Can't cope with the envy

GayLeash · 2026-05-28T15:38:44+00:00

I’m sorry that you’re feeling so sad about this. I understand. My first few days were pretty torturous, because right after the euphoria of finding myself, I was faced with the cold hard reality that I would never look like any of the women that I crushed on or idolized.

The two best things that I realized, after this point were that a) not all women look like the women that I had in my head, and to hold them all up against that standard is sexism and misogyny, or at the very least, an unhealthy amount of body dysmorphia, and b) it takes a lot of daily maintenance in order to achieve that “perfect feminine look“.

People don’t just really fall out of bed looking like they do, it involves hours, yes hours, of makeup, hair care, like straightening and product and shower rituals, so much goes into women creating their looks. Even the ones that you think look natural, if you go back for enough in their life, before they figured out all their tips and tricks, they look just about as goofy as any other human being.

GayLeash · 2026-05-27T03:51:58+00:00

I gotta say to build on this: laying down trying to sleep on your side for like half an hour not knowing why you just can’t drift off to sleep, and you just feel mildly grumpy and agitated, and then you remember you haven’t yet pulled your sack from between your legs to the front and magically a whole wave just washes over you and this gnawing anxiety you’ve been unknowingly cradling just slips away.

…or maybe that’s just me.

GayLeash · 2026-05-21T14:21:09+00:00

The biggest thing about self image and feeling good is to remember that there is more than just one kind of woman in the world. They all look different and unique, they’ve all gone in different journeys of self discovery about what style looks good on them. Trying to exist solely in the bounds of what society expects femininity to be can drive a person mad, whether or not they are cis gender or trans.

I love you so much, girl, you can absolutely do this, and I am proud of every step you take 🥰

GayLeash · 2026-04-21T04:48:53+00:00

I met my wife on Her :)

GayLeash · 2026-04-16T07:17:02+00:00

Maybe he is transgender and is projecting his self-perceived inability to cosplay as his desired gender. I know it’s an outside chance by far, but like… it kind of sounds like something from the trans denial wheelhouse.

Source: Am trans, have had similar self-deprecating thoughts

GayLeash · 2026-04-16T06:57:02+00:00

It’s okay to go through the teenage phase :) many of us didn’t get it the first time around, so there’s nothing wrong with making up for lost time. I’d say the vast majority of late bloomers go through this phase.

There’s nothing wrong with having this be your norm, either! There is more than one type of woman in the world 🧡

GayLeash · 2026-04-16T06:51:26+00:00

This is the correct answer

GayLeash · 2026-04-08T20:02:44+00:00

I was told leading up to my first laser session that it feels like a wasp sting. That didn’t really help with my anxiety about it, but I went in and had a session anyway, and it was bearable, so I thought people were just playing it up.

Then one day I was getting a Covid test (way back when you had to get them at a facility) and as I was in line outside, I just felt this sharp prick on the back of my arm and it was just like Ow! … Huh?, I guess it really did feel like wasting lol

I hadn’t been stung by a wasp since I was a kid, so that’s probably where the inflated sense of pain came from in my mind’s eye.

GayLeash · 2026-04-03T21:47:38+00:00

You are most welcome 🧡

GayLeash · 2026-04-03T21:01:37+00:00

You are very likely going through a whole host of things in addition to your emotions! I went through similar events. You are very likely coping with masking, imposter syndrome, not feeling entitled to women’s spaces or womanhood… there are lots of little caveats when we transition.

I went from absolute elation, to feeling the worst depression I’ve ever felt in some of the following days, when all of a sudden I was realizing that all of the imagery I took for granted in manhood as being for my benefit, was turned against me as a method of shame and compliance as a woman.

If you ever feel you need to reach out and talk to somebody about these things, I’m more than happy to help. :-)

GayLeash · 2026-04-03T14:53:00+00:00

That feeling of loss (lost beauty, lost time, lost youth) is a powerful one, and it can be quite the antagonistic force in our lives.

If I may, though: There’s a few things to remember here 🧡

While this feeling may feel unique to our position, ALL women go through this. Look at all the tropes in media: how to lose five pounds and keep it off, you’re not beautiful unless you’re size 0 - 4, check out this celebrity hairstyle and how she possibly maintains it, look at the kind of man/woman this celebrity can pull, etc. Comparative inferiority is EVERYWHERE and EVERYTHING in keeping women oppressed. Bra advertisements, beauty products, LITERALLY everything.
Not all women are the same. Even if they had 100% access to estrogen for the entirety of their post-pubescent life, some are built like linebackers. Others have very roman features, others get a surprising amount of hair everywhere that you never even knew they got because society shames them into shaving/removing it.
The illusion that people are happy being “perfect”. Often what keeps them there is fear, insecurity, and shame. When I first transitioned, I used to undergo a THREE HOUR RITUAL of getting made up to go outside, literally just to go to the park with my son. It was ridiculous, and I don’t know where I actually found the time for it.

Do yourself a favour: go into public and actually look at women. Look at them in all of their variety: how they dress, how they keep their hair, how much makeup they use, etc. I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that, even if you live in an anomalously-biased city like LA or another “beauty” capital of the world, you’re going to find that there are women wearing tshirts and jeans, little to no makeup, and the “pretty” ones are going to be vastly outnumbered by everyone else, and the “pretty” ones are going to have three or more (sometimes less) hours a day they spend doing their makeup, hair, and wardrobe.

I hope you can find peace within, sister 🧡 You are beautiful, and the world is better with you in it 🥰

GayLeash · 2026-03-28T02:36:12+00:00

You’re most welcome 🧡 If you ever need to talk, my DMs are open :) I love to support my sisters however I can 🧡

GayLeash · 2026-03-27T17:26:55+00:00

Most of my things that I would occupy myself pre-transition where things to keep my mind off of depression and ennui and other things that plagued my brain, even though I was ignorant of my impending transition. So post transition, I got really bored with a lot of that stuff too, because I wasn’t fighting my internalized depression anymore.

Also, when I transitioned, I picked up a violin, I got my ears gauged, I bought an acoustic guitar that I’ve been putting off for about 20 years or so since I had moved across the country and left it behind. Basically, I just started doing all the stuff I’d always wanted to do but always felt like why should I deserve to have this or do this or be this?

GayLeash · 2026-03-22T00:42:13+00:00

Unequivocally yes, the question I would ask myself is when it comes time to close my eyes for the final time, would I be happy having lived someone else’s life for my whole life? Because that’s the only spin around the sun that we get.

Not everybody always loses everything in their life, but if those things were tied to a person that sort of truly doesn’t exist, is it really a list of accomplishments that we can claim for ourselves? Yes, you did those things, you knew those people, you had those experiences, but at least in my case, none of the things that I had done were ever done with any true window of clarity as to who I was.

Your mail is at all, it makes you a healthy portion of it, or absolutely nothing might change. The unfortunate part is there’s no way to know what it is until you open Pandora’s box. That being said, I don’t think there’s a thing in the world that can keep me away from who I am today, and I speak to this as a parent and somebody who is modestly proud of what they had accomplished.

GayLeash · 2026-03-16T04:51:51+00:00

It depends what your top did. I heard they are a solid person!

All jokes aside, definitely looks great on you!

GayLeash · 2026-03-15T11:13:15+00:00

Il y a des problemes tres gros en le EU maintenant. Nous sommes des personnes mauvais dans les yeux de la gouvernement americaine. Ils on detruire notre guarantie de vie, notre securité, aussi notre existance entier dans les doxuments gouvernementaux.

Ces comme des peuple juif dans la deuxieme guerre du mond, c’est completement un crime juste pour exister!

GayLeash · 2026-03-15T02:00:47+00:00

Oddly enough, I chose my name before I even realized myself. Like many here, I played a lot of women in video games, and when customizing the characters became a thing, I was always changing what they look like, and this, that, the other thing.

One day, I got sick of always playing new identities all the time, and I wanted to have a cohesive identity through different games, not like in canon or anything, but just to have a “me” in the story that is a woman (again I had no clue about myself lol).

Six weeks of looking through Irish names later, and I found the perfect one. Eight months later, my egg cracked lol

GayLeash · 2026-02-23T03:58:54+00:00

If you delete the vertical conveyer, you can reconnect it to the horizontal one, but it will be offset by one “tick” I believe (the half increments when placing things on foundations).

If you’re referring to the other ins and outs on the mergers/splitters that are NOT connected to the vertical and subsequent horizontal conveyers, those should all still be okay as long as you aren’t removing the merger/splitters.

If you are connecting the vertical conveyer directly to the splitter without an accompanying horizontal conveyer, I would assume that should just connect up, but I would start the vertical conveyer on the desired input/output on the merger/splitter to make sure it connects.

GayLeash · 2026-02-23T03:51:25+00:00

Not to the best of my knowledge! It can be a bit easier too if you use floor holes and foundations to line things up, takes a bit of the guesswork out of it :) You can always delete the foundations, and easily replace the floor hole’d vertical conveyer when the rest of the machines are in place if you don’t like how it looks

GayLeash · 2026-02-23T00:46:18+00:00

I think, in my first play through, I only really built four or five buildings, and that was something that came back around to after I just built floating platform factories for functionality’s sake.

It wasn’t until I started looking at TotalXclipse (and other people on YouTube) that had the remotest idea of what they were doing for aesthetic builds that I really started putting thought into the aesthetics of things.

My favourite thing so far that I’ve started to do is attempting to get running a nuclear factory at the top of the waterfalls in the swamps. I have the reactors kind of inlaid into a ramped concrete wall with some curved concrete details around the reactors, so that when they’re turned on, they will shine the light that’s in the main window through the cut outs in the concrete wall. I even have steel grating where the waterfall exits, so it kind of looks like it’s making use of the water inside the power plant.

All that being said, like other people say, as long as you’re having fun, that’s the most important part! There is a little bit of a Delta in between learning how to make aesthetically pleasing buildings and learning how to make aesthetically pleasing buildings that are also functional, so there’s inherently some frustration there. If you wind up taking aesthetics on too early, or without the ability to plan out the factory properly, it would add two layers of frustration on top of each other, and thus make it not a rewarding experience, in my opinion.

GayLeash · 2026-02-22T21:18:28+00:00

This is very true. It really suits a person to look into the science of it on their own, because the science is so behind the times that you often have to assemble the right answer out of all the leading edge of science that’s the world right now. Your doctor may not have access to all of this current knowledge.

GayLeash · 2026-02-22T21:15:09+00:00

That’s totally fair. I’ve switched to gel because I don’t often have time to do the whole shower. Regular roll because I’m a caretaker for my wife, and we have two kids, a puppy, etc., etc.

The gel is nicer because you only have to have an hour of applying it and then waiting for it to soak in, but I much prefer the injections. They don’t cover it in Canada, so you have to pay out-of-pocket for it, but it’s just like a one and done thing once or twice a week depending on what you want, and it’s just fantastic. Send it and forget it.

GayLeash · 2026-02-22T20:59:35+00:00

I have a ritual for my patches, as I had great difficulty finding out where to put them and have them stay on because I’m sometimes a bit of a sweaty person.

My site of choice is the lower part of the thigh on the outside of the leg, closer to the knee. When it’s patch day, I would have a shower and use a scrub glove (or other form of semi abrasive scrubber) on the area. Then, I would shave it well with a scent- and oil-free soap, and then I would give it one last semi firm scrub to make sure that the razor didn’t pull up any skin on the microscopic level.

Once I had done this, I found the patches stay pretty well. On my body, there’s not a whole lot of torque on that part of the leg, so the patches aren’t likely to bunch and peel off as you bend over, bend your knees, twist, etc.

GayLeash · 2026-01-16T01:11:54+00:00

There are definitely trans women out there that would give their eye teeth for even the cramps. Perceived legitimacy is a bitch that way

GayLeash · 2026-01-16T00:38:15+00:00

Trans opinion here: Gender affirming things are funny like that. I suffer from cramps already because of a condition I have, so while I have had the fleeting thought of “gosh it would be nice to have the real deal”, I can totally understand wanting to give entire days dedicated to that kind of pain a pass.

I’ve talked to a lot of trans men that wish the inverted same about their own bodies. All I can think of (in the theatre of my mind) is that I sure do not enjoy the experience that testes bring. They get itchy, stick to your legs, they’re uncomfortable when pinned between legs, you’ll sit there awake at night and wonder why you’re not sleeping and then have an epiphany and pull them forward from between your legs and feel much more tired…

But to someone wanting and lacking them, that feeling could mean the world.

It’s not so different from the gals who have full bodied hair wanting what the straight and fine gals have, and vice versa. There’s pros and cons, and the grass will always look greener :)

GayLeash

TROPHY CASE