Three years ago today I stopped living a lie.
Three years ago today I started becoming who I really am.
Three years ago today I started transitioning from male to female.

It was exciting to finally realize the cause of my misery. For decades I had seen therapists, psychiatrists, doctors; none of them ever even hinted at gender identity disorder. No one saw it, despite the fact it seems so obvious now looking back.

Once the initial excitement wore off it was replaced with fear. “Now what? How the hell am I gonna do this? Just get some female clothes and start going out? It can’t really be that simple, can it?”

“Oh my God how am I going to tell my family? And what will people think? Am I gonna have to live a life of constant public humiliation?” Those were the kind of thoughts that were constantly in my mind.

Despite all these fears it was only two weeks later that I bought female clothes for the first time and told my parents about my plans to transition. And only two weeks after that I went out in public for the first time; to go to my first therapy session.

A week after that everyone knew, both on and offline. And only a week after that, seven weeks after I started transition, I went full time. I was determined to make this happen. There was not a single doubt in my mind that I had to do this in order to survive. To finally be happy with myself.

Then came hell. Months of agony as I was put on the excruciatingly long waiting list at the hospital in order to be able to even start the first part of the entire process: diagnosis. Add in the fact that in the meantime I was also going through a messy divorce and my life was far from the bliss and happiness that I was aiming for.

Fifteen months had passed before I was finally able to start the diagnosis process. For people to tell me what I already knew. That I was born in the wrong body. This entire process took ten months to complete. And it wasn’t for another month until I was able to start hormone replacement therapy. Well over two years from when I first started transition.

I’ve been on hormones for almost ten months now and soon I’ll be put on yet another waiting list which will likely take another year. This time for surgery. Some call it sexual reassignment surgery (SRS), others call it gender confirming surgery (GCS), and there are many other acronyms for the exact same procedure but I just call it surgery. It is the only one I am truly planning on getting.

By the time I’ll be done with the entire process it will have been well over four years. Still I am not one that considers surgery to be the ‘be all end all’ of my transition. In fact, in my opinion I already completed my transition well over a year ago. I have already been living the life of a girl, of my new self, for all this time and surgery will not change how I view myself.

I have a wonderful boyfriend, accepting parents, good friends, life is pretty damn good right now and it only seems to be getting better and better each day. :)