It never occurred to me that there was any connection between losing my hearing and losing my balance. Which was just a few months after I lost much of my hearing. My problem seems to have started in the summer of 2016. In fact, it may be my lack of confidence, my sense of uncertainty in the world, that brought about my lack of balance in the first place. I have begun to feel better, too: I have less pain and, more important, more confidence. It’s early yet, but I have slowly been learning to walk differently. To solve the problem, I’ve been working with a gait specialist, a kind of physical therapist I did not previously know existed. As a result, apparently, the muscles in my shins have had to work overtime to keep me standing upright. And not only do I walk funny I stand funny, too, balancing on the sides of my fallen arches instead of on my heels and toes. But recently I discovered the root of the problem: My gait is, to put it gently, curious. Then I lost it again.įor many months, I simply thought I had lost my sense of balance. I found my footing, and for 20 years, I have been both joyful and wary. When we walk alone, we’re always a little bit careful. But all the women I know have this one thing in common. There are a lot of different ways of being female in this world and a lot of different ways of walking. That’s what it actually means to walk as a woman: to constantly be on guard. The real difference is that now, when I’m walking home alone at night and I hear a pair of footsteps behind me, I feel a sense of vulnerability I never felt before transition.
Still, over time I discovered there is a distinction between walking in the world as male and as female, but it doesn’t have anything to do with swaggering or gliding.
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