My week has been great! My girlfriend and I told each other that we love each other this week, and it just made me so happy. I’ve been having a stressful time lately adjusting to some changes, since the grandma I live with is at a point where she needs to move to assisted living in a few months and we’re selling the house to pay for it. However, all the difficulties at home have been balanced with the joy I feel getting to spend my time with a girl I adore, so things could be so much worse. We’ve been talking about possibly moving in together, which is an exciting prospect!

Thank you! <3

Thank you!!

It was truly wonderful. Couldn’t imagine a better date night, honestly!

My week has been great! A girl I’ve recently started seeing asked me to be her girlfriend, which made me wildly happy. I’ve never been somebody’s girlfriend before ☺️ We tripped on mushrooms and cuddled the night away, and things have been going really well so far since then!

Whoa, that’s awesome! Once you start getting read as “girl” when you’re out and about, it is such a lovely change. You can look forward to a lot more comments like that in the future!

I’m doing well! Had a lovely Halloween with my friends. For work, I dressed up in a witch costume, and then at a party I went as Gretchen from Cuckoo, had a blast wearing both. A few friends told me that using she/her with me feels very natural, and that made me happy :)

My week was great! I took some sunset pictures with a friend and wore a dress I like, and made my first facebook post in over a year with them. My last post was from before my transition, so I was nervous that I’d get a lot of shock and negative reactions. It’s Facebook, after all. However, everybody was SO kind and just had lovely things to say, and some people reached out to me in private to ask how they should refer to me. That made me happy

Heck yeah, congratulations!! The wait is finally over 🙌

My transition’s been going decently well. I’m only about a year into HRT, so I have some physical changes yet to go, and possible surgery on the horizon, but socially things have been going really good! I am out at work, at home, and with all my friends, and it’s been nice to be called Astrid by qll the people in my life.

More often than not, I look in the mirror and like the person I see. Sometimes I worry that I am still visually exactly the same when other people look at me, but what can ya do 🤷‍♀️

My week was very not good, sadly. I had to take my grandpa to the ER on Friday, and then I got broken up with Friday evening. Had a ten hour video shoot Saturday, just been pretty overwhelmed with work and home life in general. Things will work out ok, but this week has been a lot lol

My week has been great! I went to a drag brunch today and needed to figure out what outfit to wear. I found a little goth dress that I bought many years ago when I was firmly in the closet, which had made me dysphoric back then because it didn’t fit. Today I tried it on, and it fit great! I received many compliments, and it was super fun to celebrate pride in my local community.

I hope you’re all having a great week, too!

Heck yeah! It’s my first summer wearing dresses and flowy things too. Feels so freeing to be able to dress how you please and take full advantage of the hotter seasons! I hope you love it!

Been a good week for me! I ran my first 10k today and did not finish last, so that was a big win. Summer weather is here too, meaning I get to try out all my new flowy outfits and shorts and whatnot. Feeling good!

Also got to see the aurora and take MANY pictures. Truly one of the most beautiful nights of my life. Hope you all are doing well, too!

Huh, a long faucet ad in Vietnamese posted to the Star Trek lemmy community. How in the world has this come to pass? lol

My week is good! Weather is warmer over here, so I got to try out some of my new summer outfits, which was very affirming. I also took some measurements to determine my cup size, which according to the calculator is 32DD. Pretty pleased with that! I know cup size is meaningless without band size but it is funny to tell my friends that I have double Ds lol.

Other than that, just been gardening and working like normal!

It was pretty good! Started a workout routine with my mom, and that was fun. I also had to do a 4:00am hike to do some sunrise filming for work, which was both beautiful and exhausting haha.

My E got raised to 0.4ml injections so I am hoping that speeds some changes along a little more. I do find myself catching myself in the mirror and just being so pleased with the direction things are going, so that’s been nice!

What’s your story, cowboycrustation?

My dark and brooding backstory? Idk how deep to go into it, but I can give the cliff notes of what lead up to my transition. (It ended up longer than I expected, apologies)

All my life, I’ve had a deep admiration for women. I didn’t actually have a sexual awakening until I was like 22, so very late compared to most of my friends. I just felt this extreme envy of the opposite sex, and I was like “this must be what other people mean by attraction” lol. I spent most of my years feeling like I didn’t fit into my box. When my dude friends talked about girls, I just could not relate at all. I couldn’t get into the macho, masculine role it seemed like I was supposed to fill. I did musical theater in high school, and was exposed to the wider gamut of gender expression and sexuality through it, since in my experience theater communities tend to be pretty diverse in that way. I saw friends transition, but I didn’t think it was something that was actually possible for me.

When I became an adult, moved out and was living with friends, that’s when something inside me clicked, the hormones turned on, and I was overwhelmed by a new side to life I hadn’t previously been experiencing. I got on dating apps, went on many dates, had one or two short term girlfriends, but I found that my heart just was not in it. I liked girls, and still do, but again I felt like something about this dynamic I was inserting myself into wasn’t fitting.

During this period, I also spent a lot of time on grindr talking to various dudes and meeting up, having encounters, etc. Grindr is a wretched place but it felt like a very low-stakes environment to experiment with all these new feelings I was having. After a while, I found that I still couldn’t shake the feeling that people were expecting things of me I just couldn’t gel with. Like “if only I could have gay sex, but like, as a woman, you know?”

I found that I was so much happier with myself when I got rid of all my body hair. For some stupid reason though, I thought my friends would judge me if they saw me like that, so when we made water related plans I would get anxious and let it grow out until that event was over. I felt like I had to balance the times when I could be myself with the times I needed to fill the expectations of people in my life.

All of this time, I was DEEPLY unhappy. I had been unbelievably anxious and struggling with major depression for most of my life, and so around a few years ago I started to seek help and try to improve myself. I got therapy, learned I was experiencing OCD, got medicated, and suddenly didn’t feel insane all the time. I made new friends, filled my life with social events, and felt less alone. I tried new substances, accidentally had an extreme mushroom trip, and felt a strange, detached clarity I didn’t imagine was possible.

All in all, I started to live happier, and no longer caught up in these wells of depression from which I could not escape. Finally I was unburdened by baggage that had been weighing me down for so long, and with my newfound clarity of thought, I could start looking at my life and piecing things together. I’d had the DIY HRT resources open on my computer for a whole year, but now I had the mental fortitude and courage to do something about it, combined with a support structure I felt confident in. I made an appointment at Planned Parenthood and I never looked back.

Finally I feel like I “fit.” I can be myself all year, and not have to worry about if I’m not performing masculinity enough for the people around me. I just feel myself, and I feel free. I have never been happier.

Sorry you’ve had to go without binding for a bit dude, that’s no fun at all. Dysphoria blows, but it’s really cool that you’ll at least get to buy a bass soon and start learning! Playing guitar always makes me happy, hoping it will do the same for you