Gratitude For Transitioning and Detransitioning
How Gratitude and Grief Compliment Each Other
Writing on trauma requires emotional discipline. My previous essay on shame during the memoir process honors negative emotions, during the writing process, but this piece will honor a different feeling—gratitude.
“Gratitude” sometimes provokes an eye roll from me. It can sound trite, shallow, or feel dismissive of complex life experiences, especially inconsolable grief. But within the years of grieving work I’ve undertaken, I’ve found that grief and gratitude are complimentary states.
Mourning The Past and Present
As I enter the later half of my memoir and write about early recovery, I am at present experiencing heartbreak from the loss of a potential relationship. It was the only loving romantic dynamic I’ve had in 27 years, and ending it due to incompatibility was devastating. Yet, because it was the first loving encounter of its kind, and ended with love above and beyond my expectations, the grief feels sweeter than I am used to. This is because above the fray of sadness, anger, and resentment love reigns more powerfully. I am so grateful to have met this person, and for their kindness, that my disappointment and emptiness feels less significant.
Most losses I’ve experienced as documented in the book aren't like that. The first half of the memoir contains tales of bruises upon bruises, relentless misfortune, and ongoing depression. In my adolescent and teen years I didn’t have many breaks to the onslaught of predictable traumatic events. It was like a train rushed off its tracks speeding uncontrollably as I watched from inside the conductor’s station and closed my eyes.
Life was rattling, muddy, and bitter—it was difficult soil in which gratitude could grow.
Retroactive Gratitude
Explaining my life history in recovery—much of that recovering from nihilism and a disdain for life—I am allowed a retelling of the situation from an older, philosophically advanced perspective. During immaturity I didn’t have control over many circumstances, but not every bit of life was bad. Not everything about me was as horrible as my abuser programmed me to believe.
Negative events stick out in memory as the most jarring, but it is also harder to reminisce about fond moments because throughout that period I was unable to appreciate anything positive I had or did. Amidst my past grief, I did not possess the skill of gratitude and so everything felt hopeless instead of only damaged.
As I journey through the past with my younger, naive self I am mindful to both grieve her tragedies and appreciate her willpower from my healing adult perspective. Laura was still in there the entire time, growing in little bursts, aggregated, until she finally bloomed in the right environment with the right nutrients.
I am grateful not only for her, but for the briefer moments of inspiration, love, and joy she received to keep her going through hell and chaos.
Grateful For Losing My Breasts?
Recently, as I was reflecting on the bittersweet love I have for this unattainable person, I thought, for the very first time, how grateful I was to have lost my breasts to the trans catastrophe. Not because it was healthy, “authentic”, or “life-saving care” but because through this disaster I was eventually able to connect with a network of truthful, compassionate, healing people who refuse to submit to child abuse, societal manipulation, and moral degradation.
The “trans issue” or “gender issue” is a web of profound myths around, at the core, healthy acceptance of reality. The women and men who have allied to protect my past self and uplift me to leadership are united around what I’ve always needed most—earnest validation, not pandering dismissal or cruel lies.
Do I wish I had my breasts cut off? Of course not. Do I regret the medical neglect my body endured? Every day. But do I still find gratitude for where that dark fate eventually took me? Significantly.
Grief Sent Me On A New Timeline
Without the fuel of misery and witnessing of abject generational horrors, I might not have become a voice for reason and human dignity. Had I lived a gentler youth, I might still be wokeishly promoting self-destruction and depreciating life. I might have less pain, but I would not be as grateful, because I wouldn’t know what it’s like to truly live without meaning, purpose, or love.
The medical experimentation me and my peers have endured has forever set me on an upward course of truth-seeking, meaning-making, and community healing. I know that when I find the person I will build a family with, it will be a person who truly appreciates the gift of life because I am grateful, in spite of evil, to be alive and choose to honor the blessings along with the losses.
The Perfect Ending For My Book
Funnily enough, as we gently parted ways my recent ex suggested Thanksgiving as our future checkpoint for speaking again. Maybe he picked it only because four months seems like enough time without it feeling unbearable, but having written this essay I wonder if a celebration of gratitude is fitting for reunion.
My sentimental side enjoys that :) but in any case, this loss reassures me that not only can love come freely, but the solitary grief work I have been doing is priceless.
Since beginning trauma recovery and detrans advocacy four years ago I have created a life where I declared healing my “full-time job.” Although I wish for togetherness and the meaningful bustle of motherhood and family living, I am in a favorable position of easy-going solitude where I can finally rest from the trainwreck of my formative years. Life is a little dull, lonely, and sorrowful, but it is richly meaningful, and that is abundance.
I am grateful to be healing in this time and space, and able to share it with others. Maybe I finally figured out the ending for my book that has yet to be written. My story, and the lives of my peers harmed by gender medicine, are not only tales of sadness and grief, or healing and resilience, but the complicated complement of grief and gratitude.