For those that have started HRT, what was the most surprising change you noticed that you weren't expecting?
I'm still pretty early on in my HRT journey at just under 5 weeks of estradiol IM injections and Spironolactone.
One thing that I kind of was expecting but still took me by surprise was the depth of my emotions increasing.
I kept reading about "a larger range of emotional responses" but feeling it is a whole new world! I feel like my emotions have so much more texture and nuance that I pick up on. I can feel them shift from sadness to anger to determination to whatever so quickly and so intuitively.
Before I started E, the best way I can describe how my emotional state behaved was like these blurry blobs of feelings that were difficult to distinguish or identify. Everything swirled around me without me being able to fully experience them. Now they are a part of me and I would never go back ❤️
One of the side effects of feminizing HRT is smoother skin, which is terrific. HOWEVER, be prepared for your fingertips to lose basically all their spidey-esque gripping power. Prepare for the butteriest of butter fingers. You will be dropping shit ALL THE TIME. Boxes that you used to be able to just grab the sides of to carry around? That life is OVER HONEY.
I've gotten used to having work gloves to wear when I'm doing anything physical.
Oh my god... That explains so much! Did you possibly notice it around the 1 month to 6 week mark? The past couple days I have been CONSTANTLY dropping things that I thought I had a good grip on but never did. Just slips right out and I look down like "what the hell just happened there" 😖
Indeed I have been frustrated for years over my sudden propensity for dropping things. I think there has also been a change in coordination/spatial awareness for me.
I wonder if this also factors into the increased difficulty of opening lids? No matter how much force I apply, I can't move them without adding a grippy texture.
I think it's also skin moisture. Since E, my wife feels totally different - her skin is cool, soft and velvety now, it used to feel warm and almost radiate humidity.
That humidity feel definitely helps grip, that's supposedly the reason our skin prunes up in water; better grip!
Oh,if you're anything like me, you neednt worry. The amount of times I've cut, sliced, or knicked my already large-ish hands (both from manual labor as a teen, and my hobbies now).... I wish my hands were changing at all... They're more like lumps of charcoal than buttered noodles.
I've only been on E for a month, so changes are still young, but my hands have always been and still are quite masculine. Since I have some callouses and scars from work and injuries, I'm not sure that my hands will ever look feminine in the traditional sense. It used to be a large source of dysphoria for me, but I've come to realize that my hobbies (woodworking basically) mean that I just have butch hands on will hopefully be an otherwise femme-body. 🤞🏻🤞🏻