Reconciling my spiritual side

Good morning blog,

During the past few months, the one thing my forced vacation has seemed to provided to me is a lot of time for self-reflection.  Today this self-reflection is around what I would consider my spiritual journey.

I have probably spent the majority of my time over the past few years with the physical aspects of my being - they way I look or don't look and how to present myself in a way that makes me feel good.  What I haven't spent much time with is on my emotional or spiritual side.

Now I grew up in a very religious repressive environment so naturally when I think of the word spirituality I naturally become negative.   Talking with my therapist this week made me start to think of this in a different way.  I'm trying to think of my spirituality instead of in the formal religious aspect but as have I feel complete inside.  Its really a different way for me to connect so I'll try to make some sense in my ramblings here.

I know inside that I feel more female than male but instead of thinking of things in two genders I'm trying to think of myself as one whole, and some smashup of feelings and emotions of both.  I am starting to realize that regardless of which physical gender I present myself with, I have both male and female thoughts, feelings and emotions inside.  And that is ok.   It is just me and whom I am.

Now the real tricky and difficult part is accepting and being comfortable with myself regardless of what gender most perceive.  Our environment reacts to our physical appearance, I would get strange looks if I tried to present as male and showed up to work with painted nails for instance.  What I have to reconcile is feeling content and happy with myself regardless of how my nails look and any other physical traits.   I realize that I was not born to be able to blend into a female appearance naturally and do not have limitless resources to achieve this, and if I do transition someday I will still always have some 'maleness' no matter how hard I try to remove all traces of this.  I need to find more of the spiritual strength inside to accept this and to accept who I am - with all my faults along with all my good qualities.

Do we need to lose oneself in order to find ourself along this journey here?  I feel like I have done a lot of work and still have a lot of work to go in order to get rid of all my preconceived feelings about me to get down to my core being.  Is this the key that once I have gotten rid of all the distractions that I can figure out what is really important and make some healthy steps forward to achieving a complete me inside and out?

I am not really sure about most of this, but I do feel that I need to feel content about myself in order to make a change forward or I may be always doubting what step I'm taking.

Hugs,
Jaclyn