There’s a lie I’ve been telling myself for two and a half years. It sounds like concern. It dresses up as diligence. It says: you missed the window.
I’ve been on hormones for two and a half years now, and I’m happy with where my body has landed. Good breasts, by any honest measure. But somewhere in me lives a smaller, louder voice that keeps whispering about the growth I could have had — if only I’d been less stressed, less broke, less human during the years it counted most. As if I could have white-knuckled my way to a better chest. As if peace were something you achieve by force.
It took a long conversation to see the shape of that voice clearly. And once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.
The missed window fallacy
Here’s the truth I kept flinching away from: I cannot go back and un-stress the past two and a half years. There is no version of me that gets to relive them calmer. So the worry does nothing. It’s not preparation. It’s not protection. It’s just a tax I keep paying on a debt that was already settled.
The Dalai Lama put it plainly — if a problem is fixable, there’s no need to worry, and if it isn’t, worrying doesn’t help. The past isn’t fixable. Which means the only honest place to put my energy is now: my sleep, my stress, my protocol, the years still ahead of me. Some people keep developing past year three anyway. The window isn’t a door slamming shut. It’s just weather I can still work with.
Where the perfectionism actually comes from
Straight A’s. Eagle Scout. Black belt. Build the resume, polish the résumé, never let the thread go slack. I was raised to believe my worth was a performance I had to keep passing. So of course, when I transitioned, my body became the next exam. The next thing to optimize perfectly or fail at completely.
That’s the engine under the catastrophizing. Perfectionism and doom are the same animal wearing two coats — both are just white-knuckled attempts to control an outcome that feels unsafe. When you learn early that falling short means rejection, your nervous system starts rehearsing disaster in advance, as if imagining the worst hard enough could keep it from arriving.
But I already did the hard things. I transitioned. I made it two and a half years. That’s not a window I missed. That’s a life I built.
Breathing their anxiety
Here’s the part I’m still sitting with.
I’m surrounded by people I admire, who obsess over this — the surgeries, the sizes, the jawlines. They compliment my growth in a way that makes my worth feel like a number on a chart. And what it reveals, if I’m honest, is that their own worth is pinned to that same number. They’re chasing something external to solve something internal. They’re chasing self-worth and projecting it onto flesh, and flesh will never hold it. Peace doesn’t come from a cup size. It’s an inside job. It always was.
And I’ve been breathing their anxiety. Inhaling a room full of people whose sense of enough is fragile and outsourced, and wondering why I can’t catch my breath.
I want to be careful here, because it’s not simple. Trans people do need to affirm our bodies to feel stable and safe in the world — that’s real, that’s necessary, and I won’t let anyone flatten it into vanity. But beneath that legitimate need runs an insidious, insatiable pattern: the externalizing of an internal problem. The trick — the whole trick — is learning to tell the difference. To do the affirming work that actually serves me, without feeding the machine that can never be fed.
Where I landed
I came into this looking for a growth hack. A supplement, a suction device, a hormone ratio. I left with something bigger and truer: the growth I’m actually after was never only in my chest.
I still feel the sadness sometimes — not for missed breast growth, exactly, but for how hard and expensive and lonely the years have been. That grief is real and I’m letting myself feel it. But grief is a thing you move through. Catastrophizing is a thing that just holds you in place.
So here’s what I know now. I have a good body. I have years ahead of me. I have tools — rest, softness, the slow undoing of a lifetime of performing. And I have the one thing that actually drives all of it: the willingness to look at myself clearly and keep going.
The past is the past. I’m still here. I’m still becoming.
And I’m going to try, from now on, to breathe my own air.