Originally Posted by
Amy Fakley
I can certainly understand your desire to have a clearer vision of the future. You want to know where it's all headed because that affects you. Totally understandable.
Unfortunately, at least in my experience of this, clarity is hard to come by for everyone involved. To directly answer your question ... I have no clear memory of the first time I dressed, nor of instances of whom I secretly borrowed clothes from along the way. For one thing, I'm also in 40s and that stuff was a long time ago ... I mean how many things do you clearly remember from when you were 5 or 6 years old?
I do remember certain aspects though. I clearly recall feeling left out and sad when I asked my mom for cool clothes like the girls had after my first day of kindergarten, and I was told in no uncertain terms "that's not for you, you're a boy". To this day I remember that. I also remember a specific blouse that I used to borrow from my mother's closet, and a specific dress one of my girlfriends had in college. Can't remember the first time dressing in those things though.
I will say this ... and this is definitely true of me, and I've read many similar accounts on the forum over the years ... there is an "expansion" nearly all of us experience after coming out.
After I admitted everything to my wife (17 years into our marriage), and it turned out that she was so accepting and supportive, there was a little "girl explosion". I bought new clothes and shoes and my wife taught me how to do my makeup better and I finally spent real money on a good wig ... and BOOM! Amy was "born" in a way ...
What I mean by that is that my feminine side had been made physically real in ways that simply were impossible before. And the closest person in my life still loved me, and accepted it ... and that made me very happy, but it also "expanded" that role in my day to day life, where my feminine side had been a closely guarded secret for literally all of my life up to that point. Naturally, I wanted to dress more often, and I thought about it more often. My wife also worried that I had been lying to her or that I didn't fully understand the extent of my transness.
However, after a time it became apparent that those fears were not founded. I had moved no further along the trans spectrum than I had always been. It's just that barriers had been lifted and the pressure inside me released.
For me it was like a tube of biscuits.
I came out ... that was like knocking my tube of biscuits on the counter. The seal was broken, my contents expanded. With a little baking, I became the biscuit I always was on the inside. But I wasn't a muffin. I was still just a biscuit, lol.
Hope that made sense, and I hope you and your SO find your balance :-)