So to continue with my story, hopefully this one might not come across as me feeling sorry for myself. I usually don't allow that to happen, but oh well no one is perfect I guess.
In my twenties I was done with College and was working a the local Chippy (for American friends - Fish and chip shop - but sells all manner of fried food, including pizza - fried and baked). I was one of the delivery drivers, having started doing that while at College. It was a good enough job, so I kept it up after College. It gave me money, meant I wasn't in an office all day and I worked in the evenings, up to midnight, so could avoid the usual commute.
At that time I never really wished to work anywhere else. I was still discovering myself. My dysphoria made it difficult for me to make friends, and getting a regular office job would mean interacting with quite a few new people. Being introverted didn't make any easier either. At the time I thought it was just my natural personality, now I am fairly sure my dysphoria and how uncomfortable I was with myself that kept me introverted.
For 6 years and more I worked at the chippy. I got to do my own thing during the day and went in to do deliveries at night. It got the stage I was working 6.5 nights of the week. I was fine with that, since I didn't want to be around people.
When I was home alone I could pretend to be the girl I always wanted to be. At that point in my life I really liked the name Gillian and she became my alter ego. Whenever I could, I imagined I was Gillian, since it was all that I wanted.
I worked at night and during the day I wrote my stories, always pretending I was my lead character. That did have the benefit of improving my writing and imagination. I could easily imagine all the scenes I was writing about, since I was right in the middle of pretty much all of them. Putting myself in the middle, tended to make the fighting scenes better. I have been told that I am very good at writing action scenes, and I put that down to me planning out every part of the fight, acting out most of it as my character. For those years I spent a lot of time in my own head, planning my stories and imagining what I wanted myself to be.
It became my escape from reality. In fact I wanted very little to do with reality at that point. All I wanted was to be alone, with my character, my stories and my imagined life. But the problem. That left me yearning to have all my imaginings in real life, which was far from possible.
I kept to myself, not spending much time with my friends, and not having any relationships either. All I had was a few hookups. I didn't want to get into anything serious, but I have to admit to being lonely at the same time.
To beat the loneliness I created an online profile and tried to meet a couple of people. It didn't exactly work very well. Back then it was difficult to break in to the chat groups and such. There were a couple of people I met online and then in real life, but neither one was what I hoped it to be.
The first one turned out to have a boyfriend. She had been having difficulties when she contacted me and then didn't want to break the news to me, so I found out the hard way, great. Oh well, I shook it off and moved on.
The second one seemed better. She was not in a relationship, and she was really out there, which was what I was looking for. She was a practicing Wicca, which I found interesting. Anyway I drove down to Derbyshire to meet her and spent the night. I thought this one was going places, but that was not to be.
She did get me interested in Wicca thought. Since Christianity has rarely been supportive of people who are different, I never felt that I belonged there and so that opened me up to exploring other beliefs. I started with Wicca. I liked parts of it, in that they accepted all. But many other aspects were just not for me. All the ritual and spell casting was not something I could get into. I consider it mumbo jumbo. I am cool with Magic, just not the spells associated with Wicca. I mean its only energy right, what does it know about spells. The energy has no bloody idea what someone is muttering under their breath.
Since that was not for me, I explored other beliefs, mostly pagan religions, Druidism to name but one, but I found none that were a good fit for me. I found something of interest in every religion I studied, be they Pagan, Islam, Judaism, but not a one of them were quite the right fit for me at all. I believe in a bigger puzzle, in which all religions are but a piece of that puzzle and only when you look at many beliefs do you begin to see the bigger puzzle.
My searching never really resulted in anything like a fixed set of beliefs and nothing helped my dysphoria. All it really did was pass the time while I tried to find out who I was. Deep down I knew I wanted to be a woman, but it was not something I could face. I still dreamed of waking up female, but ofcourse that would never happen.
At 26 I met my wife (or future wife at the time). During our getting to know one another phase she asked me to tell her something no one else knew. So I told her about my wearing womens underwear and other clothes. She actually kinda liked the sound of that. She had been wanting someone a bit more kinky.
She was married, had been for about 14 years or so, but unhappily for most of those 14 years. The person she had married was someone who was just not a good fit for her.
Shortly after we began talking it came about that she was getting a divorce and we decided that we would be getting married.
She then asked me to grow my hair and I was overjoyed to do that. I had been wanting to grow my hair for years, but never had the nerve, knowing that my family and friends would just make fun of me about it. My wife had a thing for more feminine men, perfect for me.
I knew then that I had met a woman who was good for me. Who could accept the stranger and more feminine parts of me. And deep down inside I hoped that I had met someone who could truly embrace the feminine me and would help me to explore it, perhaps bringing her out on a more permanent basis.
Next time I will move on to the point in my life when I got married, and how I grew to slowly accept the truth of myself.
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