I have a happiness, a peace calm and contentment in my life, that eclipses anything I have ever experienced before. I feel complete and released. I never knew my life had been so full of chronic, nagging anguish for knowing nothing else I considered it to be a normal state. Now I am free of it I realise how abnormal it was. I feel alive, liberated, rid of a weight and a burden that has dogged me all my life.
I saw flashing glimpses of what was to come during that terrible period of emergence. Even in that most troubled time of my life there were glow moments, flashes of watery sunshine through dark and heavy clouds. Coming out, first to Joan, the sunlight got stronger and the periods of sunshine longer. Now, living my life as a transitioned woman, still aware that the road in front is littered with potholes and obstacles, still needing to rectify and rid my body of the deformities I was born with, I feel as though I am basking in warm sunshine. I know at the end of the road how warm that sunshine will be.
None of that anguish of the past, or the fear and turmoil of those events four years ago that blew the lid of the simmering volcano and allowed Gender Dysphoria to erupt, not even those terrible times of anxiety, depression and dreadful mental pain of emergence can ever dim the sunshine I am in now. I have found happiness and I am in the incredibly fortunate position of sharing that happiness with the person I love most, the woman who has stood beside me for 36 years, Joan my wife.
Jenni brown - 1st July 2006.
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