For me I had to make a value judgement in regards to transition because my partner’s got phenotype preferences that don’t match where I would like to go and ultimately I had to break ot down as to whether keeping him as my romantic partner or transition would bring me more net happiness and chose my partner. It’s still a struggle because all that dysphoria doesn’t go away I just have to feed it different things to placate it enough to function.

I have a weird relationship with a lot of photos of myself pre social transition. Any photos of weddings or big family events where a dress code prompted me through soft pressure to try and “clean up” is sort of just interpreted as me being in drag but I never look happy in them. My Mom ended up taking down a bunch of family photos where I am so dressed because she started interpreting me as having “dead eyes” in them and they make her feel weird.

I can’t really erase all existence of my past self as I feel that’s kind of unfair to the other folk who were there with me at the time but we’ve definitely had conversations of “hey, using my old name and pronoun set to describe past me isn’t cool, please don’t.” but stories where the tale’s context involves me being interpreted as my birth sex by other people still feel bad. It doesn’t feel like a clean chapter break. It feels messy and threaded with compromise like I made some kind of fairy bargain- rewarding true love in exchange for staying the frog and never becoming the prince but I make it work. At my worst I feel like I stuck in the middle of a story. If my partner ever dies or leaves me then there’s a whole heartbroken third act that could kick off but as is I feel like I would still take a bullet for him any day of the week so this could just be the end of the tale. My relationship with act one is as compassionate to all involved as I can make it. It happened. It sucked. If I could go back and do it all over again from scratch I would have to know for certain that I would end up exactly back where I am now to not make different choices and as precarious as that is it’s enough.