Maiden’s Journey

It's the beginning of autumn (fall) here in the UK and we get a beautiful golden light in the early morning and late afternoon.  It has rained overnight so everything looks shiny and gilded, it's really lovely.   There's probably some kind of brilliant metaphor that I could try to link to there, but that's not where I'm going with this, I just wanted to share a nice moment with you.  Perhaps I should have just taken a photograph.  What I actually want to talk about is the patterns of thoughts that I have come to recognise in myself.  I mentioned a couple of posts ago that it feels like my own brain is trying to 'gaslight' me into feeling or not feeling certain things and I suppose this is another example of that.   A brief recap for those who haven't read the last few posts: I finally managed to come to terms with my wish to transition, made a plan to come out to my wife, and then my courage failed me and I didn't go through with it.   T...

Ok, so I bottled it (that’s a British expression meaning to not have the courage to go through with something you planned, not sure if that translates!) I feel bad and embarrassed for myself but I think it’s important if I’m sharing my story here for others who are maybe in a similar situation that I share the downs as well as the ups.  What happened? Well nothing. There just didn’t seem to be any right time during the day to bring it up, and normal life was going on and throwing a huge thing into the conversation unexpectedly didn’t seem to be a good idea.  So I thought I’d look for some online inspiration to help me feel positive about my journey so I would want to take the leap.  Twitter was full of people talking about depression or discrimination they had suffered. That didn’t help. The first YouTube video that came up on ‘how I knew I was trans’ was a 100% passing beautiful young woman who was saying how she played with dolls as a child and wore pink and always knew...

I'm thinking this weekend I should take that terrifying leap into the unknown that I have been dreaming of for ever, share who I am with my wife and family and start my journey for real! Can I really do it? I know who I am: Nicola and I am a transgender woman.  I know what I want: to be able to fully live my life as Nicola as a woman I know what I need: to socially and medically transition These are positive things that I feel really good about and 100% want and need my life to be.   Just the small matter of taking the scariest step of them all and sharing all of this with those close to me, who will probably feel that I am pulling the rug from under their certainty about what our relationship is and who I really am, and therefore might well react quite badly initially.   Hence my trepidation and slight uncertainty that I'll be able to actually go through with it.  My brain is playing its usual trick of trying to prevent me from taking risk by focusing on t...

Having spent years thinking about who I am and what I want, and wasting many hours of your time dear reader, I have finally got to the point where I feel certain about my need to transition.  And I’ve got to say, this feels great. It’s like a weight of doubt has been lifted and I can confidently move forward. I’m able to visualise a future and all the positives that can bring rather than only see the barriers along the way. I have hope, which is joyous.  However, while my optimistic tendencies are happily looking to the future and how amazing that is going to be, there is one immediate and not insignificant barrier to be faced: at some point I am going to have to share all of this with my wife and teenager.  Now the teen will be fine, he’s of the view that all genders and sexualities are normal and you can just be what you want to be. So long as I reassure him I won’t pick him up from school looking like a drag queen to embarrass him, he’ll be fine with it.  My wife ...

Do you know, I almost added a "?" to the title but that isn't appropriate.  Such is the state of where my head is at right now, I feel ready, no question mark.  This feeling has come upon me suddenly after literally years of procrastinating, and to be honest has slightly taken me by surprise, although in a good way.   To feel certainty, and real certainty, without any of those nagging doubts, I've got to tell you, it feels amazing!   I don't even know where it has come from, because nothing tangible has changed in my life.   I did go out presenting female in public last week and that certainly made a difference.  It showed me that I can totally do this, it can be fine and I will cope.  Having done that though, there's this part of me that wants to jump straight to living that life always, and I am wanting to listen to that part of me more and more.  The other thing I have changed is the type of content I have been consuming. I had s...

If you’ve read my previous ramblings you’ll know that to date, my trans experience has been mostly theoretical, alone in secret or online with a few trusted friends. I’ve only actually been out dressed once, at a shopping mall far from home and it was during covid so I could hide behind a face mask.  At the weekend, I was reviewing old posts and found that almost exactly a year ago, I had written about how none of the obstacles would be any different in a year’s time so there was no benefit to waiting. If I started that day, a year hence (now!) or ten years in the future, everything that I am fear for will still be there, the only difference is I will have lost a year (or decade) of being who I want to be. My conclusion being: why not just do it now? Well I didn’t, obviously. But I can now say, one year in that I was absolutely correct. Nothing has changed, I have lost a year and it is not any easier to transition now than it was then. So I can take credit for my great wisdom and t...

I’ve done a lot of research, a lot of reading, many YouTube videos, much social media and time on trans forums. This on top of three decades of thinking about it in my own head, experimenting in private, sharing with a few confidants.   Has this got me anywhere? What have I learned about myself, what I want, who I am and the perennial question of “am I trans enough”?  Or framed another way: do I want to be like a girl, or to be a girl? I have found that I have a great deal in common with other trans women.  Psychologists and women who have transitioned talk about feelings and anxieties and thought patterns and I can relate to and have experienced all of these things myself.  I have found absolutely nothing at all that might indicate that I am not a trans woman.  Nothing.   Questioning my own thinking, over and over and I still feel that I am female inside, that I want to be a woman fully.  That thought makes me happy.  I have no similar feelings a...

There’s a whole load of similar questions that I could ask: - Why do I want to be a woman, can’t I just be a man? - Can’t I just cross dress in secret and that be enough? - Why socially transition, can’t I just keep Nicola for weekends? - Why change my body with hormones, can’t I just wear breast forms? - Why surgically transition, can’t I just keep things as they are?  I started off thinking about things people might say if I came out to them and then at each stage of the process. A sort of anticipatory “handling objections” list, like you would in a sales approach. Although it would be a pretty weird sales call!  But this has got me thinking and I realised that I need to be able to answer these questions to myself. Each of those questions is important and relates to a step along a journey, each a major escalation on the last.  If I ask myself would I like to start that journey, and take each of those steps, and all of them to the end, my feeling is: yes to all, but I’m ...