This past week I have been subject to some wild blood pressure fluctuations, which landed me in hospital. Fortunately, they’re not serious — except in my mind! — or I wouldn’t be here typing this. Nevertheless, because crossdressing tends to excite me a lot, and this invariably brings my blood pressure up, I’ve refrained from donning some femme clothing and enjoy myself  — at least, not before I talk to my good doctor and have the assurance from her that there is nothing wrong with me. I seriously suspect it’s all psychosomatic anyway; I’m very prone to that. It could just be a hint I’ve been overextending myself at work (even though I have been increasing the amount of rest lately — which makes the symptoms look all so much more stranger). Or possibly I’ve been worrying or being anxious about something and not even realise that I’m worried or anxious. Whatever it might be, it cannot be much serious, and I hope to be “back in full dress” quickly

Oh well. But here goes an account of what I’ve been doing in my last few CD sessions, which are not obvious from either the pictures or the videos I’ve been posting since the beginning of 2012.

This has been (literally) the dawn of a new year. As I’ve hinted before (but perhaps not fully written about), my wife has finally thrown away her objections to allowing me to go out during the darkest hours of the night. While it’s hard to convey all the exhilaration of finally being able to escape the confines of my little home, I can at least make a feeble attempt to give a short idea on how it feels.

First of all, I’m — not yet! — fully “free” to do whatever I please. There is a simple rule to observe first: I can only go out when my wife finally falls asleep (but I go out with her permission; she knows I’ll be going for a bit, I don’t need to “sneak” out and break her trust in me). The bad news about that, of course, is that she rarely goes to bed before 3 AM, as I’ve mentioned on the last article — meaning that I’m almost half-asleep myself as well. Scratch that: I’m terribly sleepy by that time, too. And even if she goes to bed at 3 AM, it doesn’t mean I’ll be crossing the threshold of my flat’s door at 3:01 AM: she takes at least half an hour to get asleep properly.

It’s just then when I start doing my “final preparations”, and these take time as well. The most stupid one is using the toilet first — I’m really not very comfortable being out in the middle of nowhere and suddenly having to pee! (I know, little steps…). Then I get my purse (I just own one) and pick a coat. Technically, I just have two coats for going out — one which needs serious fitting (I’ve lost too much weight) and which is appropriate only for the coldest Winter nights, since it’s a faux fur coat. But it’s two sizes too big and needs to be tailored to show off my waist — it has a straight cut. So, although I love it, it makes me look like a fur barrel and that is not the kind of image I like to present myself in public. The other coat I’ve got is a white windbreaker. It’s 3/4 long, very likely not really waterproof and relatively light (thus it’s not a trenchcoat), but because it features a nice belt it’s great to show off my waist, even though I think it’s a size too small for my massive “girls” This is enough for most spring/autumn nights, but not all. So more often than not I tend to borrow a woolen black overcoat from my wife — it’s too large for her (although she still uses it) but fits me rather nicely and even gives me a flattering figure. It’s warm enough for most winter nights and chilly spring/autumn ones.

Then, of course, I need to check and re-check myself once again. This often means giving the unruly hair a touch of the brush, a bit more lipstick, some retouching here and there, a whiff of perfume, and making sure that I haven’t forgotten anything essential in my handbag — no, not only the femme things, but, most importantly, the house and car keys, the driving license, and some money! I’ve also agreed with my wife that I would take my iPhone with me and keep it turned on, so if she suddenly gets anxious about where I am and how I’m faring, she can call me (I also use it to take a few snapshots, of course!). So far, though, she remained deep asleep and untroubled.

With all this I might lose another half an hour. Easily. Sometimes I even have to use the toilet again but that’s mostly because I’m nervous, not really because I need it…

Then it’s “going out time”. Some deep breathing, and off I go, still all jittery with the adrenaline rush, while waiting for the elevator to arrive at my floor. A last check — and a smile! — at the mirror inside the elevator, and it’s the street for me. Yes, I don’t own a garage. Or rather, I do, but it’s not in the same building, but a block away… long story, but what that means is that I have to round a corner until I get my car, parked on the street. It’s an old, tiny, battered vehicle — not female-looking at all. The advantage of old cars is that nobody thinks of stealing them, they’re really worthless. The disadvantage, of course, is that the maintenance costs are rather high, since the poor car is falling apart and showing its age…

This is the bit that my wife actually fears most: that a neighbour appears and sees me en femme while I’m walking to the car, my heels sounding incredibly loud on the cobbled sidewalk in the empty street. Well, it’s not as if there are many people around at 4 AM, but — who knows? One of our neighbours is a taxi driver, who often does a night shift. He usually comes home by sunrise, but one day he might come earlier. What would happen then? Another of my neighbours is a hot young redhead, who often comes home late. Well, usually much earlier than 4 AM, but one never knows when she might come in later. There are also a few young adults living on another apartment — I don’t remember their faces, and they probably don’t remember mine, but sometimes, specially during the warm summer nights, they stay up late in the balcony, where they have an excellent view. Once or twice I came relatively close to discovery, but it was still pretty safe — I had a good head start!

Most crossdresser friends I know who go out semi-regularly have a completely different routine. Some don’t go out on their own, they just go out with friends. They can usually be split among three types:

1. Living in their own house. This is usually in a quiet neighbourhood. Even if it isn’t, their cars are in a garage that either connects directly to the main house, or, if they need to walk, they’ll be safely inside the perimeter of a walled/fenced property. So there is no risk of getting seen. Even if some pesky neighbour is awake or notices that someone is walking around the home, it’s too dark for details. Once in their cars, it’s rather impossible to figure out that the driver is crossdressed or not, so they’re safe.
2. Having a garage in their own buildings. This means that the only moment they’re at risk is when they’re riding the elevator: a neighbour might just pop in. But besides that, once they leave the elevator, they just step inside the car and drive away. There is no risk of being seen while on the street, fumbling for keys or something like that.
3. Having no garage.What my friends do in this case is to deal with the basics and just wear a huge overcoat, and bring all their extra femme garments in a bag. Then they drive to some place remote first, and change inside the car. Some might use a public toilet for that (I admire them for their nerve!). What fascinates me in those cases is how they can get ready so quickly! I take hours to get dressed and the makeup ready!

I suppose that in wintertime this might be a bit easier. I did some long car trips while fully crossdressed under a large overcoat. It was rather funny entering a roadside café being fully aware that I had large breastforms, a corset and some padding beneath the overcoat, but of course nobody had the slightest idea, and while I kept it close, nobody would notice really. What these CDs do is something pretty much like that: get fully dressed except for the shoes (if you’re using pants — and not skirts or a dress — this should be manageable). Do you nails, but wear gloves until you reach the car. Put the foundation — nobody notices that during the night, even if you get “caught”. If you use a net to tie your hair before wearing a wig, just use some sort of headgear. Some jewelry might be easy to disguise even under an overcoat. So then it’s just a question of putting some lipstick, do the eyes, some blush, put on the wear, change the shoes, drop everything non-female in a bag, and off you go — it might take perhaps 10-15 minutes if you do it right. Before you arrive back home, just do the reverse operation…

Well, I cannot do that so quickly Specially when I’m already too nervous and excited… it’s true that I do sometimes “partial crossdressing” when on long trips, but it’s not the same thing.

So, for me, there is always half a minute of excitement and some anxiety as I walk out from my building and enter the car. Then, when driving off, I’m comparatively “safe”. Sure, all my neighbours know my car, but most are asleep, and even the few that aren’t would just recognise the car but not see details on the driver. Just think: how often have you noticed, except on the brightest streets at a semaphore, who is driving the car?

Once I’m a little bit away from home, I relax, and at that moment all my anxiety and nervousness is gone, at least while I’m inside the car. I feel safe. Sure, when stopping at semaphores, people will see me — very few are around at 4 AM anyway, and it’s too dark for details. They’ll just notice a woman driving a car. Guys will often spare an extra moment or two looking at me; I just smile, but usually don’t look back. My smile actually disguises me even more. Some might suspect something’s wrong about my profile, but the semaphore lights don’t stay on red that long. Sure, there might be some stalkers around, but the likelihood is pretty low.

So driving around fully crossdressed is where there is no fear of discovery, no anxiety, no nervousness — I just enjoy it while I can

Then it’s time to pick a spot for walking around a bit, because, well, until you’ve experienced the thrill of listening to your heels on the ground, and (if you wear dresses or skirts) the different sensation of how even the slightest breeze will tickle your lower body, from heels to waist; how your long hair (if you like long hair!) brushes your face with the slightest caress… well, it’s pointless to describe it. Walking dressed inside your own home is simply just a shadow of what it feels when walking on the street.

The spots I pick are not the same, I tend to vary a bit — I don’t want to get into a routine that might draw undue attention. It’s not too easy to find the “right” spot. I don’t want to be in a completely empty, abandoned space: while it minimises the risk of being seen by anyone I know, it also might be dangerous — our area is in a very low crime zone, but with the ongoing crisis, no place is really safe any more — or put you in delicate circumstances, if by chance a police car stops by and wonders why a lonely woman is on an isolated spot like that. I’m sure that it wouldn’t be easy to explain! So I tend to be careful about the places I choose for walking around: they should be mostly empty, but close to residential areas, so there might be a “plausible” excuse for walking quickly back to my car, as if coming from a visit to friends or something like that. Once I stayed too long at the same place — a residential neighbourhood — having a peaceful smoke sitting on a bench at the bus station (hours after the last bus had made its call, of course), and at some point, some guys inside a building nearby just came to the veranda to watch me. It was rather unusual to see a woman at that time of the night waiting for the bus. But I didn’t lose my self-control; with a smile, I just walked casually back to the car, which was not far away. They certainly watched me with considerable interest, but made no comments.

That’s pretty much my routine these days. As you’ve noticed, it has been increasingly difficult for me to crossdress and go out on Sundays, which used to be “Sandra’s day” — I do too many social calls on Sundays for my taste, and just get back home completely exhausted and not in the mood to dress. So I generally go out on Mondays or Tuesdays, sometimes Thursdays, which are the few days on the week when normally I have some free time. I say “normally” because every week is a surprise and totally unpredictable, and all my best laid out plans tend to fail.

Of course, it also means that it will be hard to go to the next stage: having the courage to go out to a CD-friendly place, with or without friends. Most are long closed. In my youth, most bars and clubs — and even several restaurants — would easily be open until 4 AM. Some might only close at 6 AM. But these days, specially on weekdays, they all close much, much earlier. The only choice is to go to one of the “night areas”, full of bars and clubs, which will be open until very late. This poses a serious problem: there are few places like that in my neighbourhood. It means driving to Lisbon instead.

It’s not a long drive. During the night, using the highway, it might take me 20 minutes or so. The problem is that Lisbon is not as “safe” as my neighbourhood; also, even during the week, specially around 2 AM, there will be lots of people in the street. Well, comparatively speaking, of course: Portugal is not Spain, the country where people don’t sleep The issue is that these well-known spots draw all “night owls” together from an area of about 3 1/2 million people, so I have no idea who I might be able to meet! It’s not as if my closest friends are always up at late hours in bars in Lisbon. But you know how it is: friends of younger brothers of friends of friends might be able to recognise me. Some idiot might take a picture of me and publish it on Facebook — “look at the tranny we’ve seen last night on the streets!” — and these days you can reach thousands of people that way. While I could shrug off a blurry, badly taken picture, what about a picture showing the license plate of my car? Now that would be very, very hard to explain to my closest friends!

This has somehow started to worry me a bit. It’s true that I go out so late that the option of walking into a public place is not there — most will be closed, so I won’t feel “tempted”. But my wife is right: the more you do when crossdressed, the more you wish to do. One day I won’t be happy in staying in the car and walking an empty street at 4 or 5 AM — I wish to go in for a drink at a bar and get addressed like a woman (even though it’s far more likely I’d be scorned and laughed at, but that’s another story!). The problem is where to do that safely!

My CD friends in Portugal are starting to go out much more regularly, which is good news. The problem for me, of course, is that they go out on Fridays and Saturdays, like 99.9% of the working population — two days where I’m almost always unable to dress. Very, very rarely I might have a Friday off — once every three or four months. In the past, I have always been unlucky to be very ill that day — or something different popped up, and my wife, knowing that very exceptionally that particular Friday was “free”, arranges something for us to do, spoiling all my plans. I still haven’t completely given up hope, however: I think that this year there will be a Friday where the local CD group gangs up and I might be able to join them.

It should be fun, for a change.

As I’ve told before, I managed to go out for a short smoke early in January. Then I had a chat with my wife and she allowed me to go out for a drive again. The chat was a mixed blessing really, but there were some good points — namely, that I was somehow allowed to go out more often and even plan ahead for, say, Mardi Gras (which we call Carnival around her; same as in Brazil, the only difference is that we’re in mid-winter and there is no scanty dressing possible!!), or even for a short trip with my wife to a LGBT-friendly hotel or something.

Well, today is the Tibetan New Year — one day after Mardi Gras — and the past few days and the upcoming ones are completely crammed full with activities. Nevertheless, there was a small break on the last Saturday: my wife’s mother went for a short trip through Spain with her own sister, and our “usual” Saturday dinner was off. That was a good starting point. The local CD community around Lisbon did also announce a “girls’ night out”, since during Carnival celebrations, we’re sort of “allowed” to go out in complete freedom, because nobody will care, and we can even go to “normal” restaurants and “normal” bars — nobody will mind. They might taunt us, but everybody taunts everybody else’s costumes anyway, so it’s all part of the fun.

I have to say that I used to hate Carnival as a child. There was a good reason for that: it was actually traditional to crossdress one’s kids, and I was already having some mixed feelings about that, even when very young — I feared I’d enjoy it too much, so I sort of stopped going out in a costume when I was very young, telling my mother I didn’t want to do it. I remember going out with some friends in my teens, with a “normal” costume though, but since then I pretty much refused to “celebrate” Carnival, because I felt it was, well, ridiculous.

After so many years I lost the sense of “ridiculous” and don’t take myself that seriously any longer Also, of course, it’s the only opportunity for a crossdresser to go out in public and enjoy herself without any silly “fears”. Even if I get recognised, there’s no problem! Unfortunately, as I said before, Carnival tends always to be during the Tibetan New Year celebrations, so it’s difficult to coordinate plans — there are too many activities and too little time left for crossdressing.

But this year things seemed to be going rather well. Now, unlike Brazil — where Carnival is a national institution and celebrated everywhere — not all Portuguese cities celebrate it. In fact, very few do anything at all. But there are a few major Carnival celebration areas in the country, and the nearest town is around an hour’s drive from my home. That was the spot picked by the local CD community to hit this year.

And yes, I got permission to go with them. I just got it at the last possible moment, but I got it My wife even briefly considered coming with me, but, in her words (and I hope nobody gets offended…), she was not in the mood to “be with a lot of gurls talking about the latest makeup tips and what they have recently bought”. She’s an intellectual and not very feminine in that regard, although she enjoys some gossip with the closest friends. But she was fine with me going alone, so that was what mattered!

Unfortunately, as such things happen, I literally collapsed from exhaustion on Saturday — which started for me very early, by sunrise, and went all day long until 6 PM. By that time I was already feverish (usually my tell-tale sign of exhaustion) and so I had to cancel my going out, and went to sleep instead.

There I was, driving in my car…

In truth, I was not too disappointed. Deep inside myself, I never really believed that I would make it. There is always something that goes wrong! This time, well, it was my body that didn’t cooperate (in fact, I had been feeling exhausted for several days, and it still goes on — today I spent more time in bed than standing up!). But I managed to rest a bit on Sunday, and on Monday I decided to get dressed and at least go out for a bit on the Night Before Carnival, which is usually when there is a lot going on, even though I’d be alone.

Well, this year’s Carnival was a bit different. For the second time in my entire life, Tuesday (Carnival day) was not a holiday, as it usually is — due to the ongoing financial crisis, a lot of public holidays have been cancelled. A lot of companies still gave their employees the day off, to keep in spirit with the tradition, but I suppose that over time, the tradition will die. Instead, people celebrated Carnival over the weekend. Just my luck… still, the nice surprise was that even in my area, there are a few places celebrating Carnival — I didn’t need to drive much far. In fact, there was a nice, free “Carnival concert” at the local Casino, and I was intrigued — would I dare to enter such a public place, where everybody has to show an ID card to get admitted?

The issue was actually solved by the time I took to finally get ready to go out. My wife was agreeable — another surprise: this time I didn’t get much grumbling and complaining, just a comment — “you take full responsibility for what happens to to you!” which is, obviously, a factual statement and not even an accusation. By mutual consent, I just go out when she’s asleep; sadly, for some strange reason, the days I crossdress are the days she stays up the latest — and when I finally went out of the home, the concert at the Casino was practically over.

It might have been for the best, though — the next day, I got an SMS from my sister-in-law, mass-sent to all her friends (which included us both) telling us to join her at the Casino concert! (She’s a fan of one of the singers, a local celebrity). Oops. Now just imagine what would have happened if I did, indeed, enter the Casino, dressed like this, stumbling upon my sister-in-law — a conservative pseudo-Christian — surrounded by all her friends. Uh-oh. That was a close call! (The day after, she told us that, after all, at the last moment, she didn’t go to the Casino… but really had planned to go…)

I remembered a few spots (from my Internet searches) where there was supposed to have been some Carnival celebrations, so I drove around to find them. Unfortunately, it was really too late. Even though I think that most people wouldn’t wake up early on Tuesday, most things were over by 2 or 3 AM — and I was driving through them a bit after 3 AM. I still saw some people in costumes — some guys dressed in drag, too, but clearly non-crossdressers — and cars full with costumed groups, driving very slowly back home. And, of course, the later it was, the less opportunity I would have to find a place worth visiting. Oh well. So I sort of gave up, and just enjoyed a smoke walking first across one of the main streets of the local equivalent of the county capital, and later walked a bit more near the Casino, an hour after it had closed down. Nobody really saw me, and even if they did — it was Carnival night, the safest night for crossdressers to be on the street There was a car from an all-night doctor parked near my home (probably doing a late call…) but I was full of self-confidence when I returned to worry about that.

Then I went home for two hours of sleep and back to the grind. I’m still exhausted, and there are still four days left on the Tibetan New Year activities: the upcoming weekend will be an utter nightmare!

So what comes next? Well, for a while I will be enjoying this new stage, where I just get some grumbling and minor insults from my wife if I want to go out, but not an outright prohibition. I might not go out all the times I crossdress — sometimes I’m simply too tired for that, or I might have some things to do early the next morning (it was really stupid to sleep only two hours after Monday’s going out — but what could I do? It was my last opportunity this Carnival…). Being able to go out some more really makes a difference!

I’ve still have plenty of constraints — see, I’m never happy! First, the “agreement” to go out only when my wife is asleep makes things a tad more difficult, if I want to meet up with a CD friend — most will long be asleep, because hardly anyone is awake at 3 AM during the week. Also, most places where I might wish to go will also be long closed (specially during the week). The alternative — going out on Fridays or Saturdays, like everybody in the world does — is not an option: I’m always busy those two evenings. Always. Well… with a few exceptions, which happen perhaps one Friday every other month and one Saturday or two per year. That’s a very narrow window of opportunity! And so many things can go wrong that I feel very reluctant to make an commitment to meet anyone: it’s simply too complicated.

For instance, I have this plan to wear my old human hair red wig the next time I go out, and have pictured the outfit in my mind. But I know that next weekend will be impossible to go out. I tentatively planned my schedule to do a session next Monday. In the mean time, I’ve been notified that an even I was supposed to attend at 8h30 on Monday is PM and not AM as I had scheduled… so there goes my plan. Instead, I’ll plan for Tuesday instead. But should I announce it to my CD friends? Probably not, because between today and next Tuesday, who knows what will happen? My car can break down again; my wife might be in a nasty mood on Tuesday; something unexpected might be scheduled for Wednesday morning; something even more unexpected might appear on Tuesday night; I might be too tired or even ill; or, well, who knows what will happen… the point is really that this “session planning” is truly so far beyond my ability to schedule in advance that I have just to be content about having the possibility to go out and drive a bit around in the early hours of the morning, instead of fretting about being unable to schedule anything worthwhile to do.

My wife prophesied a few weeks ago that I wouldn’t be merely happy with going out once in a while. I was so happy that day (because it was one of the days that she allowed me to go out) that I really didn’t care much for her prophesy. Now I feel that it might have been a curse, not a prophesy! But then again, we’re all “cursed” with insatisfaction — Mick Jagger was right — and the trick to deal with it is simply to be content with what happens and forget about our hopes and expectations, specially because they almost always become thwarted somehow.

Ironically, last week I had an interesting conversation with my supervisor. Once I finish my PhD, there are not many opportunities to get a good job during this financial crisis, but there are a few. But he told me that I had a much better chance in Brazil, where they’re desperate to get professors for an exponentially-growing student population — Brazil is shaking loose from its classification as a “developing country”, they will be the 5th largest world economy in less than two decades, but require a lot of know-how to reach that level, and that means higher education for a substantial part of the population. The trouble is that Brazilians don’t speak anything else beyond Portuguese, and, as an intellectual and research community, they’re totally isolated from the world — in my own country all university professors are fluent in technical English and there are routinely classes and even whole courses given in English, because, well, that’s the lingua franca of the research community world-wide. Well, Brazil has a lot of catching-up to do, and what they require are bilingual Portuguese/English speakers, and they need them fast, and are willing to pay premium for them. So this opened up some interesting possibilities for my future life. It’s not just shaking loose from the mires of poverty and grabbing an opportunity. It’s more than that: being finally unshackled from the “burden” of family and friends, I might consider transition very seriously. Why not? Nobody knows me in Brazil, and for a while, I won’t be able to afford travelling back-and-forth to visit. Brazil is probably not the most tolerant country in the world regarding transsexuals, but everybody knows Roberta Close, even though Brazilian legislation is not as liberal about gender changing as around here in my country. On the other hand, transexuals are commonplace in the large cities, and they have lots and lots of highly qualified plastic surgeons of all sorts, and surgery is relatively cheap. Hmm. This definitely made me think a lot about my future…

Still, I won’t make any plans! I’m learning my lesson: don’t take anything for granted, and just enjoy the few moments when everything happens according my wishes, because they’re so rare and precious.

By definition, BDSM relationships are by mutual consent; they cannot be “involuntary”! Also, most have some sort of physical element, where there can be the notion of physical pleasure and “restraint”, even though I admit that I’m not that familiar with the BDSM community — I’m aware that in some cases, the restraint is purely in the mind of the participants, and not in the physical sensations. And to be more specific, I’m addressing the Dominant/Submissive aspect, and not the others.

You see, in recent days, I realised that, in many aspects, my wife plays a dominant role in our relationship, while I play a submissive role. This has to be understood in a context which does not strictly follow “common” D/s relationships. We don’t engage in any sexual activity of any kind. In fact, neither of us derives any pleasure from it — far from it, we both suffer under it. In a sense, this almost sounds like a double-masochist relationship, where both partners are made to suffer because one of them (myself!) wants to engage in activities that the other dislikes (going out crossdressed), while that same partner (i.e. me again) suffers for being forbidden to do so.

This came to my mind when one day I had to send an email explaining somehow why I couldn’t attend a meeting: my wife needed that I did something for her (I don’t remember what it was). At that point, I thought: “someone who reads this will not understand why I’m constantly at my wife’s whim”. To be sure, my own wife thinks I’m actually “too independent” and “too complaining” when she “demands” something from me: she expects me to jump at any request of hers, instantly and with energy and good will, without a moment’s regret. And every time I flinch or mumble a word of complain — or even something as simple as “let me at least save the document I’m working on” is met with contempt, and often with a nasty comment — at the very least, I get sarcasm.

Well, of course she’s not aware of that. In her own mind, she views me as an unruly kid of 6 years (she tells that often, even to friends and family) who has to be admonished all the time, and this even tires her — the constant yelling “do this now, stop doing this immediately“. In fact, she even complained to my own mother about that, saying that I still behave like a child all the time. This baffled me for a long time, until I understood that I cannot change other people’s perceptions, not even my wife’s. What she means is that I should anticipate her wishes. I should be constantly vigilant and read her mind to know what she wants and when she wants it — and respond immediately. Of course, after so many years living together (mostly 24h/day), I consider myself relatively good at doing just that, but I’m not really inside her mind, so often I might just be “too slow” (in her opinion) in my reaction.

So this is the first aspect. It’s not different from many (most?) relationships where one of the partners is known for their temper, and the best way to avoid long-winded discussions that end in yelling and tears is just to practice patience. Fortunately, I have lots of patience, and being scolded at is just second nature to me. Most of the time I don’t even get angry or frustrated; I just view it as being part of my own training to be even more attentive to my wife’s whims, in order to anticipate them more. The worse her mood, the earlier I have to jump at her demands, and that just requires me to be always paying attention.

As part of a long-lasting relationship, this also has more implications. “Whims”, as the name implies, occur spontaneously, unpredictably, and might be either very simple to fulfill (e.g. getting a glass of water) or take a long time (“I wish to go out and have some coffee”) and require some preparation. In my own experience, the longer the time my wife used to work, the less “whims” she had, so we could organise our lives better: there were “working hours” and “whim hours”. During the “working hours” I could focus on my own work and get things done, and subject myself to whatever would happen during the “whim hours”.

Now that she stopped working due to her many chronic diseases, things are a bit more complicated. First, she doesn’t know in advance how she’ll feel in a particular day, so she won’t plan anything and rarely commit to any appointments she might have: it will depend only on how she feels. If she feels better, then any activity has to be immediately suspended in order for me to take her out on her whims — instantly, without a moment’s hesitation, because every moment “wasted” in “delaying” might bring one of her many illnesses back, and prevent her from doing whatever she wants/needs to do in that moment. In a sense, any crossdresser can actually relate to my wife’s illnesses: she spends most of time waiting until she happens to feel well enough to be able to go out; and when that happens, she seizes the opportunity as quickly as possible. We tend to be the same way about our crossdressing; it’s not so different!

The second aspect has wider consequences: it’s unlikely that she will get better. In fact, although some of her conditions are still undiagnosed, because auto-immune illnesses are very hard to pin down. Some might never be correctly identified, and, as such, it means that if they’re treatable (most aren’t), it might be too late for her anyway, and she’ll have to suffer until her bitter end — which can go on for decades upon decades. So the best she can hope for now is to remain “stable” (whatever that means in medical terms) and hope for the best. But the undiagnosed issue is another problem. Undiagnosed, she has no hope for an early retirement and a small stipend from the Social Security, like any other chronic disease in my country; but she is also unable to work, since there is hardly any activity that she can do for over two hours at a stretch (not even sitting down in front of a computer). So what this means is that she’s on some sort of an “interlude” in her life: waiting until some doctor hits on the correct identification of her disease, and either hope for some treatment, or at least for some early retirement (at 37 years!). But until that happens, it’s just waiting and waiting.

So what does someone do who has nothing to do in her life but wait? As part of her psychological makeup, she also a very anxious person — in fact, and perhaps not by coincidence, the first symptoms of her chronic auto-immune disease coincided somehow with a panic attack she had, four years ago (we both thought it was a heart attack; they’re very hard to separate from each other, and both can be fatal). This was mostly related to her anxiety about lack of money to survive. Being now forced to a life of doing nothing, and having no way to earn a living, this increased her anxiety levels. Fortunately, she’s been treating herself with a most excellent therapist, and that, plus her own meditation practice, has done wonders to keep her anxiety levels down at a tolerable level. But the truth is that she has nothing else to do.

What does she do, then? Easy: pester me. It’s only natural: as we live together 24h/7, and my cat doesn’t talk back, there is just me to become the focus of her frustration, anxiety, worry, and anger. Also, being relatively averse to social life, she has few friends, whom she sees perhaps once per year. That means that I’m right in the middle of her blast radius. Naturally enough, everything that happens wrongly in her life is my fault. If there is not enough money for us to survive, it means I have to work harder until I get exhausted (a year ago I was working full-time at three different companies). As it often happens in these cases, I’m not allowed to complain, because any kind of illness I might have pales into comparison to whatever she might have or feel. So I’m not “allowed” to sneeze or cough; if I hurt somewhere, I’m being a weenie (because she hurts so much more all the time). If I’m bleeding from a wound, she yells at me because I’m always cutting myself or doing it on purpose — and exaggerating my tiny complaints all the time. In fact, the only time in the past four years where she took me seriously was when I fainted twice at her mother’s place, right in the middle of dinner — because I certainly couldn’t fake that. Also, she realised at that moment that I might have some condition preventing me to work for a time, and thus slash our meagre income even further. So she took that seriously, until (fortunately) the extensive medical exams I took showed that it was nothing really serious, just some minor adjustments to my blood tension medicine, some rest, and I ought to be fine.

Now we all have our own problems. Most people have far bigger problems than me — my wife is a constant reminder of that. So I’ve learned, over the years, to forget all about my own problems, and focus on other people’s issues. The constant reminder of how so much worse my wife is makes me neglect things. How can I refuse to go out whenever she snaps her fingers, when I’m fully aware that she has few opportunities when she feels good enough to go out — no matter how tired or ill I might feel, or how delayed my work is? How can I refuse to carry loads or do severe exertions — being strictly forbidden by most of my doctors to do that; even physical exercise is to be kept to a minimum — if I know that it’s a pain for her to do some ironing once in a while? Obviously I cannot refuse her anything, because she’s so ill and I’m theoretically healthy enough.

So that’s the major reason why I don’t crossdress as much as I wish, or don’t go out when I’ve planned to do so. In fact, that’s why I cannot plan my own life ahead. I’m totally dependent on my wife’s whims, and have next-to-zero freedom of choice. The best laid-out plans almost inevitably fail, just because I rely on expectations of what is going to happen to give me some free time for myself, but that rarely happens. And sometimes I’m simply too exhausted to do anything but sleep when I have the opportunity.

My apologies in advance for everybody who often expects me to come online and is patient enough to wait hours for me. But there is so little control I have over my own time that it’s really, really hard to compromise on a certain date or hour.

Inspired by one of the articles on the Portuguese side of my blog (sorry, no translation available; the articles are not kept in sync, since they actually target different audiences), which featured smoking fetishism — something completely unheard of in Portugal, while it has a widespread audience elsewhere — I thought I could write a simple tutorial (well, at least the first episode of a series) on the art of smoking with a holder in the female fashion.

There are a few good reasons for that! I’ve always wanted to do something like this since I gave a few “lessons” to a genetic female living in Brazil, using CamFrog, which is a webcam chat with a rather friendly environment; I gave similar lessons on other webcam chat sites. Ironically, most of the people interested in the “smoking lessons” were almost always genetic females.

Why? The answer is a bit strange, but easy to understand… we crossdressers still pride ourselves in trying to excel in presenting a most feminine image, full of glamour. We learn from each other to do that, and get inspired by others who do the same, and teach us how to look more feminine. While styles vary — from coy to sexy, from sultry to slutty — the truth is that we actually have lots of opportunities to learn.

Genetic females, these days, have less choice. At least in some areas. One is smoking: a generation of anti-smoking prohibitions have made the old-time tradition of mothers teaching her daughters how to properly smoke in public an aberration in political correctness; girls still learn how to smoke on their own, but their teachers are — guys. And men smoke so differently from women…

So, to revert this, we need to train all those young, lovely, sexy smokers in the Ancient Art of Glamour Smoking — and this is my small contribution!

You’ll probably need to press start/stop a lot of times to catch all the information on that video (sorry, I’m unskilled in doing tutorials). So, for your convenience, here goes a textual description of all the scenes.

Your accessories

First of all, buy a thin lighter. Girls use thin, slim lighters; it’s guys that get the blocky, stocky ones (remember Zippo? That’s a guy’s type of lighter!).

Then get the longest cigarettes you can. This is because everything long and thin is automatically more “girly”. All-whites are best. 120s are best. 120s all-white slims are perfect. For this video, I’m smoking a 100s John Player Special “Black” brand — there are no longer cigarettes available in my country, unfortunately.

I’m a holder fan, so — like all my previous movies — I’m using a holder here as well. But here is a tip: there are fantasy holders, and there are casual holders. In the 1920s, everyone (guys included!) would use fantasy holders: that’s the kind that is a foot long (30cm!). These days, they would look ridiculous in public. A fancy, elegant holder should be about as long as the cigarette you’re smoking, so a 100mm cigarette holder (4 inches) is what you’d use in a public setting.

Lighting up

The first thing to remember is that women always hold their cigarettes (and that includes casual holders as well) between the topmost finger bones (the distal phalanges), as close to the nail as possible (fantasy holders have a slightly different technique, but I’ll explore that on a future tutorial…). The exact spot where you hold the cigarette and holder combination depends a bit. If you’re just using a cigarette, hold it as near to the cork as possible (guys tend to hold them mid-way, which looks ugly on a woman). If you’re using a holder, there is some extra weight there and the exact point of equilibrium varies on the holder brand and model. As a rule of thumb, holding it half-way across the holder should be fine; as close to the mouth tip as it’s comfortable (but you should have some control, which means that the equilibrium point should not be too far away, or it will be awkward to hold).

The next rule of thumb is to do everything slowly: slowly move the holder and cigarette towards your mouth. There should be a graceful curve, when you flip the holder + cigarette so that they point upwards until it comes close to your lips (aim for the centre; it looks far better that way, at least in an elegant setting; for sultry looks you can use the corner of the lips, which will give it a more powerful and dramatic look). Of course there will be a moment where you’ll have to lower the holder to actually light it: this means clenching your teeth on the holder’s mouth tip. Then you can dangle in safety.

It’s hard to see it in the video, but ideally your elbows should be tucked in, and the hand holding the lighter should be facing outwards (or as much as you can — I’m not that good, either, as you can see). Usually, you use both hands — one to hold the holder and cigarette, the other for the lighter — because it’s guys that “show off” and just use the lighter but never hold the cigarette to their lips when lighting up.

Avoid making grimaces when lighting up: look at the flame and pull in very very slowly. Then it’s always the same technique: hold the holder + cigarette always at an upwards angle (so many women and T-gurls do that wrong!); exhale slowly at an upwards angle, too! There are lots of reasons for that, but one is very obvious: when looking upwards, you’re exhibiting your lovely neck and showing it off (or your jewelry, if you’re wearing it).

Inhaling and exhaling

The pros seem to always inhale seriously, but smile afterwards. I tend to naturally do that as well, unless I’m in a naughty mood and wearing a playful, sultry smile. But in an elegant or casual environment, you’ll be doing a natural smile between inhales (where you can be serious).

Why are women serious when inhaling? Well, depends a lot. If you’re a smoking fetishist, then the sucking in has a connotation with oral fixation — deep pulls are erotic, so pull those cheeks in! This, of course, means it’s hard to smile

What is a no-no is to keep doing a serious face with very open eyes between exhales. Remember, you’re supposed to be enjoying the smoke; we smile when we’re enjoying something. Men, by contrast, don’t worry much about the “enjoyment” bit, so they keep a serious face between smokes. Note that you should also wear a smile — even a thin smile — when smoking by yourself, not only when in company (it’s also a good training: it keeps you constantly in mind that you’re enjoying yourself). Smoking, for the fetishist, is not merely a “dirty habit”: it is, above everything else, pure pleasure. So show that pleasure with a smile!

Dangling

Of course rules are there to be broken (more on that later). But first, some dangling. It’s hard to do with a very long, fantasy holder; I recommend the training with a casual-length holder first (anything between 3″-5″ should be fine). Here is the trick: you will totally spoil the effect if your lips are compressed and tensed in a thin line. Instead, make sure you have full control of the holder with your teeth and part your lips. Lips parting is always sensual, and you don’t need to overdo it; just enough so that you can exhale properly. Since dangling tends to get the holder on a downwards angle, you compensate by blowing smoke upwards when dangling (it requires some practice). Of course, there are a lot of ways to break the rules when dangling which will make it look nice But when in doubt, part the lips — because tense, compressed lips will never look sexy. Not even if you’re lucky to have thick, sensuous lips.

Dangling at an upwards angle is also possible — and was very typical of the 1920s and 1930s — but you should practice the look so that it doesn’t look too “severe” and “aggressive” — which is what it invariably will look like. You might get away with it if you’re smiling. This is because, specially for us crossdressers, we’re trying to soften our image, not making it harder. You will still look “powerful” enough — at least for another smoking fetishist — even if you don’t smoke in a “powerful” way. This is the whole trick of female sensuality: softness, well played, is powerful in itself, it doesn’t require “enhancement” in any way.

Tapping ash

The video is also not very good for the last point — dropping the ash in the ashtray. The feminine way to do it is to tap the holder + cigarette ensemble along the axis (and not perpendicular to it, as guys do). The whole point here is that we are trying to imagine the holder and cigarette as an extension of our own fingers. We like long fingers. We like long fingernails. So, we like cigarettes and holders that extend that long line as well. That’s another reason why women smoke with extended fingers and hold cigarettes at an upward angle — to continue the illusory line extending from the fingers.

That’s why we also avoid smoking with the hands curled in a fist. We try to keep the fingers extended, even the ones not holding the cigarette. We want to encourage that illusion of slimness and long-ness all over the hand. Of course, at some point, there is a limit and the cigarette will have to be held at an angle sometimes, but we can aim to make that angle as soft as possible. Guys, by contrast, will aim to have the cigarette always at right angles to their fingers, and hold the cigarette with their hands curled into balls. We wish to avoid this.

Breaking the rules

So of course that following the rules all the time is not fun; also, we have our own personality, and so we want to show that we’re independent That’s fine! But my recommendation is that you practice a lot “by the book” first, before you start breaking all the rules.

Perhaps some of you have learned ballroom dancing (I certainly did in my late teens). If you remember your dance classes, there were always a lot of “basic steps” to learn first. When you mastered those, you’d learn a few advanced steps, and then you were on your own, free to improvise — which is what pros do, improvise all the time. If you’re like me, you might probably have forgotten everything — except the basic steps But I know that if I’d pick up ballroom dancing again, I’d remember the basics very quickly again, and would be very comfortable with the rest of the steps with little training. This is natural: the basic steps are a foundation, with which we’ll “never go wrong” and always look great. Not extraordinarily great, but good enough to look like we know something about dancing.

Once we have mastered the basics, then it’s time to “show off” with breaking the rules. Now genetic girls will have an advantage here: no matter how “funny” they smoke, they’ll still be looked upon as women, even if they smoke like guys. They will just seem… inelegant, but that’s the worst they can get. We crossdressers have it harder: if we step outside the rules for feminine smoking, we’ll just enhance our maleness, because we’ll revert to “smoking like guys” immediately — probably because we’re so used to it. (If you only smoke when you’re crossdressed, you’ve got it easier: you just need to learn the female technique, and never worry about “getting it wrong” )

The first “rule breaking” is easy: smile all the time. This is usually combined with some form of sultry smiling, of course; if you can pull it off, you can smoke that way all the time. Lots of women do it to seduce guys (if you hang around on smoking fetishist websites, you’ll see that’s their primary technique to “catch” their guys with seductive smoking — using the smile to enhance the sultriness of the experience).

The reverse rule, not smiling, is far harder to achieve. You will see a lot of GG pros doing it. Usually they have gorgeous bodies (at least on the videos), so you will focus on pretty much everything, and the lack of a smile can actually give them a more powerful look. But if you’re not specially attractive — or merely a crossdresser — the lack of a smile will make you look horrible. I know from my own experience: my very first videos, where I tried to put on a “sexy”, hard, serious look simply looked — ugh! — awful! (I’ve removed most of those videos, I couldn’t stand them any more!) Why? Because 90% of what people see in my face is the smile, the eyes, and the hair. Of those, the smile curiously draws the most attention. If I’m looking serious, I’m just a guy in drag and a wig. If I’m smiling, people start having doubts about my gender. That’s because women, in general — not on the porn movies, though! — are smiling most of the time when engaged in public conversation. Their smiles might be coy, or sensual, small and timid, or large and attractive, but they’re always smiling. Guys, by contrast, only smile when drunk — or after having sex — or, well, under extremely exceptional circumstances. So, as a rule of thumb, when crossdressed, just keep smiling as much as you can. Show your teeth!

A variant of smiling is just parting your lips, something that a guy will never do (or if he does, nobody will pay attention). You can get away with a sultry look with parted lips — but you will need to have very think, sensuous lips to start with, or it will just look like a “smirk” and, well, spoil all the effect. See, I know, because I’m lucky to have pretty female-ish lips; even so, parting lips doesn’t come easily to me, and in most cases, I tend to spoil the effect as well. It requires a lot of practice to do it “just right”.

Now about the upwards-pointing cigarette… you can try to hold it horizontally. It will work, too, but make sure you have your fingers well extended. Downwards is always tricky to get it right, but you see some 1950s divas managing to do that. But in then 1950s, women had so many curves that the downwards angle would actually enhance the effect. You can catch Greta Garbo smoking with the cigarette held at a downwards angle. But then again, we’re talking about one of the most beautiful women ever of the 20th century — she could pull it off For the rest of us — genetic girls or crossdressers — we’ll have a much harder time.

Of course, dangling is different, as mentioned above: it will almost always be at a downwards angle, simply because gravity will demand it — you’ll be only holding the mouthpiece of the holder, so, very far from the equilibrium point. Obviously you can clench your teeth and force the tip upwards, but, as said, this “powerful” look requires a lot of tension, and while it’s appropriate for a “powerful” setting (say, if you’re playing Domme in a D/s relationship), remember that your face will become tense with the strain, and even doing that with a smile will always looked forced, or, at least, will project strength. While women project weakness and softness. In the 1930-1950s, women would even push the holder as downwards as they could, specially with fantasy holders, and this would work — even without a smile. As we’ll see in a future tutorial with fantasy holders, it’s actually rather difficult to dangle them properly at a horizontal level (they’re too heavy, and the equilibrium point is too far away from the tip).

By the way, why a holder? Many of my fans always complain about my holders, for them, what is so exciting is to see the lipstick stains on an all-white cigarette (you get lipstick on the holder, too, but you cannot see them on a dark holder though). Well, there are — for me — three main logical reasons for using a holder (and a fourth is simple: it’s because I like them!). First, holders — casual holders, that is — will have a tar filter, which will at least prevent some of the tar from entering your lungs; when you switch the filter (which I do every day) you’ll be truly shocked on how much tar is actually deposited in your lungs! The filter does not remove the taste — the nicotine is not absorbed by the filter, only the tar. It doesn’t make smoking more “safe”, of course, but at least it keeps a bit of tar away (which is where most of the harmful elements in tobacco are). The second reason is avoiding nicotine stains: you will never get them if smoking with a holder (and this was my main reason for using them when I was 15; the breath can be disguised with chewing gum or something like that — even mouthwash helps! —  but explaining nicotine stains on the fingers to my parents would be harder). Not everybody will get their fingers stained (it depends on skin type), but you will at least get them “smelly” if you don’t use a holder. And the third reason is that you won’t get smoke in your eyes when dangling. These three reasons are enough for regular smokers, male or female.

As a female, the holder is attached to a nostalgic past where smoking was glamourous, and obviously it will enhance the “long line” of the fingers which I have alluded to earlier, far more than a very long cigarette — because, well, a holder will always be longer. “Long” is directly connected with “slim”, and we associate “slim” with “female”. That’s just how our minds work. These, however, are emotional reasons. And since it’s not fashionable to use a holder casually on a daily basis, many might feel uncomfortable using them. In my country, in the past 27 years I’ve been using a holder every day, I just found, so far, two persons using a holder as well. Both were male; I haven’t yet found a woman smoking with a holder, although a few use those super-short “filter tips” which are technically also holders (even if they’re just half an inch long). So it’s a dying art!

Anyway, that’s it for today. I hope you had some fun watching the video and reading the text I’ll promise to do a few more tutorials; on the next one, I’ll specifically address some tricks for smoking fetishists, which a woman would probably never do in public, except if she were alone in a bar and looking for a date Except for smoke rings, which I cannot do, I’ll try at least to show French inhales, nose exhales, snap inhales, and double pumping. And if I have the opportunity, I’ll show the special technique for using a fantasy holder, too. All these are appropriate for smoking fetishim, while on this video, I tried to show everyday smoking techniques. You can even use them if you hate holders and prefer to go without them: the technique is pretty much the same one.

You can also view the above video on Blip.TV or iTunes.

Something like this:

All right, all right, I admit it: it’s just a photoshopped image I’m not an expert in using Photoshop, but you can get reasonably good results even with little skill.

To do this image, I just wore my silicone prosthesis and removed the edges, smoothing over the skin tone and colour to match. It’s far easier to do it on Photoshop than using foundation and concealer — specially because I’d need some special-effects “flesh putty”, as they use in the movie industry, to make sure the edges of the prosthesis wouldn’t show up. It’s soooo much easier to paint it over using Photoshop!

So anyway. For all of you who always complain that I never show my boobs on the webcam, here you go: my perfect boob job! If they were real, I’d be more than happy to show them — lol!

If you’re pretty much offended by the lack of ethics publishing photoshopped images, I do apologise! My intention was only to have fun, not to anger anyone. On this subject, you should read this article from Ana Cristina García, one of the crossdressers I admire most. She writes about the issues of publishing photoshopped images, as she has been the target of many complains about how some of her pictures “are not real” and somehow delude people thinking they are.

As she so well puts it:

As you can see, all wrinkles are gone, boobs are made larger and with more cleavage and every little imperfection is taken care of to present a perfect image.  This is the perfect image we all seek and strive for but, as the Dove commercial, in the link below, clearly states, it is an unrealistic and unattainable beauty standard since it is produced electronically.  Yes, every gorgeous girl with a perfect body, face and hair we see in all sorts of magazine adds is not as perfect as she seems to be.  Having a good raw material to start with makes the task easier but the photos they show us are idealizations achieved through the manipulation of photos of beautiful subjects that are close but not quite there and, in some cases, not even close to perfection, on their own.  Every woman, and I count here TGirls too, would like to have the figure of a Barbie Doll or Jessica Rabbit but we know that their extremely slim waists and exaggerated proportions can only be produced in plastic or drawing and lately, with Photoshop.  Our ideal of beauty has become, thanks to photo editing, quite unrealistic.  Take a look at the Dove commercial now:

Read her article, it’s very interesting — she draws her own limits on how far she goes with photo manipulation tools, and even has a separate Flickr account just for digitally enhanced pictures (she’s still lovely without the enhancements!). And the article — and its many links! — should give you food for thought when thinking about all those gorgeous women on magazine covers and adverts. For the past ten years or so, no shampoo ad has been “real” (that I heard from a senior marketing manager from one of the top European cosmetics brands) — they’re all produced in a digital studio with the equivalent of the Photoshop tools, but applied to video. So if Vichy, Garnier, Pantene, and all the others are allowed to do some photo/video manipulation, well, why shouldn’t I?

After my last post, I simply had to have a talk with my wife about it. This was actually about the end of my crossdressing session… but we talked for quite a long time. To keep it short: the major dilemma I have to face is to deal with what is more important for me, giving full reign to my urges and compulsions — and through that, diminishing my own personal suffering — or causing my wife’s anxiety levels to rise, forcing her to take extra medication and even risking another panic attack. This is a very tough dilemma when speaking about choices, where one’s personal choice will only cause the suffering of others and there is no way to rationally deal with the problem. Of course, my own “problem” is not rational either, but purely emotional (a state triggered by my condition as crossdresser, which I cannot physically change), so it’s hard to discuss which emotion should prevail.

At the end we sort of reached a temporary compromise. I cannot deal with my urges rationally, and I accept that my wife cannot deal with her anxiety rationally, even though her logical arguments are a bit stronger than mine. You see, she claims that when I’m crossdressed, I’m at a higher risk. This is a fact. Puritans might pick me as a target and attack me, which will not happen if I’m dressed as a male. Of course I can argue that we cannot truly and completely avoid getting attacked by robbers or merely angry or drunk people, and so, being anxious about accidents that might happen is not a sane concept: you might be stuck at home with agoraphobia, fearing the outside world, because there is so much that can go wrong. But even at home you’re at risk: a meteorite strike might puncture the roof and kill you. Or you can slip in the bathtub (or the shower, in our case) and hit with the head on the floor. Anything can happen: our lives are very fragile anyway.

But it’s true that when crossdressed all of the above can happen plus being a target from intolerant groups. That’s true. Also, if an accident happens to me, I’m more likely to get help if dressed as a male than if I’m crossdressed, which might trigger the “serves you right, you pervert” kind of reaction. So there is some ground for my wife’s anxiety. The difference between us two is not about the facts, where I concede that she has a point; it’s about how we react to them. I just pay more attention and take good care of myself when crossdressed in public; I don’t tremble in fear for imagined accidents that might happen (and thus losing all the pleasure and joy of going out).

So we talked about minimizing risks. We both agreed that the major problem is that we’re surrounded by intolerant people, some of them our neighbours, which might shun us (that’s the least that could happen — though they’re not really aggressive types). So perhaps going out dressed should be restricted to, say, short vacations in places where nobody knows us two, staying at a LGBT-friendly hotel. This is certainly something I have long planned to do — we simply can’t afford that for now, and it’s still something months and months ahead in time (if ever). But we could agree on that. (More on this below.)

Secondly, there are obviously LGBT-friendly spots, even near our home. My online CD friends living in Portugal meet all the time in many of those spots. While I’m perhaps not overkeen in just going to those places — I shall expand on that in a bit — we both agree that it is “safer” to go out to a LGBT-friendly bar or restaurant than asking for a coffee on a “regular” café. There, at the minimum, I’d get strange looks. I might be refused service and asked to leave. I might even be a victim of aggression (because I might be “tainting” the environment of the café and turning customers away). That’s true, so I had to agree as well about that. At the end, we agreed that it would be safer just to go out with some of my online friends, to see how I felt about it, and make sure it was on a LGBT-friendly environment. There is still some risk of “discovery” — mostly when getting in and out of the car; that’s the disadvantage of living in an apartment building without a garage. While on my previous “going outs” I just drove through the neighbouring towns at 3-5 AM in the morning — where everybody is asleep — these CD outings on LGBT-friendly places are much earlier than that: dinner usually starts at around 9 PM or so, and going to a drag queen show perhaps around midnight. So: going out much earlier means higher risks of meeting neighbours. Still, my wife agreed with the plan.

The only point I made is that I need some more practice driving around, with which she also agreed.

We also discussed some alternatives. A few CDs live relatively close to us, and we might think of inviting each other for dinner or something like that. Or perhaps I should try to reveal myself to my mother-in-law, who is a relatively tolerant person and might find my crossdressing “amusing”; we dine at her place every Saturday, sometimes with more family & friends, but often just us three. This would be a perfect pretext for me to go out. We filed that as a “possibility” which would depend mostly on my confidence in my mother-in-law to reveal myself.

Now, so far this sounds great, right? Well, sort of. When I said “my wife agreed” I should put that word in perspective. Usually, we mean with “agreeing” that “we both think the same way so we agree with each other”. This was clearly not that kind of “agreement”. She doesn’t “agree” with my decision of going out. She reluctantly agrees for me to go out because she feels how unhappy I am. But, in turn, if I go out, she becomes even more unhappy than me, and, worse than that, she might be prone to panic attacks (we sort of agreed that I would either go out when she was safely asleep, or, if it’s too early for her to go to bed, I’d keep texting her to say I’m well and safe). So this is the kind of agreement like you get on a war between two countries that hate each other but very reluctantly “agree” to stop the war because it’s leading nowhere, and each side makes some concessions to the other side. It’s not exactly the best analogy — because my wife and myself love each other, we don’t hate each other — but it’s the best I can come up with to express what we’ve actually “agreed” upon.

Of course I was rather happy (even if incredibly sleepy) at the results of the discussion. On the other hand, my wife was clearly very unhappy about it. Being on the losing end of this “battle” for seven years, I can fully empathise with her — I know exactly what makes her unhappy, and somehow it feels “wrong” to “win” the final war, when the result is just suffering for her.

I let this stay for a few days and didn’t mention it again — she’s someone prone to spend hours thinking about those things in silence, and it’s better to let her do so. But I had an excellent opportunity to dress during the Sunday before last, and so I announced — not unlike what I had done over a year and a half ago — that I would like very much to go out as Sandra, just practicing my driving and nothing else.

As expected, she didn’t take it well. I was actually expecting her to go back on her word, as she has done so often in the past years. This time she didn’t go back, but was clearly very unhappy about it, and so I said I wouldn’t go out if she didn’t allow me to go. She said I could make up my mind when she fell asleep — the decision would be up to me. So she took her anti-anxiety pills and tried to get to sleep, which she only managed to do after some three hours of restlessly turning in the bed. But finally exhaustion and medication gave her a deep sleep.

I need a nose job!

And of course I went out. I just did the same routine (but took a different path) that I had done a year and a half ago: drive around the neighbouring towns at 4 AM, and, on two occasions, leave the car and walk on the pavement, feeling the excitement of the sound of the boots clicking on the cobbled stones. Unfortunately, there was a light rain (I had an umbrella with me if the rain got too heavy) and also relatively cold, so I didn’t walk as much as I wished — and, of course, I was also already very, very tired, and when one’s tired, one is prone to make mistakes. This was all about controlling risks, after all, so after an hour and a half I went back home. I still was very happy about it, as this picture (taken in the car) shows

See the red eyes and the wrinkles beneath them? Yeppers, I was tired. But still felt extraordinarily well about it. This is definitely the kind of thing I’d love to do every day

Exhausted, I woke up late on Monday. My wife slept well, and, as she is prone to do, used the spare time while I was asleep to do some chores (our house is a mess!) but obviously also to reflect on things. If she’s daunting when she improvises — I have to tell you that she is a genius who was brought up in a family of geniuses; her own uncle, for example, could be the next Einstein if he managed to finish his PhD in physics; his ideas of how to explain the Universe, picking up where Einstein left, are fascinating to listen; but I digress — she is obviously much better in the morning, with a fresh mind, a clear head, and having given very good thoughts about the subject. While I was naturally a bit dizzy and sleepy. The point is that what she lacked in oratory skills on Sunday evening was vastly compensated with the argumentation after a good night’s sleep.

And here I will need to get back on Buddhism again. I have mentioned my own Buddhist training in past articles, but this will apply to anyone following a spiritual path. For example, this crossdresser managed to convince himself that his urges to crossdress were nothing less than the Devil putting thoughts in his mind. Focusing on that, he stopped crossdressing, and describes his own path leading away from it.

Now whatever your own personal spiritual path is, most of them (except perhaps for a few crazy sects here and there) just have two purposes in their teachings: explaining how to reach ultimate happiness, and how to avoid suffering. The way this is accomplished, of course, depends on the particular flavour of the teachings. In Buddhism, which has just these two purposes to deal with, the major difference — unlike pretty much any other system — is to train in the recognition that these two states (happiness and suffering) do not depend on external causes. It’s all a question of being in the proper mindset. The usual example given is that both believers and unbelievers suffer, and have moments of happiness that aren’t ever-lasting — so it’s not “faith” that makes a difference.

The major difference is on the method to apply to deal with the problems. This shouldn’t be too unfamiliar to anyone who did some therapy with a modern psychologist (i.e. as opposed to old-fashioned psychotherapy). They identify triggers — external conditions that will trigger a mental condition — but train their patients to identify how those triggers act upon mental processes, and teach them how to deal with them. In effect, the purpose is to separate the external triggers from the internal mental processes. When doing so, the patient is able to exercise freedom of will, by disallowing their usual, conditioned mental processes to be activated in the presence of a trigger, and activate (by an act of will power) a different reaction instead. There are a few techniques to do that, and usually (depending on the patient) you get results after some three years of therapy or so.

Buddhism techniques do pretty much the same — even though they take much longer, but have long-reaching effects — but there is a catch. They assume, for all purposes, that even the sanest person in the world is subject to react strongly to their own emotions, and by doing so, engage in activities (even mental activities) that will leave them in a state of insatisfaction. This “state” requires a bit of explanation. The technical term is dukkha which implies a degree of not being satisfied with something, of change, and of actual pain (mental or physical). It does not imply it’s always something “bad”. In fact, the most difficult aspect to understand about dukkha is that it applies to good things, too! Let me give you two typical examples. Imagine that you like ice cream a lot. If one assumes that one gets happy when eating ice cream, and the feelings related to ice cream were only “good” ones, then, the more ice cream you eat, the better you would feel.

But in reality what happens is that at some point you simply cannot eat any more ice cream. Your stomach is full. You can force yourself to eat more and more, hoping to get more happiness from ice cream that way, but there is a limit to how much you can take. If you continue to force yourself, you might get stomach cramps. This is the aspect of physical pain related to an activity that usually makes you feel good. But even if you stop eating ice cream well before that, you’ll be ever-so-slightly disappointed that you cannot eat more. You might be thinking about the next time you have an opportunity to eat more ice cream, and that thought is related to a feeling that you’re not absolutely happy until you get some more. This is dukkha, and we all experience it.

If ice cream doesn’t rock your boat, then perhaps sex will. Sex is one of the ultimately pleasing experiences; orgasm, or ecstasy, is possibly the strongest, most powerful “good” feeling we can have. So it’s natural we strive to get as much sex as possible. When finding the perfect partner, we might feel compelled to have sex with them for as long as we can. But depending on our robustness and age, we might not be able to hold on for many hours at a stretch. Even when young and healthy, and possibly very fit, we might manage to get the experience of having sex with our partner for a whole weekend and never leave the bed during those 48 hours. Nevertheless, we’ll have to stop and sleep; and maybe on Monday we’ll be incredibly sore, even though we might be otherwise fit and healthy. There is a limit to how much sex we can handle. So while the experience is undoubtedly ”good”, at some point, it hurts so much to have just a little more sex, or one’s so tired that one has to give it up. Even if you’re not overly frustrated about it — after all, you might be able to do the same thing next weekend! — there will be a moment where you simply cannot go on and need to stop feeling the pleasure of sex to get the feeling of either outright physical pain and tiredness, or at least the feeling that “now I have to postpone making sex until the next weekend — how boring those next few days are going to be!”

Unless you’re seriously addicted to ice cream or sex, those moments where you simply cannot take it any longer and have to stop are not necessarily connected to “frustration”, “depression”, or even what we conventionally call “suffering”. It’s just the way things are: our body has reached a physical limit. When we reach that limit, we just have to wait until our body handles more of that wonderful sensation. This is dukkha. Normally, people don’t go to therapists telling them that there is something wrong with them since they wish to have sex all the time, but since the sensation of exhilaration has stopped for a bit and sex became painful, they have a “problem”. In fact, we just accept things as being that way — there are elaborate scientific explanations to explain why we cannot have sex and feel pleasure from sex 24h/day, 7 days a week — and don’t worry too much. We still crave for sex (or ice cream) “constantly” in spite of knowing we cannot have it all the time. Some, indeed, suffer so much from the absence of sex (or, again, ice cream) that the craving never ends, even though they might realise that it’s impossible to engage in 24h-a-day-marathons of sex (or eating ice cream) during the whole year because it’s simply physically impossible.

So how does Buddhism provide a method to deal with these things? Firstly, it encourages one to look at the source of the problem; and then, once it has been identified, to erradicate it. After that, something important and interesting happens: you can full enjoy the experience without suffering (in the sense of dukkha, not in the sense we usually attach to the word in the West) any longer. Here it’s important to understand that we all have a confused mind which usually never pinpoints the source or the cause of the problem correctly, and Buddhist training and practice exists to help us to identify that cause.

What we usually say is that the problem is caused by things like, well, “the way our brain is wired”. Hypersexuality — or addiction to ice cream — is not rational, but it’s “encoded in the genes”. Or, if we’re bahaviourists, we might say that being exposed to something repeatedly, we somehow get “addicted” to it and there is nothing that we can do about it, because we somehow have “interiorised” this experience. Social context and history (the way you were educated, the way you were exposed to the environment, the kind of relationships you have formed in the past) just reinforces the “addiction”. In effect, we sort of find out a lot of justifications for how we think about a certain compulsive behaviour, and push the cause into some kind of external thing — it’s the way we are, and we cannot change it. Western forms of treatment are usually a combination of drugs and therapy.

But what actually is the cause is far more subtle, and there is just one real “culprit”: our own mind. Due to a lot of circumstances, our mind functions in the sense of gratifying the ego, pleasing it through activities (and thoughts!) that make us temporarily happy. When these activities stop, we are unhappy, but we’re driven by those same circumstances to seek an ego-pleasing activity once more, and while we’re opposed in our search for those ego-pleasing activities, we reject — or even get openly angry at — every obstacle that opposes our desire. That can be a person (like our parents denying us some ice cream), a physical constraint (for some reason, our bodies cannot absorb more ice cream…), or a social conditioning of some sort (“it’s bad for you if you eat too much ice cream!”). These are ego-traps; the ego does two things at the same time: first, it enhances the qualities of the desired object or activity (eating ice cream — or having sex — is viewed as being way better than it actually is), and this reinforces the craving. Secondly, it diminishes the qualities of all obstacles in reaching that desired object or activity (e.g. the parents preventing us to eat ice cream are “evil”; our body is “weak” and “wrongly-wired”; the whole world is out there conspiring against us to prevent us from having more ice cream or sex). This “shifting of the blame” occurs all the time, and it’s part of our nature: we’re constantly doing it, even though we might not be aware of it.

Buddhism training exposes a method where we observe how our mind forges these ego-traps, and, with enough practice, one is able to recognise the moment when our self is forging a new trap, and identify it. When this moment is recognised, we have freedom of choice: we can indulge in those cravings — fully aware that they are ego-traps, created by our mind — or we can choose to avoid them (because we recognise them as ego-traps). Needless to say, it’s far harder to actually do it than to describe what happens. That’s why “weekend seminars” on Buddhist meditation will have little effect, and that’s why Buddhists take years or decades to achieve something that from a purely rational point of view seems obvious. Obvious, yes, but insanely hard to do. Why? Because we have lived a whole life (24 hours per day!) used to shift the blame to something outside our own selves, and this reinforces the way we automatically react to certain emotional states that get triggered by circumstances. We see a cup of ice cream, and instantly we crave to eat it, because we’re so well “trained” or “conditioned” to react to our emotional attachment to eating ice cream — over decades. Breaking that conditioning is obviously not going to be easy, and naturally it takes at least as long to “undo” it than to learn it in the first place.

It’s like riding a bicycle — or tying up your shoelaces, or learning how to write, or walking in high heels and applying makeup. At the beginning it’s incredibly hard. But after enough repetition, our mind learns how to do it, and we don’t give it a second thought — we just enjoy the benefits of having learned a certain behaviour. We can learn pretty much everything this way. Unfortunately, we also “learn” how to crave for ice cream (or for sex!) in the same way. Buddhist meditation is the method by which we “unlearn” those habitual tendencies that afflict our mind by creating ego-traps. Like anything new that we begin to learn, it takes time, patience, a lot of diligence, and the results take time to appear. But once we master it, we’ll do it automatically.

Buddhism is not so simplistic as too refute that there aren’t other circumstances beyond the mind. As in the example above: if you’re “unlearning” your craving for ice cream, because you rationally understand it’s not good for you, and are able to go for many days without feeling that craving desire to eat ice cream, when you suddenly see a cup of ice cream in a shop (or a friend brings some over to dinner because they know you love it), all that precious training will be lost. We might shift the blame to the ice cream cup itself for “causing” us to relapse, or even to the friend who brought you the ice cream, unaware of your training to get rid of the ice cream addiction. In fact, the “problem” is not in the actual cup of ice cream (since it doesn’t trigger the same craving effect on other people, it just triggers it for you) nor in your friend (who actually thought they were doing a kindness) nor even in society (which just says that overeating is bad for your health — a scientific fact, not a rule to put a burden on your conscience). They are, however, conditions or contributive causes. When you wish to plant an apple tree, it’s not enough to just throw the apple’s pips onto the soil. The pip (or seed) is indeed the cause of a new tree, but you need all sorts of things for the tree actually to grow: farmed land, sun, water, protection from weeds, fertiliser, and so forth. It would be silly to say “the cause of getting a tree to grow is sun and water”. We all know these are contributive causes; just the seed is enough. Similarly, to get a child to grow, all you need to start with is some semen and an ovum. But then you need to nourish the newborn baby, protect it from harm, cure it from any health issues, supply clothes, and of course give them some loving kindness, and, at last, some education. If all those contributory causes fail, the child might never fully develop into an adult.

What our minds tend to do is to “confuse” the contributory causes with the real causes, and, as such, we tend to wish for those contributory causes to be present, and hate when obstacles are put in the way. So, for instance, for having sex you need a willing partner and some leisure to get some sex. If you crave for sex, and suffer from lack of sex, it’s typical that you shift the blame either on the partner (which might be unwilling) or a lack of partner, or all the environment (society, work, family…) which prevents you to have leisure to have as much sex as you wish. You might even blame your own body for not being able to endure sex marathons of several hours or days without resting. But these are just contributory causes — triggers, if you wish — for having a fulfilling sexual experience. When in fact all you need is your mind.

Now this is something that our egos very strongly reject. In our ego’s constant craving for pleasant experiences, it rejects any “explanations” that prevent us from having those experiences. Even when we start rationalising about those experiences, our egos will create justifications for behaving like they do. We might enter a support group to help us to deal with our craving for ice cream — “Ice Cream Addicts Anonymous” — which will basically suggest methods to train our mind to deal with the craving. But even after we start the training, even if we get some mild or moderate success, the ego will strike back. It will, all of the sudden, start making us believe that we’re somehow “special”, by convincing our selves that “others are lucky, for them ice cream craving is just an addiction, while, for us, it’s something inherent in our being — it’s encoded in our genes, it’s part of our brain’s neural pathways, it’s something which is beyond rational explanation — and so we’re allowed to go after our cravings”.

This is rather frequent. Specially in modern times — and there is a good reason for that. Unlike the previous Puritan societies we used to live in — “don’t do this, don’t do that” — we have thrown away all values of the past in this so-called “more enlightened” society and created new values to replace them. One of them is that our egos are worthy of being self-pleased. Technically known as hedonism — a right to please ourselves and indulge in our wildest dreams, triggered by our emotions — it’s the hallmark of the modern world. We got rid of a collective notion of “sin” or “wrongfulness” and the associated feeling of “guilt” which tried to curb our strongest cravings to avoid us to fall into the downwards-leading spiral of constant suffering (because we will have constant craving). We felt that this was far better than constraining ourselves (which also leads to suffering), and, as a result, we hoped to get a happier society that way.

This is not the case. If we look around ourselves, we see that one third of the Western world is taking pills and doing therapy to deal with depression. Marriages are a joke: nobody seriously expects to remain with a chosen partner “for life” any more. People are wealthier and healthier, but that didn’t make them happier — the rate of suicides has steadily grown in our “modern” societies. Put into simpler words: in Third World countries, people die from hunger. In the developed world, we die from excess of food. Being overweight is a consequence of too much ice cream (stretching the analogy) because we feel we have the “right” to pursue eating whatever we please; breaking marriages is allowed because we feel we have the “right” to have as many sexual partners as we wish, and that novelty of experience is more important than being “faithful” (which is boring, depressing, constraining, and doesn’t really classify as “happiness” any longer). So this is not really about “don’t do this, don’t do that” — morals imposed by “someone” in their self-righteousness — but about what makes our lives more functional (and, as a result, more happy).

While our grandmas might have been sexually repressed and thus lived very unhappy lives, the current free-for-all sexual freedom doesn’t lead to happy lives. Sure, some people are happy that way. But in the times of our grandmothers, some people were happy as well. In fact, it seems that there might have been more people happier in the past  — hard to say, since people wouldn’t talk so much about themselves, and when they did, they weren’t that honest as nowadays — but even if there weren’t, all we can say is that neither extreme — artificial moral constraints or free-for-all morality — leads to complete and absolute happiness. Rather the contrary!

I do apologise for the long ranting, but in fact this was pretty much what my wife summarised to me on the day after my short drive around. Even though I obviously felt otherwise, what I am constantly doing is to justify my “right” to crossdress (more and more), or even the “right” to transition (as if that were possible…), and using that as an excuse for self-gratification. Now I obviously agreed that I was trying to get all pretexts to crossdress, of course — what crossdresser wouldn’t do the same? But when I try to justify it by saying “I’m different; my body/brain works differently; I have no way to change the way I am” what I’m saying is that I don’t have free will: I’m just a mere product of my emotions, triggered by my body (when I crossdress, I get ecstatic with the image) and my own mental processes (I love to feel, act, and behave like a woman) — all that to seek some sort of temporary happiness. While my argumentation might sound more rational than someone “justifying” their craving for ice cream — and it’s a far more elaborate argumentation, involving academic studies about what triggers the craving for crossdressing — when observed in a detached way, I’m not so different than an “ice cream addict”. I just have a different kind of addiction — a different way to please my ego — than others, but I use similar arguments to “justify” them.

Now, I’m not saying that I’m aware that somehow all my cravings and desires are “illusions” or “mental constructs” created by my brain to delude myself. No, I’m light-years away from recognising that. My usual image is the following: a person can desire to be a cat and go through surgery to become as closely possible to a cat. But we all know it’s impossible for a human being to be a cat. You can act like a cat, but not be one. Nevertheless, this person (shown in that article) has a strong wish to become a cat, and it’s not merely a fancy; he’s just “a cat in a human’s body”, but he cannot change his nature, and he suffered until he could at least become a simile to what his inner self tells him what his nature is.

Of course I can say — at a sufficiently high level of realisation, Buddhist masters can transcend all of that. They can discard their own body like clothes. If you think that’s wishy-washy mysticism from ancient times when people were more gullible, think again; these things happen every day in the 21st century. For us Westerners it’s an impossible-to-grasp concept because it goes against our experience. In the highlands of Tibet, in the present day, this is common-day experience. So common, in fact, that people don’t make a real fuss about it — they have lived for a millenium being constantly exposed to that kind of experience, so it’s natural for them. If you ask them why they cannot do the same, they will just shrug it off and say, “I’m not diligent enough in my practice. If I trained like those masters do, I would accomplish the same thing; I simply am too lazy to train that hard”. For us it sounds like magic; for them it’s just the difference between being a farmer (which takes little training) or going to university and become a doctor (which takes decades of study).

Now obviously I have not those “decades of study”, and I’m also lazy as well. This means that in spite of intellectually understanding that all my “urges” and “desires” are nothing more and nothing less than aspects of my mind — thoughts, if you wish — over which I’m supposed to have full control and a free will to decide to follow them or not, it doesn’t feel like that. Like a person wishing to become a cat, but cannot do so — even though, ultimately, having the body of a cat or a human is irrelevant, what counts is the mind behind it — I cannot become an ex-crossdresser by sheer amount of willpower. I simply have no willpower for that, and, more to the point, I don’t want to become an ex-crossdresser, and I don’t even believe I can become an ex-crossdresser at all. Of course I’m aware that some people can wish not to be angry or depressed people, and, with enough training, actually accomplish that. In those cases, I believe that the strongest reason is having a wish to become someone different. I don’t have that wish. I’m fine in being transgendered. If I have anything “strong”, it is the wish to become more transgendered, not less (as if “transgenderism” can be defined with adjectives like more/less). And while I keep thinking that way, I won’t change deep down in my self. I might take decades until I realise that those “urges” and “desires” are merely thoughts.

That doesn’t mean that I’m not working on it. For instance, a few things are the result of my training, but not all are positive in the sense of what my wife wishes me to accomplish. One is that I don’t get frustrated when undressing. Most of you might have gone through that terrible moment, when you’re having a lot of fun, but at last you have to remove your makeup, get rid of the wig, undress, and go to sleep — how terribly painful that moment is! Specially if you have no idea when you’ll have another session again! Well, it was like that for me, too, but not any more. I just enjoyed it until the end, but knowing fully well that everything has to come to an end, I relax, and enjoy the restoring sleep after a long session. On the next day I might watch some of my videos again, but with a degree of detachment, not of frustration, depression, or anxiety — I’m usually smiling, remembering the fond moments, but recognising them as merely more happy memories and nothing more than that.

Then my practice focuses mostly on paying attention to things. I’m naturally very unfocused and rarely pay attention; when crossdressing, of course, a lot of things require attention: remembering my pose, remembering that I’m even taller on heels and might hit my head on low ceilings (well, almost), remembering to take care not to smear the nail polish, remembering how to light up a cigarette as a woman, and so forth. But also, when driving, there are a lot of small details that are different – long hair gets stuck on the seatbelt, for instance. When going out of the car I have to remember how to place my legs on the ground in order to reveal little — like a lady does. All these things, which become more and more familiar with training, benefit a lot from my own Buddhist practice in attention, and become easier to accomplish.

The other thing is losing more and more the “fear of discovery”. This is also part of the training: losing the self-importance attached to my self which makes me “shy” away from “looking ridiculous”, by pushing the idea of “looking ridiculous” into other peoples’ minds — who cares what they think about me? I can only feel offended if I wish to feel offended — made me much more bolder in presenting myself publicly. Sure, I will attract a few laughs. So what? I’m happy if people get happy at my expense — isn’t that the point of my training, which is to make others more happy? My experiences so far only involved webcam chatting, of course, but I have great fun these days. If people laugh at me, I laugh with them! The more they attempt to make fun of me, the more I enjoy the session, and make fun at myself, too. As a result, in some chatrooms, my presence is usually welcome, because I make everyone laugh! (Of course, sometimes I get a few more serious comments — strangely coming from genetic women — asking me about makeup tips or similar things…)

So, thanks to my training, I diminished the level of post-session frustration, I’ve increased my attention, and I’ve managed to deal with the idea of being a laughing stock, and even enjoy that others have fun at my expense, and get some well-deserved laughter (which will make them forget their own problems in turn — isn’t that great?). These are real benefits, for myself and for others. But the crux of the problem is that I’m not even close in coming to terms with my transgenderism: it still feels like it’s something beyond my ability to “constrain” or “eliminate”. I simply cannot “let it go”.

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After this huge side-track, let’s get back to my conversation with my wife. To conclude, I admitted that she is right. I use my alleged “built-in transgenderism” — substantiated by all sorts of documentation on research in the field — as a justification for continuing to crossdress and do it more and more often. I give myself the excuse that, because I feel I’m transgendered, I’m “entitled” to go out, and who knows what else. I admit to all that. But I also admit that I’m not an enlightened being. If I were, I would be able to transcend the notions of gender or of “needing” to crossdress to feel more aligned with what I believe to be a core quality of my being. But I’m not enlightened. I’m not even a very serious practitioner. I might need decades — or perhaps a few extra lives! — to be able to reach that point. That doesn’t mean that I “gave up” on my practice: it just means that I (or my wife!) cannot expect that a few years of practice are enough for me to transcend my “needs” as a crossdresser. I can intellectually admit that my wife is right. But I simply do not experience things like she says. I’m very, very far from it. Rather the contrary: the more I observe my own mind, the more it seems pervaded by the urges and desires of becoming female and fully enjoying it. I realise, however, that this is just a first step: it’s not bad to be able to look at one’s own limitations, and work on going beyond those limitations. But I’m not at the stage of “going beyond my limitations” — not yet.

So — I told her — what this means for me is that being kept separate from my crossdressing will still make me suffer, even though I understand intellectually that it’s a suffering that I create for myself. I might justify it by claiming “it’s the way my brain is wired”, but I know that ultimately there is nothing “wired” in the brain — I just believe it is. Breaking that belief is, at this stage, well beyond me.

My wife proposed as a measure to work towards “breaking that belief” that I stopped chatting with my fellow crossdresser friends, and, instead, focus on observing what I feel and experience while crossdressed. She argues — and, again, there is no fault in her reasoning — that by chatting with other crossdressers I’m only reinforcing my own self-image as a crossdresser. This is part of her theory that no sane (male) person would actually like to be a crossdresser if they would have to worry every day about their hair looking right after waking up, or dealing with the period, or any health complication related to te female genitalia, and so forth (because she has to deal with all that, and even more). When a crossdresser puts on makeup and wears a fancy dress, she’s just creating an artificial, idealised image of a woman, where everything is positive and nothing is negative, so we crossdressers naturally find that image very appealing. Being female 24h/7 means having to deal with all the negative aspects of the situation, too. Now this is the kind of argument that I’m unable to reply to: because, of course, I have no experience in living 24h/7 as a female, I have no idea how I would deal with all those negative aspects. Would I find them so overwhelmingly painful that the desire to “look great” (meaning wearing makeup and fancy dresses) would simply disappear? Perhaps. That depends so much on so many factors. It’s true, of course, that I tend to minimise all negative aspects of being female, and enhance the positive aspects — all crossdressers and transgendered MtF will feel like that. Unless I transition and went through the Real Life Test, I will never experience the negative aspects of being female. So obviously I cannot contradict my wife’s argument. She might be right.

Then she added a further argument, which is one that I have alluded before on my earlier articles. I’m currently studying to be a teacher — both of computer science and also of Buddhist practice. In both cases, my appearance as a crossdresser will shun people away. I won’t be able to get a job as a transgendered person in any university; and I won’t be allowed to help others to do Buddhist practice if I appear in front of them dressed as a woman. So insisting on my “urges” won’t benefit me at all, and, more important, it won’t benefit others, either. Not to mention being shunned by neighbours, friends, and family. My wife doesn’t worry too much about that — when she’s being rational about it — except when she considers that my appearance will actually drive others away. And that’s something I’m not supposed to be doing: I should be encouraging people, not frightening them by showing an unusual appearance, which might make others question my sanity and the kind of things I’m supposed to be teaching. Teachers, whatever they’re teaching (well, unless it’s on a seminar about transgenderism…), should present themselves in a neutral way that is “politically correct” and doesn’t drive away potential students. Again, her logic in this aspect is blameless; and while we haven’t discussed this specifically, it’s obvious for anyone following my rantings that I’m not really keen in moving out to some remote place and become a sex worker or transvestite performer or something like that.

Now wait… wasn’t this only about going out? Well, yes and no. My wife is just following the reasoning to its ultimate consequences. She said that soon just “driving around” wouldn’t be enough, and I agreed. Then “going out” with some CD friends might lose the “novelty appeal” — I might have to agree with that, because, well, almost all of the crossdressers I know just share one single interest with me: crossdressing. When chit-chat about crossdressing is exhausted, what else is left? Unfortunately, I consider myself a pseudo-intellectual who requires a bit more from a friendship than just talking about lipstick, mascara, lingerie, high heels, and cocktail dresses. So, yes, again she’s right: going out with CD friends would, at some point, not “be enough”. So she assumed that going out in plain daylight would come next; and facing angry looks (or even violence) if I wished to go shopping fully dressed in the middle of the day — not to mention the high risk of being recognised by someone and losing all my credibility as a relatively serious and reliable person. Again, she’s right: I’d certainly love to go out during the day, and not necessarily with other CDs, but probably having a nice afternoon with my wife at an esplanade — that’s what we enjoy to do together anyway. And what would come next? Well, I’d become bolder and bolder, go out more and more often, until an “accident” happens — and an “accident” might very well be recognised by someone.

At this stage I was pretty much speechless, because, well, I had to admit that she was right.

She did leave a suggestion, however. As said, she suggested that we could go out for a few days and get a room on a LGBT-friendly hotel in a city where nobody knew us. That way, I could go out fully dressed and enjoy myself — and also see how I react being laughed at in public. Still, accidents might happen — like a car crash with me fully dressed — how would I react then? What my wife thinks is that I’d get so scared that I would never crossdress again; it’s possible, it could happen. In any case, having a short vacation where I’m dressed all the time (like I used to do before I met my wife; even though I didn’t go out much back then) is currently out of the question, since we cannot afford it.

She also hinted that we all have our dreams that will never be fulfilled — her own dream is to visit Italian cities (she’s attracted to the architecture, since that was the training she had at university). Sadly for her, when we could afford travelling, we never had the opportunity (time!) for doing so — I worked 350+ days a year and had no time for vacations (the remaining days we did, in fact, spend on some short vacations, but always inside our country, Portugal). And I didn’t even know when I’d be free for taking a few days off. Well, now I’ve got plenty of time — or rather, I have a much more flexible timetable, so I could fit any amount of vacation days pretty much when I wish. But now we have absolutely no money

She is fully aware of that, and, after a lot of thinking about it, she managed to persuade herself that her own dreams would never come true, and it would be stupid to pine away in frustration for something that will not happen. She just watches movies and pictures of the cities that she would love to visit, and remains content with that. I should have the same attitude about my very limited and restricted crossdressing.

As you might imagine, after the thrill of going out, this was a serious blow. In a sense, I had this strange premonition that this would be a one-of-a-kind experience. I didn’t even talk much to my CD friends about it — I was expecting something of the sort to happen, but not at this level: I was just fearing a postponement of the next time out. What my wife sort of hinted at was far more overwhelming: stop thinking so much about your dreams of crossdressing. Face reality: you will never be more than what you are now. Be content with what you have. Forget about your dreams, as I (my wife, that is) have forgotten about mine.

That was a hard pill to swallow. Now, on a previous article, I mentioned that some wives might be very tolerant and even slightly encouraging while their CD hubbies remain at home. Since then, I’ve seen a lot of similar reports from other CDs. Many report that, at some point, their wives have pretty much the same conversation — the arguments might vary; my wife is extremely rational, while other CD wives might be more emotional about it — and put a stop to the “going out silliness”. All seem to reason in pretty much the same way as my wife did: if you start going out, when will it stop? What is the limit? So they enforce the limit: stay at home.

In my case, there was even a second limit to be imposed: stay at home, don’t chat with your CD friends. Then perhaps crossdressing loses a bit of its “positive” image. Being bored when crossdressed should show you that it’s the same as being bored in male clothes. That was the second blow.

Needless to say, this evoked a feeling of deep frustration. While you all know how patient I can be — waiting years and years for my wife’s agreement on CD-related things — there was always a certain amount of hope and expectation: maybe next year she’s more willing to let me out; maybe in five years I might be allowed to travel crossdressed, etc. My own plans for this year were to try at least to get some therapy from a professional. After this discussion, I feel that need even more, although I also fear what the therapist might say — you see, these days the current fashion in therapy is to “build up a stronger self” (which runs contrary to my own Buddhist practice), and a therapist might turn me against my own wife, and that cannot work well (some CD friends already have warned me about that). As my wife so well put it: “I don’t want to be seen as someone evil which prevents you from having fun. Instead, I wish you to observe your thoughts and feelings well, and realise how stupid your own expectations are.”

Again, this has a ring of rightness. But on the other hand, I suddenly realised I lost my last drive in life.

I will have to step back a bit again.

When I was a teenager, I had this idea that I wished to work on computer science research. But my experiences on a State-funded research lab weren’t the best, so I dropped that “dream”. Shortly thereafter I started my first experiences with crossdressing — and got my first information about crossdressing on the Internet too. I sort of justified it because I had a very confusing relationship with my former girl-friend. She sort of hinted that I should risk a bit more instead of sitting all the time in a research lab, and somehow this would make me more “worthy” in her eyes. So I followed her recommendations, left the lab, and built an Internet start-up from scratch. This was a few years before the dot-com bubble, so it was actually very successful. Sadly, this also meant working insane hours, and, after a while, my girlfriend left me, because I simply couldn’t keep up with my appointments with her…

This was truly a turning point in my life (even though it was later wasted…). I decided back then that I wanted to be a millionnaire before I was 30 years old. I didn’t want to become a billionnaire — I have no greed — but just having enough to be able to enjoy the rest of my life without having to work (the perfect dream of a lazy person!). But by that time, I had a secondary goal — one that nobody suspected. If I could afford to live just from interest in the bank — and I’m frugal; I could certainly have an enjoyable living with just half a million in the bank, it would be enough! — then I could also eventually transition in safety, not needing a job to sustain myself, and thus avoiding the terrible dilemma that every transgendered person has to face when trying to live in a workplace which is intolerant of transgendered people.

So, unencumbered by a girlfriend, I did really work hard for a few years. And I did make close to a million dollars — not before I was 30, I was actually already 31 at that time. My plan seemed to be working! The only “gotcha” was that in the mean time I was already dating my wife, and we already spent all the time together. I was not keen in getting legally married, so I actually bought just a tiny bachelor apartment, because I didn’t expect our relationship to last long (at that time, I put little trust in “relationships”). I didn’t know anyone in this town where I bought the apartment, so it would also be a “safe” place for my crossdressing sessions.

A lot went wrong after that: The dot-com bubble crashed, and with it the financial system collapsed; I believe it was even worse than the current crisis we’re going through — at least it was for me — the difference being that the media shrugged it off as being “something affecting only the computer industry”. In reality, for me, it meant that all my money in the banks disappeared in less than a year — literally it vaporised! Just one of my banks lost 100,000 (!) customers over a year, as their money all disappeared. How? It’s way too complex to explain here and requires a detailed explanation of the devious and tricky ways banks have to screw their customers… The point being, after a few years, not only I lost everything — money, cars, even my home — but I had accumulated an insane amount of debts and was being stalked by petty criminals who couldn’t believe I had lost all the money and attempted extorsion (threatening me and my wife); I had to leave for half a year and let the police do their work. (I wasn’t much lucky, though; all the police managed to do was to scare them off, but since they very likely left the country and never bothered me again, it pretty much amounts to the same thing.)

Well, I didn’t give up easily; after a while, I was determined to “raise from the ashes” and build up everything from scratch. It would take longer — I was not as young as when I was 24-25, I had less energy, and the opportunities in the post-9/11 world were much more scarce than before. Then this current crisis hit at full force, and I pretty much resigned myself to forget all my dreams of becoming a millionnaire again merely by working hard. The economy never recovered enough after 9/11 and the dot-com crash, and this second crash was too overwhelming for an economy that was barely recovering. So I have pretty much abandoned that plan; now my only “plan” is to survive at minimum wages — enough to eat, have clean clothing, take a bath every day, and get access to the Internet. Ironically, adjusting for inflation, I earn now the same I did back as a junior researcher in 1995 — but now I have to sustain myself and my wife (who is too ill to work), plus pay huge debts, as opposed to living with my parents with no financial worries.

There was just one thing left on my plans for this current life: build up on my crossdressing, eventually considering transition at some point. The problem is that, unlike in the pre-9/11 days, now I have no money to sustain myself, except through work — and there are no jobs for transgendered people. Also, back then I had more than enough for all kinds of plastic surgery, if the need arose. I could buy a new house in a completely different city if I needed to. I had no problems in buying clothes to stock up a female wardrobe from scratch. So, back then, I was all set up for the “transition scenario”, if I truly wished to go ahead; even if I had to move away from everybody and everything, and could even afford to hire someone to buy groceries for me if I wouldn’t be able to go to a supermarket (due to ostracism). Alas, all that is just the past, which doesn’t exist any longer, and it’s pointless to dwell in the past, hoping for a future that will never be.

So, sure, I still stuck to crossdressing as my “last plan”. But for me, time is running out. When I was 25-30, I would look great as a woman with enough cosmetic surgery. 15 years later, I need a lot more surgery. In another 10 years, no amount of surgery will be able to make me look good enough — and afterwards, as my body declines in vigour and looks, I will just be able to enjoy “life as an old lady”. That’s not terrible in itself, but it will mean moving away from elegant dresses with a lot of cleavage to show and dress in more “sensible” clothing with uninteresting dressing styles. As my wife remarked, after a certain age, there is simply no fun any more; the advantage is that, as you get older and older, males and female tend to become less distinguished in their appearance, so having the proper hairstyle and clothing is pretty much the only difference — there is less need for surgery with advanced age. Still, I guess you get my point: after a certain age, the urge to crossdress and feel female will be offset with the inability to attain a “perfect” image.

All of a sudden, thanks to all this, I sort of lost my purpose in this life.

Oh, don’t read me wrong; I’m not at the lowest levels of depression and considering suicide I’m not even “depressed” in the usual sense. Disappointed, sure; sad, yes; but not more than that. I finally realised that we truly don’t live much time, and that all our available time disappears in an instant. And for me, that time seems to be over: there is little else that I can do in this life to be part of my “plans”, whatever they are. The least I can accomplish, for now, is to somehow be able to help others to lead better lives — I’m training for that as well — and this will definitely make my life worthwhile, if I can teach at least one person to be happy, and hope that they, in turn, will be able to use their time much better than I did to teach many others to be happy as well.

In a sense, it’s a strange feeling. But when one’s ultimate hopes and expectations get finally discarded, somehow life seems not to be so “stressy”. I can appreciate the little things much better. Without having a “plan” it also means that I won’t get frustrated or anxious because “things are not running according to my plan”; in fact, it seems that I have much more “freedom” than before, just because I don’t feel “conditioned” any longer — I just happily trod along, without fear of “failing”, but without needless hopes of “achieving” anything.

In the mean time, of course I will enjoy to continue to crossdress. I also look forward to be able to go out more, even if it requires a lot of grovelling in front of my wife. I even came up with a very devious trick. If my wife is so frustrated because she will never be able to visit the Italian cities she so much craves, and if I wish to stay a few days in a place where nobody knows me so that I can enjoy my crossdressing in peace — why not combine both? Thanks to some ads I’ve been selling on a few blogs I maintain, I have a little stashed away for emergencies. It’s not unreasonable to believe that I might be able to get enough, in a few months, to afford a trip to Italy. I’ve researched some of the cities that my wife would love to see, and there are LGBT-friendly hotels there (not many, but a few). All it takes is some recommendations from local groups — I wish to avoid going into a “rowdy” hotel where people are just there for a one-night stand having wild sex — but it’s definitely feasible. This shall be my next, small goal.

So instead of thinking about grandiose plans — like how to plan for transition! — I’m sticking to these very small goals. First of all, getting more comfortable in driving crossdressed. Maybe get authorisation from my wife to join a CD going-out night. Experiment with a trip to Italy and remain crossdressed in plain daylight for a few days, to see how I react to being laughed at in public. Desperately try to find further sources of income, because I need to get a new corset (the ones I bought more recently do not properly fit my long torso; and the old one, which I bought almost a decade ago, is literally ripping apart at the seams, and I’ve lost weight and it’s already getting too large — my waist is now slimmer than it was a decade ago!). The unexpected waist slimming also means that a lot of my dresses need the attention of a seamstress — specially my old faux fur coat, which is now some 2 or 3 sizes too large for me! I also need a pair or two of new shoes, some brown boots (I have a lot of brown clothes…), and possibly a few more basics and… well, you get the picture. All small things for getting a more passable image.

Then I really need to talk to a psychologist who is a specialist in gender issues. I’m not sure what exactly will happen after that, and most likely I won’t just take a single opinion, but listen to what two or three specialists have to say. The approach will be slightly different from what I had in mind: probably putting more the focus on dealing with the issue that I will never transition, instead of looking at the possibilities of eventually transitioning. Depending on what the response is, this might involve some hormonal treatments — I have read cases of crossdressers who were in similar situations than mine (i.e. unable to transition) and the hormonal treatment just diminished their “urge” to crossdress or even to think about it, by giving their bodies a slightly less masculine appearance, which would be enough for them to feel much better with themselves, but still present themselves as males in public. This might be a possibility. I regret not being able to get nice D cup implants in the future — there is no way to hide that  under male clothes! — but it would be fun to have natural B-sized cups, which would be unnoticeable without a push-up bra, and I think that these are attainable with some hormones (I have enough breast tissue to classify as [small] A cup already; this is normal, it comes with age…). I would have to avoid the beach, of course, but I’m not a beach person anyway. So this is also a possibility.

At that stage, I would also probably “reveal” myself to some selected members of my family and friends, although I have not many options. Both my wife and myself agree that her mother might be tolerant; I’m thinking about the best way to approach this, because one plan — if my mother-in-law agrees — would simply to go out to the regular family dinner on Saturday evenings as Sandra. As said, these dinners are almost always restricted to just us three (very rarely, we get a few friends as well — sadly of the most intolerant kind, they’re right-wing extremists, and one of them a pious Catholic), so it would be a safe environment and add for variety. My wife just said that the decision would have to be mine. That requires a lot of thinking on how to deal with that, but it’s a good first step. Sadly, among the rest of my friends, few are tolerant persons, and it’s even worse on my side of my family: there are no friendships with LGBT people there. Strangely enough, nobody even has gay friends, so it’s a whole world that they simply  never got in touch with. (The only gay person I actually know is an old friend from my wife and her sister, and he’s absolutely accepted — they have been friends for decades, and his revealed homossexuality didn’t interfere with the relationship. But that’s the sole exception. On my own family’s side, as well as on the list of my friends, nobody has any contact with anyone remotely homossexual or bisexual…)

Small steps. Forgetting about the “grand picture”. No more hopes, no more expectations. No more “life plan” for me. No more dreams about the future, no more planning for a better future, just taking things along as they come, and be content with the little I get. That’s what I have to face now. It’s tough, but it’s all for the best!

Lucille Sorella has an interesting article for the “New Year Resolutions”. She suggests that we don’t think of “resolutions” but more as “intentions”, since in many cases, we will fail those resolutions and then become frustrated. Whereas by “intentions” we might achieve some success and thus gain a bit more of self-confidence. I think I last published my last list of “resolutions” back in 2008, and was not very successful — some of the things I “decided” upon only happened in 2010 or so. Some of the “resolutions” on that list were actually planned for 2010… or 2012… like remaining a whole month as Sandra. But this becomes less and less likely as time passes: last year, I’d have settled for just a week. Then just for a few days. Now I just pine for going out…

You all know that my wife strictly forbids me from going out alone, because it causes her intense anxiety. I’ve very reluctantly accepted to patiently wait until she felt a bit better about it, and bring her with me the next time I drove round as Sandra, but she keeps postponing the experience. Every other week, some fellow CD tells me about an event or just invites me out, and I keep being denied. Two years ago, I was granted the promise to go out during Carnival (our local equivalent of Mardi Gras, and since it’s during deep winter, unlike in Brazil, it means wearing a lot of clothes ), but I’ve checked the calendar, and Carnival is almost always on top of the Tibetan New Year, which we’re otherwise busy, and there is no time for crossdressing. So this means that the most likely time to be allowed to go out is — never.

I admit that in the past few months, the last thing I do before the long ritual of undressing is just to wear my faux fur coat, pack the handbag, and pretend to go out. My wife, by then, is fast asleep. So I just enjoy the adrenaline rush from imagining that I could actually go out while she’s sleeping. By then she usually coughs in her sleep, or moves in the bed, and this is a clear sign that she’s probably not that fast asleep, and that I should forget all about it — so I just put the coat back in the closet and start undressing.

Well, during my last session — the first in 2012! — I couldn’t resist any longer. My wife was really deep asleep. It was a Thursday, when there is pretty much nobody awake after 2 AM. The clanking of the dishwasher covered most noises anyway, and when my wife is asleep, she doesn’t wake up that easily with the barely perceptive noise of opening the apartment door (although even the slightest metallic grinding from the lock seems unusually loud to my ears!). So, in an impulse, I called the lift, and stepped on it, and there I was, back to the street

Of course I felt horrible about it; I was breaking a promise to my wife, and I truly hate to do that. Even the “justification” that she has been breaking her own promises for the past seven years is not valid. I’m supposed to keep to my promises to build up the trust she has in me, and, through that, get her to accept my need of going out.

So instead of my usual drive — sometimes walking around for a bit — I didn’t even do that. I just had a smoke in front of the building, enjoyed the cold January breeze in the night, and went back home again. It was perhaps not even ten minutes.

But of course it was exhilarating! When you’ve been postponing going out for so long, even ten minutes of walking around just in front of the building, listening to the high heels of my boots on the cobbled stones, was more than enough to utterly enjoy the adrenalin rush. The coat I wore  is a bit too thick and hides the feminine curves, so I would be picked out far more easily that way if there was anyone around (I use a belt on top of the coat to get at least a visible waist line!). But, well, it’s very elegant. Overdressing for sure!

Back at home, I sighed, and got through my undressing routine again. My wife never woke up. And this naturally creates a dilemma. Doing it once is worse than never doing it: besides dealing with the remorse, there is also another point which becomes complicated. The more you do something, the easier it becomes, and breaking the trust that my wife put in me — even though she doesn’t suspect anything — will become easier and easier.

And one day she will be not so deep asleep, but I will not notice it, and she will wake up and see me gone. All Hell will break lose! Worse than that: all these seven years patiently waiting for her approval will be wasted.

In one single instant, you can destroy the whole relationship on trust. Oh, I’m sure we wouldn’t actually break apart, but she would never trust me again with simple promises, and this would be all my fault. All that for just 10 minutes of adrenalin rush? It’s not worth it.

So for 2012 I will just stick with one “intention”: the intention to make her see that her reluctance in letting me go out, with or without her (that’s irrelevant for me, I always enjoy the pleasure of her company), even though I fully understand her anxiety, also creates a similar “anxiety” in me. It’s different from hers. It’s more frustration than anxiety, and a deep feeling of profound sadness. It’s suffering, however I look at it. I can deal with it — I have done so for many years — but it’s not easy, and I’m by far not a perfect person. I know now that the urge can be so overwhelmingly powerful to go beyond my own self-set constraints. Perhaps, in a sense, I got a taste of how it feels “cheating your wife” — granted, I did crossdress and I did go out (albeit very rarely) many years before I have revealed myself to her — and I was not happy afterwards. Still, I got my lesson: uncontrolled urges can break promises easily.

But my subconscious mind dwelt upon this for a while. Just yesterday I had a bit of an unusual dream. I mean, most dreams I remember are actually almost always nightmares, with very few exceptions; since I was a kid that I always had nightmares, and, after having enough of them, I just don’t care much more about what I dream about They’re usually related to things I hate to do, like studying for exams or being late for an appointment.

On this dream, however, things were quite different. I dreamed I had been given permission by my wife to make a trip by train, crossdressed. I remember wearing my long hair wig and a white tailleur (not quite like the one from Dior on the picture; the skirt was shorter, and I was wearing a cream handbag), driving to the train station and buying a ticket for Oporto, 300 km away from my own home city and the second largest city in Portugal — it’s known for having some of the best-dressed women in the country, and I also have a few CD friends from there, whom I wished to visit at some point.

What was interesting about the dream was that it was relatively realistic. Usually I dream more of “being a woman” and the dreams are just plain fantasies. In this one, I distinctly remembered that I was crossdressed and not looking specially passable, specially at daylight, but I wasn’t uncomfortable. Most people either didn’t care much — they surely picked me up every time — but they weren’t downright pleasant — except for a ticket seller on the trip back, who clearly was being extra nasty with confusing ticket options because he was intolerant against CDs. When arriving at the destination, I went shopping in small boutiques on side-streets (something I actually do in reality, when I’m on my own, even if not dressed, when I have some spare time — I don’t care much if people find it strange that I’m looking through the women’s collections; I’m a customer like any other! — and the truth is, nobody truly cares much these days). I remember dreaming of sitting down at one or two cafés, calling up my wife telling her that all was going well, trying to catch up with my CD friends there, and so forth. Again, during all that time, I was pretty sure that most people were picking me up, but I was quite indifferent — I was enjoying myself, I was feeling great being dressed, and I was definitely feeling great for doing so. Then I remember that the return trip was a bit more chaotic. This actually happens me almost every other time on my return trips from Oporto — I keep missing trains, picking up the wrong schedule, missing connections, and so forth. I have more stories about failed return trips from Oporto than stories about going out crossdressed so I’m sure my mind played some tricks and mixed both things together in the dream, where I got in the wrong train, then had to switch at a junction, got in touch with a nasty ticket seller (as said), but eventually got into a train back home. There was not really “stress” when doing so, just annoyance: in fact, that’s exactly how I feel in reality as well, after being so used to missing trains and airplanes. In the dream, there were some short attempts to conversations with the neighbours in the many trains, mostly complaining about conflicting schedules and misinformation (which actually is not that close to reality… the Portuguese train system, surprisingly, works rather well). In some cases, the conversation stopped when the person picked me up as a crossdresser and was somehow bothered; on other cases, even if they picked me up, they just continued with the conversation, looking beyond the dress and the gender, and just pretending to ignore it. There was also a moment at one station where I hesitated before deciding on the toilet, but finally went into the ladies’ toilet. I should explain that in my country people are not so obsessive about toilets than what I read about in the US. Many toilets in relatively small offices — if not all — are used by both sexes (like on an airplane or train, after all). Some universities, using buildings originally built for different purposes (like old army barracks), have toilets being used by the thousands of students and teachers, no matter what their gender is. In the early 1990s, it was still a bit uncommon to go to a bar or a club with single-sex toilets, but these days, even old-fashioned restaurants might just have a single set of toilets for both genders. Of course, in all these cases, it means there is privacy during the actual use of the toilet, but the wash basin might be common.

When I woke up, I found this whole dream a bit unusual. I usually dream all the time of being female, that’s not an issue. This was one of the much more rare dreams where I was conscious of being dressed as a woman but not truly “passing”. I cannot, in retrospective, remember if I dreamed of being already through transition, or actually at the end of transition; the dream is far too vague in my memory for that. What counts is that I was aware that I didn’t pass. And what was important is that I truly didn’t care. I looked smart and elegant in the white tailleur — business-like and professional — and wasn’t “dressing to shock people”. With a long-haired wig and sunglasses I definitely didn’t draw much attention, except for my height, but I didn’t look un-womanlike. It’s just that I simply didn’t pass. What was interesting was that most people didn’t really care much. Some might never have noticed anything; some might have noticed, felt uncomfortable about it, but didn’t make a fuss. Some even smiled and tried to be gentle and nice. And all through that experience I was pretty much indifferent to what people said, thought, or even how they looked at me; I was very comfortable in being dressed like that and full of self-confidence.

Now, I don’t believe in “visions” or things like that, but the dream showed me an “alternate reality”. This, I thought, would be very close to my life if my wife just allowed me to go out. While I’m always excited when dressing, and feel the adrenaline rush very intensively in those rare occasions when I go out, after a short while, it becomes natural for me, and I’m very comfortable with it. Incidentally, this is one of the many reasons why my wife actually gets even more anxious: she’s a bit indifferent when I’m crossdressing at home, but, because I get this adrenaline rush while dressing up, in the first minutes when I finally return from the bathroom and sit down in front of the computer, I’m still jittery and nervous: my fingers tremble, I drop small things, my gestures are awkward. She notices that very clearly. Then, after a cigarette or two, the adrenaline rush goes away and I’m just enjoying comfortably what I’m wearing and how I’m behaving. It’s just during those moments that the nervousness — driven by adrenaline — manifests itself. But my wife reads that as “being clumsy and prone to make mistakes”, and this makes her more anxious when imagining that I might be out driving and having car accidents because of that.

What actually happens is that the adrenaline rush hits me before I walk out of the door. It stays for ten, fifteen minutes. It might get triggered again when I start the car, but, again, it subsides after a while (I just have to be careful while under the influence of the adrenaline). On those occasions where I stopped the car and walked a bit on the sidewalk, I obviously got a new rush, but then it went away and I was walking more relaxed. This is natural! Adrenaline rushes don’t last long (they tax your organism, after all) and then you can either feel comfortable or uncomfortable afterwards, but you’re “back in control” once more.

This is pretty much what my dream was telling me. I can very positively imagine that the first time I go out in plain daylight, I might be very nervous about all those people looking at me, many of them probably laughing, and just thinking of that might trigger the adrenaline rush — but after a while, I’ll be ignoring it, and just feeling comfortable with myself, and pretty much don’t caring about what people think and enjoy the whole experience. Now this is something I cannot explain to someone who is naturally anxious and every little thing will trigger even more anxiety on top of an already anxious mind, like my wife. It has to be horrible to live like that, day by day!

And it was because I think a lot about how my wife feels constantly — that never-ending adrenaline rush which makes her feel so uncomfortable — and try to understand what she’s experiencing, all the time, that I’m so reluctant to be more pressing about her allowing me to go out. If I’m aware of the sheer intensity of my urges, desires, and anxieties, but know they’ll pass eventually, just leaving me feeling very comfortable about the whole experience, how does a person feel whose feelings of anxiety will never subside (except with medication, and that can only be taken to a certain degree)? I simply cannot fully understand that. It seems very close to living in a permanent nightmare, and must be horrible!

When I wake up from nightmares, I’m aware it didn’t take long — it just seemed that way. When experiencing terrible things, which certainly happened in my past, I’m aware that they will not last “forever”. So I have a more relaxed attitude towards life. Even the urge to go out fades now and then; it’s not something that remains at the peak of intensity all the time. It’s clear that on all those past nights, when I wore my coat, and waited to listen to my wife’s regular breathing during her sleep, I was actually feeling the full force of my desire to go out for a bit. It’s always an incredibly strong sensation; the heart starts pumping like crazy, my breathing gets shallow, I tremble with excitement, I might even get a cold sweat — all those are symptoms of the self-induced adrenaline rush. It’s exciting because it’s something I can trigger just by thinking about it. It is, in fact, so exciting that it comes close to an orgasm — that’s why crossdressing, on top of everything, is also a fetishism: it triggers very powerful emotions.

But I know it will fade away. When I give up and put the coat away, almost instantly my mind switches — I know I’m not going out — and the whole body relaxes and gets back to normal. During most of the time in the day, I’m not constantly thinking about crossdressing — just when I’m really in the mood for it. When I’m crossdressed, I’m not constantly thinking about how wonderful it would be to go out. What I’m mostly thinking is that this urge, this desire, will also fade — nothing lasts forever — so why give it such importance? Of course, under a spectacular burst of urge to go out, and under the right conditions — like last Thursday — I truly lose control and just go with my emotions. I’m not exactly happy about that, since I’m supposed to be training to keep my emotions in check and not let them influence my rational decisions, but, on the other hand, this just gives me a bit more humbleness: after all, in spite of having this positive self-image of myself, I’m actually not so good as I thought at controlling my emotions and keeping them in check. Under the right circumstances, I still lose control.

This is perhaps what worried me much. On one side, of course, I’m not happy about the whole situation. My wife’s anxiety is not rational and because of that, I have to suffer, which seems unfair. But what I learned was that the reverse is also true. My urge to go out is anything but rational, either. It’s triggered by the most irrational bits of my mind. So how can I shift the blame to my wife for being irrational about my going out, if I’m irrational about it as well? I’m not better than her! Perhaps I’m even worse, because I usually remain in control for longer, and am fully aware that this compulsion to go out is just triggered by my desire — something I can switch on and off, given some training, and it becomes easy with enough training. By contrast, my wife’s anxiety is a clinical condition — she can do little about it. Medication helps, and her mind training also eases the anxiety a bit, but, ultimately, this is very deeply ingrained in her genetic disposition, and, as such, close-to-impossible to shake off. Why should I be angry or sad about that? She cannot change the way she is by sheer willpower — she would do it if she could, and she’s really training hard to do so. Perhaps it’s time to use her as an example and try to use my own willpower to keep myself better in check.

But it’s so hard to do!…

All dressed up and nowhere to go

Also I have to consider the people I know. Some of them know that they’re crossdressers for many, many years, but are completely unable to dress — either because they don’t dare to tell their families (many might even have started a family to “forget” about crossdressing, which obviously won’t work, but they realised it too late…) or even though they have told their Significant Other about their urges, they’re strictly forbidden of doing so. This, of course, is a much more serious burden to place on anyone who feels they’re crossdressers. Just the last Sunday I found someone on MSN who is completely destitute, lives with the sister and the brother-in-law and has no means of getting a job, or of studying to improve their chances to get a job, and is a crossdresser with a strong urge which cannot ever be fullfilled. Since that person works at the same place as the sister and the brother-in-law, it means spending all the time together — at work, at home, during vacations — and not having a single moment for themselves. How can such a person possibly ever deal with the urge of crossdressing, specially if “revelation” is not a choice?

Under these circumstances, it would be more than natural to expect that people like that would be very frustrated and that, in turn, would lead to depression. Another friend of mine, who is currently under transition, had a long history of depression for many reasons; she revealed herself to her wife, who forbade her to crossdress. This just aggravated her condition — and her relationship — to the point of getting a divorce (both were very religious and were not keen on that solution, even though at the end there was no other choice). She immediately started her transition afterwards, and due to her clinical past of so many depressions, she was swiftly passed through all successive stages in record speed, and is now ready to begin her real life test: her doctors believe that refusing her the swiftest transition might aggravate her depression levels. Things are linked together, and it’s the doctors belief that by dealing with one thing — transition — will deal with the depression as well.

I’m sure you can add a lot of similar examples, more or less drastic, where the two things are tightly related. So tightly, in fact, that I’ve already written a previous article on that: in some cases, the urge to crossdress might come from a wish to deal with a depression, but the individual is not truly a crossdresser — just someone with a depression — and careful testing should be done by a professional therapist to separate both issues.

The problem here is that it’s a very difficult condition to diagnose, and one that requires a lot of symptoms to be present to be diagnosed at such. It’s not just “being sad all the time”, for one reason or the other. Many people might not feel actually sad at all, but nevertheless be depressed, sometimes without even the slightest idea that they are depressed. And often this state of mind doesn’t last long enough to be qualified as depression at all: we all feel some of the symptoms — like lack of interest in certain activities, tiredness, inability to make decisions, etc. — some of the time, and then revert back to “normality”. This is technically not a “depression” at all, just a way of our organism (and the mind) to react to a certain temporary condition, which might simply go away, and we “come out of depression” on our own: healthy individuals will do this automatically.

I remember saying a few years ago that I found it very hard to be “sad all the time” and thus it was easy for me never to feel “depressed”. I’m deliberately putting that between quotation marks, because I still made the mistake of equating “depression” with “feeling sad”, which is just one of the symptoms, albeit the most popular one. In fact, in May/June 2004, due to a series of terrible circumstances in my own life, and being stalked by some petty criminals who were blackmailing and extorting me, for about two weeks I found myself completely unable to make a single decision. I was sort of apathetic, not really feeling sad, but unable to make any kind of decision. It seemed to me that my brain had stopped reacting and I didn’t even know what was best for me. There was bafflement and the sensation that things were not real, or that I simply was unable to cope with reality — I swinged between both perceptions and couldn’t get a fix on either. At some point, however, someone made the decision for me — “we have to leave our home” — and then, all by itself, this strange state of mind, which I had never experienced before, simply disappeared, and I literally “snapped out of it” and went on with my life.

Now I had seen a lot of depressed people who were just crying and crying, feeling sad at all the time, and unable to do anything because they just felt like crying… and that’s what I thought that depression was. As a matter of fact it’s just one form of depression. Apathy and the inability to make decisions, even if there is no actual feeling of sadness, are other signs of depression. So in retrospective I think now that those two weeks were the only ones where I actually felt something close to a depression, which remained undiagnosed, because it was not something permanent: it simply faded away as soon as someone made a decision for me and put me in the right track.

Fast-forward to the present day. Life goes on, and life goes relatively well, with its ups and downs. Some projects I’ve worked on did succeed, most failed; some months I was clueless about where to get money to sustain me from another month, just to get a new assignment after a few days which would last for half a year, and something else would come up. My wife, who is chronically ill, came close to get surgery “by mistake” just to be rescued by a better diagnosis, and some treatments started finally to work for her and restore her to a semblance of normality. Except for a brief period in late 2004, we’re now financially at the lowest point ever, but since we now get the money regularly, it feels as if we’re actually much better off than ever before — we just learned to cope with reality. Life is not just money and health, and it goes on just as before — in some cases, having more free time to enjoy is actually nice for a change So during all those years I never gave much thought to my own mood, I was far more worried with my own wife’s health and condition.

In the past few weeks, however, as my wife’s condition seems to be stabilising (not really getting better but at least becoming predictable in some way), I turned my thoughts to my own self and the relation with my own moods. In general, I’m always a happy person, in the sense that I don’t bear a grudge to nobody, don’t truly feel that “external conditions” are somehow preventing me from continuing to be happy, and pretty much accept that, while those external conditions are not under my own control — and thus it’s silly to get angry or frustrated at them — my own mind and my feelings are definitely totally under my control, and thus I depend exclusively upon myself to be happy (or not). Putting the blame elsewhere will simply not work. Blaming myself is not really a good expression: what I try to see is that most of those “problems” are just the way I look at things and label them as “obstacles”, but the person doing those labels is just myself. So that’s easy to fix. For instance, I might get “angry” or “frustrated” (like on my previous article) about not crossdressing enough, but the major reason is that m own mind links “frustration” to “lack of crossdressing time”. If I can just realise that for what it is, I won’t be frustrated. “Time for crossdressing” is beyond my control — so why bother and get frustrated? If it were under my control, I would take advantage of it, and be happy all the time. Since it isn’t, it’s worthless to worry too much about something beyond my control. So, in general, this made me deal with the frustration to a reasonable, tolerable, acceptable degree.

I would be lying, though, if I said that it’s easy to do. In fact, what I’ve noticed in the past few weeks was a growing sense of apathy and indecision — which then leads to laziness. And this is a bit uncommon for me; I’m the kind of girl who is always doing a gazillion things and complaining of not having enough time for anything! But recently, the reverse seems to be happening. Or rather: what happens is that a lot of circumstances, all beyond my control, push me here and there, like leaves on the wind, leaving little actual time for “myself” to do what I need to do in my work. And when that finally happens, I feel exhausted, tired, and unfocused, thus avoiding to work — writing blog posts, for example, instead of going through my research, which is allegedly what I should be doing. Then, of course, work gets postponed, and this means that on the next day, I have twice the work to do than the day before. But on that day new things would happen preventing me to find enough time to deal with that, so the pattern repeated itself: until I dealt with everything, I would become immensely tired and unable to do the regular amount of work, much less twice — so I started to drop things and give up any pretense of being able to deal with them. And on top of all that, when finally I got a day with plenty of time and no interruptions, what would I do? Crossdress, because that’s what I always do when I finally have the chance to thoroughly enjoy it for a long stretch of time! While sometimes I would work crossdressed — some of my friends complaining that I looked “too serious” on the webcam and wasn’t paying attention — the truth is that those days were exceptional cases: usually, when crossdressing, I’m not truly thinking about “work” and just about enjoyment.

So of course the mind starts playing tricks. On a daily base, my very confusing schedule leaves me numb, bewildered, flabbergasted, unable to decide much, unable to get anything done, and incredibly tired. Those are not “my best days”, and I label them as such, and store them in my memory. Exceptionally I would be able to crossdress, and since that was what I always dream of doing, those days would obviously be filed as “a good, happy day”. Naturally, since we all strive to have “good, happy days” most of the time, this meant that I would be craving more and more for those rare crossdressing days, and pretty much cope with, as best as possible, with the non-crossdressing ones. This cycle repeats itself and enhances my habitual tendencies: more and more I would label the non-crossdressing days as “worthless” (in the sense that they wouldn’t truly matter) and only look forward to those scattered crossdressing days. In fact, it might feel shocking to some of you, but I’m looking forward much more to my next crossdressing session than to Christmas Eve or the New Year party or whatever else. Besides my spiritual training, which still has the highest priority in my life, crossdressing comes so high as a second priority that it overwhelms everything below it: it simply lost all significance.

When that started to happen, I believe I began to look at myself quite differently. Up to know, I considered myself to be a complex person with lots of roles that I would play according to the environment and society I was in. Crossdressing was just another one — a very important one, of course, since the urge to crossdress (like an ex-smoker’s continuing craving for tobacco, even years after giving up smoking) is always there. But now my mind has subtly changed. Now what I feel is that I’m a crossdresser who is being prevented, by circumstances beyond my control, to crossdress most of the time. It’s not that “crossdressing” is my only source of happiness — but it’s a guaranteed one. Even if I’m very tired and my feet are hurting from wearing heels, or the corset and bra are starting to chaff and get itchy, or the wig’s getting too burdensome, it still feels wonderful all the time, because, well, that’s what I truly feel to be “in tune” with what I truly like to do. But by contrast it means that I started, more and more, to lose interest in pretty much everything else: work, family, friends. Those are only external things that take up my valuable time which leaves me little left for crossdressing. Now this is a tremendously egoistic attitude, so, in truth, I still view them as important: work is what keeps me alive with food and warmth — and clothes — so that I can occasionally crossdress. Family is mostly who brought me into this life, and if my parents didn’t have me, I couldn’t enjoy crossdressing — so I naturally feel towards them an overwhelming sense of gratitude. My wife is who is always there for me to help me across the time when I’m not crossdressing and makes everything look so wonderful just because she’s part of it. And friends, of course, provide companionship, a way to discuss things together, exchange ideas and insights, share whatever good moments we have together, but also provide help in the bad moments, and so forth. They also provide me objects of study and of inspiration: why do they feel unhappy? Can I do something to help them out? Can I learn from the way they have tackled with their own issues and apply their solutions to my own issues?

But more and more I feel in a sense a bit “disconnected”. Most people I know define themselves as the “family they built”, as the “career” they created through hard work, as the “opinions” they have (and have made known), and eventually, on the more materialistic side of things, “the things they own”. More cerebral types will lean more towards the opinions they have, more materialistic ones towards the career and the objects they’ve bought, but, in general, for most people I know, the activity they do on their daily routines is how they define themselves. Most, unfortunately, are not truly satisfied with that; some might even be unhappy but pretend otherwise; a few feel somehow accomplished in spite of everything, but still strive for more recognition, a bigger family, or more ownership of pretty things. For me, however, all these are merely distractions — we have to endure them in this life because it’s expected of us, it’s thanks to those things that we have a relatively sane society, but they’re not important in themselves.

For me, the only thing that seems to be important in itself, besides a deeper studying of how my mind works — because that’s the only way to find permanent happiness, by changing my own mind to deal with everything — is to be crossdressed. Strangely enough, that’s how I define myself. At the core of my being, my self-accomplishment comes first by crossdressing, and only in a very minor secondary way through everything else — career, opinions, family, friends, and so forth.

This is a strange feeling, because it makes me neglect most of what usually is called “mundane activity”. If a career is secondary, because ultimately it won’t lead to any permanent happiness (jobs come and go, money is lost to ever-increasing taxes and creeps that cheat me out of it, so why worry so much about all those circumstances beyond my control?), it means that I don’t take my work so seriously, and, naturally, I’m not as eager to work as before. But this, of course, is no solution: it just means work piles up and people get more angry, and I might have to sacrifice crossdressing days in order to work more. This is the kind of thing that can indeed lead to some of the lesser-known characteristics of depression: a certain apathy and lack of decision regarding things that suddenly are becoming less and less important; and a craving towards something else — in my case, crossdressing — which becomes so overwhelmingly important that it eclipses everything else. When that happens, it means that the urge to crossdress becomes all-pervading. I not only dream of crossdressing, I daydream of crossdressing. My agenda (not the written one, but the one I have in my mind), instead of having meetings, holidays, and time to enjoy with friends & family, is a succession of crossdressing days and non-crossdressing days. I crave for those crossdressing days like most “normal” people crave for the weekends, the public holidays, or their vacations, and set their goals by those: crossdressing is a holiday for me, and the only kind of holiday that really matters.

While the urge and craving is “natural” for a crossdresser — we cannot change that, it’s how we are — the apathy and lack of decision that follows between crossdressing sessions is not. These are depression symptoms. Not enough symptoms to clinically establish a depression, sure, but perhaps some early warning signs. I’m truly not sure about that, but there is obviously a solution: talking to an expert. Unfortunately, due to my attitude towards work, and my wife’s own chronic illnesses, it also means that the amount of money free to consult an expert therapist is not currently available for me. I keep postponing that because my wife’s health, and our own daily need to survive with what little money we have is a much bigger priority. Also, I’m not truly fond of most over-the-counter solutions provided by therapists in general. Feeling depressed? Take some happy pills. That’s just masking the symptoms, not dealing with the cause. The cause might simply be that I’m “more than a crossdresser”, as I’ve suspected for half a year or so, and if a therapist confirms that diagnosis, what can they do but advise transition, which is currently not an option?

Also, when thinking very deeply about that option, it becomes obvious to me that I would be just switching problems. In exchange of “living crossdressed all the time” (i.e. become a woman), I would then need to deal with a huge lot of new problems which I don’t have right now, namely, the inability to sustain myself through my own work, since transsexuals  have little or no opportunity of getting a job. So instead of struggling along, but generally surviving, I’d be starving and having few options to get some food — while having to deal every day with ostracism and anger at a transsexual. Who would sustain my wife if I were unable to do so? How would I deal with family & friends who would be no only unable to understand that “decision” but feel utterly frustrated themselves — specially my own parents, who might not be able to survive with the thought of “having done something wrong” in my education, as if that mattered? I would disappoint pretty much everybody who has been kind to me in some way, big or small. And then I would have to deal, on a daily base, with the consequences of that decision, and the new responsibility of having to deal with the blame that everyone would throw upon me, and the disappointment of so many people.

It’s such a hard choice that I obviously cannot even start to consider it seriously. But on the other hand, it also means that the whole notion of crossdressing (and transition!) sometimes becomes pointless on its own. Currently, the only person suffering from my lack of crossdressing is just me. That’s just one person to deal with, and, better still, it’s within my own power to deal with myself. If I transitioned, then a lot — and I really mean a lot! — of people would suffer, for several reasons, but I would be absolutely powerless to deal with their own suffering. I might explain in some cases, but still my family and friends would feel betrayed (at least). Some of my closest friends are even homophobic and genderphobic, and for them, the notion that they had been such close friends to a “naughty transsexual” would totally break them down. How could I possibly deal with the idea of being such a horrible person that would bring so much unhappiness to so many different people, just because, at a single moment of egoism, I decided to go ahead and do something just for myself?

There is an old Buddhist saying, from a great master, who once said: “All happiness in the world comes from thinking about others. All suffering in the world comes from thinking about ourselves.” This is not an appeal to become a mindless idiot who self-sacrifices oneself to be some sort of slave to others. Instead, it helps us to put a focus on our decisions. When choosing between an action that will only benefit us, but harm countless other people, what should be the correct choice? Why should my own unhappiness force others to become unhappy too? Isn’t it better to deal with one’s own frustrations and depressions, get rid of them — because we can! — instead of spreading out an ever-increasing circle of unhappiness to all other people? This is rather far more functional!

At least, from an intellectual and philosophical point of view — because we are so attached to our own thoughts and feelings, we tend to think precisely in the opposite way: do whatever is required to become happy, and let others find their own happiness for themselves — don’t care about them. Well, I’m trying hard to do the opposite of what is, for most people, their “natural” way of behaving. Every time I feel unable to cope with my lack of crossdressing, I start thinking about how many people would suffer (including myself!) if I crossdressed all the time (i.e. went through transition). And then it becomes more and more obvious that this is not my way to follow. Obviously I have to grudgingly and reluctantly agree with my more intellectual analysis, even though my own feelings and emotions give me a different answer.

So somehow this has to give me the strength to deal with those symptoms of apathy and inability to make decisions which might — or might not — be a prelude to a minor depression. By setting a higher standard than my own personal immediate happiness, I might find that crossdressing is, in fact, as little important as any other thing that I’ve mentioned: a career, success, glory and fame, lots of money, and so forth. It is definitely something deeply part of my mindset, as of every crossdresser, which I cannot change — but I can certainly change the way I let myself get affected by it. The so-called “easy way out” (i.e. transition) is just a delusion: a nice idea I create in my mind which lets me believe that by going ahead with such a plan, I will reach somehow a plateaux of absolute bliss and ultimate happiness, when in reality I would be just opening a Pandora’s box of new problems to deal with, some of which are way harder than the ones I deal with on a daily basis — and, on top of that, I would make lots and lots of people very, very unhappy. Thus I place the consequences of either decision on a balance and try to make a rational judgement about it. In the mean time, because I’m not yet at the stage of abandoning crossdressing as a “minor thing” in my live — exactly because it is, indeed, the most important thing in my life! — what can I do? Well, it means very likely to negotiate more crossdressing time with my wife. It means making her understand that her constant constrains put upon me (not being able to dress as much as I want, preventing me from going out, stopping me from buying more clothes, even cheap ones in sales) will only aggravate the current condition and make me believe that crossdressing is far more important than anything else in my life. I have to shake that feeling off and start concentrating back on the rest.

The good news is that I’ve managed to do so successfully for many decades Just because I seem unable to do it now doesn’t mean that I cannot do the same again; it’s always easier to do something that you have done again and again — “practice makes perfect”. I just need to recall how in most of my life so many other things were much more important to me than crossdressing, and reduce crossdressing to the same status once more.

In the mean time, I wish you all a merry season! I shall be unavailable the week after Christmas, so, for most of you, this will also be the last message of 2012. I shall be back in January!

The first lesson to learn is that the universe is not out there to conspire against you; but neither is your s.o. or family “conspiring” against you to prevent you to dress. It only appears to be so. In reality, what happens is that you will enhance the importance of crossdressing to be your utmost priority and the only thing that will give you a tiny taste of happiness, even if you recognise that it doesn’t last for long — a few hours, a day or two, a week if your’re lucky — but then the daily grind will catch up with you once more. Again, it’s not that this daily routine is “terrible” in itself: in this case, the reverse mechanism is being applied: you exaggerate how badly things are on the day-to-day, neverending routine, and wish to escape from it by crossdressing.

So the only person that thinks “crossdressing is good and makes me feel happy” and “the daily routine is terrible and only makes me suffer (while I wait at last for another opportunity to crossdress” is you. For instance, a not-too-encouraging (but tolerant) Significant Other might have the reverse view: she might love the daily routine and hate when you crossdress, because it means she cannot enjoy her routine any longer.

Obviously there are exceptions: couples where crossdressing is part of the daily routine have no such qualms. They might still be unhappy — for instance because both have to work, come home tired, and having the hubby crossdressing to enjoy a moment of wild sex might be too exhausting for both. So they can become frustrated as well. I know a few couples where the crossdressing hubby, mostly too tired during the week for any “bed activity”, just wears some female clothes and spends the rest of the evening dressed (either fully or just partially) but just goes on with the house chores and the “daily routine at home”. Sure, he’s crossdressed, even if just partially, but he’s not really fully enjoying it.

There are also degrees of enjoyment from crossdressing, which are different for each of us. For some, the full enjoyment comes only from having sex while dressed, either with the s.o. or with another partner. A second level of enjoyment might come from going out with some CD friends, even if sex is not part of the plans. A third level is just getting fully dressed and staying at home. If all else fails, shopping for clothes, makeup, and accessories — either on physical shops or online ones — might be the next-to-lowest  level of pleasure and satisfaction. And if not even that is possible, well, watching videos of happy crossdressers, chatting with some of them online, or just blogging about crossdressing is the lowest possible level. Beyond that is just frustration.

During a crossdressing session, even one apparently successful one, frustration levels also vary. You might get frustrated because your current outfit, which you had selected so carefully in your dreams before the target day, doesn’t fit at all. Or it fits but you look terrible. Or it did fit you last year, or five years ago, or a decade ago, but suddenly — because you have physically and mentally changed — it doesn’t look as right as before. But even when you pick up the “right” combination, spend your time getting dressed, and the result looks nice, things can still go wrong. If you go out, full of confidence, and are immediately spotted and “read”, it might spoil your evening — all that trouble just to get spotted just at the start of your enjoyment! And on a day where you looked particularly passable, too! What could be worse? You might “not be in the mood” any longer and just drive back home, remove the makeup, and go straight to bed.

In my case, this usually doesn’t happen — I tend to enjoy all the moments while I’m dressed, even if the outfit does not fit, or people start yelling at me on the many chatrooms I go — but tiredness will always spoil the evening. While I might feel sexy and alluring at the moment I finally get out of the bathroom fully dressed, after being dressed several hours, and chatting with fellow CDs, I get tired. My first symptoms of being tired is when I don’t feel sexy any more. I can smile at my own face in the mirror, pinch my breastforms, stroke my unnameables, but that won’t work — tiredness is the most effective drug against sexyness, at least in my case, and no, it’s not a question of drinking more coffee. At some point, the corset, which fit me so well, starts chafing. The heels are hurting my feet. The bra straps are cutting deep gorges on my shoulders. The makeup is starting to irritate my eyes (which are already drowsy from tiredness). The hairdress, after so much careful grooming and combing, finally gives up its spirit and just looks shabby. And the beard stubbles finally conquer over the heavy foundation I use and start to show, even in bad light. At that point, no matter what I do, it’s too late: all the pleasure from crossdressing is gone. I might still drive myself onwards by sheer willpower, but the spirit is broken.

One way I used to deal with that — but cannot do any longer — was just to change environment: this mostly meant just going out for a bit. Then I’d get an immediate adrenaline rush and the strong surge of sexyness that would drive me on to walk to my car and drive around for a bit, or even go out and walk on the sidewalk, listening to the sound of the heels clacking on the cobblestones. So, in a sense, intensifying the crossdressing experience would somehow bring back the spirit of pleasure associated with crossdressing. But, alas, there is a limit — a day has just 24 hours, and at some point I have to get back to “reality”, even if it’s just by sleeping a few hours, and no matter what I do, there is no way to sustain the pleasure of crossdressing any longer. The mind is willing, but the body is weak

I should be considered a very lucky person by the standards of most crossdressers. After all, I’m allowed to crossdress at home. My femme clothes are stored in the common wardrobe that I share with my wife and with my male self (who takes the least space in it), so it doesn’t get wrinkled, neither does it acquire any stuffy, mouldy smell from being stored in a “hidden place” (like the trunk of the car, where I used to store them before revealing myself to my wife). The makeup I wear is in a cupboard in the bathroom, and there is no difference between “my” makeup and my wife’s makeup. And the best of everything is that I curently am a telecommuter and a remote student, meaning that I really don’t need to work 9-to-5, and can stay at home for as long as I wish. I have no kids, and my cat doesn’t worry in the least if I’m crossdressed or not. And, of course, I have a wife who consents to my crossdressing. What could be more ideal?

However, in this life, there is no “perfect” environment, no matter how hard we look for it. It’s true that I can crossdress at home often — at least once per week, sometimes twice — but I will never know in advance when my wife doesn’t want me to. The best days are often spoiled because she “suddenly” decides that she has to go out shopping for groceries (even though we did the weekly supermarket shopping the day before), and, since she doesn’t drive, and there is no public transportation in our neighbourhood, I have no choice but to “play driver”. This ruins the whole day, even though it’s just half an hour. Of course — some might say — I could drive dressed as Sandra. I wouldn’t mind! But to aggravate issues, my wife doesn’t want for me to go out dressed as Sandra (I’ve written a lot about that and so won’t repeat it again). So while theoretically I could combine both experiences — crossdressing and being my wife’s driver — in practice she doesn’t allow me to, and it’s all just because the way her mind works. I cannot change that. The only thing I can do is change my own mind, and be content about the few scarce opportunities I have, which, compared to many other crossdressers, might look like an incredible amount of freedom and luck.

There was an interesting article at the Suddenly Fem shop’s blog which talked a bit about the different “stages” of revelation to one’s Significant Other. The author of this article, a genetic female who has a lot of experience in dealing with crossdressers, explains that, according to her, it’s sometimes easy enough for s.o.’s to accept one’s crossdressing, but that being public about it might be pushing too much. Going out, even in the middle of the night, even when I’m not going to any particular place, is being seen by our beloved ones as “going public”, and the first reaction is rejection. In a sense, what that means is that crossdressing should be a private activity and not spill out to the public sphere, and so long as that is maintained, crossdressing is allowed.

On another forum — which is in Portuguese — some of us were discussing about how lately our respective s.o.’s seem to be constraining us more and limiting our own time to crossdress, even though they have been very tolerant so far. What is happening? I thought a lot about it, and I think that two different things are becoming more significative. The first is that, like all habits, we crossdressers tend to think that it’s never enough. If you’re able to crossdress once per year only — because you take a week off from family and work and have some time for yourself — you wish to crossdress more than once per year. If you can do it every month, you wish to do it once per week. If you do it every week, you want to do it every day. If you do, indeed, crossdress every day — like so many actually do — you wish you could be crossdressed 24h/7, i.e. not only do it at home or among your circle of CD/TS/TG friends, but all the time, at work and all. Effectively, at that stage, there might be little difference between a “full-time crossdresser” and a transitioned MtF transexual, even if one doesn’t look at oneself as such. At each stage, there are obstacles and barriers to prevent us to do what we wish. Some of them are clearly just inside our mind: e.g. the fear of the reaction of our Significant Others (or the rest of the family and friends) if you “reveal” yourself. But that fear is just inside our minds — nevertheless, it’s very hard to overcome. Other obstacles seem to be external and impossible to overcome: what should you do if your s.o. simply says “no”? The choice is sticking with her or abandoning her and go on with your own life as a crossdresser. So while you technically have a choice, that choice is incredibly hard to make.

Recently, however, I seem to be surrounded by CD acquaintances who simply couldn’t stand it any longer and just went ahead with their lives, transitioning to women. As I’ve said elsewhere, what surprised me most was that they weren’t that regular in their crossdressing before. But for most of us, that radical choice is not very practical. Also, many regret the loss of a s.o. and wish they could have kept the relationship; in most cases, it’s actually the s.o. that severs the relationship — not the CD — so in a sense there is “no way back” even if one promises never to crossdress again. It’s too late for that!

The second aspect, which was questioned by some of my acquaintances, was a rising feeling that our s.o. may somehow be a bit scared and perhaps even jealous of our crossdressing. Again, people will react in different ways, but it’s legitimate to assume that the more you practice crossdressing, the better you will be. With enough sessions, walking in heels becomes second nature. Do your makeup once a week, and after a few years, you’ll be better at it than your own wife (specially if she doesn’t weak makeup so often, but just for special social events). Even simple things like doing your nails and painting them, given enough practice, become commonplace. My own wife, even though she has formal training in the Fine Arts, does only some minimalistic makeup, and only once or twice per year, always using the same simple technique she learned when she was a teenager and went out every night. She has a firm hand and an excellent grasp at colours, but, well, she doesn’t have the practice that I do — or the patience. She shrugs it off saying that she cannot do anything without her glasses (which is true), but I often remarked that I’d be more than happy doing the makeup for her, which she rejects — a common reaction of hers is to reject that I do something that she feels I’m not good at. But, humbleness apart, I am good with my makeup. Not a pro, not a specialist, but I know enough of it to be experienced — experienced enough, for example, to match the makeup with what I’m wearing. My wife is still stuck at using the two colours she always used for eons, no matter what she’s wearing.

Similarly, while it took me eons to learn properly, I can paint my own fingernails quite quickly and efficiently. These days, I hardly even need to “wipe off” the corners where the nail polish is off. My biggest struggle is with low-quality products that aren’t uniform, or too runny, or simply not opaque enough for my taste, and in those cases, I might not get it right at the first time. Now I’m not claiming I can do my nails as well as a pro. They will look always a bit amateurish under close scrutiny. But I paint them better than my sister-in-law (who always wears them short but painted). When I offered to do the same to my wife — it’s far easier to paint someone else’s nails than our own — she shrugged it off and never accepted my offer of help.

Why?

According to the discussions with some other CDs, we speculate that there is a psychological thing going on in our s.o.’s minds. Somehow, even if they don’t admit it to themselves, they’re recognising that, at least in some cases (or in some details), we’re truly getting better at “acting” female — at being female — than they are. We should not forget that in this age women are encouraged to think, act, and work like men — even though, fortunately, there is a counter-culture of Third Wave Feminism encouraging women to act and look like women, while still behaving in an acceptable way in a still-male-dominated environment. But for some — like my wife — there is a long battle that has ultimately be lost: being female takes too much time, too much effort. Being constantly swamped with images of beautiful models everywhere, plain and common women just feel frustrated — they will never look like that. Some, of course, don’t care how they look — they just do the best they can with the bodies they have, and still enjoy all benefits of looking female (in a sense, with very much the same enthusiasm as many crossdressers!). I usually give my mother-in-law as the best example of this — she’s incredibly elegantly dressed, all the time, and takes good care of her face, her makeup, her nails, and so forth, to the tiniest details, without looking garish or out of place. But she is, in fact, a very plain woman, without any significant feature that would draw one’s attention to her — it’s the whole ensemble of clothes, accessories, and carefully applied makeup that makes her stand out in a crowd and look truly elegant and feminine. Even my own mother, who, at 75, looks obviously old and due to excessive suntanning in the beach in the 1960s, is all wrinkled up, does some effort to look as fine as a female as possible. My own wife — like so many others — even though she’s actually much better-looking than her own mother (or my own), or even more than her own sister (who suffers from morbid obesity; which never stopped her to try to do her makeup as best as she can and wear the best clothes and accessories she can use), just gave up “looking female” years ago (in fact, well before we met).

So it might be that she isn’t too happy with my own results. And, in fact, there is really a huge difference from my pictures from 2005, when I first started crossdressing in front of her. So much that I have slowly removed free access to those old pictures, they simply don’t please me at all, and I truly looked horrible in them. Not only horrible, but also uncomfortable — like a fish out of water. I was not only “a guy in drag” but “a guy suffering a lot of pain to be in drag and trying to deal with it”, in the sense that nothing I did was “natural”, but forced and constrained. Well, of course, it was the best I could do at that time, but it simply wasn’t enough. And my wife was keen to tell me that I could never go out looking like that until I got a bit more confidence in what I was doing and started looking a bit more natural.

A lot happened in the past years. I’m reaching the limits of what I can do with clothes, accessories, and makeup, and since I have a limited wardrobe (who hasn’t? ), there is not much more that I can “improve” externally, without going a more radical route (i.e. hormones and surgery). Even though the pictures and videos I post don’t truly capture the reality — I make sure to get the best angles under the most appropriate lighting — the changes, I think, are mostly internal. For instance, I learned how to smile all the time — in my pictures in 2005, I rarely smiled, because I was aiming for the “sexy seductress” look, which took me quite a while to understand that it’s very, very hard to get, specially if you’re encumbered by the wrong biological body. Smiling, by contrast, will change your face 180 degrees towards a display of womanliness, and it makes a huge difference. But there is far more to it: it’s not just walking in heels as if it’s second nature and I never used any other kind of shoes, but it’s the whole posture. At the beginning, I had to make a conscious effort to “look female” in my postures and poses, but now I don’t even need to think about it; it happens naturally. There are still some things I cannot do: it’s hard to cross one’s legs very naturally when encumbered with a) relatively low chairs when I’m tall (and wearing high heels!) and b) a corset. I can do it, but not on any kind of seat. In spite of all those limitations, I think that I can project an image of self-assurance as a female, most of the time. I still catch myself slouching, or forgetting to tuck in the elbows, and all sort of small “mistakes” that crossdressers so often do, but I’m getting better and better. I sometimes even practice in male mode: the beauty of it is that nobody truly notices, specially if I’m with my wife (and thus are automatically labeled as a heterosexual male, and my body posture is not deemed “strange” — it’s fun to see how people think and react!). In any case, there are a lot of differences of what I do now compared to how I moved and behaved in 2005, even though most of you wouldn’t know (the videos are phantasies where I’m essentially acting — it’s good practice for me to see them afterwards and notice what I’ve been doing wrong).

But I seriously suspect that my wife notices the differences. Sure, I might not move and behave like her own super-elegant mother; but my movements and behaviour are more fitting for an “average” female, and I’m sure that she cannot fail to notice that. One of the reasons she gave (not the true reason, but one of them) for not allowing me to drive crossdressed is that I’m too nervous when crossdressing, fumbling with things, not picking up objects correctly, and all that would destroy my concentration while driving, and so it would be dangerous for me. She was right to a degree. When gluing false nails, I tended to have some trouble with them. My first exercise was to learn to type as fast with long fingernails as without them (it takes some practice, too!); and then to try to do most house chores with the nails. But since I’m always worrying that they might get unstuck (which happens often, specially in the most embarassing moments!), I tend to be a bit overprotective, and this leads to “fumbling”. Growing my own nails helped me a lot to get my hand movements right (I’m still a bit overprotective while the nail polish is drying!). I’ve also learned how hard it is to pick up small objects; or how to turn the hand, or move the fingers, so that I can grasp objects without fear of breaking a nail or ruining the polish. That took me a quite a while to master, but… I’m getting there, even without overlong nails (they’re passable most of the time — my wife and my sister-in-law just noticed them twice or three times), because now I practice every day. So, no more fumbling with keys, opening zippers (useful because my purse has them!), stashing handkerchiefs in pockets, and so forth — even picking up cigarettes and placing them in the holder is done differently these days, just because of all that training.

Again, I suspect that my wife is paying attention to all that, and, who knows… she might not be very comfortable with that. She might, on one hand, be a bit worried (and perhaps jealous) that I’m doing progress, and what I will demand next as result of that progress. She might even think that unless she keeps me in check I might just “go over the other side”. And she might be even right in assuming that!!

There are amateur runners who train every day, and do it for their own pleasure (or health reasons), and be content with the daily jog. Others, however, no matter how amateurish they are, dream of participating on one of the many marathons that are held worldwide, and work towards not only entering the competition, but of being able to finish it. They might be very honest with themselves and not expect a gold medal, or even be in the ranks of the pros, but just be content that they have participated and finished a race. Once they finish their very first race, they will continue to practice to participate in the next one. Now imagine that this amateur runner is constantly being checked by their own families, who see their progress, and how much effort they’re doing to be able to compete, and start blocking his attempts, fearing that they might “lose” their husband and father to sports competition — because a professional athlete trains 8 hours per day, has a lot of requirements in diet and so forth, and leads a completely different life than a “normal” person who is not a professional athlete. Well, if this story is told to anyone, it would be laughable — no serious wife would ever dream of preventing her beloved husband, an amateur runner, to train and participate in a public marathon, where they have no chance to win but feel content to participate and even finish.

When it comes to crossdressing, I don’t see any difference. I see myself as an “amateur woman” in training, and I do my training every week or so at home, under controlled conditions, and I see some improvements and progress due to that. I cannot “compete” with a “professional woman” (that is, a genetic one) but that doesn’t mean I cannot “participate” in typically outdoor “woman activities”, and while I won’t get a “prize”, I’ll be content just to be able to “participate” That’s all I aim for, that’s all I need.

Unfortunately, the message from my wife is clear enough: “you can ‘train’ at home, but forget about ‘competing’ in public”. And this is a source of tremendous frustration for me.

Of course I’m aware that the “frustration” doesn’t just magically disappear by going out. Then I will have to face the naked reality of truth, which is that I will be “read”, probably laughed at, get funny looks, nasty comments, and, if I’ extremely unlucky, even aggressive words or even offers of violence. That all might happen, and theseobviously will be new sources of frustration. One way I “train” myself for that is to go “public” with my pictures, videos, and open webcam sessions — where obviously I get all the above (except physical violence — there is safety being behind a computer!). Of course at the beginning it was very frustrating to be “read” and be the target of so much verbal abuse or plain laughter, specially on a day that I thought I was actually looking quite well on the webcam. Today, I merely laugh and joke with the ones directing their mirth or aggressive words at me — I’ve learned to outgrow the frustration of “not looking quite right”, and play with others’ own insecurities using sarcasm and irony; they will quickly give up. While online experience cannot replace the experience in the real world — specially because I look much worse “in flesh and blood” than on a webcam in a controlled environment — it’s certainly a good first training towards dealing with my own expectations (which are far too high) and the resulting frustration (because I delude myself in thinking I’m actually good at passing, when clearly others will “read” me in an instant). In my daily Buddhist practice, we use a lot of methods and techniques to practice first with simple things to get a taste of what it looks like on the more advanced levels — there is a progression, and beginners are encouraged to take small steps at first, to learn how they can deal with it, before they go to a further level, where there will be way more serious obstacles.

Crossdressing, like any other human activity (including meditation!), is about dealing with a lot of obstacles, most of them internal: dealing with one’s self-image; building up confidence in what we’re doing; learning a lot of methods and techniques to “become female”, some of which are hard to do because we’re simply not used to it (like walking on heels or applying makeup); and mostly dealing with the frustration from each obstacle we encounter. Some of those obstacles are not strictly related to male crossdressers, but apply to women as well: for example, dealing with the idea that we have not a perfect body of a supermodel and that some clothes will never fit us. But we can learn how to use corsets and padding and using different styles of clothes to give the illusion of a better shape — women do it all the time and learn it since their teens. Getting frustrated because you don’t have the “perfect” body that only surgery and hormones will “fix” is not a way to deal with the issue: firstly, because there are tricks you can use (so there is no need to be frustrated), and secondly, because, well, if all else fails, and you’re really serious about it, you can always resort to hormones and surgery…

But the hardest obstacles by far are the ones that are external to you. Ultimately, of course, there aren’t really any “external” obstacles, just the way your mind looks upon them as obstacles, but that takes a completely different kind of “training” — a mind training, not a training in the arts of womanliness. And sometimes the answers to deal with that kind of frustration are very hard to swallow. For example, if my wife never allows me to go out, I have to learn to be content merely with crossdressing at home, and don’t crave going out, ever again. But learning to be content with what we have is very, very hard.

So currently I do these two “trainings”. On one hand, every time I have an opportunity and my wife doesn’t constrain me, I try to crossdress for a few hours, and improve my image, my movements, and my behaviour. I go to online webchat rooms to test out my self-assurance and my image, and deal with the “exposure” to the public, just to see how I react. This is the training to overcome my internal fears and lack of confidence, and to be honest, I’m generally happy with the results. While I still believe that I would have a hard time going out in public in plain daylight and facing a friend, the more I train, the less I worry about that actually happening — except for the consequences of such an encounter, which are out of my ability to deal with (e.g. the friend wishing never to see me again, calling up my wife and parents and telling all about it, and so forth). I think I could handle some of those reactions, but not all — my parents, for example, would definitely want me to enter a mental asylum [as a side note, if that meant contacting a specialist in gender disphoria, that would ultimately mean I'd get diagnosed as a transexual, and helped out during transition — which would be exactly what I'd like, but it would drive my parents insane, and possibly kill them indirectly — they're already very old]

The other training is, however, much harder: it’s the one dealing with the external conditions that prevent me from crossdressing, and over which I have absolutely no control. On the lowest end are the sudden changes of mind of my wife which cancel one of my crossdressing sessions in unpredictable ways — for example, I’m typing this while patiently waiting for her sister to call, because she wants me to drive her to her sister’s home. But her sister might never call. She might only call in 4 or 5 hours, and tell her that she’s too ill with a cold and doesn’t want any visits today (which is the most likely thing to happen) — making me waste the whole day, which is just perfect for crossdressing (no pending urgent work, nice, warmish weather for December, good sunlight, and new nail polish to try out). This kind of thing happens all the time. Sometimes I ask her early in the morning if she has any plans for the day, and she says no, but when she sees me shaving, she “suddenly” remembers that, after all, it would be nice to go out and buy a lettuce (even though we were the day before at the grocery) or some tooth paste, and so I should cancel my crossdressing plans for today. This is the kind of frustration that is very hard to deal with. I start thinking about all the “what if” scenarios — if I had remembered to ask the day before if it wouldn’t be a good idea to buy some lettuce too, then I could crossdress today. If I had remembered to ask earlier about the lettuce, then I could just go out and buy it quickly, and return back home in time for another CD session (after all, it just takes half an hour to buy a lettuce and drive back!). If my wife had no qualms about letting me drive her while crossdressed, I could simply dress up, pick up the car, drop her at the grocery (or at her sister’s), drive around a bit, have some fun, pick her up again, and so forth — I would just combine the crossdressing with her impossible and completely unpredictable demands, making us both happy, and making this obstacle disappear.

Instead, I have to accept that these obstacles will exist, that they will come up unexpectedly at any time, that they will always be irrational, illogical, and made up on the spur of the moment, and if I don’t comply with them, she’ll be angry and aggressive for the whole day, and possibly even create more obstacles in the future. So I have to learn to be more patient, look at those obstacles she creates for me as just an expression of her own way to show fear or anxiety at my improved crossdressing — which apparently is starting to make her unhappy — and pushing her unhappiness into my face is the only way she has to deal with the issue.

Earlier this year, I had the plan to do more crossdressing in 2011 than in 2010; I wanted to remain a few days, possibly even a week, crossdressed all the time; and I wanted to drive around crossdressed a few more times. All these plans went down the drain of frustration and disappointment. Even when I alluded that due to my wife’s bad planning, I could have enjoyed more moments of crossdressing, she never agreed to my simple plan: there are days with fixed schedules, social or otherwise, where I will never be able to crossdress. So all her “impulsiveness” in forcing me to drive her to do the most illogical and irrational chores should be restricted to those days — and only those days. For example, if we are planning to go out for lunch with my own parents, it’s obvious that I will not have time to crossdress afterwards; that day is perfect to go out and buy groceries. If there is a planned event at our Buddhist centre, I will obviously not crossdress that day (even though high-level Buddhist practitioners are supposedly free of concepts, none of us is that advanced yet ), so I’ll be happy to waste all day doing chores for her. These days are very frequent and regular, giving her plenty of opportunities to waste my time with a clear conscience of not creating any obstacles to my crossdressing — the obstacles are already there, she has nothing to do with them. But it also leaves a lot of days free for me to crossdress at will. Just jumping at me out of the blue with a sudden impulsive need which will completely waste a day is, well, unfair.

Since the person who experiences that unfairness is just me, I have to work harder at dealing with that, and practice more contentment. That is just very, very hard to do. But — like with crossdressing in general — I have no other choice but to practice contentment as well, and I’m sure I can only get better and better at it over time.