: Welcome :
A note from the author:
Welcome to Waterlilies, my personal journey of gender transition that covers the period of my life between Oct. 1, 2005 (my first day of going full-time as female) until February 14, 2007 (recovering from sex reassignment surgery in Montreal). In order to make this blog read chronologically, I have changed all the dates so they are consecutive in reverse order, so please disregard all blogger-generated dates listed as inaccurate.
In order to read the blog in the correct order, navigate the archives backwards. For example, this entry is dated on Blogger as Dec. 31, 2007. The next entry will be dated Dec. 30, 2007 and so on. So when you finish December, click on September 2007, and so on. All dates are in the year 2007, although actual events happened between Oct. 2005 and Feb. 2007 as noted above. If you want to read about my SRS experience, for example (the last six entries) skip to January.
I hope you enjoy reading about my story.
Michelle
October 3, 2007
It's time for a new chapter of my life. After the next 24 hours have passed, I will come to a milestone in a journey that has been at times difficult, exciting, heartbreaking, joyous, confusing, enlightening, painful and wonderful. Twenty-four hours from now, I will finally be free to be myself, the person I've always meant to be, if I wasn't born in the body that I was.
Hi, my name is Michelle, and I was born as a male. I'm 37 years old, of Chinese descent, and lived most of my life in Houston. For the past six years, I've been a public relations executive at one of the largest independent PR agencies in Texas. Tonight was my going away party, when I told all my co-workers (the ones who didn't already know) why I was leaving my comfortable job and taking a chance by moving to New Jersey to find a job. Before I go, I'm going to get cosmetic surgery on my face, breasts and midsection to make me more passable as female, although I do fine with that already with the right clothes, hair and makeup. But going from an A cup to a C cup in bra size makes it a lot harder to mistake me for a guy.
I decided to start this new blog because after tomorrow, I will be full-time and starting my so-called Real-Life Test (RLT - there's going to be a lot more acronyms coming, so you may want to take notes) where I prove to my medical caregivers that I can survive in the female role for at least 12 months in order to qualify for sex reassignment surgery (SRS). I've been pleased to find out that there are a lot of people out there who are interested in my life, so this blog is where I'll post my day-to-day activities and thoughts about Houston, New Jersey, surgery and my life in transition, a 37-year-old girl learning to become a woman.
My birthday was last Sunday. Since my 35th birthday two years ago, my life has changed dramatically. To briefly recap, although I have had transgendered thoughts and feelings all my life, they only became strong enough for me to act on them two years ago. After researching on the Internet, I started experimenting with herbal hormones and came out to my spouse in November 2003. After she got over the initial shock, she supported my desire to explore my feelings and seek medical supervision.
To prepare my physical transition, I went on the South Beach Diet in March 2004 and started losing weight to get rid of my male pot belly. Over the following six months, I dropped more than 60 pounds, mostly driven by my desire to feminize my body. In July 2004, I entered therapy and started taking pharmaceutical-grade female hormones (estrogen and progesterone) and another drug to block the effects of testosterone in my body. In October 2004 I started laser hair removal treatments on my facial hair to remove what little beard growth I had - I'm very lucky in that respect that Asians normally don't have much body hair because laser is very painful and very expensive.
Over time, these procedures have feminized my appearance dramatically, as shown in the before-and-after photos below. The first one was taken in Oct. 2003, the second one was taken in May 2005, less than 20 months later:
2005 has been the watershed year for me, starting on April 1, when my three-bedroom house caught fire in the middle of the night due to a faulty garage door opener and was destroyed, nearly taking me, my spouse and my five-year-old son with it. We managed to escape in time, running out into the street in our pajamas at 2 a.m., knocking on neighbors' doors to use the phone. The fire destroyed nearly everything in the house, incinerating half of it and ruining the other half with smoke and heat. With the help and generosity from friends, co-workers and family, we managed to recover our lives, but regrettably, for various reasons, our marriage did not survive. We separated in April, and are in the process of selling our property and getting a divorce.
So that brings you pretty up to date with my life so far. Feel free to share this blog with anyone you feel might be interested - I am writing this for public consumption, and therefore will not use any names save my own. Take care, everybody.
Welcome to Waterlilies, my personal journey of gender transition that covers the period of my life between Oct. 1, 2005 (my first day of going full-time as female) until February 14, 2007 (recovering from sex reassignment surgery in Montreal). In order to make this blog read chronologically, I have changed all the dates so they are consecutive in reverse order, so please disregard all blogger-generated dates listed as inaccurate.
In order to read the blog in the correct order, navigate the archives backwards. For example, this entry is dated on Blogger as Dec. 31, 2007. The next entry will be dated Dec. 30, 2007 and so on. So when you finish December, click on September 2007, and so on. All dates are in the year 2007, although actual events happened between Oct. 2005 and Feb. 2007 as noted above. If you want to read about my SRS experience, for example (the last six entries) skip to January.
I hope you enjoy reading about my story.
Michelle
October 3, 2007
It's time for a new chapter of my life. After the next 24 hours have passed, I will come to a milestone in a journey that has been at times difficult, exciting, heartbreaking, joyous, confusing, enlightening, painful and wonderful. Twenty-four hours from now, I will finally be free to be myself, the person I've always meant to be, if I wasn't born in the body that I was.
Hi, my name is Michelle, and I was born as a male. I'm 37 years old, of Chinese descent, and lived most of my life in Houston. For the past six years, I've been a public relations executive at one of the largest independent PR agencies in Texas. Tonight was my going away party, when I told all my co-workers (the ones who didn't already know) why I was leaving my comfortable job and taking a chance by moving to New Jersey to find a job. Before I go, I'm going to get cosmetic surgery on my face, breasts and midsection to make me more passable as female, although I do fine with that already with the right clothes, hair and makeup. But going from an A cup to a C cup in bra size makes it a lot harder to mistake me for a guy.
I decided to start this new blog because after tomorrow, I will be full-time and starting my so-called Real-Life Test (RLT - there's going to be a lot more acronyms coming, so you may want to take notes) where I prove to my medical caregivers that I can survive in the female role for at least 12 months in order to qualify for sex reassignment surgery (SRS). I've been pleased to find out that there are a lot of people out there who are interested in my life, so this blog is where I'll post my day-to-day activities and thoughts about Houston, New Jersey, surgery and my life in transition, a 37-year-old girl learning to become a woman.
My birthday was last Sunday. Since my 35th birthday two years ago, my life has changed dramatically. To briefly recap, although I have had transgendered thoughts and feelings all my life, they only became strong enough for me to act on them two years ago. After researching on the Internet, I started experimenting with herbal hormones and came out to my spouse in November 2003. After she got over the initial shock, she supported my desire to explore my feelings and seek medical supervision.
To prepare my physical transition, I went on the South Beach Diet in March 2004 and started losing weight to get rid of my male pot belly. Over the following six months, I dropped more than 60 pounds, mostly driven by my desire to feminize my body. In July 2004, I entered therapy and started taking pharmaceutical-grade female hormones (estrogen and progesterone) and another drug to block the effects of testosterone in my body. In October 2004 I started laser hair removal treatments on my facial hair to remove what little beard growth I had - I'm very lucky in that respect that Asians normally don't have much body hair because laser is very painful and very expensive.
Over time, these procedures have feminized my appearance dramatically, as shown in the before-and-after photos below. The first one was taken in Oct. 2003, the second one was taken in May 2005, less than 20 months later:
2005 has been the watershed year for me, starting on April 1, when my three-bedroom house caught fire in the middle of the night due to a faulty garage door opener and was destroyed, nearly taking me, my spouse and my five-year-old son with it. We managed to escape in time, running out into the street in our pajamas at 2 a.m., knocking on neighbors' doors to use the phone. The fire destroyed nearly everything in the house, incinerating half of it and ruining the other half with smoke and heat. With the help and generosity from friends, co-workers and family, we managed to recover our lives, but regrettably, for various reasons, our marriage did not survive. We separated in April, and are in the process of selling our property and getting a divorce.
So that brings you pretty up to date with my life so far. Feel free to share this blog with anyone you feel might be interested - I am writing this for public consumption, and therefore will not use any names save my own. Take care, everybody.
