Ever changing, ever shifting exploration

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#21

Phoenix phoenix, what else are you digging at?

I think along with Phoenix, HOT has sunk deeper. And at the depths of it all is the very gender affirming messages for me mixed with, in IFS terms, a protector part whose job it is to prevent these things from surfacing.

I worked with my therapist today and she reminded me parts don’t go away, we can only reduce the extreme roles they get stuck in. In my case this part was there to make sure I didn’t become a target as a child when expressing very non-male behavior. All this past week I’ve been trying to bypass it and just live as my authentic self, but I didn’t hear it out. So these coming weeks my job is to just listen and understand. I need to respect my fears and difficulties, they aren’t trivial matters to be glossed over or pushed to the side. I’m making a very big life transition for myself that’s scary.

Honestly been beating myself up lately instead of showing myself compassion. I’d find myself thinking “if only I was more confident and didn’t give a fuck I could rip this bandaid off and live as myself”. But that does me no good because A. I’m not gonna do it and B. It’s completely devoid of empathy for the reason WHY I have so much fear of being myself and C. I put too much pressure on myself to uncover some “true self” when really part of my journey is discovering that self because it’s been repressed for so long. It didn’t interface with the world, it’s kind of ridiculous of me to expect it can just pop up and take form as a fully actualized self identity just because I want it to.

So yeah I just need to chill and let things come to me. Been putting too much pressure on myself for rapid transformation. Marathon, not a sprint. This is all new, it’s fine, I’m not doing things wrong or not doing enough. It just is. Phew, needed to get that down and calm my mind.

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#22

I don’t know how to describe it, but I feel like I’m locked in and on rails for something good in my life. Like a centering. As turbulent as it’s all been, it makes sense, my life has more meaning lately. I know I still have a lot of challenges ahead of me, but I think I’m gonna be ok.

This past week I’ve had an explosion of repressed feelings. A scramble to make sense of it and fit it into my internal identity. The thing with being male is I used self identified traits and behaviors to affirm my gender. So confidence? Male trait and that’s not true. So a lot of settling into my real gender identity is also throwing out rigid gender roles of what being a woman is. And that’s been kind of a mindfuck to unravel. Society very much uses gender roles to explain gender, but that’s not how it works.

I know there’s definitely a lot of expressive behavior I’ve repressed that I plan to uncover more. But as a whole I’m trying to avoid the whole “what would a REAL woman do here or like?” Cuz that’s not me, that’s just trying to shove myself in another box to make identification easier for other people which is a whole other grade of certified bullshit.

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#23

Sanguine has been SUPER helpful navigating my gender dysphoria. It’s still there, but it’s not completely knocking me on my ass like it was about 2 weeks ago. That was brutal. Now that I’ve committed to making changes for myself to feel better in my identity, I know it won’t be there forever and it’s lessened. Contrast that to a few months ago where I just had no solution, life was a perpetual state of hoping that things could feel better for me but always struggling in some way. Looking back I was heavily dissociated and didn’t even realize it. Things didn’t seem real, life didn’t seem real, my entire existence just felt meh. Which is kind of wild because I was definitely making life improvements and it didn’t seem THAT bad. But looking back on it now, yeah it was pretty bad. That’s the crazy thing about growth and perspective, you can only really know once it’s happened. Just an absolute plot twist in the story of my life, but I’m here for it because I know this is what will bring me happiness.

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#24

It’s wild what your mind can hide from you for so long. I’ve just been allowing things to show up and express themselves. It’s been about 2 weeks now since everything kind of just reached a “can’t do this anymore” point and pushed me to prioritize myself.

Part of what Phoenix is doing is recovering old memories and taking away the judgement of acting “wrong”. Prior to this point my life was about correcting myself. There was nothing wrong about it, maybe society saw it as wrong but that’s because nobody took the time to understand what I was going through.

There’s still knee jerk reactions where I feel even when I’m alone I shouldn’t feel or be a certain way. But then I just remind myself that’s not true. That’s not what life is about, it’s not about trying to be someone else, it’s about embracing and being the best version of yourself.

I’m so happy to hear nowadays about parents breaking generational trauma or letting children explore themselves fully. It still makes me sad when I hear stories of super proactive, attentive, and mature parents because I never knew that existed. It just helps remind me that it’s very easy to get stuck in my own dogmatic views because of a lack of experience. But that doesn’t mean it’s inherently more real than another experience.

#25

Physical change check in time for HOT.

For only running this two weeks my self perception has changed a ton. I never really had much upkeep with my beard so I was light on supplies. Decided to say screw it and treat myself to a nice electric shaver. Promptly shaved every last strand of facial hair off my face and then felt good. Really really good. I took some pictures of myself and felt like I wasn’t looking at a guy anymore. Physically my eyes look larger, my lips have more color, overall my features seem softer. It’s very very subtle when comparing pictures side by side, but the internal difference is immense. I pretty much cried today because I had no idea someone could feel this way about how they look.

I still have some stuff that hurts pretty bad. Specifically a very obvious male receding hairline. Looking at my side profile is like a gut punch. But I’m using red light therapy to try to restore some of it and I just bought a hair serum that might hopefully help. Unfortunately I never did anything for it when I was younger because I was too apathetic about what I looked like.

Everything has been surreal. I can’t believe I’m here and overcoming these fears every day to live as myself. I was so afraid of being seen as a freak or unwanted, but then I realized that’s on them. And I’m not going to let the ignorant people of the world ruin my chance to live my best life. I’m not going to keep letting the weight of others opinions hold me down. Life is too short for that and I’ve already compromised on it enough in the past.

#26

Even though you seem to be having negative feelings (as you have from time to time in the past), there seems to be a sense of optimism and hope in your writing, as though you know you can handle this successfully.

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#27

There absolutely is. In the past a lot of the times I wrote here trying to convince myself of it. But lately I genuinely feel it. It’s been a really good sign for me.

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#28

Ran 6 minutes of HOT about two days ago and I wasn’t ready for that. Still recovering, luckily I’ve got my 5 days rest period coming up so I timed that pretty well.

Not much going on with me. As the days go by more and more is uncovered. My therapist has been insanely helpful these past few weeks. We’re working on mapping out my IFS parts more. What’s interesting is I wrote her a message about “new” parts I’ve encountered with all the gender stuff. But she dug into it more and nope, they’re the same parts that came up in my sessions earlier. It’s like they take any issue and run it through their filters and cause some blocks. Been an interesting thing to witness, these sort of core coping mechanism that are kind of adaptive to what comes in.

Overall taking things one day at a time and trying to not have breakdowns in the process. Past week has been rough, but I’m working things out. A lot of this is just listening to myself, my needs, and going from there. Not something I’ve been particularly good with throughout my life, but it’s getting better.

#29

So I’m committed to a full on gender transition. Legally, physically ,and socially. Absolutely terrified but I’ve got plenty of tools to help me out with this. Each step is just more self discovery, I cant map out everything but I know this takes a while.

One thing I’ve been battling with, and maybe this is where the butt load of recon came from on HOT recently, is the fact that I grew up as a guy and learned all this behavior, “safe” behavior. Letting that mask fall away and be myself hasn’t been easy. I also fell into this trap of trying to uncover deeper parts of myself vs just focusing on change that makes me happy. I have to remind myself it’s ok if I have to learn to be myself, I wasn’t given an opportunity to do that. I don’t need to prove anything to anyone, this is for me only.

None of how this unfolded was ideal for me and I’m making the best of it now so I can feel happier. But I’m glad I’m not hiding from myself anymore.

#30

Been thinking a lot more about my diet lately. By no means am I chronic junk food eater, but my diet is kind of unstable. Going to be cutting back on meat a lot more. I went grocery shopping today and found myself naturally avoiding all the tempting crap which was cool. Still need to figure out some solid replacement meals and experiment with other stuff. I’ve stuck to a routine for a while now because I didn’t have the mental energy to rework a whole diet plan. But lately I feel like I’m more connected with my body and the direct impact food has on it, whereas before it was like “well gotta make sure I stay alive”.

Lately each new day brings opportunity to explore myself more, without restriction. I admit though I feel woefully behind in understanding myself and who I am. I’m making sure I remind myself to just do what makes me happy and follow that. Everything else will fall into place with time.

#31

You know, it’s easy to tolerate life and dismiss my own needs as non important. I’ve realized this is a very strong reoccurring theme in my life, downplaying my own needs. Creativity for example, I find it’s really important. If I can’t be creative and free I get depressed.

This past week I’ve been more honest with how I feel and allowing myself to feel. No matter how small, repetitive, irrational,etc. There’s a part of me that goes “oh this crap again, why aren’t you over this? Why do you keep coming back to this?”. I’ll be the first to admit ruminating does no good, but there’s a fine line between giving yourself space to feel vs judging yourself harshly for experiencing those things. Applying a strong logical framework and intellectualization to offset emotional pain has been my cope throughout life. It worked for a time and did what it needed to do to allow me to survive. But I never learned to regulate my emotions on an emotional level.

I guess this would be considered re-parenting myself. Feeling the emotions, being less judgemental, and understanding why I feel that way and how it relates to my life vs being perceived as an obstacle holding me back from what I want.

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#32

Would you please elaborate more about this?

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#33

Sure!

This is Internal Family Systems, the modality my therapist works with. There’s a lot of theory on what “parts” are, but in IFS we interface with them as if they are sentient individuals within. Parts can get stuck in rigid roles, roles born out of necessity due to early life experiences or survival strategies. They maintain the system, but it can greatly restrict the ability to enact different changes.

The parts I had mentioned in that post were the same parts I identified when first working with my therapist when we were tackling trauma. Some of them blunt my self expression, some of them figure out ways to get me to avoid things, some of them are very critical of perceived weakness. So when being transgender popped up that ran through all those parts and they identified what it means, how it might interfere with my safety, how to work around it, etc. I had mistakenly assumed because gender was a new concept in my head that it might be a new series of parts, but that wasn’t the case. This was important for my therapist to identify because it shows where the focus should go. Just because the topic changed, it doesn’t mean the fundamental structure or system did. Anything can run through those parts, like the idea of moving to a new job or leaving my career path, it all gets filtered through there.

For me this is like a macro level subconscious structure within the large umbrella of emotions and beliefs. It’s a general lack of fluidity or emotional regulation due to the fact there are competing parts each trying to fulfill a separate goal independent of each other. The theory with IFS is everyone has “parts”, they’re just largely unaware of them because everything operates smoothly in people who had healthy early life development. Those of us who didn’t basically engage in push pull or polarization within ourselves.

It might seem really odd to people but I’ve had a lot of growth come out of working with my mind in this way.

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#34

I’ve started voice training. Not sure if HOT is helping me out with that one or not. But it’s a very big psychological barrier I’m trying to overcome. I’ve noticed since I’ve relaxed and don’t feel this pressure to make sure I’m a guy my voice has naturally lifted into a higher pitch, less deep resonance. I’m trying to hold that vocal range throughout my day around people at work and whenever I talk. Even my internal monologue I try to get to match up, sort of like ear training when you identify notes by referencing the pitch in your head. I’m trying to tune into a more female voice. But it’s not just pitch, there’s a whole mess of theory behind it I haven’t even dug into. It goes deep because there’s so much variability between male and female voices.

But really I’m painfully aware of just how often I’m afraid of what others think and go back to old behaviors. I hate it. It just reminds me of my chronic people pleasing throughout my life and how I limit my own life just based on the perception others have of me. But I feel like for the first time in my life even though I’m afraid, I know what I’m moving towards is what I really want. So yeah it’s scary uncovering everything because it’s just that different and unknown to me. But I’m doing things in a safe way, every day just exploring a bit more of myself.

When I first started exploring all this I felt like I had to justify my path to everyone around me. That I had to have answers and explanations. But now I’m just letting it unfold how it wants to. Like not forcing a song to develop. I didn’t choose to be this way and I got 0 support over the years for it, so it’s kind of unreasonable to expect I actually know with 100% certainty who I am. And that’s ok

Aside from all that. Uncovering myself, my needs, my authentic expression, I’m becoming increasingly dissatisfied at being subtly pressured by my job to keep climbing higher in my skill set. I just need to make money, I don’t want to be this neverending resource to benefit the needs of the company. I work in IT and the goalposts are constantly moving. Keep up with all the emerging tech or you become irrelevant, screw that I don’t care enough to dedicate my free time to studying and learning. So I’m taking steps here to stop being manipulated into fulfilling the needs of others at the expense of my own

#35

I think I’m gonna swap out sanguine for love bomb. Feeling an intuitive pull.

I had an experience last night that made me think this should be in my stack. I was just trying to get to sleep last night and I was feeling distraught. I started having these feelings come up about my childhood. My parents fought a lot, they’d show absolute disdain for each other at times and our house felt like it would become a warzone. The ever looming constant threat of something being done wrong, a mistake made, an emotion out of place, and an explosion of hostility.

I realized that they should have done better. It wasn’t my job as a child to modify my behavior to avoid these episodes. And here I am as an adult still carrying the influence of those early life experiences.

The way I’m seeing it in my head. Phoenix is the car being built and repaired to get me to where I need to go, but love bomb might be the gas I need to actually get moving. I have serious self love issues, always have. It can be hard to even accept help from yourself if internally you feel like you don’t deserve it.

#36

Yup that went about how I expected. 30s of LB, that was all I could handle. I also dropped Phoenix to 30s again. Just being more conservative with sub exposure lately, if my mind says enough I do it. Learning to say “it’s ok that this is your threshold, you’re doing enough”. A lot of my overexposure is due to fear. Am I pushing enough? And I gonna fall behind? Am I getting enough of the script? Etc. Learning to not let those fears steer my decisions has been tough. But I feel like I’m getting better. Interestingly enough I can see LB helping in this area because you have to care for yourself enough to know when you’re hurting yourself unintentionally.

#37

Came out to my boss today at work about being transgender and my upcoming transition. He was super supportive and happy I was discovering it for myself. He also said he’s witnessed it in a professional environment about 3 separate times over his career and tech fields have A LOT of transgender individuals.

I trusted him and he did not let me down. I know stuff like that is a gamble sometimes, especially when personal and work mix like that. But I took a risk because I know this is all part of breaking me out of my echo chamber of critical thoughts about myself.

Phoenix has been absolutely amazing for all this. The way everything is lining up to just keep supporting me. I spoke with HR today and she told me to call her personal cell. She was super supportive, a close family member to her has been going through the same thing. She encouraged me that I don’t have to tell anyone if I don’t want to and that was just so validating and comforting. I forget that sometimes on this journey. There’s so much pressure to be out and being courageous, but who’s that for really? There’s nothing wrong with keeping things to myself, it doesn’t mean I’m weak or hiding, it means I’m prioritizing my needs.

I’ve been having some truly profound experiences lately that have been doing so much to heal me. And some of them have been bringing me to tears because I didn’t know I could be this accepted for who I am.

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#38

I was talking with my friend again. Then our conversation switched to life stuff and happiness. I realized that even though I’m empathetic and caring, I derive some self worth when I can help others. That’s a dangerous thing because sometimes I can’t. Sometimes I don’t have good advice and sometimes their problems are so foreign all I can provide is empathy. That will have me panicking a bit, like I’m failing the relationship somehow. I’m looking to change that, I’ll always try to help when I can but that’s not my role in relationships.

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#39

Finished my appointment at the clinic today. Getting on HRT within the next few days once it’s filled at my pharmacy. I feel so much relief. Some people won’t get it, but that’s ok. I know I need to do this so I’m gonna and that’s all that matters.

I came out to my mom today. She supports me on my journey but was not expecting it. Trying to explain the discomfort of living in a gender you don’t feel is right to someone who has no issues with their gender is insanely difficult. Coming out to my brother tomorrow when I hang out with him.

The whole thing has been insanely difficult to process. But it boils down to. Was I happy with the way I was living? No. So do something about it. And I did. I don’t want to be 60 or 70 years old and be like “damn I made a mistake not going for that when I was younger”.

I still have my doubts. Why am I like this? How? Could I have maybe lived as a guy if I doubled down on the alpha subs (not likely lol). I said it before but the heavily alpha masculine titles, something conflicted with those. Beyond just the fear of change or uncomfortable feelings that can come with growth. It felt like I was trying to overwrite who I was. After running Phoenix for a bit and even HOT, I understand how the subs are actually supposed to work with you to achieve goals. It’s a weird feeling to NOT feel like you have to fundamentally change who you are, just strengthen and embrace more of yourself. Well I guess from the outside looking in yeah I am gonna seem like I’m “changing” myself, but it’s more like matching the inside to the outside.

Phoenix helped me tear through all this. Throw away all the bullshit and rip me straight to what I needed. It’s been difficult but rewarding. Very often I felt like I needed to stop, like I was doing something wrong, but I kept going.

And the wild thing. This is just the first step on a massive new journey for myself. But I’ve committed to it and I don’t have to worry about this ever escaping my grasp again because I’m here and I made it.

#40

Been both insanely happy and sad today. My whole family knows I’m transgender now and fully supports me. But I’m very much grieving all the years I’ve missed in life being myself. Now that everything is more real it’s really hitting me.

My cope throughout life was just taking any emotional discomfort I experienced and minimizing it to not a big deal. I did this with my gender identity for years until I couldn’t anymore.

I don’t think at the time when I was younger I had the resources, exposure, or feeling safety to explore these feelings. I did what I could.

Lb and Phoenix hitting me hard. All I can say is, I’m home. I’ve been looking for this feeling for years. I knew it had to exist, I just didn’t know how to get there. I just need to give myself the best life for myself possible moving forward and accept amazing things.