When Something Has To Give

By Amanda J.

If ever there was a word that defined my life, or at least the part of it that you would recognise, it’s ‘conflict’.  From the moment that I slipped on a pair of my mother’s tights and experienced the dual emotions of ecstasy and guilt, that conflict has been raging in my mind.  And, give or take a year or two, that’s been going on for half a century.

I guess it’s par for the course, though.  After all, as guys our primeval instinct should be to pursue women, not to envy them and seek to emulate them.  It’s hard enough being a teenager as it is without having to factor in the situation where our fantasies about girls are very different to most of our peers (at least as far as we are aware).  Add in the reaction that most teenage boys experience when confronted by anything vaguely sexual and that battle really starts to rage.

That said, in many respects, being a teenager was the easy bit as I only really had to worry about myself – I don’t know whether my mother ever realised that the sanctity of her clothing was being violated but nothing was ever said.  Marriage, however, took that conflict to a whole new level.  At first, it was easy as the rush of love and excitement at finding ‘The One’ pushed any feminine thoughts right out of my consciousness.   A simple explanation – my CDing was just a surrogate for having a woman in my life and, having finally found said woman, I had no need for the CDing.    And that was further reinforced when I realised that Mrs A looked far better in that gorgeous dress and stilettos to die for than I ever could.

Except, of course, all of us who have been through that know that those feelings are transitory and it’s only a matter of time before things go back to normal (or, more accurately, abnormal).

As I said above, as a teenage CDer, I only had to worry about myself, now I had to add someone else into the equation and the conflict really ramped up as a result.  Initially it was a case of battling to keep my feelings away from someone who was oblivious, latterly I had to keep them from someone who was disapproving.  Even though I have now been given Mrs A’s blessing to do what I need to do as long as it’s kept well away from her, the conflict continues as I try to balance what I aspire to do in my feminine persona with the boundaries I believe Mrs A expects me to respect.  And in all honesty, I expect to live with that conflict for the rest of my life.

Except that’s not really the point of this post.

As you may be aware, a few weeks ago, I took the decision to step back from my feminine life for a while.  In some respects it was a hard decision to take, in other respects very easy but at the root of it was the conflict between my male and female worlds.  But unlike the other conflicts I described above, I wasn’t really aware of the effect that this particular conflict was having on me until it was almost too late.

I have worked hard to keep my male and female worlds completely separate.  Unless any of my online friends have worked out my male identity, only two people have ever knowingly seen both sides of me.  And that suits me fine.

I love ‘Amanda’s’ world.  In it, I’m the woman I always wished I was and at peace with myself.  Of course, there’s an element of frustration that it’s largely a fantasy world and not the real deal but that in itself permits me to put on my favourite dress & heels, do my makeup and then look in the mirror and imagine being swept off my feet by a handsome suitor (and that, in itself, is a huge conflict given that, under the finery, my heterosexual male brain is still controlling everything and dating guys is definitely not on my bucket list!).  Or, as I did recently, put on a more casual outfit, pack my handbag and take that exhilarating step over the threshold into the real world and blur the lines between fantasy and reality.  And as most of us find, when we cross the gender divide, many of our worries and anxieties seem to evaporate, replaced by a feeling of abject bliss.

But, for me, therein lay the problem.

Feminine thoughts shoot through my mind several times a day.  Sometimes it’s just a yearning to feel feminine fabrics against my skin for a few minutes, sometimes a desire to see ‘her’ smiling back from the mirror, sometimes an urge to push back my feminine frontiers even further than I already have and sometimes even thoughts of full transition.  And clearly, those thoughts have to be dealt with.

In the early days, things were relatively easy – put a few things on and feel good for a while before packing everything away till the next time.  But as the persona you know as ‘Amanda’ took shape and grew things got rather more complicated and, in the process, more time consuming.  Corresponding with online friends was taking up around one hour per day, sometimes more.  And then I added writing for Kandi’s Land into the mix.  With the writing, I have a Word document which I use for all of my posts.  Ideas get worked on, sometimes they get finished and sent to Kandi for publication, other times they languish unfinished in that Word document.  As with all of my other posts, this one is being prepared in that document and I can see from the stats at the bottom of the page that it now contains 165 pages and over 75,000 words.  That’s the stuff that’s never been published and in a lot of cases never will be either because it’s been superseded, I’ve not been able to coherently develop the idea or because I’ve strayed into territory that some may feel is too controversial.  But those 75,000 words took time – a lot of time – to think about and to write.

And then there were the forums & blogs.  Whenever I had a post published here, I’d be checking all day to see whether anyone had left comments and then taking time to think about how to reply.  And it was the same story with a couple of other private groups that I’m a member of.

And all of that was going on while I was dressed as a guy!  Retrieving the stash took things to a different level.

My modus operandi was generally to remain in bed until Mrs A went to work, then get up and have my breakfast.  Around 9:00am, I’d check the CCTV feed on my phone to make sure that our business was up and running for the day and then get out the ladder, go into the roof space to retrieve my bag of goodies and then start my transformation which generally takes around one hour.  Then, if I was going out, it’d be a case of getting everything together, if not then I’d sit at the computer and try to work.  ‘Try’ being the operative word.

When Amanda comes out to play, I want to see her.  Whilst there’s something wonderful about looking down past longed-for boobs to see nylon clad legs, or seeing jewellery and painted nails (OK, red fake stick on nails) on hands normally devoid of adornments but there’s nothing quite like looking in the mirror and seeing ‘her’.  Life just feels different and better when one actually likes the person smiling back.

But, and it’s a big but, a problem was looming.  I’ve already talked about worries and anxieties evaporating but, in my case, those worries and anxieties demanded attention.  Attention which they did not receive.  I don’t intend to go into detail but suffice to say that I run a business with Mrs A and dark clouds of a financial nature were starting to gather.  We’ve been there before and things always seem to sort themselves out; this time, though, it was apparent that the ostrich strategy of putting my head in the sand and hoping for the best wasn’t going to work and I was starting to experience panic attacks when waking up in the morning.  It was also apparent that, with everything in Amanda’s world being rainbows & unicorns and about as far away from our business as it’s possible to get, I had to turn my back on that world to have any chance of righting the ship.

It wasn’t an easy decision to make because ‘Amanda’ is still very much alive in my thoughts.  It’s meant backing away from online friendships that I value greatly.  It’s meant not giving affirmation and support to the other contributors here, either by not leaving a comment on their posts or by not responding to new comments on historic posts of mine that Kandi has very kindly rerun.  It’s meant that I cannot reach those in our community that are bewildered by the whole thing and come to places like Kandi’s Land in the hope that they’ll find answers.  I could go on but I’m sure you get the picture.

This has been a very long winded way of saying that when two mutually exclusive worlds conflict, something has to give.  And, for me, the situation was all the more problematic because, unlike the conflicts I talked about at the start of this post, this was a conflict that I couldn’t see coming, or maybe a conflict that I could see but couldn’t or wouldn’t acknowledge.  But why should I when there was something far more satisfying to focus my mind on?  Something that I knew would make all the problems in the world seemingly vanish.

Fortunately, I realised what was happening just in time and, after a few frank discussions with Mrs A, things are already looking better as far as our business is concerned.  But I’m well aware that like the recovering alcoholic who decides that ‘just one drink’ won’t do any harm and then finds themself back at square one, I can’t be complacent and there is still a long way to go.  As I said above, I hate not leaving, or responding to, comments here and feel a lot of guilt about neglecting friendships but I have to stay focussed, at least for now.  Even writing this piece has been a distraction, not least as by the time you read it, it’ll have taken around five hours of my time to write and edit plus a lot more time thinking about it when I’ve not been at the keyboard but there’s an important message that I wanted to share.

For those of us so afflicted (or blessed, depending on your point of view), there is no better feeling than crossing the gender divide in some shape or form.  And not only that, it’s the gift that keeps on giving and I’m sure that everyone reading this understands exactly what I mean.  For me, and for many others, it’s a feeling of absolute bliss with a sense that everything is just as it should be and life couldn’t get any better.  But apart from the lucky few who can completely integrate their feminine activites into their lives with the full support of their spouse, most of us inhabit two worlds which necessarily have to be kept completely separate.  And unfortunately, those amazing feelings we have in our feminine world do not resolve any issues that may be plaguing us in our male world, they just mask them and, in certain cases, provide escape from them.  CDing resolves one issue – the persistent need or desire to cross the gender divide in some shape or form – but it won’t fix a bad marriage, boost a flagging career or turn around a failing business.  In fact, it may well make things a lot worse through neglect as I found out.  Because, the bottom line is that, like any other woman, the inner woman will grab any opportunity she can get to cause mayhem!

Ultimately, like everything else in life, we need to keep this in perspective & balance.  Exactly what that means is unique to each of us but for me, it boiled down to two choices.  Carry on as I was and then, in a few months time, sort out the mess of a failed business or concentrate on that business so that, hopefully in a few months time ‘Amanda’ can flourish once more.  And for once, both my head and my heart are telling me the same thing.

So ‘Amanda’ is very much alive and kicking even though she’s not seeing the light of day nearly as much as she once did.  I look forward to the day when she can once more spread her wings, unfettered by the challenges that are currently distracting her less fabulous twin.  But until that day comes ‘she’ understands the need to put ‘him’ first and neither of us would have it any other way.

And as an addendum, please feel free to add to this discussion in the comments section below but please also understand if replies are not forthcoming.  I appreciate and treasure the friendship of everybody here but I have to be steadfast in my resolve, at least until the waters in my other life are calm once more.