I sit here staring at the blank page, questioning everything. It used to be easy to feel nothing. Before hormones. Before transition. Before truth. When I lived behind the mask, I had a system. Suppress, survive, repeat. It was efficient. It was safe.
Back then, emotions were dangerous. Letting them show meant giving people ammunition. If I didn’t cry, they couldn’t see the cracks. If I didn’t get angry, they couldn’t twist my rage against me. If I didn’t show love, they couldn’t take it away.
So, I learned to bury it all.
Now, after years of living as myself, the floodgates are open. Every small thing hits harder. The song on the radio. The kindness of a stranger. The look in a mirror that finally matches the reflection in my soul. I cry more now in a single week than I did in the first three decades of my life combined.
And it’s terrifying. But it’s also healing.
The Survival Skill That Becomes a Cage
For many transgender people, emotional suppression begins as a form of armor. We learn early that showing who we are, even in small ways, comes with consequences. Maybe it was a cruel parent, a classmate who mocked us, a teacher who looked away, or a system that told us we were wrong for even existing.
Every tear we swallowed felt like a victory. Every emotion we buried was another layer of protection. Over time, we convinced ourselves that numbness was strength.
What we didn’t realize was that it wasn’t armor at all. It was a cage.
Inside that cage, emotions didn’t disappear. They fermented. They grew sharp edges. They learned how to leak through the cracks at the worst possible times. One small moment, one comment, one glance, or one offhand joke could send us spiraling. Not because of what happened in that instant, but because of what we never allowed ourselves to feel in the years before it.
When you’ve built a life around not feeling, rediscovering emotion feels like being skinned alive.
Hormones, Healing, and the Emotional Avalanche
When I started hormone replacement therapy, I expected physical changes. Softer skin. Redistributed fat. Mood swings, maybe.
What I didn’t expect was the emotional reckoning that followed.
Estrogen didn’t just soften my features; it softened the walls I’d built around my heart. The chemical balance that once numbed me began to fade, and suddenly everything felt like too much. Sadness. Joy. Love. Fear.
Some days I would find myself crying at commercials. Other days I’d feel bursts of pure, radiant happiness that made no logical sense. Then, without warning, guilt would crash over me, guilt for not allowing myself to feel sooner, guilt for wasting so many years behind the mask.
It wasn’t just hormonal. It was a spiritual detox.
All those years of hiding, pretending, and enduring had created emotional scar tissue. Estrogen didn’t cause new emotions; it gave me permission to access the ones I had buried to survive.
The Illusion of Control
Suppressing emotions tricks you into believing you’re in control. When you’re young and powerless, control feels like safety. You learn to keep your expression neutral during a beating. You learn to speak calmly while your insides scream. You learn that silence can sometimes save you.
And for a while, it works. You get through the day. You function. You even achieve things. People call you strong, stoic, and composed, not realizing that your calmness isn’t peace but paralysis.
Then transition happens, and suddenly the old rules don’t apply. The emotions you trained yourself to silence finally find their voices. You start to understand that control and healing are not the same thing.
Healing isn’t about bottling your emotions tighter. It’s about finding the courage to open the bottle, one memory at a time, and letting the pressure escape before it explodes.
When the Mask Slips
I still wear the mask sometimes.
Old habits die hard. When I’m around people who might not understand, I slip it back on. I become composed, neutral, and professional. I laugh at the right times and nod on cue. But the mask doesn’t fit like it used to.
Now, it’s fragile. It cracks under the weight of small kindnesses. It melts when someone calls me “she” with genuine warmth. It slips when a friend asks how I’m really doing, and I realize I don’t know how to answer honestly without crying.
That’s the tricky part of transition. You can’t selectively reopen yourself. Once you allow truth into your life, it doesn’t stop at gender. It floods every locked door you’ve built. It demands to be felt in every corner.
And that’s the point.
Transition isn’t just about changing your body. It’s about reclaiming your right to feel.
The Science of Emotional Reawakening
While my story is personal, what’s happening inside me has roots in psychology and biology. Emotional repression literally rewires the brain. Studies show that chronic suppression can increase stress hormones, weaken the immune system, and disrupt emotional regulation.
In contrast, expressing emotions, especially after long-term repression, activates neural pathways that help integrate traumatic memories and reestablish emotional balance. Hormone therapy, for many transgender people, amplifies this process by restoring alignment between body and identity.
When your body chemistry finally matches who you are, the brain stops fighting itself. The tension that once kept emotions locked away loosens, allowing long-buried feelings to surface. It’s not weakness. It’s your body finally exhaling after years of holding its breath.
Isolation as a Coping Mechanism
There are days when I can’t face anyone.
Not because I don’t love people, but because I feel too much. The world feels raw and loud, and every glance feels like it cuts straight through me. So I retreat into my apartment, into music, into silence.
Isolation feels like safety again, but it’s a dangerous comfort. It’s easy to confuse solitude with healing when, in reality, it’s just emotional triage.
There’s nothing wrong with needing space. The problem comes when space becomes a substitute for connection. Emotions are meant to move through conversation, laughter, tears, and creativity. When we lock them away, we stagnate.
But when we share them, we heal.
Even if that sharing starts with one person, one journal entry, or one whispered truth to ourselves.
Learning Emotional Fluency
One of the hardest parts of rediscovering emotion is learning the language for it.
When you’ve spent decades not feeling, you don’t just lack expression, you lack vocabulary. Everything feels like either “fine” or “falling apart.” There’s no in-between.
Learning to feel again means learning to name things. It means asking: Am I sad, or am I lonely? Am I angry, or am I hurt? Am I scared, or am I simply unsure?
Therapists call this emotional granularity, the ability to identify and differentiate complex emotions. For people emerging from repression, this skill takes time. It’s like learning a new dialect of your own soul.
Each new word you learn gives you power. It lets you respond instead of react. It lets you soothe instead of spiral.
Tears as Transformation
I used to be embarrassed by crying. It felt like failure. Now, it feels like freedom.
Crying is the body’s way of saying, “I survived.” It’s the release valve on a lifetime of compression. And when you’ve gone years without letting yourself cry, every tear feels sacred.
There’s science behind that too. Emotional tears contain stress hormones and endorphins, literally flushing your system and helping your body regulate mood. Crying doesn’t make you weak; it’s a biological reset.
Every time I cry now, I remind myself that I couldn’t before. I remind myself that this is progress, messy, inconvenient, human progress.
Relearning Safety
The hardest part of emotional healing isn’t feeling; it’s believing you’re safe to feel.
When you’ve lived through trauma, your nervous system learns to equate vulnerability with danger. Even when the threat is gone, your body doesn’t know that yet. It reacts to peace the same way it reacted to chaos.
That’s why healing often feels uncomfortable. Calm feels suspicious. Love feels like a trap. Happiness feels temporary.
But safety isn’t the absence of fear; it’s the slow realization that you can survive your emotions. You can sit with sadness without drowning. You can face anger without losing control. You can feel joy without bracing for loss.
Every time you let yourself feel, you’re teaching your body a new language of safety.
The Mirror and the Flood
One of the strangest parts of my journey has been seeing my reflection evolve alongside my emotions. When I looked in the mirror before transition, I saw nothing. A blank slate. A stranger.
Now, when I look, I see someone alive. And sometimes, that aliveness is overwhelming.
It’s not vanity. It’s recognition. For the first time, my reflection mirrors my feelings. The body matches the heart. The tears make sense.
But that recognition also carries grief, for all the years I didn’t get to live as her, for all the birthdays I spent pretending to be someone else, for every person who never got to meet this version of me.
Grief isn’t just for loss; it’s also for time stolen. And when that grief comes, I let it. Because every tear for my past is also water for my growth.
Letting Others In
Transition teaches you how to build yourself. Healing teaches you how to let others in. Both are hard.
When you’ve spent your life surviving alone, connection feels like a risk. Letting someone see you cry feels dangerous. Letting someone comfort you feels almost impossible.
But isolation, over time, becomes another form of suppression. We don’t just need to feel; we need to be felt with. That’s the foundation of belonging.
It’s okay to be selective. Not everyone earns access to your vulnerability. But find someone. A friend. A therapist. A community. Let them see the parts of you you once buried.
Because when you let others witness your emotions, you show them that it’s possible to survive theirs too.
Rediscovering Joy Without Guilt
One of the strangest emotional challenges I’ve faced since transitioning is guilt over happiness. After years of struggle, joy can feel undeserved. Like I should stay small, stay quiet, stay grateful, and not ask for too much.
But joy is not a luxury. It’s a right.
If sadness was the flood that broke open the walls, then joy is the sunlight that dries the ground. It’s the proof that all that pain had purpose.
Joy is a radical act for transgender people. It says, “You didn’t break me. I still feel.” It reclaims everything society tried to numb out of us.
And every time we allow ourselves to feel it, truly, shamelessly, we heal not just ourselves but the next person watching, wondering if it’s safe to smile again.
Practical Steps Toward Emotional Healing
Emotional healing isn’t linear, but it helps to have tools. Here are a few that have helped me and others in the community:
- Journaling: Writing turns chaos into language. It gives structure to feelings that don’t make sense yet.
- Therapy or Support Groups: Professional or peer support helps you recognize patterns you can’t see alone.
- Movement: Exercise, dance, and even walking help the body process trapped emotion.
- Creative Outlets: Art, photography, music, and creation are expression without judgment.
- Mindfulness: Learning to observe emotions without fighting them teaches your brain that feelings are temporary waves, not permanent storms.
These aren’t cures. They’re practices. The goal isn’t to eliminate emotion but to live alongside it.
The Bottom Line
Transition taught me that authenticity isn’t just about gender. It’s about emotional truth.
For decades, I survived by suppressing everything that made me human. Now, I cry at sunsets. I laugh too loud. I love fiercely. I still have days where I retreat into silence, but I no longer confuse silence with strength.
Feeling doesn’t make us weak. It makes us real.
The flood that once terrified me has become the river that carries me forward, messy, unpredictable, but alive.
So, to anyone else standing at the edge of their own emotional dam, wondering if it’s safe to open the gates: yes, it will hurt. But the alternative is never feeling at all.
And life, real life, begins when you finally let yourself feel it.
Thank you so much for this beautiful essay!