everyone else who also claims to have been born that way.

I’m a twenty something year old woman who hopes to soon find a boyfriend, love, to someday be married and a mother (somehow).

I’m a twenty something year old woman, who’s contemplating doing a degree in high school teaching because she wants badly to help kids and offer them the understanding, compassion and assistance that they each need in order to become well-adjusted young human beings (whatever form they may finally take) that never had to know the hurt she has known personally.

A young woman who desperately hopes she offers those she considers friends, that most basic of human needs that this post talks about; understanding (free of consequence).

AND! I'm a young woman who; regardless of what people might know or sense of my history or origins, refuses to explain or feel responsible for explaining to others that I AM female, that I AM a woman and/or why (no other girl has to, and niether do/should I).

My history and how I got to be who I am (although I'm in no way proud OR ashamed of any of it) is NO-ONES business but my own, what they get to have, is me at face value, and most have no problem with that at all.

In fact; many go out of their way to make an effort and help me because of who they get at face value. They see a kind, intuitive, humble and hard working young woman and recognise the rarity of that in this day and age.

Who would some people SAY (or think) I am?

Some would say I’m one of a group of “bullies”, a separatist, an “elitist”, some would say due to the perspective my life experience has given me and the opinions I express because of that, that I (and those they think are like me) would be a “classic tranny skank”. (for example)

I often wonder how many people truly assess the motives and personal issues behind their own perspectives? (before opening their mouth and voicing their opinions, even though I realize the example I've given is a response to a post from another blogger that becomes a pretty generalized attack on what the author views, perhaps incorrectly, as a certain "group")

I know that now-a-days the only affinity I have for the term “transsexual” is due to my desire for those born into (what I deem as) the same condition I was, NOT to have to suffer and be mistreated, and I see and have seen first hand the irreperable damage conflating and co-opting different motivations with that word can and DOES cause, and my experiences are NOT from 40 years ago, they are from NOW!

I also know that the more/longer I’m involved here, there more I realise that the only people I can seem to find are the egotistical ones trying to compensate for their insecurities instead of truly assessing and facing up to and working to resolve their own history and personal issues.

And the more I constantly see that, and see it conflated with me, the more hurt I feel and the less I am inclined to come here in search of fulfilling that basic human need.

Someday I’ll get smart. I’ll work out that it is simply NOThere and I’ll do myself a favour and stop coming back.