The Long Road Ahead: ...one person's struggle for identity
Reena Leigh Gibson
Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
2015
nidottu
On February 11th 1994, Reena took a step that she'd put off for what seemed like eternity. After a works party, and having being very drunk, she came out to her two best friends as transsexual. It wasn't planned at all; it's just the way it happened.The Long Road Ahead follows her own story and the way in which she remembers things from her tender years as a child and how it was for her back then. Growing up in an environment that for what she remembers wasn't so typically "Gender Specific", where if you did something that wasn't stereotypical of what boys and girls were expected to do then you wasn't mocked or belittled for it.This is the story about her personal life; some of what she writes about is drawn directly from memory whilst other parts are collected from diary entries. Some of it is quite personal and detailed, yet other parts might go off on a tangent and somehow at times might seem quite irrelevant, but in its entirety is still a true account of the life she lived. She admits at the time of "coming out" that she never fully understood what "transsexual" was; for her the only reference point was two articles she'd seen in a tabloid newspaper and a women's magazine of two transsexuals who had told their story how it was for them. Reena soon came to realise how very similar their own stories were to how she knew she'd felt since her early childhood. At that time there was no internet and no real way of finding these things out, reading other people's stories in the newspapers, magazines and the very rare TV documentary was all there really was. "...the chance to look back through my life as I remember it, or even recoup memories of my past I thought I'd forgotten about, also to see how much of my life was actually trans related, although at that particular time in my life I judged it as being quite normal""...from the first time when for some strange reason you're tempted to wear that skirt and blouse and it feels right, but you know that doing such things will cause you to be hurt with ridicule by others, so you don't. It's the period of time in which you live in fear, the time between you living how think others wish you to live and the time you start to admit to yourself that you're not actually the person you think others would want you to be and the need to do something about it. You stay locked there in this state, in constant denial with yourself and that it's all just a phase, or a period in your life when you're lost, it's just some stupid fetish you have and that it'll pass. That eventually you can put aside all of these feelings and the thoughts you had and it'll all go away and no one will ever need to know. But you later come to realise that it doesn't pass, it never does go away, that it is in fact something that's very real, that it isn't something that can hide from for the rest of your life, as much as you may want to believe that you can."
