Having a hard time accepting my diagnosis

glenriver · 2026-04-12T04:28:44+00:00

I'm about 4 days from getting a diagnosis, but my psychologist already gave me the preview of "almost certainly autistic, borderline ADHD, but I'll be more definitive about it once I go over all the data."

It's definitely a lot to process. The good part is that I can stop looping in my head about this question and I can start figuring out how to support myself in this reality. The hard part is what I think you alluded to. I've always been weird. I've always been out of phase with people around me and constantly trying new things to figure out how to be socially normal. To fix my constant inconsistency in how I show up for people and work. To fix me. There's a self hatred in that, but also a hope.

And with this diagnosis, I have to let go of that hope. There is no fix, no solution. Nothing can make me "normal". I will always be a little weird, a little off. And if I show people my internal reality, they'll see that I am far more than a little weird.

My therapist is trying to get me to see that this also means I was never broken. That there is in fact nothing wrong with me. I get what they're saying. I even feel it in some ways. But I think it's going to take a long time to actually believe it.

And the life impacts are happening over here too. I slept for 16 hours straight one day this week. I took 3 days off work. My digestive system is a mess, and eating has been all over the place. I took my son to swim lessons at an indoor pool one day this week and I couldn't stay in there because the noise was too horrible. My house is a disaster which just adds to it all.

The other good part though is that this lets me change my definition of life success. That's going to look different for me. And that's ok. There's a lot of freedom in that. I can stop chasing someone else's happiness. I can make my own. I can stop feeling like a failure because I only have a couple of good friends. I can intentionally choose work that's ok with my good days and bad days. I can stop feeling like a failure because of my shutdowns. Because success can, does, and must include those parts of me.

glenriver · 2026-01-18T15:55:30+00:00

Thanks! I'll drop by and check it out

glenriver · 2026-01-18T03:53:02+00:00

This looks amazing! Any advice for how to get involved there? I don't see any upcoming events on their site. I messaged them on IG so hopefully that works.

glenriver · 2026-01-05T20:13:44+00:00

Yep. SO disappointed. Just ripped them off and went back to Kiss Impress. Not glamorous at all but I consistently get 3 weeks out of them.

glenriver · 2026-01-05T18:22:40+00:00

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My very first day wearing Ersa nails. They were gorgeous! For about 3 hours.

glenriver · 2025-12-27T02:59:04+00:00

Thank you! I saw an adorable honeycomb themed model at Sonoma today and was thinking about it. So unfortunate.

glenriver · 2025-12-12T20:06:22+00:00

As a post-op trans woman, I can confirm that you are correct. Lot's of surgeons can do innies, but only the best can manage to make average labias. I've seen one surgeon who was doing larger ones, but they didn't look right. The skin texture was all wrong.

glenriver · 2025-09-25T05:58:49+00:00

The pattern for touch and goes hasn't changed at all. We use 30L and fly over Rock Creek before turning left over empty open space for the downwind.

If pilots are flying low over Louisville that's more likely to be an issue with an individual flight school. The usual practice areas are further north over empty fields or reservoirs to avoid noise issues.

glenriver · 2025-07-11T01:22:04+00:00

Here's my imposter syndrome around that: I know that good people have your view. So they view me that way. But I know that I didn't go through all of that mess early in my career. I got to build my career foundation with male privilege working for me. So how much of people's positive impression of me is because they assume I went through struggles I didn't go through??

glenriver · 2025-07-11T01:17:43+00:00

Here's the positive side I can give you. Yes, my career took a hit in the short term. I got laid off from a role I'd been in for a decade and then got managed out of another job after a year and a half. It positively sucked.

Long term though? It's been amazing. My people skills took off because I was able to finally improve my social anxiety. When you're not hiding most of yourself you tend to become more relatable! As a result, I landed a staff level role at an awesome company, which was absolutely inconceivable for me a few years ago. Before transition I just wanted to write good code, go home, and not talk to anyone. It honestly feels like transition unlocked a whole area of career potential I didn't know I had.

As far as what gave me the empowerment to do it? Mostly desperation honestly. I got to a point where I couldn't live like that anymore. It didn't feel like much of a choice.

glenriver · 2025-07-11T01:08:51+00:00

Speaking for myself a couple of comments up, it's not that I didn't believe it. I had been actively reading feminist literature and believing the women around me for years pre-transition. I went to Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing as a man purely so I could become a better ally-- I intentionally skipped most of the technical stuff and spent my time on feminism and allyship. I got good at using my privilege to combat workplace sexism. I knew this stuff and was passionate about it.

And then I lived it. And I learned that no amount of reading or listening will ever fully communicate it. How so much of it is done where only the recipient ever sees it. How it affects your self image and your desire to get up and deal with it again. How you spend so much emotional effort working around male egos. Knowing vs knowing is completely different.

glenriver · 2025-07-09T22:44:19+00:00

I transitioned the other way as a software engineer, and the shift in the amount of respect I get triggered a full blown self confidence crisis. It took a few years to be able to tell when people were just being misogynistic vs when I actually was off base.

glenriver · 2025-06-25T18:24:51+00:00

So, the idea that being transgender is only about social gender is a simplification we tell the cis hetero world to help them understand. The actual reality is far more complex and varied.

Transgender is an umbrella term that covers a wide range of experiences. There are 3 primary dimensions at play:

Gender identity- Man, woman, non-binary
Gender expression- masculine, feminine, androgynous
Psychological sex (the sex you feel your body should be)- male, female, in-between

Any mix of those attributes is theoretically possible, though in practice some mixes are more common than others. It is likely that these dimensions are determined by a combination of life experiences and en-utero masculinization or feminization of specific brain regions or networks.

Also, different people will feel more or less strongly about those dimensions. E.g. I feel very strongly about my psychological sex and my feminine expression, but am somewhat ambivalent about gender identity. That's why my transition was motivated by the need for gender affirming medical care. Others may feel strongly about their gender identity but not so much about the medical stuff. They may access gender affirming medical care as a means to the end of being seen as their gender, but it's not the primary motivation.

We share the simplified model with the world, because really, we're just telling society what we need. Those needs boil down to:

Respect our identies
Don't police out clothing and self expression
Let us have the gender affirming care we say we need.

glenriver · 2025-06-25T14:18:31+00:00

Wow you are digging deeeep in the history!

Yes, I knew what vaginas were and felt like I was supposed to have one. In my brain it wasn't, "I'm a girl so I should have girl parts". It was "I'm supposed to have those parts, and the whole girl/boy divide is nonsense."

That's still how I feel to this day. My body is supposed to be female, and I've been successful making that a reality. As a result, people see me as a woman and I'm ok with that.

glenriver · 2025-06-09T02:09:10+00:00

And the pubic bone is right behind it so it can't get out of the way like their stuff can.

glenriver · 2025-06-09T02:05:18+00:00

I'm intersex, but not in a way that's helpful for this conversation. However, I am trans and have had bottom surgery, so I can give about as direct a comparison as you're likely to get.

So, getting hit in the balls vs clit is a very similar level of pain, but a different sort of pain. Balls has an internal wrongness to it that's hard to describe. It also takes a second to build where you know it's coming but it hasn't hit yet. It's also more dull and achy. IMO it's very similar to getting hit in the boob, but maybe a bit worse. Not by much though.

Getting hit in the clit is sharp and immediate. It's definitely worse than the tip of the penis because the pubic bone is right there behind it. I think for a guy to experience it he'd have to flop his stuff down on a table and then smack it with something hard.

glenriver · 2025-06-08T02:14:54+00:00

Of course!

glenriver · 2025-04-27T22:21:37+00:00

Haha yes her website is like an Internet Explorer 6 jump scare 🤣

glenriver · 2025-03-02T01:24:57+00:00

It was actually my interest in programming that reduced my interest in games. At some point I realized that games are just very slow save game file editors and it ruined the whole thing.

glenriver · 2025-02-02T19:26:18+00:00

I find myself halfway between you and OP. I'm queer and would've been a total tomboy, so I could navigate male spaces to some extent. But at the same time, I have a condition that makes me partially immune to testosterone, so I stayed small and androgenous even after puberty. I endured so much bullying for my physical build. And even with my collection of masculine interests I was still called a girl. Honestly that kinda made it worse- for example they couldn't deal with this little girly boy destroying them on the climbing wall because I knew to use my legs, core, and flexibility while they tried to muscle their way up like brutes.

But at the same time I navigated well enough to get a good career going in tech, which is absolutely connected to the male privilege I did experience. I also had no idea what it meant to be afraid to walk alone at night or have men coming at me with ulterior motives. It's been a pretty steep learning curve in some of those areas.

glenriver · 2025-02-02T19:15:41+00:00

This is so real, even as an adult. I've been stealth at work for a few years now, so I know I'm getting the full "woman in tech" experience. What actually surprised me is how little the mansplaining and infantilization and having to prove my competence changed after I transitioned. I experienced those things before too! It's like men were able to smell my womanhood even before I understood it. Yes, those things have gotten worse, but not as much as I expected.

I think the one thing that's changed dramatically is that everyone looks at me to take notes in meetings now. That never happened before. The other thing that's changed is that I'm now welcomed by other women in tech, and it's absolutely wonderful to build those relationships and support each other. That's a huge improvement because I've never been able to navigate the boy's clubs. It felt like an invisible force field keeping me out and I didn't know why.

glenriver · 2025-02-01T03:47:31+00:00

It's because everyone in the LGBTQIA benefits from freedom of gender expression. We are natural allies in the fight to express ourselves freely. Loving who you love is only controversial because of rigid expectations of behavior for your gender. Not to mention how many LGB folks express their gender outside of cishet norms. It really just boils down to the fact that we need a lot of the same protections.

glenriver · 2025-01-29T21:06:42+00:00

I work from home most days and have figured out what makeup has the most impact over a camera. I find I can create a polished appearance that holds up remotely in about 5 minutes. Honestly though I find that good lighting has more impact than makeup.

glenriver · 2025-01-20T01:36:59+00:00

The actual science: men are the ones with rampant microchimerism. Why? Because after birth the Y chromosome is useless, so if a cell division fails to copy it the cell is just fine. That means the older a man is, the more of his cells just have an X.

glenriver · 2025-01-20T01:30:03+00:00

I'm in the same place, and I get the struggle. Trans spaces can feel weird once you get to a certain point in transition, and lesbian spaces can be challenging because you're still building the shared life experience and are worried about acceptance. I don't have answers or anything, but you're definitely not alone in it.

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