The Evolution of My Smile
By: Constance Rowan
Tags: Humanity, Transgender, Self Love, LGBTQ, Positive Thinking

The Evolution of My Smile

An account of transitioning and self acceptance

Photo by dusan jovic on Unsplash

I am 40 today. Birthdays in my past had always been an exercise in despair. A feeling of old age followed up with musing of my eventual mortality. I have looked ahead to this day in fear for over 20 years. After all, I’m 40, time to start dying, right?

I haven’t written for a while, which I regret, but the break had been necessary while I transitioned and still balanced the rest of my life. I felt, however, that today was a good day to break my silence. I am indeed 40, but I feel even more alive than I have ever felt in my existence, and mostly I can’t help but smile lately, in excess! People have noticed at work, passing me in the halls, at the coffee stand I regular, and especially on Facebook when I post my selfies

That’s not to say shit hasn’t gotten real these last 16 months. My life has turned upside, and my world has shrunk. People I have known most of my life up and abandoned me, and I struggle every day to prove to the rest of the world I am a valid human being and not a tragedy incarnate. I cry a lot, I feel rejected, suffer from Dysphoria and Isolation, and the soul-crushing loneliness of this pandemic. Yet, despite all that, I still smile a lot.

Despite popularly held beliefs about trans people, I don’t seem to be the only one who experiences this either. Why is that?

The truth, for me, comes down to self-love. I have hated myself most of my life. I always blamed it on my weight, social class, or the fact I felt I never fit in with the groups I got involved with. It seemed whether it was a church, or my co-workers, or my friends, I always had a reason to be miserable. When I looked into the mirror or someone complimented me, I instantly felt uncomfortable. I thought I could never take a compliment,” if only they knew how useless I was, they would have to take it back.” I thought.

So what changed? I’m still fat! I have the same job, the same people in my life (just less of them), and yet sometimes I feel a happiness I can’t contain from merely realizing that

I am FINALLY myself.

Some of that is Gender Euphoria, but there is something deeper, more permanent.

Let’s start with the mirror, as we have a sorted past. As a result of my lifelong dysphoria, my reflection caused an instant feeling of revulsion. I saw a sad, pathetic male staring back at me even from a young age. It only got worse as the weight started to come and the depression. Eventually, I got to a place where I would avoid the mirror at all costs. Mirror avoidance became difficult in my home because my bathroom is almost mostly all mirrors, so I got in the habit of looking down to avoid them altogether. Even after losing 153Lbs, I still felt uncomfortable looking in the mirror.

“I could begin to see a glimpse of the person I was supposed to be. All of a sudden, my reflection and I had a new understanding.”

As I started to experiment with my gender and finally accept my true self, the mirror became a portal to hope. With experimentation and the right amount of imagination, I could begin to see a glimpse of the person I was supposed to be. All of a sudden, my reflection and I had a new understanding. I started hormones and started to feel out who I truly was. I began to look for that person in the sea of male imagery that greeted me every morning. It was small changes at first; a line here, a crease there, a little more life in the breasts. I would look for Constance in the shell of a man I had once existed as. Eventually, the course of time brought a shift. Instead of the old man, Constance would greet me in the mirror. Instead of looking for ‘her’ in my old self, I looked for the remnants of who I was In Constance. I would look for those remaining fragments that would impede me from being seen as who I had become. Eventually, even that exercise turned into a futile attempt to nitpick old me into obscurity.

One day I got out of the shower and felt odd. The man who usually presented to me was gone, and it was just this stranger — a woman. I know the narrative is getting thick here, but I want you to understand, something happened; there was a tipping point where I mentally accepted that the person I was had vanished. In a more meta way, I already knew this as I had felt my personality changing. From the moment I accepted my true self to the moment I began hormones, I was becoming new, free, hopeful. This external validation just told me I wasn’t waiting to become a woman; I was already there. In the way that matters most, I always was one, but this allowed me to remove the restraint on my true self, and then eventually to correct the mistake made at birth with my physicality.