Freight train

    I'm told that this is something that comes eventually to most of us in this sphere, the point at which your transition comes to a head and it hits you like a freight train that you need to move, and quickly. After a year or two settling down and reinventing myself following the turmoil of my first year after going full-time, it came to me. Going back seven years, losing the ability to sleep, hit again by wave after wave of dysphoria as though I was still hidden in the closet.

    Yes, it's taken a few months, but the anti-androgens have hit with a vengance. All the good stuff is accelerating, building on all the estradiol patches of the previous year or so with much nicer skin, less body hair and a pleasing resumption of breast growth. But I didn't expect to be hit in this way, and to be honest I'm rather embarrassed about it. I've always pursued a "Better slow and right than quick and wrong" approach to transition, and it has stood me in good stead. It's allowed me to build a successful life as a woman unencumbered by other considerations, and I strongly believe it's given me an advantage in that I have less baggage than some contemporaries I've observed.

    So I'd always taken a view that some time in the future when I was ready I'd go forward and talk to the medics about surgery, but there was no point in pushing it if things might go awry. I imagined it would probably be another year maybe, and I'd get on with my life. It therefore feels a little silly to be reduced to a gibbering eejit by it all, I didn't think I was like that!

    Normal service will be resumed. I've made an appointment to go back and talk about it all, then no doubt I'll see psychs and all sorts again before one day taking a trip to Brighton, or West London. It'll be a couple of years, plenty of time to regain my composure.

    I feel as though I have gone back a year or two though, I thought I'd mostly dealt with this kind of dysphoria. That's weird!