210

As we turn the clock on another year all of social media is abuzz with people posting about their New Years Resolutions. If you were already a member of a local gym then you know that you are about to be overrun with bunches of people swearing they mean it this time… Our holiday traditions lead to gorging oneself on multiple fattening foods and drink followed by vows to shed it all as soon as the holiday ends. Now don’t think I’m discouraging people from bettering themselves but you know as well I as do that in so many cases it simply does not last. I used to do that song and dance just like everyone else but honestly I got tired of the ups and downs.

When you are young in many cases you are blessed with high metabolism. Eat whatever you like and run outside and quickly burn it off. Problem is you are developing harmful habits that trust me will end up haunting you. You get a taste for all kinds of garbage food and its very hard to let that go. I have never been one to go on diets but I have been inclined to alter my eating habits. Sometimes it goes really well for a month or two and then the craving returns… Taco Bell, McDonalds, Burger King, KFC and my new vice Panda Express. I even came across an article trending on social media listing Taco Bell as one of the top healthiest fast food chains in America. Yes they have a “healthy” menu but trust me when I go there its not to eat that stuff. I want the nachos (chips & cheese), tacos, burritos, and the quesadillas. Yeah not a lot of health value there. Point is that my biggest failures start with the best of intentions but always end up the same. You may be asking what all of this has to do with my transition? I mean isn’t that the reason you made the choice to write all this? To share your story? Truth is this has now become the main focus for me personally this year.

The reason as I mentioned in my previous post is my SRS. As I was looking at my surgeons website in preparation for what is to come, I was reminded that if I show up for surgery at a weight heavier than 210 (which I currently fall short of) the minimum cost would be an additional eight hundred dollars or in the worse case scenario I could be turned away and then have to be waitlisted again… For someone like me who has been literally counting down the days (403 and counting if your wondering…) this is just not an acceptable option. So if you ask me what my resolutions are for the new year I will tell you I have none. This is much more than that. 210 is the number I MUST achieve and I WILL achieve!! Its just not an option to fail.

As always I thank you for reading and I invite you to share my blog with anyone that you think can benefit or would simply enjoy reading it. I also welcome your feedback. Until next time.

HUGS!! Erica 🙂

A Different Direction…

In 2015 I started this blog as a therapeutic way of putting the pain I had inside down in words. All you have to do is read the previous posts to see how sad, frustrated and angry I was. Don’t kid yourself being born transgender is not something one would choose willingly. There are so many uncertainties that one has to deal with just to find the courage to be yourself and there is no way of knowing how your friends and family will react. I definitely had thoughts about who would and wouldn’t be able to accept me and for the most part I was pretty damn close. I had fears that I wouldn’t be accepted by society and that becoming who I really was would end up costing me. Hell even one of my doctors told me the first time we met to be prepared to lose EVERYTHING…

Turns out she could not have been more wrong. Here we are a couple years later and while my father has not and most likely will not come around, the level of love and acceptance I have received on my journey has been so overwhelming I find myself crying tears of joy on several occasions. HRT definitely makes you ride a roller coaster of emotions but it didn’t take much as I have always been highly emotional. I consider myself very lucky and truly blessed to be surrounded by the amazing people I have in my life. I’ve also come to realize that I can use my story and the experiences I have had on my journey to help others and recently I have had someone come into my life that is just starting her journey.

Let’s call her “C” to protect her real identity. C is a young high school student that recently had the courage to come out to her school as her true self. She has already experienced so much of a roller coaster ride of highs and lows that sometimes it can be a bit overwhelming to try and be there for her when she needs me. Between work, family life and my general need to spend time with those most important to me I can be difficult to reach at times. I want to be available to anyone that needs me and be able to use my experiences to help others that need it most so this is why I have chosen to come back to this blog. Here I can write about what it’s really like to live the life of a transgendered woman. I began this journey in the fall of 2014 and while this journey will never be fully over I have a huge milestone fast approaching.

On February 13, 2018 I will undergo SRS to correct a birth defect that I have had to live with. For those not familiar the short story is they take your male member and created a vagina. My therapist likes to say that every significant step I have taken in my journey I have come to on my own terms. This is definitely the case with choosing to have the surgery. I have always felt uncomfortable in my body as far back as I can remember and while I now feel a certain comfort level inside the outside is still something that makes me cringe. I guess the best way to try and help people understand is it really is the desire to have the inside match the outside. While all women have insecurities having to worry about ones genitalia is not something most have to give a second thought to. But think about that for a moment… What if your body didn’t match who you were? For me it was never a question of did I want to have a vagina it was just all the fear of the cost and the pain that I would have to go through to make it a reality. First the cost and without going into details (I prefer to keep my company I work for private) I have been blessed with having insurance coverage to pay the majority of my medical expenses which includes paying 80% of the cost of SRS!!! When I found this out I knew it was meant to be. As far as the pain, I have done plenty of thorough research that assures me that while it will be painful (as is all surgery) its tolerable and I will recover. If you want to know more about the procedure I suggest you visit the website of Dr. Marci Bowers which I will list below. Its by far the most detailed and thorough site and seeing how I am privileged to have Dr. Bowers do the procedure this would be the best source of information for you look at.

Well safe to say I’m back and I want to thank C for getting me motivated to get back to writing. I can’t say how often I will write in here but I can tell you if I am inspired to you will see new posts. Thanks for all the love and support!!
HUGS!! Erica 🙂

http://marcibowers.com/mtf

the struggle is real…

My entire childhood was haunted by endless teasing and lots of time spent in tears in various counselors and other authoritative figure’s offices. As I mentioned earlier being a child of JW’s did not help. The only way to be accepted with the other kids was to get involved with after school activities (sports or clubs) and basically give them a reason to like you. I have always loved sports and wanted to be able to play on teams as far back as I can remember. But my parents would not allow me to participate in after school activities because that just means spending more time with kids that were not JW’s and of course spending time with those kids was the first step that would lead us to all kinds of godless bad behavior…

However this is nothing compared to what I encountered this afternoon with regard to others horrible experiences in this cult that is moonlighting as a acceptable religion.  I watched a video of a young girl that was giving a speech to her class on all the awful things she and other women she knows have experienced at the hands of the JW’s and while I can say I was fortunate enough to not have to deal with the awful things she spoke of, I went through plenty of experiences that pretty much prepared me for the inevitable fact that my father would disown me once he found out he has a daughter and not the son he hopped I was.

When I was 16 years old my father and step-mother had made plans to go out for dinner and a Broadway show.  So knowing how much time that afforded me I planed one of my many trips to my step-mothers closet and makeup drawer.  I had been experimenting with her clothes one item at a time over the past several years and was so prepared that I never got caught.  Had a number of close calls but always seemed to find a way to escape detection.  Let me say that by no means am I proud that I violated her personal space and had I felt like I had another way to go about what I needed to do I would have taken it…  while I did one day apologize to her for violating that very personal space I never apologized for trying to discover my true self and I never would…  So anyway there I was dressed from head to toe in feminine finery and feeling such an overwhelming state of bliss that I failed to notice that she had pulled the car into the driveway and by the time I heard the door shut it was too late.  As she reached for and turned the knob to the garage door I panicked and without thinking ran into her bedroom and tried to hide in her closet.  But considering that my male clothes were scattered on the bedroom floor and her makeup I had experimented with was still laying out on the counter in the bathroom I knew I was just delaying the inevitable…

I can honestly say I have never been so terrified in my entire life.  I kept running through various scenarios in my head about what was about to happen.  One of those was that she would actually embrace this scared and confused child and put aside her shock and disgust and try to understand something much bigger than a violation of privacy was happening here.  After all she was the one that actually believed that there are some things out there that are beyond our control and need to be understood not just shunned.  However when she opened the closet door the look on her face said it all…  I was doomed and I knew it.  The series of events that followed that evening unfolded about how you probably expected.  I won’t go into the details but I can honestly say that the one positive that came out of it all was my brother was there with a big comforting hug and absolutely no judgment whatsoever.  He held me as I lied on the floor crying my eyes out trying to tell me it was all going to be okay but he knew the same thing I did and that was it wasn’t going to be ok…

I became a prisoner in my own home as I was grounded and of course there was an immediate lock installed on my parents door.  I spent the next day stacking all the wood that my dad had gone out and chopped to deal with the horror that his child was a dirty, perverted and godless freak.  After all how could I disappoint god by giving into my disgusting and unnatural urges.  Not only did I have to deal with his wrath which was mostly looks of disgust and silence I also had to go before a group of older men (elders in the church) to receive discipline from god.  The result of which was a private shaming and religious encouraged therapy as I now like to refer to as their version of corrective therapy.  And I will go into this more in my next post.

As always thanks for reading and all the encouraging support I have received! If you want to watch the heartbreaking video I mentioned earlier in this post you can find it here: https://youtu.be/RDvT_gYq-ls  Its kinda long but worth your time.

HUGS ERICA! 🙂

 

Chaotic ClusterF**k

So at this point I kinda feel like I am in a vicious circle of which I started and now have to backtrack.  I wrote in one of my prior posts that I made the decision to celebrate my birthday on Dec 4th since I started HRT and felt it was now the most important day in my life…  well one of the things that I have learned about transitioning is there is no sketchbook or guidebook that leads you to all the right decisions and sometimes the conclusions you jump to can be rash and not real well thought out.  This was my first major fuck up as far as I was concerned.  You see I have been telling people that deep down inside I always knew I was different and I was born this way.  And it’s 100% the truth and so that being said why does it make any sense to deny my actual day of birth???  Truth is it doesn’t…

A person can have many days in their life that have very significant meaning and I’m gonna be honest because I for sure do.  I will always remember in a very detailed fashion those series of events and could probably still give you all the play by play but the dates???  Not so much.  Its because life is a series of important moments and there is no way I could or would even try to remember dates.  What I will remember is the moment I decided enough was enough and I could no longer deny myself happiness out of fear.

Erica was born in that small town in Idaho on May 25th she just didn’t know it at the time.

You know someone asked me the other day if I was scared the day I started taking hormones and at first I was quick to respond with a very emphatic, “HELL NO!!!”.  However as I was thinking back to the conversation later that day I realized that this person might have been actually trying to dig deeper into the whole decision to start on hormone replacement therapy and not just my feelings on that first day…  Truth is there was a point that I was never considering HRT.  I had read countless stories of people getting them on the black market and then not taking proper dosages and even being improperly prescribed what to take and how much…  we are talking blood clots and even death.  There was no way I was going to risk my health or become some sort of half man/woman creature (I had no plans to have SRS at that point).  But just like so many other changes that have happened throughout this journey I am on, I worked through my fears and realized this is something that was ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY for me to feel whole.  I didn’t get there over night but as my beautiful therapist likes to say, “You got there on your own terms…” That really is the point because this whole journey has been and will always be just that.  Truth is the only fear that remains is when I have to jab that needle in my thigh every other week… 🙂

I realize that I kinda strayed from the original purpose of this blog which I advertised as a chronological story of how I became who I am, but this is at the very heart of why I chose to blog about my story and not write a book.  This is gonna be a very chaotic and unorganized story but I promise at some point the past present and future will come together in a beautiful twisted mess that is my life and at this point I wouldn’t want it any other way…

HUGS ERICA 🙂

growing up JW and how it contributed to keeping Erica hidden…

Tags

born this way, male to female, transgender

Let me start by saying I realize that nobody gets to choose the family they are born into and with that family comes certain ways of life and beliefs that as a child you have no choice to learn and embrace… After all you have nowhere else to go and know nothing except what your parents force down your throat. And the reason I say that expression is that growing up JW is basically being born into a CULT… If you don’t know much about them then let me drop a little knowledge on you.

From a very young age you are conditioned to go out and knock on people’s doors and try to assimilate them into the most “backwards way of thinking” that I can imagine… You are basically separated from all the “normal” kids when you are sent to the library because ALL holidays have pagan origin and therefore are forbidden to participate in. You can’t even celebrate your BIRTHDAY for christ’s sake… of course we didn’t think too much of it early on because we had been force fed their bullshit from the day we were born. But the joke was on them because while they thought they were sending this little girl off to the library to read nice things and keep her safe from the PAGANISM taking place in the other room, she was researching and trying to make sense of the war that was raging in her brain…

Now you might be thinking at this point wait a minute didn’t you say that you just started your transition just a few years ago?? So why are you referring to yourself as a little girl and using female pronouns to describe your childhood?? Well let me make this as plain as I can… I have ALWAYS known I was female and that being the case I was forced to present myself as a male for most of my life. So I don’t see my transition as becoming a woman, I see it as removing that fake male facade that I have been forced by my parents, religion and societies expectations to present. I AM WOMAN HEAR ME ROAR!!! 🙂

The JW’s teach that gays & transgender people are an abomination and that anything outside of their “normal” circle is not ok with God. Hell if it was legal they would probably still support the extermination of us as a whole… Why would I say something so damning? Well it’s quite simple actually that they believe that ANYONE who is not a JW will not survive the end of the world because only they have found the true way to worship God and so the rest of us filthy sinners won’t stand a chance…
Still wonder why I left???

Anyway I could rant about my extreme dislike of the JW religion for days because of what it took from me and forced me to endure. But that’s not what this blog is about, it’s about how I overcame all this shit to emerge as the beautiful soul I know I am today!

I just wanted to give you all just a little taste of what I have dealt with and why it has made this journey so much more difficult to travel. The JW’s will play a very prominent role in this story but this is not about them.

I mentioned earlier about many impromptu dress-up sessions in my mothers closet and trust me people there were many of them. Some she participated in and some others she did not. I’m not going to go into the vivid details that still remain in my mind to this day but I know that these memories remain because they were powerful and though most parents may say it was innocent harmless fun and there is no way you could know this at such a young age, those were the ONLY memories I really remember from my childhood with my real mother. Like many children my parents got a divorce when I was very young age and there are so many painful moments that I have chosen to repress or only share with my therapist… TO BE CONTINUED

OK so this post was probably already too long but honestly I’m so anxious to tell the world my story I am pretty much just vomiting words at this point. Gonna try to make this more compact and clean it up for shorter easier reads in the future. Quickly want to thank all of you that have given me such positive feedback and please make sure to follow me and share this blog with anyone you think will either enjoy it or in someway benefit from reading it… Also these posts may be coming fast and furious as my goal is at this point to post one once a day! Love you all!!

HUGS ERICA 🙂

And so it begins…

Tags

born this way, male to female, transgender

On the 25th of May several years ago in a tiny hospital in McCall Idaho those familiar words, “It’s a boy!” were announced.  What nobody knew at the time was that the doctor had no clue what he was talking about…

Of course I didn’t know it at the time, after all I was but a newborn baby and if I had any thoughts I can honestly say I don’t remember them.  In fact if you asked me to recall many of my childhood memories I would be hard pressed to do so.  However the ones I do recall have a very prominent reoccurring theme.  It was the dress up days in my mothers closet.  When I asked my mom about it recently she said she had to drag me out of her closet on many occasions which I realize might explain a whole lot about the events of my childhood.

So at this point you are probably asking yourself why in the world should I care about any of this or what is the point of all this?  Yes as you probably guessed by now I am a transgender woman who is currently almost a year and a half into her transition.  Yes I am on HRT (hormone therapy for those of you that don’t know what that means) and have been since December 4th, 2013.   Coincidentally that is also the day I now choose to celebrate my birth.  I know some of you are probably wondering why I would do that?  After all you can’t pick the day your born so what gives me the right to change my birthday?

Well the simple answer is I’m not changing it at all, just the day I celebrate it.  And if you decide to follow this blog on regular basis you will get to know more about who I truly am and the long and sometimes agonizing journey I have been taking to get to be the proud and deliriously happy woman I am today!:)  I love my life and honestly wouldn’t have it any other way…  I consider my life a blessing because through all the hardships I have faced I have found a way to find an inner peace I once thought never possible.

The reason I decided to start writing this blog is for two reasons.  I’ve been dying to share my story and how I got here so I can hopefully encourage others out there that are afraid to show the world their true selves.  And also so all these truly amazing people in my life that I consider my family can read my story and see what it was that shaped the woman they have come to know and love.  So I’m gonna wrap this up because it’s now 1:36am and my eye lids have gotten a little on the heavy side.  But before I go I want to let you know why I feel my story is unique and why it’s important to share with the world…  I have basically been disowned by a father that can’t wrap his mind about what I truly am and one of the main reasons is I was raised a Jehovah’s Witness and it ROBBED me of a normal life… TO BE CONTINUED

Side Note: If this post seemed like a big mess I ask you to bear with me as this is my first blogging experience and I will get better once I get back my writing style… It’s been 5 years since I graduated from college so this may take awhile. Thanks for reading and I truly hope you hang with me and support this new endeavor.

HUGS ERICA 🙂