I'm still here, though I haven't posted anything here - or on my Spectralwolf account - over the past seven and a half months.
Feeling rather like a butterfly trapped in amber. It's now 9 months since my Male to Female Gender Transition surgery - which has gone well. But between recovering from that surgery, doing required dilation physical therapy to make sure the surgical work remains viable, and working a full time retail job, I've had virtually no free time. The physical therapy consumes two hours per day, by itself. A typical work day gives me only three hours or so of 'unallocated' time when I am not sleeping, getting ready for my day, working, or wrapping up my day - usually at rather inconvenient times of day - like an hour at 8 AM, and two more at 9 or 10 PM, after work and before bedtime. When I do get a day or a weekend off from work, I am either catching up on a weeks worth of required 'adulting' tasks like getting groceries or doing laundry, or eagerly escaping my routines to run off to a cabin in the woods owned by a friend of mine, for social time with friends in the rural community where the cabin is located.
Personally, I am doing fairly well. Very happy living an extremely public-facing life as a woman. I work as a sales floor assistant manager in a mall store, so I am talking to hundreds of customers and co workers each week. And generally well accepted there and elsewhere in public as a woman. But my social life has certainly suffered, aside from going to Karaoke and dances at that community maybe 4-6 times per month. No serious time to even consider trying to date again. And very fragmented time for art or writing.
Financially? Just hanging on month to month. My retail job doesn't pay all that much, but between that and Social Security, the important bills get paid.
I did manage to rework the eyes on my wolf fursuit this last week. See pics linked below. My design for the original eyes used glass sunglasses lenses with painted on irises, which I looked through. They looked great, but had a bad tendency to fog up. So I finally gave up on that approach, and used a more 'traditional' approach, using painted buckram fabric for the eyes. They can't fog up, and vision is still pretty good.
Having some difficulty with my Die Role story. Feeling rather like my protagonist, Karen, and her lesbian girlfriend, Mia, are just rather pointless wish fulfillment for what is missing in my real life social life. Gets a bit depressing, trying to write about their happy relationship, when I have no romantic partner myself.
And... the current political situation here in the USA is not a good one for a bisexual transgender woman like myself. My one saving grace is that I pass fairly well in public as a straight, cisgender woman, and all my legal ID indicates I have been a woman since birth. So I can 'fly under the radar' if haters start abusing the LGBTQ community. For a while, at least. Still, the next 4 years are gonna be anxious times for me.
