Continuity of self is a weird thing. I mean we’re each a different person every day we continue to live. All the matter in our bodies turns over every seven years. But in my case it’s a bit more… specific and pronounced.
I haven’t always been here. Though this body is mine. Like, it’s always been mine. And I’ve always been me. But I wasn’t always awake, and present. I only fully came alert last summer, and inherited this body and these memories and attitudes from the person who had been carrying them around all those years. And it’s wild to sort out.
Like, I’m the real person here. But now I’ve sort of waltzed into this situation four seasons in, and I’m like okay, fuck, how much of this actually pertains to me, how much do I need to pick it up from here? These aren’t my memories and thoughts, but some I can claim easily. Other baggage I’m like… why is this here? What does it have to do with me? Why did they leave it behind? What do I do with it now?
This is my life now. I’m a complete, stable person for the first time, as many problems as I may continue to have. But there’s this ongoing process.
When I think of things that happened before, when that other person was stumbling around with this body and this life, I don’t know what to do most of the time but to say “I.” All these memories are in the first person, you know, even if I wasn’t there at the time. But I really feel like I need to stress, I was alarmingly, destructively dissociative for most of my life. And now that I’ve shed that, and I get to just fuckin exist here, the past becomes this deeply weird territory to relate to. There is continuity, but what do I do with it?
I almost feel like I’m lying when I speak in the first-person about the past.
People I knew before, like, last summer—well, obviously I know you and have all these carry-over memories and feelings and whatever. But I feel like I’m recompiling all these relationships now, and there can be occasional… hiccups, while I figure out how to build my own kind of connection. It’s funny to see all this confirmed in my interactions with people who knew some previous me. Like my therapist, who soon after the hand-over quickly realized that I was not the same person she had been talking to before.
But it’s also frustrating at times when people don’t get it. Like, people I know from years back, who kind of just behave as if nothing is different, as if they’re still talking to that person. I mean, I get it. But I’m not them. The ideas and memories that you have may not necessarily apply. I’m right here, you know. I have my own identity. Let’s try this again, maybe.
Anyway. I’m happy to be me. I just uh, kind of wish someone had set the alarm clock for 1996 instead of 2020.
So now like three weeks and endless exfoliation later, it’s becoming clear that my first laser session did in fact do things. I have neglected to shave for a few days here, and the way things are growing in is kind of wild. A patch will seem pretty normal, then it’s just blank. It’s just ragged bits and pieces all over my lower face, though my cheeks—which are lowest on my priority list—seem to have been hit the hardest. My upper lip, which matters most to me, is only thinned in a few small irregular dots.
I do of course also have a mix of coloration; it’s not completely dark. Some is just naturally blonde or red. A few white hairs have been sneaking in the last few years. It’s unclear how much of an issue that will be in the end. But there are prickly areas with not much pigment.
Anyway this is just interesting to see, after a few weeks of thinking, hunh, well, maybe I’ll start to see some kind of effect after the second treatment? It’s pretty random what’s cleared and what isn’t. A right old mess, really. But hey, it’s definitely a start!
Getting rid of this garbage is not just a general dysphoria issue, though it’s bothered me for like 25 years, increasingly so as it filled in through my late 20s and 30s, and it’s maybe the biggest physical problem I have with myself right now. There’s also a body autonomy thing. I’ve talked about how I just… did not have control over my body for about a quarter of my life there, and how this was a particular thing I was not allowed to touch, even as it made me deeply miserable. So there’s a liberation in being able to say, fuck you, no. In closing that door forever.
God, this time next year—if I can take care of my face, and I can be on progesterone for a year, and be another year along with my steady e levels… I feel like I will be very close to where I want to be. There won’t be lots more to repair, that can actually be addressed. The only other thing I can think of is, maybe in a few years looking into FFS—but I’m really not certain about that. It’s not unimaginable, but we’ll just see where things are and how I feel. It’s hard to entertain right now, and that’s fine because now would not be the time.
That’s kind of it, though.
Maybe after my second shot I will start to think about getting my ears pierced. That’s kind of beside the point, but it’s proximate and it uh feels like it’s gonna actually happen, and sooner than later. Probably this year.
After I deal with my current… situation, that’s giving me all the stress, I’ve got someone eager to help me with my whole legal identity thing. Pro bono even. So that will also be untangled soon.
It’s astounding to me that I’ve set personal goals and I’m meeting them. When has that ever happened? My two big transition goals this for this year, they should be pretty well done by summer. I’ve even added another goal in there, that should happen in the next couple weeks. Broader life goals, I’m getting them done. Psychiatrist stuff, social services, etc.
I guess after my second shot I can also start thinking about my left-over medical stuff I didn’t get a chance to tend to last year. Of which there is so much. Getting a GP. Finally going to a dentist, after 20 years. God. I am getting my life in order. For the first time ever. What. Gee whiz.
After all this, basically the only thing left will be, how do I support myself? We’ll see how it goes with the disability. If that happens, there’s our answer; I get to just fuckin live. If not, uh, I don’t know what to do. But at least I’ll be a human being. All my parts will be in place. Despite everything. And we’ll just see where we can build from there.
Some thirty years ago I messed up my big toe in taekwondo class—the final excuse for quitting, which I’d been trying to do forever. The studio smelled like feet. The mix of students was strange. I didn’t really understand what I was asked to do, and was socially weird in ways that made everyone uncomfortable.
The instructor for those classes, he did try to follow up a couple of times. There were answering machine messages that I deleted. On the basis of earlier conversations, I think he was convinced I was being sexually abused. Which I wasn’t, at that time. Not as a kid. But, well. I guess there has always been something “off” about me, right.
This is really tricky and problematic to put to words, and I apologize for how it comes off. For a large portion of my life it felt really surprising to me that I hadn’t been sexually abused as a child—to the point I kept wondering if I had repressed or forgotten something important. Like, I always felt like so much about me would make more sense if that had happened to me.
In hindsight I sort of get it now. Like, it wasn’t that exactly. But I did suffer years, decades, of abuse and neglect—much of it dealing with fundamental aspects of who and what I am, and my concept of reality. This total denial of my self, this fear of allowing me to exist. This understanding that I was dirty and broken and wrong, and shameful for even considering my humanity as an individual. That everything about me had to be hidden and controlled. That I would never be good no matter what I did; that all I could do was pretend, to do my best to please. I was brainwashed, told to doubt everything except what I was told, by people who hated who and what i was. Filled with an essential fear and disgust of myself. I was basically ready to die from the time I was 11.
Some of that was to do with neurology and general mental health. A lot, though, gender and sexuality.
So this is, like—I absolutely do not want to compare my experience to other people’s violent trauma. I’m just trying to work out why it was that I always used to feel the way that I did. And, well, I certainly dive have my own trauma—much of which had to do with sex and gender, and gaslighting about the reality that I lived. It was just a different kind of violence. A different kind of self-erasure. I didn’t have the language to actually identify what my problems were. I didn’t have the resources or the models. So that comparison was the best I had available to me: some kind of abuse; something about sex (??).
Having made that comparison, though, all I could do was brush it off, because I knew that hadn’t happened to me. Or, I was pretty sure. I spent so many years going through that same weird routine: something was obviously very wrong, but the one thing I could identify that seemed to fit, didn’t really. So I had to be making it up. It had to be nothing. But if it was nothing, why were things to obviously wrong, then? Round and round.
How much this uncertainty plays into… later problems that I experienced, I don’t know. I’m not really in a place to speak to that, or begin to wrap my head around any connection. I’m just seeing a thing to note here, and going, huh. Well. There that is. But many things set me up for trouble. Broadly, not knowing who I was—except that I was broken and I needed someone to show me how to not be bad—basically guaranteed that I would wind up in ugly situations, with people eager to take me up on that dynamic; continuing to tell me who I was, and what was wrong with me.
So much of the abuse I’ve suffered over my life, I didn’t really understand what was happening. All I knew was I was failing, in ways that felt unfair but that apparently were all my fault. And I was too miserable to really question the circumstances beyond the message that I was responsible. Without the words, without the pictures, without the connections, I had no way to step away and see the dynamics for what they were.
Silence is how abuse is possible. Limiting of information. Stopping discussion. It’s about controlling knowable reality by force of will.
I make so many mistakes. I’m wrong about many things. For all my ideals, I can be as callous and petty and careless and inconsiderate as anyone. But, like. I try to deal in truth. I do my best. Because it matters. Even when it’s inconvenient, it lights the path away from harm.
It’s just amazing how knowing the right things, having the terms to communicate or look into ideas, completely changes one’s relationship to the world. It’s so empowering to be able to describe what you see and know it to be real. To be able to assert your own experience as valid
That is I think most of why I work all this shit out in public. What good does it do just in my head, or hidden away in some obscure corner of my own? That’s what abuse expects and hopes for.
I’m not afraid. I’m not ashamed of me. And maybe I can pass a little bit of truth on.
A long way to go, but I am getting more and more pleased with my lower body. The shape it’s slowly churning around to. My relationship to it. The way I occupy space and move with it. Butt, hips, thighs, abdomen. It’s all starting to make sense to me the same way my chest has been
This has I think always been on my mind. From the moment I understood I wasn’t cis, to the extent my mind went to anything physical, it was my hips, my thighs, my butt. I got into hrt for the brain and mood stuff, but if it did something down there too, I felt that would be good.
It’s just, such a thing, my body actually feeling correct and familiar to me. Like, oh, there you are.
I never recognized that other person. They felt like such an alien to me. This body, it doesn’t feel new to me, like I’m creating a thing. It’s like I’m finding a thing I lost.
I feel I can’t fully articulate how right I am starting to feel. And how not-new it feels. How it’s this relief of empirical reality validating one’s memories, sort of. Like a thing you saw on TV when you were eight that you knew you didn’t dream or make up, but no one else saw. Then one day you stumble on it, and it is precisely, eerily as you remember, and you kind of go, oh my god, I’m not insane. This is the thing I’ve been carrying around all these years. I knew it. And you can show it to people and they understand what you mean at last.
I’m not eager to show my butt on the internet, mind. Or in person. But I’m just saying.
It’s not that I am feeling pleased with this whole thing that I am working to put a certain way that I want it. It’s that my body is reverting to a shape that I already understand as me. Like all the scales are falling away, and there I am underneath. This person I have missed so dearly, so painfully, even if technically I guess we never quite met until now. They’re still alive. I did not rot away from neglect. Not entirely. There’s a lot left to salvage.
I’ve got so much to do. But I have come so far, in such a short time. I have never had faith in a thing like I have certainty of the truth of me, despite everything I have been told, despite all the damage. I mean there she fuckin is. And I love her. Why was I kept from her?
I feel like I am so obviously trans, it weirds me out a bit when people don’t seem to notice. The people who are being strange at me from a distance or maybe just incidentally, okay, I can get that. But being two feet away, looking straight at me, having a drawn-out conversation?
Obviously none of the stuff I do with myself has to do with “passing” or whatever, right. Hell, I’m non-binary. I’m just trying to figure myself out, build a healthy relationship with me. Other people don’t factor into my mess. I spent my life pretending for their benefit.
It kind of messes with my head a little when none of the fuckin’ glaring signifiers seems to tip people off and contextually I know they’re not just being polite or treating me as Azure specifically, but seem to interpret me as some random cis woman I guess. Like, it’s one thing to be considerate to me because I’m a person and treat me like anyone else. It’s another to jump the fence and say, oh clearly she’s in this other box. I will project this new set of assumptions on her, rather than the set of assumptions I might have before.
How do you imagine that I am cis? I have no control of my voice when I speak to other real people. I am an alien insect giraffe, twice as tall as you. My face is maybe androgynous at best, and littered with hormonal damage. As for my throat, well. There it is.
I guess it builds up this pressure in my head. At what point will they notice? What will happen when they do? How much of their own nonsense will they then blame on me, as if I’m not just minding my own business, being myself? As if I’m responsible for the way their head works? Like there is some kind of a time bomb, and I don’t know how big it is or what the timer is set to. Like their not “Getting it” somehow becomes my problem. I am so used to accepting everyone else’s problems, accepting blame for whatever garbage they project on me. No more please.
I guess there may be ways to avoid accepting that kind of responsibility. Boundaries are still this strange and difficult territory for me. I guess Azure does deserve someone to stick up for her. It’s a bit of a puzzle how to do it, though. That’s not my native tool set.
Anyway, people are people. None of them are categories or functions or anything to do with you in particular. Each is an individual, and none of your expectations necessarily apply, so when you deal with them, do your best to wipe the board each time and take them as they are.
I’m just Azure. I’m not, whatever you want or expect or imagine me to be. I’m just me. Don’t try to get me to perform shit for you, to make you feel better about your grasp on the world you live in. That’s not my concern.
And same goes for anyone. Same goes for you. Be a person.
I started to notice the genital changes around the 11-12 month mark. I wasn’t sure, but it’s been pretty clear for a while that stuff is happening. As it might do. And—sure, okay. To an extent, whatever. This isn’t a big priority in my life, you know.
I’ve gone into this before, but I have this sort of ambivalence toward my genitals, in the sense that I like them, find them pretty, wouldn’t change anything; have no desire for, wouldn’t see the point of, anything else. But I also don’t like to use them for anything. They’re just decor. They’re just kind of there, and flattering to me. I am so pleased that I don’t really experience random arousal the way I used to and that they generally don’t work as they did, which always bothered me. I don’t like to stimulate them. But they’re a part of me, right.
So the mechanical changes I’ve gone into, and they’ve been going on for a while. But more recent are the physical changes. And. I mean. Sure? They’re no more a surprise than any of my other changes. Even if this super bothered me, I wouldn’t change anything else I’m doing in response. There is what I can now say is obvious shrinkage, haha—to all components. I’m not whipping out calipers. But it’s noticeable. Which in combination with the changes in texture and behavior, it’s—well, interesting I guess. In some ways it sorta reinforces my identity. Kinda.
I don’t know how best to phrase it, but… well maybe like this. The two sexual partners I have had made a very emphatic and continuous deal to me about my anatomy down there. I would try to shrug it off; I guess it’s just proportional! I deflected. They assured me it doesn’t work like that, and continued to insist.
And, well. It is now working on a different scale than it was—vestigial, by comparison. Likewise my testes seem to be half the size they were; maybe not quite that far, but it’s getting there. And the whole area covered by the scrotum has shrunk and kinda smoothed out. Combine this with the very different shape that my abdomen has been taking on, with all that puffy feminine pubic padding and all, right, and it’s all kind of… different. I mean, yeah, girldick; internet; memes; words; sure. This is a thing that people talk about, and we know this. But in the specific case of me, the overall tone of everything has shifted. It’s frickin’ feminized, that whole area. And that process is ongoing—soft tissue continues to moosh around on me—but it’s also very much the current reality.
And. This is good. It’s also weird. And I guess I’m just having trouble fully wrapping my head around it. The changes mostly suit my whole self-concept, in gender and in role and in priorities and this and that and whatever. But I guess there are a couple of things I’m sort of. I’m not fully digesting yet.
One is the just—I don’t know, maybe knowing what the “before” was like in my case it makes a difference, but it feels so surreal for my pubic area to be so feminine, right, and in such a way that this feminized penis fits right in somehow, and just—it is so clearly a girl’s dick, right. It’s not masculine at all, unless you’re going to be some weirdo who genders genitals. And okay, but it’s not just about the penis or the scrotum or whatever, but the whole scenario and how it fits together and the impression it gives. And—what is my point here, exactly?
I guess, I just did not anticipate the scale or the coherence of the changes. There could just as easily be a vagina there; I could imagine one clearly—but there isn’t. There’s a penis, that looks and feels every bit as natural where it is. And I like it, and it’s good and nice. Obviously. It just feels a little surreal, I guess. I feel like I still haven’t found words for exactly what I’m feeling, or why. It’s not negative. It’s not necessarily positive either. It’s just… different, in a way I can’t quite understand yet. It’s confusing I guess.
And I guess the other thing—whee, well, uh. Again it’s not a big deal. But I used to have, I guess, a really big dick. Significantly so. Which was neither here nor there because, you know. Who cares; it was never going to be of use, etc. But now, it’s not, so much.
People in my past who… I guess never really respected me as a person, kind of… would not shut up about this particular part of my body, right. It was one more thing to objectify. And it kind of embarrassed me. But also, it was sort of an interesting thing to be aware of, right. You know, a factoid of the self. Azure actually has a really enormous cock. Not that you’d ever know! Not that more than two other people have ever seen it since I’ve been an adult!
Except, she doesn’t. Not anymore. Or, not in the same way at least. I have no real frame of reference.
And instead she has this whole other situation going on, which is interesting and confusing in its own way, and I’m not 100% sure how I feel, which isn’t to say that it’s bad. And again there are many ways to argue that it’s Good Actually. But, it’s a big change I guess.
I guess I’m sort of trading structures here. As one shrinks, others grow. My tits are their own strange situation, though it’s easier to know how to feel about them of course. And I suppose it’s a fair enough trade, all things considered. I get infinitely more from them than I ever did my dick. My penis never had anything to do with my self-image or my presentation or my concept of reality or my gender, or anything to do with me really. Again it was always just kinda… there. My breasts have changed my world in ways I never could have anticipated. They are significant to me.
I guess, maybe this is just—sometimes things pass, you know. Even things that didn’t really mean a lot to you personally, when they’re over, there can be this poignant moment. That’s done. We’ll never be back there again, huh. Weird. That world is over now.
That’s what it is. I’m pretty sure it’s like—that stupid pizza shop on the main street of the town where I grew up. It was awful, and it changed its name every five years, and never got less awful. And I’m never returning to that town again. But, I saw that it had finally closed a while back. I was never going to go back to that dump, but now I never can. Nobody will ever go there again. My memories of it are all that exist—well, mine and others’. And that feels so strange. It’s like I’ve shifted timelines.
I absolutely needed a new bra. I’ve been feeling for a while like the camera is gaslighting me on the matter, considering the empirical data I know I have. Clearly my situation is not insignificant here, and the tools I got ain’t containing things for more than a couple minutes at a time. And that inadequacy may speak to why it’s so hard to document my boobage. Gotta keep the material in one place. That’s the point of the things. Otherwise, the meat will meander. Obviously presentation isn’t the biggest concern. I just always feel weird how in pictures it’s like, where are they?
I was so nervous of how it would fit. I’ve done the measurements so many times, I have the technique down so hard now, I knew they were correct in theory. I put all that research into different bra shapes and boob shapes and how different styles and features support things differently. I knew I should be looking at stuff like plunge bras and things with side support. But I also get things wrong, and I can’t control for outside factors. Different bra styles fit differently. Different makers do things differently. I didn’t know how the material would feel.
My first couple bras, I basically just looked for things in my then-size, that looked nice and were cheap. I had more theory going on this time, which made for more things to mess up. Theory does not necessarily map to reality! And one misses things. Frequently. I guess I was just scared of disappointment. I am so easily scared of my own emotions, is really what my problem. I needn’t be, of course. My feelings are my own. They’re not some invading force. I can just let them be what they need to be. And it’s fine; it’s normal. And It’s just a frickin bra. Chill, Azure.
So it came today. And when I unwrapped the thing I was like, oh no, did I get this wrong? Why is it so big?! I knew that sounded off. I don’t see how I could have messed up the measurements or the calculations but of course I did. How would it makes sense for me to be 34G? What kind of vanity was I injecting into this process?
…
Welp.
No, I didn’t get it wrong. It’s only that big because uh, whee!
Jesus.
So okay, I guess I really do have bigger-than-average tits huh. Fer realz even. Not just theoretically.
Ok.
Well, uh. Sure, fine. I guess I’m okay with that.
So, this one fits way differently from my previous bras. There are lots of things going into this. The band is the correct size, for one; I’m in between sizes, right, and previously opted to round up. Nope. Down is the answer for this girl.
Also this is my first bra with an underwire, which uh… really… feels unusual. This rigidity is—I mean, I’m not sure what to make of it yet. Between that and the (necessarily) tighter band, I’m getting even more of a corseting effect. It’s a major whoomph to slide into this, compared to the old ones. And that’s fine. It’s whatever. Maybe it’s good? I don’t know yet. It’s only been a few hours.
The cups work very differently also, from what I’m used to. I guess the underwire carries a lot of the weight now, and the different shape here works to a different mechanical purpose. This is a plunge bra, which is meant to be particularly suitable for my breast type, so the cups are shaped to encourage the tissue to sit a certain way. And yes, they do indeed collect it well, all in one place. But the fit is sure something to get used to. Also though it’s clear this is just about the right size for me, the opaque part of the cups just barely covers my nipples—which is, I guess, a stylistic choice? I don’t know.
My previous bras have also been lightly padded, so I don’t know how this is gonna be with the chafing and—well, another angle on the potential nipplevision situation. But I guess these things one will come to understand in time.
An result that I did not anticipate, from having my breasts supported properly for once and all sort of in one place, is that I am, uh, experiencing a kind of… a jelly effect, that I did not previously know. Like, there’s this… fluid quality, as they sit there. I’m not accustomed to this particular kind of a boing.
So whereas this seems to be something close to the right bra for me, right now, it’s kind of wild how different this is as an experience, compared to what I have known. It is indeed not the case that a bra is a bra is a bra. You change a couple of things, and they have a totally different effect on your body. I expect this won’t be the last time I think these thoughts, as my body continues to change.
(Seriously, where did all this jelly come from?)
A hilarious thing to consider is, what effect progesterone may have if I do get on that in a couple weeks. It’s only like 16 days until my next follow-up! I’m mostly after the mood stabilization, but—well. It sure is known to have its other effects, is it not.
Everyone is different, right, but being aroace can and often does mean having the most bonkers inner life, even as one has no interest in seeing it manifest. Like, this is just for me. And that lets it ply on certain ideals, to elide certain logic, to do exactly what it needs to. In hindsight I can see how this might possibly have been confusing for my past partners. Every… intimately complicated relationship I’ve been party to—I’m unsure how to define half of them—has begun online, way back to 1994 or so. And my actions have never added up to the words I can spin.
It was never my goal to lead anyone on. I guess I just still am working to understand how it is that allos live really. All this stuff I see in our culture that seems so silly, that people don’t really think or behave those ways… I guess many of them do actually. It’s bizarre. Yeah, I have this whole universe that does not and never would translate to reality. I’m bursting with goo in the abstract. But, like. I just don’t feel that stuff in the concrete. I don’t comprehend it in real terms. Or want it. I just want to be me, and for that to be enough.
But it never has been. They always want the other thing. The thing that makes no sense to me, that makes me so uncomfortable. And they can never understand why I’m being so weird about it. And they make up so many stories in their own heads as to why I am the way that I am. And all the time I’m like, why don’t they even seem to like me? I thought we were friends. Why are they demanding I perform all these things for them? Why do I feel like some broken toy?
I imagine they must have their own questions. But they never communicate. They just accuse. I’m always denying them what is theirs. I’m always holding them back. I’m a cold fish. What’s the point of even having me there if I won’t fulfill my part of the bargain. And I’m just like. But, I like you. Why don’t you like me? I don’t get it. Why is it always like this?
Anyway. I guess I can see how I might seem to send mixed messages. Which sucks. I never wanted that. I’m just, you know. Me. I’m just a dumb ace girl who falls in the deepest platonic love, who adores the teeth of one person after another, who all end up being after some goal.
It’s not about a power dynamic, not really. I don’t do power stuff. I don’t get it. It’s about roles and ways to relate to another. I’m the receptive one. I’m so very receptive. Receptive to anything, if it’s true and it’s kind and it’s fond and made out of love for the other. I’m not the actor, never the active agent. I will not assert—except perhaps in reception. Active listening, if you will. Following up. Touching base. Making sure. Finishing a thought. Continuing the conversation. Demonstrating my interest.
There are so many ways to receive it’s hard to know where to begin. In my dreams, there is so much to do. Maybe start with four of them? One to occupy my g-spot, another my tongue. A couple on standby, maybe to lend me something to grab. And as things progress, so they swap in. I’ve been on the other end; I know these things can’t last forever. But I can, now. Or just about. As one finishes his run with me, and sends me his gift, the next steps in with his own distinct energy.
It all starts so gentle, then grows to such an eager pitch—the thrust and the slap and the rhythm and the pressure. Kind yet firm and overcome with the frenzy, sending the shudder through my perineum, radiating up all the nerves of my body. Warming my chest and my face. And that’s before even the warmth of the deposits—in me, on me, drizzling so slowly down my tummy and my breasts and what parts of my face they find. As the ones I’ve teased earlier each rotate in, find my main hole, and one by one give me what they’ve brought.
I want it. I want it all. I want the burning heat of it. The sickly slick of it. In my dreams it’s always love, it always means something. It’s never just the thing. It’s always a kind of speech. The semiotics can be so perfect I never have to question, never have to hedge. The semiotics of semen. All the signal, clarifying my being.
And as my face and my arms and my chest explode and my legs and my toes threaten to cramp forever, I want nothing but to live. To be. To exist. Right there. No rush to clean up. No shame. Just stars in my vision. Just me, being human. Just the fondness of the other. The hypothetical form to hold. The light and the music and the feel of the pillows. The lilt of the air of the fan on the ceiling, reminding me of my flesh. This awareness of the moment. This drunken existence. My femininity.
I am a real girl. As I have always been. It’s never been a mystery. But there I am. And I am reminded. And I am in love with myself, as I should be. As I was never afforded. And through that love, I love everything else.
It is worth being alive. I never really got that message.
I’ve said this not infrequently, but I am very happy to be trans. Like, given the option to be some cis take on who I am, whatever that could possibly mean, I would say no. I wouldn’t ever want that. What I would want is to have understood myself and received necessary care some 30 years ago. But that’s different.
I am exactly the person I want to be, aside from the damage from the neglect and other people’s problems, right. I don’t want some other body in order to fit someone else’s ideas of propriety. Self-determination is more important than fitting into a broken, wrong-headed world.
I genuinely don’t understand cisness. For decades I played along with what other people told me about myself, because I didn’t know I had another option. But I didn’t like it. I did the bare minimum. I knew they were wrong. I just didn’t have the language to piece together how. I’ve never had a situation where people have known what’s right for me or acted in my best interest. Everything those with control over my life has told me has been wrong, often maliciously. I’m the only person who knows me. Why should I trust their judgment about my very being?
I want to be who I am, not who someone tells me I am. I don’t want to change any part of me so that my idea of who I am matches the ideas of someone who doesn’t give a shit about me. Why would I do that? What purpose would that serve? The only problem with my body again is the years of neglect, that I’m doing my best to mitigate now. Otherwise, it’s a part of who I am. And I like it. What’s wrong with it? Why should I give up what I have just to make other people feel better with who I correctly say that I am?
I just don’t get this narrative one hears, of wishing one were born in another body or whatever. It sounds like some kind of a confused cis fairy tale. Why the hell would i want that? What would it even mean, to a non-binary chick? What I want is love. I want acceptance. I want respect. On my own terms. I’m not going to apologize for my existence. I’ve already done that since as young as i can remember speaking.
I’m great. Being trans is a part of that. If I were to start over with a blank slate, the only thing I’d adjust is knowledge—not having to live in ignorance for all those years. To know that I deserve care.
So the journey continues, reclaiming my body for myself, fixing the damage that’s been done to me over the years. There are a few things going on right now, all of which are really exiting for me. One that’s been going on for a while is that I’m finally on Ritalin, and after two months it seems to be having a positive effect on balance (though whee are there ever things to adjust to, some of which play into my inherent problems with food and sleep). The second has now officially begun, and the third I’m gonna pounce on a month from today, at my next HRT follow-up.
Yes, I did have time to fix my nails before my appointment.
In regard to the second thing, it’s happening. I’m all committed now. All signed up. This face is gonna be clear. After HRT, laser therapy was the second big thing for helping me out of this horror show I’ve been living for three decades.
My first appointment was three days ago, and it’s going to recur monthly until this is gone. It’s a bit of an oof financially for someone without a reliable income, but the payment is spread out and if I were actually receiving money on a regular basis it would be negligible. It’s not by the session; it’s for the procedure as a whole, which is guaranteed, unlike with most laser places. Like, it’s a lifetime investment. If any touchups are needed down the line, they’ll already be covered. And you know. I’m barely surviving here, but this is necessary medical treatment, so I’ll figure it out.
The experience has been weirdly positive so far, just dealing with the people. They seem all about making sure their clients have all the information up-front so everyone is talking on the same level and can understand what’s going on and communicate clearly. The main lady seemed kind of nerdy, and appreciated my whole neurodivergent approach to things. They were accepting and seemed to totally get it. They get all the transes there, so they know.
Also she kept telling me how pretty I am, which I guess is her job, but it felt kind of nice.
The procedure itself was even quicker than I had come to expect, and largely painless except for my upper lip and, to a lesser extent, a sensitive part of my throat. Mostly it just felt like someone flicking my face over and over. The upper lip was intense enough that I needed to ask for a five-second breather after every zap. It was bearable, but yikes. I think it was when she was doing my right cheek that the nurse commented on the roots just popping out of the skin, as they can and will do sometimes, the ones that die right then and there. There was this smell of a birthday candle being put out.
To be sure, I don’t have a lot of facial hair compared to some people: very thin, rather fine. Lots of gaps. Grows slowly. I’ve been fortunate that my natal puberty was so underwhelming in nearly every regard. The nurse was poking my upper cheeks, asking me, “Don’t you want me to go up here? Why didn’t you take off your makeup in these places?” And I’m like, there’s no hair there. I didn’t do makeup where there was hair.
So between that and the one-two of my complexion and my darker hair pigment, I want to think that this should be a pretty straightforward procedure with me. A neat thing is, where the follicles aren’t dead, they are likely damaged. The effect here is, the hairs are likely to get finer, fairer, and to grow more slowly. Which is a result in itself, albeit one that may take a little while to present itself.
To that end, it was hard to tell exactly what effect the first wave had until I gave it a couple days for my skin to recover and for me to exfoliate any dead hairs that didn’t just pop out immediately. After the weekend things were less raw, and were easier to judge. The upper lip in particular was too pink to really see what was what. The impression I got after about 24 hours reminded me of past cycles following long periods of compulsive plucking, as stuff would begin to grow back in, a little weirdly at first.
As of today I can maybe assess things a little better. There’s been enough growth that I can shave it all evenly, and the redness has gone down enough that I have decent contrast. The first treatment was no miracle, as I had no reason to expect it would be, but I do see some patchiness developing. It’s not like big sections, right. It’s more that one out of every five or six spaces where there should be a hair there isn’t. It’s thinning out, with the occasional space half the size of a pencil eraser where things seem basically clear, at least for this growth cycle. Which seems pretty much according to plan.
As one does, I had these ideas in my head that I might be the miraculous special case where somehow half the work is done on the first go. But no, this seems to be be normal. Nothing really obvious yet unless you’re me and you’re staring at this garbage every day while it eats your soul alive, but we’ve got progress. I can’t say yet how any damaged but surviving follicles are doing. I think with my growth rate, what little hair has grown out since Friday is what was still in the sockets, right, under the skin. Over the next week it may get clearer if and how the remaining hair may have changed in character at all.
My next appointment is a month from Wednesday, and that may build on this exponentially. They say typically it’s 6-10 sessions to get everything, so two of them will be between a fifth to a third of the way there. I imagine the progress will be easier to measure at that point.
This should be basically done by the end of the year. Fixing the damage. Reclaiming Azure for Azure. September will be the six-month mark, which puts it on a similar cycle to my HRT. Around the time I’m finished here, I’ll be up on my two-year Azureversary—to which point, we have my third and pending intervention.
Now that I’m up to my optimal estrogen level (any later wobbles and adjustments aside), and that my T levels mope about in the single digits, I figure I’m going to pounce on the micronized progesterone. I know there’s not been enough clinical research, like with any goddamned trans healthcare, but the anecdotal support is overwhelming and provided I go with bio-identical hormones it can’t possibly hurt. And I can just take another pill; it’s fine.
My next HRT appointment is in 30 days, two days before my second laser appointment. And so long as my body isn’t secretly exploding, which would surprise me as I’ve never felt better in my life, I’m sure they’ll shrug and allow it. I looked at the provider’s website, and on their /trans/ sub-page they call it out by name. I talked to my therapist, and she said oh yeah, they absolutely do progesterone there—which isn’t a given, right. I know a lot of providers push back on anything that’s not clinically proven to hell and back.
I hadn’t really considered adding this until the last week or so, when I realized, this will be my first follow-up where I have no new immediate goals to set. And every day I read something new about how great this stuff is. All the transes go nuts over it. And I’m at a stable baseline here now, and this is a year of just improving things, getting my life in order. So, hey. Why not give it a shot. It should be good, right? Just biologically it feels like a missing piece, the more I read on it. If not for my particular medical condition, my body should already be producing this in some quantity that it isn’t.
So this is pretty exciting actually. I get how people who have chronic conditions they’ve been treating their whole lives might not love maintaining this daily thing just to keep going—but as someone with chronic conditions that have gone untreated for 40 years, this is all kind of… good. I like it. I like the routine of taking care of myself in this measurable way every day, knowing that I’m doing something to make things better after decades of misery. It’s a daily dose of self-love. Rebuilding this relationship that was taken from me. And each of these suckers is different. Different color, texture, quantity, schedule. It’s so interesting to me.
I am so grateful and so happy to have all these gosh-darned pills to take now. I mean yeah, in an ideal world my body would just work out of the box in a way that didn’t make life unbearable. But as with so many people, it doesn’t. And now I can address that to some extent. So, hooray? Keep it coming, sure.
I used to get so upset when people complimented my appearance, unless they did it in a super weird way. For one thing I just didn’t want to be seen. For another it was such confusing dissonance from what I was told the rest of the time. And then the terms they used were all wrong.
There was that one guy who went up to me on the upper east side, and told me I looked like the lord of darkness. That was kind of interesting. Random shit like that, yeah. Sure. Baffling, but I’d take it.
Otherwise it’s like, either you’re wrong or everyone else is wrong—and if they’re wrong, then oh no, because I don’t want you to be right like that. The things everyone else said, they sucked but at least they reflected how I actually felt about myself at that time, drowning in dysphoria.
Getting an insult almost felt neutral. Yeah, it was no good but at least it was true. Getting that kind of a compliment—I’ve never been suicidal exactly, but if I’ve ever been close, those moments would have edged me in that direction. At times I remember melting down entirely.
It never made any sense to me, why I reacted like this. Which just added another layer of fuckery to the whole thing.
I mean. Makes sense now. I didn’t want to be that person; I wanted to be me.
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