Dear ---,
Congratulations girlll!!! I am so proud of you for taking this big step towards joy & self-love. Give my best to Dr. ---. You have made one of the hardest, scariest, steps of your life.
I am sorry.
You are going to make these same steps, have these doubts, feel these pains at least two more times girl. I am ashamed—and/but working on it okay?!—to admit you/I do not stay the course this time. Or the next time. Today is not 48 months, only 10 days into New Game++.
I am sorry.
I can't help but feel I've betrayed you. Dashed you against the rocks your so-thought-overcome internalized transphobia, your self-hatred, your 6' 1"—though after round 1, reported 5' 11" to fuck with that self-conscious chauvinist—your masseter—only dentists should know that one babe—your shoulders. your anger, your fear, that bouncer, transphobia, and transphobia, and transphobia, and transphobia (thrown to the wolves and hiding).
I am sorry.
The joy of resolve/acceptance/etc. will wane faster. You will pass 200 pounds. You will find and lose purpose in communism. You will drink too much. You will develop a flight response at family gatherings. You will love & be loved again (fucking accept it!). You will probably kill yourself id you don't learn to love yourself as a woman...
...i am sorry...
...because I still can't, four years later.
But I'm trying. I have the support you only briefly had with ---. I ahve the certainty of more years of pain and (less naive) denial. I have the certainty that I cannot survive any other way. I want to survive. I have myself to do it for. My friends to do it for, you to do it for now that I am no longer you; that us feels tenuous.
I am sorry I am not the woman you wanted us to be.
But I am trying.