#6) Transitioning to Womanhood

My friend Stephen is now Evangeline

Stephen Knell and I worked together when I lived in New York many moons ago - our project was never.no, pioneers of interactive television technology, which then evolved into “social tv,” still going strong today from its HQ in Manchester and tech base in Oslo.

Stephen was our creative director and he and I travelled around the city (the country) and pitched a lot. We were often pitching creative as opposed to tech. Formats. Concepts. We got to know each other well in the process.

Then I left New York and never.no and Stephen and I lost touch over the years.

However, last February Stephen turned 50 and announced on FB that she was transitioning to being a woman named Evangeline.

She took this brave decision after years of knowing she was unhappy. As she put it to me last week, “there´s always been 25% of my brain sending me signals that something was wrong, not right. Not right at all.”

And further, over the last years in particular, she had become so depressed that she felt she was running out of all options in life. She had hit a wall completely. End it - or change it.

I myself have hit a few walls in life, and I can relate. For the most part I pride myself on having a well of positive energy, but there have been definite points in life when I have been depressed, too. We discussed how “sad” it is that you must come to such a point before you dig deep and make a drastic change to get you out of your dire situation.

We both nodded our heads and agreed, but now as I write, I think to myself, is it really that “sad”? The presumption here is that happiness is the natural state of life, like saying a flower should always be in bloom. But from great pain comes great change. And this change can sometimes lead to greater good.

Speaking of bloom, all I can say is that the Evangeline I met for the first time online last week felt so much more right to me than Stephen ever did. Here was this force of nature with a happy gleam in her eye and a natural confidence that has been wrought from pain - and a profound courage to make as enormous a change in life as one can possibly imagine.

Without hitting that wall, would she ever had the courage to make the change?

Would she instead be stuck in an awful limbo, a state where almost all life withers, fades, dies?