Hi Holly
Please stay with us and don't start that exit plan. You have come a long way and we are all here to support each other. Its not true that you are not making an impact on the world, you are having an impact on us and countless others who have read this thread but not posted.
2 years is complete bull->-bleeped-<- like a lot of what the GIC has to say. For a start it doesn't matter if your trans or CIS your face and looks change your whole life and I have looked at enough trans timelines to know 2 years is only the start. For some its a dramatic start but for us its more subtle. But believe me you have changed. You also say you have been on HRT for 18 months, but you have not been stable on that HRT for 18 months, your not long into your prostap so T is only really just getting under control and all the time those little T factories are still there there is a fight in our operating systems going on. We are running virtual femme at the moment on hardware designed to run only the host OS, once we get the OS on the bare metal it runs a lot better. Performance is below par until then.
There are countless stories of post op women who say their transition really started after surgery, once those T factories were gone and they could settle into themselves, That once they were gone there were other more dramatic changes in how the body shapes itself and how they feel about it.
And back to the 2 year thing, We are about 13yr old girls now. Yeah between 13 and 15 there are a lot of changes to a cis girl, we wont see those changes to the same degree. But there are also massive differences between a 15yr old and 18 yr old, even bigger ones to 25. A standard puberty lasts a decade or so, so giving up after 18 months to 2 years is too early.
You are not alone in how you feel either, I have had some of my darkest times since starting transition, not in the same way as before which was from a place of fear and expectation of failure and loss, but more from a place of hopelessness. The thing that kept me going before was something that was once said by a trans woman, which was in essence, may as well try transitioning as if it doesn't work i can kill myself afterwards. That was one of the things that kept me from the pill cabinet. But now I have started transitioning it has no meaning to me. If I get in a dark place now what is to stop me, after all if I have tried this being a woman thing and failed, and I have had those thoughts, I have them every day, I have them most when I get my bank account locked because they thought i sounded male. When I think how much I have spent on speech therapy and that still happens. When I shy away from changing my name or opening an account at another bank for fear of it happening there too. When I look at my passport and realise to travel to the USA I have no hope of making it all the way as Lisa so will have to be him for the journey. When i sit in front of the mirror and cry because it doesn't take cis women 30 minutes of markup to go to the supermarket or even set foot out the front door. All these things make me feel fake and it shouldn't have to be this hard to be me. But I have to believe, even against all the evidence that things will get better, even though they show little to no signs to me so far.
I had a plan for my transition that was supposed to see me at a certain place at the end of last year, that was nearly 9 months ago and I see no chance of meeting that goal any time soon, I just got to make new goals as I learn what I can achieve, I will get to that goal one day. My income and survival depends on it, just not today or last year even.
You are not alone, we can do this together and we have barely started.
XX Lisa
