CW: imposter syndrome, depression, passing mention of prior religion.
This turned into a novel, sorry. I don't have anyone trans to talk to IRL and I just... Needed to say it.
TL;DR, I was exploring my identity a bit and ended up swinging a golf club straight through the center of my egg last night by reading the gender dysphoria bible. Now I have no idea what to do and am alternatingly filled with huge buckets of fear and joy. Advice from transfem people or validation from anyone would be really wonderful.
I finally got to a very stable place in life at 33, and started a journey of self-exploration with a therapist to sort through the last 17 years of depression, escalating introversion, and extremely low energy for anything outside of the house.
After a lot of talk about a lot of other things, I allowed myself to step out of this safe and sturdy mental construct that I built for a time in my life that I needed it, and opened myself up to being someone other than the person that I always thought that I had to be.
Among other mostly smaller shifts, I ended up on a gradual slide from "maybe part of my identity is enby? Is that a thing? Enby-sometimes?" To "oh, no, that part of me is definitely female" to "oh, uh, the more I leave the rigid fenced-in built-for-survival part of my mind, the more parts of myself I find that feel this way".
I always wished I was a girl, but my mind refused to cross to the idea that maybe I am one. But I opened my mind a little. My wife gave me an old skirt to try to see how it made me feel. I was a little scared because I knew I really wanted this. I waited until midnight, slipped out of bed, put it on and just sat down in my closet. And just wearing it, just sitting down in the closet for an hour, was the most fulfilling experience I can remember in my life. It felt spiritual, somehow it felt whole. I cried and smiled and just felt my heart and my legs until I couldn't stay awake any more. I held that memory in my head for days, replaying it over and over and just lived in that feeling in my head.
I bought a few more skirts online, and wore them around my spouse. We went out of town for a long weekend and I just wore them inside the room with her, and basked in the feeling of feeling feminine while I sat on the couch or played board games. Even outside of those moments, I started to feel better, and realized how bad my head had gotten beneath the surface as I started to have better feelings to compare it to. My wife took me shopping for some other female clothes. I almost died from shyness. Then I went home and held them and wore them and my entire world felt so much brighter. Mirrors feel bad, but I feel happy without them.
So of course, the completely logical conclusion that I reached was that there was this feminine part of me that I needed to make room for, off to the side of the rest of the "me" in my head. Yeah. Totally just a wonderful hidden aspect of personality to welcome in. Not trans here, haha. I don't have bad conscious dysphoria about my body, and I only always WISHED I was a woman, that didn't mean I AM one, I can't count as a real trans person, I'll just have this nice little ball of sunshine in my life over to the side to enjoy when I can. Like I found a new book to obsess over, just a few thousand times more amazing. And more fulfil- wait, no need to disrupt my thoughts or reconsider anything at all, haha. I'll just enjoy the moment, that's all.
Then I remembered seeing a reference to the gender dysphoria bible somewhere here on Lemmy, and thought I would look it up. I read through it expecting to learn a bit about how to explore or understand that feminine aspect, maybe how to bring it out a little bit since it makes me so happy. Instead, I got the uncomfortable feeling that the author had lived inside my bones for 30 years, told me my own story back to myself better than I could have told it, and pointed out that all of those data points make a constellation that screams "you are trans" so completely that I cannot possibly un-see it. Egg: kaboom.
Since then, SO MANY pieces kept falling into place, one after another. I had "no true scottsman'd" myself my entire life - with a sheltered christian homeschool upbringing, being a woman just wasn't in the list of options I thought existed for me, so absolutely everything was somehow included in a box labeled "totally fine for an admittedly abnormal man to feel" and now I suddenly realized that maybe always wishing I was born as a woman, always relating better to women, only ever having close female friendships, frequent fantasies about being reborn/reincarnated as a woman, and preferring a thousand sociatally-female things weren't just quirks in a totally-a-man's personality. This wasn't some side aspect, it is a lens that finally makes everything fit, rather than feeling like kludged-together random parts of human.
I read about gender euphoria, I read about biochemical dysphoria and realized I checked off every box in the "depersonalization" section, I read a lot of signs in the following chapters that felt uncomfortably like they were written specifically about me, I read about Managed Dysphoria and thought "oh shit", then imposter syndrome, and the Am I Trans page. I followed half a dozen links from the pages and some of them further. And I was left feeling SEEN in a way that felt both devastating and somehow whole.
I can't un-know this. I can't explain why this feels like it changes everything, but it does. I have no idea where I want to go in the long term. I still feel like I don't count as a trans woman and it makes me cry. It all just feels like too much, too overwhelming. Everything in my personality and history is recontextualising and it is overwhelming.
How do I process this? What do I like... do... about this sudden knowing? How do I find someone who has walked this path to tell me that what I am experiencing is OK, or to help me start to paint a picture of what I want the future to look like? Every path seems endlessly long and frightening right now. How do I get my euphoria at the possibilities to come back, instead of this fear?
Additional info to help narrow down "what now?" - I am safe to be out at home and in most of the tiny fragments of human community that I still have, if I ever feel comfortable in myself. I'd probably keep most of the people. Transitioning is fincially possible, if this doesn't nix all job prospects forever (tax accounting). I used to have a decent number of friends all across the lgbt rainbow, but moving --> covid --> depressive isolation means I don't any more, only my pan wife and a few cis friends and family members nearby and far away. My wife is extremely supportive of wherever this journey takes me (as long as it is still with her). My depression manifests with an inability to do anything, not in an "active" way, so I am not in physical self-danger. No kids to worry about, but we do have 2 cats, a dog, and a handful of half-dead plants. Family that would judge is already cut off, and those that remain would approve, but may not quite "get it". I often use too many words when writing things down.