Running for my life
Can you recapture loving something that was used to hide who you really were?
I ran a simple 5K on limited training over the last month, today. My time was fine, but not great, but this is what happens when you stop training for three weeks.
To be honest, I only ran the race because I signed up for it and paid money for the entry fee. If it was a free race that I had signed up for I would have skipped it. Sometimes when you’re off your game, running just feels like a chore.
Normally this would be the end of this story and I’d move on with my life and focus on the next goal I set for myself. Except, this week was no ordinary week.
You see, I came out to my therapist and some people very close in my life as transgender earlier this week. It was the culmination of about four years of earnestly questioning my gender idendity and making connections behind the scenes.
Over the last 3 or so months I’ve managed to find a community of supportive trans women (there were others before, who I cannot thank enough) that helped me get to this point where I felt comfortable enough to get out of the closet. As I sat terrified telling my therapist this truth about myself, the most striking thing she said to me was how calm I was telling her. She had never seen me this calm in sessions, and here I was bearing my soul that I’ve wanted to be a woman my whole life and I can’t ignore it or wish it away or come up with excuse number 10,349 to avoid saying it out loud.
These last few months in earnest have felt like my life was travelling at two different speeds. There was the one speed that felt like a glacier, where every day I was making the tiniest incremental decisions which would lead to this point and that it would take me decades to reach my true self. At the same time I felt like I was on a rocketship to the furthest reaches of space travelling at warp speed. Every day felt like the closet, which I had built for myself was getting smaller and smaller and the urgency to take an axe and break myself a hole out of it was getting more and more dire.
More importantly, I’ve learned that this kind of feeling is actually normal and I’m not some unicorn who lives alone and weirdly dreams of being a girl while living out day to day life as a boy.
So, I went and did the thing, and for the first time in my life I feel relieved. My partner is on board and has been incredibly supportive (even if we have other issues in our marriage that need addressing), and I’ve started to find kinship and community with other trans women online in a way I’ve never found before. All of this has honestly been incredible and life affirming.
Imagine the shock when a few days later, I found myself at the starting line for a road race feeling completely like a fraud and out of place and dreading doing something I’ve loved for so many years.
I know this process is not going to be linear, and I also have started falling in the trap of retroactively applying being trans to different aspects of my past. It is hard not to do this because I feel I’ve finally been given the cypher to a code that had clouded my whole life in a language I couldn’t understand. While there are things that were painfully obvious behaviors that I could attribute to being an egg (such as half of my wardrobe literally not fitting me at times), its tough not to blanket apply being trans to everything you did.
Last Thanksgiving I spent the holiday weekend alone because my wife was called back to her family, a last minute change from our normal plans. I was feeling incredibly down on myself (this was actually because of the gender stuff) and decided to drown my mind out by going for a run. I was incredibly out of shape at that point and vowed to use 2019 as a chance to get active again.
Sports have always been a literal escape for me growing up because it was the only space I felt safe as a man. I had some athletic ability, and when you’re constantly bullied for being sensitive leaning into that cishetero masc space feels cathartic.
So this year, I ran and ran and ran. What I thought I was doing was running to reclaim my life, when in fact I was running away from my life. Pushing myself in working out was a chance to hold onto this vague idea of who I should be instead of who I am.
One of the best things I’ve learned over this journey though is that I’m not going to change completely. I’m not going to put on a dress ( a dream of mine) and just wake up a different person with different interests and throw out the things that have made me happy throughout the years.
I have a confession to make though, I wrote a lot of the outline for this in my head during the race. I am not going to lie and say it felt right to be running a race as [deadname] so close after coming out. I felt like a fraud, that I was posturing as something I was not and the whole experience felt off. I also had stopped training for a month because I started anti-anxiety meds.
But, I finished. That matters. I’ve done a race as me. My times are going to be all over the place going forward especially if I ever start hormones, but I’m hoping that the joy that I felt running will not go away. I may have had a sinister motive at times, but I’m looking forward to relearning how to love something that has brought good things into my life. Maybe now I will stop focusing on arbitrary times, which I never could seem to quite get to and start focusing on being myself and challenging myself to learn more.
Maybe now I can finally start running for my life.