Okay, so, you don't know me. Aside from a post or two here and there I'm usually a bit quiet and shy when it comes to message boards. Dunno why.
But maybe someone or several someones has been where I am now, and maybe that someone or several someones can tell me how to get out of this funk, to focus on hopeful and good things again. Maybe someone can cheer me up.
I am totally fishing for emotional support, and I'm sorry. I know message boards tend to be a bit like large extended friend circles and when someone who hangs around quietly for a long time finally says something there's a bit of a 'where were you when---?' that goes on.
I'm 29. In about three months I'll turn 30. And that number, that age, keeps hitting me in the face with feelings of dread and hopelessness related to my transition.
I started transition at 23. I was on hormones for about nine months, I think, before my parents threw me out (I had moved home after leaving college for a while so I could start transition, and was a bit slow finding a new place to live) when they found out that I was secretly in a romance with a young man around my age and planning to go full time.
I restarted my hormone treatments about six-nine months later and since then I've been very hit and miss with funding. One month I'd have enough money for hormones, the next two I wouldn't. And it's not like it was a low-priority cost for me, I'd skip paying the rent, the power, the phone -- I just never seemed to have enough for everything I needed just to stay alive. I'd be able to afford them for about four months, and then I'd suddenly have an emergency -- broken foot, severe depression one winter/spring (I went to a bad place emotionally, not connected with transition, more to do with parental rejection, and got very scary), unemployed TWICE in the last two years.
It has now been almost 18 months since I was last on hormones. For the better part of the last five years I've been on and off them enough to ... A) severely ->-bleeped-<- up my body chemistry, and B) sustain a level of passable female-ness even without having finished a 3 year transition. I have ... moderately full B-ish cup breasts (slightly too small for my 5'11/6'00 frame) that are still a bit conical but much more womanly-breastish than early pubescance-girly. But for the last 18 months I havent been able to afford any hormones. I was unemployed for six months, and then when I found a job my rent went up by over 20% and my power bill quadrupled that same month. All of my hormone-savings went up in smoke. And since the recession hit a year or so ago it seems like all bills everywhere have dropped their 'you can skip a month and pay 2 months together' final notices and have just adopted 'if you dont pay us in 15 days we shut you off/evict you' policies instead, and let's face it. On hormones and freezing to death (in my own home or on the street) does not radically improve on my situation. So it's been 18 months, and my face has lost the feminine roundness from hormones -- it looks somewhere between androgynous and masculine again, sans babyfat this time.
I mean, I still pass as well as I ever did, I guess. I'm much better with makeup than I was when I first went full time at 23, and yes, I have been living full time since then. I have long (thin, but long) hair that looks very feminine and I have wider hips than I suspect I deserve given my track record with hormones. My shoulders are still too broad, but my arms are long and thin and my hips arent completely out of balance with my shoulders, and when I can control my genetic disposition towards having a potbelly (thank you daddy) I look fairly hot for a girl -- I had a pair of young men give me their sweatshirt a few days ago because I was shivering outside waiting for the bus. I was hiding my face from them, but they took me as writ -- female.
But ... I've always had in the back of my mind this thought that as long as I could get my transition fully on the road again and mostly over by the time I turned 30 that somehow things would be good, that I'd still be young and passable and able to be semi-stealth and have semi-normal relationships with people as a semi-normal looking tall girl.
But now that decade marker is coming up, and while I'm sort of managing to convince myself that I can consider myself a YOUNG WOMAN until I'm around 40, I feel as though the window of opportunity to 'make it' as a young, passable post-transition woman is closing on me, and that anything I do after 30 will just result in an unhappy future of dissapointment for me.
Not that I would stop living as myself, or transition back. Nothing like that. I've been out so long I wouldnt know how to play the part of a guy again, not that I want to. I just feel like yes, I do this because this is who I am, but there's no more rainbows on the horizon. No more hope for happiness. I dont want to be one of those freakishly weird old women who cling to their lost youth and pretend to be a decade younger than they are (although I have... considered it...) And I know there are plenty of beautiful women who are 35 or 40ish (Charisma Carpenter, Angelina Jolie, Carmen Electra) and plenty of beautiful women who are over 40...
I'm just... I dunno, reaching, I guess. For someone, anyone, who has been where I have been, who can... give me hope.
Sorry to dump this all on you. Maybe just venting is enough. I'll see.
