Skip to main content

20th February - worrying myself again

After yesterday of feeling that all the things yam doing are pointless someone responded to say that it feels routine and unexceptional because it is right. 

That is a really nice thought. I would like to know that the reason I don’t feel anything special about the routine stuff anymore is because it is the right and normal thing for me as a woman. 

Problem is that my head is suggesting an alternative viewpoint: that it doesn’t feel special because it’s like an addictive substance and now what I’m doing isn’t enough of a “hit” so I need to escalate my steps to get the same feeling. 

What if everything that I have ever done and thought about gender has been that?  The first time I tried a skirt, gave me a sense of something but I needed more. Wearing my mother’s bras (as a teenager) was enough for a while, until it wasn’t. Then I wore one to school under my uniform which was sufficiently terrifying to up the excitement level. Later in life, going to shops and looking at women’s clothing escalated to buying it, to buying more and more daring things. Then sharing my feelings with a few friends, creating a Nicola email address, a Nicola twitter account, reading about transitioning, researching clinics. 

One interpretation of all of this is that each small thing that I have done has given me the little hit of whatever the trans drug is in my brain, until that isn’t enough and I need to up the ante and do something a little bit more to get the same effect and so on until what, the only thing left is transitioning?  

Have I done this to myself? Taught myself to be trans by feeding my addiction for years and years? 

Or the other interpretation, that I am trans and always have been, but have had to progress in baby steps and only move on to the next thing once I am feeling comfortable with the last? 

How do I know? Is it even possible to know? 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

27 May 26 - does my brain actually have a “girl mode”?

As I keep reflecting on my night out as Nicola last week there are a lot of questions and ideas that are swirling around in my head.  One is, whether my brain has a “girl mode”, because I felt so different and behaved in ways that were unfamiliar to me.  The really distinct difference in how I felt this time was that I didn’t feel like I was a man in a dress at all, I just felt like me. I remember thinking that this is what it is like to be “inhabiting womanhood”. Evidently I have ridiculously pretentious notions after a few drinks, but it was what I was feeling. This is what it is like to actually be a woman. Less pretentious.  An odd thing, but one which does make me wonder if my brain has some kind of “switch”, is that I looked at women differently. I am exclusively attracted to women and I am attracted to boobs and bums as much as the next man (cringe at associating with being a man). I know it is impolite to stare at a woman’s chest, and I make a conscious effort no...

21 May 2026 - a night out

Having a night on my own in London, I wanted to go out presenting female and get some more “real life experience”.  I had drinks and dinner with some colleagues early evening and to be honest had already had too much wine before I went out later by myself. This probably helped my confidence, although not my coordination with nail polish and mascara, which were a bit slapdash to say the least.  I remember last year getting in a lift in the hotel in a dress ready to go out, and being self conscious of people staring at me. This time, didn’t give it a thought. Likewise going into the underground and being on the train with other people. I didn’t notice if anyone looked at me and nor did I care. I was just me being me and wearing a skirt didn’t feel like a Thing, I wasn’t conscious of my clothes at all.  Similarly walking through a busy Soho to the bar, I just felt like I normally do walking around town.  Got to She Soho. Amazingly the bouncer asked me for ID. I’m 51...

31 Dec 25 - reflecting on the past year

I could see 2025 as a failure.  After all, I started the year with the intention to begin my transition. I still haven’t started.  I made initial contact with the endocrinologist clinic about feminising hormone therapy, but then didn’t progress that at all as soon as I encountered the blood test hurdle.  Here at the beginning of 2026, I am no closer to living as a woman than I was at the beginning of 2025. I have not come out to anyone, I don’t have a hormone prescription, my body is still male, my presentation is still full time male, everyone still knows me only as my male name.  Has the longing to be a woman gone away because I haven’t done anything about it? No. Obviously.  Although I have not begun transitioning, I have achieved a couple of things this year.  One is that I survived my wife catching me out and finding a pair of knickers that I had forgotten to hide. It was awful, and she was terribly upset, but I got through it and that is somethi...