"A Journey To Self Love- A Southern Trans Woman" with guest blogger Jaisee Alexander

       How does one encapsulate their entire experience of life onto a few written pages?  I’m not sure that it is possible, but I am going to give it my best.  I was born in 1988 in the state of South Carolina.  They deemed me male at birth and that was a mistake that would take me my entire life to reconcile.
       As a child, I was quite content with life and myself.  I was caring, light-hearted, spirited, and loving.  I was quite feminine naturally and my parents took notice of it.  At the age of five, they put me into Tai-Kwon-Do in hopes that I would be able to learn to defend myself physically from those who might want to do me harm, due to my feminine nature.
       By the age of seven I was still sucking my thumb (my first addiction, one of many to come) and my parents made me an offer.  They said that if I quit sucking my thumb they would buy me a Pocahontas Barbie doll!  My father reconciled this by stating it was NOT a "real" Barbie doll, but a Native American figurine.  You see by this time, most of my friends were girls.  We always played with Barbies and I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to have one.  You better believe that I quit sucking my thumb, and so that Pocahontas Barbie doll was mine.  It is important to note that before I even left my mother I was using external means (my thumb) to bring about internal peace.  This is a behavior that I’ve carried ever since.
       By the age of eight I realized that the way I behaved was contrary to what others expected of me.  So embarked my journey on how to become a boy.  By middle school I was completely isolated from the male population.  I tried to imitate the behaviors of males, but to no avail. No one was buying my act and I’m not sure I did either.
       I began to struggle, as I could not harmonize my religious beliefs with my growing sexual desire for males.  I tried to throw myself deeper into my faith in desperation that if I just loved God hard enough my profane desires might be alleviated.  My teen years were filled with hazing, isolation, self-hatred, confusion, and so on.  Spring break my junior year in high school, I finally agreed to try marijuana.  It was magically incredible and I was temporarily relieved of my suffering.  Within a couple of weeks I began using cocaine and then alcohol.  So began my decade of using mind-altering chemicals in order to avoid and alleviate suffering.
       Puberty came late and so did the most unexpected.  I had been waiting with such hopes that puberty would save me.  My body would masculinize so that I could finally fit into this binary system of sex and gender.  That was not what happened.  I began to develop fat tissue in my chest.  As my nipples protruded a pain began to develop.  As the months continued, so did the pain.  After a year plus, it was unbearable.  I used to walk down the halls of school pulling at the bottom of my shirt so that no one would see the development of my breasts.  I had to walk down stairs so cautiously because it hurt unbearably.  One day I pushed back on my chest and, much to my surprise, a liquid substance secreted from my nipples.  Thus began the draining of my breasts.  The pain became greater than my shame and I finally told my mother.
       My senior year of high school, I under went liposuction surgery and removed all of the breast tissue in order to make my body resemble a male.  I am an intersex person, but I didn’t even know what that was at this time.  I wanted so badly to be “normal”.  I didn’t realize what a mistake of understanding that was.  I was normal.  I was intersex.  Intersex people are normal and are naturally occurring with biology.  I eradicated my experience and natural state.  If only I had had the understanding of loving myself for myself rather than what I believed others wanted me to be.  Now I see that I dismembered my body due to fear and the hopes of acceptance of others rather than my own.
       I’ve always had this skewed idea that this next thing is what will bring about peace.  I went to college and thought education would save me.  I then graduated and traveled Europe.  I thought traveling would save me.  I went to California and thought being in the LGBT community of San Francisco would save me.  I worked on a hippie farm on Mount Madonna and thought that I could find myself under the tit of a goat and chasing chickens.  Since that didn’t work, I decided to go live in a hippie commune of two hundred plus people in the forest of Guatemala!  That surely should do it.  Nope.  So on to Santiago, Chile to teach English I went.  That wasn’t as successful as I had hoped either.
       My life began to unravel in 2012 and I could no longer keep up my appearances.  I became fragmented in mind, body, and spirit.  My addiction to crack and alcohol had consumed me and I was the hostage.  Something came to me in my crack and alcohol induced narcosis and revealed to me that, in order to ever find peace, I was going to have to transition.  My pain was so grave that I tried to take my life for a third time to get away from the suffering.  I was clearly unsuccessful as I suck at killing myself.  I ended up going to rehab and began my transition to female.
       My sobriety date is October 25, 2013.  Within this time I have done many things, such as work on a leadership board of a non-profit directly giving aid and financial grants to transgender citizens in the state of South Carolina.  I’ve held a few jobs but mostly being employed within the sex industry.  You see, internationally the sex industry is the #1 employer of transgender people, as many places will not higher us knowingly.
       I got lost.  Fell off the path and so found myself again using external factors to create internal peace.  I stayed sober from mind-altering drugs, but found other ways to get high.  I bathed in the attention of males and their attraction to my body.  I felt validated in the way I had always craved.  I gave my power away and became dependent on their attention and validation.
       In January 2017 love found me most unexpectedly.  I met with this guy who said that he was looking for a domme trans woman, and I said that I was looking for a versatile submissive male.  At the time we had no idea that we weren’t really looking for that at all.  He peered straight through all of my masks.  There was no deceiving him.  He saw my pain and instead of running in the opposite direction he held it.  This changed everything for me.  I no longer had to carry it all on my own.  So I met again since I was a child, what it meant to be vulnerable.  Having this man love me showed me all the ways that I still came up short in loving myself.
       After he left and returned to his country I was at such a loss.  I no longer had the attention of males and no longer had his love by my side.  After tasting love I no longer wanted the instant gratification of male sexual attention.  I was stuck with the wreckage I had caused.  Again pain became too great to bear, and so I cracked into fragmented parts of myself.  As I did in 2013, I was able to construct something entirely new from the destruction of my own creation.
       I now have a daily devotion to a daily reflection, sending inspiration to over fifty people daily, practice guided and silent mediation daily, practice yoga a couple times a week, attend recovery meetings weekly, focus on a healthy and nourishing diet daily, and aid those that are suffering when presented.  I am finally able to see that craving has been at the root of my suffering in life.  Unless I work to remove it through compassion and love it will continue to limit my fullest potential within this life.
       -Jaisee Alexander
What's your journey to self-love?

Photo by Nic Pilch

Jaisee is a Charleston native with a traveling soul.  Forced to carve out a reality for herself, she lives within alternative planes of existence finding what is meaningful and purposeful for her.  She’s worked in F&B, taught English in South America, WWOFed, been a small business owner, worked in theater, and currently is developing a career in adult entertainment.  Struggle has been the majority of her life until she was able to untangle the twisted worldview that had been given to her.  She strives to empower others through her experience. 
- Jaisee Alexander

The Wise Owl Who Said, "Who?"

       My deep slumber was broken this morning by a voice outside of my window.  It was a familiar voice; one that I have heard a few times before in my life, but the words that she said this time were very different.  She didn't perch in a far off tree exclaiming, "Hoo!".  She stood directly outside of my bedroom window to ask, "Who...who...WHO-WHO?!"  Angry at the intrusion, I held the pillow over my face to drown out her questions, but as the morning went on I knew that I would not forget her query.  Who?  Truly who am I?  Who are you?  What makes us who we are?  I am my fathers daughter, my sisters sister, my husbands wife, my sons mother.  I work at this place and I have these friends.  I shop at that place and eat this food.  But WHO AM I?  Under the physicality of my clothes and my hair style and the side of town that I live on, who am I?  If I'm looking past the existential and the physical, am I the sum of my thoughts?  We are always trying to express our thoughts through words and other means of communication, but maybe that's not who I truly am.  I find that I'm constantly trying to shape my thoughts because I am human and my thoughts are not always true.  Thoughts arise through human nature and emotional responses, but they aren't always real.  There must be something deeper, something at the core, that makes us who we are.  Maybe there is no one particular thing that makes us people.  I believe that a combination of things can form us into the people that we are, but only the "at the core" me can shape myself into something more, something better.  Perhaps you would call that my spiritual self, my higher mind.  The part of me that sees a fellow human struggling and bleeds a little on the inside for their pain.  The part of me that goes beyond empathy and reaches out a hand to help them.  The part of me that speaks kind words and smiles at a homeless person who smells of week-old garbage, because I know that they have feelings too.  The part of me that recognizes the soul in the people that I see rather than the human face that is before me.  Yes, we are multi-dimensional, complex, intricate, a system of thoughts, feelings, past experiences, and knowledge.  But there is a higher self, the real me, my soul consciousness that inspires and guides me with intuition and inspiration. My GOD VOICE, if you will.  It is always connected to me, but I do not always communicate with it.  We must learn to listen to ourselves, but it is imperative that we learn to discern between the fear-based ego voice and the aware higher self voice.  Only then can I become more than human, more than kind, more than wise.  I can take faith and be strong in who I am, because I know that I can be more than Jain.
What does your owl say?

Through The Rain

       I awaken from a deep slumber to the steady rhythm of soft rain pattering across the grass outside of my window.  My muscles beg to be stretched as a yawn escapes my lips and my blurry eyes try to focus on the clock.  The minute hand rests at five 'till, and I roll to turn off my alarm before the dreaded buzzing sound assaults my ears.  My feet shuffle through the carpet towards the bathroom where I splash warm water on my eyes before climbing into the sink to sit and paint my face for the day.  A chill creeps across my arms and down my back and I shiver momentarily as my body adjusts to the morning air.  I fight the urge to crawl back under the warm blankets, knowing that my son will be up soon to get ready for school and the baby will be crying for his "Mah" before long.  After the chaotic morning routine subsides, I enter the kitchen and stand at the window watching the rain fill the yard puddles and the cats run from bush to bush in a desperate attempt to keep their gray and white fur dry.  I am suddenly aware that I am alone, and for once everything seems to be still.  There is no sound aside from the rain, and the only movement is the ripples that undulate away from each water droplet.  I momentarily feel sad, peaceful, thankful, still, quiet, and content.  What is the purpose of the rain?  Of course rainwater is essential for all of life, providing the majority of the fresh water on earth which is needed to sustain many types of ecosystems.  But what is the purpose of the rain?  As I drive away from my home I notice the absolute stillness on the roads around me on the way to work; the drone of the windshield wipers and the splash of the tires making my mind sleepy.  Perhaps the rain falls to help us be still.  Life gets to be such a whirlwind of activity and due dates that we sometimes forget to stand motionless and allow nature to be the moving force around us.  We only notice the little things, the birds bathing and the squirrels chattering, when we aren't occupied with our own selves.  Or perhaps, the rain falls to wash away the dregs that built up while the wind was blowing dirt and the animals were tracking their prey.  Cleansing the earth and cleansing the soul is healthy and much needed.  Sometimes we have to strip down and step out of our dingy skin to see the world anew and feel the refreshing breath of life renewed.  Maybe the rain falls for no other reason than to help us all appreciate the sunshine a little more.   Or maybe the rain is nothing more than music sent from the heavens for the special few who have the ears to hear it and the feet to dance in its glory.