transretrogurl

Going to stick with this format of posts for a bit; I like the ability to just vent on loads of things without having to write a novel on a single subject. And at the moment, I’m in the mood for venting. So, bear with me dear reader, and I’ll explain why I feel the need to create some new words (preferably not swear words) to cover just how I’m feeling at the moment.

Goodwood; the aftermath

So, Goodwood. Loved it to bits; not sure I’d do it again because I get the feeling the rush of sheer terror combined with delight wouldn’t be the same again, but it was a wonderful experience. There is a however, as there always is with pretty much anything I do, and that however is the crux of my unhappiness at the moment.

I managed to get food poisoning. Yeah, it was kind of not surprising; we are a lot of shellfish the first night and my body, post weight-loss and post my little bout of Covid, doesn’t seem to be, well, as concrete-stomached as before, And I got it bad.

Horror story time, so if you’re not a fan of the absurdly insane and amusingly horrendous you may want to look at the pictures (I had a couple of hours trawling my archive to cheer myself up). So, the day after Goodwood I had to get home. It was the day before the Queen’s funeral, and trains were very busy into the capital. Myself and my friend got up early, checked out of the hotel, and headed to a DPD shop to courier the wigs back to the wig maker.

As I stood in the shop in Brighton I felt, well, odd. A little hot, a little out of sorts. I said goodbye to my friend with a hug, then stomped up the long hill to the Brighton train station, hopping on the first fast train to London. I felt, well, worse.

By the time I hit London it was reasonably warm, I was pulling a suitcase on wheels and London was insanely busy. I got off at London Bridge, then dived into the Underground. Riding the escalators I realised I felt very wrong, dizzy, almost passing out.

I got to Euston station just in time to rush into the toilets, which are the worst place to be; no offence Euston, but they are grim. They are not the place to have a catastrophic uncontrollable bowel ‘episode’.

And it went downhill from there. Ninety minutes on the train, cursing my life in general while clenching as hard as I could, followed by ninety minutes drive. I wish you could burn calories from clenching as hard as you can, but life isn’t that fair. I got home just in time to descend into five days of constantly being unable to be more than thirty seconds away from a toilet. It was that bad. Nothing solid, just kept drinking water and waiting for it to end.

In the space of five days I dumped my entire bodies biome; literally flushing the entire contents of my intestinal tract. It was, well, an experience. I’ve never seen droppings that yellow (I checked the colour; some form of lower intestinal infection).

So why am I telling you this? Because I had a session organised, my first in London since April (!!) and it was going to be a doozy. I have so many new retro outfits, ideas; I think I’ve conquered my fear of going outside so the intention was to put on a lovely black with leopard trim wiggle frock from Rock and Romance and get some pictures posing in front of the Tower Bridge.

Now a bowel infection wouldn’t stop me, and I had a couple of weeks to get better. Problem was this; my body was seriously run down at this point, my biome was in a mess and I had, being honest, been very anxious (or tranxious if you will) about Goodwood. I had IBS on top of the infection so my body was, well, bleurgh.

Four days before the session the train unions announced YET ANOTHER strike, this time directly on the day I would be travelling back. So I had stress lumped on me; after driving to London so many times and doing twenty hour session days including three hours drive back after through central London on a Saturday night I’d developed a fear of driving there, and now I would have to.

Two days before the session and I had to travel to London for work. I got drunk, like you do, and because I’m truly an idiot I ate the grossest Chinese food at 1:00am in Chinatown (let’s just say cold beef lung in vinegar is an acquired taste). Hungover I travelled home on the train, looking forward to filling a case with gorgeous frocks and just having some fun.

The next day my eye itched.

There are things you can get away with when having a session; if you have a cold you can take Lemsip just before the session to stop the dribbling nose, if you have an upset stomach you can take something to settle it. And then there are other things that just stop you dead in your tracks.

Because my body was run down it was very prone to other infections, and I got a massive sty in my right eye. There was no way I could put makeup on it; the whole lower eyelid was swollen and dark red, the eye itched terribly. And so I had, with serious regret, to postpone my session. Now, a week later, my eye is still a mess and being honest it was a massive downer.

I was soo looking forward to being Sarah again. The state of the world at the moment means everything feels bloody awful, and getting something that absolutely prohibits me from being the person that gives me pretty much the only joy I have at the moment was a kick in the (now useless due to hormones) balls.

I was cross, cross at myself for not listening to my body, cross at the world in general.

The problem with not being able to do it is when you spend a lot of time on social media you see a lot of people doing what you want to. And it makes you jealous; combine that with the fact Putin has nukes, the Government is no longer even hiding the fact that the rich matter and everyone else is just there to squeeze for the top 1% to make more money off of, and the fact that when I stare into the mirror looking at the pea size bright red lump on the bottom of my eyelid I also see the wrinkles and sagging skin and, well, I’ll let that sentence talk for itself.

Grumpy does not start to describe the way I feel. Anyway, I’m going to book another session when the eye recedes and I feel it’s OK to do it without annoying the glands on the eyelid.

I want to dress right now and if it was anything that wasn’t disfiguring I’d be having the fun I need. But it is what it is. Bah humbug.

But anyway, let’s talk about something else.

Understanding the Social Media Male mindset

Yeah, I should probably not dive into too deep a subject but again, when you’re interaction with your feminine side is curtailed you have to do something else. Personally I’ve been angrily masterbating a lot, seems to help 🙂

A little advice for people like me starting out on the Social Media journey – you need to understand the nature of the people who will tend to look at your stuff. I love the internet, it’s changed society in ways that have made me able to do things I would never have dreamt of, even as recent as twenty-five years ago. It lets me put out a side of me that I could never have embraced in the world before digital freedom. But there is a cost to it, there are traps you need to be careful of.

Firstly, remember that there are no filters with what people can say. From personal experience I am a very shy person in real life; when talking to people in the flesh I find it hard to express anything beyond ‘hello’ without second guessing everything I say. With Social Media that is not a problem at all; the insulation of a screen means that I can say what I want. Granted, I still respect the people I talk to and present to, but some people don’t (literally can’t).

We all have an idea of what we think the perfect person would be. To me, as Sarah, I’d love to (virtually) meet someone who genuinely loves the woman they see. That would treat her as a real person, with feelings, with foibles. Being brutal, I’d love to find someone who would hug Sarah. I’ve managed, through my awkwardness and terrible upbringing, to never be able to have that kind of relationship as a man with a woman.

Because of the self doubt from Real Life ™ I always assume I’m unloveable. Projecting Sarah out there gives me a way to tap into the soft and beautiful part of myself that never got a chance. The thing is, there are people out there who feel the same way, but for a man on social media, especially one who finds himself loving the idea of trans-women, cross-dressers and the like, it’s actually more difficult.

Let me explain; I can put aside all the masculine blockers in my mind when I post a picture of Sarah. I can slot into another character that is so far from the real me, in terms of femininity, sexuality and, yes, yearnings, that it is immensely freeing. An admirer (and I apologies for using that term, it’s not the best) doesn’t have that ability to put their, for lack of a better phrase, heterosexuality aside.

So what you get, even from the nicest admirer, can be the most self-hating side. Ultra sexist, saying things they’d never dream of saying to a ‘real’ woman. For every man who sends me a delightful (and I appreciate them more than I can say) message complementing me on my choice of dress, choice of shoes, colour of lipstick, there will be ten saying how much they want to f*ck me, asking how much I charge for sex, asking me if I’ll dress them (I have enough problems dressing myself).

And some people in my position like those down and dirty interactions. Again, it’s down to self-hate and I’m more than ready to admit earlier on in my journey I was there. I felt I was broken and, dare I say it, deserved to be treated badly. In fact that was part of the thrill; I’ve always thought there’s a sadomasochist side to some form of cross-dressing, the emasculation, the humiliation.

The point is that that’s not a sustainable or a really healthy fantasy if you’re already convinced you’re broken. It’s a negative force feedback loop that a lot of us let ourselves get into.

I’m being contrary; the stuff I put up on Fetlife, for example, really plays on the raw erotica side of my ‘hobby’. There are way too many pictures up there I created specifically to turn men on. Someone nicely sent me an email there earlier this week complementing me on my ability to be all the women he found attractive, and apologising for commenting in a sexual way on the pictures. I was absurdly touched and told him not to beat himself up; he was polite, his comments were delightful and respectful. It was a lovely conversation with someone who genuinely found Sarah to be sexually attractive and, most importantly, he wanted to chat about it rather than sending me a dick pic with the caption ‘U SUK THIS’.

Again, I’m grumpy, but I’d give anything to have more of that kind of man in my social media life. Constantly having to delete comments and block people gets tiring and shouldn’t be 50% of the effort a girl has to put into maintaining a Social Media presence.

When you dress as an attractive woman you will attract people. It’s just too easy to get overawed and depressed by the sheer amount of thinly veiled anger at the comments; I dress as Sarah because I am Sarah. I’m not going to turn into a £5 prostitute the minute some twenty year old logs onto Instagram with his parent’s machine and tells me I should be walking the streets and, quote, ‘sucking real men’s cocks’.

And therein lies the paradox of Social Media. I can be who I want to really be, but others can be the people, unfettered, they want to be, and some of them are a little frightening.

The key thing is; remember anything you put up will be seen by people who don’t look at it through the same eyes you do. It would be nice to not have to grow a thick skin, to be able to just ‘be’ but, I guess, you have to take the very bad with the very good.

And it doesn’t help to be……. feral

Probably (no, definitely) not the best way to follow the last little gripe on overly sexual men lurking around Social Media, but with the lack of being able to dress and the feeling of impending doom (hell, I grew up in the 80s when we expected to get nuked every other Tuesday; I was convinced this was all behind us but with Putin’s sabre rattling I end up feeling like the scared 18 year old closet transvestite terrified of the stuff shown in the TV movie ‘Threads’ every ten minutes nowadays) I have found myself getting very feral again.

Luckily feral for me doesn’t entail chucking on the sluttiest of outfits and going to the nearest ‘that kind of’ bar; also living in Hereford means the nearest bar of ill-repute is probably too far (I say probably as there are definitely places like that in this country but I’ve never looked for them). Being feral for me means dipping into my internal fantasy life with a ‘what the hell’ mindset.

The odd thing is, without the steam valve output of being able to dress, which always burns off these deep rooted needs and wants, the feral fantasies get stronger and stronger. I mentioned earlier that, in the lack of a session, I find myself having to, well, relieve myself a ridiculously large amount of times a day.

Part of me is almost impressed. I’ve read that when you (sneakily, in my case) take female hormones the first thing that disappears is your male libido, followed by any way of satisfying it (things go floppy fast). Thing is, I’ve never had what could be properly called a male libido and even after nine months of self-medication I have absolutely no problem in either ‘rising to the occasion’ or reaching ‘la petite morte’ as the French so delicately put it.

What’s mildly worrying (which is a polite way of putting it) is what I think about basically all day. My fantasies are 100% about sex as Sarah.

It occurred to me a couple of weeks ago that I no longer (and maybe never really did) get aroused at the idea of being with a woman. And also I have no urge to become a woman. But I’ve also reached, perhaps through the use of hormones, the point where I no longer feel shame and self-hate when I have those kind of fantasies.

And to be honest, they aren’t all pure sexual fantasies. I think about what it would be like to go for a meal with a man on a double date with another couple; the idea of their being two men and two women in a social situation is delightful, especially if the other woman is actually a woman.

I also fantasised about doing a ‘fake’ porn shoot. Full porn star makeup (with very full red lips), photos taken that match the standard poses you see if every 60 seconds clip on XHamster. That one pops up a lot and normally requires me to go off and deal with it so I can get on with the rest of my day.

On the subject of Xhamster; why on earth does it make me watch 10 seconds of an advert of a naked woman using a toy on herself when I click on something cross-dresser-y? Know your market, Xhamster…..

But again, I so need a session right now that my brain is flailing all over the shop; It’s an odd situation, if I don’t feed the girl inside she takes the reins and steers me in delightfully different directions.

Anyway, enough venting; if you’ve made it so far without logging off I love you. 🙂

Stay beautiful, take a deep breath, remember this is the only trip we get around and find a way to be happy. I’ll try and take my own advice, but don’t hold your breath. Unless that’s your kink, of course.