I feel like since starting hrt I feel more hopeless, and I look and realize that I’ll never look like a girl, there’s nothing I can do. My life is essentially over. While yes I look better than I did pre hrt I still look bad and I hate myself and the person I am.
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.
It’s been 2 years nothing amazing will happen I’m at the end of the road of what hrt can do
Two years probably seems like an eternity right now. It is a very short period of time for a person to develop. HRT will continue to shape and mold your development for many more years to come. It is not magic, but it’s close. The real magic is your patience and your continued work on this.
It is such a heavy weight to constantly be dissatisfied with onesself. Most people will never know this burden, and it is exceptionally unfair to you that you are tasked with this. But it will be unfair to those of us who will meet you, know you and love you if you were to cast off this burden and abandon us. You do not know the love, joy and help you will bring to us in the years to come. I want you to stay here on earth not just for you, but for us. The people you will meet in your life. The person you will eventually spend the rest of your life with.
I didn’t meet my husband until I was 30. My 30th birthday was spent drunk with a gun in my mouth. We’ve been together for decades now. I have absolutely no idea how I survived long enough to meet him. It was a fluke, probably. My best friend did not survive. Her drinking and depression took her from us last year and I cry almost every day because of it. Please do not follow in her footsteps. Please. I am begging you to understand that your impact on others is profound and far beyond what you are able to know.
HRT doesn’t fix people, they just often have the motivation to work on themselves after being on HRT. Not everyone gets that motivation just from HRT, though. It took realizing who in my life I’d be sending down the same road for me to end up committing myself to an inpatient mental clinic rather than ending my own life. This was also after two years of HRT - it very much did not fix me, but in retrospect it definitely contributed. That being said, it was only one piece of the puzzle. Your betterment may look different, but ultimately it will have to start with how you perceive yourself - not just in terms of how “womanlike” you may be, but also in regards to your own personal narrative, how you appraise your own value as an individual. Best of luck.