Sometimes we cry

I just got back from running some errands, and I'm exhausted. Not physically exhausted, even though it was a long walk. Emotionally exhausted. Sometimes it happens even in the smoothest transition.

I mailed a card to my mom. In it, I mostly wrote about friendly nothing, but I also apologized for having minimized the impact my transition has on her when I last wrote to her. I try to make sure never to write when I'm hurt, but sometimes I write when I don't realize that I'm hurt, and the wrong things come out. At any rate, writing to her always makes me feel fragile.

Then I went to London Drugs to get a whole bunch of things that had either run out or were about to. As I walked through the aisles, "Vida La Vida" by Cold Play came over the speakers. It was all I could do not to start crying right there.

"Vida la Vida" is the song my friend Breanna used for a performance she did a while ago in which she portrayed a male-to-female transition. The lyrics are about how the singer used to "rule the world" and had power and influence, only to discover that it was all built on sand, and now "(I) sweep the streets I used to own." She wanted to convey how she had given up the things that being male, and a particular kind of male, could bring, in order to be herself.

I didn't get it at first. I saw things that disturbed my sometimes fragile sense of femininity. I didn't really hear the lyrics, didn't understand the performance. Brea had to explain it to me. Sometimes I can be kind of thick.

I don't quite know why I was fighting tears, which continued after I left the store, almost all the way to the salon a mile away. Part of it was that I was set up for it already by having just sent a letter to my mom. Maybe it was because that performance, which Brea poured her heart into and which brought people who saw it to tears, had weirded me out at first. It made me deal with feelings that I didn't want to deal with. Maybe it was because I finally did get it, so now the song triggers an emotional reaction even though I'm not seeing the performance. Maybe it was because before I finally got it, I felt like I had been hurtful to Brea because of stuff that was in me, not in her or her performance.

I don't know. Sometimes we just cry.

I never came close to ruling the world, even figuratively. I didn't give up power and influence to transition. But my need to live authentically has not been without cost, the most painful of which is the breach with my mother. I don't always handle that well. And not handling it well reminds me of kinds of behaviour that used to be part of me, the old me, that I no longer want. Reinvention of self lets us get a new start. I'm never going to be perfect, of course, but there are some things from my past that I really don't want to repeat.

It might be that none of this makes sense to anyone but me. Maybe it won't make sense to me when I read it later. So maybe I just haven't had a good cry in a while.