Come to think of it, I suppose I should do a quick "intro" for new folks, and, you know, since I'm a newbie here.
I'm 57 years old, and while my first, vivid, memories of a strong sense that my outer candy shell didn't match my inner nougat filling began in third grade, I spend the next 50 or so years trying to make those feelings go away.
Extremely happily married, with a wonderful son... when he graduated college in 2021 I had increasingly found the episodes of deeply longing to address the situation and not being able to push it away getting longer and longer, and my ability to suppress them shorter and shorter.
So in January of 2022 I began working with a gender therapist (my wife thinking I was talking to someone about panic attacks which I'd increasingly had... which, while technically true, was a lie with with I was quite uncomfortable).
Later that summer, after our 30th wedding anniversary, I came out to my wife. It was the single hardest thing I've ever done. We talked all night that night, and she came home from work the next day crying... and has not shed another tear since. She has been unbelievable supportive and amazing every single day since then.
The mantra I used when coming out to her was this: "I would rather go slowly together, than quickly on my own." — meaning, the pace of this would always be when she was ready.
A few months later she suggested I start electrolysis (which I've now been doing for about 15 months... maybe halfway done?), she later suggested voice which I did, and in April of this year I started hormones.
A quick side note - I suffer from something called chronic daily cluster/migraines. If you've never heard of a cluster headache — that's great. Usually to have heard of them means to know someone with experience with them, and that's no good. They're called "alarm clock headaches" or by their no-so-nice name: "suicide headaches." Anyway, for the last 10 years I was forced to leave a job I loved because of all this... I have about 14 hours of migraine every day, and a cluster headache once per night, at exactly 1:07 am.
I mention that only because it was and continues to be a complicating factor in my hormone journey. We started slowly to make sure it wouldn't make things worse (that would have been the ballgame if it had) and have increased slowly over time.
My lead neurologist, who was against the hormones, actually put the odds at 70% making things worse, 20% the same, 10% better. So far I've had a dramatic decrease in cluster frequency (which could be related to my other treatments)... but good news is that so far I'm safely in the 30%.
You'll notice I haven't mentioned telling our son. Well we wanted to wait until we knew the hormones were going to be possible, and now that they seem established we've just been looking for an opportunity to have the talk. It was supposed to happen over the holidays but it didn't. More on that later.
But that is me, in a nutshell. And if you know me, I really lean towards the "nut" in nutshell.
Love,
Allie
