Earlier this year I put a name to the shift and duality that I can remember experiencing for so much of my life. I’ve been experiencing gender fluidity. But its been purely situational. But recently its stuck. My internal dialogue has become decidedly more masculine, but its not ebbing and flowing between the 2 voices like it used to.

I remember in early August when I noticed my voice shrink and soften while having a difficult conversation with Joe. I was disgusted by what I witnessed of myself. I think that is when the masculine voice started to take over my internal dialogue. I’m thinking this is happening in an effort to demand the space I need from Joe. It came forward forcefully the day Joe insisted on a hug without asking first.

I’m not convinced that it’s going to stay so forward, but I do like how confident it keeps me most of the time, and that it allows me the frame of mind to identify what is best for me… not always putting the needs of everyone else first. I don’t know what I’ll do if it’s going to be permanently dominant though.

I think its too early to tell. I won’t be able to really get a good read on this until after I’m fully separated from Joe. I think I will get back to my familiar fluidity soon enough.

The wording is weird… and I know that this masculine aspect isn’t really a secondary entity, the way the wording might suggest. Its not a second person, just the flip side to the coin that is me.

Being a Gemini has never been so fitting!

We watched my maternal grandfather deteriorate from dementia for years.

Near the end he didn’t know any of us, not even his second wife. At one point he woke up in bed next to her and started apologizing without end because he thought he had cheated on his wife with her, not realizing that his first wife was LONG dead and not remembering any of the life he had built with this woman since then. It broke her heart.

He used to mistake me as my sister’s boyfriend, because of my short hair and his macular degeneration, but he also mistook my sister for being his daughter. This was a decline over the course of 10-15 years, starting with the macular degeneration that caused him to get into a car accident and have his license taken because he was deemed legally blind. And then little by little his mental faculties declined.

I can’t say that this was the start of me recognizing my masculine side though.

I remember as a kid in elementary school hoping that by some miracle I would change into a boy. I didn’t take into account what kind of social chaos this transformation would cause but I knew what I was experiencing was a problem. As I was… I didn’t fit, my body seemed foreign… but I eventually chalked that up to the changes of puberty. I didn’t fit socially, which I chalked up to being teased relentlessly over my weight.

I don’t remember when the dreams started. I thought I was dreaming of a person who I needed to find in the world, but the features of the person never really stood out, just the setting and the familiarity of them, and the depth of their eyes. There were lengthy strolling conversations in my dreams which seemed to last for hours but in reality probably only lasted milliseconds. These dreams persisted into high school and beyond, along with other dreams of physically intimate interactions with women.

I pushed the dreams about the women out of my mind, or tried to. They always came back. Not super frequently, but regularly enough that they should have been a sign of something. But I ignored them. I think the fact that I can peer into my past and see all of these things so clearly, things that I actively ignored, is proof that my masculine aspect held these things for me until I was open to receiving them… held space for me in anticipation of a time when I would be ready to occupy it.

Recognizing my duality, I mean REALLY recognizing it and accepting it has been a hurdle in a larger journey. Hurdle isn’t really the right term though. Yes, it has been difficult to rationalize and digest it. At one point I panicked and thought that me being seemingly “stuck” in the masculine meant that I was trans. But as I digested things along side the reality of my life as it stands, I’ve come to the realization that this isn’t the likely explanation. There are a lot more variables at play than just my gender identity. There are so many facets to the demands that are being put on me in my day to day life that it makes sense that the aspect of me that is most adept at setting and enforcing boundaries is taking the lead.