I guess this is part of that series I had back in like 2023, so check that out if you’re missing any prior context as to what’s going on here.

So, today I was planning to go thrift shopping with a friend for some feminine clothes, but she woke up sick so… that didn’t work out. She encouraged me to go out anyways and gave me a list of shops to check out, all conveniently by a Skytrain station so there wasn’t too much transit needed to get there. After a bunch of anxiety and generally feeling like it’d be easier to not go, I toughed it out and went to the thrift shops.

Now, heading out did not make the anxiety lessen, instead it was still pretty omnipresent everywhere I went. The more people, the more anxiety because of perception even though like, nobody’s gonna fucking care. It’s Vancouver. Who would give a shit about someone who looks like a man checking out the women’s clothing at a thrift store. I’m aware of this, but nonetheless the anxiety of how I appear persisted the whole time. And it wasn’t just “oh god everyone’s gonna think I’m a man checking out women’s clothing and think it’s weird,” it’s also that… I don’t ever let myself appear to lack direction or clarity. And this was something that I hadn’t done before, and I didn’t have any backup (aside from the friend mentioned earlier giving me advice over Discord, shoutout to her,) so my lack of certainty as to what I was doing or how to go about the task was very evident.

Ultimately I ended up getting 4 shirts, 2 of which are t-shirts that pretty much just look like slightly more feminine versions of the kinds of shirts I already wear pretty much every day. Didn’t get any pants, skirts, bras (even though I definitely need to get the last one sooner rather than later, I have not struggled with a lack of breast growth on HRT as many people I know have. It’s not even been six months, jesus christ.) So Ultimately I didn’t have anything to radically transform my wardrobe, and I was just as uncertain and messy at the end as the start.

Now, what I’m most interested in here is my aversion to not appearing to know what I’m doing. Because in life, that’s going to realistically be 90% of the time when we’re outside our routines. But I hold an inordinate amount of my own self-worth in how much I can hide my own messiness and uncertainty, and instead look and seem like I always know exactly what I’m doing. Because… when transitioning I’m going to need to kind of get the fuck over myself for that. The first year of transition is infamous for how much you have to relearn and how messy it is. And I would ideally avoid all of that but I can’t, so instead I’m trying to speedrun it over the summer so that I don’t have to worry about it at times where more people I see regularly are going to perceive me. Which, yeah, that’ll totally work. Obviously. There’s no flaws in that plan whatsoever.

It’s not like changing your gender is like learning to swim a second time because of the complete reframing of everything that’s related to it.

…at least voice training is going alright. Thanks for the lifetime of singing and acting training, Mom.

Anyways, why can’t I let myself be a mess? What’s so bad about not being perfect at how I go through the world?

It’s because I’ve been a mess too much in past, and I’m not allowed to get things wrong. My whole thing is always being right. Whenever I make a mistake I research the fuck out of it so that I never trip up in that way again. I accidentally was incorrect about periods when talking in my friend group chat when I was… 15? So I spent like a month researching them and asking the people around me who menstruated about their own experience with it. I don’t make the same mistake twice. And ideally I don’t the first time, which is why being messy is so fucking terrifying to me. It’s about being mistakes… and being allowed to make mistakes.

Which is why I think, out of all of the transfem fiction where some sort of fantasy is fulfilled that I’ve read, the one I’ve most connected with was Sarah Zedig’s Homestuck fanfic, “Godfeels”.

Transfem fantasy fiction exists on a spectrum of "save me from having agency" to "you have full agency" because those are the two fundamental fantasies of trans women. Either being saved from all the pressures of the world, or getting to be a free person

Aka the HDG-Godfeels spectrum

— IntangibleMatter (@intangiblematter.net) May 17, 2026 at 4:10 AM

I like Godfeels, or at least I like it up until Harbringer Silverbark, at which point it becomes more of a high-concept space opera and moves away from the interpersonal drama that I found engaging about the work. And it’s one of the many, many things that can take credit for cracking my egg at some point or another. And the reason I like it, in part, is because it’s a story about radical agency and being allowed to mess up and make mistakes… and still be able to come out the other side no matter what happens. The main character, June, is messy and she’s thrashing around and she hurts people she loves, and she’s allowed to, both by herself and the narrative. The story is about the messiness of figuring yourself out. And that’s something I don’t allow myself. I don’t do things unless I’m >99% certain about them. I probably could’ve started transitioning when I was like 16, but because I didn’t have the mental room to figure things out over the noise of being a teenager, I didn’t seek HRT until I was 19 and didn’t start until I was 20. (by like 5 days lol, my first appointment ended up juuust after my birthday.)

And I really need to allow myself more room to be messy and figure myself out, but I can’t, because who I am is someone who isn’t a mess no matter what happens. I’m known for having a strong sense of self, and part of transition is ego death, so what do I do now? How should I handle this? Because I don’t know, and it’s scary, and it’s even scarier knowing I have to deal with uncertainty when part of how I go through life is *making sure I never have to fucking deal with uncertainty, especially about myself.

A lot of trans women at this point have their escapist fantasy be something like early Sisters of Dorley, or Human Domestication Guide. Because that way you’re protected from yourself. Everything is taken care of, and you don’t have to worry about making mistakes, because there’s no decisions for you to make for yourself. You’re mommy’s good little girl and you don’t have to worry about thinking. Just turn your brain off and let mommy take care of you. And while I don’t judge people for liking that, personally I like having radical agency as an individual, “mommy”. If I make mistakes, I want them to be my own, and I want to carve my path for myself. I don’t want to be taken care of totally and completely, because that’s surrendering the nature of who I am and what I can do to someone else entirely, and that’s not who I am.

Where am I going with this? I don’t know. I’m a messy person, and transitioning is the messy process of re-figuring out who you are as a person, and I derive too much of my self-worth from not looking messy and I end up an anxious mess if I can be seen being uncertain, which then makes me more obviously uncertain, which then makes me more anxious, and it’s a self-hatred spiral in the making. I need to get over myself for that, and I need to afford myself more room to figure out who I am and not be 100% certain all the time.