Be all that you can be. :)

[Sephirah]

This is kind of following on from my other thread about what pushed you into going down your road. What made you be all that you can be? What made you never look back? What made you finally say "I'm too old for this shiz!" What was the tipping point to be yourself?

[Lori Dee]

Divorcing wife #3 and leaving the state. I moved to a place I had only visited and knew no one there. I saw it as a fresh start, a chance to start a new life focused on myself. I cast off any imagined obligations to others and said, "This is MY time." I never looked back.

The course of my life changed dramatically in ways I never imagined, like being diagnosed with GD. But I embraced it as part of the new life I was about to live. I continue to live my life going forward and never looking back.

No regrets, no excuses, make it happen.

[CosmicJoke]

This is kind of following on from my other thread about what pushed you into going down your road. What made you be all that you can be? What made you never look back? What made you finally say "I'm too old for this shiz!" What was the tipping point to be yourself?

Good question. It was a whole cluster of things really but I think the main "tipping point" for me was 7 years of therapy. I spent all of my teen years in therapy. It became very clear and apparent to me my therapist wasn't going to do anything and neither were either of my parents. I sort of used that rage as the fuel to be myself.

Now I am 32 years old. I was hospitalized for a pulmonary embolism nearly a year ago. Being faced with my own mortality really made it that much clearer to me I may not have as much time as I think. I had thoughts about detransition and going back to "the way things were" before but now I realize I have to live each day to the fullest. Getting bottom surgery is that dream I'm chasing now.

I don't know if I gave the answer you were looking for but that's just the short version of the story.

[Caiwen]

Real acceptance and self love.

I struggled with it for a long time. There were times I thought I was embracing being trans, but I had so many thoughts and feelings and questions that just stayed in my head as I, sometimes dangerously, shuffled down the path that I ALWAYS questioned myself. I got to the point where it became so hard to identify as female that I just kept telling myself that I was non-binary, justifying it as "well, sometimes i feel just fine living as a male."

I just got tired of being tired all the time. I did the work on myself, and came to the concrete realization that I was a girl. No more pretenses. No more conditions. With a little bit of self compassion and forgiveness, I was able to let that sink in, and its been nothing but a wash of euphoria since.

I'm not going back.

[Sephirah]

Real acceptance and self love.

I struggled with it for a long time. There were times I thought I was embracing being trans, but I had so many thoughts and feelings and questions that just stayed in my head as I, sometimes dangerously, shuffled down the path that I ALWAYS questioned myself. I got to the point where it became so hard to identify as female that I just kept telling myself that I was non-binary, justifying it as "well, sometimes i feel just fine living as a male."

I just got tired of being tired all the time. I did the work on myself, and came to the concrete realization that I was a girl. No more pretenses. No more conditions. With a little bit of self compassion and forgiveness, I was able to let that sink in, and its been nothing but a wash of euphoria since.

I'm not going back.

The hardest person to love in this world, is yourself. Because we come at it with a mind seemingly designed against the very notion. It's the relationship that, hands down, takes the most effort of any we probably have in our lives. Which is weird and counterintuitive. But that's the beautiful mess of the human brain for you.

I'm proud of you. Of all of you. It takes a certain something inside a person to decide to do instead of do not do... there is no try (sorry, couldn't resist, lol)

[Lori Dee]

The hardest person to love in this world, is yourself.

This is because we know our own deepest, darkest secrets. We have failings, regrets, and things we just don't like about ourselves. The key is to accept these things. It doesn't mean condoning them. Work at making amends and improvements. It's a lifelong journey, but eventually, you reach a point where you can look at yourself in the mirror with forgiveness and say, "I love you!"
 

[Sephirah]

This is because we know our own deepest, darkest secrets. We have failings, regrets, and things we just don't like about ourselves. The key is to accept these things. It doesn't mean condoning them. Work at making amends and improvements. It's a lifelong journey, but eventually, you reach a point where you can look at yourself in the mirror with forgiveness and say, "I love you!"
 

Yeah, that's true. I also think we just have a brain designed with about a thousand different failsafes. We live with self-preservation in mind, although most of the time we don't realise it. Anything that's perceived as a situation where we could be hurt, we are like "Nope, you stay away from that! I don't care how much you want to do it, here's some emotional baggage and a nice hormonal cocktail, to show you why it's a terrible idea!" And showing vulnerability, like the kind that comes with love, is about the biggest risk the mind can take. We have literal hormonal drugs designed to avoid that kind of thing, lol. I don't know if it's evolutionary, or societal, but it's really annoying, lol.

[MissRachelW]

I work on ambulance, family illness and the pandemic taught my life is short and unexpected, so embrace things. But the tipping point, this last year, the event that has "enabled" me to start becoming me... Is my father's end stage alcoholism. He was a powerful man, with strong "traditional" views. We all know the type. I love him as he is my dad and I made many decisions in my life to try and make him proud, to live up to his expectations as the only son. Being here, being like the eldest daughter I suppose, if he knew, would upset him to say the least. But frankly despite massive family intervention with my sister's (cis females) for over two years, he still won't face the problem and I realised or felt he was gone (one sister says it's like death without the death). The facade of trying to please him fell away. I realised I have to be me. Otherwise I could end up addicted too or with poor mental health. It's early days for me and Rachel lives alongside my boy persona. I don't know how or where my story will go, I'm not full time, I still have days where I want to purge and repent and ive not even mastered make up yet!  but it was and is liberating to open this chapter in my life. The more I allow her existence the better it is.