Emotional changes and Moods.
After just over four years and a bit back on HRT, I have had a range of emotional changes.
Importantly we all need to understand that in effect we are all undergoing a second puberty as the body switches from a Testosterone dominant environment to an Oestrogen dominant environment.
Gradually after about 6 months on HRT I started to find myself feeling uncertain with conflicting thoughts and you may also experience frequent and sometimes extreme changes in your mood.
For example, sometimes your mood will swing between feeling confident and happy to feeling irritated and depressed in a short span of time. These frequent swings in how you feel are called mood swings. They may occur due to the shifting levels of hormones in your body and other changes that are taking place during this second puberty, such as there growth of your breasts.
During puberty, a young woman's body undergoes many changes, so for Transgender women we too can feel uncomfortable about these changes and become overly sensitive about our physical appearances.
As a result you may feel irritated quite easily, lose your temper or feel depressed.
These emotional experiences are more pronounced for girls because they develop faster and obviously the changes in their bodies such as development of breasts and widening of hips are more noticeable. Although we are unlikely to have the widening of our hips, fat redistribution and breast development and facial changes do happen
One emotional change I noticed is getting sexually excited by normal everyday activities such as reading a romantic novel or watching a romantic scene on television. Also this emotional engagement can find me weeping profusely.
I've also noticed a greater emotional range. I cry much more. I only rarely cried before, yet now some things can reduce me reduce me to an incoherent bucket of sobbing.
Occasionally I also receive little heart melting flutters more, with acts of kindness sort of leaving me with an overall warming of my soul in a way I didn't feel before. Basically I just more aware of my emotions that I was ever before as a male.
Things I noticed more in my second year on HRT was that I was then on a high dosage of oestrogen, and I tended to take a higher oestrogen dose in the evenings than in the mornings, but I noticed that as I wound down the day, around 12 hours after my last oestrogen dose, I started to feel... off. A little depressed, irritable, and generally a little overwhelmed.
Part of that may be because it was early in transition and just getting dressed as a woman and going out into the world can be draining, but I also found that smoothing out my dosage, so I wasn't really high right before bed and then coming down over the course of the day helped even out a lot of that overall bout of emotions. Of course over time Oestrogen builds up in the body and will over time somewhat smooth out the emotional effects.
All the hormonal changes of another puberty may mean one has mood swings and bouts of feeling sad or down or really high. This is of course just an important part of a young woman's self-discovery and growing up.
Remember that this second puberty is a time of adjustment for all of us when we will be discovering new interests, becoming more aware of our sexual attraction and what we generally crave for is female reassurance that what we feel is normal for women going through a puberty .
In short this second puberty is a roller coaster of emotions, and the second puberty that you will experience during your transition is no exception. You may find that you have access to a wider range of emotions or feelings, or have different interests, tastes or pastimes, or behave differently in relationships with other people and have other people behave differently to you as well.
Judith
