It's been a while since my last daylog. A month and nine days after that writeup, I started hormones. It's now been a bit over three months since I started, and I officially feel fantastic. An enormous cloud of depression has lifted; I feel the best I ever have in my life. I'm currently in the process of getting my ID changed (only another few months of government form processing to go), but presenting as a woman 24/7. Other than some awkwardness at liquor stores, everything has been perfectly fine.

The main change so far has been mental. Hormones haven't done much physically yet other than make my nipples puffy, enlarged, and sore -- which admittedly is a welcome change. I'm excited to see how things progress from here.

I thought to write on Everything2 today for the first time in months because an old man offered me money for sex. He lives next door from my mom and is so old he can barely walk -- I think he's in his late 80s. He phoned me over to fix his TV today, but after I did that he stopped me from leaving, offered me $50 and started talking about how he'd like to "catch me". Wink wink. I walked away utterly speechless and thought "I need to write about this in a daylog."

...So there are some downsides to being a woman, but none that make me regret transition. Having little-to-no dysphoria makes anything worth it. Some dudes are just assholes. Like the old high school acquaintance who messaged me on Facebook a few weeks ago to ask me if I wanted to join a threesome. That was pretty gross.

I haven't been doing a ton other than make the occasional Minecraft video for YouTube (it makes for good voice training) and enjoying my newfound happiness. At some point I'm going to apply to go back to school and try to reboot my life in a new city -- the biggest downer these days is running into people who knew me as a kid, so a change of setting would be great.

Hopefully I'll start writing more again soon.

Justin:

I wanted to write, and I've been putting it off because it never seemed like the right time to pull my thoughts together. I started a new journaling course called Staying Started, and I meant to write this last night, but then I got sucked into a whirlpool of distraction, and since I didn't have a plan, what I wrote wasn't what I wanted to tell you. I can't remember the day we met, I doubt you'd remember it either, we had a common interest, and I didn't picture me becoming such a fan of yours, or realizing what an impact you had on my life until I read your email. I read what you said several times. I still have it marked as unread in my inbox so I can go back and remember what you wrote. I shared the idea with others, a friend of mine down in Arizona is excited, she's going through a difficult time with her mother so she and I have shared what caring for a parent that we don't live with is like. It's a stress reliever for both of us, and I hope we're able to stay in touch because she's such a wonderfully grounded concrete person.

Another friend of mine who lives in Canada, I really must get there as I have so many friends I'd like to see, but his roommate moved out, and I said he could call, but I didn't think he would, and sure enough there was an email from him about the move, and he said he was going to bed early, and I'm really worried about him for many reasons. He's lost weight, has no appetite, he has financial problems, very serious ones, and a crippling inability to do a lot of the things that he knows that he should be doing. And it's so easy for me to sit here listening to my Zen Garden relaxation music and forget that earlier I was crying while speaking to a British friend of mine that I just love. His sister has struggled with OCD in the past. She was treated at a place when she was sixteen, and I forget what words he used, but it was a nicer way of phrasing it than the term I would have used to describe where she stayed.

He was so nice to me this evening. In the past, I wouldn't have realized how much kindness matters, and I pictured the characters that I created as being wealthy, beautiful, noble, really the kinds and types of people I wanted to be myself, and I don't think there's anything wrong with this. I don't believe that any writing is wrong unless it's an attempt to make another person feel bad about themselves or what they believe which is why I have so much trouble with advertising and marketing because the lie is that your hair is not lustrous because you don't use a certain shampoo, your smile is not alluring enough without a layer of deceitful shimmer, and you can only figure out what he's thinking about when you're intimate after you purchase the glossy pages of Cosmopolitan. Years ago I read a definition of it, and it seemed terribly important that I know things, facts and how to do things, and I was insecure so I bluffed, but I didn't fool others, I only fooled myself.

Now you and I know that I still do that from time to time, but my friend from California talked to me about joining his crew of Long Tossers the other night, and I told him that I would, but I wasn't a long tosser. He laughed and said that I was funny and very real, and maybe a few other things that I can't remember right now, and that scares me too because I wonder about losing my ability to remember things as I age, and then I wonder if it's a real aging problem, or something more serious like a psychiatric issue, and I know I have problems there, I like to think of them as my pets that I've been neglecting and they've gotten more and more unruly as I've neglected them. I'm a terrible pet owner at times, obsessing over them, sacrificing for them when I should be taking better care of myself, and I had a chance to listen to my friend whose team won the 18U Baseball Chamionship over in Taiwan, and he talked about the importance of routine which made me realize that I don't have one. So I need to get one.

I'm tremendously grateful to you, and for you. For the encouragement you continually provide even though I know that you have days where you don't feel like doing things too. I feel as if you're honest, and so are my friends, and I value honesty as I value kindness, and one of the cool things I did was scrap a scene that I had thought wasn't too bad, and rewrote to make the main character really pathetic. As difficult as that was, I'm so glad I did it. What it does apart from making the story more realistic, because not everyone we know is a Major League Baseball player who makes a miraculous recovery afer a TBI, was force me to work through his problems which made my own seem not quite so bad. It also showed me that I could get him, and myself through a situation that was embarrassing, emotion based instead of rational, and I have a lot of trouble with my emotions coming out at the wrong time, so I think that him being like that will help me in real life, and if not, so what?

And that's really why I wanted to write to you tonight because I Can Not Tell You how your philosophy has helped me through things that I've dealt with. Not the big things like packing to move out, or filing for divorce although your strategy will come in handy then, I'm talking about the little things that break my day. The sickness, the unwellness, the not wanting to get out of bedness I go through whenever I wake up. The fact that I don't want to admit that I sleep with a pile of scarves wrapped around my head regardless of what time of day it is when I go to bed, or the fact that my kids ate beans and rice and we drank tea and ate grapefruit for breakfast, and I don't have a plan, and I didn't go to the grocery store when I should have because I thought I had plenty of time only then my sister called, and I was going to go over, and then the calendar scared me by reminding me that I had been invited to an event at church which was the same time as my conference call, and I sat on the couch with the girls watching Grease because Jane was sick.

She was so sick. Her head was warm and pale as she lay beneath her blanket. She told me that everything was moving too fast, people, and time were just flying by, and then she mentioned that she was hearing voices in her head, and that scared me too. And I wonder if her health is being destroyed because of things I've done, or not done, and I got her some water, and some rice, and she sat up, and I was so relieved to hear that the voices had told her to sit up and lie down, and nothing more. She's creative and artistic, and fragile and kind, so kind, and deep, and thoughtful, and I am blessed, and calm, and healed, and exalted, but I can't say these things to her so I put my hand on the warmth she radiates, and run the shower while she brushes her teeth. And I see the shadowed eyes, and the impossibly long lashes, the fine strands of gossamer hair, and the length of legs, and the fineness of her bones, and the coarse contrast of the movie that I chose because I felt like it was a classic, and I had never seen it through its entirety.

Possibly you will worry when you read this, but I'd like to encourage you not to as these are the things I think often, but never get out so they stay trapped inside, and erode my self esteem and willpower, and now like birds, they can take flight away from me leaving me freer, emptier, purer, cleansed of toxicity, and I couldn't say these things if we were together, but writing them now is not difficult, and the things I've worried about in the past are never the real things that I need to be worrying about so what's the point in worrying? There is none so I won't worry. I will act, because that's been effective in the past, and I can go to the store to buy wholesome nourishing foods, and I can contemplate the heavy heat of Florida in the summer, and envision the dog days of July here in Wisconsin, and perhaps some day I'll own the red mosiac table with the wrought iron chairs that I saw at the garden center, but today, I can proudly proclaim that I left there with nothing more than ideas so I am richer for not having consumed, and that's what I wanted to share with you.

Take care, and know that I love you.

J

I'm looking at a tin canister with a painting of a surreal landscape on the sides: there are winged dice, both on the ground and in the skies, and gigantic pearls, large enough to be playthings of the children playing on the green. On the top of the canister is the portrait of a pretty little girl of about ten. I open the canister. Inside, there's a newspaper clipping from about fifty years ago, a small (modern) doll dressed in 18th century garb, a length of lace, and some wool, apparently to cushion the rest of it.

The headline reads: "Little girls are just naturally...Divas!" with the tale of a girl in Mozart's day feted by the crowned heads of Europe as a child prodigy: the painting on top matches a photograph of a painting in the article. A paragraph or two talks about her Italian voice coach, who claimed to have taught her "by natural methods, and no tyranny" in the then-fashionable manner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It also mentions a canister, with lace from one of her gowns, selling at auction: the dice and pearls are supposed to be a caution about the nature of fame.

At the bottom of the clipping is a note reading "For a great recital!"

Somehow I get the feeling this didn't end well....

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