Hey, everybody.
My therapist directed me to this site, since I'm still fairly new to this whole thing, and after a few days of poking around I figured I'd go ahead and register and introduce myself. It seems to be a very supportive and informative community around here and it's a little bit of something that I need to help me through this. So, here's a little bit about myself.
I'm a 39 year old IT professional, who's always struggled with depression. There have been times when I have attempted to take my own life, when things had gotten bad enough, and I wasn't on my meds. During these bouts of depression, I always thought life would have been better if I'd been born a girl. Not easier, mind you. Just better. The attempts at my own life was in a twisted way of thinking, a means to achieve that through reincarnation or some such nonsense. Keep in mind, I'm an atheist so you can kind of understand how desperate I was.
I always thought that these thoughts and feelings were just a side affect of my depression, that it was some kind of wish fulfillment that I was using to escape my horrible, horrible life. Which, honestly, a lot of people I know would be jealous. Sure, while I'm living paycheck to paycheck, I do make enough to support myself, my wife of 15 years, and my 14 year old son. It's not perfect by any means, but it's a far cry from being horrible. Anyway, one day, late January, while at work, I had come to a sudden epiphany:
I had it all backwards.
It was while reading my tumblr and looking at a post about a trans woman and her cis woman partner (and forgive me if I'm using the wrong terminology, as I'm still very new to this) getting hateful posts on their tumblr account for being just who they were and I was looking at their pictures and realized just how jealous I was of them. How natural she looked and how happy she was, despite the hate. I wanted that to be me.
And I broke down in tears, and became a sniffling mess. Hell, I'm still tearing up thinking about it. I was almost useless for two weeks while I struggled with this, and realized that I had to get help, where I sought out my current Psychologist who specializes in gender related issues. The only person I've come out to (other than my medical doctor and my psychologist) is my wife and she's handling it amazingly well. I've yet to tell my son, or my parents, and to be frank, I'm still at a loss about what I'm going to do with myself, and I figure that this is probably a good place to come because a lot of you have already gone through this, if not gone through worse.
So, yeah. Here I am. Greetings.
-SHODAN-
