Broken Windows and Empty Hallways.

Tonight I was going through old photo's of my life and my life with Chanel, I was getting my old MySpace account ready to close and downloading all the photos into the computer and then moving them into a photo bucket account.
I am so saddened by these old memories of times of happiness and a life that was filled with such wonder and experiences........and inner pain. I looked at the photos of our first year and read the notes that were posted at the time and remembering the days that were important to us. In the beginning I thought I found a end to my pain and loneliness, I found someone that I fell in love with and wanted to spend the rest of my life with, not really at this time understanding what the inner struggle inside of me was.
All I knew was I had found happiness and wanted to bury my demons in my past and not look back. We got engaged a month after we were dating and in the dawn of the new year began planning our family, we were married in the spring and in the fall Zachary was born. We were happy and in love and life was good till just before Zachary was born we found that he had a birth defect in his urinary system and that he would have issues till he was old enough for surgery to correct the issue. This was a blow to us both and Chanel took it the hardest and it changed her over time and the woman I loved started to fade away and I myself one again withdrew into myself and put my emotions aside and did my best to support my family.
Over time as we dealt with trying to life a normal life and trying to be happy and having great memories of a new child growing up. In this time Chanel and I began to become distant and things seemed to erode away at our relationship, and at the same time the inner conflict I had inside started to return. In the fall of 2008 Chanel and were talking about separating and spending some time apart from each other, that's when we decided that I should go on the road and drive truck for a wile and set some distance from each other. During all this Chanel was with child with Ryan, and was born in the spring of 2009. Our life together was a struggle and we thought we could handle it and in that summer as we got Zachary's clean bill of health, we saw new light but that light turned out to be on two different paths.
Two years ago I took a self improvement and awareness class called Landmark Forum, it was a three day seminar that was to change my life. The main premise of the coarse was to empower oneself by facing there past and to put it behind them and to not let it rule there lives. Well the primmer of this is what are we being untruthful to our selves about and what are we telling ourselves to hide from it. This was a very hard thing for me as I was subconsciously protecting myself from knowing the truth about being transgender. So I worked on in the class the outward things in my life and glazed over transgender, it took me a year and several more advanced programs that were part of the first to give me the strength to finally face my inner conflict. In that year it became harder and harder to ignore my feelings inside and I also began to fear what would happen if I did face it and what would be the outcome. I knew and feared I may loose everything. I had hope that Chanel would understand and with her love for me would not leave, I was wrong. But I had to come out and become who I really am inside or I would of faced loosing my mind and possibly my life to my inner-struggles.
I had never "seriously" in my entire life considered taking my own life, but I can say is that when you never really live, what is there to extinguish anyway. So you may say for the most of my life I was lifeless and non-living, but I found Chanel and she brought me out of the darkness. I am sorry that she had to be the one that I had to find out about myself with and that the life we had was gone as fast as it began. But I am grateful for the brief life we had together and the gifts of our children. I know she is in her own struggle to find herself now and that I have not been able to help her with support for our children as I have very little income, and I am sorry for that as well and as stated previously I am improving my life to better support them.
It's been a year since that fateful day of confession and pouring of the hearts and souls to each other and the completion of our relationship and the beginning of our new lives in new directions. I look back and I see that everything was meant to happen as it did and that fate dose not just give out happy moments. My life has begun anew but you can't have creation without destruction, that is the nature of life. I wish it was not so, I wish I was still in a home with my children in there beds sleeping and still with someone I made a promise too many years ago. But alas it is so and I am creating a new life, a life at peace with myself, a life with a new love to heal my broken heart and spend the next part of life's adventure. I still grieve for my loss but I look hopeful to a new future, and with a little hope I'll defy gravity and make all my dreams come true into a life as Zoe.