Tag: progesterone

sargat

I’m on the second day of the high-progesterone cycle. And sure, I cannot tell if this is biology or placebo. But I feel like I did in that previous 14 day cycle and it contrasts a lot to the 14 day cycle with estrogen only. I should work and shower and go to my meeting, I will do that, but need to describe this.

It’s both scary and interesting and useful. I am not detached but I am relaxed, laid back. There is less urgency, more acceptance in the face of anything. I feel a little tired, a little slow, not apathetic, but slow. I am not sure if I am, and I suspect it simply is me feeling how tired I really am and have been for a long time. It’s like it shuts off my fear/anxiety driven overdrive mechanism.

That’s scary because I have use for that overdrive as an overachiever. Possibly I can stay equally productive if I ensure enough rest, self-care, work-life balance. But I do feel that since I am less afraid, I am also less energetic. I’ll work that out.

I don’t feel detached, per se, emotions are not less, I am not dissociated. But there is also an… otherness to my emotions. It’s like when I woke up after long sleep and wondered who I was. I feel like myself but I don’t know if it is the same myself as off progesterone? Of course I am the same, I love you all the same and want the same. But on some odd level I don’t have words to describe I also know I am somehow emotionally different than otherwise. It may be I am closer to my body somehow. Like I have greater emotional inertia?

I mostly like this. I’ll learn to modulate it and to understand it better.

queendom come

Very speculative with no basis anywhere, but feelings need describing whether they have statistical significance or not.

If being completely speculative and anecdatal – which we totally do when we feel like, I’d describe this state of effectively mid-late faux-luteal phase as involving:

– Bloating (probably coincidence), feeling pressing need to urinate more often

– Feeling of tingly sleepy heat of peripheral blood vessels, like after being cold (this is a vasoconstriction thing somehow? makes me somehow think of cortisol)

– Emotional salience. Feeling close to affect, easily moved, easily anxious.

– But not active or vigilant, rather tired and non-urgent, staying at rest.

I feel very small and connnected to the world. My colour is more burgundy than purple, perhaps.

I wonder about this. If it really is there, it should persist until I go into faux-follicular phase on Monday. At which point I should experience clarity, wakefulness, vigilance, reactivity, urgency.

Wondering about the cortisol. Does that cycle in cis women, all else equal?

prog rox

Nipples are sensitive today like they haven’t been since early on estrogen. This is another kind of sensitivity than the pressure-in-mound type of the months before. Dare I hope this means progesterone now makes me start evolving Tanner IV breasts? I do hope that. Hoping very much the nipples themselves will grow larger and fuller as this is something I feel self-conscious of when being intimate with cis girls, and that sort of gets to me.

spinnerettes

Was a little rabbit-hole triggered again, by the whole cis “I don’t feel gender and would not mind if mine was flipped“ idea. Wherein I’d reiterate, it’s about growing up. Trans alignment means on some level our socialization into our assigned gender cannot be completed. This does not mean crippling dysphoria from day one, only enough that our hearts are not in what we are becoming. This compounds over a childhood and teenagehood into being distanced from ourselves in a way which cis people are not. A flip of sexed body would not come with the results of a long process of socialization failure like this, but one being flipped at birth (as opposed to the putative trans brain flip before birth) probably would. And some fraction of people would be fine either way.

Took the progesterone. Sleep may have been better, felt somehow my body is a whole rather than parts throughout but thinking this is indirect. Observations continue.

moon mask merge

So what happens? My partner (once more in some form) said my face has femininized. I had more moments of not being able to let go of an emotional surge once it started, just deciding what to do with it. Touch feels good.

Got gel estrogen and progesterone prescribed, so will start a cycle now. I wonder if I will experience something.

Also second hand shopping, got some skirts and a jacket for experimenting with business chick looks, curious if I will feel OK with that or not.

EDIT: Oh, and asked my endocrinologist on the possibility of collaborating on clinical studies. He was open in principle and seemed surprised. Continuing to represent!