Hello Everyone! ( Intro Post:) )

Hello Everyone!

I have just joined the forum today, and I just want to say so far this feels like a great community, big congratulations to everyone taking part in it. The overall tone of the conversations is so nice, I love it .

I started browsing the threads, saw so many touching stories, and replied to one thread about that made each of us realise and accept that we weren't straight, and when I finished that post and hit "reply" I realised I had gone way overboard and poured a fair chunk of my life story in that reply, and hadn't made an proper introduction post yet . Feeling a bit bad about it, gonna remedy that now. . I'm not a native English user, so please accept my apologies beforehand

I have a male body. But the emotional part my brain is wired a lot more to the female side, or better said to the qualities that are typically attributed to the heterosexual female. The closest classification for me would be perhaps M2F transgender, though I did not take any action to transition so far ( but did think about it on numerous occasions) , and there have been times (though not many) when could entertain the idea that I could actually enjoy using my penis in a traditional male role .

My history is rather text-book in regard to the likely cause, childhood issues, authoritative abusive narcissistic father, arranged marriage between parents ( maybe that's not too text-book but it happened), depressive mother because of arranged marriage, I was second child, mother desperately wanted a daughter after the first born who was a son, subconsciously my brain picked up on that as an infant (maybe even before that as my index finger is ever so slightly longer than my ring finger, and that typically is a sign of some hormonal imbalance during the pregnancy that can affect infant brain development) and even before 1'st grade I already felt strongly that everything would have been better if I had been a girl. But I had a boy's parts. And the society I was in considered people like me deviants and monsters (my father actually said out laud that all LGBT people should be killed on sight, when he saw me that I was watching a documentary on LGBT on Discovery channel once, so yes I was absolutely terrified by what I was feeling inside and kept it hidden from everyone. Conceal - don't feel - don't let it show ).
My family was also religious, so that also inoculated the idea in my head that I was somehow corrupted by the devil for feeling the way I was feeling. Fortunately I did turn up to be fairly intelligent, interested in both science and arts and without false modestly, be rather good at both. After computer science degree, a business management Master's degree and many hours of personal study in Psychology I figured out ( much much later) that likely the devil has nothing to do with this , and that I have the right to love who I want to, and offer them pleasure as I want to, and if the feeling is mutual there's nothing wrong or shameful with it.


Anyway, back to childhood: struggled with that in very unhealthy ways (basically repressing it) during adolescence , early adulthood until the age of 31, drowning myself in work and doing art in my spare time (and having excellent professional results because having convinced myself that I was no good for romantic relationships with all the conflicting thoughts I was having about my body, so, in order not to give in to depression, I had to focus on something, so focused on work...wasn't doing much else with my life anyway)

At the age of 28 I had rose up through the Ranks and ended up running the company I got hired out of college in, but I was still deeply unhappy. My three more serious relationships that I had up to that point were all with girls, which was okay for me to some extent (I like to think that had I been a girl I would have been a kick-ass lesbian ) , but because I could not share with them what was going on inside my mind at that time, the relationships were doomed. I could not truly connect with them at an emotional level because I always felt guilty about having to hide this part of me . I thought they would not understand . At the age of 31 I took a chance and told a girl who was interested in me (and was puzzled on why I wasn't more forward with her) about this. And her reaction surprised me. Not only she did not seem grossed out, but she told me that makes me even more awesome, that she is intrigued, and wants to try . Ultimately she wasn't looking for anything serious, it was more of an experiment for her, so it didn't lead to anything, but it did make me realise that maybe I am not as hopeless on the relationship side as I thought I was , and that maybe I needed a therapist, so I sought one I found on a LGBT support site .

Four months into therapy was when I met and I started a wonderful relationship with my tomboy (now ex) wife. The relationship was amazing at first. It stared with all cards on the table on my side, i told her EVERYTHING. That relationship is now ending after six years together, the last year of the 6 being a very painful year (of growth admittedly, but painful nevertheless), it was mostly a struggle on my part to try and understand, and heal, and patch things up after she cheated on me with a more typical Alpha male guy and and lied to me about it, after 5 years of relationship. She was very masculine in her attitude about life, I loved her immensely but unfortunately in the end it turns out she wanted me to be a dominant Alpha male, and as hard as I tried, I couldn't mould myself into one without feeling utterly depressive.
. :. If you want the the full sappy story is here, in the 8'th post http://emptyclosets.com/forum/3218352-post8.html


I now live in a very LGBT unfriendly location, where fully coming out translates in both social and professional sepukku, and sometimes even actual real life threatening situations. So I need to do that very carefully. In real life I did come out to a few close friends ( they all ended up sticking around even though before knowing some of them had made pretty homophobic remarks on more than one occasion ).



That's about it
Happy to be here, to get to know like-minded people, and hoping my experience can help someone

 

Thank you Bunnydee, Leticia for the welcoming messages It is good to be here .
Happy upcoming 2017 ( it is already 31'st of December over here )