I have been aware of my gender differences since before the age of 10. I grew up in a small southern town outside of Charlotte, NC. There I spent my early years sneaking into my sister's and mother's pantyhose and clothes and wishing I was a girl. I grew up and went to school and university eventually in Charlotte. After getting my BS in Computer Science, I moved to Charlotte, married my then-girlfriend, and started trying to play house and get my career going. We later grew apart and divorced (she had no idea about Susan). I moved in with friends and started working harder while spending too much time in bars and not enough time in bras.


From about this time (early 90s) forward, I had begun a long repeating pattern of secretly buying a few items of clothing and shoes, etc. - hiding in secret to dress, and eventually purging - kind of rinse and repeat like this for a few years. After a couple of years of living with friends and going to too many karaoke bars, I met another woman and settled into a relationship. It turned out to be one of mutual codependency and still too much alcohol. Around late 1999 I had started working to get fully dressed and ready to venture out of the house at night, trying to get the courage up to poke my head into a gay bar or other rare friendly venues.


Around this time, I started going to the annual Southern Comfort Conferences in Atlanta, GA. At the time, I was living in Charlotte, NC, and had a couple of pivotal experiences in Atlanta that helped me come out more fully. First, being properly dressed and semi-passable out in public for a drag show at a gay bar. Second, was a large dance club evening where I was dressed to the 9's and made friends with a flirty beautiful lesbian couple and danced the night away with them. Following these amazing experiences, I took the next couple of years to start going out to Charlotte's nightclubs and gay bars for drag and dancing. This was an amazing time, to say the least! I was living with my girlfriend at the time, though she could not fully accept my need to spend time as my female self. I went into gender-based therapy for about a year to try and discover if I might be a transsexual. My work in therapy helped somewhat and resulted in me understanding myself as more of a gender-fluid crossdresser. However, I sometimes still wonder if I had just not been brave enough to face the difficult decision to blow up my life and start HRT. Honestly, it is still a lingering question hanging in the back of my mind even today.


During this time, I continued getting out more publicly. My girlfriend and I had eventually gotten married and subsequently separated and divorced. Then I moved out of the house and into a condo closer to downtown Charlotte and started frequenting a local karaoke pub. After telling one of my best friends about Susan, I began dressing in drag and street glam there occasionally. I eventually told almost all of my CIS friends and my brother and sister. Friends were VERY supportive and did not treat me differently, they even seemed to enjoy the new, more interesting me. At the karaoke bar, with help from my new drag mother from the local gay bar, I was able to spin up a hybrid crossdresser + glam semi-drag look and began hosting ad-hoc drag karaoke Saturdays there. On the inaugural night, the place was packed with friends (both male, female, and a few in between) mostly all wearing RED dresses, matching my outfit. This night and the time after it seemed all too brief *sigh*. During this period, I dated another girl from out of town. She knew all about my feminine self and gender expression and seemed ok with it all. We were together (in a long-distance relationship) for a while and then eventually broke up (she was a little too young for me, 22 when I was almost 40).


After that, I met my new wife on a dating website, and she moved to Charlotte. I had told her all about my past and feelings, but she did not seem to fully get the depth of it all until later. After meeting her (the love of my life), I tapered down my wild glam lifestyle to settle down into the new relationship. Needless to say, I stopped dressing for many years and she helped me sell my HUGE collection of dresses, clothes, shoes, bags, and wigs online. It was a lot, to say the least! After we married, I threw myself into work (software engineering) and we started a family and bought our first house together. At this point, I had mostly put all of my previous gender needs behind me for many years. We had a son and threw all in on being new parents. Work was going well and the new member of the family consumed us both fully. It was kind of an idyllic time for us all. A couple of years later, I had taken a new job working for a large software company with a remote office in town.


Later my work offered an opportunity to move us out west to Washington to work out of the main campus. It seems like a once-in-a-lifetime chance to rank up and so off we went! Bought a new house and did everything for the family. Staying very busy, thoughts of cross-dressing were somewhere deep in the back of my head lying dormant. It was the summer of 2019, when the urge to be a full person suddenly dropped down on me like the proverbial ton of bricks. I was under a load of stress at work, which possibly helped to trigger the return of my female identity. Even with a new family and a somewhat exciting work life, I felt like a half-empty person. So, I brought out some of the remaining old clothes, bought new things I needed, including a couple of wigs, shoes, and makeup, and started relearning the art of being me again.


It was a brief chance to dress as my wife and son were out of the country visiting family. So I took advantage and made the most of it, getting ready with outfits, relearning my makeup routine, and finally going out for a couple of quick attempts at bar hopping. Later I had to break down and tell my wife. It was an emotional discussion and left things very unsettled. She was unable to accept it all but did her best to try. This being as it was, I put things away again for several more years, throwing myself back deeper into work and raising a child. It wasn't until earlier this year (2024) that I had another big resurgence of my desire to be Susan again.


This time I am all in and trying to find ways to make it work. Things are still unsettled with my wife, but we are talking and working through it. She understands more, but still struggles as would be expected. She knows this is not a lark, but a part of me. How we make it work is yet unknown. I want more enriching experiences out and about, doing mundane things and being female for all of it! I will somehow eventually find the balance I have needed for so long. After all, life is short and nothing is guaranteed, so we must make what we can of it before it is all used up. I will close this with this final thought. In the next month, I plan on going out in downtown Seattle shopping at a chic little upscale consignment store, getting a drink and bite somewhere, and catching some live entertainment while making new friends too. The shop is known, the rest is an unfinished plan. More on all that soon :)