Dreams Vs Reality Truths

[Guest rebeeca]

ive been thinking for a while now and have come to a cross road my dreams in life are many and are in reach for me but as far as my truths go i believe myself to be female but this does not work with my dreams. if i can get my dreams to become a reality then i will not need to ever worry again ill have my own buiness and a carreer but changing my sex will put me back many many years and im not truly shure if i want to that.

i want to change my sex but i also want to fulfill my dreams but i can not do both this is a sad fact for me if i make the wrong choice it will destroy my life and probally end it im going to see a counsilor next week but wish to get a bit more insight so i can lay it out properly so i get all the help possible

any input is much wanted the decision hast to be maid and i fear for my self from my self that sooner rather thsn lster will neither work or help

[Sally]

Rebecca,

Sit down and take a deep breath, you say that you have dreams of how your life will be and owning your own business - why will transitoning end your dreams?

I can understand delaying them, but if you plan on owning your own business - what is to stop you from doing it?

Only you and your self doubts - I have my own business now - I am pretty sure that I will lose it when I transition, but I have plans for a new business basically do the same thing but under another name.

You have to decide - is a career and money more important than your need to be a woman?

That is not too muvh different from the decission to put career in front of family and they are almost always sorry if they selected career!

Love ya,

Sally

[Guest julia_d]

Priorities.. that's what this is about.

I have been a professional musician, a welder, a turner, a professional live sound engineer with my own company, a college governor and an IT systems admin.. working for banks. Nothing in life is fixed. There is no way you can ever say "at 40 I will be in a certain place in life" .. that will just lead to depression and a general sense of failure when things don't work out as planned... My parents wanted me to have a plain middle management type job just like them, mortgage, kids and a dreary stuck in an office 9-5 conformist life... No way! .. I wanted to have an interesting life and see the world. I remember watching TV with my mother.. a pop chart show while my father banged on about never getting anywhere with music and wasting my time.. just as my mother was commenting on how if it wasn't for my busted up nose she wouldn't ever recognise me on tv..

I went to uni and eventually came out with a doctorate in sociology.. and guess what.. by the time I had that I didn't want any more to do with all that academia and number crunching and the jobs that went with it. I thought it would make a good career.. until I had 5 years of the boring "professionals" on the courses... Talk about a turn off.

Until I actually went ahead and transitioned I was so unhappy everything I did felt hollow and seemed temporary. Dreams are great, but remember.. they are just that.. dreams.. you can try to make them reality but from bitter experience.. the world don't work like that. Get back to me in 25 years.. I pretty much guarantee you will be doing something totally different from what you think you want right now, something you probably couldn't even guess at. If anybody had told me 10 years ago I would end up being an Aussie housewife I would have laughed in their faces.. but in the next year that will be reality XD

c'mon old timers.. I guess we all have similar stories about how life turns in surprising directions and never works out how we imagine.

[Guest Evan_J]

Hmmm.

Six of one....

It's true, I certainly never expected to be where I am now. I never thought I would be trans; mainly because I didn't have a good understanding of it or me and what was actually happening to me and thought (back then) there were just "really extreme cases of people (1 in like "a zillion") who "had sex changes".

And I never thought I'd have been with someone who had children and that would be one of the best experiences of my life.

I thought I'd be some cisgendered, almost right winged at least publicly, closet lesbian, married to a butthole of cisgendered male who I was waiting for to die so tat I could run off with his life insurance lol.

.....if I didn't kill myself first.

Career? I thought (in a "dream" that didn't include that husband business) that if life were perfect I would be a curator. The art "environment " suited me.

I thought I'd move to New York immediately after high school, figure out how to get the girl I'd mooned over for 4 years and work towards that goal.

None of that happened. Instead, my mom balked at New York, (she didn't care if I had a scholarship, which I did) and there was a standoff (I almost didn't go period because I couldn't go where I wanted) I ended up in New Orleans (we waited so long with our war it was the only school that hadn't already started). I never told the girl I mooned over I wanted her. And never did I work in a museum, not even close. Thats the part where Julia says don't get caught up on those dreams, they're subject to not come true.

But the other side of that coin says you should go after your dreams. You'll remember and hurt if you don't. Yeah, you might end up having some serious psychological problems/ depression if you "hang onto these dreams and they don't come true" . But at least from what I experienced it was the ones I didn't even go after (or get to go after) that left me with that. The ones where I "attempted" and failed or "changed my mind"? I'm good with those. Because at least "I went after em".

If your dreams are important to you GO AFTER EM. But be able to be ok if it doesn't go the way you plan.

[Sally]

Remember dreams are plans that are not necessarily rooted in reality.

I knew what I wanted to do when I went to college, I started with a double major, Math and Music Education - with all of my math courses being taught by grad students who never wanted to teach I dropped the math major and focused on my true love, music - I was going to be a band director and teach others like myself to play music and enjoy it as much as I did - it took 5 years to get that degre because I was performong n every group on campus and you attended clas an average of 6 hours a week for that one half hour credit - I loved playing so who cared.

I graduated and went to my first band directing job with a huge, as yet unhealed ulcer - I lasted less than two months before going to bed for three months and then back to graduate school - on reflection as I went further in the graduate program, I realized that I did not like teaching in a classroom - individuals that wanted to learn was a different matter but I had a degree that would allow that already and after years of working slowly on my Masters and healing my body - I quit, this was not for me - my main dream what I always wanted to do and I couldn't stand it - it was my second shortest job ever. (The three hours spent working in a bakery one summer was my shortest - I couldn't take the heat.)

I worked in libraries, retail stores on commission and on salary, I managed stores in recoed sales and camera sales, I played in the bands on cruise ships and my longest career ever has been in photography, not counting all of the off and on times in the 70s until the 90s but starting in 1997 I wne to photography full time and have worked for an established studio, helped a friend build a new studio and then have her steal it from me - some partnership - and started my own - in February of this year I passed the time spent in record stores (11) years, I am in year 13 of my photographic career - the one that I was never going to do because my father hated doing weddings so much.

Life has its turns so don't stick so hard to the details of your dreams, go for the main points like owning your own business - you can do that as a male or a female.

Love ya,

Sally

[Guest Donna Jean]

Oh, My, Rebeeca, this all very interesting.....

..of dreams lost and found....lives on different paths than anticipated or planed for...

You, know, Hon.....I've known people who knew what they wanted to do from age 10 and did it and made a lifetime of it! To some degree I admired that......to be firm in your goals and carry them out....

I'm older..(NOT old!) and I've planed a future, too, yet it never turned out that way...life throws things in your path!

I have no idea what your dreams are, but, I see no reason not to pursue them...male or female....

AND!!! If, in fact, you are truly Transgender and stay male to do this dream....how happy will you be...?

You know that once we realize our true selves almost nothing stands in our way of correcting it! So you may have a good job, yet be completely miserable....think about that, Hon......

Throwing up Gender vs Job is not comparing apples to apples....

Think on it, Sweetheart......

Love...

Donna Jean

[Guest Evan_J]

See the "hook" on the thing is "what is the dream" (<--thats not request that you tell)

In Sally's case, she actually pursued the dream. -Majoring in music, venturing into that field in another capacity. Because of health and maturing understanding of herself she changed her dream. Thats far from never even trying/ taking the opportunity.

Maybe, in your case your dream involves (trying to come up with something were being trans is a NO....) being in the Olympics. 1000% you could be sure you'd be barred. Maybe your dream has those kinds of barriers to being in transition. In which case, you do have to decide which you could live without .... at least for the time being. If it's just about owning a business -maybe you're getting fronted for the business by a source that will pull out if you are in transition?- or even if it were the Olympics, then I'd think in terms of not trying to live a lifetime without transitioning but coming up with "how long will I really have to wait". Cuz basically once you have the business well then you've got it don't you?

[Guest Soph]

The only advice I have to offer you is that if you're certain you're a woman, make transition your dream. I don't know if you'll ever truly be happy in the wrong body (I know I wasn't), so make your dreams match that.

Trust me, dreams and plans you have set out seem to almost never work out. Like Evan, I didn't expect to be trans. I thought I was meant to be unhappy; that nothing I did would ever make me happy. Well, that means that for years (about 5 (mind you, I'm still fairly young)) my plan was suicide, as a sort of long term solution when things get too tough. My dream if things worked out? Become a veterinarian.

Well, I didn't commit suicide, because its not as easy as a passing solution. And I'm not studying to become a vet. I'm instead currently working on one of my two identified passions: philosophy and music (major in the former, minor in the latter). And guess what--thats only identified passions.

Open your mind a little, try new things. You will never know what you'll enjoy until you try it! Try not to look ahead and set a lofty goal for yourself, as that sets you up for self-criticizing and failure. Just be happy with the present (or try to be).

I don't know if its been posted on this forum before (maybe on the spirituality section) but picking up a copy of A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle and reading through it might help you out a bit. For me it was the one book that pushed me over the edge into realizing that cutting myself wasn't solving anything, and that I had to make a true commitment to get better. Well, since then (actually, around exactly a year ago) I've only relapsed once on the cutting, and I've figured out more about myself than I though existed!

Jeez, I wrote all of this out without looking at the dates of everything. Well, sorry I wasn't there the 14th