Transitioning Thus Far

I've seen the light! or I have an idea!

I feel I have changed so much over the past year and 4  months. I started hormones August 7th 2015 and though I had been making minor changes to my appearance going back a year before, the hormones were the biggest step for me, the biggest thing I feared. Mostly that was because I'm generally a pretty health conscious person and I know there are increased health risks with hormones. Most everything has been positive but there have been a few negatives.

Emotions

As far as emotions go, it is hard to distinguish between my social status change and my medical one. While I feel free to express my emotions fully, this may just be from years of repressing and just feeling like I can open up now. Experientially I felt that my emotions were hidden behind a thick barrier where they could just barely get to me. Post hormone therapy, my emotions are laid bare, clear as day. Regardless of the cause I feel closer to my emotions, experiencing them in a more unfiltered way. This cashes out as crying about of lot of things, especially sad movies or music or situations. I was somewhat like this before but now it's like I've got tears on tap. As for aggression in any form, I don't feel it at all. Sometimes I'm blunt or abrasive with my speech but beyond that, I lack the "macho man" tendencies i had before. The lack of aggression changes my training motivation too. I'm much more relaxed and find I can enjoy it more even if I'm not as physically powerful as before.

Strength and Training

I have lost a hefty amount of strength and have struggled to get most of it back. The loss is not entirely due to hormones. Part of it is a layoff from training after quitting my last parkour teaching job and holing up for a while in my room afraid to deal with the social consequences of transitioning. I was also fairly depressed about my failed marriage. I lost my zeal for training after burning out teaching and cycling for hours to work/home every day. I stopped cycling and just started walking everywhere, sometimes quite long distances. I was using a step counter so I was quite motivated to get a certain amount of steps. I started to get more training when I got around people more and that has kept me sane. Freediving, climbing, running, and parkour became my life staples instead of just add ons. Since the winter has hit, freediving has taken a backseat and mostly it's parkour and tumbling. I can run quite far (most was 8 miles a few was weeks ago) easy again due to a different kind a running technique I recaptured. Acquiring strength has been an up and down process that has mostly been determined by my weight loss/gain.

Diet

What a mess, to be honest. I have gone through so many different strategies to tackle this piece since it is, for me, what most affects my bodily appearance as I transition and my success in training as I seek to maximise my strength to weight ratio. Upon quitting eggs and dairy again, I lost about 15lbs right away. The variety of processed vegan junk food did not help me at all and the weight has fluctuated up and down quite a lot. My goal weight is somewhere between 122-145lbs essentially the lower to middle end of my healthy bmi range for a height of 5' 9". The lowest I have gotten to was about 153 but I've since jumped back up to 165. Now I'm dropping at a slow steady rate due to my most balanced approach yet.

I fully understand the mechanics and energy balance required to lose excess fat. The psychology of losing weight, however, is something I ignored. Most of my behavior is quite self directed. Though I may have biological limits to how long I can train or sit down and write before I become uncomfortable, I have a pretty high degree of self control. Trying to just "not eat so much food" was a test of one of those biological imperatives we will never get over: our hunger drive. Since then, I have learned to control  my food choices, a much easier variable to handle. So it is not a matter of IF I will eat but WHAT I will eat. So long as I control for the energy density of my foods, i can eat as much as I want and still lose weight. With proper food sequencing (greens then veggies then fruit then starches) I can take advantage of my limited stomach volume to feel fuller with less calories, thus satiating my hunger drive. My main mistake was measuring the scale instead of my behavior, so even though i  was able to lose a little bit of weight, it always came back on. With the correct behaviour, the weight will take care of itself so I'm only checking once a month by taking the average of 3 days of measurements. This has been my best approach yet as it supports my training goals instead of ruining them. I have much more to elucidate on diet but it deserves its own post.

Salt is the one issue that deters my dietary goals. I have an insane craving for it. I have hypothesised that craving is due to my medication spironolactone which is a potassium sparing anti-diuretic. Essentially it makes me pee a lot more so I'm not holding on to as much water. Water follows salt I guess. I have tried several times to go salt free but my stamina takes a dive immediately every time. I could be wrong about this particular issue and I'm seeing a doctor next week to figure the whole thing out. If this is the case, I am coming closer to considering orchiectomy since it means I can drop spironolactone altogether and just take estradiol.

Breasts!

They have grown steadily and considerably over all this time. I have found that it is good to keep measurements to buy the correct bra size, otherwise it will be quite uncomfortable. I can feel them bouncing around when I run or jump. Having breasts has been the most validating part of this whole transition, making me feel more at home with my body. I feel more connected to my body than I ever have.

Appearance,passing, make-up, clothing, 

My thoughts on passing have shifted from wanting to pass because of embarrassment to wanting to pass as part of my relation to others and the philosophical concept of what it means to be a woman. I've dealt with plenty of embarrassment now and I can handle going out looking like a half man/woman creature any day. Different people will call me she or he throughout the day and though it is a little jarring, it is to be expected. I now realize that I can't expect to be thought of as a woman if I don't have enough social cues to suggest that I am. There are only so many ways a person can be considered a woman from a philosophical standpoint. The ideal norm is being born with certain parts and growing up socialized as a woman. I am not a woman in that way. I was not socialized to be one. I have to pick up from where I never left off. I can change my body with hormones actualizing my subjective experience of feeling more like a woman but this can still be largely hidden. I get closer to the social part by doing makeup that feminizes my face more, wearing clothing that suggests a more feminine shape.

I used to think that feeling like a woman can only be about me and my feelings about my mind/body. But it is important to recognize that humans are social beings and that my relations with others are a huge part of my transition. This is why passing matters to me.

Voice

My biggest lingering fear. I've put my voice training off for far too long. In the rare situations I do pass, my voice immediately gives me away. This has made me not want to talk much whenever I'm out and about and it's a pretty life altering thing. So currently doing exercises on this and working on integrating it into my life more, as awkward as it may be.

That's it for now. I usually try not to talk about this stuff too much because I feel there is so much more to me and I don't want my life to be all about this. I hope this helps people who are on a similar journey.

Another Lateral Move for Experiential Alchemy

My latest book conquered, "Consider Phlebas"

Break Apart, Clarify, Understand

In a previous post, I used the term "lateral move" in the context of parkour training. I'm developing the idea that reading is a lateral move for the mind. Making a lateral move, in the context of one's experiences, involves expanding what we know outward. So instead of accumulating knowledge through our senses from the outside world, we move inwards drawing on our experiences to bring life to the words we read. The words we read break apart and reorder our existing experiences to give us a new take. If we don't allow for experiential alchemy, our experiences lie dormant as mere knowledge. 

This effect can work in reverse as well. Words have a way of clarifying our experiences. There is a base level crudeness to any given experience that is wasted on the conscious mind.  A detailed description about the setting of a room or about, say,  the complex emotions of a character in the grip of indecision, gives us new tools with which to articulate our own experiences. Understanding comes from clarity. It's like the myriad number of  Eskimo names for snow. We know that there are all types of different snow but we can have a fairly flat understanding of it if we do not make finer distinctions. That flat understanding can feed back into our experiences, dulling our ability to perceive the world in a more complex way.

Take back your exploratory nature

In terms of exploration and discovery we often talk about the world of the big and the small. The frontiers of our scientific understanding go as far as they possibly can in those directions. Scientists invent new ways of measuring to understand the world of the small. Scientists invent new spacecraft so we can get closer to the really big things. There is usually a natural limit to how much we can discover and when you ask any given scientist about the stuff on the frontier, you get the kind of response you would from a mechanic working on your car: "workin' on it". The "you'll know when we know" approach works better for humanity as a whole since we're not all qualified to jump in a space shuttle and sample asteroids or whatever. That said, discovery and exploration can still be about the individual. It's about learning something you didn't know before, even if other people know these things. That's why people still travel. No-one's reason for not visiting Japan is "well there are already people living there, so what's the point?" Even with travel there is a natural limit and unless you're living somewhere new for a while until it becomes old to you, chances are you don't sink your roots far enough in to understand what you've experienced like the natives do. Fiction promises no limits in time, geography, or even universe for that matter.

When we read, we call upon our inherent ability to model reality, to make predictions about the future. So in some sense, every experience or situation described in fiction calls upon our ability to anticipate succeeding events within that story. When we consider what might happen next in real life, we create stories and models. Sometimes these can be so vivid, they cause us to flinch away from an imagined pain or twist our faces in disgust over a sight we're not even seeing. Our powerful imagination affects even our physiology. Maxing out our modelling abilities may serve us in other practices such as creating positive associations in meditation. For that matter, any quality we develop in our meditation gets practice when we encounter scenarios in fiction where it might be possible to never come up against any major challenges in real life which test our ability to keep calm and present. Just kidding! There are tons of those but perhaps the more extreme examples don't come up in modern life so often that we can adequately prepare for them.

The moral piece:

Reading is like the movie Groundhog's Day. You go over similar types of stories again and again and you learn something beautiful/helpful from it. You go through the next day again without the deficiency you had before, with new insight, you can move further than you did, you've improved your perspective. You fill out your mind map, uncovering corners of your mental world you may never have experienced. How many lives have you lived? When you read a story, you are born into a new world for a little while. You have a chance to take on the perspectives of characters who experience things you may never encounter. The clarity with which I feel these things depends on my understanding of the words presented and the richness of my own experience. Knowledge, on some definitions in epistemology, is about interacting with the truth of the world in a very particular kind of way. Perhaps we are not gaining new knowledge when we read fiction, but we do work with what we know, bending it, twisting it, reordering it. Though we usually work with the field of our senses, that information combined with the ability to read multiplies the experiences we have. This experience explosion puts us through a gauntlet of moral fortitude which can shape and sharpen our moral sensibilities to a fine point.

Anyways, I found that I was missing some good reasons for why I enjoy reading fiction beyond fun and stimulation. Elucidating the benefits pushes me to feel like it is not just an indulgence, but an active practice which makes me a better person.