Hi I'm Zoey

I had a whole day yesterday. After finishing season 1 of Mr Robot with my girlfriend I basically slowly broke down over an hour or so.

I've been quite stressed out for weeks now. This like, mounting stress. Constantly rising intensity of stress. And I think I know why. I've been very busy, a few things happened with the other girlfriend, and I've been sick too. So not only did the pressure build up but I didn't have an outlet.

After a lot of crying (and some very, very good kink), I did some more crying. But more powerful this time. Violent sobbing. And while part of it is how amazingly lucky I am to be alive at all and with such amazing girlfriends and how bright my future is looking…

my past is being put into a perspective I never had before.

I thought I had it figured out. “I'm bad at these things, and that's ok.” Even though I could never figure out why they felt wrong to be bad at. I didn't feel like an introvert, yet all the symptoms were there. So who was I to argue, I didn't know what being an introvert was supposed to feel like. So I accepted it.

Now, though, I'm anything but introverted. And I'm realising I never was. My true introvertedness actually happened slowly during puberty (fake gasp) but before that, due to untreated dysphoria, I couldn't perform a male social role, which socially ostracized me and forced me into special ed. Yes, it looked like autism, but I'm pretty confident now that it never was.

Combine that with a very turbulent and traumatic family life and there's just no chance I won't develop trauma from it. I was pretty fucked up by my circumstances and there was nothing I could do about it. But I wasn't resentful about it before I hatched because I thought it all seemed reasonable, like it was with a good reason. That I was just bad and autistic and the people around me did their best.

But now none of it seemed necessary. Like I spent 27 years being tortured by school, potential friends, society, and my parents, all for nothing. I couldn't be male, and that manifested to everyone else as if I couldn't be a human. So they slapped the autism label on me and fucked me up for life.

It hurts a lot more every day now.

It's Halloween. To celebrate I did a cute thing and went with cat ears with lace and my bell collar to work!

I feel a lot happier with myself and my body now. I'm not afraid of it anymore. In fact I take millions of selfies every day. The little bit of makeup I use to hide the beard and the boobs I received do by far the most to make me happy about showing my body, but the hips and the skin help a ton. Everything about presenting feminine feels incredible. It's unbelievable how much I want to be seen and how I want to dress up in pretty things and try out new styles and clothes all the time. Because this rounder, curvier shape HRT gave me makes me feel like clothes should show my body and not hide it with loose hoodies like I did before. It's all so amazing that I can't describe the emotions. If I had to try it would be something like this: I lived for 27 years and was starting to accept that I would just never be happy with my life or myself and now I can see a future where I can be happy with both of those.

Oh and I got gendered correctly 3 days ago. My girlfriend told me a cashier, without thinking about it, referred to me as she in a sentence. I had a lot of emotions about that, all of them positive. Getting assumed to be female is something I never thought could happen to me. I guess my brain tried to protect me from dysphoria by denial. Wait I already knew it did that. I keep getting surprised at how well I was able to lie to myself about this for a whole life, given how good I feel about all this stuff now. I can see why I did it though, dysphoria is painful like nothing I’ve experienced and I might not have survived hatching with a less stable and self controlled life where I can DIY before this healthcare system will allow me to get life saving medicine.

One of the girlfriends has moved in with me! She’s gotten all her stuff and she just… lives with me now. It’s an unreal feeling, too, because I never thought this could feel that good either. I did live with a girlfriend for 2 months in my past life but that was a pretty shit experience for me overall, back then social things was straining so I always felt bad and had to spend a lot of time alone, and that colored my perception of what this was going to be like. It doesn’t help that the relationship with that ex was not good or healthy at all. But this girlfriend is amazing, we have a great and healthy relationship as far as I’m aware. We’re open about our feelings and can resolve conflicts without getting angry. And now that social things aren’t straining or stressful anymore I can just be with the girlfriend all the time and it’s just great. We do a lot of things together, we’ve already gone clothes shopping several times and we went thrifting and found a bunch of great new clothes for us both (some of them are so cute, oh my gosh), we celebrated our girlfriends birthday (we have the same girl as our girlfriend!!!), we dress up and look like huge queer dorks outside together. Everything about this life I’m living right now is a life that makes me so much happier than anything I could have believed I could achieve before.

It still is weird to me that I’m a girl, though. I mean I’ve accepted it but I just can’t wrap my head around why it makes me feel good. In that sense it’s almost like a religious experience. I can’t explain to someone why it’s true, but it is true and they just have to believe it. And I, too, have to believe it. I don’t have a choice.

But even if I had a choice, I would never choose another life right now. The girlfriends are amazing and I’m accepted by all my family and friends as who I am. They all came through for me when I needed it and in the process I made myself the happiest I could be and found the best people I can imagine being with. With this I’m sure I can deal with my future, somehow. I don’t know the way there, but I know I will find a way eventually.

My titties hurt. Like, a whole lot. Yesterday was the absolute worst thing I've experienced in a very long time. My nipples would randomly feel like they burst into flames. And it would last for a while before finally dying down. The rest of the time the nipples were just very noticeably painful but nothing I couldn't overcome with a bit of willpower.

Today it's not as bad but I also prepared with 800mg of ibuprofen. I can feel that helping and I don't think I'd be comfortable at all without it. So right now I'm writing this on the toilet about 5 hours after the headache pills. My nipples very much want to ache, more so than when the pills had full effect, but I can get by.

And also they are sensitive. Extremely sensitive. Just lightly moving my finger across them through my shirt now feels a whole lot and also very good. I now understand why women like having their nipples touched so much, it's an incredible feeling. Like they're light and fluffy but also extremely sensitive to touch.

Apparently I have it extremely bad as far as breast growing pains go. Usually trans girls don't have this crippling experience that I'm having, but it's not entirely uncommon. I don't know what this means for how my breasts will turn out but I did hear one suggestion that I, quote, “might get big bazookas”. I honestly don't care if I do or not, it's not important to me. My only goal is to have breasts as far as chest goes, so any size works fine for me. I would literally never have breast enlargement surgery no matter the final size of them because I could not possibly care less. It would be nice if they're sensitive though so my partners can play with them a lot, and right now it seems like that's gonna happen so yay.

Good god have I been feeling overwhelmed by emotions lately. I went on a date with this trans girl, it went really well. So well that we planned meeting again 2 days later. For some reason the Friday in between the meetings I felt extremely down. Just extremely weird. It ended in me crying for an hour. At least I had the support of my lovely gf with me.

Right as the second amazing date ended I start feeling weird again. Eventually, while my gf is there once more, I cry for an hour.

Something is happening I think.

I just can't stop being horny, huh. But also all the gender feels are still amazing. And while this diary isn't about me being sexual, that part of me is definitely extremely linked to being trans. Because like I've said before I always felt extremely creepy about being sexual. It was weird because at the same time I felt like I should be sexual, it felt wrong that I wasn't/couldn't be sexual.

But now being sexual feels so right, which makes total sense when you state it plainly. “Trans girl doesn't feel comfortable with a male sexuality she never had. Instead enjoys sex from the girl point of view.”

Holy shit my parents called me Zoey unprompted first time ever and I had to pause for a minute. It felt so good.

Oh yeah I came out to my parents while I wasn't updating this diary. I should have written about that. It went really well, anyway, as you can tell.

So life is just amazing for me right now. My gender feels are great when they're not dysphoria. And all I had to do was accept my transness.

I woke up today with E and AA in me for the first time. It felt good.

Though as I reached for the pill organizer my immediate thought was doubt. Not strong doubt, just this sense of “should I be doing this?” It went away as quickly as ever when I realized that yeah, I do.

Whenever I get those small moments I mostly think of this one simple fact: For my whole life, completely unprovoked, I've been totally ok with being a girl. I've many times thought exactly this: “I've been a guy for long enough now, I know what it's like, I could live as a girl forever just to see what it's like.”

For some reason that didn't make me dysphoric. But that also means it took me a very long time to make the connection between all of these other dysphoric thoughts.

So anyway, purely hypothetically: if I was to lose all dysphoria overnight. Would I still transition? Even if I didn't hate my male body intensely?

Yes I absolutely would. Even if I didn't hate my body I still was never happy as a guy. I still would have realized now that I'm a trans girl because that's who I really am. And I would still go through with the transition. If nothing else because “I've lived long enough as a guy now.”

So I'll keep taking the E even if, and I'm talking to you now my dear brain, you keep getting these short moments where my innate fear of change bubbles up to the surface.

I started E today. I went from feeling extremely stressed in Spain at the start of the day to feeling calm as I took the E.

It's incredible how just the act of taking the 2 small pills makes me feel so peaceful.

I've been so happy since coming out as trans and now I'm finally starting the biggest step of the whole thing. I'm happier than ever.

Everything's great. I'm doing amazingly well, I'm super happy, and just in general I feel fantastic. So yesterday I went to this meetup called “Queer Nördar” in Stockholm. I got to have a nametag with my actual name on it. And people properly gendered me! It felt so good to have people just randomly do that.

I think some part of what took me so long to figure out that I'm trans is that I don't want to be the stereotypical female ideal. You know, the one they sell on all the images and ads. Glossy red lips, tall, “perfect”, dressed for success. I don't want to be that. I mean I'd rather be that than be male any day but it looks so boring, so normal.

There are so many more amazing feminine styles that I'd rather look like. But society never sold women on trying to be those. You should be perfect, and any deviation is merely acceptable at best. Of course I, as a person, was also grossly misinformed about this stuff. I didn't think that I could just not be something. Part of why my childhood was so tame, I tried to play by the rules. Maybe that's why I have such a large backlash now that I know you can break rules.