Quote from: Audrey94 on March 05, 2017, 04:24:46 AM
Lately I've been feeling very little need to dress. But also, I've been feeling less eager to do anything feminine. In the last few days, I was at the point where I almost felt indifferent to the idea of having a female body. Right now it's clear to me that I want that body, but I don't want it as intensely as I did before. I feel weird because ever since I admitted to myself that I was female, my need to act and be feminine continually increased to the point where I fully dressed every night and every time I was alone, my inner voice was almost always female, and I barely questioned that I was female. One day, I was being especially feminine, but then, in about a day, I just stopped feeling like it. I now feel like I might 'relapse' back into male-hood--I say it like that because I feel like deep inside me I still am female, and I'm just convincing myself that I'm male because I'm tired of dealing with the fear and stress of keeping this secret. I don't want to go back to being convinced I'm male only to realize years later that I made a mistake. I feel like I'm threatening to kill a part of myself that, only recently, I learned to love.
Is anyone familiar with this? 
Yes. I secretly crossdressed for years, starting when I was 6 or 7, slipping into my mother's dressing room and trying on her lingerie. I felt horribly guilty about it, but it was the only way I could find relief from the unrelenting mental pain and discordance I labored with. Dressing was euphoric, like a drug. It killed the pain. Then the high would fade, and the strong desires would abate, too - for a while. I would feel relieved, because as Joanne and Moni said, there was so much shame and denial connected to these feelings. I didn't want this. I just wanted to be "normal". I knew being female was an impossible dream, and I needed to stop torturing myself.
When the feminine desires and feelings to crossdress started to return, I would say to myself, "Oh no, not this again." I tried to suppress it, just like Joanne said, I would tell myself, "I can beat this!". I would go through the classic cycles of purging any female clothes I had secretly collected, and "man up". Sometimes that worked for months, and sometimes it worked for years. But the desires never, ever left.
The thing is I did not know I was transsexual. I though transsexuals were people who underwent medical changes to their bodies. I thought I was a ->-bleeped-<-, and this was some weird fetish, because there was usually some sexual component to dressing. But crossdressing never fixed anything - it just made things worse. It wasn't until much later in life, in my 50s, that I found out being transgender was a thing. It explained so much! Yet, I remained in denial. I was married. I had kids, a career, a mortgage - transitioning was absolutely out of the question.
One thing to remember, Audrey, is the male part of you is just that, part of you. What needs to be vanquished is the stress and fear we all experience when we realize our social persona is not who we really are and we need to change it. That change can come with a heavy price, and can be overwhelming and terrifying.
You will find your way. The best advice I can give you is to remember to be patient and kind to yourself. You have the blessing of being young and having many more options and resources than I did in my 20s. Transition is hard, it is expensive, and it is scary. But you will know when it is time. To paraphrase one of Joanne's nuggets of wisdom, "Which fear is worse?" The fear of transition, or the fear of wasting years of your life pretending to be male?
With kindness,
Terri
