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Thursday 23 April 2015

A new old friend

Tara was a friend of mine back when I was in high school; (not her real name, by the way). She and I were never especially close to each other back then, though we were probably as close as we could have been. I kept a certain amount of emotional distance between myself and everyone else in those days: this was partly intentional and partly it just sort of happened. I think it may have been similar for her. We were part of the same friend group so we hung out a lot at school, but I can count on one hand the number of times we spent time together outside of school. By the end of grade 12 we'd mostly drifted apart. Facebook didn't exist back then so we lost touch after graduating, and I moved away from my hometown a year later.

In the time since then I would think about her on occasion, about how interesting and different she'd been, and how I'd never really gotten to know her. Back in February, sort of on a whim, I found her on Facebook and sent a friend request. We literally hadn't seen or heard from each other since our class' graduation ceremony in 2005, but she accepted it and we started catching up. We've been communicating fairly regularly since then and we've become good friends: definitely better friends than we ever were back then. We stayed up till 4 in the morning (only 3 am in her timezone) recently talking about a girl she has a crush on, among other things. So yeah, she's a new old friend.

Perhaps part of what's made it so easy to connect this time around is the discovery of what we have in common, (and I don't mean our mutual interest in Japanese culture). The thing is, when I knew her in high school, Tara was living as a boy. She only started transitioning last year. Imagine that: we were once two closeted teenage trans girls, eating lunch together nearly every day, struggling with the same unspeakable thing, completely unable to reach out and help each other. That's denial for you.

This was me in grade 10. Holy Jesus.
This is now the second time that someone I know from a non-LGBTQ context has started transitioning. (The first time I wrote about here). It makes me think that when people say they don't know any trans people, they probably just aren't paying attention. Which, I suppose, is just fine.

2 comments:

  1. It's interesting, isn't it? How we all seem to hide it so well... I have a lot of people (nearly 100) who report to me at work. I often wonder if any of them are trans. I find myself thinking hard about this at times. We just are so good at hiding this.

    Lovely picture! If it were mine, the caption would be Holy Sh....t

    Can I feature this post on T-Central, Ashley?

    Calie

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