=Dreams don't just come true=

There's probably no tragedy greater in life than in thinking it's too late until it really is too late & consequently never becoming and doing what you were meant to be and do.

But then it can seem "too late" even relatively early on in your life.

It can seem too late right out of the gate.

What if, before you quite know what's happening, you already have a family—a wife, a child, a career—and only after several years do you come to realize, singing along with the Talking Heads song you play over and over and over, "This is not my beautiful home. This is not my beautiful wife."?

What then?

How do you disentangle yourself from all that? Haven't you already irrevocably set your course? Haven't you made your bed & now aren't you required to sleep in it? Is there really an honorable way to bail out of a life taking you where you don't want to go without causing everyone else on the plane to go down in a fiery crash?

 "It's never too late to be who you were always meant to be." A line commonly misattributed to George Eliot, but true nevertheless whether she said it or not. Whether anyone ever originally said it or it just kept getting repeated.

You can only be who you are at this present moment no matter how many moments you've already lived or how many moments are left to you in the future. Now is all you have. You can wake up this morning, right this very moment, and be who you were always meant to be and you won't be any less who you are in this moment than if you lived this way for the last fifty years. The past doesn't count. You are who you are now.

So,  if only theoretically speaking, it really is never too late.

But it's hard. Sacrifices have to be made. People will very likely be hurt. How selfish are you prepared to be? Is it really being selfish if by being anyone other than your true self you aren't yourself at all?

Are you really good to anyone as a fake? A fake husband? A fake boyfriend? A fake lover? A fake father? A fake son? 

A fake?

Don't other people, especially those who claim to love you, have a responsibility to love who you really are?

If they don't, did they ever really love you to begin with? Wasn't their love conditional on an illusion, on a need, on a fantasy of their own? Is conditional love really love? Isn't conditional love selfish? Aren't they being selfish to expect you to fulfill their needs? 

Isn't everyone, ultimately, selfish?

Isn't that a precondition to having a self?

If you aren't for yourself who will be?

If you aren't selfish, how can you be for anyone's else's self?

Let's stop being so abstract.

How do you find the strength, the courage, and, yes, the ruthlessness to stop the locomotive force of your life once it's set in motion down a one-way track and send it off in another direction—a radically different direction?

I wish I knew. I wish I'd had the strength, the courage, and, yes, even the ruthlessness necessary to make the changes that I made. Instead, I changed the course of my life through a series of largely unplanned breakdowns, negations, and accidents.

I changed almost by a kind of default—a default on my former identity.

My life was simply wrong, all wrong. My marriage—a mistake to begin with, entered into out of a desperate need to please, a false sense of heroics, an infantile need to escape from a bad childhood and flee into a sense of mature, if false, security—was failing, falling apart at the seams, unsatisfactory in every way, on both sides, mine and hers. I wasn't the biological parent of the child I called my "daughter" though I convinced myself it made no difference, that I couldn't love her any more if she were, though I'd never wanted children, didn't believe bringing children into the world was a good idea or that I could ever be a good parent or that our marriage could withstand the pressure a child would bring. I was caught in a job that I never really wanted but couldn't leave because of financial constraints that I would never have put myself into if I weren't married to someone who wanted a kind of material and social life that ultimately I didn't only not want, but instead despised for it's convention and conformity.

Listen, the fault was ultimately mine. Mine for being too weak to say "No." And sticking to my guns. Mine for not knowing who I was, what I wanted, and having the courage of my convictions. Mine for being an adult in age but an abused child psychologically, dominated in a society that doesn't accept that men can be dominated by women or that men may not really be men at all despite all outward appearances to the contrary. 

Following an instinct, searching for some fleeting glimpse of myself in the world "out there" that the internet suddenly made available, I discovered transgender stories & pictures which described and illustrated a reality I had only up to now fantasized about—a world I thought I alone lived in, dreamed of, wished for. I discovered transgender chat rooms & a population of others similar to me. I drifted into a shared fantasy world that seemed not only more desirable but more real than the supposedly real world that took it's place when I logged off my computer. Still, I didn't understand the implications of what was happening, of the double-life I was living and what it meant. I didn't realize that I wasn't just fantasizing about being a woman, that instead it was a kind of destiny. That by investing so much energy in a fantasy world I was, as if by magick, making it an eventual reality by degrees so fractional I didn't see it coming.

For some time already, my mental health had been under assault. Anxiety attacks so crippling I could barely make the 15-minute walk from the bus station to my office without shaking, sweating, & feeling like I was going to collapse at any moment. Once in my office, I'd shut the door, lie on the floor with my eyes closed, and wait for the nauseating vertigo to subside. Sometimes it didn't. Back home I'd sit on the couch with my heart stuttering and racing for no apparent reason. I was taking 3mg of Xanax a day. Anti-depressants. Anti-palpitation drugs. I was having suicidal thoughts. Everything seemed unreal, like I was watching the world around me through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars, hearing it as if I were underwater. Once I pulled off into a parking lot to calm down after realizing with a shock that I had been about to  impulsively jerk my car sideways into a tree. I starved myself. I hit myself repeatedly in the face under the guise of "exercising." At work, I told them I was taking boxing lessons to explain my blackened eyes, my swollen lip.

Looking back on it all now, with a shudder, I realize that I was heading for either a major illness, a complete psychological breakdown, or suicide, either planned or "accidental."

Instead, there was an ill-advised, largely unconsummated & mostly emotional pseudo-affair which I readily, voluntarily, unnecessarily and probably foolishly confessed,  hoping it would finally convey my extreme distress, my desperate need to change things at least a little, but instead led to what seemed a sensible trial separation to sort things out, or so I thought of it, until locks were changed and divorce papers were quickly served up the minute I was out of the house, a legally strategic, completely untrue charge of abandonment, a bankruptcy, a punishing 18-month ordeal through family court during which I fought for the right to see my daughter who I loved more than any other single thing in my life but by the time it was over and I'd "won" the psychological damage done could never be undone and eventually ended up in a permanent (?) estrangement; there were ill-advised, self-destructive relationships, dangerous situations that amounted to unacknowledged suicide attempts,  and all the while a grim, joyless soldiering on at a job I hated more than ever since it no longer even supported the lifestyle I hadn't wanted in the first place but had to provide for two households…until, finally, mercifully, at just the right time and through no fault of my own, the economy collapsed and "my position was eliminated."

"Your position has been eliminated," I was informed. 
Truer words in so many senses had never been spoken.

What I'm trying to say is that it's easy to say "live the life you were meant to live before it's too late" but in actuality it isn't easy at all. In fact, it can almost kill you. Sometimes you can only do it, at least I could only do it, when the old life was killing me just as surely and even faster.

Today, I'm  happily married, a housewife, for want of a better term, living a second-life so radically different from the first as to constitute two different lives altogether. But it's cost me. Cost me everything I had before. Cost me friends, family, career…none of which, in the end, ever suited me, based as they all were on a person I was never intended to be. But a steep price to pay nonetheless. 

I take consolation in knowing that everyone survived the crash. Everyone from my past has made new lives of their own, too. New lives that don't include me, that don't need me, that don't want me. I feel amazed at times at how little I mattered to any of them. But I also feel relieved that I don't have to feel guilty either. If anyone wanted to reconnect, they could. I certainly wouldn't turn them away. If they could accept who I am, who I always was, who they never knew. But for them, I suppose, it would be like encountering a stranger. I can't blame them for not taking the trouble. 

Why should they? 
What do you owe a stranger, after all?

Most people, I suspect, go through life carrying along another life unlived. And the closer they get to the end of the only life they have to live, the more they come to regret and mourn that still-born twin. You have to be like a doctor, I guess, who, when encountering conjoined twins finds him or herself forced to decide which one is more viable. Unfortunately, I made the wrong choice and picked the life least viable to survive in the long run. 

Actually, I made, perhaps, an even greater mistake.

Typical of me, I didn't decide at all. 

Instead, I let both twins live. One sleeping inside the other until her desire to live become greater than that of her brother. I chose the wrong life at the start. And I paid the price of having to watch as that life painfully died. 

Maybe it would have died anyway and if I hadn't let the other twin live there would have been no life to replace it when the time came. I'd like to think that is what happened, that my weakness and indecisiveness was a kind of accidental wisdom.  

Or an unintended insurance policy.

I've lived two lives. 

I really can't take any credit for it.

I was not courageous. 

I was just lucky.

Live the life you were meant to live? 

Sure, it's good, if somewhat flippant advice. Something you'd read on a slip of paper inside a fortune cookie.

But I wouldn't blame anyone for not taking it. I wouldn't blame anyone in the least for becoming a bitter old man instead. It's easier; it's safer. You get to become old, anyway. 

To be who you were meant to be can require the equivalent of jumping off a cliff, walking into a blazing furnace, diving into the water and taking a deep breath only after you're under the surface. 

In other words, it can go against your every instinct for survival. It can cost you your life and everything in it you hold dear.

Are you ready to do that? 

To gamble it all away?

If you think too much about it, weigh all the alternatives, you probably won't ever do it.

In other words, just do it. 

Because if you make it to the other side: