Zari's story

[Absaroka]

In an effort to revive flagging discussions I thought I'd try something I thought of a year or two ago. In another forum I paritcipate in we write up our who bio as it relates to the subjects discussed in that particular forum. It's done anonymously and others can read it to see if they can identify with it.

This is what really happened, and as such is a very different effort from the "girl autobiographies" thread of a couple of years ago.

I don't know how we might handle this here. In the other forum our bios are their own seperate section. I think that might be a good thing to do here. They are also approved by the folks running the forum first, and each bio is locked. It's there but no comments and once it's posted, no changes. We could do it that way here.

When I brought this up there were concerns about anonymity. However as you can see I haven't said anything here that I haven't posted elsewhere already, and it's pretty easy to keep our identity as secret here as anywhere else on the internet, which is to say easy for casual use and impossible in the face of a really serious attempt to discover our identity.

Anyway I'm hoping this will inspire others to do the same. I'm fine with comments and questions, but will defer to administrators on that aspect.


My Story

I was born in the early 1950’s, a late baby boomer, and grew up in New England, not that far from New York City. I was the eldest child. My brother was born a little over a year later, and I have no memory of not having a younger brother. My sister was born when I was about five. We lived in a pleasant middle class suburb in a small city, a prototypical Leave It To Beaver setting in many ways, with of course all the dysfunction found in such places that was left out of the television show.

My first memory of anything related to cross dressing is from age three or four. My mother at that point was not terribly reticent about dressing in front of my brother and me. I think this was just leftover from when we were a bit younger and were following her around the house everywhere. Anyway, I remember watching her get dressed one morning. It all seemed pretty unremarkable until she put on her bra. She put it on backwards, then turned it around, placed her breasts into it, and put the straps on her shoulders. To me this process seemed very involved and intriguing. The idea that I would see her naked breasts did not seem worthy of any note, but I found the whole process of putting a bra on to be fascinatingly complex. I suspect it was because this was simply something that I never did when getting dressed. I think I decided to watch next time and try to understand exactly what it was she was doing. At this point I don’t remember much more, but I dimly remember watching again several times till it made sense to me. I think I asked her about it one time but do not remember this very well. And then she probably decided it was time not to appear naked in front of her male children.

A year or two later my sister was born. I remember that my mother sometimes breastfed her in front of us, and explained what was happening. Back then women were more open about breastfeeding and this did not seem odd or terribly exciting to us. My memory of it has more to do with excitement over having a new baby sister than anything else.

In terms of cross dressing there isn’t anything more to say until I reach age eight. There is plenty more to say about family dynamics and perceptions of men and women, but I’ll get to that later.

One day when I was eight my brother and I along with a neighborhood girl about my age were playing hide and seek in the house. I went to hide in my parent’s closet behind my mom’s clothes. This was not unusual, however this time something about them was exciting and I found myself sexually aroused. This was new but not surprising, in that way that children have of just accepting things. I think it was probably the smell. I stood up inside one of her dresses and found this to be tremendously sexually exciting. I also knew this was something I probably shouldn’t get caught doing, and we were after all playing hide and seek and people were looking for me, so I needed to stop doing it. I’m not sure how I made this connection but would think that it was the sexual excitement that let me know that this was no longer just another hiding place. This was even though at the time I did not really understand what sexual arousal was, what an erection meant (I thought it meant I had to pee), and so on. I’ve never really thought about this before, how it was that I knew this was something that should be concealed, and don’t really have an answer.

Either later that day or the next day I managed to go into my parent’s room again while my mom was in the kitchen and repeat the experience of standing up inside her dress while it hung from the hanger. I also experimented with a couple of different dresses, discovering I liked some of them more than others, and thinking that I had to find a time to see how each one of them felt. As I remember, she about 10 dresses or skirts hanging in the closet with a few more skirts folded up in her bureau. She owned about 4 bras and 3 slips total, all the same style, and 1 girdle. Eventually her girdle would wear out and she’d get a new one. This was the early 1960’s and people just didn’t seem to have as many clothes as they do now. There was also a long line bra, a bustier, and a waist nipping garter belt. She never wore the last two items-I kept track of the laundry. I think they’d been bought long ago for some special occasion. Her panties were mundane cotton briefs and not all that much different from mine except that they had no fly.

Back then age eight was considered a perfectly acceptable age to be left home alone for a few hours. I don’t have an exact memory of this, but sometime soon when my mom went grocery shopping, I said I could just stay home. My baby sister of course went with her and for some reason my brother did as well. I guess that up to that point we’d always liked to go with my mom. While they were away I tried on her dresses, and either that time or soon after began experimenting with her other clothing, underwear, fancy gloves, shoes and so on. And I knew that if my brother or any of my friends found out they would tease me unmercifully, so I made sure this was a secret. It wasn’t hard; by age eight I had other secrets as well. In fact by that time one of my mantras was becoming “no one will know.” The other secrets were of a more serious nature, mostly having to do with being terrified by the things I was learning in church and being sure I would go to hell when I died for not giving all my allowance to the poor and not becoming a missionary, and also with just how different and inferior I felt to the other kids due to being shy and unathletic.

Aside from trying on my mom’s clothes when she went out with my siblings, I had a couple of other strategies. Like many women at that time my mother wore an open bottom girdle with stockings as a matter of course. In the evening however she would take it off, fold it up, and put it on top of the toilet. This meant that when I went to the bathroom, or better yet took a bath, I could lock the bathroom door and try it on. Likewise there was opportunity in all the clothes that went into the laundry, which was the cabinet under the bathroom sink. This incidentally was another great hiding place for hide and seek, and my sibs and I often used it. If her slip was in the laundry I’d wear it into the bath tub. I loved how it clung to me when wet. Then I’d put a wet towel in the laundry.

I also experimented with her makeup a bit. I liked the taste of the lipstick and smell of face powder. This was the only time I ever got caught. One night while babysitting my younger sibs I tried on her lipstick and failed to wipe it all off, and then left the tissues in the garbage can. My mom asked had I been trying on her lipstick and I said yes. Not much more was ever said about it to my immense relief.

This pattern continued for a few years. I always had the nagging feeling that I ought not be doing this and should stop, and vowed to stop many times. A few years later I broke my leg and this meant that until I got the cast off that I did stop, even when I was home alone. I felt pretty relieved about this and after the cast was removed had the hope that I wasn’t going to do this any more, but within a month or two had resumed my old activities. I remember that by the seventh grade I had pretty much decided to stop and managed to refrain from dressing in my mom’s clothes for a while. Interestingly, the very few times I tried on my sisters clothing I found it unappealing, perhaps because she was a girl, not a woman. And of course most of them were way too small anyway. At that time I had an incredible crush on my English teacher. I made myself a deal that I wouldn’t wear women’s clothing any more but that if by some far fetched chain of events I had the opportunity to try on my teachers clothing that this would be an acceptable exception to the rule. I would guess that most 12 year old boys have fantasies about attractive young teachers but perhaps not quite the same ones I had.

Somewhere around that time I had a brilliant idea. Boys can be talked into almost anything at that age by merely accusing them of being chicken. We were told in school and church not to let ourselves be manipulated in this manner. We were told so many times not to do it that I decided to give it a try. I told my brother and a couple of younger boys that I was forming a club and to join it they had to prove their courage by trying on my mother’s lingerie. I included my younger sister in this group. As I remember the other boys were very enthusiastic about this, although my sister was unimpressed. However after the first time I did this I decided it was too big a risk; that someone would eventually talk about it. I swore everyone to secrecy and never did this again. My brother brought it up a couple of times and I told him I didn’t remember doing this. A few years ago I mentioned it to him and he said he remembered but thought it had been silly.

I’ve sometimes wondered if this introduction stayed with the other boys. Who knows, maybe they kept doing it on their own. They were certainly extremely enthusiastic about the whole thing.

Eventually I became a teenager, and grew quite a bit. Some of my mom’s clothes no longer fit, and I was also beginning to have the feeling that maybe I shouldn’t be doing this with my mother’s clothing, as opposed to women’s clothing in general. It sometimes felt vaguely incestuous. I also discovered the joys of drinking. I have memories of waking up one morning while only my sister was at home, horribly hung over, my bedroom door locked, wearing my mom’s slip, and with no memory of going to bed that night, let alone putting on her slip.

My relationship with my parents was changing in a very negative way by this time. Although as a child our family had been pretty close, by time I was in my late teens both parents had been institutionalized several times for alcoholism. Usually my sibs and I were glad they were gone, as life at home had become angry, occasionally violent, and often filled with despair. Although the impact of this was pervasive, it’s another story and I won’t go into it here. Let’s just say that after you find your mother in the bathroom with her wrists slit in a drunken stupor and you bring her to the hospital, wearing her lingerie no longer has much appeal. In fact the very smell of her clothing, which used to excite me, now was somewhat repulsive. I later learned that this sort of experience, in fact a lot of what goes on between alcoholic parents and their children, can be termed emotional incest. It mixed poorly with the now decreasing sexual attraction I’d had for my mom that is normal for young boys.

I don’t really remember much more about cross dressing for the next few years, except that when I engaged in normal teenage boy reading of things like Playboy the models wearing lingerie were always the most interesting, and often I was looking at their clothing and not the model. Evidently a lot of men feel this way, as there is a whole lingerie series of Playboy magazines.

Eventually I went away to college and also had my first serious love affair. I was a psych major and involved in various personal growth and encounter group things. We would discuss very personal things there and I never brought up cross dressing, mostly because I had more important and personal things to discuss about things like love, intimacy, and drug use, but also because this was a secret with a capital S. However compared to other things that were troubling me I did not think about it that much. In my senior year my girlfriend began leaving her clothing at my dorm after her weekend visits and I took the extreme step (at the time) of wearing her panties to class one day. It was my first experience with under dressing. I decided that I did not want to go this far with things and didn’t do this again. However in one of our classes on childhood development I had to do a presentation on gender development or some similar subject. I did this as part of a group. We’d been talking about a lot of things more unusual than occasional cross dressing and also about gender roles in other societies. In my presentation I said that although in our society the general view is that the patriarchy oppresses women (remember this is mid 1970’s) that my childhood perceptions were that women held the power and that to feel this power I sometimes liked to secretly dress in women’s clothing. The entire class laughed, which was the reaction I expected. I was comfortable with the laughter, and perhaps mildly disappointed that this did not lead to a discussion of covert power in relationships. All in all, I felt good at finally having said something and both relieved and disappointed at it being a non event.

At this time I also took a course on criminology. There was an entire chapter on deviation from sexual norms. One of the subchapters was an essay titled “How to tell your wife or girlfriend that you are a transvestite.” The mere fact that such a thing had ever been written, no less made it’s way into a college text that everyone in my class was reading, was very reassuring to me and I read it many times. The article basically said that some women can accept this and that some can not and that when they can not that the only way to protect the relationship was to never ever tell them.

My girlfriend at the time however was fairly open minded. She had graduated from a drug rehab at age 16 and had heard just about everything a teenage boy ever had to tell while in the program. So I told her I liked to dress up once in a while and enjoyed masturbating into her panties. She asked was it because they felt smooth and soft and I said yes. We didn’t talk about it much more. She seemed accepting but not comfortable, and I of course was glad not to talk about it. I remember going to a dance at school with her and talking to a very attractive woman who turned out to be male. She thought associating with people like this was the epitome of coolness, but did not want her boyfriend to be doing this.

Eventually we broke up, I graduated, and life moved on. With no girlfriend I did not have a supply of clothes to borrow and wasn’t about to buy my own, and not much happened with my cross dressing. My now ex girlfriend did dress me up in her nursing uniform one Halloween and I conveniently used extra panties belonging to her mother to stuff the bra, keeping them as masturbatory aid afterwards and doing my best not to remember who they’d belonged to. Eventually I came to share an apartment with a man I grew to love and became very close to. Most people who didn’t know us well assumed we were lovers, however we were both straight. During this time my drinking became much more of a problem. I’ve often thought that considering the things I did while drunk that it is truly remarkable that I managed to keep my cross dressing a secret. (At least I think I did; I am hazy about some of the details of that part of my life.) However the truth was it just wasn’t that important.

At about age thirty I got clean and sober and soon after met the woman I would marry in a few years. As we became closer I spent more time at her place, and sometimes after she left for work I’d try on some of her clothing. Not very often however. A year after we were married, with the AA saying that you are as sick as your secrets echoing in my mind, I told her about my cross dressing as a child. She wasn’t rejecting but was clearly uncomfortable, so I figured it was best not to bring it up again. She had many gay friends and some of them were into the whole drag queen thing. In fact we have a picture of her best gay male friend wearing her wedding gown and posing with her parents. (He was thoughtful enough to wait till after the wedding. A man posing for pictures in the brides gown before the wedding would have been so tacky……)

In the time between getting sober and getting married I went to therapy for a while. My therapist was quite confrontive over the issue of secrets, sometimes beginning the session by asking what I was planning not to tell him today, and saying that therapy couldn’t work if I withheld things from him. So I told him about my childhood experiences with wearing my mother’s clothing. The next time I told him I was embarrassed over telling him this. He said I had nothing to be embarrassed about and to him it just seemed that I was just describing acting on positive feelings towards my mother. I’ve always liked that insight of his, it was a completely different way of looking at things.

Not much changed in this area over the next twenty years or so. Occasionally I’d try on some of my wife’s clothing. I’d masturbate into her wonder bra. Once in a while she’d ask me about it and I’d deny it. She told me she didn’t like skid marks in her panties and I thought that was completely reasonable. It was don’t ask don’t tell with not that much to tell, and the fact that I was a married man who still masturbated was yet a new secret. Much later I’d find this also was not that uncommon.

When I was about fifty, the previously happy little girls that were my daughters became respectively a very unhappy eight year old and a rebellious and angry twelve year old. I did not handle this at all well, becoming progressively angrier and angrier. Looking back, I was also developing the early stages of Grave’s disease, which is an autoimmune hyper thyroid disorder which can create any number of emotional disturbances. But I’ve been emotionally disturbed much of my life. After all I am a drug addict and alcoholic, albeit in recovery for a long time. After a couple of years of our family life deteriorating my wife strongly suggested that I go see the therapist I’d been seeing before we got married. I’d come to the same conclusion by myself. So off I went.

However prior to going to see the therapist something had happened to my cross dressing. The year before my wife and children had been away and I’d tried on a pair of her pantyhose. I put a run in it and went to buy her a new pair. Lo and behold the supermarket had an automatic checkout counter. I could buy the pantyhose and no one would know. So I bought two pair, one for her and one for me. I work out of a home office so I wore my pair for a few days till they had too many runs in them. I threw them out, feeling relief that I was done for the moment and didn’t feel the need to do this for a while.

A year later I was in Wal-Mart and saw a nice bustier. It was just before Christmas. I figured I’d use the automatic checkout and buy it but wound up going to a cashier who didn’t bat an eyelash. And so I discovered that I could buy my own clothing. Shortly after that I started therapy. I knew that I couldn’t keep secrets from the therapist so after a couple of sessions I told him, saying that I didn’t want to focus on this since my reason for being there was my difficult relationship with my daughter. Which was completely true.

What followed was a learning experience about cross dressing. I was somewhat overweight, and that nice bustier got mighty uncomfortable after about five minutes. Eventually I threw it away, which I regret as it might fit nicely now. I bought a few more items of lingerie, perpetually frustrated at how uncomfortable bras can be, and deciding that those incredibly sexy corsets and bustiers are usually more fun to look at than to wear. I would under dress at home while I worked during the day or wear my lingerie with my wife’s dresses, and change before the kids got home. Initially I would wait to change out of my under dressing clothes till just before my wife got home, a few hours later. But that year there were just too many times my younger daughter came home in tears, and I couldn’t begin to deal with comforting her while aware of wearing stockings, panties, and a slip. I’d say I had to go to the bathroom in the middle of talking to her just to get into my guy clothes and then go back to trying to comfort her. The same thing would happen while yelling at my older daughter for something on the rare occasions she came home from school before dinner.

By now I was reading a lot about crossdressing online and in books. One of the common themes was that surrepittiously borrowing other peoples clothes is an impossition, that we should buy our own clothes. So I mostly stopped wearing my wifes clothes and bought my own, although we've always had a mutual warm socks and fleece colletion.

Summer came and my wife and daughters went away for a week to visit my mother in law. I usually felt it was more fun to stay home and work than to go down south in the summer, even without the added attraction of staying with my in-laws. I enjoy their company greatly when they come up north but staying in their home is another thing entirely. But suddenly I had a new reason to be happy to stay home alone for a week.

Always in the past when they went down South I’d feel really lonely while they were gone. This time about the 2nd day they were gone I went to Kohl’s and bought a skirt and a top. A couple days later I did it again. It was great fun to wear them while home alone working on days that it wasn’t too hot to be wearing that many clothes. I found that I was enjoying my time alone more. And no it wasn’t all about sex. I suspect that at some level there will always be something sexual about this for me. But it seemed to begin to be about something else as well. A sense of relief that I was finally doing this. Over the next year I became more comfortable with shopping and gradually more knowledgable about what actually would comfortably fit me. I became very fond of Goodwill, and also comfortable with the returns counter at department stores.

I’ve always been fascinated by people who cross boundaries. At one time I read a lot about folks who crossed racial lines, i.e. Black people passing for White, or White people discovering Black kinfolk. Now I began to read a lot about transgender and similar things, which is where cross dressing seems to find itself in books. One of the books I read mentioned some online forums. The first time I typed anything in an anonymous online forum I was incredibly nervous. Reasonably quickly I found a forum that I liked, and began to participate in it a lot. The following winter my family went down south again. By now I had a femme on line name, was thinking about who exactly my girl self was, and had amassed quite a little hidden wardrobe. I had a wonderful “staycation” and posted about it all week long on this forum. I went on a medium length hike vaguely en femme (it was after all New England in the winter), shoveled snow en femme, woke up to a new snowfall in a white nightgown, and generally had a blast with my imaginary friend. I also began writing a story about the dichotomy I felt, not male/female but public/private self, which quickly turned into an exploration of my fantasies. It’s really just a sort of Walter Mitty in drag, but I had fun. Eventually I put it all here in the girl autobiography section. I also printed it out and gave copies to my friends and families. My eldest daughter said it was fairly riveting, my youngest said it was too boring to get past the first chapter, and my wife said there was nothing in it she didn’t already know about me, which was the nicest thing anyone has ever said about it in my opinion.

About that time I was sitting at my computer in a skirt, top, and etc. when I heard a car door slam. It was in my neighbor’s driveway, but I thought it might be someone coming to see me. As I’d done many times before I jumped out of the chair to move away from the window. Something happened to my knee. To make a long story short, I had torn the meniscus and wound up needing surgery. This was the beginning of a deterioration of both knees which continues to this day. I mention it here because had I not been dressed as I was and had I not been afraid of being seen, I probably wouldn’t have injured my knee. However I’ve come to understand that it was time for the injury to occur, and if not that day then maybe some other time and place far less fortuitous, like on a hike alone somewhere. Still for a long time I wondered if this was an example of my cross dressing bringing me harm.

A couple of years later I decided that Halloween might be a good time to test my family’s reaction to me in a dress. Of course it was a costume, a witch’s costume. Folks liked it, seemed to think it was cute. However my wife made the sarcastic comment that she didn’t think it was right that she had to work while I cavorted around in a dress. I’m not sure which irritated her more, me in a dress or her at work. This gets repeated every Halloween.

Gradually my family has come to learn a little bit more about me. One day I forgot to clean the computer memory after going to the Forums, and my youngest daughter found it. She asked “who’s going to something called Cross Dressers Forum?” My wife said “oh that’s probably daddy.” It was mostly a non event. Now and then I won’t have any clean underwear so I’ll borrow my wife’s panties. She doesn’t mind and seems to like that they are a bit too small for me. I’m left with the idea that considers this to be the most important aspect of me borrowing her panties. I’ve since talked to my brother about the club I manipulated him into participating in, and he has told me of other things that probably embarrass him equally. Late at night on my staycations I will walk around the block in my dress, and now and then I’ll walk along the railroad embankment at night en femme. I went camping last fall and spent much of my time en femme in a mostly deserted campground. I’d love to do some serious hiking en femme but the knees are not up to it, a disappointment in so many ways. I do yard work and such in my skirt and women’s tee.

More importantly I made up my mind years ago that if anyone ever tried to blackmail me, I’d just tell my family everything and then call the police and have the person arrested. I don’t imagine it will happen. But my sister has an employer who routinely asks folks about stuff they could be blackmailed for and so I’ve thought of this sort of thing.

I’ve read a great deal about male cross dressers getting in touch with their delicate feminine side. It always leaves me slightly bemused. I’ve often thought that women have tremendous covert power and that my cross dressing is a way of trying to feel that power, even though I don’t involve anyone else and thus have no one to have power over. My mother’s side of the family is North Woods Scandinavian. Incredibly strong women who endured just about everything except slavery, often in the absence of the men folk. There was absolutely nothing delicate about my maternal grandmother, and her power was entirely overt. My fathers family was Midwestern bourgeois German, where the women also exerted considerable power, but in a less dramatic manner. My father had tremendous anger and resentment towards women, party because of his experience with women like this. Growing up in the late 50’s and early 60’s I absorbed a great many of the societal attitudes towards women and girls at the time. Girls were considered somehow “less than” boys. The worst thing a boy could possibly be was a girl. Girls had to be proper, behave themselves, couldn’t play sports, and so on. Girls were emotional and cried easily, especially if they were hurt, either physically or emotionally. I was very much a boy, albeit an unathletic one and thus at the bottom of the boys totem pole, Perhaps for this reason it was especially important for me to feel superior to girls.

Women on the other hand were different. Women could be authority figures, teachers, mothers, school principals. But women also had a dirty trick available to them to control men, namely sex. The scenario described in a hundred different stories, from Samson and Delilah in the Bible to the beautiful sexy witch or evil queen in the comics who lures the male hero to his doom, at least almost. The supplier of forbidden feelings. And this power fascinated me, as it no doubt does many men. So there were emasculating women and seductive women. All women who ultimately were in danger of controlling men. It’s no accident that when I would read lingerie ads and get turns on some of the most exciting one were garments that offered control. Like the control panel in a girdle. As a substitute for being seduced and controlled, I could just imagine wearing the feminine garment and being controlled by it. So at age eight or ten or twelve, unable to be seduced and controlled by a real woman, I was seduced and controlled by women’s clothing. All of which meshes nicely with my father’s feelings about controlling women, and societies messages about the dangerous seductress.

A child of the sixties, I came to be able to accept men being emotional and caring, even though my childhood did not go along those lines. I’ve had some very close gay male friends, and there have also been some straight men that I have really loved. I don’t feel that being a man prevents me from being who I truly am, and I feel that being male and embracing that is what I really am. But yet……I like wearing a dress.

In a couple of years my wife will retire. All that time to play dress up will be gone. It’s one thing to wear women’s tees and such, no one really even notices. But I don’t think she’ll really like me hanging around the house in a dress and she’ll be irritated that I like wearing that garment that she hates having to wear; a bra. I really do not want to impose on her with this. Thinking about this has led me to ask how important is this and what exactly do I get out of it. It’s not about expressing a feminine side, I can do all those nurturing/sensitive type things as a male and besides my perception of feminine is not anything delicate. Most of my favorite things to do in my girl clothes are physical-walking in the woods, yard work, and so on.

I think crossdressing for me is about a couple different things, neither of them negating the other one. The first aspect of it is what it started out to be, a sexual thing. It is for me very much a male heterosexual thing. A different way of being inside a woman.

But there’s something else. I’ve always had an extremely strong imagination. I’ve always liked fantasy. One of the things I heard in AA that I very strongly identified with is that for some of us our very first drug is fantasy. And my girl self is really just a sort of imaginary friend. The few times I’ve talked about crossdressing face to face I’ve really enjoyed it. And I love walking around outside in my clothes. But I really don’t have much desire to go out with other crossdressers. Maybe it’s because at 6-2 and 225 lbs and having a full beard I’m not going to pass. Perhaps if I actually went to a cding event I’d really like it, and that may have something to do with why I’ve never done it. But I think that for me this is something I like to do alone. Fill up my day with other people and I may decide I don’t want to dress so much.

This leads to the question: is cding a response to loneliness? It may well be; my therapist always thought it was not a coincidence that this happened at a time when I was dealing with an early precursor to “empty nest”. But I’ve always also really liked the whole idea of secrets and mystical feelings, even though as a Christian I don’t like to have anything to do with the occult or new age stuff. One description I gave my girlself is that I wanted a persona that was as beautiful, powerful, and mysterious as the mountains I used to climb, and that has a lot to do with my choice of femme name, Absaroka. Another tidbit lies in that last sentence. I’m a man. But my girlself is definitely a girl, not a woman. How much of this is about feeling like a young person in a close to 60 year old body? I after all started this when I was 8, and it took off about the time most men have a midlife crisis. My dresses are cheaper than a sports car, safer than a motorcycle, and less trouble than a mistress.

That last paragraph reveals a lot of what has changed about my cding. Remember that in the begining I was, like many crossdressers, enamored of the "control" undergarments, body shapers, corsets and the like. That's mostly changed. My girlself now doesn't like those things that much. A comfortingly snug garment, yes. But she wants to be able to chop wood in it, to be able to run and play in it. The powerful seductive woman became a playful girl, probably really a playful woman in her 20s. My inner girl is a tomboy. She didn't used to be. Perhaps another aspect of the midlife crisis aspect of all this.

So the answer is I don’t know. Maybe I’m just a lonely old man distracting himself with a pair of panties. Maybe I’m a frustrated actor and story teller. Maybe I just missed a couple of lessons in the whole socialization process. There is one thing I’m not, and I learned that here in the forums. Whatever my reasons, I’m not unique or even all that unusual in being a man that likes to wear womens clothing, even if my choice of womens clothing is perhaps a tad unique. And I certainly have had fun with my little game.

I often feel like I’ve had about a half dozen major personality changes over the course of my life, and my sister says this is because I’ve been a half a dozen different people in this current lifetime, all with one soul. Who knows, in a few years maybe this will be something I used to do a lot and it will go back to being an occaisional thing. That would be okay, it will have been fun while it lasted. I don’t think it will ever go away altogether, but I could see that if my life situation changed some of my feelings about cding might change in intensity. I guess I’ll find out, either way would be okay.

I hope this has been helpful to someone reading these things.

Zari