First of all hello, i have been lurking this forum for about 5 years and decided to create an account 3 weeks ago and finally had the courage to post something.
Two days ago i have reached my 3 month milestone in my HRT, and i have some questions i'd like some counsel on but, i wanted to monologue/vent out a bit about my past and circumstances.
My earliest memories are from around 10 years old, cant remember how i was before that but i remember not fitting in with either boys or girls, my physical appearance never let me blend in with the girls and i was never really interested in most of the group activities boys were after. I am and was tall and bulky, my entire family praised me for it, i never really thought of it as something positive and was bothered whenever a much older relative compared their hand size to mine, showing mine as bigger, or pushed down my shoulders thinking i was holding them up.
I was always weird, did whatever i wanted and was openly interested in whatever seemed interesting to me at the time, most of the time girl-oriented shows and activities, those actions coupled with my appearance started driving people away, the few friends i had either transferred schools or were told by their parents to stay away from me. At the time i didn't really care, that changed in high school.
During high school i was heavily bullied, had a month or two of peace but soon after i became an easy target for both boys and girls for being a pushover despite my size. went through cycles of depression, rage, and violence. until at age 15 my parents decided to move me to another school, that was around the time cable internet became popular and internet wasn't just a thing i used every Sunday for an hour or two on dial up to browse images of my favorite shows. Soon enough i noticed i could just act however i wanted online and appearance wasn't a factor.
At the time i started to understand why i was ostracized, and decided to change, i "manned up" and started acting in a way that better matched my appearance, and whenever i got home i would go online and change to my budding female identity. This decision pretty much eliminated any and all bullying and i started fitting in with everyone, got invited to parties(despite either declining or just watching the clock tick as i waited) became "friends" with a lot of people(unsure if i can call people i lie to, "friends") girls showed interest in me(despite me not really being interested in them) but the only place i really felt comfortable was online.
Over time my mind kind of developed a mental block, i could not be seen looking interested in anything that did not befit my birth gender, plus my native language uses gendered personal pronouns so i really focused to never commit slip ups in either "form" this kept progressing until i finished high school, by then my physical form was pretty much a thing i used to fulfill my basic needs so to speak, and talked and acted by itself, had completely escaped to the online environment.
The first time i tried reconciling both forms was at my early 20ies, a group of friends i played online with started using voice chat and i didn't want to be left out, so i explained my situation to them and thought they would understand(extremely naive and stupid with some common sense i guess) result was them hazing both my online and physical identities, spamming all my profiles with offensive imagery and anti-transgender slurs to put it mildly. For my online identity it was "easier", despite losing all friends i had and being pretty much soul crushed i could just delete everything and start over with a new name, which i did. But for my physical self, turns out i knew some of those "friends" in person and ended up started avoiding going out luckily most of my work was freelance so i could still afford to keep up my online identity with no issues while minimizing my time as my other self.
For the next 10 years i just got into a cycle of working the bare minimum so i can stay online, didnt allow anyone to get too close and was always evasive when talking about myself. During all this time i knew i was trans but always looked in the mirror and thought "there is no way to fix that."
Until... something snapped within me and made me want to actually move forward, increased my work load ten-fold, saved up for college in another country, and moved there. During college i started sessions with a psychotherapist focusing on my gender dysphoria, she really helped me get my thoughts together and then was recommended for HRT, which i started a few months after finishing college.
Had my first pill/patch in may 25 and been 3 months since then, i realize i am very early in the transition but i cant help but feel impatient, despite this just the effects of the t-blocker and the mental changes have been staggering for me, i feel like a heavy chain has been lifted off my back, i think more clearly, feel less anxious, even food tastes better for some reason.
So well with some context given i'd like to ask for advice on a few things, i have read all major relevant transgender resources including this forum, was given a timeline of "what to expect when" by my endo, but still have a few questions:
I understand the whole HRT process is 100% YMMV but so far my face has not changed much, i notice some very slight changes but those could even be attributed to lighting depending on the situation. I just worry there is a chance my face may not change much or at all, makeup helps a bit but even with my face alone i could never convince myself, so wanted to ask if there is a chance that my face may not change much, and how far into the transition i could actually see some noticeable changes.
I have a hard time reconciling my physical form and my mental form so to speak, i "trained" myself to maintain masculine mannerisms and ways of speaking(what irritates me the most is that i cant stop cussing every 10th word as if by reflex, and naturally calling my boyfriend by "man" or "dude", i cut myself short whenever i vocalize those but sometimes they slip and i beat myself mentally over it.) So was wondering if anyone had advice for eliminating involuntary habits so to speak.
As for voice training, i worry about tracheal shaves and their risks/costs, so been trying for over a year to practice by myself using online guides, followed deepsteath's guides and other methods i found on ->-bleeped-<- and so far the most I've managed was to sound like a higher pitched male, could never wrap my head around how it worked, just followed the exercises and didn't really have a lot of results, i am considering looking for a voice therapist but wanted to check if anyone had similar issues.
And lastly a bit of a weird/subjective question i guess, but i have a crippling fear of being judged by others i enjoy using female clothing much more than male clothing but i cant imagine myself walking out of my front door without changing clothes. So...wanted to ask, how did you muster up the courage to take that step?
Thank you for the attention and sorry for the possibly disjointed writing, been indecisively writing this for hours erasing and re-writing. So i'll just hit post before i decide to delete everything.
