The Disgusting Disguise I Wear at Work

After one long-ass hiatus, here I am, back again. I'm not all too sure how much things have changed in my life since the last time I posted to this blog, because I'm still stuck where I have been stuck for quite some time. The reasons why I'm stuck can mostly be found scattered throughout this site, and these reasons are being added to and examined for a few hours each month with my therapist... but this really isn't the reason I'm writing today.

So, the one thing that HAS changed in my world since the last time I wrote anything on here is that I have a new job. Though this job isn't exactly "new," because at this point I've been there for well over a year now.......annnnd this shows you just how long it's been since I've written anything.

Anyway, a new job is an interesting thing. You get injected into an entirely new situation and are instantly surrounded by a whole new cast of characters who you know nothing about, and who know nothing about you. It's like the pseudo-classic teen movies where someone goes to a new high school and becomes an entirely new person. There are zero expectations for how you're supposed to act (you know, within the confines of a professional environment) and who you're supposed to be. This, needless to say, can be very liberating.

The thing you have to realize, however, is that this liberation from your old self can also backfire. You can be so thrown by the unfamiliar that you regress into old thought patterns and behaviors. Things that you worked so hard to rid yourself of can suddenly swamp you like a flash flood, and you have to struggle like mad to keep from downing in the torrent.

This is essentially what happened to me.

Since I've started this new job I have become more and more unrecognizable to myself. For one thing, I used to be far more healthy and active, whereas now I feel like I'm the unhealthiest I've been in years. I also used to be exceedingly more confident in who I am and where I'm going, and because I had this confidence, I used to let MUCH more of myself show to the people I worked with. Now, on the other hand, I feel like I've donned a total disguise and I'm having great difficulty in escaping from it.

And yes, I know that people wear their masks at work. Who someone is in the workplace is quite often a shadow of the true being that they are. Okay, that may be overstating it, but if the person isn't a shadow of themself, then they are at least a slightly altered version of who they are, which is NOT an inherently bad thing. I mean, I don't think very many people want to emotionally expose themselves to the people they work with, and a degree of professional decorum is something that is most certainly called for, and something that I think the large majority of people attempt to cultivate. It becomes an issue, however, when you stray so far away from your core self that it renders you an empty husk that's filled and fueled by the reactions of others. Now I KNOW I'm overstating this just a bit, but here's what happened to me...

I have almost completely reverted back into Boy Mode bullshit, to the point where I don't even know who the hell I am sometimes. This not only scares me, it also pisses me the fuck off.

Why would I do this to myself? Why would I let this happen? Why would I waste all the years I strove to find who I am and all the work I did in the process? How can I just cast all of this off? Am I THAT much of a fucking coward?

Well, being that I've been going through this transitioning shit for almost ten years and I'm still completely mired in stagnation, if not out and out careening backwards, maybe I have to accept the fact that I am most certainly acting like a coward.

In work I talk different, move different, and act different from how I used to in the past, and this has even bled over into my personal life... because if you do something for 40 hours a week, how can it not? Comments that strike me as ignorant and offensive either slide right off me or I concoct feeble retorts so I can convey a modicum of my point of view without letting anyone even gain a glimpse of my truth.

I still do express my viewpoint to a degree (hooray for small victories and all that!), but I curb it. I hold back and I slap my mouth shut during situations where I should either fervently express my displeasure, or, at the very least, try to shed light on a situation that means SO. FUCKING. MUCH. to me.

For example, there's a guy I work with who seems to love pointing out that he thinks another male co-worker shaves his legs; like it's somehow the biggest, strangest thing he's ever seen. Now when he points this out to me my response is generally along the lines of, "Who cares? There's a lot of reasons why a guy would shave his legs. Maybe he swims, or he's a cyclist, or his wife digs it, or he just ENJOYS it. Seriously, who cares?"

Whereas Old Me would say something more like, "Oh yeah, so do I," and just wait to see his reaction. I used to get something out of pushing people's ideological boundaries and challenging their preconceptions. With the way I handle this now, however, I feel like I'm essentially hiding in a corner.

When I first started at this job, there was also a time where I was in a meeting with my entire department. During the course of this meeting the conversation turned to a former co-worker (whom I didn't know) who was trans. I don't know if I could have been more uncomfortable during this conversation, and while what they were saying wasn't like TERRIBLE terrible, it certainly wasn't good. And I didn't say peep throughout all of it.

Now being that I was coming off of nine weary months of unemployment, only a few months into the job, and still in the "contract" portion of the contract-to-hire thing (not to mention that four people got laid off that very morning) I felt that rocking the boat at that juncture probably wouldn't have been the wisest decision... and yet my self-hatred swelled.

And finally, just today a co-worker who sits next to me wanted to show me a picture that he took when he and his wife were in Thailand. Before I even saw it I just KNEW that it was going to be someone who falls under the whole trans umbrella. And of course it was.

He shows me a picture of a young woman. I say, "Yeah?" and he says, "That's a dude." To which I say, "Oh, she looks good," and he responded with a disgusted "BLECH" type of sound. This prompted me to say, "What? Do you have a problem with people like that? Why? It's not like she's hurting anyone." His response: "Dude, what's wrong with you?" followed by another series of revolting sounds... and I didn't even know what to say after that.

What made all of this even more bothersome is that I get along pretty well with this guy. He helps me out a lot with work, and overall I think he's a good and funny dude... well, at least from what I can tell from sitting next to him for 40 hours a week.

The fact that he doesn't know who I really am, though, or even have an inkling that I'm anything but what his assumptions tell him—which is, presumably, that I'm a straight guy just like him—was a pretty big reason why he felt he could share a picture of what was a fairly attractive girl wearing an over-sized polo shirt and some capris, and then go off about it. And the fact that she was wearing what she was meant that she wasn't like flaunting it in his face or anything, which I suppose can cause the easily freaked out to overreact.

The whole scene that went down today makes me loathe myself even more because I KNOW that visibility leads to normalcy, and normalcy leads to acceptance. I KNOW that suffering through a few potential moments of discomfort can go a long way in helping someone understand, and it could maybe even change someone's opinion about people in my progressively shitty position. Now I know one person may not seem like much, but if that one person understands, that's one small piece of the world that's better... and we all have the power to make that happen, myself included.

But instead, the conversation died... and I let all of this hurl itself around my brain and trouble me for the better part of my evening.

Maybe if he knew someone who he was friendly with and who was contending with this, it could help change his thoughts. Though, maybe if he knew this about me to begin with he would have just aggressively avoided me altogether. The latter part of this is impossible to know now, but the first part of it isn't. So what the fuck am I doing pretending to be something I'm not, especially to this degree?

I do not like this at ALL about where I'm at right now, and I adamantly vow to muster the courage to be more true to who and what I am in the future. I have realized my fault, and it sickens me. Now what the fuck am I going to do about it?

Thank you for reading, and all the best to you, always.

Stupidity Is Stupid

On a recent reunion-centered trip back to my old college, I came across a friend of a friend who I knew vaguely 15 years ago. This guy and I seemed to hit it off pretty well during our reintroduction, and, having some things in common, we got to talking a decent amount over the course of the weekend. The conversation at one point drifted into him talking about his marriage, and that was followed by a very friendly and casual, "So, are you married... or do you like guys...?"

A question of this sort makes sense when posed to me, as I guess I give off a "vibe" or I "have an air about me" that says that I'm not your standard heterosexual guy. Since I'm not that, and since gay people are far more numerous and visible than trans people, it's a fairly natural assumption to make about someone who you suspect of being not-heterosexual. In short, no one has ever met me and jumped to the assumption that I'm trans.

More recently, while at a reunion of people who used to work at my current company, I was told by a friend that a former coworker of ours (who I really didn't even talk to that night) asked if I was gay. Putting off a vibe indeed.

All of this really shouldn't surprise me, yet it still kind of does. I think this is because I have no idea of what I'm projecting to the world at large. In essence, I am really just out there trying to be more as I see myself to be, and, based on the frequency of these questions, it seems like I'm succeeding in this effort.

This is big for me because...
When I first started to get a handle on what I was feeling and told a few close friends about it, I was TERRIFIED of anyone else even suspecting that I was anything out of the norm. I went through a great deal of worrying about what people knew about me, what they didn't know, etc. etc. I was afraid of even being seen as gay, which may seem slightly ludicrous in 2009 with gay acceptance in our society growing at exponential levels (YAY!), but at the time, it scared me senseless.

I never wanted to be anything other than what everyone else was... at least when it came to this. I never had anything against gay people or trans people, but I didn't want to be labeled as one. Part of this is because I generally hate to be defined by a label, as labels provide the launch pad for people to make erroneous assumptions about other people. The other part had to do with, I would think, the fact that I was fighting all the feelings I was having, and the more people who I admitted this to, and the more people who knew about it, would only serve to make all these feelings more real.

Additionally, even just 10 years ago, while it was still okay in certain circles to deviate from the heterosexual paradigm, it certainly isn't accepted like it is today. This in and of itself would (and I'm sure still does) keep people closeted.

In the years since I first fearfully started telling people close to me how I was feeling, a lot of the concerns I had about what people were thinking about me and my sexuality have greatly dissipated. In social settings I'm growing increasingly unconcerned and blasé about it all. Where I once used to be terrified by the thought of people knowing anything about this, I am now completely unconcerned as to who knows what's going on with me in any instance of my social world.

There is only one exception to this statement at this point and time: At Work.

Now everyone is a different shade of themselves while at work; it's just sort of the nature of the beast. However, I was told by a friend and fellow coworker recently that the difference between Work Me and Social Me is "much more so than the av-er-age bear." (And yes, I loved the reference.)

In work I have played things pretty close to the cuff. Not so much that I would go and salivate over pictures of well-endowed women with the guys in the workplace just to "fit in", but that I really didn't give an indication one way or the other. My actions were much more a pretty accurate representation of the I'm Totally a Guy... Just a Different Kind of Guy mask that I wore for years (and wore quite well, I might add, as I'm apparently a pretty good actor).

And I should say here that I don't even really care if the people I work with know this about me or not. Interestingly enough, when people know about this it actually makes my interactions with them better and less awkward. They have some general sense of who I am, I can relate to people better, and I get related to better. Where my concern comes into play is: I live and work in a place where I can actually be fired solely for being trans with NO legal recourse, and this sad fact isn't at all uncommon in our country today.

Though I should pause here to say that people in many states and situations can still get fired for being gay, and they too would have no legal recourse for being dismissed in such a fashion. The company that employs me, however, has sexual orientation written into their non-discrimination policy. Gender identity, which would cover someone like myself, is not yet given the same protection. It's for this reason that I'm really in no rush to out myself to everyone I work with.

The troubling thing about this is that even with my more open social attitude, I was still concerned about people at work thinking that I'm gay. Like I didn't want them to even have an inkling that there was anything about me that was out of the ordinary, even with this non-discrimination policy in place.

This was stupid of me. This was fear and whatever other horrible emotions rearing a collective head to keep me from any overt behaviors that would make anything about me seem questionable. As I said, this was stupid of me. Especially if what I am actually rankles people more than being gay does.

I recently realized this stupidity, and have taken measures to get over it. I made a conscious decision recently to be more myself in work; whatever that means, and whatever that will mean. So, people around my office may start seeing me as gay. At one time I would have been scared shitless about this happening; now I see it as a good thing. It means that I AM being more who I am, and if people are going to think what they're going to think about me anyway, why shouldn't I at least be someone who's being as true to themselves as they can possibly be?

So, like I said, one day soon I may be thought of as this gay guy in my workplace (if I'm not actually already). Again, this is a big and important step for me... and a good thing in every possible way that this can be a good thing.

Be well.