Not Even a Chef @EloraEdwards Transitioning gets boring. Looking back, the excitement of the little things starting to change give way to normalcy. Like buying a new car. When you get it, it’s your NEW car. It’s exciting and has the new car smell. Eventually it’s just your car. Similarly, this is just my life
Not Even a Chef @EloraEdwards And the different becomes normal. Being treated as a woman has become so normal that I’m no longer surprised when an older man holds the door open for me or let’s me go ahead in line. Miss and ma’am aren’t elating, just expected.
Not Even a Chef @EloraEdwards And it’s just my body. The things I have left to change I can’t without surgery, and without insurance or an income I’m trying very hard not to even think about it. So the rest is just me. It’s the most exciting boring I’ve ever felt.
Not Even a Chef @EloraEdwards There are still things I can work on, but most are no longer transition related. Excercise, meditate more frequently... The only exception being my voice. And even that’s fine. It’s just a matter of tweaking.
Not Even a Chef @EloraEdwards I feel like I’m closing in on the end of all this. And it’s scary. I’m not as pretty as I wanted to be. I still have self-image issues. But those are mine now. Dyphoria is giving way to dysmorphia, not stacking up to other women. It’s no longer not stacking up to “women”
Not Even a Chef @EloraEdwards But the issue with this, and what’s keeping me awake at night, is what’s next? I’ve longed for this forever, and here we are, not even a year and a half after I started, and I feel complete. Complete but not whole. But the latter comes from the rest of my life. Now what?
Comic by Cassandra Calin It happens.
You’re 18-30 months into transition. You’re full time, you’ve done the majority of your coming out, your legal changes are done, maybe a surgery behind you, and the body shifts have slowed to subtlety. You might still have some surgeries ahead of you, but the bulk of the “work” of transition is finished. You start to feel disconnected from the person you used to be. Now what?
Now. What.
Now you live.
It reminds me so much of graduating from high school. Your entire life has been leading you to this day, every moment wrapped up in getting through graduation, and now… where do you go? Well… if you’re a millennial you probably didn’t go anywhere for another 5-10 years, but I digress.
Maybe you realize that the things you enjoyed before just don’t interest you as much. Old hobbies are less obsessive, being replaced by new interests and activities. Maybe your life has become more social as you expand out into new friendships and/or couplings. Transition gradually falls behind you, it just becomes part of your life, less important the further you get from it. But what do you do with yourself once you’ve reached this place?
Liz Lilly X⌬X⌬ @GuildingLilly There are several stages in transitions:
-steady state
-scared to death
-the big reveal
-euphoria
-the passion of the convert
-is that all there is
-steady state
There are several stages in transitions:
-steady state
-scared to death
-the big reveal
-euphoria
-the passion of the convert
-is that all there is
-steady state
@EloraEdwards Ah, you’re in the “is this it?” stage of transition.
Some people go back to college, having found themselves able to focus again now that their brains aren’t suppressed by dysphoria. Some people start a new career, having found that what they did pre-transition just doesn’t ring true to them any more, or because they were forced out of their previous career when they pursued transition. Some people move, relocating to places more hospitable to people like us, liberal cities where we don’t have to be as afraid. Some people launch a social media presence where they blog about their life and obsessively post photos of their clothes and gab about their mental health problems. 🤷♀️
But I would imagine that most trans people don’t do anything. They just continue on with life, nothing drastic, nothing extraordinary, just normalcy. Depending on how those around them reacted to transition, there may have been very little change in their lives at all.
Imagine what that must be like, for transition to have been completely mundane. How… drab.