Seeing The Destination

117

And with the end of May Nineteen Ninety-Four came the end of my last full semester of College. Having a chat with the receptionist student of half American and half German background, she told me that it had been a very close decision when tallying the grades but she had just narrowly beat me to become our Campus's Valedictorian. As the role conferred the responsibility of giving the speech at the graduation ceremony, I was glad I had just missed the bar as I didn't want to attend the event anyhow. I had actually received a better honor already by the time I graduated. The College had offered an Academic Excellence Award the previous year and I had won it giving me some additional scholarship money. With the end of College came the end of my Social Security PASS Plan and I would once again be back to my normal monthly income. Now with the most recent turn of the year cost of living adjustment, I would have just over one hundred dollars of spare money each month. I remembered how I had started at my first apartment having just under fifty dollars per month five years earlier.

There was still one more College class for me to take. It was a job hunt preparation class of only a couple sessions offered at the end of each semester for graduating students. As the Spring version conflicted with a core class I needed for my degree, my chance to take it had been bumped to the end of the summer semester. Still I wasn't going to wait for it before updating my resume and mailing it out. Actually, as I had gained such a diversity of skills over the years, I created three 'targeted' resumes, each with a subset of my skills intended for different types of computer jobs. One variation listed all of my Desktop Publishing skills, one for my Personal Computer maintenance and configuration skills, and finally the Computer Programming variation listing all of my completed projects, languages, and development platform experience. But this last one gave me pause. As I had roughly fourteen years of software development under my belt, but listed my degree as being received this year, I wondered if this resume would be seen as 'too good to be true'. As I had already had years of people disregarding my computer skills as they couldn't believe that I could truly have them I decided to play it safe and take out my most impressive projects, just keeping to a handful that would show breadth of skill without too much depth of experience. Technically, everything still in that resume was true, it just left out quite a bit.

With these resumes completed, I began mailing them to various businesses I thought might be interested and have openings, especially Rocky Mountain Telecom. That was still the place I wanted to work at and given my past letter of recommendation and the names of a few managers there, I felt I'd be a shoo-in now that I had my degree 'in hand'.

One wrinkle, I didn't have my degree in hand yet. As I hadn't taken that final course, they hadn't printed it up for the end of the spring semester. I'd have to wait until after the end of the summer semester before they'd issue the 'sheep skin' document to me. I didn't think it would be an issue.

Our local office of Colorado Vocational Rehabilitation was thrilled with my completion of college and let the University of Colorado job hunting team know so they could now bring forth jobs requiring a degree in order to apply. As a twist, they had found a job for me that didn't need the degree. Their helper I most often worked with had a perfect job for me: His wife was part of a start-up business that would be producing a new medical device. The Federal Drug Administration approval of their device would come down 'any day now' and they'd be making money hand over fist. As they wanted to get ready for that, they had rented office space and wanted to hire me to setup and maintain all of their data processing systems and office computers. I was taken to the empty office space they were going to move into and met his wife and all seemed fine, but it just wasn't that Rocky Mountain Telecom type job I had my eye on. Further, there were often reports in the news of how the F.D.A. routinely dragged their feet on approving anything and I felt like this new business was counting their one chicken before it had hatched. I explained this to the job hunting associate as my reasons why I wouldn't take the job, noting too that Social Security only had a limited transition period when taking a job and I didn't want to lose it on a business that might be defunct in under a year if the F.D.A. approval didn't come as hoped for.

To put it mildly, he was outraged I was turning down this job opportunity. He had been working on my behalf for the past two years to find me a job and here I was, with the first solid job opening he had found for me, nix that, a job specifically designed by him through his wife's position at the start-up to use my talents, and I was turning it down so I could wait around for a ''Pie in the sky'' corporate job that I would most likely never get. Not only was he outraged but he was dropping me as a client. My VocRehab counselor, Greg, was shaken by this as well but at the same time he understood my position and decided he wouldn't let this fall out result in VocRehab dropping me, too. Still, he warned me that I really couldn't pick and chose a prospective job, I needed to be thankful for what I could get going forward.

Two months later, Daina and I drove past the set of offices the start-up company had been settling into only to now see the offices were once again vacant and for lease. Either the F.D.A. approval had failed to come through like I suspected and the company had already folded, or they had hit it big and decided to immediately move to a more prestigious office park elsewhere in town. As I never heard the name of the company again, I suspect it was the former that happened and I had made the right decision.

In the meantime, since my resume was already sent in to various companies around town, all I needed to do was sit at my apartment and wait to hear back from one or more of them with job offers. The months came, and the months went, without a call.

When August came and I took the preparing to job hunt class, sure enough, there was nothing in the class that I didn't already know...

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A Death In The Family

116

In fifth grade, I had taken up the habit of having a 'sick day' on one of my father's days off to avoid the despised fifth grade teacher, but to also have a chance to get to know my father better. On one of these days, my father had to sort through the home's attic and I joined him up in the dark and dusty space. Sorting through his collection of post World War II 'Life' magazines he stumbled upon a box with a typed manuscript inside. He looked at it briefly as he remembered what it was. It was a book written by Pappy's brother, based in their childhood location of Nova Scotia. This came as a surprise to me as I hadn't known my father's side of the family had come from Canada. I asked about Pappy's brother but dad simply said he had died young and left it at that.

Sorting through more stuff, I found a giant sized dictionary missing its cover. Published soon into the nineteen hundreds, it had more words in it than I had ever known existed. It had been squirreled away in the attic after the hard bound cover had fallen off decades ago, but had been kept given how much it had cost at the time it was purchased. My father said it had been Pappy's brother's and he had used it while writing his book. I asked if I could bring it down and look through it. He agreed and I had a great rest of the day seeing all of these words I had never heard of before and wondered if I could one day get it rebound with a new protective cover. Then it was gone. I assumed my mother had found it.

Twenty years later, in the pre-Spring of Nineteen Ninety-Four, Daina's mother had died.

What more can one say but that?

Her various siblings from across the Western half of the country assembled for the first time in decades for the funeral, then quickly dispersed as many had disowned the others during their lives and didn't want to spend time with each other. As her father had already made plans to live elsewhere, there was the family home to sort through and place on the market. Of the four siblings living in Colorado, Daina told me that two of them had not been as helpful as she thought they should have been during their mother's illness and believed that sorting through the home would be a task handled by her and her youngest brother. Given that I had been joining Daina for years on other errand runs and I felt like I owed her a lot given all the free meals she had fed me over the years, I offered to join her on the weekends and help with the home.

Sorting through one's childhood heirlooms, there's always that conflict of things that once meant something to you, but did it still mean enough for you to make a new place for it in your adult life? That was the dilemma Daina faced with each and every day we tackled one room after another. At the time Daina kept more than she should and we brought many boxes of items from Denver back to her condo and its associated single car garage, now dedicated to storage. Even the simplest things such as a canister of soothing power Daina had bought her mother during her last weeks had a deep meaning for her and when another sibling threw it away, Daina was horrified as it meant something to her, at that time. Each loss of a personal possession of her mother's often hit her as a reminder of the loss of her mother, itself.

Daina told me I could have anything that another family member didn't want as my payment for the time and effort helping her. While I couldn't imagine wanting anything, I kept the offer in mind. Once the top floor was done and the bottom basement floor cleared out, all that was left was piled in the main floor for a final sorting and review. Would a distant family member want it? Should it go to charity? Or was it to badly worn and needed to be tossed out? Suddenly, to my surprise there was a huge dictionary that was published soon into the Nineteen hundreds. While I couldn't say it was the same edition as my father and I had found twenty years earlier, it was still similar enough that it reminded me of that treasured book, since lost.

I asked Daina if I could have it. She didn't think so as it was a family heirloom in good condition and she was sure another family member would want it. Still, she asked her father and he said, ''No,'' as he felt someone in the family should have it. Hopes dashed, it was put aside and I continued to help Daina until her family home was emptied out after little over four consecutive weekends of sorting through everything. As there was little else left to do, Daina made the last trip to Denver on her own and she and her father took a last walk through the house before it was placed for sale. When Daina returned, she had a surprise for me.

No other family member had wanted the giant dictionary and her father said I could have it given all of my help. I eagerly accepted it from her and told her to thank her father for me. I spent the next few weeks reading through one after another of the very thin pages. Given its weight, it had to be placed on a table to read through. Once the table space was needed, I made a slot for it amongst my book shelves and there it stayed to be looked at once in a very great while when it was time to look up an obscure word.

Without her mother to care for and visit from now on, I assumed Daina and I would spend more weekends doing things together...

In reality our friendship seemed to be on its last leg.

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The Holidays

115

My mother never worried about the holidays when it was just me and her yet, since the time she fractured her pelvis, she suddenly cared about them and wanted to take me out for my birthday and Thanksgiving and Christmas. This creeped me out as it was so unlike her and I didn't know what to make of it.

Fortunately I had excuses at many of these times. As Daina would often be taking me out to eat anyhow, she had roped me into annually going out to eat at a restaurant where the meal was free for the one having the birthday. She sold it as a kindness to her as it saved her money, I only agreed as long as the restaurant didn't make a show of it. It turned out they didn't like doing the clapping and singing either, if they didn't have to. Daina had also found a couple of places that would be open on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas and invite me to go with her, rather than sitting in my apartment eating ramen noodles. But with Nineteen Ninety-Three Daina couldn't make these holidays anymore as she wanted to spend them with her own mother.

Daina's mother had been recently diagnosed with lung cancer and, as it had been caught so late, it was already past the time to treat it beyond an attempt at chemotherapy and painkillers as the cancer spread. Given this, Daina had a reason to be back in Denver for the Holidays and spend time with her mother and I didn't begrudge her that. Unfortunately this meant my ready excuse to turn down the invitations to join my own mother for the holidays was gone. When she again called me for this year's Thanksgiving, I debated quietly having ramen noodles in my apartment or going out to eat even if it did include spending time with my mother...

As she had been better behaved since her fractured pelvis, and I had become used to eating out so frequently, I decided to agree and it turned out we had a very good time. After we were done eating, mother offered to have me take the wheel of her car and go for a 'drive around town or to the mountains' for the afternoon. Enjoying such drives myself, I agreed and we were soon into the mountains and running along the back roads. After a couple of hours of this, it was time to head back and go our separate ways. For Christmas we did the same thing, though given the declined weather we kept the after dinner drive to around town.

This would become an annual event for my mother and myself for the next few years and they added to the rare positive experiences I had with her during my life. While she had made a number of friends during her early years in Colorado, her penchant for always having to degrade everyone in conversation had resulted in those friends eventually avoiding contact with her and, as I was the child who had helped her when she had fractured her pelvis, I suspected she saw me as her only friend left in town. In reality, after everything she had put me through I could never be her friend. But I could be polite and have fun with her as long as we didn't spend too much time together, allowing her typical behaviors to resurface.

With the holiday season coming to an end, the normal routine of life returned and I asked Daina how her mother had been doing during her recent visits. It turned out she was now confined to a rental hospital bed in the first floor of their house. Daina found it bizarre that given how terrible the relationship between her father and mother had been when she had grown up, her father had become dedicated to helping and caring for their mother during this time and she wondered if he had any regrets over the way he had treated her during their lives, or if he was just doing it out of duty. Either way it had helped a lot as many of Daina's siblings had moved away and Daina said she and her younger brother couldn't handle it on their own as they didn't live in Denver, themselves.

With the turn of the year came my last two semesters of College. In fact it would be my last full semester of College and then an abbreviated summer semester with a single class to ready me to join the job market. After all the challenges of my childhood and all of my early adult ordeals, I could see the end coming to this part of my story and would finally have my chance to enter the mainstream of life.

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My Role

114

My life was in a gentle arc of finishing the last year of College classes before I'd have my long sought after Bachelors degree. In Nineteen Ninety-Three very little happened in my life to disturb this gentle conclusion to my college years. But that doesn't mean the time wasn't without some tidbits...

One summer day Daina thought it would be easier if I just drove myself home from her condo that evening and then pick her up the next afternoon for errands rather than making the trip both ways herself. That made sense to me and I drove to my apartment complex and parked behind my bedroom window and settled in for the night. The next morning I got up, cleaned up, and dressed and looked out my apartment back window to check the weather. While the weather was fine, I realized Daina's car was gone! Not knowing how to respond to this, I decided to go to the complex's manager and ask him for his advice. He winced when I told him the news and explained that late last night the parking lot had been filled with cars that he suspected were for the next door jazz club. So he called up a towing company and in the darkness of night had them tow away all the cars he didn't recognize. This next day, a number of tenants had been coming to him to ask where their cars were. As with them, he handed me enough money from petty cash to pay for the car to be released from the tow lot and gave me the address. I checked the address inside my apartment against the bus route map and there were no buses that went to that end of town. How was I supposed to get Daina's car back?

Sheepishly calling Daina and telling her the story, I wondered if one of her work friends could play chauffeur for us to collect her car, while I had the release money and car key, I also feared the tow yard might not release the car to me as it was in Daina's name. She called a friend who was free and gave her a ride and soon after picked me up and we got Daina's car back and took her friend out for breakfast as payment.

Always wanting to approach problems in a constructive manner, I returned to the manger and said that, since I had experience with desktop publishing, I could create parking tags for him to pass out to the tenants and then he would be better able to tell which cars belonged in the parking lot and which ones didn't. He though that was a great idea and all I asked for in return was the cost of getting them printed. He agreed and I went to work on my computer and came up with a design that he liked and the problem was soon solved. Having gotten to know me better, he asked me where I worked out. Worked out? I asked. He said he could tell I was a body builder since I wore a sweat tee shirt and he was thinking of building up his muscles as well. I noted that I didn't go to a club but 'worked out' at home.

This was funny. As with my notebook in High School, now my attempt to hide my breasts during my final college years had 'over achieved' and people mistook my sports bra strapped down breast as prominent pectoral muscles, despite my long hair tied as a tail. I'd cut the sleeves down on the sweat shirts which I used to hide the sports bra straps, I guess people assumed those short sleeves hid the otherwise nonexistent bulging muscles of my upper arms? One time a female teacher in one of my classes called for our nightly mid-class break, she quickly made her way to the door out, but then stopped with a group of girls waiting by the door for some reason. As I got from the back of the class to the door to leave she burst into laughter as if someone had told her a joke, though I hadn't seen any of them talking at the time. She leaned forward and supported herself momentary from 'the laughter' by resting her hand on the left side of my chest. Once I got to the cafeteria and thought about it, I felt this was a staged moment and could only guess that the teacher wanted to cop-a-feel of my 'pectoral muscle' to see how firm it was. As it was my breast strapped down by the sports bra a couple of sizes too small, I wondered what she reported to the girls who had gathered by her once I left the room?

When I had returned to College the previous year, I was greeted by the half American/half German girl who handled the reception desk at the office when otherwise not in a class herself. Over the years I would chat with her from time to time when I'd visit the office. One evening when I was chatting with her during the class break, she suddenly brought up the topic about 'all of those minorities around ruining the country' while eying me intently. Given my Native American mixed race background, I decided not to bring that up and instead simply shrugged my shoulders and replied, ''I hadn't thought about that.'' She didn't continue with the topic and with the way she had looked at me intently at the time I wasn't sure if she was trying to figure out if 'I was a body builder' because I was a secret White Supremacist, or if she herself was one and had been trying to see if I'd make a good recruit? I hoped it wasn't the latter as, given her half German ancestry, that would have been a sad commentary that there were still problems in Germany despite how World War II had turned out. Either way, I reduced my subsequent visits with her to only the few times I needed to ask her about an office related question.

With Fall, came the obligatory 'Psychology 101' class. I was actually looking forward to taking it as, with my years seeing Jude and then Samuel, I felt like a psychology acolyte as much of the time they would be giving me pointers on how to assess troubled people and help to calm them down if they were having a problem relating to me and my ambiguous nature. Arriving at the first day of the class, this new instructor flat out told us that, rather than going through the book and teaching us about psychology, he was going to 'teach us to be good Christians as that was the only thing we needed to know for good mental health'. Then once he was done with that he would briefly go through the book at the end of the semester to point out all of the flaws in the 'secular humanist psychological philosophy'. When break came, I went straight to the office to withdraw from the class and transfer to the daytime version taught by one of the instructors I already knew and respected. That paperwork done, I went to the cafeteria for the rest of my break.

When I left there I was spotted by one of the staff and asked to return to the office. In there was the rest of my 'Psychology 101' classmates and they, too, had decided to drop the night class and look into joining the day class. Given that the College would no longer have the minimum number of students left in the night class to pay for the instructor to be there, they were instead going to replace him by the following week and didn't want any of us to transfer out. We agreed and I returned to the classroom to retrieve my books and then left the teacher to watch me leave for the rest of the night. I wondered if he was aware of what was going on at the office...?

Had the other students been following my lead, or had all of us deciding to drop the class at the same time been a coincidence given the attitude of the instructor? In this case, rather than pet my already over inflated ego, I've assumed it was a coincidence.

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Time With Samuel

113

Seeing Samuel was a huge ego boost for me. After years of no support and harassment at the hands of medical doctors and other psychology professionals, he was completely supportive of my 'situation' and my desire to look into and resolve it.

During our first sessions, he asked about my previous experiences with psychological professionals and I told him of the psychologist who'd I first seen during my four day hospital stay in Nineteen Eighty-Seven, which was a good experience, and then the times with the mental health social worker 'Stella Hernandez' who had spent the sessions telling me about her life and problems rather than the other way around, my experiences with the Vocational Rehabilitation psychologist and his bizarre technique & findings, and my brief time with the counselor whose office was at the other hospital in town who denied I had even had a sister and who desperately wanted to find records of a nonexistent time I was in a mental institution. Samuel noted that often times people go into the psychological field to learn about their own issues rather than with the goal of helping others in mind and as a result they will often spend their time using patients as blank slates for their own use.

In my case Samuel felt I made the perfect blank slate given my ambiguous racial background as well as my biologically ambiguous sex and tendency to be initially quiet when meeting people given my stuttering. He could see many people filling in that initial question mark of who and what I was with what was going on in their own minds rather than taking me as I truly was. I noted the many times I had people see me and blow up about things I knew nothing about but they thought I was guilty of; and also of the times when people would see me and suddenly feel I was the right person to unburden themselves about dark matters in their lives.

Samuel agreed that these occurrences fit into his 'blank slate' theory. Some people saw me as a way to externalize their own neuroses, in the case of things people didn't like about themselves they would paint them onto me. In the case of people who needed to unburden themselves, they could imagine me as the person they needed to confess to as there was nothing definitive about me to dissuade them and also, seeming to appear outside of the social norm, I wasn't perceived as a threat that would, or socially could, judge them for their confession. He noted that often times people of any particular majority would often feel more comfortable telling secret things to people of a perceived minority as 'if it ever got out' they could use the person's minority status as a reason why that information shouldn't be given credence.

I mentioned a time when someone said they believed I could 'read peoples souls', Samuel returned that it was people's reactions to me that gave me the insight into other peoples' souls. In many ways I was like a walking-taking Rorschach Test for some people.

As part of coming up to speed about me, Samuel requested to get the records of my neuropsychological evaluation from 'Dr. Maverick'. I agreed though pointed out my past experiences that doctors would use those contacts to verbally pass on B.S. about me to other professionals. He said we could give it a try and see what happens. I signed the paperwork and he sent off for the records. When they arrived he told me that while she might have told me verbally that my pain in the left side of my head and subsequent permanent deficit in February of Nineteen Eighty-Nine 'might have been a stroke' she had noted it affirmatively in her records, so the diagnosis stood. He then told me a few sessions later that 'Dr. Maverick' was having to move her practice out of town and she was now disavowing that diagnosis in order to avoid further trouble with the Colorado Medical community.

Still, from her records Samuel confirmed my genius I.Q. level and explained to me that my score meant I was 'at or above the doctorate level in most subject areas'. He clarified that it was 'at or above' as the tests were standardized to the doctorate level and since I had maxed out in so many areas, for all we knew I was above the doctorate level and they simply couldn't detect that with the test. I joking asked him if that was why I had so many problems with medical doctors, since the saying was 'doctors make the worst patients' and I was 'at the doctorate level'. We laughed at that and then he confirmed it might be the case as I was sharp enough to sometimes see through the doctors' actions and realize they weren't making logical sense in what they were doing or saying.

He asked if I wouldn't mind taking one of his own favored psychological tests and I agreed. When the results came back, it found me to be normal BUT that it flagged that I seemed to be hiding negative information about myself. When we discussed what that might mean I noted the handful of questions it had asked about presumed past sexual partners and resulting problems with them. As I had never had any sexual partners I therefore reported never having problems with them. Just to see, we picked one of those questions and changed the answer to 'have had a problem with' and reran the results. The following meeting he affirmed that the test now found me to be normal without any reservations. We concluded the test should be updated not to assume everyone taking it had been sexually active beforehand.

When the topic reached to my mixed-sex 'situation' it ultimately came down to first making sure I was fully aware of the social pluses & minuses of each gender role, and helping me deal with other people who were uncomfortable with me given my ambiguity and possible future choices. In the case of gender roles he felt I had a pretty good handle on them as I had started to observe and consider the differences since my surprise puberty at age thirteen. In the case of helping people it was more of the same sort of 'unofficial psychological counseling pointers' that Jude had given me for dealing with medical doctors, to first calm any situation down as much as possible and then spend time asking questions to bring into the open the source of the other person's discomfort and discuss it.

When it came to what choice I would make, as Dr. 'Czarniecki' concluded that I couldn't be biologically any more 'a man' than I already was, and the trial estrogen injections had made the sudden fevers I had been experiencing during the previous decade of my life go away, it seemed a simple choice to me to consider normalizing as female. That decision would have been much harder for me if we had still been in nineteen fifties America with its strict and confining life choices women had in that day and age, but by the nineteen nineties women had made huge strides toward equality in America. What level of discrimination that was left seemed little different to what I had already faced with my mixed-race background and life long stuttering. When it came to seeing medical doctors, I couldn't imagine things being worse than what I had already experienced with them while being intersexed. On that point, Samuel agreed.

As women more often than not had longer hair than men, Samuel recommended I grow out my hair and see if I liked having it that way...

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