As you can see, it’s been a week since my last post on this intended-to-be-daily platform. Sigh.

Part of the idea behind this journal is that it’s an exercise in keeping my transition top-of-mind. It’s easy for day to day stuff to push into my consciousness and sort of crowd out my long-term intentions.

Transition is definitely a long-term intention.

I’m in my third week on HRT. I’m beginning to feel its effects, but it’s really just getting started. When I’ve been doing it for six months or a year, that’s when I’ll really, I think, see changes. So for now, it’s just doing it, and waiting.

Basically, I’ve got to be doing this for six months before insurance will start with electrolysis; then I’ve got some unknown period of hair removal before I can think about Facial Feminization Surgery, and then sometime in the distant future I can start thinking about Sex Reassignment Surgery (the one people mean when they say “surgery” in reference to trans people).

One of the things I can do while I’m waiting to see what estrogen does to my body is work on skills. There are so many skills associated with being a woman that most women have learned starting sometime when they were toddlers, so the skill levels I’m trying to fit in with here are actually pretty high.

Makeup is a big one. There’s so much to know and so many skills to develop. I’ve never been much of a visual artist, so I’m having to get some foundation in color theory, in the ideas of light and shadow, in everything.

I’ve never liked the way my face looked. I always just put this up to being basically ugly, but as I’m approaching this process I’m sort of coming to terms with the fact that the way I feel looking in the mirror falls into the category of things people are referring to when they talk about “disphoria.”

When I think about disphoria I think about trans men talking about their penis or trans women talking about their breasts, and I never really had the revulsion for my own body parts that that seems to imply, but taking a little more time to think about it, my disphoria expresses itself in other ways.

As you can probably tell from my previous post, I’m self-consious about my height. Actually, it goes beyond that: it seems… not part of me, weirdly. I was always a small, short kid, and then my freshman year in high school I grew a foot over the course of the school year. It’s never actually seemed real to me; somewhere in the back of my head, I’m still the small kid.

Likewise my breadth: I have broad shoulders and a barrel chest. I can get really, really fat before my gut is bigger than my chest — in part because my body tends to spread fat around pretty evenly, so my chest gets bigger along with everything else.

A long time ago, when I’d gotten really out of shape and was just starting to try to get back in shape, I was running on the treadmill at the YMCA and a guy came up and grinned and was like, “Hey, man, it’s good to see a big guy who can run, the [local pro football team] could probably use you.” The joke, of course, being that [local pro football team] was doing pretty badly that year.

In addition to my general size, I just don’t like the way I look. I’ve worn a beard most of my adult life, partly out of laziness — trimming a beard once a week is way easier than shaving every day — but a lot from the fact that my beard basically covered the lower half of my face, which I don’t like and find sort of shocking every time I look in the mirror.

My ex gave me the advice that I could get used to the way I look by taking regular selfies: Taking the time to look at myself from different angles, find the ones that show off my attractive features and hide my unattractive ones.

I put a lot of work into finding the good angles for my bearded face, and finally I managed to see what it was people saw when they complimented me.

I haven’t at all managed that with my beardless face.

As you transition, you’re encouraged to “see the girl” in the mirror, to try and find the vision of yourself as a woman reflected in your own features. You try out makeup, you play with hair, you pluck your eyebrows; one of the gender presentation people I talked to said your first year of transition was basically your chance to be a five-year-old girl playing dressup.

I have never seen that five year old girl in makeup when I look in the mirror; mostly when I try to put on a face, I end up looking like an undead clown.

HRT is supposed to help. Facial feminization surgery is supposed to help. Losing a lot more weight should help. But for now, I don’t really look in mirrors, except for first thing in the morning, when I’m doing the depilation-and-teeth-polishing rituals.

I’m pretty sure I’m never going to be beautiful — if nothing else, the fact that I’m transitioning as late as I am means that I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I’m basically opting for a woman’s old age, rather than youth or middle age — but at some point I hope to look a little more like an ugly woman instead of an ugly man.