I don't owe anyone anything. I'm putting this out here to get it out, and in the infinity of the Internet, to maybe help someone out there questioning themselves see their answer someday.

I have felt wrong since I was very young, about maybe 6 or 7 years old. I was in the thick of a very violent childhood. And I killed the person I was supposed to be out of self-preservation.

When I say I had a violent childhood...I've had my orbital socket broken by a hammer, my teeth smashed out with a metal pipe, my nose broken several times (to the point that my left nostril doesn't work anymore), I've been stabbed in the throat with a pen, I've been concussed with a coal shovel, I've been thrown into a wall so hard that I was knocked out and lost two days of my life. By my own family. That's not to speak of all of the verbal and emotional abuse I went through. That doesn't cover what happened at school. But you get the idea.

Not for any particular reason, either, for what was happening at home. This happened to me because I existed. I was not wanted. My parents already had their alpha son, my older brother. My brother felt like I threatened him by living. He tried feeding me bleach as a baby, and he likely caused the miscarriage of my twin by football-tackling my mom when she was pregnant. My dad blamed our money problems on my mom and me. He never had patience for me, never wanted me to be around. He was never proud of me, because I was never the alpha. I liked action figures, and would focus on conversations and friendships when I role played with them. I was heavy into art, and non-masculine music. I didn't like sports. I enjoyed cooking. And that wasn't his idea of a son.

He told me once that I would make someone a good wife someday. He also threatened to hurt me when I acted outside how he wanted his son to act. I was afraid of him my whole childhood. Despite this...from him...all I wanted was his approval. I got straight A's, went into boy scouts, went into ROTC to try to win him over. I drank and smoked weed with him to try to be more like him...and to numb everything I felt. I built a person he would approve of.

And right before I made it on my own, when I was 19, the first child in any generation to be in college, just before I was going to prove him wrong and be a successful man, he dropped dead in front of me. Heart attack.

But I had already invested in this ideal person I was trying to be too far by then.

I have had thoughts about being a woman, that I was supposed to be a woman, push into my mind at various times in my life, and my brain did whatever it could to disallow those thoughts every time. So many people in my life...at home, at school...were abusing me so much that I never felt safe having these thoughts. I still don't, to a degree.

But this would be for maybe a week, maybe a month at a time. I would mentally beat the shit out of myself for feeling that way, until the feelings stopped...or, at least, until the knee-jerk reaction to the feelings and thoughts was "no, you're not going to think about that, because it isn't safe to. Not for your sanity, and not for the people you are engulfed by. Nobody can know this. You will be hurt if anyone knows this."

I have had a surge of feeling I should have been a woman. Every day. It's been over seven months. I've blown red lights and skidded through intersections because I was beating myself up in my head. I have trouble concentrating at work. I have trouble watching TV and not thinking about it. Any time I am not actively engaged in a conversation, or a social game, or something to take my mind off of it, I am back at beating myself up and trying to convince myself that I don't feel how I feel.

I build ridiculous gingerbread houses. I have a ridiculous water-cooled PC. I teach a robotics team after work. When people ask me to do things, I never say no. When I see an opportunity to do something for someone else, especially if I could impress them with it, I offer myself to it. I have a thousand hobbies that take up as much free time as I have available, so I don't have to think about who I was supposed to be.

I've never been here, in this misery pit of self-rejection, for this long before.

I started to realize that all sorts of little things I have done as an adult were like little compromises I was making with myself. I don't have breasts, but I can have piercings and feel that pressure and weight. I don't have a clit, but I could get my glans pierced, and sort of symbolically treat it like one. I wear thongs to accent hips and an ass I never had. I keep growing my hair out long, then rebounding and bic-shaving it. I wear baggy clothes to hide a body I hate, so nobody has to see it. I act tough and controlling at work to reinforce this idea of who I'm supposed to be. I have overconfidence and am good at reading people to best hide who I really am. It's just...all sorts of little things. And it's absolutely fucking exhausting to wear a mask and mirror what I think people want me to be all the time.

In secret places, where people can't see, these compromises are why I shave all of my body hair every once in a while. Why I wear my wife's stretchy jeans. Why I play female characters when I can choose that in certain games, it isn't because I don't want to stare at a guy's ass the whole time. Why I sing non-male songs in my car on the way to work, and justify it by saying it's just a tool to grow my singing ability.

Why I trained my voice to be able to sing between D2 and G5, to cover the entire male vocal range and break into the female range. It freaks my wife out that I can sing higher and more accurately than she can, and she did choir. It freaks her out that I can sing songs above and below the octave they were recorded in.

Even the last pictures I made were compromises...I hate my balls, and wish I was smooth there. I wish I had to pee like a woman, because peeing like a man feels wrong. I have sat to pee for years. But if I keep my dick I'm still "male." Even though I don't even like penetrative sex where I'm the top, because I feel weird experiencing it and hate the idea of sexually topping, having a dick would mean I'm still male. When I think of myself topping, I think about it from a perspective of doing what I'm supposed to do, not from what feels comfortable or right. When I think of intimacy, I think of talking, cuddling, soft kisses on the cheeks and forehead. I gossip. I have zero problems talking to women like friends. And none of this reads male, so I hide it.

Being involved in the furry lifestyle was part compromise. Exploring myself in a safe space. My character, Daniel, represents parts of me I wish I could be. He doesn't represent me. He started as a confident and sexually in-control character, and that has largely evolved. He doesn't top anymore. As I let myself explore, he changed to follow suit. As I saw more art, other artists, and felt that envy...felt the layers peeling away...Daniel changed to follow it. Trial runs. A different flavor of shirt for a while.

It's hard for me to have the time to make art anymore, but even if I did, I don't know how to express who he is anymore. Partly because, I don't want to think about who I could have been anymore. I'm on a path to be that person.

Assuming I was non-binary was a compromise. I may still be. I don't know. But in the way I initially assumed I was non-binary, that was a compromise.

Now...I have 37 years of male experiences that will never leave me. I will always see things through that lens. I will never experience what growing up as a woman would have been like. I will always have hurt and confusion because of what I've been through, and what I put myself through, and what I didn't do. And I need to reconcile all of that. Therapy will help reconcile that. I will need therapy, likely in some degree, for the rest of my life. And that's OK.

I had to really dig deep to figure out how much of who I really saw myself as was just being covered up by expectations and compromises. I knew I imagined mapping my sensations to female genitals during sex, but didn't believe it or embrace it. I know my brain expects to see a female figure with breasts and hips, but I kept telling myself I wanted to be a curvier man. I put on weight to attempt to be curvier, but it didn't collect in that way, which makes the disconnect worse, but I kept telling myself "this is who I am, it doesn't matter what I want, or feel, because this is what is." I kept trying to rationalize everything.

Last week, for the first time, I broke my self-abusive cycle and just allowed myself to feel how I felt, embraced it, and allowed myself to just sit there in it.

God, that freedom and warmth was nothing like anything I've ever felt before. My wedding day didn't feel like that. When I graduated college, it didn't feel like that. I'm still riding high off of the euphoria of just telling myself it was OK to feel that way.

And then I knew why I felt like this all my life, and why I was destroying myself in my own mind for feeling the way I do, and just fully saw it.
Why I hate my body hair, why I hate my social role, why I hate when I cry listening to certain songs, why I hate when I can't show emotions, why I hate the normal male presentation and banter. Why I don't relate to men. Why I have a hard time fitting in with and talking to them. Why I'm always the "really smart, but pretty weird" friend.

I always knew. I just had to take steps to really feel it, and feel OK feeling it, like it was OK to feel how I feel...rather than burying it or making compromises.

I don't really hate that I cry when I hear certain music, or see certain scenes in movies...I hate that I can't just feel it, and that I'm not supposed to, and my mind takes over and stifles the reaction. Like a ruined emotional orgasm. There are a million things that make sense now.

I thought for a long time that this was just a sexual kink, or that I was a freak who objectified women, and loved the idea of women so much that I wanted to be like one. Or, I told myself that at times, anyway. It is so, so much bigger and encompassing than that. I literally feel a body I've never had like a memory. I see it like a memory. It's not when I'm horny or having sex. It's when I talk to people, when I get dressed, when I eat, when I do my taxes, when I fill out paperwork with my gender on it. When I sleep. When I'm sitting doing nothing.

So...it has been a long time coming. It's relieving. I'm full of joy, but terrified at times, in some ways. The social aspect of transitioning, and being a person in the world among people who knew me as a man, and their responses...I know my mind is trying to knock this version of me down again, but I fear those looks of rejection and disgust I know I will, at some point, have to sit through. I fear comments. I fear scenarios. I fear being persecuted. I fear violence.

In my head, I've seen everyone's rejection thousands of times. My wife's, her brother's, my family's, my co-workers'. I have heard people berate me in my head, people belittle and make fun of me. People at the store, people I know. I have felt their anger, disgust, disbelief. On a loop. For about 30 years. And it's what has kept me from really feeling how I feel and just accepting it.

I know that it won't be all bad. The people who really matter will be OK. They'll accept it. And that will help.

But it's hard not to believe they won't, because that's what my brain has been telling me since I was a little kid. A product of abuse. You have to be this idea of a perfect man, a perfect person, and live up to that idea, or you will experience hurt and more abuse.

And...I just got to a breaking point where I couldn't keep putting myself in that pit of misery where my brain was constantly attacking me. Not the first time, but I considered suicide recently. To the point where I almost woke my wife up to take me somewhere safe.

I was thinking far too much about the gun on my dresser, and the hobby knife in the drawer furthest to the left of the kitchen sink, and the bottle of fresh muscle relaxers in my med bag. I felt like I couldn't be who I was supposed to be, but also couldn't keep putting myself through the pit of self-abuse, and had no other way out.

But I deserve to be happy, and loved. None of my other options give that to me. Transitioning isn't going to be perfect, and I likely won't get to exactly where my mind thinks I should be, but I can choose to walk back into the misery pit, or to take steps towards feeling right, and embrace it, and be happy that I chose life on my terms over death on everyone else's. Going back to that pit, I feel that I will either end my life there, or the stress of it is eventually going to do that for me.

I refuse to be broken like that. I refuse to let that be my story. And that's why I'm doing this. It's my choice to continue to be miserable, or to choose to be happy.

I will be seeking HRT and SRS. I have my first therapy appointment in less than two weeks with a gender specialist. I will have to find a second one for my insurance. And I'm going to keep taking steps towards feeling happy and whole, until I get there.

A lot of this process is going to suck. But I'm prepared for it. I'm excited. I'm excited that someday, I will finally be some form of what I was always supposed to be. I'm excited to meet that person in the mirror. And that fuels me.

A lot of this is going to suck, but a lot of it will bring me happiness and joy that I deserve. Something I've been afraid to reach for for so, so long.

And, I will be OK.