First Time?

 Hello!

You'll see this a lot on here.  It has to be one of my
favourite and most inspiring images.

Welcome to my corner of the internet, a place I grandiosely believe will be engaging and interesting to people such as you, dear reader, reading this page. This is a replacement of my old introduction because, well, things have rather changed.

Best place to start? New Year 2022: here.

Happiness, this blog, began almost by accident. I was recording a complicated sensation that took me a couple of days to recognise as happiness (hence the name of the blog) and then... a few months later I posted it on this blog. I had been reading a few other blogs at the time and thought: why not?

It got dark pretty quickly, so, if you want to start reading, that's perhaps not the best place to begin. Also, there is so much denial here - I was adamant that I wasn't transgender. I had a wife, children, job and was utterly straight. Transgender, for me, was the tag I searched for on captions and in online fiction for fun and stress relief; it was not a descriptor. I believed myself to be a pervert, a fetishist and an all round bad apple. Eventually, I allowed myself to apply the label of 'genderqueer'.

This is one of my favourite images too
because she seems so free of inhibitions

This was as far as I would allow myself to have space. I hadn't spent most of my life to that point simply refusing to look at the dark ball of festering self-loathing that I suspected was trans to let myself look at it! I was much more comfortable being the bad guy and pervert, it was easier to justify the self-hate and self-loathing. Not like I felt dysphoria like the blogs I read and admired!

No, dear reader, it wasn't dysphoria, it was dissociation. I avoided mirrors and didn't look at myself. I grew and maintained a beard as a defence mechanism. Equally good at hiding myself from others as a means of preventing presenting femme in any way at any juncture. It was at once a point of pride and a shackle. It functioned as designed.

In 2017 I was diagnosed with ASD and, after moving out on my own into my new house shit-tip in 2021, I finally had the physical and mental space to look properly at what I thought might be there. I unwittingly wrote it all in a post here, Confluences where I explained that I couldn't really be trans.

<insert hollow laughter sound effect>

So, it turns out I am a trans-woman. Maybe I have always known on some level. I might also be a trans-lesbian but it turns out that Toby, my second girlfriend of three, is a trans-man. So... that's a thing. I have no idea about 'the surgery' apart from increasing realisations about just how much dysphoria I used to have but assumed was normal. For example, these days I post a fair few photos of myself. Initially I told myself I was simply security conscious, not having photos of me online or, indeed, anywhere else. But, well, funny thing, turns out I hated photos of me because of, well, because of the dysphoria. And that's just one example of a completely obvious revelation I've had!

You can call me whatever you like, to be honest, but the name I use here is Joanna. Why? My parents once told me that they had the name 'Joanne' planned if I had turned out to be a girl. Both parents have since refuted that they did any such thing, so I don't know. However, I took a liberty and changed the 'e' to an 'a' because I thought it sounded more 'girly'. However, after starting this place I remembered that my ex used to call me Bex, and that's a nice name too (short for Rebecca).  It's what I posted as at Rachel's Haven when I was active there for an all too brief time. On GetDare you can find me as Connie (but I haven't posted there since 2020, and not regularly since around 2019) but you will also see that this place is my place to be honest and truthful.

This is my favourite imaginary friend whom I believe created
the Universe. He's saying Hi.

I am Christian, Church of England flavoured, and pretty low as far as religion goes. I am very very bad at being a good Christian (as in, follower of Christ - I suck at meeting people where they are, being accepting and forgiving people. I try, I do, but recognise that I am not as good as I ought to be). Oh, and I'm happy with science, evolution, globes, space flight, social justice, and so on and so forth.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given my background, there's a fair amount of kink involved in my life - well, no, in my brain. So... be prepared for occasional sojourns in that direction here. They're usually behind line breaks and there's a tag to avoid (TMI) if you don't want to know.

I'm a fangirl of the Pet Shop Boys (sorry), EDM and a bit of a geek generally. It was Mae Dean of Real Life Comics that cracked my egg back in April. I am, of course, a fan of fictionmania (who isn't).

And there you have it. Welcome and thank you for reading if you have made it this far. I do a lot of wall of text posting and sometimes I may have something of interest to say, most of the time I write to record things so that I can look back later and see what I was missing about my own feelings at the time I was writing about them. It comes with the territory of ASD.

Stick around if you feel you can, feel free to comment anything anywhere on this blog. What can I say, I like the attention.