Hi everyone,

I posted an intro a few months ago and have really wanted to get back to this site. I write now as a matter of psychological survival. I'm in a tough situation right now: that of being very, very sick and dependent upon relatives to care for me. I've lost most of my hair and I'm not a pretty sight. It's strange now that since I've been sick, I've been able to look hard at this lifelong desire to transition from many angles.

There are times (especially in the alpha stages of sleep) where i think it's a very alien proposition; many more mornings I wake up wondering if it hasn't happened already somehow, if it isn't finally over. I touch between my legs to see if it's normal. Then there are the arguments we all know too well. Why I shouldn't transition. Why it can never happen. Why I could/should be happy dating women. That would be nice if it really did anything for me but exacerbate my condition. I get stuck in the middle and the fear that I will never be healthy enough to begin, finance or complete transition torments me.

Despite the chorus of arguements, there's still the constant awareness of where I need to be. And that is NOT in a boy's body, in a man's role, and certainly not trying to band-aid the situation with vacuous fetishism or weekend anonymous crossdressing. It's good to go out, it feels very freeing, but it's profoundly lonely, too. And impermanent. That's the worst - that I go from a happy, functional, normal modern woman and have to sink down to the emptiness of drab and waiting.

I waited like a fool. So many concerns that it was the wrong path. A path I wanted all my life! Now that I'm finally, if shakily, at the stage of acceptance, I can't go forward. My illness has me frozen for now. It's no wonder that I am sick, after all these decades of acting out a role I hated.

It's strange to see that girl waiting in the corner for me. She's not going away now any more than she was going away when I was 14. That hill seems SO easy now -- transition looks like nothing compared to recovering my health.

I find it very interesting that no amount of convincing or circumstances changes how my soul feels.

Thanks for listening. Just had to get this out.

Kellianna

*hug* I have a lot of sympathy for your plight, being in something similar myself. My chronic health problems (lupus plus other odds and ends) have gotten worse in recent years and my body's gotten so bad in so many ways that I knew I had to get out of the rut, but wasn't having any luck...

Realizing that I'm trans is what opened up the floodgates. I've made more progress on many fronts in the last few months than in many years before. There are things I may never be able to have, thanks to systemic weaknesses - but then I think, well, who's to say, once my weight is in order and I finish detoxing from accumulated auto-immune reactions and all the rest? Simply having the goal "I'm going to get all the femininity I can, and let each step show me prospects from there" has broken me out of an almost life-long rut of body horror and self-loathing.

I hope that you'll find something similar. Even though there's not a lot you can do in an external way right now, you can read, think, and dream. You can think about what you'll want to do for closet space, and look at online shopping outlets, and browse places like the wiki here. You can prepare your mind and heart so that when the opportunity to act comes along, you can take it.

And in the meantime you can put up with our prayers and good wishes.