I hurt myself today. My arm, to be more precise.
It’s not exactly a major injury, but it seems like a great way to put this in perspective. Let me back up. In 2005, I started working at Target; I had essentially been sedentary before that, so I was not exactly in good physical shape. I wasn’t exactly smart either, as I had the notion that “anything that I can maintain a grip on, I can lift,” and so I did some pretty stupid things at Target. Like, lifting 200lb grills into peoples cars without help, and participating in a minor competition to see who could hold the most 50lb bags of cat litter (I won, at 6), and so on. Pretty stupid stuff. I knew it was stupid, even, but I didn’t care, because I was pretty sure I’d be dead by the time I was 25. Not like a back injury would really matter later, right?
Heading back to today, I managed to minorly injure my arm lifting a 47lb box (it was labeled!) to shoulder height after a 30 second struggle. Since 2005, I’ve worked grocery jobs, so I’ve been lifting the whole time. And that’s where my strength is after just under a year on HRT.
I’m going to preface (postface?) this with a disclaimer: this is my experience. It’s possible yours, or someone elses, might not be as intense, or quite as fast, but I can’t speak to that. So that’s out of the way, what does HRT change?
Absolutely everything.
Before I started HRT, I had this notion that boys and girls were fairly similar. The gender gap, “Men are From Mars”, etc, that was all just guys taking any excuse they could to be jerks. (or whatever) I mean, really, we’re all the same, right?
No. Jesus christ on a stick, no. I was so ridiculously wrong I don’t even know where to start.
I could go on rambling about the physical changes (which were…are…really important), which were pretty amazing. I was 24 when I started estrogen, which definitely had an effect, but I took to it very, very quickly, and the changes came on scary fast. There’s a certain line from Ender’s Shadow, one of my favorite books ever (admittedly, about a serial killer… I won’t dwell on that) about a character who has a birth defect in his leg and gets it corrected, which basically went “Soandso’s body expected to be strong, knew how to be whole,” and that’s sort of like how I feel now. Not even a year on estrogen, and I have just sunk into it naturally. It’s like I’ve been subsumed into it, and it’s the greatest feeling ever,but enough rambling about the physical, you can get that at like, Wikipedia.
I’d rather talk about the mental and emotional changes, though they’re quite a bit harder to track directly; how do you measure your depth of emotion? They also came on quite a bit slower, while I was able to detect physical changes as early as two weeks, the others really didn’t start hitting me until about four or five months in. I remember about two or three months in, I was feeling confused and discouraged. I’d read tons of personal experiences, I’d read Whipping Girl, and so on, and they all talked about mental changes. Where were mine?
Thankfully, I was just impatient. The first thing that really hit me was crying at the drop of a hat. Technically, I’d probably have been crying because the hat existed, and then started crying more because the hat was dropped. I probably averaged about 6-10 hours/week of time spent somewhere between “sniffles that won’t stop” and uncontrollable sobbing. I cried about pretty much everything in my life, things that happened, things that I wish had happened, things that I knew would never happen. I cried over love songs, at movies and books, when I saw babies, and if I saw a loving family. Technically, I still tear up at those today, but it’s somewhat more controllable. In the beginning, it was all very raw and primal, and I had absolutely no control over it. Now I can, to some degree, say “I am in public, I need to get out of this store before I start bawling” and keep it togetherish.
I spent a lot of the months after that crying on a friend’s couch, which neatly segues into another change I really noticed, the desire absolute requirement for human contact. I find myself to be much more social now, and that I get lonely very quickly. Some of that is no doubt is related to my new-found self confidence, and how can I say exactly what estrogen is responsible for? It’s more than just being social, though. After a very fucked up childhood (if you’ve read the entirety of this series, that tiny version doesn’t even scratch the surface), I learned how to cope with things. Coping with things did not involve talking about them. Ever. Now? Talking about something is the best, most cathartic way to handle something. I can think of a half dozen instances in the last month that I tried to work through something on my own, failed, ended up crying on someone’s couch and talking about it, and instantly felt better and was able to work through it. Needless to say, I am immensely thankful for my friends and all they have done for me these last few months. There’s no way I would’ve made it through this without them.
In closing, I guess, nothing is the same. And I’m okay with that, it just feels so very, very right. Previously, I really wasn’t sure what something “feeling right” was like. I mean, I’d enjoyed things, surely that was what it was? No. It’s like a comforting blanket that just makes my heart skip with joy to think about it. There is nothing that I would give this feeling up for.
Aaaand that’s the conclusion of essays on My Life™ and The Trans™. I don’t honestly know if this means I will be blogging on on a more regular basis, but it does mean I’m no longer scared of blogging because I might actually let something slip about how c-c-crazy I am. There’s a certain level of comfort in knowing that you are naked and don’t have to worry about hiding anything.


