Myself

[This is something I wrote earlier when I was in a bad state. I'm feeling a little better now, but the sentiment is still roughly true.]

I feel ugly. I feel ugly essentially all the time. I find my body hideous. This has always been true. I won't go into details about all the things I hate so much about my shape and features as it'd be obvious at a glance what they are.

What I hate is when people try to tell me that I'm wrong about this. Seriously, don't lie to me. You can't lie to me about something so obvious. It merely shows contempt for my intelligence.

(Re)Becoming Vegan

One thing that I've been struggling with since I started my pills has been my diet. Prior to transition I was vegan and I still believe pretty strongly that, when possible, being vegan is the right thing to do. When it comes to animals, our food industry is brutal and disgusting.

The catch, though, is the "when possible". It was only about a month on my hormones when it became clear that something was very wrong with my diet. Food start tasting off, nothing seemed to feel like it was hitting the spot, and finally I started having dreams about the foods I was craving. Whether or not it was coincidence, I was also getting sick every couple of weeks when I hadn't had a cold in almost a year prior. After a lot of crying, I moved back to being vegetarian and the cravings stopped, things started tasting right again and I was fine...as long as, every so often, I ate some cheese and eggs. Unfortunately, it didn't stop there. The same pattern repeated itself about six months later, but this time with actual meat. Even more crying and K telling me that it was okay if it was to take care of myself, I started eating a little bit of meat on a roughly monthly basis. I hate it. Being vegan was so easy pre-hormones. I had no trouble with it at all.

I've heard from another trans woman that she went through a similar thing after starting hormones, so I don't think this is just me; however, I really want to try and go back to being completely vegan instead of this halfway state of eating mostly vegan, with occasional omnivorous meals.

For awhile I had given up on going back to a strict vegan diet until after second puberty, but now that I'm on leave I have enough time that I think I can do research and try to figure out how to fix what was wrong with my diet the first time. I was careful before to try and get enough complete proteins, so I don't think that's the problem. It might be something related to vitamins, which is why I'm going to try taking supplements and just try to ween myself off of animal products again.

I'm going to continue doing most of my cooking from veganomicon, since a lot of the recipes are a bit more complex than the kinds of things I was making before. I worry that I had some kind of "monoculture" problem with my diet where there was some need I was never hitting because I ate too narrow a band of foods. I'm really not sure, but I hope by my one year anniversary of hormones that I'll be back to completely vegan again.