Burying things like feelings and gender dysphoria works great.
Said no one ever.
Hi world.
In this episode, we’ll talk about the benefits of burying difficult emotions so deeply, they can’t ever hurt you.
There are none.
Join us next week (or next sentence) where we unpack this further.
My wife jokes that I don’t ever talk about my feelings. I joke back and say that, hey, my feelings are like all that nuclear waste the government has buried deep under the ground at several undisclosed locations throughout the country. They can’t possibly hurt anyone, right?
Of course, before coming out to her, what I really wanted to say was, “I can’t talk about my feelings because if you only knew what I’m keeping hidden and buried deep within me, you’d freak out. Also, did you see that eerie green glow in the backyard?”
Because the truth was, the secret about my transness was consuming me.
All those breadcrumbs were nice in making sense of it and helping me realize I was a woman. But they were less helpful in determining a course of action. Do I tell my best friend and partner in life? Or do I keep this my own little secret I take to the grave?
I wrestled with this for years. Literally. Driven partly by fear (i.e., she’s going to flip out and leave me), and mostly by shame (i.e., she’s going to flip because her husband owns more high heels than her), I kept my transness hidden. It would only come out when she left town on business trips. During those few days of being alone, I’d let myself dress and be the real me. When it was time for her to come back home, I’d hide away my secret wardrobe (and wow did I get good at hiding it…).
Feelings alert: Hiding away my wardrobe not knowing when I could be me again was an indescribably devastating sadness. If putting on my skirts and heels felt like liberation and euphoria, then hiding them back again felt like imprisonment and a farewell to joy.
But as the years passed, and I kept dressing in secret, and I got really good at timing Amazon orders so that they’d arrive when I was sure to be home alone, two funny things began to happen.
One: the voice in my head, my real voice that told me that there was a reason why dressing in skirts and heels felt so right, was getting louder and louder. If she began as a whisper, by this point last year she was yelling at me through a megaphone.
Two: I felt like I was cheating on my wife.
Of course I wasn’t cheating on her. And yet, the secrecy of my Amazon purchases and the secret wardrobe I kept well hidden, all of these things felt like dirty secrets that violated the trust of our marriage.
After at least another two years of hemming and hawing and chickening out, I chose honesty and came out to my wife. It’s been the single best decision ever. It introduced a dimension to our partnership that we’d never had, and I discovered a whole new layer of love for her that I wouldn’t have experienced if I hadn’t given her the benefit of the doubt and trusted what I knew to be her amazing, loving, compassionate heart.
In retrospect, I wish I would have done it sooner. The secret I kept didn’t just consume me: it was creating brittle fault lines that, if left unchecked, would have wrecked me, and our marriage. Had she discovered my secret on her own, it no doubt would have devastated her. Instead, we chose to move our marriage onto a more stable foundation of trust and honesty, and I somehow know that we’ll be okay.
Now about that green glow in the backyard…