The Journey So Far…

Not so long ago, in a city not so far away…

I first had an inkling that there was something not-quite-right about me in fifth grade. At the time, I had no idea what it was–I didn’t have the vocabulary. I want to say it was during or shortly after we learned about sex in class (where we learned about HIV/AIDS), but I don’t remember the timeline well enough to know.

Then I realised I was trans as a teenager, early 2004. I spent a few months using she/her pronouns online, and I had a conversation with my parent about it. I don’t recall how it went, but…after a while, I masked up and spent the next 16 years not examining much of anything and being an asshole with great confidence.

After my dad died in 2019, I had a lot of time to examine things, and slowly I turned in to a fountain of kindness. But the most important thing about kindness is that you need to reserve some of it for yourself, you can’t just give it all away. And so my examinations turned inward.

I tried being they/them for about a month, across November and December of last year. It didn’t work out; I’m agender, but not in that specific way. Then I had some realizations about my dysphoria, at which point I came out and began using she/her. And then I started HRT in January.

I don’t think I can adequately explain how much HRT has helped me straighten out my head. It feels like what came before was a veil of darkness, of self-loathing reflected out to the world as being a miserable cunt. I still have a lot of work to do, of course, but…I know the work I’ve already done has put me on the road I want to travel.