Quote from: Andrea_LS on December 04, 2013, 05:43:56 AM
My self-hatred had me in dirty clothes, unkempt face, messy hair, drinking and using drugs, and smoking unfiltered cigarettes like there was no tomorrow. By anyone's standards, I was an unhealthy mess.
Ouch. That statement really hits home for me. I stopped the drink & other drugs in the 90s, but everything else rings true until this past year.
My breaking point ?
I knew when I was 5 that I wanted to be a girl. Even before puberty hit I was fantasizing about it. This increased with puberty & continued into my 20s, 30s, & 40s ...
I somehow managed to convince myself that these were only fantasies and that I had no desire for any of these fantasies to actually become reality. On the few occasions I would look for pron, it was always images of MtF pron once I found that in 1999 (video was too obviously fake). Even this did not alert me to what now seems obvious.
Shortly after this time last year (13/Jan/2013 to be more precise) something inside me accepted that I wasn't going to have children of my own. I had known this for years - my wife went through very early menopause because of all the radiation she got for cancer as a teenager. But I hadn't really accepted it.
I didn't realise it at the time, but that acceptance was the weak link in the chains that had been doing such a thorough job of locking down my 'inner child' - the 5-year-old who wanted to be a girl.
That was my first breaking point. The one where I knew I had to do something.
Within a week:
I purchased some women's clothing for the first time (corsets - imagine that);
I found out (very little) about & bought some herbs with which to feminize myself;
My "inner child" woke up really pissed off at having been locked up for 38 years & forcefully introduced herself (in a vivid dream) as Tessa Marie;
I took way too many of those herbs (all of which seem to reduce blood pressure to some extent) and within 2 days my blood pressure dropped so low that I collapsed & became unresponsive for several minutes. I came to with my wife crying hysterically on the phone to Rescue. The EMTs arrived a few minutes later. My blood pressure was up to 90/60 about 10 mins after I came to.
My second breaking point was the result of these three happening simultaneously:
[1] Finding myself in the ER as a direct result of my own actions.
[2] Listening to the doctors & my wife fret for hours over what might have caused my sudden drop in blood pressure.
[3] Realising that I had very much not been in control of what I had been doing.
That was Sunday 20/Jan/2013.
My second breaking point was the realisation that I could not keep hiding from the desire to be female anymore. That I had to see someone about it & at least talk it through.
This was when I had to really face my fears. Talking to someone about it meant telling someone about it. My wife is my closest friend and confidant. She is also the breadwinner since I lost my job a few years ago. Everything that followed from that moment would be dependant upon whether or not she was going to order me out of the house.
Once I got home from the ER, I went upstairs to my wife who had collapsed into bed after the stress, worry & anxiety of not knowing what had caused her husband to collapse. I quietly told her I needed to talk with her and that I would wait for her in the kitchen. Something in my tone penetrated her exhaustion and prompted her to take my request very seriously. She came downstairs. I told her that I had wanted to be a girl since I was at most 5 (I remember the day vividly & I described it to her). I told her that those feelings had not left; had never left; that they were getting stronger. I told her I wasn't able to fight them off them any longer. I was beaten.
She wanted to rage, to scream, to yell at me in anger for doing this to her. But I looked so terrified, so vulnerable, that she couldn't bring herself to explode at me. She had never seen me that scared. So she listened. And at the end she held me and told me we would face this together.
I still do not know if our marriage will survive. In January 2013 she said SRS meant divorce & that she couldn't see herself ever being able to stomach sharing a bed with boobs that weren't hers. No surgeries are being contemplated, but she has become used to the extra boobs in her bed. On New Year's Eve she even insisted I reserve our hotel rooms for this year's Keystone TG Conference because she enjoyed last year so much. For now, we are still together. For now is good.
I wasn't expecting writing this to be so difficult. Tears of painful memory. Tears of joyful gratitude. It has been an interesting year.
