Today Marks Two Months on Hormone Replacement Therapy

"I adored the way she modified my mornings, when I'd wake up in the calm shoals of her bed"

I started taking estrogen two months ago. I took the first one in what I can only call an ungracious setting; sitting on a toilet in the bathroom of my cramped apartment, placing the little blue pill under my tongue and waiting for it to dissolve. There was no great watershed moment of catharsis, no tears in rain, no music swelling. To the rest of the world, it was simply another Friday. 

Actually, to the rest of the world, it was the day The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom released. 

I read an article somewhere, I’ve forgotten where, where the author referred to estrogen and testosterone as being like independent contractors for your body; let them in and they will start doing projects and making adjustments, let them stick around and they’ll remodel your entire house. I read a lot about other people’s experiences with the early months of HRT, because I like reading things I can relate to, and I like this analogy a lot. It focuses on the mentality that HRT is a path to fixing yourself, tweaking yourself into a version of you that’s better-equipped to handle life in the big city. 

It would be biologically incorrect to say that the changes started immediately, because to be honest they’ve barely started now, but the mental changes seemed to kick in within a few hours. I remember lying on my bed later that afternoon, filled with this deep sense of contentment. That feeling hasn’t really stopped, either; where I used to wake up and feel a deep sense of malaise, I now wake up and feel glad I’m here to feel the sun on my face. Taking my e has become almost ritualistic for me, a moment to collect my thoughts and focus on the things I’m doing to improve myself.

I’m calmer since I started. I was never very angry, per se, but hormones have kind of…sanded my edges down, mentally speaking. In situations where I used to swallow my anger, I now find that I have less of it to begin with, and what I do have is easier to manage, think through, and dissipate. I’m harder to rattle. I’m better at taking things in stride and flowing like water around the obstacles I may face. I’m better under pressure.

Did you know estradiol tablets are slightly sweet? At least the ones I take are. They have this peculiar hint of sweetness to them that tastes nothing like anything else I’ve ever tasted. I think there’s poetry in that, maybe, that the medication that is genuinely saving my life tastes sweet in a way nothing else does. 

The most difficult thing to accept about HRT is that it doesn’t fix all of your problems. I still have genuinely difficult things in my life, shit I have to fix that nobody else can fix for me. But the thing about HRT is that it gives me the frame of mind to be able to face those things and actually start working on them? Before HRT, I was working with a brain full of worms and a mindset of total acceptance: this life is hell, and it has crushed me, and one day I will die, and that will finally make my brain stop screaming at itself. Now, even though I have problems, I have a reason to work on them: I’m investing in my own body and mind, and I want to see what the future brings, so I will keep surviving. Before, I used to say I was too egotistical to kill myself; now, I’m too hopeful to end my shit before it really gets good.

And it will get good! I actually believe it will get good! I don’t know what that looks like, but I find myself eager to live my life. I have passions again. It feels like taking sunglasses off for the first time, and it’s bright as fuck, but the colors pop like they never have before, and my brain has stopped screaming and started singing again. 

I haven’t felt like this since I was a kid, since before puberty, I guess? I used to feel a lot, you know, happiness, elation, joy, and then around when I was fifteen, I sort of just…stopped? My body was changing in ways that didn’t feel like me, and I had just kind of assumed that was inevitable, that that happened to everybody, that growing up meant feeling your body turn to stone around your soul and just fucking suffocate you. I thought everybody just felt like that, and faced with a body that was growing in ways I couldn’t control, I retreated from it, abdicated my role in my physical well-being, focusing on my mind, reading and writing and learning as an escape from the things that I felt about my body during the moments where I would let myself face it. 

It would be fine, I told myself. I’d get a degree and a job and be the weird bachelor uncle at family reunions and holidays. I’d be dry and celibate. I’d be desiccated and passionless, and then one day I’d die, and that would be that. If everybody fills a party role in the universe’s grand design, mine would be plastic and unmoving. 

And then the world ended, and I just broke. Faced with nothing to do all day, I watched and read and listened to art until I couldn’t anymore, until I was sick of it, and then all I could do was look inside myself. What I saw scared me, infinitely more than anything else ever had, and it took years until I could finally start moving forward with being who I wanted to be. 

But I’m doing better now. I used to see the sunlight; now I feel it, actually feel it peppering my skin, the warmth penetrating into my bones. 

I don’t have to force smiles anymore.

I prefer the universe filled with light.