You can accelerate it, though. Or rather, what I mean is that you can make choices that affect the outcome.

You could, for example, choose to sit in your room all the time feeling bad about your situation and wishing it was different. In that case, the situation would stay the same essentially forever, or until you turn 30 and your parents kick you out because they're tired of giving you free food and rent or something.

Or, you could work hard in school and get good grades so you can get into a college that's far away from them. You could get after-school or summer jobs and save money so you can get your own apartment when you turn 18. Stuff like that.

Granted, there's a limit to how much you can accelerate it. It's probably not realistic to get out from under their roof before you turn 18. But you do have choices, and there are things you can do which will give you a better situation in your life, sooner, versus other choices which will be worse for longer. Yes, you will have to be patient. But you can minimize the amount of patience that your situation requires.

That's all I'm saying. It's easy to feel powerless. But that doesn't mean that you are powerless. Recognize the power you have through the choices that are available to you, and use it for your benefit.

Ah, por supuesto! Gracias. A mi me gusta esa cancion tambien, pero no tan mucho que Michelle para voy a tener un tatuaje...

Nice! That looks about right. There's a general mild trend towards longer videos at higher difficulties, which makes sense and is good in so far as they need to be longer in order for people to reach the next levels. Like, it doesn't take *that* many 10 minute videos for DS to have 50 hours worth of superbeginner content (which they don't yet, though it's kinda close), but to get people to 1500 hours is going to take a lot more videos or else much longer ones.

Well, there's a glow-up!

What I'd like to see is an x-y plot where the x axis is difficulty and the y-axis is the duration, with a dot for each video.

Good for you for standing up for what you need!

At least now you have a prescription you can use until you can get through the wait for a better doctor...

What's their YouTube channel?

It's even funnier if Ron's gender identity was genderfluid, and thus "Ron-binary".

That's fine. It'll give the billionaire something else to cry victim about.

Yeah. Wait until you're free--though remember, that freedom is something you can accelerate if you want to; there are things you can do, that we discussed earlier, to shorten the time that you have to live with them--and then see how you feel when nobody is pressuring you to be/act/look any particular way.

If you're actually trans, you won't lose interest or forget about it. Might take a while for those feelings to come back, if they've been repressed real hard, but they won't go away forever.

If they do go away, then so be it. That's fine too. The main thing is that you're able to be yourself, whatever "yourself" really means for you, and to be happy.

I was sent to a Jesuit all-boy's high school in the '80s. We also had an all-girl's school right next door, and shared classes with them, so it's not like it was actually an all-male environment. But nevertheless, the girls were definitely segregated away from us for the most part, kept as 'other' from us.

When my mom told me she was sending me there for HS instead of letting me continue at the public school, I was 13. Just rolling into puberty, all stressed out and subconsciously confused about that, really not liking this shift my body was doing towards masculinity, and here comes my mom telling me she's sending me to a boy's school.

It made me feel literally sick. Nauseous. I had to run out of the room and throw myself on my bed.

I look back on that now, and I can see how that reaction, which must have seemed like an overreaction to her, was not because of the school but the label. She was sending me to a boy's school. She was saying, in some kind of definitive way, that I was so irrevocably boy that I had to go to a school just for them. It was, in a way that she had no possible way to understand and that I wouldn't understand for another 30+ years, a deep denial of my gender identity.

Socially, the school was absolute hell for me. Combine outsider-ness, relative to the 99% of the kids there who had grown up together in the private Catholic K-8 school that was also next door, with my trans-girl-ness and inability to ever fit in with boys, and it took about 5 minutes of the first day of freshman year for them to clock me as "weirdo loser freak" and slot me right at the utter bottom of the school's totem pole. And for reference, at the time I read as a straight/white/male. That was my presentation at the time. I should have had all that 'privilege' going for me. But I instantly ranked below the kid with the congenitally deformed hand. I ranked below the dark-skinned Indian kid with the weird foreign name (which wouldn't be so weird today, here in 2024, but back in 1983 was pretty damn uncommon).

It'll be my 40th reunion year in 2027. To this day, I've never been even remotely tempted to go to any of our school reunions. Why would I? The only people at that school who ever showed me any kindness were my one friend, who has no desire to ever go back either, or some of the teachers who wouldn't be there anyway.

Because I got hooked on Wonder Woman comics back when I was a kid.

After that, it was inevitable, really. And I'm not even mad about it.

IMO, corona borealis is goals.

Same. I thought "what's Jamie Lee Curtis doing in this sub? Oh, right, she has a kid who's trans."

You're not obligated to go anywhere you don't want to go, for whatever reason.

The fact that you happen to have some very good reasons is a nice bonus, but doesn't change the essential calculus of the situation.

If anyone gives you any flack, just link them to the transgender legislative risk map.

Well, I can't answer that one for you.

On the whole, I get the feeling that you find it very difficult to figure out how you feel about any of this while your parents are busy being so loud about it themselves. And I get that. I can see how that would be pretty hard.

But it just pushes me back to an earlier idea: for you, the best thing might be to get out on your own as soon as you can. Get away from that noise so you can hear yourself think. So you actually can listen to your own heart.

I can't tell you what you will hear when you're finally permitted to listen, but whatever you end up hearing, if it's free from outside messages pushing you one way or the other, is likely to be genuine.

It's ok to just put the question aside for now if it's too difficult to figure it out.

Try also this stuff . It's working for me (albeit slowly), and my hairline was starting out similar to yours.

Concepts that are defined relative to one conceptual framework (e.g. binary genders) are not necessarily applicable or even sensible outside of that framework.

Like, "gay" as a concept only means anything if it's relative to binary genders. Asking how "gay" applies to non-binary people is kind of like asking whether neutrons are polar or non-polar particles: the whole concept of polarity is about charge distribution, while the whole concept of "charge" doesn't apply to neutrons.

Of course this is a purely philosophical answer. Our enby friends might have a different, lived answer, in which case I will defer entirely to them.

I mean, I would watch Shel giving a lecture on Organic Chemistry if she wanted to. I'd barely understand it, but I'd watch it! Something about her presentation just makes me so calm.

It's always better to quit smoking sooner rather than later, no matter why you're quitting.

That said, the best way to quit is always going to be the way that actually works. As so many people can attest, cold-turkey is a pretty hard row to hoe, and often leads to people falling off the wagon or giving up. From a health perspective, cold-turkey is better if if works, but if she judges tapering off to have a higher chance of success, then she should probably taper off.

Something else that might be nice would be an indication of what level you're at in the language you are learning, so that your chat partner can tailor their speech to something more comprehensible for you.

Like, if I get paired with someone learning English, and it told me that their level was "total beginner" or something like that, I would make the effort to speak much more slowly, use simpler grammar, use more present tense, etc.

That would be good for the learner, obviously, but also for the native speaker by virtue of setting expectations at the outset.

I can't say it any better than this article already does: https://stainedglasswoman.substack.com/p/letting-them-let-go

Your parents might also benefit from this one: https://stainedglasswoman.substack.com/p/oh-st-my-child-just-told-me-theyre

There's actually a ton of incredibly helpful stuff on that substack that could well help you, too. I'd suggest spending a while browsing through it.

It's helpful, in the sense that if I run into issues down the road (I think I'm too early into HRT to start worrying about stalling out), then I have things to investigate.

That said, I am by no means the endocrinology junkie that you clearly are, so while I kinda/sorta followed your post, I admit it leaves my head swimming a bit. Particularly when I think also about the many similar posts I've seen Dr. P. and others make over the years, I kind of feel like if I do run into troubles, I'll be completely at sea for knowing where to even start looking for a solution.

What would be amazing to have would be some kind of flowchart we could follow to take whatever we're experiencing, narrow it down to potential issues going on and what labs/genes to check to figure it out, and what to do with your HRT regimen to overcome it. Do you know of anything like that out there?