Given the choice today, I would far rather live my life as a woman than as a man. Not easy to say but fits so much better than fighting it – in a never-ending circular motion! It’s taken me the best part of seventy years to write it down where somebody else outside of close family and friends, can read it.

Funny that!

I’ve had a thousand reasons over the decades for why I’m like this, eked out of endless observation and endless analysis. My mother crying “The boys in this house”. Losing my father at thirteen. Being sent away to boarding school. Take your pick, build your case; I’ve built them all myself and argued each one to oblivion and back. I even paralysed my face from over-thinking!

Like really!

What I finally understand now though, is this: the reasons don’t ease anything. Not much anyway, and certainly not for long. So, I’m finished with the analysing; the paralysis; the questions; the answers; the dithering; the circular motions and notions.

I have to be for my sanity.

When I first wrote this down as one of the twelve apostles, it only said “live as Petra”. Later I added “with style and panache”, and that addition matters more than it looks. Because in the past, when I dressed as a woman, I did so badly! I was so busy admonishing myself or at best trying to justify my actions, I got lost in my head. In effect, I wasn’t really there. No wonder my clothes didn’t fit!  Furtively, unbeautifully, choosing things in a hurry as a ‘would-be-man’ who didn’t believe he was “allowed” could never have yielded “a good results”!

And sure, listen — “If you’re not yourself then who might you be?”

In July (26) I threw the whole lot out — all of it, every frilly I had, down to the last stich — precisely because none of it (or almost none of it) had any style at all. But it wasn’t a renunciation, like so many time before. It was a clearing. A deliberate ‘casting frills to burning flames’ move!

What stops me isn’t the clothes, for who you are must come from deep within. No, it’s the belief that doing this properly, living as a woman, could turn my life upside down, costing me the things I’ve loved the most. So, whether that’s true or merely an ‘old repeating tape’, I must find a way out, a way forward, a way to let go and be myself, to let life live me, as it will!

“Don’t let go your desires“, they say “just your attachment to them!“