Me and my partner are t4t, and they often talk about some of their early life experiences being treated as a girl. It makes me realize just how much stuff I didn’t experience that most women do. I’m happy that I get to experience everything as a woman now, but I look back and remember my experiences in high school and even earlier and. I have a hard time letting go of the fact that I didn’t get to have that era of self discovery. It was all just “mascing” and saying and doing what I thought people wanted me to.

Maybe its cause I’m coming up on my first decade of being a woman, or because I’ve been sitting home all day recovering from GRS. But I keep coming back to that what-if question and trying to recontextualize those feelings into positive ones has been hard at times.