I don't know what I'm doing

In about a month, I'm getting ready to start my HRT journey. This is something I've been mulling over for the past 11 years. When I was 18, that's when I first really started to question my gender identity. At first, I wondered if I was transgender because I never quite felt like a "girl." This was well before I had the vocabulary and understanding of gender as a spectrum. After some self reflection, I didn't quite feel "truly" trans because I had no desire to completely become a man. I've always been fond of my feminine body and have no desire to physically alter it, save for starting hormones.

Looking back on my past, experimenting with my different gender roles started as young as kindergarten for me. I'd always want to play the chivalrous prince or other male-centric roles, but I also loved being the cute, girly princess. Age 12 was when I really started to experiment with my gender presentation, but I never felt like I could be (birth name) and be a boy at the same time. So, my solution was to create an "alter ego" and call him Scotty (thanks to watching EuroTrip at the time lol). Before I fully developed and went through puberty, it was so much easier to be androgynous and gender fluid, but growing up in a small town, I didn't have the vocabulary or the knowledge to understand what I was going through at the time. Keep in mind, this was also between 2005-2011 when gender identity wasn't widely talked about either.

Throughout my late teens and early 20s, I discovered genderfluid as an identity. Around age 24 or 25 was when I started to give up trying to look masculine, because I never felt like I could "pass" and trying to look masculine caused me to feel more body dysmorphia than the gender euphoria that I craved. So, for a while, I started presenting more hyper feminine, and only occasionally playing around with a masculine-type presentation if I was really in a mood on any given day, but I would never go out in public, unless it was in a queer space. Even then, I always felt insecure about being perceived as a "butch lesbian" rather than genderfluid.

Around May or June of this year, it dawned on me that I very well might be agender. This idea came to me when my roommate asked me what gender I felt like when we were dressing up for an event. My only response was "no" as I laughed it off. However, now that the ball is finally rolling for me to start HRT, I'm wondering if I might start leaning more towards being genderfluid again if my meatsuit can match the way I feel inside. Part of me wonders if I would feel more comfortable in my femininity if I had at least the option to present more masculine when I want to. In addition to HRT, I'm also looking into getting a good quality binder from For Them (forthem.com) once I get some spending money.

I've always had an attraction to femboys, not as a fetish like a lot of people seem to have on this site, but more out of body envy. From age 18, I found myself wanting to look like a twink and dress girly if I want to. However, being assigned female at birth, all people see is a cis woman, and not a femboy. It also doesn't help that I have an hourglass figure complete with 36DD breasts and an ass like a peach. With this kind of body that I have, I also turn to weight lifting and bodybuilding as a hobby, because if I'm going to be perceived as a girl, I may as well be a muscle girl because a lot of people do perceive them as masculine. Hopefully once I start T, I can actually start building the kind of masculine body that I want rather than building up the feminine body that I have.

Come to think of it, I think that's how I initially found you back in the MySpace days. I was a fan back then, and preserving my mental health is preventing me from remaining a fan today.

You always had such a way with words and I feel like your melancholic imagination was only paralleled by mine. We stoked the flames of each other's creativity while we were together and I would have loved for that to continue forever. I believe that what we had was real, but it was never meant to last. How could it? The taboo of an age gap relationship, especially with me being underage was never going to be accepted, and I understand why; no matter how real it felt to either of us, it was predatory by nature. You were the adult and I was the child.

If I had to guess as to why you chose to get into a romantic relationship with a then 16-year-old, I would say it's because it gave you just the right strokes to your ego. You were newly divorced and the wounds were still fresh. You wanted to feel loved and appreciated again. You wanted some semblance of normalcy restored. But a 16 year old? As mature as I was, I did not have the life experience necessary to help you through that difficult time in your life, and I shouldn't have had to. I was aware of this, and that self-awareness of my limitations is what drew you to me like a moth to a flame.

To me, this speaks of a larger societal problem that the majority of cishet men have with a severe deficit of emotional maturity and a dangerous relationship with toxic masculinity. The poison is in you, no matter how hard you try to fight it. And it makes sense; you were just 19 when you got married the first time to someone much older than you and had a child. My guess is that you had to, or rather, chose to mature quickly instead of enjoying the youthful decade of your 20s. You once told me that you didn't want to rob me of that same experience, so in a way, I'm grateful that you ended our relationship when I was 18. My journey of self discovery without an inappropriate emotional attachment was spared, so thank you.

History dictates that men should not have to rely on anyone to confide their feelings in, save for their romantic partners because this is the only alloted safe space. Your pain from your divorce and other underlying problems should have been addressed by a therapist, not by a 16 year old internet fan. Therein lies the problem that is at the crux of why we were so wrong for each other.

You seem happy now in your age appropriate marriage, and I'm absolutely happy in mine. I'm almost certain that you haven't sought the professional help that you may need to address the issues that led you to dating me, but I'm glad that you seem to be thriving, and so am I. It's just taking me the majority of my 20s to process four years that heavily influenced my development. My reason for being drawn to you was easy to understand; I came from an emotionally abusive home with parents that never even attempted to understand me when I barely understood myself. I wanted an escape from that reality, and you provided it to me through your music and dark imagination. For all the pain and trauma that we endured together and inflicted on each other, I'm grateful for the experience in such crucial years of development. I mean this with the utmost sincerity that I wouldn't be who I am today without you, and I like who I am. I don't regret how I got here.

I don't understand these complicated feelings that I've been experiencing lately. About 12 years ago, I had an online/long distance relationship with someone that I shouldn't have been with, and I now understand why there were so many things wrong with that relationship, but it happened and I came out mostly unscathed, at least I think so.

The way I've tried to make my peace with it is by telling myself that we fulfilled important needs that the other had at that specific point in our lives. Despite being so wrong for each other, we created something toxic, messy, beautiful, and tragic. We tried keeping in touch on and off for at least 4 years after the initial break up happened, but it never yielded any substantial connection like we once had. Back then, we were completely in our own little imaginary world where nothing could harm us. It was our haven and fueled my creativity to no end! I wanted it to go on forever.

The problem I'm having now is that in my formative teenage years, during my relationship with this person, I used to create So. Much. Art! I loved and embraced my tortured soul back then, as it was almost par for the course of an angsty teenager, only because I believed that it would someday end. Back then, I believe I produced my best art when I was depressed and going through inner turmoil. Now, at 28 and feeling depressed again, I just....don't know what to do with this energy. I'm thoroughly disappointed with most art I make that I feel like I've lost an integral part of my identity.

In between the time I was with this person and now, I've had some artistic inspiration, but nothing that lasts. This person's one and only album that they produced in 2007 was the biggest source of my artistic inspiration, and then later, getting into a relationship with them only deepened that creative flow. They became a character at the center of every little story I'd imagine. I created an idea of them in my mind that I started to prefer over the actual flesh-and-bone human that inspired them, and I feel like that's one of the primary facets that led to our demise. I felt very detached from reality during most of my formative years for reasons I'd come to understand later.