Drop Your Guard
Discovering Your Vulnerable Self

To me, the art of being a man was pretty simple.  It all came down to one single rule:  Avoid allowing yourself to become vulnerable.  That was it.  Everything else was centered around that one main tenet.

It may sound superficial, but it's actually a much deeper and far reaching agenda than it appears.  In fact, it's not superficial at all.  It's core deep.  It takes a lifetime of training and work.  And, that's why overcoming it, going against what you've been taught since year earliest childhood, is so tremendously difficult.

I'm not saying that it's that way for everyone.  But for me, perhaps the biggest single issue to recognize and overcome in the emergence of my true self was to allow myself to become vulnerable.  It was to actively put myself into positions where I could be hurt - emotionally, financially, spiritually - after building a lifetime of thick defenses to avoid allowing just that.  It is to willingly take a leap of faith that if you jump, things can and will be okay.

If you think about it, it's actually pretty sad.  I look back on my life and although I'm not one to wallow in self-pity, I can't help but grieve at being trapped in a cocoon of my own design.  At the time, it was the key to making it through each day - preserving the distance between the soft inner core and the confident, strong exterior.  But as the days and years went by, it became a very lonely prison.  I can't help but wonder how many other people out there build a facade that they present to the world, trying to be what the world expects them to be, while at the same time hiding a secret below it all of a true self much different than the one they portray.

I sometime joke that my life as a guy was like living life through a condom.  There was protection.  The sensation was dulled - never too happy, never too sad, never too exposed.  There was very little opportunity to get hurt, to experience too deeply, to allow much flexibility.  Certainly, it was a very safe existence.  But ultimately, is that what life is about?  Safety?  I think not.  And it's not until people realize that part of actually experiencing life is to throw caution to the wind, to allow that condom of safety to be removed.  Frankly, I think few people ever realize that, so instead of people actually living and taking chances to experience and grow we've got a world of people in a defensive posture, simply trying to hold onto whatever they think they've got,  looking for someone or something to blame for whatever they don't have. 

Some people are allowed - no, they're expected - to be vulnerable.  Women fall into that category.  In some very real ways, women in our culture are raised to be victims.  Certainly, some overcome this fate but to deny this is to deny the obvious.  Women are raised to believe things that will ultimately put them into positions where they'll have few options.  They're taught that men deserve one thing and women deserve something less.  They're raised to be dependent, and their own feelings of self-worth are constantly assaulted.  The things that are important to women are the things that make them the most vulnerable - specifically, relationships. 

As a result of this odd dynamic, femininity is equated with vulnerability.  Constant reminders of this vulnerability/accessibility are everywhere.  It's built into the clothes they wear (there's nothing quite as vulnerable as wearing a skirt, or a dress), or in teetering on high heels.  It manifests itself in the jobs that are typically feminine, and into the financial dependencies of our culture.  It's even institutionalized in religion, beginning with Eve and continuing to the modern day.  It's all around us.

I'll tell you this, though.  If women could live as men for a week, or a month, it'd open their eyes to just how different life is for them.  Of course, that could never, as the fragile facade of masculinity could never survive such exposure.  As a result, most don't even realize what's happening.  It's engrained in our culture.  It's passed on for generations.  And, in many cases, it's tolerated as just the way it is.

Frankly, I think that's one of the biggest things that people like me need to deal with.  We're different.  We've been raised as men.  Perhaps it's believing that a wolf who wears sheep's clothing long enough might actually begin to believe it's a sheep.  But that doesn't happen.  We've got a lifetime of socialization as men, and no matter how many surgeries we have or how much we feminize ourselves there's no denying that.  In fact, some of us have gone overboard as men with all sorts of hyper-masculine things to try to prove that we really are what we appear to be.  To think that it's possible to suddenly abandon that, to change direction in mid-stream, is unrealistic.  Does that reality undermine our new lives?  Does it somehow disqualify us from being who and what we are?  The short answer: Only if we let it.

Many of us feel that our souls are feminine souls.  We feel that our brains are feminine brains.  And, whether or not we can prove it or explain it through science - it's true because we know it's true.  However, to truly allow our authentic feminine natures to become free we need to allow them to express themselves, and that necessarily involves allowing ourselves to become vulnerable.  It's like being asked to put your hand out onto a table to have it smacked with a hammer, and then to put it right back again for another whack.  It hurts.  It's hard.  For some, it's impossible.

It's sad to see many people in our community who can't drop their guards.  They continue to struggle with machismo self-images throughout their transitions and as a result it never quite works for them.  They have a hard time letting the hard side down, letting the softer side out, letting the things they've spent a lifetime building and doing to fade away.  I'm not criticizing or saying it's wrong - that'd be total hypocrisy for me.  What I'm saying, though, is that it will be hard for them to be able to really experience their authentic selves because that barrier will keep them from ever really breaking free.

As a man, I had a single response to those who would hurt me.  It was anger.  I'd never allow anyone to realize that they had gotten through to me, but all of the energy coming back out was centered around anger.  Thankfully, life isn't like that anymore.  My response to being hurt is to hurt.  My response to being sad is to cry.  My response to being confused is to look for help.  These are all things I could never do before - I wouldn't let myself.  I couldn't expose myself like that.  And, these are the things I'm most thankful to be able to experience.

Sadly, at a time when many of us are finally able to feel real love - to really feel all the joy and pain that entrusting yourself to someone can provide - we're unable to find it.  Transsexuals remain a pariah in the eyes of many - not really a man but not really a woman, either - so there's no place to fit in a role that doesn't accept ambiguity when it comes to love.  We can try to dull the pain, to mask the loneliness that many feel, but in the end this loneliness becomes the single most acute source of pain.  This is the ultimate of vulnerability - to shed your defenses and to finally be able to really truly love, but to be unable to find anybody to love you back. 

In some very real ways, to transition - no, to even become exposed as transgendered - is to strip yourself totally and completely.  It is to let your guard down, to close your eyes, and to allow others to fire at will.  For many of us, it is the first time we've ever felt vulnerable in our entire lives.  We're forced to strip to our bare souls for all to see - to entrust our futures to the people who happen to be in our lives.  We're told that we need to be able to risk all we have, all we love, all we know if we want to find our peace.  Frankly, I can't think of anything that leaves a person more vulnerable and exposed - it's our own unique form of chemo-therapy designed to decimate our internal defenses only to have them grow back again fresh and new.  And we need to come to terms with that as an integral part of our lives from that point forward.

Courage is the ability to allow yourself to be vulnerable.  That's an irony that I think very few can see.  Courage is not the absence of fear - that's a whole other issue.  Instead, it's the ability to overcome it.  It's the ability to manage it.  And, it's the ability to acknowledge it.

To me, the true testament of who and what we are lies in two things:  our ability to reach our humanity even though it makes us vulnerable, and our ability to rise above the victim mentality.  To make things even more difficult, the ultimate goal I've found is to eventually find some balance in these things.  It's to become vulnerable but at the same time to have strength.  Those who can do those things can unleash their true natures, whatever they may be.

Our strength doesn't really come from our strength, it comes from our vulnerability.  The unique opportunity that people like me have is to experience that first hand.  As the defensive layers are gradually shed, and the shields come down, and the arsenal of responses we've built get turned off - many of us actually begin to experience life for the first time.  Free from the confines of our culturally acceptable shells, it's almost like a new person is born.  Instead of living as a caricature of something, this new person is real - she feels, she cries, she loves, she hurts, she needs.  For the first time, she's able to acknowledge that she needs help, that she can't do it alone, that she's afraid. 

All this vulnerability remains new for me.  I've done any number of things to purposely force myself to do it, to test myself.  Even so, I continue to struggle with it - to find my balance.  I think the balance of my vulnerability/strength that I think I generally maintain is one of the most satisfying and important outcomes of my journey - it has been a very difficult journey.  But as with most things, the things that are most difficult to achieve somehow provide the deepest sense of satisfaction and this is no different.

Is it totally "masculine"?  Not even close.  Is it totally "feminine"?  I don't think so.  Certainly, to even have it is more than I could achieve as a man.  And, looking at this balance from a totally objective perspective I think it provides the best of both worlds.  If nothing else, it has provided a unique opportunity to learn things I could not imagine learning any other way.

We each have a vulnerable self.  We need to find it.  To expose it.  To nurture it.  To integrate it into the other aspects of ourselves.  We need to find ways to get past typical stereotypes of masculine and feminine and find our own unique ways to express ourselves that represent who we are, not who we think we should be to fit some label or some expectation.  That is the journey.  That is the goal.  And, I daresay, that is the prize.

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