This is a long one - a resume of the year and a thank you to everyone here.
After 12 years of occasionally wearing panties under my male clothes I got rid of them all around 20th december 2014. I later discovered this was called “purging”. By Christmas Eve I had to buy new ones, and by early January, for the first time I thought about trying women’s clothes, checked out “clothing for transvestites” online, and from there discovered the world of CD.
It has been quite a year (understatement). I settled eventually into a “man in a dress” mode of being, conducting work, meetings, client sessions and daily life in ladies clothing and a few days beard. I’ve gone out in drab less than 6 times in these 12 months, all at the behest of my wife, to cater to her fears. The neighbours all know, so does my business network(*), so do my relatives apart from my parents-in-law (who suspect for sure) at my wife’s request. It’s my clothes, so i don’t call it crossdressing, the old manclothes are gone apart from a couple of things left for manual work and a mothballed suit.
I have delved into my life, my shaping experiences to discover some causes or reasons. Like many here, the end discovery is no real reason, just the urge to be dressed. Together with chronic testicular pain and a loathing of shaving my face these are aspects of what I now realise is a dysphoria (one of many new words i discovered this year). I found for example my ankle and knee problems were resolved by wearing heels - as if my body was literally asking for this - 3.5” seems perfect, and I get along fine in them.
The jigsaw puzzle of my life has fallen into place, better than any sense before. Possibly its down to hormone levels in-utero and through adolescence, possibly its down to life’s experiences, to being different, to not fitting in. I’m a member of the high-functioning autist tribe, the dyslexic tribe, the dyspraxic tribe, but I never felt I belonged to them. I don’t feel I belong to the CD either; the interests are not really mine.
The affinity I feel is with women, from playing with girls as a child, to having what my wife called my “harem” in work (a group of collaborators, mostly female, totally nonsexual of course). I have so many female friends, always been able to chat, have a cuppa. It’s to blindingly obvious in hindsight, it’s something perceptive people have hinted and joked at over the years. They knew but chose to leave me to discover it for myself. I would not have listened before, anyway.
The feeling of happiness when dressed en-femme, the feeling of being the real me this way is the icing on the cake really. So, thank you all for being here, for being the crossdressers forum, covering the whole TG spectrum of which I do feel part.
The next year I won’t predict. I’m going to explore, make some first steps and see where they lead. I don’t know if I need to change my birth name or just treat it as now feminised.
Thanks again to all I’ve met this year, wow, some journey and experience.
xxx Pamela
(*) my website still represents me as my old identity, that’s part of 2016 to redress.