My name change forms are in the mail!

I mailed my name change paperwork off today. For some ridiculous reason, they still take six to eight weeks to process these things, so the leaves will be turning by the time my name change is done.

In Ontario, I can get my gender changed on my driver's license with a letter from my doctor, so I'll do that when I give the license people my name change certificate, and I'll have all the right letters in the right places inside my wallet.

It's bizarre how much less friction there is in my life now. Everyone else has stopped trying to frustrate my transition, and, more importantly, I've almost completely stopped obstructing myself.

What! Why the fuck are you obstructing yourself, you might ask.

Well, the key reason I hid my transness was my desire to be normal--to fit in, to not be broken, or creepy, or weird. So, the mechanism I used to suppress myself was fashioned from transphobia. I convinced myself that being trans was completely unacceptable (for me only; I didn't externalize my transphobia, thankfully!).

When I broke through the suppression, the back of my mind was like a haunted house filled with gruesome characters I had built to scare myself into secrecy. When I think of being a woman, one of these thing looms over me and castigates me for my failure to control myself. For my failure to DO IT RIGHT, and remain a man. What am I, a fucking failure, the stupid creature created by my sub-conscious wants to know. But it really doesn't care about the answer anyway. It's just the fears of a little child grown into a gibbering voice in the back of my mind because those fears weren't dealt with the first time around.

Since I finally became convinced that my ex, my family, and my son were all going to accept my transition, my own remaining ambivalence has come to the fore. It's nothing that two hours of yoga every day for a couple of months won't take the edge off of, thankfully.

J. seems quite comfortable now, if anyone's out there reading and wondering. I'm letting him set his own pace on changing my pronouns, and I'm going to try to find a comfortable way for him to call me something other than "Daddy" when he's shouting at me across the playground.

Repeatedly, as I've pursued step after terrifying step on this journey, I've found myself thinking "this is the best day of my life." The first time was after I spent an afternoon cleaning my basement wearing a skirt. That would have been about 2.5 years ago.

I'm pretty sure I haven't thought that since June 19, when I got the shitty liver results. But today, when I put the envelope in the mail, up it popped. "Best day of my life" floating around inside my brain, a comment from myself. It kind of makes me think I'm on the right track!