Though the following is about spirituality it can can also apply to life in general.

If you study the life of past mystics you’ll find they share several things in common:
First, they all speak of an induction – or of a need to learn/realize a new level of understanding. They all speak of a fundamental shift in consciousness (be it called awakening, realization, divination, or being born again).
Second they all tell of making a journey into and through a despair process of being “undone” as the precursor to this fundamental shift in consciousness — be it through experiencing 40 days and nights in the wilderness, starving under the bodhi tree, facing the dark night of the soul, or the hero’s journey. There is a Journey of metamorphosis that all mystics have undergone in some way.

Third, it is an inner journey that must be taken up and navigated alone. This is a hallmark of the mystic’s realization: The reason the journey must be alone is because that which must be faced, seen, and surrendered in order that something new can emerge, is only possible through sustaining the fear and despair process of being alone and meeting the ultimate and fundamental fear of “non-being” and annihilation.
Fourth, they all seem to realize the frustration of being misunderstood by those who have not yet been through the awakening journey — “those who have ears to hear, let him hear.” A great deal of the mystical writings are devoted almost exclusively to the fact that fundamental spiritual truth cannot be understood by the intellect nor correctly put into words. Forever, the great spiritual teachers have tried through the insufficiency of words to point toward that which can ever and only be experienced and known on a level that is before and beyond the mind. This is something unfathomable to those who have not yet had this breakthrough revelation – and particularly so in our contemporary culture that has become so overly reliant and blinded by the limiting paradigm of the scientific method that forever reduces our understanding of intelligence to that which is sensory, measurable and linear in nature. (…Life isn’t (only or always) linear .. In fact it rarely is, except in man-made constructions and habituated uses of the mind.) – Rhonda LaRue

Present Day

This is me today.  Fifty-eight year old trans-man.  When I started this journey 10 years ago I was in a long term relationship.  That relationship changed two years ago.  We are still friends but it is not the same.  We live separate lives now.  

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about being alone.  I would like to be in a loving relationship, but I fear it wont happen again.  Maybe it is not to be.   I wouldn't change my journey, I couldn't have continued as I was.  I have a lot of lonely days and nights.  

I don't get out to meet new people.  I'm disabled and have no transportation.  I am not involved in the local LGBT tribe.   I have no friends out side of my ex and my room-mate.  My room-mate is a friend and people think she is my wife. (we let them, to much trouble to explain it)

I was going to college on-line for photography but I messed up and flunked algebra twice.  Still taking photographs but not taking classes anymore.  I wanted to use photography to help me get top surgery.  Now that is on hold again.

Tonight I am just using my journal, These Shoes are Too Tight, to write how I am feeling right now...  Lonely. 

Fifty-three Years in the Past

Remember when you were a kid, the type of games you played?  Five years old, playing in the dirt near a creek, with my best bud.  We built roads and bridges over little rivers we dug in the dirt.  We played with his trucks and cars because I didn't own any.  

 At five I had two younger sisters.  Susan was twenty-two months younger than I and Karen was just a baby.  I hadn't even started kindergarten yet.  

That same year I ran away from home.  I have no idea why I ran away.  I suspect a lot of kids runaway from home when they are very young.  Maybe it is a way of asserting our independence.  

Another way I asserted myself was to cut my own hair.  I was in my parents bedroom and there was a pare of scissors laying on the box fan.  I picked them up and created my very first master piece.  I started the spike movement.  Stiff little hills with deep valleys all over my head.  

My mother took me to a hair dresser to get my head shaved so that it would be the same length all over.  After that I never had hair below my shoulders.  

Ten Years Into the Future

I haven't written anything on here in almost five years.  Lately I have been wanting to work on my special project called These Shoes Are Too Tight.  The title comes from a TV show from many years ago, called Babylon 5.  A syfi show that was a favorite of mine.  There was a character called Lando, an ambassador from another planet.  On one episode there are two lovers who have run away from home and visit Lando to get his permission to marry.  Both of the young people have been promised to someone else.  At one point he talks to them about his own youth.  He had been married to three wives non of his choosing and all loveless marriages.  He remembers something his father had told him that at the time he hadn't understood.  He father had said that his shoes were too tight and he had forgotten how to dance.  This was a metaphor describing what responsibility can cost.  

But it is also a metaphor for living a non authentic life.  For so long I had not been living my authentic self.  Trying to be someone you are not or living your parents choices or believing a religion of your family is not living an authentic life.  In other words you are wearing shoes that are too tight.  The object is to be true to yourself in all ways.   This project is to chronicle  the process of finding the right shoes to wear.