Big A Little A, Part 1.

On September 10th, 2008, I came out to my family.

I was home for a minute, waiting for news on whether or not my friends would be going to a movie night. I hammered out a letter to my mom, and surprised myself by emailing her. I quickly edited what I had wrote for my brother, dad and extended family - I took a breath, and sent them all.

My dad's was the hardest to send. My mom's was the easiest. Pretty much what I had predicted. Because this is supposed to be a record of these things, I'm going to post them all. Sorry for all the brackets - I still want to keep this fairly anonymous since I haven't asked any of these people if they want their lives in a public blog.

"Mom,

I know that communication hasn't been too great recently, but I'm happy to hear from you more often. I believe when you say that you and A. [my mom's boyfriend] are clean and doing much better - I hope you're not lying to me, and that you stay healthy and happy. If it's not obvious, I only want the best for you. As I said before, life is way too short. Life is even too short to do all the things we do enjoy, and see the people we do want to see - no use messing it up with a lot of stuff that just makes us unhappy.

It seems to me like a lot of the time, we have to chew through the bad on our plate in order to make room for the good. I hope that if you still have things you want to talk about or work through, that you find someone who can really help you. If you feel like you can keep this at bay without being in a lot of institutions, then that's your choice and I support you in it. But regardless of whether or not you're able to keep beating a serious thing like addiction, I think it's so important to figure out how you got there in the first place. I try to apply this idea to my life too - I'm not judging you, just offering you the same advice I use on myself.

I believe you're a strong enough person to make the right choices in your life. Ones that mean a healthy path for yourself and those around you. Whether or not you believe in the idea that you need to "surrender to a higher power" - I think that you can be your own higher power. We each are responsible for our own decisions in life, and you are the only one who decides a positive or negative path for yourself. I will always be proud of you when you are sober. Regardless of the fact that R. [my brother] is a surly teenager who might be upset with you right now - I can guarantee 100% that he is proud of you too. You will always be our mother, and we will always love you no matter how many times you screw up. I'm not saying do whatever whenever, but as long as you are genuinely trying, I will be happy. And the more you can stay healthy, the happier I will be.

Right now, life is good on my end. R. [my girlfriend] and I are still together. I'm still living in Dad's building, and work is always great. I'm still making new friends, traveling to new cities, and riding stupid bikes. I'm still working on the tattoo thing, but I've at least met the woman who might apprentice me someday. I need to figure out a way in, but I'm not rushing it.

That said, I have something important to tell you. For as long as I can remember, I have never felt like a girl, a gal, a lady, whatever. In the past couple of years, I've done some "soul searching". I can say with 100% certainty that I feel like a dude, a guy, a man. Or more formally, a transgendered person or "trans" man.

I'm sorry that I couldn't tell you sooner. It's taken me a long time to get to this point, and obviously there were a lot of roadblocks along the way in our relationship. While I feel I could have told you a little bit sooner, I didn't want to share (what I think is) great news with you if you weren't in a mental place to hear it. One more reason why I am so happy to hear that you're sober. My biggest worry is that you will feel like you're losing a daughter, and/or a connection to your own mom. Obviously these things are important to you, and they're important to me too. I hope you can understand that I never grew up feeling like a daughter or granddaughter, and this doesn't change my perspective on my family ties. If anything, I have always felt like my [maternal extended] family has been my real model for the world. Even though I never met my grandparents, I know I would love them, and want to make them proud. And I even have a giant tribute/memorial tattoo to show for it - not exactly a temporary thing.

I am sending letters like this out to Dad, R. [brother], Dad's family, and your family. I don't want people to gossip about this like it's some scary, secret thing. I understand that it's different and not the most common thing in the world, but imagine what it feels like for me! I can honestly say that after I figured out this part of myself, a lot of other things made sense in my past that didn't before. Maybe you'll think of some things too - it's not like my life has been completely smooth and boring. As a quick example - this is why I never told you that I was "gay" or a "lesbian". I told you I dated girls. But when you feel like a guy inside, liking girls doesn't make you a lesbian. So...there's that.

I'm totally fine with talking about this stuff in more detail, but this letter will already be long and I'm trying not to freak out as it is. Email will probably be easiest for me, but we can talk on the phone too. Anyway - after thinking about "guy" names for a million years, I finally found one that fit. [name] It's fairly formal, so I usually go by a nickname - [nickname]. [Other nickname] works too, but it would make me really, really happy if you would use one of those names for me, as well as masculine pronouns (he, him, his).

I'm going to start taking testosterone (legally, through a licensed doctor). It'll change my appearance a bit, and I'll start looking more masculine. I eventually plan to have surgery someday soon too - it's a long, complicated, and expensive process though, so I probably won't start on that for at least six months to a year.

The one thing I'll tell you that I probably won't tell Dad or anyone else for a long time - when I finally change my name legally, my middle name will be [middle name], and my last name will be [new last name]. I added the [extra letter] to round it out a bit, and considering that Grandma shortened the name in the first place, I didn't feel too bad about it. So there's that family connection again - just a little different, but not really too far from where it started.

I love you.

-[me]"