[bryony]

I've gone cold turkey from pm for about a solid two months now. Perhaps the most noteworthy change during this period is the envy/admiration I sometimes experience when looking at some females, not the women in fashion magazines, but females you would see on an everyday basis.

All of them? Attractive, plain, young, old, slim, fat?

I'm guessing ordinary, young, pleasingly attractive in face and form? If so, then yeah, I still have that envy, though thankfully not the compulsions that go with it.

It's also becoming more abundantly clear as to why my gender identity lies in the realm of obscurity or andrygnony. As much as I have a soft spot for things that would be considered feminine, I also have a rather detached, realist and sometimes harsh perspective on life.

I hope I'm making some sense here.

It's definitely how I feel... which is odd, because I'm not doing cold turkey any more! Think how bad I used to be!

Much as I admire the FFS that some members undergo, and I had the money and was free to pursue it, the rest of me would never look right.

I look in the mirror and see how wrong the width and depth of my rib cage looks.
If the diameter of my ribcage were not 34" but 30" the breasts that I have grown would look spectacular. Shoulders loom out above them, and despite getting hip fat, the dents where my narrow iliac crest are look wrong too.

As my own worst critic, I can just imagine looking at my nude reflection with a female face on the wrong shaped body and agonising over the imperfections.

I'd rather be grumpy about what I can't have than try and fail to obtain it.

(Some people are glass-half-full, some are glass-half-empty... but what if you wanted a cheeseburger?)

B.