Hi folks,

ever since I embraced the fact that I'm trans, I had this feeling of wasted years. I'm 26 years old and I'm hoping that one day, I'll be able to transition and pass. But lately, watching all those transition videos and reading about other's journeys, I feel like the last 26 years of my life were just a waste of time. This feeling is tearing me apart from the inside and I constantly have to question what would have been if I was more courageous and embraced myself sooner. All that time passed and I feel it was for nothing. And the feeling is just unbearable.

Do any of you feel the same? If so, how do you cope with this?

Big hug! I realized I was transgender in my late 40's and I said "Why, oh why didn't I figure this out when I was in my 20's?" You're starting from my dream point. You're going to be fine. You can "what if" things to death, but there's no reward in doing so.

Hugs, Devlyn

Sort of. But I am nearly twice your age. Transitioning at 26 sounds great from my perspective.

I am not trying to make light of your situation.  I'm am sure that at 26 you wish you had started at 16.  It is okay to feel that way. But if you are ready to transition, also try to focus on transitioning now instead of waiting until you are 36.

"Sooner or later we must give up all hope for a better yesterday."

Dear Sidney,
   Don't feel alone, I am 59 and I am only now transitioning. I am so incredibly happy to be doing so. I only occasionally allow myself thoughts like you describe. The thing is, it does no good to worry about it. Why torture yourself with what is done. Take each day and make it positive. Work on getting where you want to get to. The real crime would be to waste potential happiness and time on something that can't be changed. You are so young, if you are wise, you can be yourself for a very long time.
Moni

You are near my time table as far as the transition but under a whole different environment. I knew at 13 but it was an impossible task in the 1960s. I spent until age 22 getting an education which in hindsight generated enough money to pay  for all my  medical needs as they were all out of pocket. The next 8 years were spend working my way through the medical system finding the limited treatment that was available. Sure I would have liked to transition sooner but it wasn't possible to start until I was 18. As it was, working my way through the medical system burned up every spare cent I could save so with what I knew at the time, it just wasn't possible for me to do any better than  I did.

At some point you have to stop living in the past and enjoy the new future you will be living in. I started doing that soon after I went full time.

Dear Sidney,

I'm also in the 55+ group, and am (hopefully) just starting my own transition.  When I start to think about all of the "could have been"s, I realize that I am making up a story.  I really don't know what might have happened on this question, nor do I really know what might have happened after any of the hypothetical questions I could ask myself.  And if I'm going to make up a story, why not make up one that says I'm making the right choice now.  For me it's a good exercise in staying in the present, and turns a gloomy moment into a chance to kind of write my own fairy tale.

I also feel like the path I was on got me where I am, even though I never realized it at the time.  It took me a few years in Al-Anon to get here, but for all I know I might have been run over by a bus leaving the drug store with my hormones 2, 5 10, 20 or 30 years ago.  Try not to sweat the choices you didn't make and just celebrate the one you did!  Good luck and congratulations.  Sounds like you did the very best you could at each turn.  Now that's really something to celebrate! 

L

Sidney, it takes all of us, Cis or Trans, time to figure out who we are.  Now you may have a pretty good idea of who you are and what you want to do going forward.  That's where to focus.

The past is done, frozen, immutable. (Unless you happen to open a wormhole path too close to a star... )  We have to work from where that past has put us, now, to where we want to be.  Worrying about the 'would have been' and 'could have been' is just spinning your wheels in a massive effort to go nowhere.  Don't do that.

The future is where it's at.  It's time to build yours.

I'm 54 and just starting my journey in transition. I don't look at any of that time as wasted. Sure I wish I had done it sooner. I am who I am now though. The person I am now is going to lead me to the woman I'll be. I wouldn't have been her otherwise. I know that sounds like philosophical BS, but I really mean it. I love myself today and didn't before. I'll love whoever I become today. We all get here, I hope, when we are ready.

Congratulations on working through this as a young person.

I started at 30 - in 1990. Do I wish that I had started when I was younger? Probably, but there were plenty of practical reasons why I might not have been able to.

Let me put it this way:  You should only feel like you wasted your life if you spent most of it sitting on a sofa in your parents' house playing video games and swilling soda when you could have been going to school and building a career.

I did not start transition until the age of 53 but I certainly did not waste all those years.  In those years I:

Finished high school.
Got a bachelor's degree.
Got a law degree.
Passed the state bar exam.
Got married twice.
Raised three children to maturity.  (lawyer, landscape architect, and lawyer)
Set up my own law office.

And those are just the highlights.

Did I miss out on being a teenage girl when I was a teenager?  Mostly.  I had subtle little ways of being feminine.  Like playing concert flute.  And so what if I took a girl to the prom instead of being the girl?  There are plenty of clubs out there where I can put on a party dress and dance the night away if I want to.

The only way you waste your life is by refusing to do anything.  So get out there and do something.

I prefer not to think of all those years as wasted. Did I learn things that are useful to me now? Absolutely. Did I grow as a person? Certainly. Did I have a bit of fun every now and then, despite being in the wrong presentation? Oh yeah!

I've even been pretty slow to really transition, only now seriously considering HRT, three years after I came out on here as trans, though I'm not quite at that same spot. I have had some laser hair reduction, have a pretty big collection of women's clothes and makeup, and most importantly have mentally transitioned quite a bit. There is no doubt in my mind now that I am transgender. I needed that time, maybe even all that time before coming out on here as well, to decide this was right for me. It's a shame this world makes this much harder than it needs to be, I wouldn't have needed so much time in a perfect world for us, though I'm happy how much it's gotten better in my lifetime...

I know that feeling well Sidney. I realized I was trans when I was 16 but by the time I was 18 I pushed it back down and ignored it. I have days now where I wish so badly that I hadn't done that, and that I had transitioned then. However, I have had some really great life experiences that I wouldn't have had if I had transitioned then. (Had two kids that I adore and love). So maybe look on the brighter side, look at things that you might not have accomplished. If there isn't anything, then just a positive attitude. Worrying over the past won't do you any good. You're taking the first steps in transitioning now, and that is what matters.

Another late bloomer here (age 61).  Yes, things might have been different if I had transitioned sooner, and that might have been good or it might have been bad.  I wasn't ready back then to face the world as Kathy, and the world wasn't ready for us.  It's water under the bridge.

When I was a little boy, I dreamed of being a jet pilot, a firefighter, and a girl.  I've gotten to do two out of the three, and I'm fixing to make it a hat trick.  That's not bad.

Hello Sidney,

I hear a lot of common themes in these responses. Many of us are older and have a few miles under our belts. All of us have stories to tell. I look at life in a couple of different parts. One part is "who we are". This is all about gender, image, race, education/opportunities, etc. Or stated differently, the eyes that we experience through. The second part is the actual living of life. This starts out as a blank canvas and the actions that we take, the relationships that we experience, the stories and memories that the years lay out are the picture that is painted on that canvas.

The eyes/person that started my life happened to be a guy, now she is a woman. The picture is still developing and is an amazing combination of all of the experiences had by both of me. Would I like it to have it been different, perhaps. But waiting around for the change would have been a true and horrible waste, and the life that I have led, the life that you will be living, is just to precious to waste.

Please forgive the ramblings of an old, full of life, woman. - Anne

I know very well wat your talking about becaus i have it pretty much the same as i am  also around the same age. The best way of coping with it would be to not look at the past but look at the future.  I still have a lot of times where i am very depressed and start thinking of i only did this or if i knew it then it would be better but it wont do anything you cant change the past.
So try and focus how it wil be in the future at a time when you are able to transition and be happy with who you are.  If you have a bad day try and wear (when i have a bad day i will sometime wear an outfit i like and that sometimes cheers me up) or do something you like at that time.
Also with the transition videos not all of them are very young some are but others arent and you can see that no matter what age you are you can transition very well, Especially when you are still in your 20's you can get very good results when you take hormones.

Hope any of it will help you
Hugs, Sena

I get the pang of "D'oohhhh, why didn't I act on this when I was 24/29/19/3/not now?" sometimes, and you know, you gotta own that part of the experience.  It sucks when you spend so much time meandering aimlessly through the loosely-constructed jam-session of your adolescence, to finally come up with a good tune after your audience has already walked out.  But that's the thing:  that tune, that catharsis, that realization of exactly who you were and what you should be doing, that would not have shown up without the 30-minute jam session.  We were constructed, both by nature and nurture, to be and behave in a certain way; civilization has historic institutions revolving around its often-antiquated demands from us.  It takes a very, very long time to unlearn these things, to pierce through the smoke and actually get a clear view of what's going on inside you.
When I realized I was trans, it hit me like a bolt of lightning.  I seriously jumped out of my chair.  All that idiosyncratic behavior, all those bizarre whims and rituals and desires that the ebb and flow of daily life so easily kept under the tide, all those suddenly made complete sense.  I would have never figured it out if I hadn't met my... well, now ex-girlfriend, and I wouldn't have met her if I hadn't spent so much of my life trying to be a cis-hetero male like God and Country intended.
It's a process, and you can't beat yourself up over it.  Some of us just have longer roads than others.  Doesn't mean I'm not jealous as ->-bleeped-<- of someone who transitions at 18, but they're going to have their road ahead of them too.  It doesn't matter when transition occurs in your life, what does matter is that you have the courage to act on truth as it's revealed to you.

First and foremost, thank you all for your kind words. It's true that without a journey, there would be no traveller and I know that. Only now I realise how pathetic my whining sounds here, for all you friends who never got a chance to seriously consider transitioning in their 20s. Some days , I'm totally fine with my life and others...well, it comes crushing on me like a rock. You see, I have this memory of me when I was maybe 7, I wanted to tell my parents. I got up from bed, went to the living room, opened up the door and stared at my folks for a minute. Finally, they asked what's wrong- I replied with a simple 'nothing'. That night, I promised to myself that either I tell them, or stop torturing myself over it. So I buried a secret for a long time. And now I j7st can't stop blaming myself.

The other thing, of course is that ev3ry day I'm still a man it gets only worse and worse.  For each new day there is a fresh new hair. For every morning, there is less hair on my head. Every time I look into a mirror another piece of me is missing and lost forever. I can't wait to start transitioning but on the other hand I still need to get my life on the right track. I hope it won't be too late, since with my physique, my soul vanishes as well.

Quote from: SidneyAldaine on September 06, 2016, 08:34:58 PM
Hi folks,

ever since I embraced the fact that I'm trans, I had this feeling of wasted years. I'm 26 years old and I'm hoping that one day, I'll be able to transition and pass. But lately, watching all those transition videos and reading about other's journeys, I feel like the last 26 years of my life were just a waste of time. This feeling is tearing me apart from the inside and I constantly have to question what would have been if I was more courageous and embraced myself sooner. All that time passed and I feel it was for nothing. And the feeling is just unbearable.

Do any of you feel the same? If so, how do you cope with this?

Now imagine being 64🎈  But I got to raise a couple great kids.

I have a similar feeling, but under a different situation.  I think about it far more than I'd like, but I have to keep telling myself that what's done is done.  I can't do anything about the past, so chastising myself over it can have only negative effects.  Only if I think I can learn something to help me in the future will I actively endeavour to contemplate it.

I'm 26 too, and I understand wher you are coming from, though I spend most of my time thinking of all the positives I had achieved in the passed. I know some people who spend all ther time focusing on the negatives, I will tell you now point blank, they do not live fulfilling lives like I do.
Have you made any strides towards HRT? Even a blocker?
You will feel relieved once you get on them.