I've been been wanting to join this forum for a while and today I finally did.
I don't know what my name is yet, my birth name is Bryan, I'll probably end up sticking to the cliche of my new name starting with the same letter and my stepdad always calls me B for short so you can just call me that for now.
Anyway, I'm 27 years old, like a lot of people who go through with this I've had this longing to be a girl since I was just a kid, then puberty came, I was going through all kinds of issues I couldn't wrap my head around, these changes that were beyond my control and like a lot of people I had a classic overcompensation period where I tried to be as macho as possible and god was that the most embarassing period of my life, I've had all kinds of anxiety problems and I've been medicated for anxiety for over a decade.
My family has never been able to figure out why I have these issues and all they can do is speculate so they throw around a million different words to describe me, bipolar, aspergers, etc.
Once I discovered the internet one of the things that slowly became a subject of intense fascination was ->-bleeped-<-, I was surprised how common it was and I was surprised how different all of these people could be, before the internet I lived in a bubble and everything I thought I knew about gender and sexuality was being challenged and eventually completely obliterated.
I really started thinking about this stuff on a serious level for the first time in my life, and I realized that I've always wanted to be a girl, that these were feelings I always had and I kept them away because I thought you could just do that, I thought it was somehow normal to have feelings like that and that you could just ignore them and everything would be alright, and I kept trying to do that even after that realization, but it just made things worse, and eventually these thoughts started to consume me and for years it's all I could think about.
Now I've accepted that I do have gender dysphoria to some degree, and my realization has caused it to accelerate, and it isn't going away, I no longer think this is some little fantasy, it's the actual direction I want to go in life.
I've kept this from my family for as long as I've could, I've been telling them that I needed to see a therapist but I couldn't specify why, however recently I lost two of my cats to feline leukemia and that plus getting into a fight with my mom almost led to me having a nervous breakdown, I realized I needed some form of relief and that the only thing that would work (besides killing myself) is telling my family the truth, so i did.
I've told 4 people, my mom, grandma, stepdad and one of my brothers, I'm not planning to tell anyone else until after I start seeing a therapist, and I'm still trying to find someone who specializes in this subject, is affordable and takes my insurance provider. I don't want to give too many specifics about where I live other than that it's somewhere in the Memphis metropolitan area, if there's anyone who could help me with this that would be great.
