Lately I've been feeling very little need to dress. But also, I've been feeling less eager to do anything feminine. In the last few days, I was at the point where I almost felt indifferent to the idea of having a female body. Right now it's clear to me that I want that body, but I don't want it as intensely as I did before. I feel weird because ever since I admitted to myself that I was female, my need to act and be feminine continually increased to the point where I fully dressed every night and every time I was alone, my inner voice was almost always female, and I barely questioned that I was female. One day, I was being especially feminine, but then, in about a day, I just stopped feeling like it. I now feel like I might 'relapse' back into male-hood--I say it like that because I feel like deep inside me I still am female, and I'm just convincing myself that I'm male because I'm tired of dealing with the fear and stress of keeping this secret. I don't want to go back to being convinced I'm male only to realize years later that I made a mistake. I feel like I'm threatening to kill a part of myself that, only recently, I learned to love.
Is anyone familiar with this? ???
I spoke to my therapist yesterday about a topic just like this that my wife and I seem to both be on and she described a cycle and kind of drew a shape in the air.
We move forward on the acceptance road and come to terms with our present understanding and that leaves us a bit happy/euphoric etc and our attitude rises, at some point in the attitude rise we get nervous/scared/apprehensive and begin to descend and slide backwards at the same time coming to settle somewhere behind where we were earlier. After a period of time we rethink over our earlier decisions and come to terms with them again and move forward. This time with more confidence, we get farther down the road and accept more of ourselves, life and our situation. Then our attitude begins to rise and the cycle starts over again. Very frustrating but after I thought it through I have definitely been on the cycle and since my coming out have watched my wife go through it as well. Kind of a fancier version of two steps forward, one step back but it does get us down the acceptance road eventually. Hope this helps.
I've never heard it described as Dana just did, but now that I've seen that it makes a lot of sense. I've definitely experienced similar peaks and valleys.
Audrey,
I am wondering how old you are. I ask because when I was in my twenties and thirties, I had the same frustration. Now this is just me, but I was convinced by this cycling that I was not transgender, that I would never be trans enough. There never seemed to be an answer for why, it just went in cycles. Settle in on one gender and sure enough things would shift back to the other. The older I got, the stronger the female side got. When I was finally driven crazy by the cycles, I decided I needed to transition. Again, for me, once I decided to move off that miserable position I watched myself like a hawk, looking for any sign of the cycle. Everything lined up and I have never had the first regret going female. I don't think my acceptance was due to hormones. I do think freeing myself from the shame and denial I felt had more to do with it. The drive to be the way everyone expected me to be, to conform to my family's view of me was always something that drove me from the female side.
I have another thought. The brain cannot stay in a constant state of euphoria or excitement about something. It does come and go in intensity. Cis-women don't stay in that state of enjoying being female. People have long periods of just living life with no influence of gender. If you are able to dress as female consistently, there will be times where it is no great thing, it is just how you dress. Do you feel like you are drawn to being male? Does it have an attraction more than it being the fall back situation with less pressure? A question I always asked myself was, "Do I desire being a guy?" My answer was that I had no pride in it. It had no draw. Activities done as male could be done as female as well. The main argument for 'male' was it was safe, it involved less fear. I don't think that is much of an inspiring reason to go with 'male.'
I hope this helps a little.
Moni
Quote from: Audrey94 on March 05, 2017, 04:24:46 AM
Lately I've been feeling very little need to dress. But also, I've been feeling less eager to do anything feminine. In the last few days, I was at the point where I almost felt indifferent to the idea of having a female body. Right now it's clear to me that I want that body, but I don't want it as intensely as I did before. I feel weird because ever since I admitted to myself that I was female, my need to act and be feminine continually increased to the point where I fully dressed every night and every time I was alone, my inner voice was almost always female, and I barely questioned that I was female. One day, I was being especially feminine, but then, in about a day, I just stopped feeling like it. I now feel like I might 'relapse' back into male-hood--I say it like that because I feel like deep inside me I still am female, and I'm just convincing myself that I'm male because I'm tired of dealing with the fear and stress of keeping this secret. I don't want to go back to being convinced I'm male only to realize years later that I made a mistake. I feel like I'm threatening to kill a part of myself that, only recently, I learned to love.
Is anyone familiar with this? ???
Awfully similar to the prelude to my many "WTF am I Doing ???" meltdowns. You do things to address the GD, start feeling better, then that devil starts whispering "You got this beat. It was just a phase. You handled it before OK, you can do it again...."
It is scary to do or even think about trying something different. The ole "Better the devil you know....". It took a long time for me to learn and APPLY the proper response: "I know What Does Not Work". You spent a lot of years handling the GD one way and you know, you just know, it isn't or doesn't really work. Fear, Shame, Guilt, and Internalized Transphobia are great De-motivators of trying something different. Especially when shame and guilt are both screaming that you do not deserve any joy or happiness in your life because you are.....
Joanne and Moni said it best. i too have felt this. And it sucks. it happens strognest when I am accepting myself more as a woman. I will feel amazing and can move forth. Then, the evil male demon whats to come back and convince me he is just fine and you can handle the masculiniity. I think it is deeply sub-conious. Like me, you were proabaly made to be a ''man'' and it was forced into you during the years. The brain hate change nor matter how good it is. My days of having ''him'' around have gone down dramatically but he still tries to kill me.
Moni what did you do in your tweneties and thirties to allow you real side to come up? I am almsot 23 and the male demon needs to die!
Quote from: Audrey94 on March 05, 2017, 04:24:46 AM
Lately I've been feeling very little need to dress. But also, I've been feeling less eager to do anything feminine. In the last few days, I was at the point where I almost felt indifferent to the idea of having a female body. Right now it's clear to me that I want that body, but I don't want it as intensely as I did before. I feel weird because ever since I admitted to myself that I was female, my need to act and be feminine continually increased to the point where I fully dressed every night and every time I was alone, my inner voice was almost always female, and I barely questioned that I was female. One day, I was being especially feminine, but then, in about a day, I just stopped feeling like it. I now feel like I might 'relapse' back into male-hood--I say it like that because I feel like deep inside me I still am female, and I'm just convincing myself that I'm male because I'm tired of dealing with the fear and stress of keeping this secret. I don't want to go back to being convinced I'm male only to realize years later that I made a mistake. I feel like I'm threatening to kill a part of myself that, only recently, I learned to love.
Is anyone familiar with this? ???
Yes. I secretly crossdressed for years, starting when I was 6 or 7, slipping into my mother's dressing room and trying on her lingerie. I felt horribly guilty about it, but it was the only way I could find relief from the unrelenting mental pain and discordance I labored with. Dressing was euphoric, like a drug. It killed the pain. Then the high would fade, and the strong desires would abate, too - for a while. I would feel relieved, because as Joanne and Moni said, there was so much shame and denial connected to these feelings. I didn't want this. I just wanted to be "normal". I knew being female was an impossible dream, and I needed to stop torturing myself.
When the feminine desires and feelings to crossdress started to return, I would say to myself, "Oh no, not this again." I tried to suppress it, just like Joanne said, I would tell myself, "I can beat this!". I would go through the classic cycles of purging any female clothes I had secretly collected, and "man up". Sometimes that worked for months, and sometimes it worked for years. But the desires never, ever left.
The thing is I did not know I was transsexual. I though transsexuals were people who underwent medical changes to their bodies. I thought I was a ->-bleeped-<-, and this was some weird fetish, because there was usually some sexual component to dressing. But crossdressing never fixed anything - it just made things worse. It wasn't until much later in life, in my 50s, that I found out being transgender was a thing. It explained so much! Yet, I remained in denial. I was married. I had kids, a career, a mortgage - transitioning was absolutely out of the question.
One thing to remember, Audrey, is the male part of you is just that, part of you. What needs to be vanquished is the stress and fear we all experience when we realize our social persona is not who we really are and we need to change it. That change can come with a heavy price, and can be overwhelming and terrifying.
You will find your way. The best advice I can give you is to remember to be patient and kind to yourself. You have the blessing of being young and having many more options and resources than I did in my 20s. Transition is hard, it is expensive, and it is scary. But you will know when it is time. To paraphrase one of Joanne's nuggets of wisdom, "Which fear is worse?" The fear of transition, or the fear of wasting years of your life pretending to be male?
With kindness,
Terri
On a more positive note, as you begin to feel less like a poseur and more comfortable and confident in your womanhood you relax and settle into a more comfortable presentation. You don't feel the need to always be "on" to reduce insecurity. I find that when I feel insecure I rely more on outward trappings to bolster myself.
Not that it isn't fun to be "on"!
The younger people sometimes describe this as "gender fluid", which I do not understand. For me, I never stopped thinking about being a woman. I thought about it every day of my life. I did what I had to do. We are all different and we all need to discover ourselves.
Hi Sailor,
I wish I had a secret formula to impart to you. That time of my life was very distressing. At your age you have so much more information available to you, which is great. Of course, some information can only be gotten by your real life experience. I think there is no better way to figure things out then to try things and see how they work. We can sit and make all kinds of theories and let fear influence us a lot, or we can go out, experiment and see how things makes us feel.
My opinion is transgender feelings never go away. I am not convinced that it is necessary to completely 'kill off the male demon.' Everyone might have a different take. I have learned to be at peace with him looking over my shoulder. He served a purpose at one time but I outgrew him. If you want something more concrete, I will offer something I did which I posted about before. I wrote a journal. I wrote it but separated it out as written by two personalities. 'He' was given a forum to say anything from his perspective. 'She' had the same chance. It allowed for a good airing out of how I felt from both sides. Over time I figured a lot out by doing this. A big thing I learned was that 'she things' were always pleasant, comfortable. 'He things' were driven to override that because of guilt, shame, and denial. She became dominant and he became a shadow. You may find a different result.
I hope this wasn't derailing the thread, but I thought it might relate.
Moni
Hi Audrey,
What you describe sounds alot like me before I discovered I am trans. I can say that most of my life I went through periods of binging with my crossdressing for days or weeks on end. Then like having gotten the fix I needed I backed off or stopped altogether for a period of time. This is not to be confused with those times I was overwhelmed by guilt over what I was doing, purged my stash and swore off ever doing it again. Eventually the need would come back and I would dress again when I could. The cycle has repeated over and over with it's ebb and flow for more than 50 years. I just recently came to accept myself as a trans woman and start the physical process to become Her.
So what I am saying and what the others have said it these feeling you have are completely normal for us.
Hugs,
Jeanette
Sometimes you just have to unplug and just BE. There is nothing wrong with dropping the 'transition struggle" to just take time to enjoy where you are at. I have so many friends that never seem to spend any time in the moment, always looking for something to do to get them in to a more feminine light or what have you...
It is hard to practice living in the moment, but the happiest people I know reside there most of the time.
Quote from: Maybebaby56 on March 05, 2017, 04:41:57 PM
Wow. All I can say, Kaity, is you and I must have had very different lives.
Just drop the "transition struggle" and be? I can't tell you how many times I considered putting a rope around my neck and ending all this "being".
I guess I should have taken the time to enjoy where I was at, instead of going through the hell of drug addiction and prison.
I am glad you had the spiritual wherewithal to just unplug and be. It was my fate to have a more difficult path. A lot of people on this forum struggle with daily existence. It's not a question of stopping to smell the roses. It's is a question of survival.
With kindness,
Terri
I took the "Just Unplug" as being mostly akin to what my therapist(paid), as well as my "Reality Therapist" (wife) tell me time and time again. "Stop trying to control the future. Who mode you Goddess of the Universe?".
I can fret for days over where "My Transition" is taking me. Or, I can choose to let the sailor in me light my path. "It's not the destination, but the voyage that counts". The inner Control Freak, Needs to know all answers, Engineer in me only cares about the "End Game", or a Plan B, or C
Hey Terri,
Sounds like you and I have traveled some familiar paths. I have played the role of addict and been abused, but that is not my present. I have not led some unscathed life, nor have any of the sisters I am akin to. We all have our struggles. Just made the conscious decisions to not live in a hell realm over who I am and view things through a positive lens.
I think that you may have misunderstood what I trying to get across to mean something I did not intend. Joanne, you got it.
Quote from: Maybebaby56 on March 05, 2017, 09:29:51 AM
One thing to remember, Audrey, is the male part of you is just that, part of you. What needs to be vanquished is the stress and fear we all experience when we realize our social persona is not who we really are and we need to change it. That change can come with a heavy price, and can be overwhelming and terrifying.
I know this was intended for Audrey, but I can't help myself but respond. Now obviously this is just me, but as I'm exploring myself I'm finding that the only male part of me is my male parts. Dressing and acting male were a lie I perpetrated to avoid ridicule, if there was never any ridicule directed at me for being feminine I might have already transitioned right around puberty, in an effort to prevent the formation of masculine features, but it was always presented as something that only freaks and weirdos would do, never as something that could be considered a legitimate disconnect between mind and body, always the sex addled cross-dressing lunatic, never the girl next door.
Disclaimer: ->-bleeped-<- is a spectrum, just because I'm all the way on the F side doesn't mean you have to be too, there's no "you must be this far from your assigned gender to ride" rule, as much as some folks think there should be. It could also be that you are bi-gendered in some way, and flip flop between the two, in which case wether to transition completely, try to stop at androgenous, or not transition at all becomes a personal choice based on which gender you'd feel more dysphoric in, or maybe equally so in both. Personally I think that's somewhat unlikely, androgenous and other types of gender neutral people seem to firmly know this is them, and what I see here looks like doubt, basically questioning if you're really feminine enough to be female, and defaulting to male just in case.
To respond to the OP, don't listen to me, listen to yourself.
Quote
I feel like deep inside me I still am female, and I'm just convincing myself that I'm male because I'm tired of dealing with the fear and stress of keeping this secret.
There's another way to stop having the fear and stress of having this secret, and I think you know what it is. I'm not going to tell you everything will go great, and you won't have any problems, but it'll solve this dilemma, and chances are good you'll survive it. Detransission on the other hand does not solve this problem, it just makes the secret even deeper, the fear and the stress will stay with you, along with the occasional feminine urge. This is half for me because I've still only told my mother and closest female friend, and I know I have to be out to everyone within a year because I don't think it'll be long now before I'm starting hormones and it'll be pretty hard to hide eventually, better to come out on my terms than in a confrontation, right?
Quote from: kaitylynn on March 05, 2017, 06:28:43 PM
Hey Terri,
Sounds like you and I have traveled some familiar paths. I have played the role of addict and been abused, but that is not my present. I have not led some unscathed life, nor have any of the sisters I am akin to. We all have our struggles. Just made the conscious decisions to not live in a hell realm over who I am and view things through a positive lens.
I think that you may have misunderstood what I trying to get across to mean something I did not intend. Joanne, you got it.
I apologize for my lack of understanding. Your strength of character is commendable.
~Terri
Thanks for sharing, everyone. I feel better right now than yesterday, and after reading everything you all wrote, I'm less confused. I've read about these cycles before and I don't know why it didn't occur to me... Maybe I was just so attracted to the idea that I could live happily as a cis-gendered man that I forgot all about it. I don't really know.
Quote from: HappyMoni on March 05, 2017, 07:18:19 AMI am wondering how old you are. I ask because when I was in my twenties and thirties, I had the same frustration. Now this is just me, but I was convinced by this cycling that I was not transgender, that I would never be trans enough. There never seemed to be an answer for why, it just went in cycles. Settle in on one gender and sure enough things would shift back to the other. The older I got, the stronger the female side got. When I was finally driven crazy by the cycles, I decided I needed to transition.
Yeah I'm 22. I really don't want to keep going through cycles. Maybe I can just temper my gender euphoria by never indulging myself in too much femininity, and then maybe I won't cycle back?
Quote from: HappyMoni on March 05, 2017, 07:18:19 AMDo you feel like you are drawn to being male? Does it have an attraction more than it being the fall back situation with less pressure? A question I always asked myself was, "Do I desire being a guy?" My answer was that I had no pride in it. It had no draw. Activities done as male could be done as female as well. The main argument for 'male' was it was safe, it involved less fear. I don't think that is much of an inspiring reason to go with 'male.'
I hope this helps a little.
Moni
Yes, that does help. Thank you. And no, nothing draws me to being male other than the comfort in not being viewed super differently. I don't have any pride in being male really, but now I wonder if I would be if I ever succeeded with any of the women I've fallen for over the years. I think I would be... Sometimes it's easy for me to see myself as a 'failed male' that wants to try womanhood just to escape that. I don't want to think about that >.<"
Quote from: SailorMars1994 on March 05, 2017, 08:12:25 AM
Joanne and Moni said it best. i too have felt this. And it sucks. it happens strognest when I am accepting myself more as a woman. I will feel amazing and can move forth. Then, the evil male demon whats to come back and convince me he is just fine and you can handle the masculiniity. I think it is deeply sub-conious. Like me, you were proabaly made to be a ''man'' and it was forced into you during the years. The brain hate change nor matter how good it is. My days of having ''him'' around have gone down dramatically but he still tries to kill me.
Yeah, I was definitely made to be a man.. Probably more so by peers at school than parents. I kind of feel crazy when I do it but I also have a tendency of seeing my male side as a different person. It feels natural that way at least. Anyways, something I decided early on was that my male side would love my female side. He'd sympathize with her being stuck in a male body and growing up as a boy. He'd realize that he's had more than his fair share of time occupying my body and that he would help her get to that place. I figured I would make it this way so my male side wouldn't shun my female side when I felt male again. And it worked: I didn't put off my female side in disgust or anything... I just doubted it existed. I don't know how to guard against that doubt...
I wish I could respond to more of your advice, everyone. It's 3 am and my eyes are shutting. Thanks again for all the advice. I've been taking it easy and just riding it out. I met a local trans woman a few days ago. I haven't reached out to her after our first conversation ever since I started feeling all bummed out and stuff, but I think I will tomorrow. Moni, I'm taking your advice to go try things. I am a serial overthinker/ponderer and I know it. I like the idea about the journal too. I don't suffer from much shame or guilt and I think I can get over the fear, but the self-doubt gets me... I think a journal could help me with that. :)
Quote from: Dani on March 05, 2017, 09:58:45 AM
The younger people sometimes describe this as "gender fluid"
Wow, I'd never really made a connection between the cyclic ebb and flow of the level of dysphoria with being gender fluid, but you have a good point! That said, even when I wasn't being tortured by dysphoria, I can't really say that I felt like a man. Rather, during these periods, it just felt like I could tolerate living as a male without it driving me bonkers.
Quote from: Violets on March 06, 2017, 06:59:12 AM
Wow, I'd never really made a connection between the cyclic ebb and flow of the level of dysphoria with being gender fluid, but you have a good point! That said, even when I wasn't being tortured by dysphoria, I can't really say that I felt like a man. Rather, during these periods, it just felt like I could tolerate living as a male without it driving me bonkers.
Much the reason why I adopted the "Non-Binary" reality of my life these days. Certainly not male with an (almost) B cup and certainly not female with an (almost) bald head, still living and present primarily as male due to other far more pressing life circumstances.
If I looked at myself as purely MTF then WTF ??? I should be be doing X, Y & Z.... and I can't. Should I torture myself or simply acknoledge "Today's" reality?
As Terri said, the male part remains a part of you. For me, as a non-transitioning CD, it's more that the female part is a part of me.
We all have some of both, and it helps to acknowledge that and learn to live with both. I like how Moni put it, "at peace with [the male demon] looking over my shoulder."
I break into tears at movies or when listening to NPR's Story Corps (nice story on there now storycorps.org "I Was Worried that You Liked Me as a Girl" with a trans boy and his Mom). I like to talk about families. Not about sports or cars.
But I value my relative physical strength, and my ability to shoo the cat off the kitchen counter with my deepest, loudest voice.
I have both.
Randy
Sent from my SM-N910V using Tapatalk
Quote from: Audrey94 on March 05, 2017, 04:24:46 AM
Lately I've been feeling very little need to dress. But also, I've been feeling less eager to do anything feminine. In the last few days, I was at the point where I almost felt indifferent to the idea of having a female body. Right now it's clear to me that I want that body, but I don't want it as intensely as I did before. I feel weird because ever since I admitted to myself that I was female, my need to act and be feminine continually increased to the point where I fully dressed every night and every time I was alone, my inner voice was almost always female, and I barely questioned that I was female. One day, I was being especially feminine, but then, in about a day, I just stopped feeling like it. I now feel like I might 'relapse' back into male-hood--I say it like that because I feel like deep inside me I still am female, and I'm just convincing myself that I'm male because I'm tired of dealing with the fear and stress of keeping this secret. I don't want to go back to being convinced I'm male only to realize years later that I made a mistake. I feel like I'm threatening to kill a part of myself that, only recently, I learned to love.
Is anyone familiar with this? ???
Not familiar with it but then I have never been interested in dresses or makeup. I wear jeans shoes and shirts. Women's of course but casual. I guess I'm a plain Jane kind of girl. Oh but I do wear nail polish. I like nail polish.🙂
Quote from: JoanneB on March 05, 2017, 04:50:39 PM
I took the "Just Unplug" as being mostly akin to what my therapist(paid), as well as my "Reality Therapist" (wife) tell me time and time again. "Stop trying to control the future. Who mode you Goddess of the Universe?".
I can fret for days over where "My Transition" is taking me. Or, I can choose to let the sailor in me light my path. "It's not the destination, but the voyage that counts". The inner Control Freak, Needs to know all answers, Engineer in me only cares about the "End Game", or a Plan B, or C
Hi Joanne,
I'm so like this. Like you said, I need to take it a day at a time and enjoy the ride. I need to stop fretting about the future.
Love your posts.
Paige :)
I am always amazed by threads such as this one. Although our individual paths are varied, the central themes are fairly consistent.
I've had a similar but not identical experience over the past several months. I was stressed nearly to the breaking point with dysphoria and confusion over how to resolve the consuming internal turmoil over my MtF urges and transgenrderism. With the help of friends here on this forum, I mustered the strength to begin therapy. Therapy made all the difference, rapidly easing the disphoria, helping me to understand my internal milieu and gender conflicts. Resumption of meditation practice really helped gain a much clearer perspective of my internal organization, and aided in calming my emotional distress. I guess I did not take the route that many do, moving directly into transition although I was very, very close to starting HRT, willing to do nearly anything for relief from dysphoria at the outset of my therapy.
I clearly see my internal personality and psychological makeup is feminine if not overtly female, certainly not male. Over about 60 years of life as anatomical and socialized male, I've learned the routine, the roles, the standard male behaviors quite well. I am not suggesting that it would have been the wrong decision in principle to transition. Without going into details here, the consequences of transitioning would have been quite catastrophic for me with absolutely predictable loss of my marriage, most of my family and very likely my career. I viewed, and continue to view transition as the absolute last resort for me short of suicide. If I lived on a desert island where the consequences were few, or I were younger with less life infrastructure at risk, I would have surely chosen to transition.
So here I am, now with substantial time spent in therapy with a therapist that is more along the lines of the Freudian analytic school with substantial degree of Jungian approach as well. Not your typical gender therapist. Interesting that I have had a substantial loss of urge to dress, to the point that I purged all my feminine effects several weeks ago. I would like to believe that I have found a long term solution to my dysphoria in therapy and meditation, but honestly am optimistic yet skeptical. For now, I'm getting along fine. I am regretting the purge, mainly because I liked the stuff; nice clothes I picked out over about the last couple years, accessories, etc. The entire collection became quite physically large and impractical to keep from discovery by my wife and family, whom I have not come out to, or even made slightest inkling of my transgender state. This purge was not driven by guilt or shame, simply by pragmatism. I miss the stuff, not as much the opportunity to dress.
With the perspective that I understand my internal workings better, I'm feeling less need to dress as a means to (1) reassure myself that external femininity is congruent with my internal psychological state, (2) relieve dysphoria (in fact, dysphoria was worse in rebound after a period of dressing), (3) embrace femininity, to the contrary it brings up conflicting feelings about the "realness" of my femininity.
The last point has been intensified by the birth of my first grandson just less than 2 years ago and my same daughter's second pregnancy she just announced to us last week. I am feeling less and less urge to play out a feminine role seeing her life evolve as I realize the intimate role of maternity in the larger scheme of being a woman. As has been correctly stressed many times on this forum, childbirth is not the sine qua non of being a woman. Nevertheless, it is a constant reminder that in transition, I cannot help but feel I would be a facsimile of a woman, perhaps even an excellent one at that, but not a complete woman--at least in the physical, bodily sense. I don't want to have this misunderstood as critical of transwomen. I am wholeheartedly in support of transition, MtF and accept the reality to the definition of woman as an internal gender based concept and reality. Truthfully, I stand in awe of the amazing transitions many members of this forum have achieved, the remarkable strength of character and resolve demonstrated in moving toward this goal. In a more perfect world, as I said previously; I, too, would transition.
But, for now I can manage without having to undergo the physical treatment for gender dysphoria, avoiding need to make my best effort to physically bring my gender incongruent body as close as I can to a gender congruent body. My therapist made an interesting comment to me when discussing how I internally felt odd, unusual, always the outlier and eccentric most of my life. He asked is I was happy with my life on the whole: family, career, personal values, etc. I replied that I was. He made the simple observation to the effect of "So, you are different. Why should that matter? Do you really care what other entirely conventional people think? [My answer: "Of course not"] You are successful in life as a whole but we need to figure out a way to relieve your unhappiness over gender. I don't see any inherent problems with your life or your larger psychological makeup. Now let's work on a solution to the gender problem."
I'm getting older, and with it, the external flesh and trappings seem less important to me now that I have been able to work through my gender conundrum with my therapist. I seem to be managing well enough knowing what and who I am, worrying less about the external perceptions of the world. I realize I am the outlier here and worry that the state of mind I've managed over the last 8 months or so may not be a solution lasting through the remainder of life. Some of my friends here have expressed their concerns that I was attempting to deny or rejecting my "trans-ness" in an attempt to conform to a cis-gender role. Not so! Here I am and here I will be. I'm in this for the long haul.
So, Audrey, at age 22 you have considerable flexibility that many of us who have lots of life's infrastructure in place do not. The Buddhist say "the jewel is in the lotus" which is usually taken to mean something along the lines of the answer lies within. You are at a point in life where you have the time to do some introspection, seek therapy, figure out what you are and what you want to be.
Forgive me for the long post.
Steph
I too am one of those people who have gone through periods when I have thrown away everything female; this includes wardrobe and mental state; and tried to go back to just being male. And I always end up buying female clothes all over again, wigs and all. I have learned that "when and if" I go through those states of mind again, At the most I will box up everything and store them away in the garage and tell myself to give it time and see what happens. I always end up retrieving those boxes! Its like even if I tried to go back and being male and male only, I cant do it. The female voice in my head is ever present. Oh, sometimes the voice appears to take a vacation for a period of time, but she is always there and always returns. I can say that purging the clothes rarely happens anymore. And the length of time the male voice comes back is getting shorter. So I know inside that things are moving forward, just at a slower pace than what I would like it to.
And then there is the generation I grew up in. The world when there was no internet, and thinking things like this were taboo. The world that I thought I was the only person in the whole world who thought the things that I did and that I must be sick. So I never talked about it to anyone. It was kept bottled up inside and the inner voice was not allowed top speak. I think this is why I have such a hard time in accepting the female side. When you live a life the same way for so many years, the one you were forced to believe in, change becomes a hard thing to accept.
It took me many years to get where I am today. I accept who I am. I accept the female voice. I accept my life as a girl. It is who I long to be, need to be, want to be. I am a girl.
Roni
Quote from: Roni-jalyn on March 08, 2017, 06:39:20 AM
And then there is the generation I grew up in. The world when there was no internet, and thinking things like this were taboo. The world that I thought I was the only person in the whole world who thought the things that I did and that I must be sick. So I never talked about it to anyone. It was kept bottled up inside and the inner voice was not allowed top speak. I think this is why I have such a hard time in accepting the female side. When you live a life the same way for so many years, the one you were forced to believe in, change becomes a hard thing to accept.
Roni,
I thank you for writing this paragraph for me. You and I must be of similar ages. Did you also search the libraries surreptitiously in order to see if you could discovery what was wrong with you? In those days such information was scant and for a young person nearly impossible to find. You didn't dare let anyone suspect what you were looking for.
Hugs,
Jeanette
No Jeanette, I didn't. I always tried not to think about it. I never acted out. I didn't accept what was "wrong" with me until after I was in my 50's. As far as I knew, I was the only one in the world who thought the things I did.