I have arrived at an interesting point, a place that feels unusual for me and it may strike my friends as incredible. But after visiting Trinidad for GRS, after scores of laser hair removal sessions, after hundreds of hours of electrolysis, after almost three years of therapy, after reconfiguring my body to be my new self, after throwing away all my old clothes and buying all new ones, after telling everyone in the world that I was becoming Joyce, and after being Joyce for long enough that it’s becoming hard to remember not being Joyce — after all of this, I suddenly feel almost as if it’s all been unnecessary. And by “unnecessary,” I don’t mean to suggest that I have any regrets — what I think I mean is that whatever was driving this incredible change within me has vanished, that I don’t feel any urge or necessity to make any changes. And if I could imagine myself three or four years ago feeling like I do today, then I probably wouldn’t have had to make all these changes.

But there’s the rub, isn’t it? Because I was NOT at this point three or four years ago. Back then, I was eaten up with shame and guilt and anxiety and despair and couldn’t possibly imagine (no matter how hard I might try) arriving at today’s place of stasis. At this point, I don’t feel anything — I don’t have a single gender, I don’t belong to a sex, I don’t have a firm history or identity. It’s as if this huge turmoil of the past few years erased — no, burned or grinded away — the bumps and ridges of my surface like an industrial acid or a giant grinding wheel of my re-formation, leaving me smooth and finished in only once sense of meaning. I can also be seen as raw and unfinished, a jewel that’s half-way complete, not quite a stone, but not glittering, either.

I don’t feel elation, excitement, despair, or depression — just mundane rawness.

It’s a paradox because I’ve just returned from a fairly important surgery of transformation, and yet instead of feeling transformed, I feel normal. My body’s just a body. Maybe that’s what feeling all right in your skin feels like. Or maybe I’m just settling into my new parts. Does this mean I’ve lost my feeling of gender-variance? I don’t know — I don’t feel terribly variant right now, but maybe I need time to heal. On the other hand, maybe I’m on the cusp of being perfectly normal for the rest of my life (history notwithstanding).

This feeling of nothingness may seem familiar. In fact, I wrote about 9 months ago that I seemed to have arrived at a point of nothingness, but if this transition has taught me anything, it’s that just when you think you’ve reached a plateau, there always seems to be another bit of interesting geography ahead. Maybe it’s a gentle settling into a certain valley of peace or maybe it’s a completely-unforeseen peak of difficulty, but the important thing is that one is never finished.

Maybe that’s the obvious and natural way to perceive life. We’re never really finished learning or growing or experiencing life’s rough blows, so why would a transsexual believe that there is some kind of flat stasis waiting him or her after settling a huge piece of life’s unfinished business? The very act of settling that business gives rise to new insights, complications, ambitions, does it not?

Will this current feeling of nothingess, of being utterly mundane, give rise to new terrain of physical, emotional, or psychological complexity? Who knows? Probably, but there’s really no anticipating what’s over that next rise, that undiscovered country.