Hormones (So It Begins)

I really don't know.

So, hormones. Puberty 2.0. This has been an interesting couple weeks changing my hormones around, and I gather it will only get more interesting.

First, a quick technical note on what hormone therapy is. Two things need to happen: I need estrogen, and I need to get rid of testosterone. So twice a day I take estradiol (a form of estrogen I can absorb orally) and spironolactone (a diuretic that eliminates testosterone from my system).

Two weeks on a starting dose isn't going to do much in the grand scheme of things, but it's certainly enough to knock a few things off-kilter. And by "off-kilter," I mean my mood has been wobbling like a broken shopping cart wheel. Let me give an example if what I mean:

I was having a bunch of anxiety about how to write this. More writing anxiety than usual. So I'm pacing around thinking, anxious and a little agitated. Next thing I know I'm grinning so broadly that it's making my face sore and I don't know why. On the flip-side, more than once I've experienced a rush of gender euphoria (more about that some other time), only to crash, in the span of a couple seconds, into an anxiety attack about something like my voice - both mini-moods greatly exaggerated from healthy emotions. Little things might send me shooting off in some direction like that, or it could be nothing at all - that shopping cart wheel just wobbling.

It's a bit like someone turned up the gain on my feels. Not the volume - the gain, so even the noise is strong enough to be amplified into a 10-10,000 second Feel (usually on the shorter end).

This is largely why I've been on hiatus from Facebook. I know I could be a righteous bitch at any moment and unleash that on someone for no good reason. Or I might be prone to posting really stupid stuff in a fit of irrational exuberance. Basically, I don't trust my emotions.

However...

There has been one focused change that isn't scattershot feels: lots more gender euphoria. What that completely entails is, as I said, for another time, but the short of it is: it's the utterly blissful feeling of fully internalizing my femininity for a moment. It's been happening a lot more since I started hormones - I'd say at least 4x as often as in the 2 weeks before. And it's more intense. I don't know how much of that is purely psychosomatic and how much is my brain reacting to the estrogen, but it's there. Regardless of the origin, that is one emotion I do trust. (Except when I have an anxiety attack, then I don't, because I don't trust any emotion other than anxiety.)

And that's where I am right now. Feeling level, even good, most of the time, but a couple dozen times a day, I have super-feels, even if I don't have a trigger to send me off in some direction. Let's see where this round of puberty takes me next!