hrt diary stuff (10-30-23)
cw: personal touchy feely sex-ed style explicit stuff
alright, dolls, we're approaching month seven and the HRT is really starting to hit different. i haven't really kept a chronicle of my """""journey""""" (the irony-poisoned xillennial in me screams), and if i don't write something i'm just gonna end up as a baldur's gate/armored core reblogger so i think i'm gonna start doing that! but first, i need to catch you up
off the cuff: i'm in the latter half of my thirties. i go by "B" right now since i can't settle on a name, but right now i have the names "Cherry" and "D'arcy" and i'm trying to see if they can be put together somehow. i'd love to write the story, one day, of what made me start doing all of this in the first place, but for now we can just say that denial is one hell of a drug.
i live a privileged life - i'm white, reasonably educated, i have a job title with the word 'engineer' in it. i grew up incredibly poor, but in today's times i have had the rare luxury of being able to transition from a place of social and financial comfort. my parents do not have control over me and my workplace is supportive. i'm very lucky, and i'm having a much easier transition than most women will ever get. i try never to forget this, and try to let it keep me humble.
on new year's eve of 2022, i made the new years resolution to "destroy myself," and on april 15, 2023, i began doing exactly that. FOLX, my provider, suggested that the best way for me to destroy myself was with 4mg of Estradiol, taken orally every morning (i take 6mg now). i don't recommend FOLX, but if you live in the southern US they might be your only decent choice.
anyway, it basically goes like this:
super early (almost immediately): the Feelings
dosage: 4mg (first, one pill in the morning and one in the evening - later, two pills in the morning (no real difference!))
this part was near and dear to me. i think back to when i lost my brother - in the middle of the grief i felt, i observed that i was experiencing a depth of sadness that was very new for me, a sort of uncharted emotional frontier if you will. to put it simply, i just really never felt THAT sad before. it reminded me of how my mother would say that when you over-ate, it would expand your stomach. in its new size, you'd want more food and you'd feel hungrier than you normally would.
this 'expanded' state is how i live now, 24/7. my friends are darling and very supportive and they've had a wealth of viewpoints as to how our emotional expression is rooted so deeply in our perception of gender, and for what it's worth i think they're right, but i have one experience most of them don't: i'm AMAB. occasionally their support would leave me feeling a little shut out, as if they were unintentionally discounting a very real chemical change that has opened previously shut doors in my brain. it isn't their fault. i just don't think anyone realizes what a poison testosterone can be
it isn't simply that i'm allowing myself to feel more. it doesn't feel like a psychosocial phenomenon. i actually feel more. it's stronger and rawer and so much closer to home. picture your sense of touch being amplified, so that you can't stroke a bedsheet or touch your hair without your nerve endings blasting dense packets of sensory information to your brain and back, seemingly out of proportion with what actually happened. i want you to imagine this happening with your emotions, instead. happiness has so many more shades; anger is so many-layered and so very complicated, very specific. i can be affected by faint, hazy motes of love and lust and loneliness that each demand careful consideration, and that touch very specific parts of my spirit. the spectrum of emotion is such a dense and noisy neighborhood and there are ever so many avenues
i don't feel like i'm letting down my defenses... rather, i feel like a longtime smoker who has just quit, and is now realizing just how flavorful all of her food is.
second puberty kicks in during the later stages of this. i couldn't imagine trying to work a customer service role at this point. you're going to freak out, girlie. if you have the luxury of working a job where you don't need to see anybody, put on some music, keep your head down, and just get through it. if not, i'm so sorry. do the best you can, love, and don't forget to forgive yourself
nothing else super exciting to report. the natural oils of my skin and hair started to change and i began feeling "cleaner" if that makes sense. the biggest physical change here was just how often i smiled.
mid stage (3-6 months): the Softness
before my next estradiol refill, i got bumped up from 4mg to 6mg, taken orally - i had some serious issues trusting FOLX so for the first month, i continued only to take 4mg and banked the third pill. i'm taking all 6mg every day now. i'm going to check in with my doctor but if i understand the research, i may have balanced myself enough that i can get away with monotherapy - only taking estrogen, as my T levels are so low that my body could very well shut down testosterone production all on its own.
this part absolutely fucking ruled, and it's pretty neat to know that it basically lasts forever. it's one thing to touch your forearms and wonder if you're getting softer; it's a very different and altogether more enormous thing to realize that you are indeed getting softer. my skin was changing, actually changing!
there is something unutterably beautiful about the naturally-defined order of dance steps that your body will effortlessly follow, under the influence of hormones. not to be a hopeless nerd, but it has the same carefully thought-out, human vibe as a well-made game tutorial or a meticulously planned dinner. first it coaxes open the little latch in your brain that lets you feel and dream and sob and love in 4K, and then once you've had a little experience and gotten the hang of it, it does the same trick with your nerve endings and says "alright doll, go touch the world back."
my roommates thought i was a pervert because i'd keep gasping at touch. i was wholly unprepared for the texture of the couch or for the feeling of my own hair after it'd been freshly blow-dried. i remember one day i woke up and the hardwood floor was tickling my feet so much, i was trying not to whimper. it was so fucking much
in the previous stage, it was hard to avoid the sense that my emotions had scarred over, and that the HRT had sanded away the edges until i was left with vulnerable, exposed organic surfaces
in this stage, i felt like i finally had some kind of proper cover, some interface, some missing and necessary part to put over those surfaces. i was a machine being slowly but surely finished. now, my body matches my mind - it feels the way i do. it is no longer a protective layer through which i touch the world, but is instead substanced by it; made of world-stuff, so that there is no difference between feeling the world and feeling myself. John Locke suggested that the doped tabula rasa of the mind is little more than an illusion, facilitated by your organs of sense - but now i am an organ of sense and the mind/body barrier has never felt more flimsy
i think i started growing breasts around month 4. naturally the dolls are fixated on this part, and i don't have anything to report that you can't find in a million other hrt blogs and similar spaces - they're gonna get sore. they're gonna feel really weird to touch. they're gonna be fuzzy and having to shave them sucks so fucking much. you're absolutely going to forget you can't just casually bump your chest against a door frame, and you're gonna have to explain to your roommate that no, you weren't being stabbed through the spinal column with a superheated ceramic knife, you only screamed that loud because your weird little cone titties were so goddamn tender!!!!
right now (6 1/2 month mark): the Urges
i noticed that from the outset, my hrt experiences aligned pretty closely with the net's wealth of anecdotes - but the longer i'm on estrogen, the more i begin to find variations, the more i start to read things like 'this may impact you later or earlier' and for me it's almost always earlier (i was kinda low on T naturally). don't freak out if this stuff isn't happening to you yet!
hrt completely trashed my sex drive. sometimes i went through the motions anyway, because i am a profoundly and unapologetically sexual person, but it was more of a learned/cultural thing, and even that stopped. my sense of touch was currently being reserved for enjoying silk and kitty ears, i had seemingly no interest in my annoying, distracting sexual characteristics!
i have a lot i could say on how sexuality has influenced my life - like a lot a lot. i can't really summarize it here but i can do the best i can: a man's sex drive is torture. doubly so if you're a man who knows he isn't one, and who has actively been living the sort of sex life that occasions unsolicited "you're like a lesbian" comments from past lovers. combine this with the tendency for men to put their self worth into their sexual prowess, and you have the perfect conditions for a confusing mess
anyway - one day, i'm sitting with my friends watching the Good Place, and there's this scene where one of the main characters is shown briefly kissing Janet, just before she transforms into somebody else.
i just suddenly couldn't breathe. when i could, i wasn't getting enough air, and i was so light-headed and so warm and i felt so silly. it feels really uncharitable to say that i thought i'd suddenly lost a few dozen IQ points, but i honestly felt like, so small and so silly and just a little stupid, and in that moment i sort of wanted to be told those things.
it kept happening: once when my roommate put her hand through my hair and told me how good i was doing with my makeup; once when the gorgeous woman who pierced my ears giggled and called me "a bleeder"; far, far more than once when i'd read saved chat logs with old flames, reread saved bits of roleplaying, and more.
i get turned on, babes! it's so fucking weird! it's not like anything i've ever experienced. just with everything new in my life, it continually shocks me with hitherto unexperienced layers of complexity: being turned on by a little touch and compliment is so much different from being outright hit on. being called "'good girl" hits way harder than being told i look "stunning." all of these come with their own new and dizzying qualia, and they all have different ways of interacting with my limbic system. this was all supposed to affect me the same! it's so complicated now!
the best thing is: i know when i'm turned on and when i'm horny. i know when i'm feeling warmth for someone and when i'm attracted. it's like my brain had been sending everything down the same tunnel, and now it realizes it's supposed to have its shit together, to propagate signals through the correct channels. i can be turned on and not want to be touched. i can feel love and genuine affection for my friends - without the queasy, guilt-inducing part where i desperately keep my sex drive down, ignoring the out-of-place and unwanted things i feel for them. i can keep myself up until 3am, driving myself insane, exploring my body, and come out of it feeling silly and tired and satisfied, without the loneliness, the sadness, the self-disgust.
my body is very, very soft - it isn't just the better skin conditions i alluded to before, but as i lose my visceral (below-the-muscle) fat, my body replaces it with subcutaneous (above-the-muscle) fat. i'm still in the very early stages of this, but it's already noticeable. i'm skinnier than i've ever been in decades, yet my chest, ass, and thighs jiggle when i walk! HRT is so fucking cool.
at this point in the adventure, if you've been keeping to a skincare routine you really should be seeing results. i'm working on developing better habits and i still struggle with motivation, but still - i try to exfoliate at least twice a week and i moisturize regularly. if ADHD allows it sometimes i'll remember to bust out the serums or the snail cream. my body hair's growing in a little slower, it comes in thinner and lighter, and my skin has this lovely translucence that i never get sick of looking at. i shine, very faintly, in the light.
i've never kept a diary in my life so i'm just gonna decide how it works: here we close. i just really hate how hard it is to find testimony and shared experiences. it's so fucking crazy how i can ask google to name a movie i barely remember but it is somehow useless when i want to know if my nipples are supposed to hurt at 5 months of HRT (they are).
i think that even a single trans girl finding my blog and maybe feeling a little less unsure about herself is enough for me to keep wanting to do it, though.
