1. What you are experiencing is totally valid and nothing is wrong with feeling any of it. Generally speaking, you, and everyone else, should be in regular therapy, where you would have the opportunity to process these thoughts and emotions. It helps me so much just to have someone that can keep me away from mental pitfalls and traps that often cause most of my emotional discomfort about a thing.

2. Uhhh you already look like a girl (or woman). We are women, and so we look like women. This isnt to dismiss you, but to reframe your perspective. Personally, I don’t look like the woman I want to look like, but that comes with time and will likely change to be a more awesome version than the compilation of ideas borrowed from all over. But I DO look like a woman.

3. Life isn’t over until it is. Its cliche, and a bit meaningless if you let it be, but its still true. If you need some comparative outlooks on life, you will always find someone more miserable, older, and in more pain than yourself. If you met that person, would you be ok telling them “Hey, you’re life is over”?

No? Thats because you’re not an asshole (presumably), and its not kind… so why in the ever living fuck are you being an asshole to yourself? Sheeesh! (seriously though, chin up friend. Not cause its easy to do, but because seeing something good coming to you is impossible when you’re staring at the ground)

First of all, you don’t look bad. You just haven’t found your look yet. I am not dismissing your current stress and dissatisfaction with your look. I am telling you that your current look and your opinions about your looks in the future will all evolve. Everything about you will evolve and only get better and better. You WILL evolve into an amazing look and level of confidence that you are finally happy with that passes all the tests. You will.

I suspect you are your own worst critic, which means you are normal. No one knows how to beat you up better than you do. You know where all the buttons are. So, it’s extremely important that you don’t beat yourself up. It’s not at all a fair fight. You will lose every time.

Your standards are high. But they aren’t impossibly high, despite your current perspective on this. During this part of your transition, which will take muuuch longer than you want it to, you will look in the mirror and insist you can’t be a girl because you don’t “look” like a girl. In this moment, stop and recognize that the issue has always been that you are a girl and the outside doesn’t yet look right. This. Takes. Time. It takes more time than anything else in life. You aren’t done yet. Being a new person takes a lot of time and it WILL happen. The evolution won’t stop until you are satisfied with your look, and your voice, and your expressions, and everything else that you might judge yourself on. All the tiny changes here and there that you may not even be aware of add up over time.

Stop fucking drinking. It will wreck your ability to be nice to yourself. It destroys your ability to be patient and thoughtful and introspective and constructive. You need all of these things right now. You don’t need the alcohol. Alcohol leads to self-destruction. You can fuck with that again AFTER you are happy with your look and after you are happy with yourself. Alcohol is deadly as fuck in your first years on HRT. Deadly. Stop it right now. If you need to party, consider THC, or shopping or a greased-up nude fight club or anything other than alcohol. Alcohol only leads to death. Stop it.

You are worth this. You may not know it yet, but you will. I promise you will. You can do this. Everyone around you knows you can, except you. Make a rule to treat yourself the way you would treat your best friend in the world if they were experiencing this transition. Follow that rule and never break it (and forgive yourself when you do). You will succeed. I promise you will.

Are you getting treatment for depression? Or alcoholism? There’s medicine for both of those that can help (although it can take trial and error). Also therapy.

HRT can’t help everything. I was definitely expecting too much when I started, and after a year I felt in a similar position to you. . Fortunately, I started therapy and antidepressants, and they’ve slowly helped. They’ve helped me better appreciate the changes from hrt too.

Think of it like this: testosterone is like a dog biting you. HRT is when the dog finally lets go. But you still have that wound that needs to heal. For some people, it just needs a little time to heal. Others need bandages, stitches, antibiotics, etc.

I definitely needed antidepressants and therapy on top of HRT. I’m still not quite where I’d like to be, but holy shit it’s been much easier with the professional help.

And just one more thing to emphasize: there are prescription drugs that help with alcoholism. Benzos are used to manage withdrawals, if that’s needed (although some people aren’t comfortable taking benzos). Naltrexone lessens cravings, and isn’t something like a benzo that can get you hooked

There’s nothing wrong with feeling bad about the way you look. You can’t be blamed for the ways you tend to perceive yourself. Although the obvious thing to say is “there is no such thing as looking like a girl”, it’s obvious from the context that you mean you’re worrying about your looks not meeting most cultural expectations of what a woman is and/or generally not passing as a woman. Not that it’s any consolation, but plenty of cis people are in the same camp there… there’s not much some rando like me could say that could make you feel better, but it’s always good to think that now is better than before, and the future will be better than now.

Hopelessness is the worst feeling, and I remember frequently just reading and writing and thinking on and on, all in hopes that eventually I’d stumble upon something that solved my problems and suddenly get the drive to completely turn around my life. But that wasn’t how it worked. It’s a tempting and addicting path to spend all your time and effort boiling alive in your own stresses, and it’s hard to push yourself away from harmful coping mechanisms since they can be ways to get stress off your chest temporarily, and they can introduce a low-level comfort in the short term. Even though you’re still feeling anxious the entire time and it just makes it worse in the long-run. To me it feels like when I drink tons of caffeine…

The only way I was able to eventually mostly detach myself from my stress-cycle was by cutting myself off from the mechanisms I used to dump stress on (including Reddit and Discord, and other social media/forums/boards/comment sections), to keep attempting to rationalize that the gods can take my executive functioning but they can’t take my ability to obsessively write cursive variants of foreign scripts (I mean to say that I have at least a little control as long as I tell myself I do), and most importantly trying to accept that nothing will happen when I want it to happen (or even near when I want it to happen) and that the betterment I hope for, while they’ll come eventually, aren’t coming now or even in a week from now or even a month or year from now. And that I will not have any radical sudden change in my life whatsoever.

Saying “just stop feeling the way you feel lol” isn’t very insightful, but my gist is that sometimes your goal should be to avoid focusing on the grandiose illusions of what you want for yourself, to avoid having big dreams and big expectations, and to avoid feeling that you need to constantly be changing or improving or doing something with your time/life. There are no deadlines. You just started young adulthood, you have like 10 years minimum to get around to doing the stuff you want, you’re not imminently becoming a retirement home grandma or anything (although with my back sometimes I’m not so sure). Some days you can get up and focus for a bit, many days you can’t. Any progress is good and there are no set-backs.

My experience relates to other aspects of myself and my life, both flexible and immutable, especially neurological disorders (mostly ADHD & Dyspraxia) and things caused by them plus inadequate parenting (I’m sure everyone on this community could tell you this, but that sort of thing is a recipe for a pretty awful self-image). I haven’t experienced HRT or any significant form of gender-related treatment or anything.

It seems you expect too much of yourself. Therapy can help get you out of these negative spirals by developing techniques to regulate your mind. While it’s hard, I think it’s a more reliable solution than hoping you’ll eventually look good enough for your standards.

Something that helped me with my mind was realizing I am not a rational being and I do not control my thoughts. That voice in the back of my head criticizing me feels so real, but it’s not some objective judge, it’s actually incredibly biased and changes its mind based on my mood. If I can block out that voice, eventually it starts piping up less and less, and if it does pipe up again I know I can do something like play nice music to distract it. And sometimes it gets to me anyway, but I try to learn what triggered it and think of how I can mitigate that going forward.

But also, see a therapist if you can, and be honest with them. They can really speed up the process of finding problems and coming up with mitigation strategies.

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