Hi everyone. I'm Val and I'm at the beginning of my MtF realizations. Like many others, I knew at an early age that I should not have been a boy. When I was about 8 I asked my mother about the operation they did when I was born to turn me from a girl to a boy. She laughed and said that no such thing happened. I thought that of course she'd deny it if she wanted to keep it a secret.
For about five years after that I knew that I wanted to grow up to be a girl. I even found out about SRS and knew it was for me. Then I saw a certain episode of Saturday Night Live of all things that had one skit making fun of MtFs. I started pushing it back then. I wasn't going to be "like that". So I joined sports, took JROTC classes in high school, became "a guy". And it worked for a time.
Fast forward two decades. I'm married to a wonderful woman (who was bisexual, which meant I could dream of living vicariously through her). I've got a good job, enough to buy a house, support the family and buy the expensive toys I always "needed". Only I've started withdrawing into my shell. I couldn't take life anymore. And I couldn't figure it out. My wife and I argued over it and I'd promise to try to be better. My job suffered.
Eventually the job got to the point where the company and I "mutually decided to part ways". That was okay, though. The wife and I figured that I could spend a lot of time looking for a job, and that we could use time while the kids were at school to reconnect and rekindle things. Only it didn't work. After one week off she withdrew for a week, then told me that she was a lesbian. This triggered a lot of things for me, despair, rage, and finally I told her. And by saying it out loud it was no longer "the dark thing in my head". It was in the light and I could see it clearly.
So now I'm figuring out what I'm going to do and how I'm going to do it. I've started therapy, started buying proper clothes. And the odd thing is, once I came to a bit more peace with myself and started being more like I wanted, even if only for short periods of time at home, the job search started taking off.
Well, I'm blathering. I do that a lot it seems. It's good to be here.
Val
