Feel Stuck or Not Making Any Progress? Here is Why Trajectory is THE Key!
You feel stuck or like you're not making progress in transition—Dr. Z explains why you're looking at the wrong thing.
Why do you feel stuck or like you're not making progress? You're looking at your transition as one snapshot in time—focusing on what's happening today, this week, or this month. You're getting a very narrow and skewed view.
Transition entails a lot of things—different for everyone. Some want multiple surgeries, some want one or two, some want none. Some have financial/resource/support challenges. Your overall goal is a ball. If you crack the ball open and spread it out, you'll see it's comprised of many mini steps: coming out, finding a provider, starting therapy, scheduling surgeries, feminizing/masculinizing, presenting as yourself.
When you assess where you're at, you're not looking at the whole thing or what you already achieved—only the snapshot. You're cracking the ball open and narrowing down to this week, seeing only progress made within that week. Reality: depending on what you do, progress will be small because some things take time. Example: been on hormones six months but when you look down you only see "I've been on hormones this week"—you disregard that you accumulated six months worth of hormone treatment that will add up to bodily changes.
Watch to find out why your trajectory is NOT linear (you wish it was straight—everything step by step, nothing wrong happens, but life happens with external variables), why trajectory is wavy like weight loss (dots go up, down, up, down, up—but if you put a ruler to line up the slope, it moves upwards), and why any upward movement no matter how small accumulates into bigger changes.
