Every single day. I “knew” I was transgender when I was 16 years old. I think I subconsciously knew well before then, but 16 is the earliest I can remember actively thinking about what it would be like to live as a woman. At 18 years old, I officially “came out” to myself. I wrote a letter to people that explained how I was transgender and was going to start transitioning that basically laid out a lot of information they might need. It was a sort of introduction to what being transgender means to me. I guess it was a way for me to avoid having the same conversation with every friend and family member. I sat on that letter for 3 months. Eventually, I tore it up and threw it away. I ran from my feelings. I tried so hard to be a “normal” man and all it led to was a very depressing and chaotic life. I spent the next 5 years in a constant state of dissociation, I smoked like an eighth of weed every day and developed a very unstable relationship with alcohol, and just floated around aimlessly from job to job with no real motivation. It’s really hard to think back on those years, literally have very little memories from that time because I was a drunken dissociated mess. As dramatic as it sounds, I was not actively living, I was just escaping into my own mind and living on auto pilot. I hit rock bottom in 2017. I started hormones at 23 years old a few months later, and I’m actually living now. I still have problems like every other person on earth, but at least I’m actively living my life. I would give everything to go back to when I was that young 18 year old kid sitting in my car at night hyping myself up to hand my parents the letter only to bail out because of an anxiety attack. I wish I could just hug her and tell her everything was going to be okay. Even at 23 years old, I know I’m still kind of on the younger side, but I can’t help but get a pang of jealousy when I hear about some one who started in their teens. The most disphoric part of my body is my hips and looking at pics of 18 year old me, I would have been so fucking cute if I had started then. Now I’m kinda stuck looking like a brick. Like I’m glad my mental health is better but I wish I would have taken the leap those 5 years earlier because then my mental health would have been better, and I would have have killer hips >:(

But I’ve dwelled on this for so long that I’ve already come to grips with the fact that i started when I started and that’s something I’ll never be able to change.