I feel a little alienated from my sisters sometimes and took forever to understand myself because I lack the standard narratives everyone seems to have. I never knew what was wrong with my life. Not even a little. I’m AuDHD and I grew up when Silence of the Lambs and Ace Ventura were coming out. I had a privileged, well-off childhood with early access to the internet and my parents told me that if I just kept acing math and science tests I’d be set for life. So I just got up in the morning, put on clothes society told me to put on, sat through school, and then went home and dissociated out of my body onto the internet. On the internet I got to be no one without a body, shitposting on 4chan (before /tttt/ existed, thank the sun) and then fark and then reddit.
I never picked girl characters in rpgs, but you know the one rpg character I really, really got into imagining myself as? My Forsaken (undead) WoW main. Because he was dead, and struggling to find some purpose in his undead existence.
Taking hormones shocked me to my core because I suddenly came alive and hadn’t even realized I was dead. I felt present in my body and feminine and they went together and felt completely right. Looking back on my life now, I didn’t feel like a girl trapped in the wrong body, I felt dead and absent and coped with it by being anon online. Life never forced me to reckon with myself and that feels embarrassing now.
Now I’m craving sisterhood and validation and being seen. But I’m well into middle age and I’m shackled to a house in the suburbs I sleepwalked into. I can be the woman I want to be but real growth is slow and I’m impatient. I keep vomiting my feelings at people like I am in this post (and people find it off-putting I think). Can anyone relate to my story?
Fuck, I need to watch I Saw The TV Glow, don’t I
You’re welcome! Thank you for sharing your story.
I felt the exact same way. I was curious about how I’d feel on it more than I wanted body changes. I was intrigued but scared by the idea of feeling differently, thinking differently on them. I dithered on it for several years. With a trans friend’s encouragement I tried them.
The first full day after injecting I felt alive and present in a way that I can’t remember feeling since I was a little kid. I started being able to process what I was feeling while I was feeling it, instead of being hit over the head with an emotion and only being able to process what I was feeling in the aftermath. An intrusive thought that normally I’d dwell on and be upset and angry at nothing entered my head, and I was able to stop and go “that’s just gonna make me sad to think about. I don’t want to feel that way, I’m gonna dispense with this thought and not worry about it.” And it happened.
Everyone’s body and endocrinology is different, but in my experience the body changes take weeks to start and happen slowly, but I felt right and certain that it was good for me immediately. All the advice I’ve gotten told me that mental changes come before physical body changes, and if you don’t like the mental changes you can stop them and you should go back to the way you were before.
So that’s some more of my story there; you don’t have much at all to lose by trying estrogen.