impulsiveingenue

Once again, I've gone a long stretch without posting anything here. In the meantime, I started another blog that I haven't posted to in a long while either. This sort of thing seems to happen with alarming regularity. This provides an amusing counterpoint to part of what I want to talk about.

First off, it's been a couple of weeks since I got my blood test back. My cholesterol dropped 60 points. My HDL could stand to be a little higher, but my LDL is well back from where it used to be. But that's not all. In the course of my low-fat diet, complete with plenty of the ultra-bland quinoa? I lost 15 pounds. And I'm still losing weight, though much more slowly than I was.

Losing all that weight has really changed the shape of my face, and it's given me something approaching a figure, which I really like. The t-shirts I've been buying fit me way, way better now. The downside? My ultra-cute jeans don't fit me right anymore! My ugly-as-sin zipperbelt that I got for five bucks on clearance? I've taken it in to the last notch. There's no more leather after that one. Just zipper.

Optimus fucking Prime, I am so skinny and it is awesome. I look and feel so much better, which is a real self-esteem booster. It used to be that I'd take pictures of myself on my webcam and go "bleh," but now I do it and go "holy shit I look amazing!"

That picture was taken yesterday. I started taking hormones and dieting on April 7th (or, as I like to call it, my transbirthday), so I'm just shy of four months on hormones, albeit at a pretty low dose. But that's something else I need to bring up. 

Since I cut my cholesterol so much and lost so much weight, I got a prescription for a higher dose of estradiol. No more peewee dose for Vera! I've titrated up to the new dose and I've been at it for just a few days, but already I feel great. The biggest thing I've noticed is that I'm finding it a lot easier to be motivated to do things. For example - I recently ordered PC parts so I could build a better gaming rig (Deus Ex 3 is coming out soon, and you'd better believe I'm going to be playing that at full sexy). I realized that my living space needed a serious makeover if I was going to accomodate the monster tower I picked up for it, so I went on a cleaning spree the likes of which I haven't even contemplated in years. I've freed up so much space I'm honestly not sure what to do with it all (this last part is a lie, but it's a lie that sounds nice, so I'm going to hang on to it). A desire to wash my face (ick, breakouts) led to a full-on scrubdown of my bathroom sink and a monster dejunking along the way. it's a little thing, but it's making a big difference in my quality of life. 

I think part of why I haven't been posting here so much is because changes have been so gradual, I don't really stop to evaluate them until a whole host of them build up and I have to stop and say "Whoa, when did that happen?" 

Still. Four months in, still going strong. 

I haven't been posting a lot lately. I suppose I haven't really had a lot to say. I've just been keepin' on keepin' on. Still taking my hormones, noticing slow emotional shifts but not much else. I'm only a month and a half into a very low dose regimen, after all. But there's definitely a difference, and I'm very glad I've gone ahead with this. It's just difficult to articulate at this point. I see my therapist again on Wednesday, and I'm pretty excited about that, because I really enjoyed our sessions together and I haven't seen her for a good four or five months.

I've been keeping a dream diary lately. My natural dream recall is nothing short of dreadful, and that really annoys me. Keeping a dream diary supposedly helps to improve it, and after two weeks I'm definitely noticing an improvement. I spontaneously recall details and that leads to fully fleshed out narratives, something I really couldn't do even a month ago. I still have trouble remembering dream conversations verbatim, but the gist of them is pretty solid.

The ultimate purpose of this is not just greatly improved dream recall, though. Eventually, I would like to get to a point where I can reliably induce lucid dreaming. There are techniques for this that exploit the neurology of sleep paralysis, but those haven't worked for me so far, so I'm currently just trying the easiest and most basic way of doing it, which is realizing that you're dreaming during your dream. So far, all I've been able to do is be "genre-savvy," and act like a lucid dreamer without actually being aware that I'm dreaming (stopping time to clobber a super-speedster, for example). It's a little frustrating once you wake up and all the dream signs are glaringly obvious in hindsight, but I suppose it's progress.

I'm tempted to type up my dreams here, but I'm not sure I really want to go ahead with that. Some of them are kind of personal, after all, and most of the rest are really boring. I may change my mind, though, especially if a dream is particularly amusing or poignant. Like last night's, in which I discovered an office literally stacked to the ceiling with business cards for Barack Obama's backup business, in case he didn't get elected President. You could not move in that room without knocking over a tower of little yellow business cards. This was probably the least bizarre part of the entire dream.

Onward, oneironaut!

Sakuracon 2011 is next week, and I'm really excited. :3

I've ordered a wig for my potential Twilight Sparkle cosplay. It's almost the right color, and it was on clearance, so this is nice. Unfortunately it doesn't have the stripe, nor does it have bangs. I ordered a weft in a pinkish color as well, so I may end up cutting and sort-of-styling this wig. If I do it'll be the first time I've ever even tried that, so as you can imagine I'm a little nervous. I found a three-quarter-sleeve v-neck that's just the right color, too, and its twin fit me pretty well, so that's that taken care of. This is going to be my Thursday/Sunday lazy-ass cosplay, because more than two days of Terezi in a row is enough to drive me quite mad.

I also need to make a horn out of model magic and lacquer it up. In theory that shouldn't be too involved. In practice... well. I also need to find an old-ish looking book. Twilight without books? Inconceivable!

In the presentation my friend and I put on at these conventions, we advise people not to half-ass things and not to wait until the last minute before preparing their costumes, and to never test drive them at conventions. I am terrible at taking my own advice, considering that not only have I test-driven all three of my costumes at conventions, I test-drove them all at Otakon, in Baltimore, in AUGUST (which is how I almost got heatstroke). On the other hand, I suppose this makes me an excellent example of what not to do...

We've ironed out a lot of the kinks in our presentation, but somehow it's still taking at least an hour to get through. Thankfully we have a full 90 minutes so there should still be plenty of time for questions at the end. I'm tempted to give out this blog as a contact point for people, even if more of my posts are me bitching about gender stuff than are cosplay-related.

I've posted here a lot about the subject of my transition. In fact, I've talked about it almost to the exclusion of everything else, which wasn't really my intent, but hey. I've hemmed and hawed and squee'd and freaked out and it's all led up to this moment.

I have, in my hands, a low-dose transdermal estradiol patch.

This is what I've been wanting for damn near eight months now. I decided sometime last summer that I was going to see a therapist and, as a result, most likely start taking hormones in order to properly transition from male to female. From there a two-month telephone dance ensued before I finally got in to see the therapist, and she helped me square away a lot of my expectations and worries. Not all of them, but enough that I was much more certain at the end of the experience that this was what I wanted.

Then I had to see a nurse about the actual hormones themselves, so cue another month of waiting, a short appointment, and then another month of waiting and one of the worst blood draws I've ever been subjected to. All of that was a road leading here, to this day, to this moment.

I still have worries. I worry that I won't be pleased with the outcome after all, that somehow I've completely psyched myself out. This is because I second-guess literally everything I do, and rarely trust my gut instinct on anything because I am convinced that I am wholly unreliable as a judge of situations. This is probably less true than I think it is, and while I'm intellectually aware of that, it's still a nagging discomfort I have to deal with.

I worry that this is going to cause serious health problems for me. This isn't such a stretch, as apparently my cholesterol is pretty high for someone my age and weight. This is a hereditary thing for me. Almost everyone on both sides of my family, except my mother, have or had very high cholesterol. Part of the reason I'm on such a low dose of estradiol is that my cholesterol is high enough to be a worry, so before I see the nurse again (in three months time) I need to make diet and lifestyle changes (read: get off my ass and exercise) to bring my numbers down.

I worry that I'm making a mistake in not paying scads of money to a fertility bank in case I ever change my mind about not wanting a squalling little me-spawn someday. At the same time, the only attraction this has ever held for me is a purely emotional one, and one which probably has more to do with a desire to be female (and giving birth is about as female as one can get, on a purely mechanical level) rather than actual desire to have children. There's also the fact that every day I go into work and some parent treats the library like it's their own personal babysitter, it only cements my desire to never interact with anyone under the age of 12 unless absolutely necessary. There's also the fact that if I do change my mind, there are plenty of children already who need parents and don't have them. I'd probably adopt even if I was a fertile ciswoman.

I'd also be a terrible mother, but that's an entirely different issue altogether.

And yet, these worries aren't a roadblock. They exist, and I'm aware of them, but I'm also very aware of why I started this whole process in the first place. I'm not happy with my body. I have probably waited too long for this, assuming all the while that I couldn't ever be a woman, at least not to anyone's satisfaction. I've proven that assumption wrong almost every time I've left my home for a purpose other than work for months now. And, more importantly, I've realized that what is much more important that meeting other people's definitions of "female" is meeting my own definition of myself.

It has been a long, long road getting here, and there is still a long, long road ahead of me. This is not an ending; this is a beginning.



Let's get this party started.

So today I had my first appointment with the nurse who's going to give me the hormones. Which is to say I went and talked to her and she gave me a lab checklist to hand to a bloodwork specialist who I have to go see at some point.

And then I get to go back in early April. Another five-week wait.

I know I shouldn't be complaining because I am making progress, and I really shouldn't have expected anything major to happen today, but I am really fucking sick of all this waiting around while nothing happens...

Just so we can call this blog something other than Vera Bitches About Transition-Related Bullshit And Squees At My Little Pony, I think I'll link to a project I'm slowly starting to put together that involves fixing some of the more glaring issues I have with Exalted. I love the game but it has issues and as a result it doesn't get run very often. I'd like to change that.

Here's the current location of my typed-up notes.

Among other things, I change the way that the anima works entirely. Instead of just being a showy giveaway that the person in the middle of it is Exalted, the anima is now integral to how the powers of the Exalted work. More anima = more powerful charms. I've also nailed down some of the Limit replacements I'd like to make, because the Limit mechanic just plain never worked as intended.

Welp, so much for my hopes of being on hormones before my birthday. The RN I was recommended to has such a full schedule that it'll be late February before I even get in for a blood test... and it'll probably be a while after that before I can get prescribed any hormones. Too bad. Would have been nice to be able to track my transition along with my birthday. ^^;

I'm going to start making these posts public now, I think, since it's less about therapy now and more about the transition itself, which I'm not shy about at all. I generally despise the idea of New Years resolutions, but I did sort of make one this year, which was to not keep myself closeted for the sake of making others comfortable. I've almost come out at work a couple times when the subject of gender indirectly came up, and I did show off my cosplay pics to coworkers... who proceeded not to notice the fact that I was presenting female in the costume (granted, it was on a tiny tiny cell phone screen). I'm pretty sure they've all got it through their heads that I'm not straight, at least, considering how often I contribute to conversations about how attractive Viggo Mortensen and other similar actors are. >_>

I think I'll probably wait until I'm well into a hormone regimen before I come out at work, though. Make sure I've got my shit together, emotionally and mentally, before I toss that big heaping pile of stress on top of it all. ^^;

I am really tired of closeting myself for the benefit of others.

I don't mind helping out, but this is getting on my nerves.

Thirty-three days. I may end up giving the Doc a call after the New Year and see if we can't move up the date any.

Akicon was pretty awesome. I think I'm going to have go back there next year. Smaller conventions have a totally different feel than the ginormous ones I usually attend. You see the same people over and over, and essentially continue conversations you started before. It's fun.

The panel went well, too. I sort of choked, but I managed to get everything out that really needed to be said. I even came out to them as part of it, which I don't think I could have seen myself doing in a room full of 30 strangers even a couple of months ago. We'll probably be doing another panel at Sakuracon, or at least I hope we will, because I really enjoy passing on skills to others. ^^

Pictures from the convention can be found here. There's also a folder for the couple of pictures I uploaded for Kumoricon.

Suggestions for upcoming cosplays accepted - I need a new cosplay because to be honest the hourlong makeup application of Terezi is starting to wear on me, even though I really love how I look when it's all done.

Good: Finding cute t-shirts that are on sale.
Awesome: Getting ma'am'd by the sales lady!
Not so great: Why is so much of women's fashion so LOOKIT-MAH-BOOBS-tacular? I had to really dig to find shirts I think I'll be able to wear, since mine aren't real and thus I really can't show them all off at all. Scoop-necks, V-necks, I can't pull off any of those. Whatever happened to the silly cheap-o graphic tee that I look awesome in? I had to go to Hot freaking Topic to find those.
Lame: Dear new theater shop gal; when someone is clearly presenting female, including breasts, what possesses you to use male pronouns? =_=