I need a vacation.
The last time I actually dressed up was… 8 months ago? I don’t really know how it’s been so long. Oh wait, yes I do. I know exactly why I haven’t dressed up in months. Here’s the recipe:
Get a large bowl and add:
- A kid that you need to get ready for school every morning
- 8 Months of being sick on-and-off because your kid keeps bringing diseases home from the other kids at school
- A job that runs 5 days a week, which has been incredibly stressful for a while now
- A pinch of sheer exhaustion
Mix well, and pop the fucker in the oven and in 20 minutes you’ll have yourself A long, unwelcome dry-spell.
Liz never goes away though. She’s under there, doing stuff. I haven’t really figured out how to live in suburbia yet – can I just take a walk around the block in a dress? What’s the point of that? If I’m not leaving the house, then it’s just another prison.
Clearly, I need a vacation.
Las Vegas remains my go-to. It’s a short flight with cheap hotels that you can get fancy rooms for. But my angle this time isn’t entirely just to do a photoshoot. I want to get out a bit more than I have before. Sometimes I haven’t bothered as much because I’ve been exhausted by spending hours doing a photoshoot, but this time I’m trying to aim my sights a bit higher, get out of the room more and be. Then I had a mini-breakdown.
I started imagining all the things I was going to do. I could get cocktails at a fancy cocktail bar. I could see a show. I could hit up. whiskey bar. I could go shopping. I could sit at a slot machine in an amazing dress and feed it while a waitress plies me with martinis. I could hit up the pool in a bikini. Could I hit up the pool in a bikini? Am I allowed to hit up the pool? Where would I pee, anyway? Are there gender-neutral bathrooms? Actually, which hotels are LGBT-friendly? All of them? Why are only some of them opted into <booking-site>’s “LGBT-friendly pledge”? Does that mean the others are not? When they say “LGBT Friendly”, do they really mean “Gay Friendly”? The Flamingo has a RuPaul’s Drag Race show, that seems safe. But I went there last time. Let me spend fucking hours looking at hotel rooms and deciding how nice of a room I want for pictures, and find one with a good location, and then panic about whether or not the hotel is right or safe or appropriate for me, and then go to the hotel website and see if I can find any defined policies about how they treat/support gender-nonconforming people? And why am I doing this anyway? Maybe I should just stay at home and save the money.
I tend to get stressed out sometimes. This was a solid 48 hours of staring at a laptop, watching hotel video reviews, reading stories of other people’s experiences in hotels, and trying to get to a point where I was happy with where I booked.
I did end up booking something though. Sometime in May I have a nice room booked at the Venetian. As soon as I completed the booking process, I could feel my cortisol levels drop significantly. (I really need better stress-management strategies). But hopefully if things work out, you’ll see another post from me in a month or so about how my trip went. Fingers crossed!
Now all I need to do is figure out what I’m going to wear… and where I’m going to go. And I need to buy a new suitcase. Maybe I should get a new camera? I wonder if I should get another DSLR, or maybe one of those new fancy point and shoots. Do I have enough clothes? I haven’t actually bought much in the last few years. Do I still remember how to do makeup even? Am I going to be walking around a lot? I’ll have to figure out what shoes to take…
oh my god.
I know what you mean about the prison part. I thought my daughter was moving out. Jade would at least have the whole house for a few hours. But grandson stayed with us. So I am a prisoner in my own house locked behind a door to not allow people that can’t handle such a sight from seeing it.
No chance of showing Jade to the family?
I didn’t end up writing this in the blog post, but I’m kind of feeling like I’m trapped in a bit of a hierarchy of prisons – like the first prison is when you’re not even able to dress. You know she’s in there, but she’s trapped inside the internal prison of your psyche. A level above that is the next prison – you allow yourself to dress up, but you can’t tell anyone of leave the house. Another prison of fear. I think right now I’m mostly trapped in the prison of “but how do I even find time to dress up?”. I was going to write a blogpost about how to schedule time for yourself to dress up, but I wasn’t even actually doing it, so it seemed disingenuous!
Hey there ,
I hope you’re doing great ! Though it was an irrelevant topic to me , but i would suggest you to come out of all your fears , one life is all we have and we should live it to the fullest . I’m sure that everything goes well with the time . You need to convince yourself first in order to show it to the world of yours what you really are . And really looking forward to your blog on your vacation . Enjoy !
God bless .
Best of luck with your vacation. I’m like you in that i tend to over plan and over think stuff. As far as feeling safe to be out dressed in public, other than perhaps San Francisco and a few very TG friendly events Las Vegas is the perfect place to be out dressed. In a town full of Marvel superheroes and Elvis’s no one is going to pay a great deal of attention to a crossdresser. I can dress any time I choose at home as my wife knows about Ramona, but much like you, life tends to get in the way all too often. It’s all very, very frustrating I know.
I’ve been out dressed in Vegas before! It was a lot of fun! I think I’m just reeling from the general miasma of anti-cis hate going around lately :/