Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Origins of Tammy World and The Block

Awhile back, my friend Sophie Lynne challenged me to write a blog post about my writer's block.  We were chatting on Facebook one night and I was telling her about my long, storied history with writer's block, which she found fascinating, so she gave me an assignment to write about it.  In the meantime I fell victim to my two greatest nemeses when it comes to writing, procrastination and my old friend writer's block. 

Today she asked me out of the blue to give her a writing assignment, so I thought of something and she came up with this interesting piece, some of it very deep and quite dark.  Throughout my own life, much of my writing has been of a dark nature.  In fact, the most extreme of my dark compositions are what originally got me in trouble and became the origin of my epic case of writer's block.


*******

In school I was a creative kid.  The older I got the more creative I became.  I wasn't good at sports, I wasn't popular, I wasn't a math whiz.  My grades were very good but I wasn't first in my class, which was a fairly small class because for the first 10.5 grades I went to a private school.  It can be said that I made good grades without putting a lot of effort into it, but many of the kids went the extra mile and were considered better students.

The older I got, the more withdrawn I became.  When I was 12 years old (I must have been in the sixth grade), things started going downhill for me.  I had been a relatively happy kid before that, different but fairly well adjusted and fairly happy overall.  Other kids sense that you are different and always treat you differently but it wasn't so obvious.  I was transgender of course, but I did not realize it per se.  I felt it but it wasn't so apparent on the surface and at the time I didn't know what it was.  I wasn't going around wearing wearing women's clothes or anything or telling people I wanted to be a girl.  I tried that when I was younger and it was not well received so I hid it, acted out in private when I could and held a lot of things in.

When I hit puberty things began to take a different turn.  Now something was going on in my body that felt foreign to me and my mind started to go black.  A cloud fell over me.  I always lived in a fantasy world that I never completely shared with anyone.  It wasn't just wanting to be female, it was much more than that, more complex.  I do remember that I created an entirely different world in my brain that was similar to earth but not the same.  This world had two equators, different land masses and some of the laws of science that apply here were irrelevant there, 

The older I got the more complex this world within my head became.  I never wrote much about it, I just spent a lot of time thinking up various scenarios for my world rather than interacting with other people or doing my homework etc.  My parent's still remember a song I sang to them when I was very young, though I don't remember my age at the time i think I was in grammar school.  The tune was Mathalon Marches On, and it was basically the national anthem of a fictitious country named Mathelon that I created.  I didn't live there and and it was somewhere overseas, maybe a mirror image of England, or something along those lines. 
 

In some ways, I did not live in the real world.  I didn't like the real world and wanted little to do with it.  It was a few years later, when I was 17 and began smoking a lot of marijuana every day, that I began to spend less time delving into this deep fantasy world.  When I could be high, that was enough to numb me, I didn't need to spend as much energy creating my elaborate world, although it would be many, many years beyond my teens before I stopped spending much time thinking about living in my alternate world.

Maybe my fantasy world was the origin of Tammy World.  When I started this blog and came up with the name, I was establishing a new world for me, one that is reality based.  Tammy World is not a fantasy at all but reflects a time in my life when I can put the fantasy aside.  Yes, a lot of my fantasies were of things like being a middle aged housewife or being a teenage girl.  I think when I was younger I fantasized more about being older and the older I got the more I fantasized about being younger.  In any case, none of this occurred on Planet Earth.  My world was similar but different.  I think we were both carbon based life forms but other than anything was possible in my other world.

This brings us to my case of writer's block.  Actually, I didn't write much about my alternate world.  It was my thing and I didn't want to share too much of it.  I was a very inward, private kid and I have been that way pretty much throughout my adult life.  This is something I am working on now as part of my life therapy.  I did go through a period in school where I was drawing elaborate maps of places I made up. Some of those maps still exist in notebooks at my parent's house but I don't think any of my writings still exist.

What I did get into in my early teens was writing poetry and increasingly dark prose.  I would spend hours scribbling stuff into notebooks, and I am not sure how much of it even made sense.  I know that I didn't write violent, threatening things but I did write very morbid things.  Some of it may have been deemed suicidal but I was not trying to kill myself.  I just wanted to leave this world and I had created another one that was ready to take me.  No one understood this, including me.

So here we have the origins of my aversion to therapy that kept me as far from metal health professionals as possible.  I have been convinced most of my life that I am insane, and after reading this you are probably convinced of it to.  It was only when I entered actual therapy, a little over 2 years ago, that I began to become convinced that I am not insane after all.  Building up a new word for myself, a real one, has not only let me get away from my fantasy world, but let some light come in.  People that see me as a positive person today did not see the withdrawn, negative person that existed before.  I am a different person, and I don't just mean the gender transition.  Of course I am still a work in progress in all aspects but it is much, much better today than ever before.

Actually, there was an early foray into therapy that contributed to my writer's block.  One day I came home from school and my parent's had found some of my notebooks.  I think they were as amazed by the sheer volume of stuff that I had written as they were alarmed by its content.  All I can think of now to compare to what I might have written is something along the lines of an entire book that says "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."  Over and over again.  Of course that was not what I was saying and I thank The Shining for the analogy, but I think the dribble was just as mindless.  At any rate it was something that nobody wanted to read and it landed me in a child psychologist's office.

All I remember of my afternoon in therapy is putting together blocks, taking some kind of tests and talking with either one or two psychologists.  I didn't tell them much and tried to them exactly what they wanted to hear.  All I wanted to do was get out there, they were keeping me away from my world.  At the end of the day they told my parents that I was normal but very unhappy.  We went on with our lives.

Some of the poetry I wrote was considered quite good.  The writing I did for school got me consistent A's and praise from the teachers.  As I got older, they said I had the potential to be a writer.  I enjoyed writing and began to write a lot.  Some of it was bad and some of it was good, I guess.  And by bad I mean it had bad subject matter.  Much of it probably had death as the theme.  It was the very bad material that caught the attention of one of the teachers and landed me in the school's office with the counselor, teachers and whoever was in charge of that little school.  Whatever it was that I had written, they didn't want to read.  They were concerned but it wasn't serious enough to go forward with any discipline, as I recall, but i do think my parent's were contacted.  I also recall deciding to shut down writing anything of any consequence after that day.

I still wrote my school assignments and did very well on them, but I no longer wrote for myself.  I turned my attention to photography as a means to express myself and was considered talented at that too.  As I progressed in school, I continued to write for the school newspaper and did some freelance writing, sports and other assignments, for 2 local newspapers.  But there was no more poetry, no more crazy prose, nothing interesting.  The few times I would write something like that for myself I would destroy it fairly quickly.  Even though I wasn't actively worried about people finding it and passing judgement on me again, I just didn't do it.  Eventually I lost much of my interest in expressing my thoughts on paper.  I would sometimes write poems in my head, or song lyrics that I thought were quite good, but didn't write them down.

As an adult I write quarterly articles for my mother's historical newsletter.  Even that has been like pulling teeth though.  Somehow, after my experiences as a teenager, the joy of writing was sapped out of me.  Through this blog I have taken steps to get back into it but even now it is often hard to get the motivation to write.  I hate reading what I have written  and always pick it apart or want it to be better than it is, but I guess that's typical. 

Writing this blog has brought me a lot of joy, when I can push through the writer's block that has become so instinctive.  Slowly, I may be coming out of it.  I have found the most painful subjects the easiest to write about but that has probably been true my whole life.  It's just that now I try to write things that make sense.  In the past, especially the teenage writing that got me in trouble, most of what I wrote was coded jumble alluding to something or some feeling I was experiencing, without actually saying what it was.  Nobody really understood much of it but from reading it they understood I was having problems.

At lot of the dynamics of my life changed when I began getting high.  The things that were bottled up inside me did not need to come out because I could numb myself.  The pain didn't go away but it became manageable and the pressure inside seemed to subside.   Except for my forays into hard drugs, I always felt that the pot helped me and therefore I didn't want to quit.  Actually, the pressure never subsided it was just being temporarily subdued. 

Only when I started taking female hormones did the pressure go away and I was able to quit smoking pot.  Who knew?  I've never seen that on the list of MTF hormone effects.  Now I don't know what to do with my mind sometimes.  It is clear and it's not dark.  Although sometimes it can drift in that direction, it's not a problem.  I don't feel as if I am dying anymore.  A lot of what I used to write was about death, probably glorifying it.  I can see why the adults didn't like it.  I didn't want to feel that way but I did. 

I have decided now that I am going to live and I want to live.  This is a fairly new development with me.  I have a long history of embracing death without actively taking the plunge so to speak.  I am lucky because a lot of my behavior in the last 30 or so years was so self destructive I could easily not be here.  At least I never had the gumption, and probably not the desire, to blatantly do something to bring it about.  Still I have managed to come close more times than I care to think about.  Just one example was going to a hospital emergency room for acute cocaine poisoning or overdose.  It hasn't been pretty.  When I stopped writing about death and started flirting with it, I didn't do myself any favors.
 

Having made it through all of that and much, much more, I am really thankful to be here.  The light is on again.  Taking baby steps towards writing again is one of the good things to come out of turning my life around.  Hey, I didn't just turn my life around, I began to build an entirely new life and it is similar to the one I always dreamed of having.  There was a reason that dead, empty shell of a human being kept walking the earth. 

In my early twenties I moved to Florida for about 7 months.  My dad's friend got me a job as teller in a bank, but outside of work I had no social life.  I didn't make any friends and my only interactions with people outside of my work at the small bank branch were with street drug dealers.  While I was down there I had a lot of time to think and started writing again but I destroyed everything before I came back home.  That was typical of me but perhaps it showed I had potential to break out my writer's block one day. 

The thing I took away from my time in Florida was that I was dead.  I considered myself already dead so nothing that came after that really mattered.  So you see the empty shell of a human being analogy was pretty accurate after all.  In fact, it was no analogy.

I really wish I had not destroyed the volumes of material I have written over my lifetime.  Most of it was written when  was a teenager (a long, long time ago), but I think among the dark dribble there may have been a few gems.  Anyway, I am starting over, with my life and my writing.  Maybe it can even go beyond this blog someday.  I've been given another chance to live for a reason and I survived the abyss for a reason.  A lot of people have written me and told me they've been inspired by my blog but then again a lot of people are in the same boat that I was in and can relate.  A lot of trans people are living in an alternate world, or trying to get away from this one.  They are trapped and want to break free.  Maybe I have shown that it is possible, no matter the circumstances. 

So today I have a reason to write and something to write about.  Back when I was doing all the drugs, especially the bad ones, I told myself I was doing research for a book.  I was a character in the book going through scenarios to get material for my novel.  Much of it was quite interesting and even then I saw myself as a third person character going through the motions, doing research.  I never wanted to be whoever I was until I became myself.   

Now I have joined you in your world.  I think I am going to do something while I am here.  This writer's block has got to go!  I am going to take Sophie up on her challenge to write something every day.  It may not all end up here, but every day I am going to set aside some time to write.  I already write a lot of material for my group, Trans Beauty Network, and that is positive and often helps people, but much of the other Facebook stuff is mindless dribble.  At least it doesn't have the dark, death themes of my youth, but it doesn't accomplish much outside of the positive chats I often have, basically counseling people.  


Sometimes writing takes unexpected turns.  Today I wanted to explain the origins of my writer's block and expand on what I've written about it before.  Just writing about having writer's block in itself is a way to break writer's block.  And in the process some of the origins of Tammy World have been uncovered.  Fantasy world meets reality world, that's my life today.  I am really glad to finally be able to share Tammy World with real people and I am really glad to have you here.








Thursday, January 23, 2014

I Have A Dream

Suddenly lifted off my feet and surrounded by light, rising at what seems to be the speed of light.....Up, up into the light....For that split second I can feel myself flying, straight up, into the brightest of the light....



Floating down the hall I approach the swinging doors and as they open I notice that I am in what looks to be a restaurant kitchen.  There is a table in the center of the room and people are gathered around it; men, women and children.  Something is happening on the table and I want to have a look, but it is so crowded I cannot get close.  I realize that some of the people are working on something on the table and I have the feeling that someone is lying there, possibly being operated on.  Finally I am able to get close enough to almost see what is going on and immediately I am flushed with bright, white light and feel myself rapidly ascending through the ceiling and beyond .  It is a feeling of being pulled up into a vortex as everything is blanked out by the light.   And then I woke up.


This was a dream I had a couple of years ago, one of those dreams I will never forget.  It was surreal and seemed to be in slow motion until I got near the table and then, Wham, I started flying up.  The feeling I had when I awakened was one of having been jerked away from a scene, or jerked out of my dream, and being transported somewhere.  Did I get there, I wonder?

I even remember little details about this dream.  Like the people at the table that turned and looked at me as I approached.  Was there something there that I was not supposed to see?  

I vividly remember the feeling of floating down a hall when the dream began although the place I associated with that part of the dream was a restaurant or one of those little beach bars on the boardwalk.  And I was heading into the back through western saloon style swinging doors.


The people seemed to move away from the table as I drew near as if they were creating a place for me to join them in viewing whatever was going on.  The looks on their faces were expressionless and they seemed to float above the ground as they moved, the way that I was doing.  I can only assume it was me they were making way for.  I never saw myself but everything was in a first person viewpoint. 

The dream moved quickly and ended abruptly.  The only feeling I remember that morning when I woke up was a fascination with this dream and living it over and over again in my head.  For awhile, as I laid in bed, I could still feel the sensation of being pulled into the air and into the brilliant, white light.  It was a good feeling, though strange.

It is not unusual for me to wake up and relive a remarkable dream, tracing back through it in my mind.  It is unusual to remember one as vividly as this one for so long, and there are only a couple more that have stuck with me like this.

It's typical for me to try to interpret dreams in the morning.  Sometimes they perplex me and other times I sort of make the meaning fit into what I want it to be.  But I never had any doubts about the meaning of this particular dream.  At the time I interpreted this dream to be symbolic of me having SRS and to this day I feel that is what it symbolized. 

During this period I had just started therapy and was considering the fact that transition might just be a real possibility for me.  I still had to climb Mount Everest but more and more this did not seem like an impossibility.  Maybe my life's dreams could really come true and maybe that is what happened in this dream.

So, there is a still a lot of mystery surrounding this dream.  I remember having the feeling that a child was on the table being operated on, but maybe that was something I wrote into it when I was rethinking the dream over and over the following morning.  Maybe the child is symbolic of me and when I took off into the sky and into the light, it was symbolic of my (re) birth.  Then I have thought it could be symbolic of my death, but that is not the feeling I took away from it.

*******

Symbolism and interpretation aside, my real dreams are coming true today.  After the seemingly insurmountable feat of climbing Mount Everest, anything seems possible.  So, after coming down from what seemed to be a rapid ascension of the mountain and spending some time resting in the valley, I have caught my breath and have big news to deliver.

Last month, December 2013, I completed all of the requirements of the WPATH Standards of Care to qualify for gender affirming surgery (SRS, GRS, GCS...).  My primary therapist wrote me a "surgery letter"and I went back for another session from my secondary (PHD) therapist and got a similar letter from her.  My doctor wrote me a letter describing my treatment as well as the fact that I am in good general health.  In fact, he wrote me that letter on the same day he wrote my letters for my NC driver's licence and Social Security.

Having all three of these letters I have scheduled GRS with Dr. Brassard in Montral, Canada for June 16, 2014.  I need to get a passport and if all goes as planned, Mitchell is going to go with me.  He's working on getting a passport too.  Of course I am very excited, extremely happy and a little nervous so please stay tuned to Tammy World to see what comes next....




I have a dream.  And it is coming true..:)




 

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Snow World

Snowing hard on Tuesday night, 1/22/2014
It has been awhile since we had a decent snow here in Eastern north Carolina, so I was delighted when a couple of inches of the white stuff fell last night, all in less than 2 hours.  Temperatures tonight are in the teens, so hopefully some of it will still be around much of the day tomorrow.  I hope y'all enjoy these pictures of when It Snowed here in Tammy World...
Nighttime snowfall, in my back yard...


Her name is Holly, and she is an ice princess...


Buddy and Nightingale playing in the snow, the day after it fell...


Buddy Matthews, always the star!


Icicles...It didn't get above freezing today but we still had melting in the mid day sun...


Nice effect, natural and straight from my camera...


The Promise of Spring


Snow Flower


Blooming Camellia, in the snow.




"Second snowfall" as the wind gently brings the snow down out of the trees...


Snow sticks around into the afternoon...we got between 2" and 3" here...


Don't go away snow.  Stay awhile longer, please...
I love snow!  I am like a kid when it snows, not as active out in it as I used to be but I still love it.  Here's hoping that Winter 2014 will bring More snow to Tammy World....

BAM!


WHAM! So, I was driving on the Raleigh Beltline yesterday (I-440) and was behind a truck that had a lot of what looked to be construction debris in the back. When all of a sudden, several pieces of something flew out of the back of the truck and I could see one of them heading straight for my windshield! It looked like a big piece of wood or something maybe a foot square. Anyway, it hit my new car with a big Thud and I was happy that the windshield didn't break but I just knew there would be a dent somewhere, maybe on the roof. I backed way off the truck (maybe I should have from the beginning) and when they turned off I got the license number. When I got to my destination I looked and all I saw was a spot on the windshield that was small and I was not sure was permanent. Later on I noticed a small dent in the metal frame around the windshield. I called the Raleigh Police and my insurance agent and we decided to just file it as a small comprehensive claim as it seems I am covered for "flying objects". So, I am looking at a $100 deductible to get this thing fixed and it won't increase my premiums, but Wow what a scary moment and what a headache this careless driver is causing me....

Can you notice the dent, here?
Damage in perspective...

The damage...marks on the windshield and dent on the molding...

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Tammy World 2014



Welcome to Tammy World, 2014 edition.  This blog started in 2012, the most pivotal year in my life so far, when my transition began.  In 2013 I was able to live completely as myself and was amazed at how easy that seemed but not surprised at how quickly the year flew by.  Tomorrow I begin my 20th month of HRT and have almost completed 13 months of living full time, Real Life Experience.  Things are beginning to come together nicely for me and 2014 promises to be even more monumental in my life, transition and adventures. 

We've had a little bit of a lull here on the blog since the holidays so we have some catching up to do as well as getting on with the exciting business of the new year.  Things have been a little bit stressful and crazy here as I talked about in my last post, Christmas in Tammy World.  My dad has fallen twice more since Christmas morning when he had to go to the emergency room after a nasty spill on the porch while picking up the newspaper.  He seems to know how to fall well so he hasn't hurt himself anymore and his arm is continuing to heal.  Either my Mom or myself stays with him all the time to make sure he doesn't venture off without his cane or walker, as he tends to be pretty stubborn in his old age.  He is figuring out that he needs assistance now but it tough letting go of your independence, especially after living most of his life as such a strong, successful man.

I take him to the doctor about twice a week to change the bandage on his arm and the stitches have yet to come out.  The big news is that we are experimenting with having a sitter come in and help look after Daddy part time.  It is taking a little time for my Dad (and Mom) to get used to that idea but Mama and I at least see the need for it.  This should free me up again to get out of town and have some more adventures.  I'm getting a little stir crazy here and I need it!

It's been two months since I last traveled out of town and that trip led me into the state of Pennsylvania.  My blog about that adventure is part of the catching up we need to do from 2013, so look for that exciting entry as my next post.  Tomorrow I am leaving for Pennsylvania for my first adventure of the year and the goal this time will be getting another full facial electrolysis clearing, my fourth one.  I am planning three of these clearings in the first 5 months of the year, which should put me back on schedule and leave me over halfway through with hair removal.  There are more big plans in the works after that, so stay tuned is all I can say right now.

A New Car


First selfie in my new car
I guess my first adventure of 2014 was buying a new car.  In my blog post, Legal Changes, I told y'all that my van was out of commission with a bad transmission and I was looking for another car.  I test drove one on December 14th and was sooo happy to show the salesman my new licence, complete with my real name and the letter F.  Because of the holidays we didn't go back until the day after New Year's to test drive any more, even though Mitchell and I were scouring the Internet for ideas and deals. 

My mind was not made up on whether I wanted a small "crossover" SUV or something like a mid sized sedan.  I got a lot of advise from Mitchell on what would be acceptable for me safety wise, what had good reviews and what performed well.  So it came down to a matter of what I really wanted within the parameters we set up. 

My first instinct was to buy a purple car.  I wanted to get something in a pretty color and I thought why not get it in my favorite color.  The first car I drove came in purple, but it was really more of a dark cherry.  I didn't like the way that Nissan Rogue handled and it seemed small inside, so I wanted to drive some more SUV's and give a few cars a try.  


I found out that it would be extremely difficult to get a car in one of the bright, showy colors that I wanted.  If you look around you will notice that most of the cars on the road are in what I call dull colors, grey, black, white etc.  I don't like bright red so that color was out.  So I gave up looking for the perfect color and just focused on looking for the perfect car.  The few cars that do come in really, really pretty colors either seem to be the tiny models that are not big enough for my dogs and I, or some by a couple of the domestic manufactures that we wanted to avoid.  I never had a "foreign" car but felt this was the right time to give one a try.

The day after New Year's, Mitchell and I went to two dealerships here in town and I test drove 7 different models; 4 cars and 3 SUV's.  It started raining towards the end of the day so the last couple of vehicles I drove I wanted to test drive again on a better day.  Because Mitchell had to go back to Virginia to work, we waited 9 days to look at and drive some more.  I just feel a lot more comfortable having him with me at the dealerships because I don't like dealing with salespeople, although only one of the dealerships seemed to take a high pressure approach.  That was the place where I drove the 2 models in the rain, so when we went back on January 9th I wanted to go to a neighboring city to look at the deals there.

This past year living as myself has really helped me a lot as far as confidence and I feel I pass pretty well these days, although I still think I have to keep improving.  Having that license with female gender on it helps a lot when it comes to time to show identification and at all of the dealerships we felt like I passed to the salespeople.  With this in mind, I was really enjoying the experience of looking for the right car. 

On the 9th, our last day of test driving, we went to two dealerships and I drove 5 vehicles in 3 different models.  The last car we drove was a 2014 Kia Optima LX.  The LX is the base package but this particular car had 2 features I really liked that are usually only available on the fancier, more expensive models; satellite radio and a back up camera.  The color was Dark Cherry and some of the dealerships call it purple.  It has kind of a dark, royal purple, burgundy or cranberry look.  It is an interesting color, and very pretty. :)

I loved the way that car drove.  The fist Optima I drove was on a rough road in town in the rain, but this time I drove on the highway and in town, so I got to really get a feel for it.  It felt wonderful!  After we left the dealership I told Mitchell that if I could get the added leather seats thrown in, as well as a spare tire, I thought it would be a good deal.  This was the first car to make me smile when I test drove it, so I had a really good feeling about it.  I've learned to follow my feelings and they were telling me that this was the car.

Mitchell and I went back in the dealership and our salesman seemed to have a surprised but happy look to see us walk back in the door.  It was almost closing time so there was really no one else around.  Mitchell told him that we were not going to haggle over this car and that we wanted the leather seats added as well as the spare tire.  He wrote his email address on a sheet of paper and told the salesman to talk to his boss and let us know by noon Monday what his best price would be, and that it needed to be every close to the number we gave him, which was lower than the sticker price.  I have to admit to feeling more than a little bit turned on seeing my man operate like this, so smooth, confident and professional.  It's just one of the many reasons I love him and feel lucky to have him in my life.


Mitchell decided to stay over an extra day and leave Monday night.  This way he got to help me take my dad to his doctor's appointment Monday morning and find out about the deal on the car.  He got a call from the salesman right before noon and the figure he gave us was acceptable.  We were going to buy a New car.  I started out looking at 2011 or 12 models and ended up getting a 2014!  In fact this car was lower priced than the low mileage 2012 Honda CRV that ended up being my second choice.  The only catch was that the deal included a trade in of my ailing Chrysler van, so I would have to drive it up there Monday afternoon when we went to buy the car.

There was another problem.  I had not yet changed my name on the title of the van and I did not want to trade it in with a title showing my old name.  Mitchell went with me to the DMV right after we got Daddy home and ate lunch, but we found out that it would take a couple of weeks to get the new title in the mail.  I wanted to wait or drive up to Raleigh and pay extra to get the title right away, but Mitchell talked me into taking the van up and selling it with the existing title.

He reminded me that it had not been long since I changed my name and I was still having to deal with having to go places to change paperwork, an example being our visit to the local DMV office.  I told him that was true, and even though this was outing me in various places I was just having to deal with it.  But buying this car was different.  During the the entire process I had been showing my new licence and felt that not only was I passing, that no one had any suspicion that there was anything different about me.  This was the most normal I had ever felt in my whole life.  Before transition I did not feel normal and while I have felt much, much better since going full time, I was still getting over the stigma of having to use my old name in official business or get over the worry that people could tell I was trans.

Having Michell's support made the decision to go ahead and sell the van with old title a viable option.  My Mom was going with us because she was going to buy the car and put it in her name until after my divorce.  No sense in adding more personal property to the list of things that have to be split.  It would be my car to drive anyway and one day I would hold title to it.

Driving the van on the highway for 40 miles was a lot of fun, especially when I could only get it up to 45 mph because of the bad transmission.  We were all worried that it would break down along the way and I did have the phone numbers handy for three different towing companies in the area.  One of them was Lizard lick Towing , made famous by a television show I have never seen but seems very popular.  I am really glad that the van made it all the way to the dealership but if I had to call a tow truck it would have been cool to have them come out, and possibly end up on television.

My dad stayed home with the new sitter and Mitchell drove his car, following me with Mama riding shotgun.  They watched me like hawks the whole way and Mitchell even called me one time to tell me I was driving poorly.  I got bored driving the car so slowly and ran off the road, but just for a second.  Stuff happens...

When we got there everything was going smoothly and then the salesman asked why the car was still in Mr. Matthews name.  He assumed it was my dad.  That's when Mitchell looked at him and said there was something he had to tell him.  Mama quickly took over from Mitchell and took the man inside to explain the whole situation.  I really appreciate all she does for me and her acceptance, and I do appreciate her explaining this situation to the salesman even though Mitchell was prepared to do it.  The only thing that concerns me is that she is all to willing to go telling everybody my life story, sometimes at the drop of a hat.  We need to have a little talk about being more discreet, for my sake, but on this day things worked out well.

Like Mitchell told me later, I should take this as a really good sign.  The surprised look on that salesman's face said it all.  He had absolutely No idea!  I am going to build on that as a mark of confidence as I continue my journey in 2014.  Self improvement is still one of my primary goals, as well as getting on with the serious phase of my transition.

Like I said earlier, things seem to really be coming together here in 2014.  Good things are happening and are going to continue to happen.  I have a really good feeling about it.  This year promises to be special, a watershed year like 2012, only better perhaps.  Believing in your dreams helps make them come true.  This can be true is your life too!
 

So what is next in Tammy World?  Stay tuned to find out...

Tammy World 2014