Who am I?  What am I?  And does it even matter?

As I lie in this cocoon, my Californian hideaway where I am recovering from what is hopefully the only surgery I will ever need, I flit between wakefulness and dreams.  I have now moved from the baby room, this small internal bedroom lit only by the wan light coming through the window from a light shaft, to the front room, the guest room, the room where all of these incredible women have stayed who came to care for me.  The last one has come and gone.  And I wonder, when you sleep in the same bed as someone you love, even if just a few days later, is there spiritual residue?

Once upon a time, the Den Mother and I shared a bed.  It lasted for a year.  Only we never slept in the bed at the same time.  I was living in London but working in Europe, leaving on Monday mornings early, and coming home on Thursday night…working from home or popping round the office on Friday.  She had a personal and professional life change which saw her move to England from the faraway land she had called home.  She needed to be in London on the days I was gone, and so, without fail, we had an arrangement.

We were close.  I’m not entirely sure how, but I guess as with many women, I was ‘safe’ to be friends with because I wasn’t predatory.  At school, we used to ride horses together every day after class.  I don’t recall being a fig leaf, the chevalier whose presence deflected potential suitors, but I do recall overhearing conversations between men who found her ‘hot’.  You know how those conversations go.

I have always cherished that kind of friendship.  I have cherished it so much that it was more than enough to overwhelm feelings of frustrated desire.  She surely felt it.  A woman who is close to me, but who is partnered recently remarked, “I can feel your desire.”  That has not interfered with our friendship or companionship.  The same with the Den Mother.

If given the chance, love takes many forms.  Each one offers us different things, and a richness of feeling and complexity.  If the eskimos have nine words for snow in order to express the subtleties of their lived experience, why is it that the Ancient Greeks have so many words for love?  Did they have a richer lived experience?  Why have the rest of us forgotten them?  [I have taken the liberty of adding compersion.  It is a term most usually used in the polyamory community to describe the joy one partner might feel over the joy that the other feels when the other finds pleasure in the company of a third.  I include it because it takes a very peculiar form of love to produce this feeling, one that transcends jealousy.  My experience of compersioncomes in many forms, not just suited to sexual relationships, but is a by-product of any loving relationships that are untinged by mania.]

• Eros: physical love or sexual desire, passion, lust.  A dangerous, fiery passionate love
• Philia: affectionate love, deep friendship.  Comradeship, loyalty
• Ludus: playful, non-committal love, flirting, seduction, casual, unattached sex
• Agape: unconditional, sacrificial love.  Selflessness.  Empathy.  Universal loving kindness
• Pragma: practical love based on duty or obligation, business-like love, compromise
• Philautia: self-love…how someone feels about their body and mind.  Self-compassion
• Storge: familial love, what parents feel for their children and vice versa
• Mania: obsessive love, as what a stalker feels for their victim.  Jealous love, possessive love
• Compersion: Joy in the joy of others…

How much of these forms of love are present in your own life?  With the exception of mania, which is unhealthy in any form, the others seem to offer such richness.  When I feel ‘slave’, which I really describe as a physical-emotional-spiritual-mental state, I feel a mixture of eros, agape, and compersion.  I seek it.  I cultivate it.

I don’t like being whipped.  I am not a masochist.  But impact play has an ability to push me into this space in a very intense fashion.  Impact play combined with high protocol with someone that I am attracted to, aroused by, is a guaranteed way to put me in sub space.  And what is sub space and why is it so Divine?  Perhaps everyone has a different answer.  My feeling is one of a baby towards its mother…a mixture of surrender, total love, and unconditional trust.  The more I play and experience, the more I find that BDSM is a way to talk to God.  I am sure that other people have different ways, and some might find it silly that we do these things in the community with each other, and there are all these unusual practices, items of clothing.  Rubber, latex, collars, black.

But I ask you this.  Are these not just vestments?  The uniform of the Priestess, at least symbolically, is no different than the gear of the dominatrix.  And her role of holding space is can be just another form of guiding someone on the spiritual path.  Somehow, “talking to God” draws on all of these forms of Love.  In my life, the more I do it, the more I play with a Priestess, the more eloquent I become in my relations with everyone, not just sex partners, play partners, but also with friends, business colleagues, even strangers.

I asked who I am, or what I am.  Labels.  Finding oneself is like tracing wisps of smoke.  You can’t grasp what isn’t corporeal.  It is still real but is only real when we sit back and watch it, enjoy it, feel it, rather than try to understand it.  Longstanding readers of this blog will know of my obsession with the “how” of life.  That our conduct is what defines self.  Everything else is just noise.  It is nice to be rich, and perhaps it is true that everything tastes better this way.  Perhaps.  Though it also comes with complexity which is a burden of a different kind.  I do, however, prefer it over the current state in my own life of financial uncertainty, mostly occasioned by my former life partner.

I am grateful for my time in this cocoon.  It is a literal cocoon.  My apartment is bright and sunny in the front room.  The room that a sequence of Princesses, Queens, Whores, Friends, Lovers, and now me, have slept in.  The other bedrooms have a dream-like quality to them, for both have only a soft light available from the windows.  The back of the apartment is a room with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on a cloud forest garden…an urban vertical garden with lush, temperate tropical vegetation, dark green and giant leafy plants climbing the walls of the neighbouring houses.  It is a beautiful room in which I cook, or just lie on the couch, and in which I used to sit, when I could still do that.

My visitors have all remarked on first entering this apartment that it had great energy.  That it felt like a cocoon, and that the little room I slept in, recovered from surgery in, prepared myself mentally for what was to come, was a womb.  And yes, it really was.

My last caregiver visitor, all women, left the day that I was given the “all-clear”.  That first period of 3 weeks after the operation require 24/7 observation and living no further than 15 minutes from the hospital.  The risks of falling, breakout fever, bleeding, serious complications, all live with us who do this operation, during that period.  Thankfully, nothing like that happened.  I didn’t even have a fever.  

But I was totally dependent on others.  And this was so different from me.  So different.  I’ve never allowed myself to be dependent.  Even as a baby, with the breakdown of mother-son/daughter bonds, I learned that to be dependent meant to be disappointed.  Wanting that, seeking that, became a deep-seated desire, and one that I have even fetishized in both superficial and profound ways…neither of which strike me as particularly healthy.

Together with my therapists, I believe that I have overcome these developmental weaknesses.  My transition has been a big part of it.  The words of my lead therapist, “I’d like you to consider being your own dominatrix. How would she guide you?  I’d like you to consider being your own perfect slave.  How would she serve you?  And now, what kind of mother can you be for the little boy you used to be?  How can you hold space and love him that you were?”

Learning to receive has been a powerful lesson to me.  I have not learned this lesson fully.  But I have learned to open up and let it happen for the very first time.  And the more I do it, the more love that flows in.  Every one of the women who came to care for me went with me to places we had never been before.  My relationship with each of them has deepened enormously.  I cried with several of them.  I was read to until I slept by most of them.  And I heard from each of them about what it meant to them to be a woman.

The first place that people seem to go when they ask me about what it is like to have a sex change operation is a question about mechanics.  Do I feel like I am missing something?  Apart from the first few days of reaching for something to direct pee that was no longer there, I have no sense, and have not had any sense of “missing” anything.  It sounds cliché to say ‘it just felt right’, but I can’t think of anything which more accurately describes what it felt like down there when I woke up from surgery.  It felt exactly as if it was always meant to be.

The mechanical question, however, is just what breaks the surface in this feeling of ‘right’.  The real substance comes from everything else, the non-physical elements of self.  Today is the first day that I will put on knickers.  Real knickers.  I have been wearing paper or micro-fibre disposable underwear since leaving the hospital, or glorified diapers when the bleed was stronger.  My flow, which smells like pineapple and maple syrup, the result of a diet rich in said fruit and fenugreek, is starting to diminish, so that I can now “get away” with the thinnest of pads.  My pace of healing is really something.

The part of me that hurts the most is my abdomen, where they performed robotic keyhole surgery to harvest the peritoneal tissue which has now become my vaginal canal.  The feeling of a carpet burn on my vulva is diminishing only slightly, for I am also cutting down progressively on pain meds, so am feeling more and more, what trauma is left there to feel.  But I am now on one-sixth the dose of one of the narcotics I have been taking, and have altogether dropped the other one, that being med free is just a question of days now.

My gut appears to be re-finding its feet after a course of antibiotics and some imbalances in food intake…I am shifting from a calorie binge to equilibrium and managed deficit.  I can once again contemplate that in a week or so, my body will actually feel ‘good’ again.  The distance I can walk each day seems to be doubling.  And I am encouraged to do so as long as I don’t overdo it.  Hills are still too much.  Stairs are okay in small doses.

The change in me that is the most welcome comes when I look in the mirror, when I see what it looks to have a vulva.  It brings on a profound sense of quiet, private joy.  It is the gift that I always wanted.  The idea of lingerie as wrapping paper for this quiet treat, is not lost on me.  To feel and to be sexy in our bodies is a state of mind.

This was not something that I ever accessed as a male bodied person.  I don’t know if that is universal, but it didn’t occur to me to even try…to even know what was missing.  I knew that being male bodied was not what I wanted, and I understood the physical change, and on some level, I knew that having a vagina would have an impact on my mental state.  The vulnerability of being penetrable, but also the sheer joy of welcoming someone into my body…and the feeling that I can canoodle and play, experience ludic love and pleasure with more people, without the fear (that either of us may have) of mania in any of its forms, oh gosh, the joy!

And that is a gift beyond compare.  This physical change is one half of a loving couple walking along the beach hand in hand, the other half has been hormone therapy.  Both have had profound impacts on my mental-emotional landscape.  The quality of mercy that is a true Divine Feminine power is one that flows in me. Female rage is there too, giving me quiet reassurance that I am not alone.  But also my capacity for love has grown.  Some of this has to do with how a woman thinks, how she is attracted to another.  My male brain was very oriented towards looks.  My female brain sees me playing with, making out with, having fun with women because they’re fun, they have some other quality about them that makes me want to play with them, to explore.  I seem to care less and less about visual aspects, and to see the whole person, to feel a connection based on emotion.  What a gift.

And I really want to go home.  I miss it.  But I am also so grateful that I took this time.  That my surgeon asked for a three-month total blackout on activity, work, worries.  That crap is getting through.  Life has a way of intruding.  But for the most part, this is a dream.  And the dream of it is to allow me time to settle into this.  To find out what it means to be me, the ‘how’ of my life as a woman.

On a superficial level, I no longer put up with pronoun errors or misnaming.  I just correct people, immediately, and without fail.

There are three phases I am finding in this process.  The first was surgery and its aftermath.  The second was healing and recovery.  The third is re-integration…I have been in an eddy on the stream, healing, waiting until I am ready to rejoin the fray.  

Now is the time.  Now is the time.