If they have succeeded, it's not likely they're going to come back and tell us about it. I can remember several people who left this forum (or the one many of us had before this one), and said they were done with this. And I personally never heard back from any of them, nor did anyone else I know here talk about it. Did they make it work? We don't know.I need this to go away...has anyone ever succeed? I'm so sad.
Our support group is a drop-in group, so I've seen hundreds of CDs/TGs/TS men and women over ten years. Only one that I remember said that she was stopping, so that she could be a "man" for her girlfriend. It didn't work, and four years later she came back to the group.
Another thought comes to me. You can "white-knuckle" it, and not give in to the impulse, no matter how hard it comes on or how much you think you want it. You can have a spotless record of no dressing at all.
But are you going to be more open or more fun-loving because of this change? I doubt you will be. Trying to avoid doing something like this takes a lot of energy. There's not a whole lot left over for spontaneity. At least, that's been my experience. While planning what to do about dressing, and how I was going to handle it, I had to suppress it for eight months. It got so that it took too much energy for me to even smile at people. It was requiring everything I had to keep the dam walls up. That must be extreme, other people hide it for years. Maybe because I was already almost 50, I saw that I didn't have enough energy to keep the secret. Keeping this a secret was not a passive process for me; it took active energy for me to do it.
At one point I was in so much pain about it that I cried in the car, driving down the freeway. For the only time in the 17 years since my mother died, I felt her presence, and it was comforting to me. I've never sensed anything like that before or after. It helped to think that she was on my side in this struggle. Whatever the reason for my feeling, it was a small moment of relief in what had been months of turmoil.
I'm sorry that you've been sad about this. I do know that when some people finally decide to embrace it, (both on here, and in my home city) they can find happiness, sometimes for the first time in their lives. It wasn't that dramatic for me, but I got gains from it that I could have never imagined. I had to risk losing everything and everyone I knew, though, and that's not a light gamble. Only you know how much risk you can afford, Laura, in this dilemma that we all have to live with in one way or another.