Why I take the time to present as female when no one ever sees me.

So it's Friday night. I just got paid and I took the past hour painstakingly applying my makeup and generally making myself look as feminine as I can. I have a long way to go but I clean up pretty good.

Now I'm ready! Uh, to stay home.

It seems like a pointless endeavor and yet it's a ritual that I repeat almost nightly. I'm not getting dressed up to impress anyone and my wife sure as hell doesn’t care. The reason I do this is because I'm doing the only thing I can to reign in my gender dysphoria.

When I'm in female mode and I look in the mirror while presenting as a man I feel disgusted with my appearance. When I'm in guy mode I don't mind so much that I look a little feminine now, so that's not the problem. The only thing I can do to make myself comfortable in my body is to present as female.

As I'm getting ready there comes a point when I look at myself in the mirror and I can see my true face behind the one I've been stuck with, and when that happens it's like a heavy burden is lifted from my shoulders, the stars align and I can finally be comfortable in my body again. Just seeing myself as a female, despite all the major stuff that gives me away as a bio male, is an incredible relief and it's enough to get me through another day.

So some people dress as the opposite gender for fun. I do it to maintain my sanity.

What hurts is that I want to always look like a woman. I have an overwhelming need to go out and live my life as a female, but my social anxiety is a mother fucker and it prevents me from doing so. I think that if I could “pass” as female the male part of my mind would be OK with me living part time as a woman, but I have such a long way to go before I can blend in without being clocked.

I get dressed up every night and I want to live the life that's been denied to me for the past 31 years. When I'm in male mode, I feel like it's my obligation to make sure that I give myself room to grow as a woman, and when I'm in female mode I just feel lost and scared. I have to catch up on decades of knowledge and habits in a short amount of time, plus I'm just starting puberty so YEAAAAH. It's complicated.

Someday I won't be afraid any more. I’ll be able to go out, have fun, buy cloths, get my hair done en femme and I'll wont worry about what other people are thinking about me. Until then, yeah. All dressed up an no where to go. Story of my life.

Paige

The face in the mirror (Edit)

Edit - I need to like, proof read the stuff I write before I put it up.  What a concept huh?  Anyway, I fixed this post to be somewhat coherent now.  Sorry.  =P

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Who do you see when you look into the mirror?

When I was a child I was fascinated with my own reflection and I would stare at it for long periods of time in the giant mirror that my grandparents had in the living room. My grandmother would yell at me to stop, but I don't remember why.  Probably because it seemed narcissistic, but I'm not sure if that was the case.

I just could never really except that it MY face. I was looking at another person looking back at me. I made funny faces and he made them right back at me. (Alas, to this day I am the king/queen of funny faces.) Who was this boy in the mirror? Why did he look like me but was not me? (And me at the same time?) 

When puberty hit my face betrayed me. Have you ever seen an acne ad where they show a person with the worst possible acne in the world?  That was me.  No exaggeration.

I'm not going to be a misery dick http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=misery%20dick right now and go into my teenage years but in the aftermath my face is a ruin of scars and craters. I hate my face. Where it once held fascination it now mocks me and yet when I encounter a mirror I still have a hard time looking away. Ok, I can't NOT look away.

“That can't be me,” I think. But yeah, that's my mug staring apologetically back at me, as if to say, “Sorry Bra, not my fault your hormones are all out of wack.”

I learned to live with my face as a man because men can have scared, craggy faces and still be excepted by society because that shit sometimes happens to “us”. When I came to grips with the fact that I'm (mostly) a woman trapped in this body that all changed.

I remember an incident that occurred shortly after I finally “came out” to myself and accepted the fact that I was bigender. It was probably a day or two after I had done so. I stepped out of the shower, looked in the mirror and saw someone else looking back at me. I was a woman in mind and spirit, but my reflection was that of a pasty white, overweight male slob with a ruined face. I threw up violently in the toilet for several minuets.

That was my first real taste of gender dysphoria, and it's something that I still struggle with every day.

Right then and there I changed the way that I live my life. I eat healthy and mostly vegetarian, I do moderate exercise for an hour a day, I went to the dermatologist and I'm on retain a which has thus far had a noticeable impact on my skin quality. Les and I have two grand saved up for either dermabasion or laser resurfacing for my face, which will hopefully either eliminate or greatly diminish my acne scaring and smooth out my complexion.

I still have “man fat” around my waist that makes me feel disgusted, but my body looks sooo much better than it used to. I've trimmed at LEAST 30 pounds of fat and I had to pull all my old pants out of storage. (Despite all the problems it's raised my wife says that realizing that I'm bigender was the best thing to ever happen to my health.)

But back to my face. While there used to only be one reflection now sometimes there are more. There's the “Ugly Reflection” where I see every issue with my face that I could probably imagine amplified by 100 times. Sadly, that's the one I see the most. Then there's “Guy Face”, with his strong jaw, steely eyes and serious expression. Then Androgynous Face, still masculine by birth but soft and feminine. I like that one.

But sometimes, I look at myself and I see a phantom face behind my own. That of the woman who I so often am inside. It's like I can't focus on her, but she's there, trying to manifest herself in my world. “I'm here!” She screams, like someone trapped on the other side of a mirror in a twilight episode. “See me!”  (Don't you dare start singing The Who right now.  Well, hell, let's at least sing it together. . . )

As I modify my body through surgical intervention and as I feminize myself with hormones will her reflection become clearer? And once I can look into the mirror and see her, will it finally be myself looking back at me? Or just another stranger?

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