Today is my 8mo HRTiversary, and I wanted to do a thread about how much things have changed for me over the past 8 months. A lot of this is direct HRT effects, but I am planning on including anything else that comes to mind as well. 1/

First, I feel much more "centered" and in control of my own emotions. Previously, my emotions felt like a meter, with one button, that added to it, and if it got too high, it exploded. Now, I feel different emotions, and anger isn't the default. 2/

In Inside Out terms, I went from being driven by a set of 5 Louis Black Anger characters to having a full set of emotions. That's been awesome. This has been intense at times, with some highs and lows, but I can feel now. 3/

My internal monolog used to use a lot of "we". I never really understood why, but this has dropped off dramatically, and now if I start feeling that "we" coming back, I know I'm dropping into some old thought patterns. 4/

I have thought of my egg self as a husk. I think that husk knew it was carrying more than itself, and that spawned the "we". I don't think its a coincidence I feel "him" when I start using "we". 5/

Mindset wise, I feel a lot better about the future. I always had this vague fear of aging that I could never fully articulate, but just assumed it was the human condition. Now, I am relishing time passing, because I just feel more me. 6/

Now let's talk physical a bit. Pre-transition, I had "man boobs" if you will. They always felt.. wrong somehow. Like, the idea of having breasts appealed to me, but these felt "wrong". Well, 8 months on estrogen has turned that feeling right around. 7/

I am up to around a B cup, and the "feel" has completely changed. Overall, I'm very satisfied so far, and am looking forward to further developments . 8/

Overall, the skin all over my body has completely changed in feel. It's softer, overall, and a lot smoother. Some of this is taking care of myself for the first time in 30-some years, but the change is pretty substantial. 9/

I've definitely noticed some fat migration as well. I've been yo-yoing a bit in weight over quarantine, and now, when I gain weight, it goes right to my hips. 10/

Like, when I first came out I had a very noticeable waistline. Pants sat under my belly and I was basically a lump. Like, you could see exactly where the pants sat. Now, that all filled in, and pants sit naturally up near my actual waist. 11/

My butt has also filled in nicely, and has a nice little ~wiggle~ to it I find quite satisfying. Really, all of me does. It's nice. I feel much more at home in my body than I ever did before. 12/

My body hair has dropped off dramatically, and I've become a lot more adept at removal. I picked up an epilator a few months back, and once I figured out how to use it without hurting myself () its been awesome 13/

There's basically 0 pain now when I use it every couple days, and the lack of hair makes me feel way better about myself. What hair does come in tends to be a lot thinner and less colored than before. 14/

I've had 4 laser sessions on my face, and the beard shadow is very nearly gone. I still get a bit before my next session, usually, but its way less and I've gone from shaving 2x a day to once every 3 days or so. 15/

One thing I'm very thankful for is my awesome friend group from pre-transition. Egg me had this inherent sense of who's decent, and so far, I've received little to no pushback from friends. I was able to come out to them very quickly after I cracked 16/

And I never felt othered. The girls very quickly adopted me into their side groups, and sent me some very nice care packages that really helped me along early on when I was trying to build out some new self-care routines. 17/

But the group of folks I've come to rely on a lot recently are the trans folks that I've met since coming out. In trans spaces, there's this inherent understanding of this stuff, and its nice. A feeling of common bonds. There's nothing else like it. 18/

I got very very lucky to be adopted by a pretty loving group very early on. They've been some of my closest friends ever since, and sharing joy and pain with them has made this year bearable. 19/

When I see how beautiful, how happy, how full of life these women are, it makes that iternalized self-hating voice real quiet. So please share your stories of joy, your cute selfies, because it at least helps me 20/

I'm gonna keep updating this as the day goes on and I think of more stuff, but its been nice to reflect a bit on the last 8 months, and relish the changes I've had so far. I can't wait to see what's still coming 21/

A negative. My nails break so much easier. I used to be able to like, grow my nails out, bend them back, and they'd go right back to place. Now they crack all time.

Also, its cold now. Wtf. I always ran so hot, and so far, the internal temp in my aprt is up like 3 degrees from last year.

Another big one that's more just time spent existing as me has been recontextualizing memories from when I was younger.

My thought is that life is like a puzzle and for 30 years, I was trying to jam pieces into the wrong puzzle. As soon as I started trying to put together a DIFFERENT puzzle, those pieces I had started fitting in a lot better.

Like, as a person, I make WAY more sense as a trans woman than a cis man, so trying to build a trans woman out of me intuitively makes more sense to me.

Like, I spent years trying to learn to "be a man" in various ways that just were laughable. In fact, they pretty inevitably wound up with me getting into my deepest derealization stints.

I dream more now. For about 5 years, I had pretty dreamless sleep, when I was able to sleep at all. Now, I'll wake up sometimes at night, but I sleep better than before, and I dream more often.

The change in body odor is real as well. I smell way less, and when I went off spiro earlier this year, I could literally smell the change. I sweat way less.

On this, I had to go through my wardrobe and pretty much deprecate every old shirt I had. I could literally just smell them. Like, wash 'em 3 times, its just in the material. But thankfully, now I have a bunch of clothes I like rather than just tolerate