(10 Years Later) THE SHAPE OF ME: In the Days Before I Recognized Her

PROLOGUE:

I’ll resist the temptation to embark on one of my usual long-winded prologues and instead offer two brief but necessary asides before you dive into this entry.

First: nothing in this journal should be taken as medical advice. I am not a medical professional, nor do I possess any training in medicine. The medications I take were prescribed specifically for me by a licensed physician, tailored to my body and my needs. Your own journey—your dosages, your timing, the way your body responds—may differ dramatically from mine. The changes I describe here belong to my experience alone.

Second: this entry touches on themes that are intimate, bodily, and occasionally sexual. They may not be suitable for all readers. Perhaps, somewhere down the line, I’ll regret laying such personal details bare for the world to sift through. But I chose to present these journal entries as they were originally written—unredacted, unpolished, unshielded—because anything less would feel dishonest to the person I was when I wrote them.

What follows are my private notes from the earliest days of my transition—an attempt to serve as a “somewhat reliable witness” to the changes unfolding in real time. When I first wrote these pages, I had no idea where I would be years later, whether I would feel at home in my own skin, or whether I would still be struggling toward the woman I hoped to become. Transition is never a single moment of transformation; it’s an ongoing process, a continuous unfolding. This journal is simply one marker in that long and disorienting journey, a record of who I was just before everything began to shift.

Tuesday, August 03rd, 2010 (Day 6. Week 1)

In the early planning stages, I imagined this journal—this haughty, indulgent, and likely futile exercise in self-exploration—as nothing more than a crude logbook. A witness to the physical manifestations of HRT and whatever surgeries might one day sculpt the course of my transition. A neat ledger of dosages, dates, and healing timelines. A tidy chronicle of a body in flux.

But before I began hormones, there was another version of me: a half-formed creature with one foot hovering above the water, always testing but never brave enough to submerge. I have felt inadequate for as long as I can remember—like someone dipping a tentative toe into a pool whose depth threatened to swallow me whole. Despite wanting to transition since childhood, the time had finally come to “woman up.” Who I was simply wasn’t working. I had spent a lifetime preparing for this plunge, yet standing on the lip of that metaphorical pool, I felt the double pressure of fear and a ticking clock. My unsteady hands scratched at my own itchy skin, as if trying to claw free from the turbulent anxieties that churned beneath the surface. Those anxieties demanded resolution. I could jump, or I could turn back and continue performing the uncomfortable expectations of others.

And then I jumped.

While the central purpose of this journal will remain that original, noble enterprise, I need to depart from it momentarily—to capture how profoundly this first week of hormone replacement therapy has disrupted my internal weather. From about day three or four, something within me shifted. Not dramatically, not cinematically, but distinctly enough that I kept checking in with myself, disoriented.

If I’m being honest, most of the physical sensations that people associate with early HRT—tiny shocks of static under the skin, the sudden warmth or chill, mood volatility, unexpected tears—weren’t fully registering yet. I was living inside a mind busy congratulating itself for a mission accomplished, for finally silencing the doubts planted by others during my younger, more impressionable years. Some physiological changes are impossible to track without bloodwork, but others sit just on or below the skin. So in that first week, I ran my hands along my face, over the dry sandiness of my arms. Still no change. But I was logging my baseline, preparing to recognize my body the moment it began reshaping itself.

Then there was the matter of libido—a sudden, cyclopean shift that seemed to rearrange my identity in real time. I don’t know what triggered it exactly—whether it was estrogen, or the quieting of old internal scripts, or the simple act of stepping into my womanhood at last—but by day two post-injection, something in me had dimmed. According to the literature, these early fluctuations are more psychological than biochemical. It’ll take several injections before estrogen reaches therapeutic levels. But regardless of cause, the effect was unmistakable.

To be clear, I wasn’t Caligula before HRT. I wasn’t conducting Roman orgies in my living room. Even so, the sudden quiet was jarring. Only two instances of masturbation in a week, and neither due to lack of time—the desire simply wasn’t there. A total and bewildering absence. And that absence left me spiralling: What does this mean for me? What does this mean for Sabrina? Is this once-natural indulgence now a relic of a person who never quite fit? Am I destined for nights of quiet reflection, sipping boxed wine to the soft hum of Enya, crocheting mittens for hypothetical children who will never exist?

Pardon the tangent—but the absurdity captures the disorientation more accurately than anything clinical could.

Because one of the strangest parts of early HRT is the sensation that your body is beginning to contradict habits formed over a lifetime. Old reflexes suddenly mismatch with new sensations. My body doesn’t feel like it’s reacting the way it used to, and though the implications of that wouldn’t fully take shape for years, this was the beginning—the first tremor in the fault line between body-memory and new-body reality.

Now that the process has begun—and now that it feels real in a way it never did when it was still theoretical—I find myself revisiting questions I thought I’d settled years ago. Before my first injection, I feared waking the next morning and feeling regret crash over me. But nearly a week later, everything feels different. What was once a boy staring up at distant stars is now a woman drifting among them—weightless, unsteady, disoriented, but undeniably here.

Logistical concerns that once felt abstract now loom with blunt immediacy: changing IDs and credentials; navigating bathroom anxieties; choosing which surgeries to face and fund alone. I don’t have answers yet. I suspect I’ll game-theory myself into a stupor. But even through that chaos, one thing remains constant: not a flicker of self-doubt has touched me since I sat across from my doctor.

As for facial feminization surgery, the question hovers—unresolved. Friends tell me my face is feminine enough already. Maybe they’re right. Maybe they’re indulging me. Maybe I’m lucky. Maybe I’m blind. I simply don’t know yet.

What I do know is this: everything in me is shifting. My body, my mind, my identity, my desires. All of it bending toward a version of myself I’ve been trying to reach since childhood. Standing inside that transformation is thrilling, frightening, destabilizing, and wonderfully disorienting.

This was originally written on August 3rd, 2010, with a prologue added April 18th, 2020, and then edited again December 7th, 2025.

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