At the core of it all, for me, is letting sweetness in. Allowing myself be cared for; being able to care for others as effusively as I always wanted

I speedran the entire "beware the pipeline" meme, hitting every stop from he/they to she/her. I got FFS, which was easily the scariest thing I've ever done. Slowly but surely I'm making peace with what I can and cannot change, the shape of my life from here on out

It's been a little over 3 years since I told anyone I wasn't a guy. Relationships I had back then have fizzled or faded. New ones have taken their place. I've experienced turmoil and doubt much worse than the first time I went through puberty, in part because the stakes are so much clearer this time

For years I didn't know how to name this absence. I felt defective; tried to ignore it by being what I thought other people needed me to be. On the outside, I faked it pretty successfully. But when relationships would get serious, my partners would always feel like there was something missing in me

It's a tenuous connection, but a rush of old feelings nearly bowled me over, remembering the absence of basic emotional proximity I used to experience living as a guy. How I always assumed anything nice had an ulterior motive. On some level, always walking on eggshells

I saw a post today on the NYC subreddit — some guy totally dumbfounded that another man on the train complimented his shoes. How at first he assumed he'd caused some offense, that the compliment was in fact an underhanded way of saying he'd stepped on this guy's foot