I’m not sure if I’ve met a trans girl without some flavor of trauma tbh. This is a vent post but fuck it no one is going to read this anyway. I don’t have many friends. A couple are trans, one I suspect is an egg, and a few cis holdovers from my pretransition days. Every single trans person I know is dealing with some sort of trauma.
Me? Mine is a constant grieving for a past that never was. Every single day for the past several years it feels like I’ve had to rebuild myself from a broken and fragmented past while confronting it.
I mourned that I could not have started HRT sooner. I grew up in the 90s and 00s. Would have been a bad time to be trans and it was simply unrealistic. Couldn’t have happened. Not with my family and not with my living situation, at best I might have been able to try and sneak some puberty blockers or start transitioning in my early 20s instead of my 30s. It’s not something I’ve quite gotten over but it’s something I’ve started to accept. I’m glad I transitioned when I did regardless. I’m glad I have the opportunity and I’m glad I live in a place where hormones and surgeries are covered and accessible.
The thing that hit me the hardest recently? ADHD. A psych recently diagnosed me and prescribed me some Vyvanse. Today was the first day I took it. It was like magic. I felt incredible. To see a task and just do it? No hemming and hawing? No pausing perusing social media between and during chores? Just deciding to do something and immediately being able to do it? Indescribable. i could do chores and get them done quickly. I could pick up a pencil and draw. I could read. Interruptions didn’t bother me. I could focus on work. I cannot convey to someone neurotypical how wonderful this all felt. Imagine your entire life a layer of fog covers your eyes but no one else’s. You ask around and people look at you like you are crazy. There’s no fog, no one else has to deal with the fog, no one else is incapacitated by the fog, it must just be you. Why don’t you try harder? There isn’t any fog. You must be making it up, why are you having so much trouble with this?
And once again. Emotionally devastating. Once it wore off, once I settled in for the evening in my bed next to my spouse, I sobbed. I just felt such… Deep sadness and again mourning from the depths of my soul. I could have had this. I could have had this sooner. It wasn’t even a pipe dream like HRT, this was something I could have had that would have measurably and drastically improved my life. And it just wasn’t there before today. I’m furious. I get to live the rest of my life in a way that matters and I am angry in such a way that I feel like the heavens could burn with my fury.
I could have had this.