Good recovery from surgery starts with good preparation. Preparing for your top surgery procedure well in advance will help to give you a great head start in your healing process. In this blog, I will share my tips on how to prepare for top surgery*.
In today’s blog, I want to share my top favourite self-development books with you. Whether you call them self-help, self-improvement or self-development books, these are always my favourite genre of books to read. I love these types of books because every time I read one, I learn something new about myself and the way I interact with the world, and I grow from the experience.
I am incredibly passionate about change and share about my own changes often. I have changed my entire life, in a relatively short space of time. From addiction to recovery, from living as female to transitioning to male, from being held back by poor mental health to learning to live my life around it. These profound changes have made me passionate about helping and inspiring others to make changes in their own lives. Often, when I talk with people about change, the common response is, ‘How did you change your life? I don’t know how to begin’. Therefore, in this blog, I want to answer that question. Whilst I would love to offer you a magic ingredient, it is not in my power! Instead, I can share the things that I have found helpful in my change journey. I hope you find them helpful too.
A little while ago, I decided I wanted to explore the option of writing for a living. Since that time, I have been on an incredible self-employment adventure! In today’s blog, I want to reflect on the goals I initially set and evaluate how things have turned out. Although this blog is more of a reflective piece, perhaps sharing my process may also be useful to someone who is in a similar position*.
I find myself torn between pride and concern on Coming Out Day. On the one hand, I love that our society has evolved to the point that we now celebrate people coming out. On the other hand, I wish it wasn’t a big deal. I look forward to the day where it doesn’t matter what our sexual orientation or gender identity is. A day when we just accept that people can fall in love with other people of any gender. A day when we also realise that gender isn’t straight forward and for some people, they need to define themselves differently. I can dream.
This week is Mental Health Awareness Week and I want to talk about why I began to share my mental health story. I also want to talk about why I think it is still important that I continue to do so. This blog has been written in support of the This Is Me campaign, which aims to raise awareness and change attitudes about mental health, by the sharing of personal stories.
Over the years since I began my recovery, I have been consciously invested in my self-growth. I love that feeling of shifting and changing and learning new things about myself. Sometimes, I will experience a sudden shift, seemingly out of the blue. A sudden shift is what appears to be happening to me at the moment, and I feel it is time to do some spring cleaning of my life.
Stress is problematic for us all. Left unchecked, stress can lead to increased anxiety and low mood. However, when you have existing mental health challenges, being mindful of stress becomes even more critical. In my mental health journey, I have learned that I must deal with stress quickly, to avoid any negative impact on my wellbeing. To do this, I created the acronym R.E.D.U.C.E to remind myself what I need to do to take care of myself as soon as I notice I am feeling stressed.
Chest dysphoria is extremely painful and understandably we want to find a surgeon as quickly as possible. However, it is important to take time to decide, so you can find the most suitable top surgery surgeon for your needs. In the following blog, I am going to share how I found my surgeon. I hope that these tips will help you to begin your own research process.
I feel compelled to write this blog to share some incredible news with you all. This week, I received the official confirmation, that I am to be a TEDx Open University speaker! This news comes at a poignant time for me, because this week, I also celebrate nine years clean and sober. Being given such an incredible opportunity stands as a testament to how far I have come. And to think, I worried that my sober life would be boring!
The hardest part of going through gender transition is coping with long waiting times. We wait for our first referral, for appointments in between, for hormones and surgery if we chose it. The relief first felt at realising we are trans, is soon replaced with anguish. The road ahead seems impossibly long and the mountain too high to climb. Understandably, our mental health often suffers as a result. Therefore, if we are to survive this process intact, we must learn ways to cope with the wait. In the following blog, I will share the top five things which helped me to get through my gender transition.
Phalloplasty, in being such a complicated procedure, comes with a lot of possible complications. A major concern for a lot of transgender people considering this surgery is the risk of loss of sensation. Losing sensation was certainly something I feared. However, thankfully, my fears have not been realised. In the following blog, I map out my phalloplasty sensation progress over the four years since I had my first stage phalloplasty.
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