Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes

"Turn and face the strange".

Since my father's death last month, something has changed, deeply, inside me. It's not about that relationship - that was always hard, and of late, very distant.

It's more to do with the growing self-realization, the part of me that now, finally, is starting to know who I am, no longer the definition of someone else.

And with that has come an odd shift in my sex and sexuality and my desire.

Whereas before it often felt (at least it was very vague and undefined) that when, for example, I wore thigh high nylons and walked about with them, it was as though part of me was trying to broadcast a message - "get laid". Was I? I don't know. (And I mean "get laid" in the broadest, most 'meta-' way possible, not just a BDT literal meaning). So when I was noticed, it was a lot about trying to see if what I imagined their conception of the meaning behind it could be something I understood in a way that opened the door to further connecting. That was me, compromising my self, in order to get the connection, whether sexual or something else.

But now, wearing thigh high nylons is more a marker of who I know I am, deep inside. And now it is not a matter of when someone sees me they say "Hotcha hotcha" and "Let's screw" but rather, I wonder, do they see the real me, and do they really know what this means as part of who I am? Do they truly understand that part of who I am, and do they grasp that the symbols are no longer a request for something like sex, but rather now are intrinsic representations or manifestations of the true self?

It is as though the symbolic language I've incorporated into the "me" of the past 15 years has suddenly jelled, morphed, into something at once deeply intimate and strangely unfamiliar. Who IS this odd person? [I KNOW this odd person well]

And with that comes the recognition, I think, that the inner person, though highly desiring of good sex contact and such, is no longer driven to that particular edge based on how I appear, no longer reaching for that fulfillment because of someone's "definition" of "me", but instead stems from a more fundamental place, and an interest in connecting that is totally free and clear of those older, familiar identities.

The person I am, really, now, finds solace, and, I hope, true self-confidence because I AM able to simply express that inner me as I feel it, and not because I am trying so so hard to "fit" into the mold of what others have tried to make me, whether real or imagined on my part.

There is one more sub-barrier, but even that, somehow, feels a lot different. I suspect I will manage to overcome that one with considerably more ease, esp since that relationship as it was is over.

It's both scary and exhilarating.