Reinvention
8:43 a.m. -- 2008-06-30
So... I moved out of the house I'd bought with Lucy. I didn't get ripped off; I got some money, although I couldn't afford to get a new place of my own. A guy at my university had just lost his flatmate, so I moved in with him. (Americans would say room-mate rather than flatmate, but to us that means somebody that you actually share a room with. Which would not be an ideal arrangement for the cross-dresser, if you think about it. With me shaving before bed, moisturising, and slipping into bed in a silk nightie... Ahem. No.)
My flatmate was a lovely guy. We played computer games together, we talked a lot, and he liked to cook. I only knew about eight recipes, but he was always experimenting with things like balsamic vinegar. A great person to have around, and not just for the free food! He often arranged parties, and we'd have some of the other postgrad students round. If my flatmate could be persuaded to leave the kitchen, he was an excellent host. Little by little, he rebuilt my confidence and my social life.
You know that statistic about how young men think about sex every 'X' seconds? Well back then, I just used to think about Lucy, and how monumentally I had fucked things up. I was feeling shitty... but in good company, I could forget all that, for a while.
My flatmate was so sensitive that at times I have wondered if he was gay. He's moved to the U.S. and appears to have severed all ties with his former life, so I've lost contact with him, although I tried to stay in touch. But I wonder? Not that it matters. Anyway...
Cross-dressing had lost a lot of its appeal, for me. Perhaps that was no bad thing, because opportunities for dressing up were more limited. I wasn't about to come out to the guy I lived with! I did a few crazy things, though, like wearing a bikini in the shower. (Why the hell would a real girl wear a bikini in the shower? Well, she wouldn't. But as I've said before, the rules of tranny fashion are not quite the same as the rules of girlie fashion.)
Also, I had to ration myself carefully. With Lucy gone from my life, I'd lost my friendly shopping partner. When I ran out of foundation, I wouldn't be able to replace it. If I put a run in my stockings, I'd be stuck with them. Unless I wanted to either start shopping for myself, or explaining to my flatmate why I was getting packages in the post from Figleaves or something.
But it didn't really matter, because (based on what it had done to my life) cross-dressing seemed to be a character flaw. Something to be suppressed, rather than celebrated.
In fact, this was wrong. It wasn't the cross-dressing that had caused Lucy and I to split up... it was my selfishness. Lucy had made concession after concession, with me always pushing for more. I always wanted the next dose of tranny heroin, to the exclusion of all else. When I wasn't scaring the hell out of her, I must have been an absolute bore.
There's something else, too. When you lose something significant in your life, like a lover or a job, there is a process of re-invention. It's a good time to make changes, because there are less constraints, less pre-conceptions. So I reinvented myself. In a good and healthy way... I wasn't deluding myself.
If you know a transvestite, you have probably heard of 'purging'. This is when the tranny attempts to stop cross-dressing by disposing of every feminine item they possess, to rid themselves of temptation. I have never purged. I have sometimes not felt the need to get dolled up for a long period of time... but I don't feel that disposing of inanimate objects will change my nature. My girlie things have been hard-won, and I don't treat them lightly. (I still treasure a couple of items of underwear that Lucy bought me, even though they're monstrously unfashionable now.)
So, no purge. But I did get a haircut. Being into rock music, I'd started growing my hair as soon as I'd left home. I'd had long hair throughout my studies; at first it was just long, horrible boy-hair, but after I'd come out to Lucy we had taken better care of it. For some time, I had been sporting a little ponytail as a guy, and looking like Jet from 'Tank Girl' by night.
The first time I went for a short haircut, the hairdresser talked me out of it. She loved my long hair, and its condition. Since it had never been permed or coloured, it was actually in pretty good shape. But I was reinventing myself, and the hair had to go.
With my short hair, I returned to the world of flirting and dating. I'd originally met Lucy within a week of starting at university, and we'd rapidly become an item. As a result, we'd both missed out on some of the fun craziness that takes place when you go away to study. Now, I made amends. A few years older than most of the girls I dated, perhaps, but I'd needed that time to become mature and secure enough to know that I shouldn't feel crushed by a rejection, and equally that I shouldn't feel elated because - wow - a girl was actually talking too me!
So, it was a happy time. And it got better when my flatmate and I finished our studies at last, and started earning money for a change! Almost without my noticing their slipping away, two girls all but disappeared from my conscious mind. One was Lucy; and the other was me.
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