I posted this on twitter but felt like sharing here as well. This has been a major development and want to share it in case others are in a similar situation.

One of the major motivators for my transitioning was that I felt for years that my brain just didn't work right without estrogen. It felt like there was a link in there that required an emotional connection of some kind. Well it turns out I was right. That circuit was completed about 6 weeks ago, shortly after my dosage was increased and I likely reached my ideal levels of estrogen. I literally felt it change in my head one day. However at the time I didn't realize what that meant, only that the hole was gone. I've spent the time since then trying to figure out what's been happening and the revelations have been startling. Gradually I started to see mistakes I had made in my core assumptions in my work. My idea of confidence came into question and fell apart. I realized that that circuit was responsible for the connection between feeling and knowledge. Essentially intuition and instinct, the ability to apply knowledge based on feel. I had relied almost entirely on rote methods and logic to compensate for that deficiency. Now I find myself in a place where I realized that very little of what I've learned in the last 18+ years is part of that intuitive connection, and I need to basically start learning for real for the first time ever. It's hard to ask for help when the fundamental question underpinning everything is: "How do healthy brains apply information?". This is a very strange situation well beyond anything I expected. But at least things work as I've always expected them to. Needless to say I'm extremely anxious and rightly so, I quite literally have a different brain now. It's got obvious effects such as significantly improving the expressiveness of my art. But also subtle ones like how it's affecting my motivations and impulses.