Quote from: carrie359 on August 13, 2014, 05:10:33 PM
Laura,
So wish we had the internet when I was young.. I would have been on E when I was 11 if I knew what was wrong.. I faked it well.. I really did..and look at the old me as a sad scared helpless girl in a guy body just using what she had to make it best she could as a dude.
I am trying to look forward and not back now but its hard.. I mourn the life I did not get but have to enjoy the future so on we go....
I can only be the best me I am now.. and enjoy the time I have left....
Love it...
Sincerely with love
Carrie
Honestly, it wasn't that for me. Even though I didn't have the internet. I knew where to look for some info back in '88. I was able to piece together enough info to know that surgeries and hormones were available. I knew that you had to see a therapist. But that was all. I had no other really specific information.
But, it wasn't that stuff that held me back. It was the idea of "Man...there is no way in hell that my dad is going to go along with this." If I had lived in a single parent home, I would have told my Mom everything when we had "the talk" when I was in fifth grade. I was busted for the 1000th time with her clothes in my room and she asked me point blank if I wanted to live as a girl. I would have told her yes without a second thought had that been the case. One really ironic thing is that had she taken me to see a therapist, it more than likely would have been the one that I saw when I went downtown to where his office was at that time. He was one of the few therapists in the immediate area that worked with trans people. Of course, my Mom would have probably called him a quack back then too. But I would have demanded to go back.
I don't know....thinking about that whole thing just sucks. On the one hand, it would have been great to be able to talk to someone about this stuff at that age, (Even better if they could have helped me get on hormone blockers). But I know that I would have been without any real power to get anything done at that time.
Hell, I remember when I came out to my Mom at age 29, she immediately jumped on the "you are only doing this because you read about it on the internet" bandwagon. Never mind that I had felt this way for 25 years at that time, and only had internet access for about a year. It was just after my 29th birthday a few months prior, all of the walls that I had built up to fight against GID had crumbled into dust. I basically gave her an ultimatum at that point: "You can have a dead 'son' or a live daughter. The choice is up to you." I was quite serious about it at that point since I felt that this was my last shot in life. It was the third time I had felt like killing myself (The first times were ages 10 and 15). But through the use of many distractions, I was able to keep things at bay. By 29 that was no longer an option.