Quote from: Eve of Chaos on February 16, 2011, 11:19:10 PMmy therapist also warned me that it makes you moody and emotional and I may confuse that for a "wrong" feeling.
I'm using my own methods for transition, and I have become a lot more moody. I had a lot of trouble in the first few weeks, but that's only because I was trying to change too quickly. If you start out slow, the mood swings won't be as bad.
Actually, I'm feeling very moody right now, and it still feels better than what I felt back when I was more masculine. Now I'll get cranky or depressed, at the very worst. That's the extent to my negative emotions, now. Several months ago, the "low end" to my emotions would have been rage or aggression.
Being moody isn't necessarily a bad thing if you learn how to manage it. Even my worst days of being moody are often the same or even better than my
best days of pre-transition. That tells you exactly how WRONG testosterone was for me.
QuoteI also kind of feel like I need to push myself into the point of no return so I can get the strength to keep going and not hide out so much.
"Only he who has drunk the water knows whether it is cool or warm." - Zen saying
Just like the Zen saying above suggests, sometimes you have to drink the water. You can't just stare at it forever. If you feel like you need to try something, you should do it. But don't forget the Hendrix moderation:
"A mystic is a diver who can swim. A schizophrenic is a diver who can't. If you go too far out of your depth, you drown. If you never go out of your depth at all, you never learn how to swim." - Howard V. Hendrix,
Better AngelsQuote from: Eve of ChaosI am 100% sure that I want to be a girl, what I am not so sure of is if I can handle life if I dont pass to 95% of people.
That might change. Even though I feel essentially genderless, I've noticed that my transition experiment has made me feel more "girly" for lack of a better word. I've done a few things that i wouldn't have done pre-transition, and I've also changed my mindset about certain things.
A very intelligent person on another forum was talking about this effect. She said there is the men's science and the women's science. Men's science is about mechanics and predictability. Women's science is about adaptability and results. I've found, just like her, that as I began my transition process I began losing concern for the "men's science" in favor of the women's science. I stopped caring about knowing every little detail of transition, and instead I starting taking everything in the moment and started using more relative measures to judge my transition which were less based on timing and predictability.
The same thing could happen to you. All of the stuff you find important now, could change. I know you worry a lot about passing and about finding a way to make the body as female as possible. But if transition begins to FEEL right to you, I promise that it will be harder for you to obsess about those things. My transition experiment has significantly affected me emotionally in ways I could not have predicted before all of this. It feels really good to feel more female, and to not be plagued my masculine libido. Sometimes, these things are much more important than what the body looks like, or how quickly I am changing, or other things which I thought would be important before I began my experiment.
How I think about transition has changed a lot over the last two months. The same thing could happen to you. Try not to put too much obsession on the thoughts you are having now, because those thoughts could change.
Quote from: rejennyratedMy very good friend in the UK Dr Russell Ried was a big proponent of the idea of using an early exposure to low dosage anti androgens and hormones to sort out those for whom the idea of being famale was some sort of sexually driven fetish from those for whom it was indeed a matter of total identity need. The idea is that the HRT removes the male libido and thus anyone for whom this is mainly just a sexual fantasy will not like what happens and will stop before they do themselves any harm.
I agree with this totally. I was a classic ->-bleeped-<- case. Most of my transgendered thoughts from the age of 12-22 were of a sexual nature. It was only after that when I began to think of gender and try to work through all of my feelings.
As my male sex drive reduced and my "female" drive increased, it became much easier to focus on what I wanted out of transition. Yes, I had to adjust to the emotional changes. Yes, I'm going to have to deal with social judgments when I eventually come out to everybody. But transition still feels right to me.
If someone had some false ideas of what it means to be female, I'm sure that a couple of months of HRT would bring that to the surface very quickly. If someone's ->-bleeped-<- was tied to their male sex drive, I'm sure they would absolutely hate how hormones would make them feel.
