Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More

by Janet Mock

  I can’t imagine having such blind confidence and trust in a teenager, but my mother must’ve seen something in me, something that comforted her and told her things would be okay. The guilt my mother carries about Thailand is not necessary to me, because I never expected it of her; I don’t feel she should have been there with me. Though I kept my expectations of my parents low, I felt and still feel it was my own journey to take, a journey of self-revelation, mirroring that of Janie returning home from burying the dead in the beginning of Their Eyes Were Watching God.

  “There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction,” author J. K. Rowling said in a commencement address. “The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.”

  I took responsibility for my life at a young age because my mother and my father steered themselves and me in the wrong direction. The choices they made were fueled by their own desires, good and bad, and taught me that I, too, must follow my own. My father loves reminding me that we are so similar, yet our likeness is what maintains the distance between us. Though we have healed and made vast improvements over the years, I am still learning to accept that I don’t have to like him all the time, and he doesn’t have to like me, but we will always love each other. Our relationship is composed of love and friction, nostalgia and expectations, respect and contradictions. My father holds a grudge against me for not consulting him about my journey to Thailand, yet he’s unapologetic about his absence through those formative years. I, on the other hand, long to be close to him but can’t help silencing my ringer when he calls. That’s the isness of us.

  Regardless, I would not be the person I am today without him or my mother. I’m grateful that they lived their lives on their own terms, that they instilled in me a sense of personal responsibility for my life, and that they always let me know that once I attained whatever it was I sought, they’d always love me.

  When I returned to my twin mattress on the floor in our apartment, it was my mother who helped nurse me back to health, preparing meals and filling my prescriptions. It was the first time in my life that I remember her doting on me. We would both heal and grow closer over the years, years in which my mother would have other chances to dote on me. I still smile when I get my monthly care packages filled with my favorite Hawaiian delicacies, li hing mui gummi bears, furikake popcorn, and bags of vanilla macadamia-nut Kona coffee.

  My mother often claims that I was the parent and she the child. I like to think that we were growing in life together, figuring out who we were in the context of our relationship and our relationships with ourselves and other people. I can honestly say that my mother, who has been happily single for more than a decade, has settled into herself, into a point of contentment that has allowed the two of us to be more than mother and daughter but actually friends. When I think about my relationship with Mom, I think about what Maya Angelou said about her mother: “My mom was a terrible parent of small children but a great parent of young adults.”

  One of my fondest memories of my mother as an adult was at Chad’s wedding to his wife, Jane. At the Catholic ceremony in Schenectady, New York, Jeffrey, twenty-two, stood by Chad, twenty-eight, as I read Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. I was struck by a “patient” and “kind” love that “takes no account of evil” and “endures all things.” Most important, I realized as Jeff, Mom, and I witnessed Chad’s expansion of our family, love doesn’t ever fail. The memory that stuck with me is Chad’s dance with my mother, where I bawled like a soap opera actress as my brother held my mother in his arms and lip-synched Boyz II Men’s “A Song for Mama.” I realized the journey it took for the four of us to be there together, for Jeff to be all grown up and married, for me to be there with the love of my life, for Chad to celebrate my mother, letting her know that she, despite her guilt, had been the best mother she could be. She was enough. We were all enough.

  There was a resounding peace that day, one that mirrored my first night back home after Bangkok. Lying on my twin mattress where, just weeks earlier, I had wept myself to sleep, I heard something unfamiliar, something so foreign that it felt right: tranquillity. I relieved myself of the tears and the sobs and the prayers for miracles, and realized myself. And that realization lulled me to slumber, serving as a backdrop to more far-reaching dreams.

  You are a composite of all the things you believe, and all the places you believe you can go. Your past does not define you. You can step out of your history and create a new day for yourself. Even if the entire culture is saying, “You can’t.” Even if every single possible bad thing that can happen to you does. You can keep going forward.

  —OPRAH WINFREY

  NEW YORK, 2009

  An unbearable silence draped over me as I clutched Aaron’s pillow, the only thing I felt would ever embrace me in his room. Aaron stood in front of me, tall, immovable, processing all I had told him about my journey. I had to stop myself from filling the void between us, from reaching out to him, from begging him to love me. I wasn’t sure of anything but the fact that I was no longer merely the veneer I had cautiously constructed since leaving Hawaii for New York. I could no longer maintain the shiny, untarnished, unattainable facade of that dream girl, the mixed one with the golden skin and curls and wide smile, the one wielding a master’s degree and an enviable job.

  In mere moments, through the intimate act of storytelling, I’d shattered that shell and replaced it with the truth, and I witnessed Aaron’s awakening to the reality of me. We were two people facing ourselves and each other, not sure what the future held. Those silent seconds after my mouth stopped moving, I didn’t know if he saw me in his future, and that uncertainty hurt and gave me an overwhelming sense of premature loss.

  I thought about Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God, about that evening on her back porch when she sat in the darkness and told her best friend, Pheoby, her life story. She talked about the pear tree blossoms, about kissing Johnny Taylor over Nanny’s gate, about being forced to marry old Mr. Killicks, about running away with Jody and then Tea Cake, about experiencing and burying soul-crawling love. Like Janie, I didn’t want to meditate on the horizon; I wanted to conquer it, wrap it around me like a shawl. Like Janie, I wanted to be fully known, and I had finally told my story to someone I deeply felt for.

  His brown eyes were flung wide open, looking at me in all my bare honesty. Then Aaron stepped toward his bed and parted his lips. “Can I hug you?” he asked, resting one of his knees on the foot of the bed.

  I rose to my knees as he leaned toward me, and I fell into his arms, exhaled heavily, and cried. For the first time in my life, I was recognized in totality. Not in spite of my experiences but because of my experiences. Aaron embraced me, though I knew, with his smooth, solid, sunburned arms surrounding me, that my challenge would be embracing myself. How could I expect this man to love me when I didn’t know what it meant to accept, embrace, and love myself?

  When I left Aaron’s arms, I flung myself onto the streets of downtown Manhattan, the home of my choice, the place I had entered nearly five years before, representing a new beginning. After graduating from the University of Hawai‘i in 2005 with a degree in fashion and media studies, I moved to the East Village, where I roomed with two other New York University grad students, met new friends at magazine internships, tipsily kissed boys on St. Mark’s, and cautiously kept my distance from people. Detachment allowed me to know people on my terms.

  I had been openly trans from the ages of fifteen to twenty-two, in the midst of finding who I was and revealing my findings to my loved ones and the community I grew up in. I went to bars in Honolulu with girlfriends and flirted with guys. There were numerous times when the man I was dancing with would be tapped on his shoulder or pulled away. He would return with a look of confusion, detection, or disgust, as if he had lost something, as if he had been blind to something, as if he were the only person in that bar who didn’t know. The moment of forced disclosure is a hosti
le one to experience, one in which many trans women, even those who have the conditional privilege of “passing” that I have, can be victim to violence and exiling. In Hawaii, my home, disclosure was routinely stripped from me. People would take it from me as if it were their duty to tell the guy I was flirting with that I was trans and therefore should be avoided. It’s these societal aggressions that force trans women to live in chosen silence and darkness, to internalize the shame, misconceptions, stigma, and trauma attached to being a different kind of woman.

  No one in New York City knew I was trans because I chose not to lead with that fact. It was the first time in my young life when I was able to be just another twenty-two-year-old living in the big city, shedding the image that my hometown had assigned me. E. B. White, in his love letter “Here Is New York,” wrote that it is the New York of “the young girl arriving from a small town . . . to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors” who gives the city “its incomparable achievements.” For me, New York was “the city of final destination, the city that is a goal,” and my goal was independence.

  In New York, I had the freedom to declare who I was, discover who I wanted to be, and choose who I wanted to invite into my life. It was freeing to be another girl in the crowd, enjoying and experiencing life. I was able to learn about storytelling from some of the nation’s best journalists at NYU. I nabbed internships at magazines I had torn pages from growing up and rubbed elbows with editors whose letters I had read every month for as long as I could remember. I earned my master’s degree and landed a coveted online position at People magazine.

  My past wasn’t something I thought of in my early twenties because I’d fought hard to be in the present I created. I chose, because it was my decision to make, not to announce I was trans. My trans-ness felt irrelevant to most of my informal, passing relationships. It was not something I discussed upon meeting someone. It was not my editor, my coworker, or my colleague’s right to know that I had been born a boy. I also felt that if I told people I was trans, the hurdles that I would have to climb to get to where I yearned to be would become even more insurmountable. Being trans would become the focus of my existence, and I would be forced to fight the images cataloged in people’s minds about trans people. Trying every day to combat preconceived ideas and stereotypes learned from popular culture was not on my priority list at the time. I was trying to survive, in addition to figuring myself out and unpacking who I was beyond the gender stuff.

  This took work that involved me excavating what it meant to me to be me, to be a multiracial trans woman, or at least the kind I embody: one who’s most often read as a cis mixed black woman; one with no discernible accent reflecting my father’s Texas twang or my mother’s Hawaiian pidgin roots; one with an advanced degree, the kind of education that my teen-mom mother and sisters didn’t have access to; one with large, curly hair called “good” by my father’s sisters, even though the kids in Hawaii teased that it looked like limu from the bottom of the sea; one with skin brown enough to be called out but light enough to be deemed not really black; one who was taught to identify as black because that was visible and the world would judge me accordingly.

  I was raised by my parents to be visibly black and raised myself to be a visible woman. It took me years to stand firmly at the intersection of blackness and womanhood, a collage of my lived experiences, media, pop culture, and art. I had come to blackness through Clair Huxtable’s swift didactic monologues in reruns of The Cosby Show ; through the anger I felt when I was prettily invisible in clubs in New York’s Meatpacking District, where guys looked through me in search of white girls; through the uh-oh dance in Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love”; through the sounds of bottle-popping douches who called me “exotic” and said “You’re really pretty for a black girl!” and “I’m usually not attracted to black women”; through the revolutionary words of Audre Lorde; through the vision of Michelle Obama’s fist bump; through the consensus of the black-girl interns who said I was different because “You’re the right amount of black,” the kind white woman editors aren’t intimidated to work with; through the raw brilliance of This Bridge Called My Back ; through the beauty of Marsha P. Johnson’s flowers, smile, and S.T.A.R.

  I am aware that identifying with what people see versus what’s authentic, meaning who I actually am, involves erasure of parts of myself, my history, my people, my experiences. Living by other people’s definitions and perceptions shrinks us to shells of ourselves, rather than complex people embodying multiple identities. I am a trans woman of color, and that identity has enabled me to be truer to myself, offering me an anchor from which I can uplift my visible blackness, my often invisible trans womanhood, my little-talked-about native Hawaiian heritage, and the many iterations of womanhood they combine.

  When I think of identity, I think of our bodies and souls and the influences of family, culture, and community—the ingredients that make us. James Baldwin describes identity as “the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self.” The garment should be worn “loose,” he says, so we can always feel our nakedness: “This trust in one’s nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one’s robes.” I’m still journeying toward that place where I’m comfortable in this nakedness, standing firmly in my interlocking identities.

  Like identity, my not-so-relationship with Aaron was a complicated matter that was finding its way. Aaron refused to commit to me, and I refused to let him go. That romantic, dizzying feeling of infatuation was no longer in his belly after I told him I was trans. Those fleeting, fluttery feelings in mine were replaced by something deeper, something resembling love. The unevenness of our feelings filled me with insecurities. I told Aaron several times that I felt demoted, and each time he told me, “I never not want you in my life.”

  I trusted Aaron with my vulnerabilities because of his reaction that night in his bedroom. He showed himself to me as well, validating every instinct I had about him. Aaron recognized that opening up to him must’ve been difficult, but it was difficult for him to think about what was next because he didn’t even think that my being trans was a possibility. His initial instinct was to comfort me.

  “It wasn’t about me and how I felt,” Aaron said, reflecting on his reaction. “It took me a while to process all of it, but immediately I wanted you to know that there was nothing wrong with you and that I valued what you shared with me.”

  Aaron told me that he hadn’t internalized what I’d said. My story didn’t make him question his gender or sexuality, an assumption many people think must have been difficult for Aaron, a cis heterosexual man. My identity as a trans woman didn’t make him doubt his manhood or my womanhood. He said it actually made him feel closer to me and made him see the parallels in our journeys, specifically with the isolation of having grown up visibly different, the only black kid in rural North Dakota and Maine.

  “I was out there all alone, questioning who I was and what it all meant at a young age,” Aaron explained. “Being different, I was forced to look at the world differently, and I constantly questioned who I was. By the time you opened up to me, I was fully formed, if that makes sense. There were no more questions about my identity, about who I was.” He did admit one thing: “I no longer look at people the same way anymore. You taught me to question those assumptions I made about people every day.”

  I continued to open up to Aaron, telling him other pieces of my story over those months throughout which we watched movies, chatted about them over coffee and brunch, attended block and housewarming parties, all the motions of a couple. He also opened up to me, telling me that my revelations had forced him to focus on his own struggles. He wondered why he’d fallen so quickly for someone he didn’t know, why it was so easy for him to sacrifice his dreams for a woman, why he hadn’t been single since he was fifteen. He returned to the promise he had made to commit to himself, not to a woman or a relationship.

  Though he made room for me, Aaron’s inconsistencies were consiste
nt, and they supported the pit of dread in my belly that I was not worthy of love. His texts and calls and dates were intermittent. We’d spend a long weekend together here and there, growing closer, having sex, getting to know each other more intimately. I told him that I wanted to be brave enough to tell my story someday, and he encouraged me to retrace the steps I’d taken over a decade ago. He held me accountable to my truth, suggesting that I write down my story for myself and open up to those closest to me in New York.

  One of the first people I invited into my life was my best friend, Mai. She was the woman who hired me at People.com, despite an HR rep’s “professional” assessment of me as an entitled, incapable diva, which Mai attributed to my looks. Mai and I bonded over the fact that we were women of color in corporate America, over a silly devotion to The Hills, and over a mutual love of vintage shopping. Most important, we were both on the rebound, having left our starter relationships, longing for partnership.

  There were moments of deep intimacy and sharing during our three-year friendship when I felt myself pulling back, withholding details that would reveal me. I remember that evening after her thirtieth birthday when we were placing her clothes (including a Minnie Mouse costume that still cracks me up), DVDs, books, and photos in cardboard boxes. She was sitting on the hardwood floor in gray sweatpants, weeping over leaving a man who was no longer good for her. “I don’t know if I can do this,” she said. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough to do this on my own.”

  “You’re not alone,” I said, writing “sweaters” in bold print on a cardboard box with a black Sharpie.

  “I know I have you, but I don’t know if I can do this.”

  “You will do this,” I assured her.

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  My heart was open, and I was ready to bare myself to her, to tell her that I knew she could do this alone because I once was a scared girl afraid of the unknown, of stepping out on her own. I pulled myself back and protectively squashed my instinct to share with her because I was too afraid that if I told her, she would think of me differently. Instead, I hugged her, grabbed another box, and filled our glasses with cabernet. A year later, we were in different places, and our friendship had grown constant, reliable, sisterly. Unlike when I was a teenager, I knew I didn’t have to do it all alone. I had someone I could rely on, to share my anguish over the grayness of my relationship with Aaron. I called Mai wracked with fear. “I need you to know that I’ve wanted to share something with you many times but was scared,” I told her over the phone.