The Tadpole Dream

on a very impactful dream I had when I was a child and my journey to find the feelings it showed me

My first three memories from childhood are still easy to recall, though their order is disputable.

In one—definitely the first—I remember my bed-with-walls contraption getting its walls taken off and feeling proud. The only reason I remember this was because I reinforced the memory when I was young by watching home movies.

In what we will call the second. I would look over to the bedside table, having seemingly awoken in the dead of night, to find a giant spider standing tauntingly in the light of my lamp.

After a few terrifying moments watching it dance there, I awoke, later coming to realize I’d had my first nightmare.

Fucking spiders.

The third memory was also surrounding a dream. Though, it may have actually been before the spider fucked with me. But we’re going to call it the third memory, if only for storytelling’s sake.

So, what was this dream about?

Fucking Tadpoles

There I was. Floating. Nothing to worry about. Living this simple tadpole life.

I remember being surrounded by tadpole community as well. The vibe throughout this early portion was pure contentment.

There were tadpoles I was close with who meant a lot to me.

Eventually there was another, and a new feeling along with the contentment and companionship.

A feeling of the heart—very intense.

More powerful than any other feeling I’ve known.

Singular. Unique.

A draw, a pull. Tied to this one other tadpole. Being in their presence made me feel so unendingly happy and filled with love.

Love that burned like a fire. A big one.

And it didn’t take anything but being near this other tadpole.

It was a whole beautiful tadpole life in a dream.

I just remember getting to spend a bunch a time with them. And this feeling of wanting someone so badly, and impossibly, them wanting me back just the same. A feedback loop of electric love.

The deepest sense of kinship with one. Not possessive, and more intimate than you could ever imagine.

The feeling could only be explained as unconditional love of the highest order.

And Then I Woke Up

Fuck. That sucked.

Honestly, deepest sense of loss I can remember feeling.

I wanted to die and go back to being in my tadpole life. It was very intense how distraught I was to be back in my body and my family’s home.

It took me an incredible amount time to move in bed that morning. I tried to go back to sleep for the longest time.

I can still feel the hurt. It still makes me cry.

And then life goes the fuck on, right? It just faded. But the feeling lingered through my youth.

There were lots of times where I would fantasize elaborate schemes, when I was elementary school age, imagining a scientist creating a tank or a machine to change me from a boy to a girl.

In these late-night dreamscapes, I would live life as a woman and sometimes feel fleeting sensations of that unconditional love.

This feeling, a calling card of the most intimate and compelling feelings I’d generate upon imagining a future I didn’t even know was possible for myself—being completely unaware of transgender people at the time.

Praying most nights that a higher power would switch me with someone who was unhappy the other way around—a girl who wanted to be a boy.

I was like, Even if they’re ugly.

Just try to pick someone I’d like. If you can. But I’ll take whatever.

Or just re-write history and make me forget I was ever a boy, like it’s always been that way.

Or even better, I’m the only one that can remember I’m different.

Or… how’s this? I lay here and you change me right now.

I did that last one a lot.

Never worked, unfortunately.

Bonnie Hunt

It’s 1993, I’m watching Beethoven’s 2nd with at least one member of my family in a movie theater. This is when realized I wanted to be a woman. Which is just how I understood my transness at that time.

Bonnie Hunt, the mother, was really sweet and kind and loving and pretty.

And I just… knew. I was going to be that mom. My heart fucking exploded in that theater.

It felt life changing.

Then, I walked out. Got into the back of my mom’s car. And drove off. A moment burned into my brain, there, in the movie theater parking lot.

Realizing this thing that felt like everything. Had absolutely no where to go.

There was nothing I had to do with it.

I could tell no one. Nobody would understand.

So, I tucked it away. Somewhere inside.

But this exploding in my chest. It was the closest I ever felt to that tadpole feeling in terms of love. Almost the same.

As years went on I repressed this memory.

I would see Bonnie Hunt in movies and have little heart attacks where I felt the loving feelings inexplicably. Literally, not understanding or remembering why.

Why do I love Bonnie Hunt so much?

I knew something important was in the answer to that question. And that it had to do with my heart and childhood. Still, I just let it sit there unpondered.

When I saw her in other movies, I just thought that somehow it was taking me back to that tadpole dream.

It would be only when I unrepressed these memories—after coming out to my closest people and beginning to unfurl a lifetime of self-denial—that I would once again remember why Bonnie Hunt made my heart go supernova.

That movie is awful though. Don’t bother.

As I grew older, all these remembrances of childhood feelings faded. I saw Bonnie Hunt in movies, and I felt it less.

I could not remember how my dream felt. Nor could I generate any passing sense of the feeling from it. I could only remember that it existed, and that it was unmatched by any other feelings I’d ever felt.

Growing old, accepting a life of denial. I lost it entirely.

The Search Began Anew

A spiritual awakening led to my gender transition.

During that awakening, I remembered the dream. Remembered how it was something important. How I couldn’t feel it. How I wanted to again.

I remembered those damn tadpoles.

An intention was made of my spiritual path to find this feeling.

There were a few times explaining this all to my spiritual friends, where I got these fleeting glimpses of it in my heart. Feeling it in a flash. Not quite something I could grasp.

Shortly thereafter, my gender transition had begun. It was a great time of change. Empowered by the spiritual community I’d forged and loved ones who supported me. Along with the world changing just enough to convince me I could be safe.

So, I’d decided to love myself the mostest, and give myself the gift of my heart’s greatest desire. Not even realizing I would reenable my search for the feeling.

I had lost any remembrance of it being connected with my gender transition. Only later, did the memories become clearly un-repressed of my late-night fantasies of body change taking me to that feeling.

My intention with transition from the beginning was to do it as gracefully as possible.

Something nearly impossible to do.

Inherently, by entering second puberty and relearning yourself anew—allowing the version of you which you’d prevented from ever existing to be born into the world, while simultaneously allowing your false self to die—things are going to get messy.

Especially if you’re entering that in adult mode. With a full-time job.

Or perhaps, you may have even foolishly decided to synchronize your transition with your wife’s pregnancy; something the two of you should have thought through more clearly.

Yes, then, I think you’re bound to stumble as you essentially allow yourself to be re-socialized while your body and presentation change over the course of a few very intensive years. The same intensive years you become a parent.

Still, grace was what I intended on anyway.

Eventually, my transition led to something entirely ungraceful. A separation and end to my marriage.

Which then led me to date again.

My mind strayed from the spiritual. My interests pouring into the idea that I may get some brief experience of feminine youth before my time was up, even though, on another level I was already embarking upon motherhood.

I had always wanted to have loved as a teen and a young adult.

But it was too hard for me because of my self-denial.

I hated that core part of myself so much; the trans woman I am today.

Stuffing it down so deep and so long, made it impossible for others to know how to love me.

Those who tried couldn’t break through.

I didn’t know how to receive it while being someone so false and uncomfortable.

There was just no understanding how someone could be interested in me. The body dysphoria went bone deep in that regard. I found myself completely reprehensible physically. And I doubted the motives of anyone who was showing interest.

So, I was alone when I was young. And I only found love once, with the woman I had married and was now separated from.

A love crafted with the labors of two committed people who would work through anything for each other and their shared goals. Even if it was probably more than a truly compatible romantic couple should have to work through.

Made the love stronger. Made leaving it harder.

But it never burned the way this love in my dream had. And I grew very sad as the relationship went on. A part of me realizing those feelings wouldn’t be found with this person. Even if I couldn’t admit that to myself consciously.

So, after the separation. I had started dating, right?

Somehow the first conversation I had that amounted to a date ended up being kind of miraculous.

Staying up texting nights for a weekend before meeting.

Honestly, already kind of feeling heart-woozy and excited from the intimacy of these chats which went so late and shared so much.

Then, the first date was five hours of conversation that just flew by and was surreal, in retrospect.

Somebody who I was just so incredibly stoked about, because they were too cool.

I had always wanted a friend like them. They were an amalgamation of all these character traits I’d idolized in others before. But all in one person. It actually kind of floored me. And I recognized this immediately.

Still, they were a lot younger. I have a kid. Total no go long-term, but there was chemistry, and it worked that way for a while—friends with fun.

They made me promise to never fall in love and confess it to them all dramatically. Which had happened to them over and over.

There were three times I explicitly remember having that conversation. Even the very first one I was already like, oh shit.

I knew I was getting close to falling for them.

By the time they came around to ask it the second time, I was long gone.

But still, even in love with this person I wasn’t supposed to be in love with. I knew it wasn’t to last.

That was fine to me. I had wanted this kind of lost youthful romance, which you expect to come with heartbreak. And thought somehow that I could hold all the pain myself.

Also, so much about them didn’t feel like a fit to me either. They just didn’t tick the practical boxes I was looking for. And I knew I didn’t tick those boxes for them.

So, that was how it stood for a long time.

Me secretly loving them, just trying to share what I could, and enjoying it while it lasted.

And Then We Kissed

To be clear we had kissed before. But this night was different.

Also, And Then We Kissed is the overdramatic title of my journal entry from a few days after this. So, it feels right.

I don’t want to get too specific here, for the privacy of this unnamed person. (HA! This line is hilarious in retrospect)

Though, I have basically publicly published a book worth of shitty poems about them, so, I probably don’t have to worry about speaking plainly.

Anyway, without getting into details I don’t have to.

They kissed me so good one night—a night where I had been made to feel cool and interesting and wanted. A night where I had been held. Where there had been attention paid to me in a way I wasn’t used to. Where I’d gotten to cook beer-battered fish and chips and be really tender.

Those are the key ingredients I’ve distilled.

Along with the presence of my own adoration of another person, in a way that can only be described as deeply held innate respect.

Even though they were far younger than me, I looked up to them.

There’s something about who they are as a person that I respect like no other.

They feel like the most raw and true human I’ve ever met.

And this one night. They really wanted me back.

They kissed me out of my mind, in terms of just knocking me right out of being mentally present for a minute or so.

When I come back—still kissing—just having the capacity to think again.

For the first time in my whole goddamn adult life…

For the first time since the tadpole dream itself…

I’m completely immersed in the feeling I’ve been searching for.

It’s everywhere. And It’s full blast. It’s right now.

My heart is racing.

I start kissing them so fast it’s ridiculous.

They laugh and tell me to slow down. Which I hear as their higher self talking through them.

Telling me to hold my fucking horses. Because I’m freaking out.

I can’t help but feel one thing.

It’s you. I’ve found you.

I feel as if I’m remembering how much I’ve missed this person my whole life.

I've done a lot of group meditation. Sitting in circle with folks in person and meditating can be the most powerful thing, and take your mind and body and spirit to places that are really special. Where you feel tapped in beyond your normal self—into a larger a more expansive version of you—which may or may not exist beyond time.

Here in this moment, I felt like that.

And it felt clear that I was finding out this person whom I had been enjoying myself with casually, but slowly falling for more and more due to the intimate time spent and profound respect I had for them as a person, was someone whom I had missed dearly my whole life.

I was immediately telling myself.

Don’t freak out.

I remember repeating that in my head. Still being kissed. Going slower, but with the biggest smile I’d ever had. Still right in the feeling.

And there, I heard a voice clearer than I’ve ever heard before or since in meditation. Which is rare for me. I get messages like this in dreams but not when I’m awake in meditation.

It said, as I’m losing my shit.

You don’t have to convince them who you are to each other.

Cosmic joke and a half.

Sure… I tried not to try.

And the message has helped me be a lot better than I would have been, surely.

But I’ll be damned if all this writing, all the intense gender transitioning I’ve been doing, hasn’t been about them in one way or another.

Tied to the hope that one day perhaps—when I have come into myself, when I am whole and complete—they will see me. And see within me what I came, in this moment, to see in them.

That they too might find this feeling. And it may make the practical things matter as little to them as they do now to me.

And Then Life Goes the Fuck On

I never accepted mentally that they were my person.

What I’ve told myself from the beginning is that this was a sign I had entered a new phase of life, where I was now capable of feeling love on a more complete level, and they had just shown me that.

One thing kills me though.

The fucking taste of the beer-battered fish and chips in their kiss.

Somehow that was a part of what I remembered ahead of time.

It was there from before. That specific.

So, it’s been hard not to let the seeds of hope linger they could be more than just a signpost. That the voice I heard may have spoken truth to me that night.

But I lost them as a friend when I revealed my true feelings.

While I never said those words they told me not to. I still placed all the weight upon them and plenty more. And then acted a fool when they needed space to figure things out.

I thought for a while after they were out of my life, that I might be dying soon.

Morbid, I know. But I didn’t get it.

What am I striving towards if that was a moment which has come and gone?

A revelatory moment brought me back to gratitude. Knowing, that even if I am to live with this as a one-time passing event in my life. It will be worth it. And by learning to hold the love and grief and everything in between this makes me feel, I have and will become incredibly strong and wise.

Part of me knows I’m a twisted bitch who would have planned it this way.

Even if dating has been a fucking nightmare, by-and-large, since this momentary success at the beginning of what was to be my era of freedom and liberation.

Instead, gifted a fleeting glimpse of this feeling I’d sought so long, held for maybe an hour there in their room. But then also for hours the next day as well, when I was home with my daughter. Somehow, my motherhood being connected to it all. The Bonnie Hunt vibes truly a part of it.

So, I spent a good part of that next day just lying around and feeling through all the nuances of this feeling I had missed for so long. Coming to understand more about it and what conditions birthed it.

Since then, it’s returned to me only in fleeting moments. To my chagrin, still exclusively when my mind draws me back to think of this one person in some way or another.

I have prayed to find another who can take me to this feeling. To free me.

To help me find this love that I’ve known I was looking for since I was a child. That I’ve wanted so badly, for so long.

Perhaps this is something I can feel for myself?

We will see.

I am amidst a journey of discovery. And I approach each day with curiosity. Knowing that I was a part of writing this plan. Crafting these tests. And that somehow and someway it’s leading to something beautiful. Because I can feel it out ahead of me now. Just like I could feel that night with my dear friend when I was only a child.

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