The Secrets of My Life

by Caitlyn Jenner

  WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU JUST DO??!!

  The cold dread of fear.

  The public may be accepting of me in the 20/20 piece. But I was still Bruce when the cameras rolled. They haven’t seen me with my face altered and augmented breasts.

  I haven’t seen me!

  What if I look in the mirror for the first time and see a complete stranger?

  Who is this person?

  What if I look in the mirror and hate the way I look just like I did before? What if I regret this?

  Oh, God…

  Please, God.

  Don’t desert me now.

  Don’t do it.

  The nurse is right beside me in the room. I put my feet down on the floor.

  Turn on the TV!

  I need distractions, noise, anything. I can’t go where my head is going right now.

  Just the noise. Please just the noise. That will help. I know it will help.

  It doesn’t.

  I walk out of the bedroom and start pacing in the adjacent hallway.

  That will help get this out of me. I know it will.

  It doesn’t.

  The questions are flying fast and furious now.

  One after another after another with no space in between.

  How am I going to be accepted? How are my kids going to accept me? Are you going to be considered a freak from this point on? Here you were the big, big jock Bruce Jenner, and now all of a sudden you’re not. You’re not. Not even close to that. What is my mother going to think? What is my sister going to think? What am I going to think?

  I will pace all night if I have to. I’m not shutting my eyes again.

  The questions die down a little bit. The panic turns into something a little bit softer and easier to manage. It isn’t questions that fill my head now but another thought entirely.

  It can’t be worse than the other side where I came from.

  The thought builds and now there is a slice of comfort.

  I can make this work. I will make it work!

  I am going to live authentically for the first time in my life. I am going to learn every single issue facing the brothers and sisters of the transgender community. I am going to raise money. I am going to start a foundation. I am going to use my public platform to tirelessly speak on the issues. I am going to have an enthusiasm for life that I have not had in thirty-nine years since the Olympics, almost two-thirds of my life.

  I will make a difference because I am different.

  The pacing back and forth helps. The panic attack subsides.

  It never comes back again.

  The only problem now is that I look like hell, as if my face was thrown in the dryer on high heat and then ironed. It is not a pretty sight, and the fear is that I am going to end up looking like Michael Jackson. But after roughly six weeks the swelling has gone down and almost all the scars have disappeared.

  I look like… Well, who do I look like?

  You try picking out a permanent new name for yourself after sixty-five years.

  It’s weird.

  I had thought of names as far back as Graceland. There was a singing group at college called the Serendipity Singers and one of their numbers was a song called “Heather.” I thought Heather might be a cool name because the song was so cool. But after college the name faded away. I thought about something simple, like Mary. Then when Kris and I got together I felt obligated to pick a name that began with K, which is when Kathy popped into my head. But Kathy seemed like… well… Kathy.

  So one of my favorite pastimes became watching the Miss Universe and Miss America pageants with pen and paper in hand to jot down the names of all the different contestants. I was hoping there was one I particularly liked whose name I would also like. But I struck out and never did settle on one that seemed just right.

  Until I became a woman.

  Now I really did need to find a name for the rest of my life.

  I went back to Heather, but I really wasn’t crazy about it. I talked to Ronda about the naming dilemma, how whenever I thought I had found one that works, I ended up getting bored with it after a while. Ronda made her own suggestion:

  I’ve always liked the name Caitlyn.

  I had thought about Caitlyn back in the K period, which meant it would have been spelled Kaitlyn. Or Kaitlin. However it was spelled, there was no way I was going to have a name now that began with a K. That would have been beyond creepy.

  Which is when Ronda chimed in again:

  I always liked the spelling of C-A-I-T-L-Y-N.

  So Caitlyn it will be. I choose the middle name Marie simply because I like it. I leave the last name Jenner intact, even though at a certain point I had thought of changing it to get away from my past life as much as possible (I am glad I didn’t).

  Caitlyn.

  Caitlyn Marie.

  Caitlyn Marie Jenner.

  I can get used to that.

  But I am not sure everyone is totally happy with it.

  I was with Kim one day when she asked me:

  Well, what are we going to call you?

  It’s Caitlyn.

  You stuck with the Ks, huh?

  I’m spelling it with a C.

  Oh. I’m kind of disappointed.

  Spoken like a true Kardashian.

  So now that I have a name, what’s left?

  The final hurdle, when all I do is tell the world who I now am and show them what I now look like.

  Several weeks before the shoot Annie Leibovitz comes out to the house to scout the site and get to know me a little better. Vanity Fair’s fashion and style director Jessica Diehl flies out from New York to meet with me as well and find out what I like and what I don’t—or more accurately, what I shouldn’t wear, tactfully steering me away from the big fashion statement in favor of a mix of what she describes as Rene Russo in The Thomas Crown Affair meets Angelina Jolie, elegant with a dash of tough.

  The day before the shoot, she and her assistant Ryan Young return for a fitting.

  I had always fantasized about having beautiful clothes that fit. As many times as I had stood in front of hotel mirrors and thought I looked good, I always knew it could be better. Just as I also had convinced myself I would never get the opportunity.

  So now…

  Some apparel has been shipped previously, other items were brought by Diehl and Young on the flight to Los Angeles. There are well over a hundred different pieces—gowns, blouses, sweaters, belts, cocktail dresses, lingerie, jewelry, heels, high heels. So many items that a temporary tent is built on my sizeable deck. What is perhaps most amazing of all is that none of the haute couture shops where Diehl and Young searched for clothing in New York asked who exactly these items were for, given the person was six-foot-two. Diehl thinks it’s because I have the look of a 1980s Amazonian model with a slender frame, which is what I may want carved on my tombstone, along with a quote from Diehl saying I look perfect in Tom Ford.

  I have trouble initially believing that this is all for me to try on, the only goal being to make me look my best. Ninety percent of the clothing fits. It is the first time I have ever openly tried on women’s clothing in front a group of strangers. It is so easy, so natural, so effortless, so fun, the way my life was always supposed to be.

  Annie comes to the house the next day to take the pictures for the magazine cover, arriving with a caravan of assistants to rival that of Genghis Khan. Several editors from the magazine are here, including Jane Sarkin. So is Dana Brown, the editor on the 11,000-word piece by Buzz that will be published in several weeks in the July issue that actually comes out in early June (I have no idea why magazines do it this way). Jessica Diehl is obviously still here to make sure that the outfits Annie ultimately choses for the shoot will fit perfectly. There are also two professional stylists for hair and makeup.

  Are you kidding me?

  Security is airtight so news of the photo shoot will not leak. Those attending must leave their cars in the parking lot at Zuma Beach in Malibu
. They are picked up by a nondescript white van driven by a member of the security detail and then transported up a winding road to the driveway of my house. Once there they are required to turn in their cellphones, after which they will be escorted inside. I have already had a temporary wall built around my house to block out the paparazzi, who over the past several weeks have taken photos from roughly a mile across the canyon using supertelephoto lenses.

  The shoot lasts for two days. Annie Leibovitz is Annie Leibovitz, after all. She has a clear vision of how she wants me to look—a little bit forties Hepburn, a little bit Vargas girl, glamorous and beautiful and a touch of sexy. The photo of me that is chosen for the cover, posing in a cream-colored bustier with perfect makeup and hair and a headline that simply says CALL ME CAITLYN, will become instantly iconic. It is the photograph that everyone will remember me by.

  But the pose I remember the most takes place in the garage of my house, which has been converted into a studio. All the junk that has accumulated over the years, including the accordion, has temporarily disappeared. I am wearing an off-the-shoulder black gown by Zac Posen. It is killer, if I do say so myself. All the lights in the garage have been turned off, leaving only the ones set up for the shoot. There is dark everywhere else except on me, a kind of spotlight effect. There is a large mirror; Annie tells one of her assistants to move it behind the camera so I can actually see myself.

  Not every day of my life will be spent with hair and makeup and beautiful clothing handpicked by a stylist with Annie Leibovitz taking my photograph. It is safe to say that no day of my life will ever be spent this way again.

  But in that moment, when I look into the mirror, I truly see myself for the first time. So many other times I had looked into the mirror with familiar loathing and disgust.

  But now…

  Now the view from the looking glass is different.

  I see who I am.

  I am who I know.

  I know who I am.

  I am Caitlyn.

  Caitlyn Marie Jenner.

  Forever forward.

  September 17, 2016

  “I am ready to seize the day.”

  We are waiting for the moon to rise over Malibu.

  It is a perfect night atop the ridge of Decker Canyon, no fog rolling in from the Pacific Ocean, no cloud formations spreading darkness through the Santa Monica Mountains. The temperature is in the seventies, and the usual wind has simmered down to a refreshing breeze.

  It is good to be home.

  I am hosting an after–Labor Day cocktail party on the back patio, something I did not do a lot of back in the Bruce era. Actually, I don’t think I ever did it at all.

  Some of the guests are old friends who supported me in my most difficult days in the late 1980s. Some are new friends I have made, trans women who have become soul sisters, members of the gay and lesbian community and straights. Together they form a rainbow from the worst period to my happiest one.

  Perhaps the best proof of how far I have come: I like being around people now. I want to be around people now. I like parties, when for sixty-five years of my life I hated them because I felt socially awkward and insecure. I like them now because I am comfortable with myself.

  Comfortable.

  Not a particularly complex word. Yet a feeling so difficult for too many of us to attain because of all the roadblocks.

  I am Caitlyn. I am a woman. What does that mean to be a woman now that I have been one for eighteen months?

  How should I know?

  You can’t learn how to be a woman. A woman has been inside me all my life, and I just have to let her live. There is no guide or checklist except those meaningless stereotypes. Each of us is distinct and different, so self-evident yet so difficult for so many people to accept or embrace. We all have choices. We all make choices. We should be allowed to make them without threat.

  It is why I have written this book, so that you see through my life the pain and compromises and inevitable unhappiness that accompany you wherever you go when you cannot make those choices even though they are embedded in your soul. I have written this book to help us see that there is no right way to be, or wrong way to be, or any way to be except who you are. I have written this book to show all the obstacles to equal rights that exist in the community that I love and am so proudly a part of, the transgender community. I have written this book because I am lucky to have a public platform and want to use it. I have written this book because there is a way out no matter how long it takes.

  There is no magic wand. There is no sprinkling of fairy dust and poof!, you’re completely different. When I became Caitlyn in March 2015, I didn’t wake up and immediately have an urge to cook and clean or sew or do any of the other tasks that women are still assumed to do in a society still dominated by men. Nor, for that matter, did I run to the bookstore and buy books by such landmark feminists as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. All I can say is that I am evolving. Gender is a journey whoever you are: thoughts change, circumstances change, your view of what is important changes, the world changes.

  It is easier for me to show emotions now, although it will never be easy. I feel so much more connected to the world now. I get up in the morning and get out of bed and look in the mirror and everything is in kind of the right spot—well, almost everything. I put on the clothes I want to put on without the perpetual fear that someone will see me or discover me. I go out and do the things I want to do without assuming a mask. My life is so much simpler now, no more a thousand steps for a sliver of authenticity.

  I am ready to seize the day, learn something, get something done, after so many years in which I just wanted the day to end. I can talk to women now instead of being envious of them or removed from them because of fear of discovery or just feeling like I never fit in, because up until I transitioned I never did.

  Hell, I don’t even golf alone anymore. One of the best times of the week is Tuesday, when I play at Sherwood in a women’s foursome, where we gab and laugh and trade style tips and I outdrive them by 150 yards and they still like me. In a men’s foursome I would hear the grumblings of competitive jealousy all the way into the next county.

  There is the inevitable and cosmic question of what it all means now besides the option of hitting off the women’s tee if I feel like it. It is a little presumptuous to answer—I still have enough trouble figuring out what to wear in the morning—but I also feel I should try given my lengthy journey.

  Appreciation. Beauty. Freedom. Joy. Liberation. Love. Simplicity. And of course comfort. There are many more descriptive words. I don’t want to double the length of the book. But maybe it all boils down to this:

  Please, I am begging you, don’t ever let your life succumb to what others think. Do not give into fear, as I did for so many years. Do what is in your heart and soul. I guarantee you will never ever regret it. Instead, you will have the very opposite, not an imagined life but a life of new possibility, a true life. The more we celebrate our difference, the more we will be celebrated. There are too many of us out there anyway just waiting to bloom and blossom. The status quo of society will just have to get used to us.

  Not everything is perfect. It is foolish to think that everything will be.

  I am still trying to sort out my relationship with all my children. I thought transition would draw us closer. Initially it did. But over the past several months there has been a void, a distance, with many of them.

  Sometimes as parents we aren’t always aware of how unavailable we are in the best circumstances. Then as we grow older we have that feeling of wanting to be with our children when they can’t because of their own full and busy lives. It is a circle of life where they can’t always be there. It seems like they are doing the same thing we wish we hadn’t done, but it’s part of human nature and our own foibles. I want them to be more attentive, but how attentive was I when some of them were growing up?

  But I worry that my transitioning has been harder for them to cope with than t
hey have let on, because in public their support for me has been stirring. But perhaps there is private embarrassment. Perhaps it is weird to call me “Dad” when I don’t look like Dad. I know that Burt and Brandon and Brody did not like the Vanity Fair cover, not only because they thought it was too risqué, but because I did not gauge how a son would feel seeing his father in a cream-colored bustier.

  Fair enough.

  Perhaps there are aspects of Caitlyn they hoped would be different. Although I feel much more empathy on the inside, I still have trouble showing it on the outside. Although I am observant of others, I still talk about myself too much. Maybe some of the kids feel I spend too much time over the way I look, an admittedly radical departure from Bruce, who never worried about the way he looked. I am aware that in the newness of being a trans woman there is a tendency to have an initial period of pseudo-adolescence, in which makeup and clothing become your touchstones of discovery, a way of feeling liberated. So maybe that will change.

  I wonder if I should sit down with the kids individually just as I did before transition so each can talk candidly with me and I can talk candidly with them. Just as gender is a journey, so is the relationship you have with your children after you transition. Nothing comes instantly or overnight. There is no perfect.

  I know what it is like to be lonely. I was lonely for most of my life. My greatest fear now is that I will one day revert to that same kind of loneliness, a prisoner of my house when the big difference now is that I don’t want to be a prisoner. I am scared of becoming a hermit again, probably because past so often is prologue, at a time in my life when Caitlyn sees the possibilities of the world that Bruce never saw.

  I still spend many nights alone. I still fear that I will be a loner even though I no longer want to be one. Maybe it is just ingrained into my soul like my womanhood. Just as core beliefs don’t change, maybe certain traits of personality don’t either. But I am going to give it a hell of a try to break the habit. Caitlyn is too much damn fun. Bruce fundamentally disappeared the last ten years of his life. Plus, talking about the Olympics does get old, very old. Two days of my life lasted for more than thirty years. There is so much more.