What do you do when your life is improving and your brain is still telling you everything is hopeless and nothing will ever get better and you should die? First, you respond by being kind to yourself. If you have suicidal thoughts, then you have spent years needing those suicidal thoughts.

This will be an adjustment for anyone, but if you are a people pleaser, you may have the added difficulty of feeling as if you are a fraud or as if you are tricking people.

The desire to fit in and not be shunned by your peers usually wins out over trying to be someone far outside the gender norms. This can result in the splitting off or fragmentation that we mentioned. And sometimes you role-play or act for such a long time that you forget that you are doing it, and it takes well into the process of transition to

becoming your authentic self is one of the best things you will ever do.

a life of low levels of unease or distress is far from thriving. A life where things just feel vaguely off and uncomfortable for decades is still a burden.

When you make the decision to be the truest and most honest version of yourself, maybe everything else is just what happens alongside it. It is not something you meant to help or harm anyone with; it simply is. Try to hold this thought for as long as you can tolerate it: Perhaps whatever happens is exactly what had to happen.

There is commonly a last-ditch effort at hyperfemininity before realizing that the problem isn’t the effort given to the task; it is that they are attempting the wrong task. Apparently cis people don’t find performing their genders a task!

It is not uncommon to feel even more confused after proceeding with early aspects of transition.

The choice of chemotherapy is never so simple as, “Do you want your hair to fall out? Yes or no.”