A very cool thing happened today

My last two blog posts shouldn't be online.  I know the best thing I could when I post a story is to walk away for two to three days.

I didn't.

I obsessed the last two days.  I posted my fears in two blog posts.  I hit refresh on my story knowing full well that if I'm lucky maybe 10 people will bother to leave a review in the next few weeks and then the story will fade into fictionmania's vast stack of old stories that no one reads anymore.

By noon, I had 2 reviews.  I got another in the afternoon and another after dinner.  Four reviews on the first day!  Wow.  The story is twice as long as I originally intended and I didn't expect a quick response as 20,000 words take most people 1-2 hours to finish. 

Then I saw I had another review.  I opened the link and it floored me.  Here it is:

Maggie Finson - 

A very nice, and poignant story, Sarah. Change is necessary in life, but with every chage something is lost to offset the gain. That was shown very well with Sams 1,2,and 3 and their efforts to make things better for James and Lynn. I really enjoyed this one.

 

Maggie

Ok she spelled my name wrong but she also misspelled the word 'change' too.  Who cares? It was Maggie Finson!!!!  When I saw this I ran around the house beaming like a little kid with a secret.  Her name might not mean much to many people but it does mean a lot to me.  To explain I have to give some backstory.

About ten years ago I was having some issues with a girlfriend who told me she thought I was gay.  I'm not effeminate in a stereotypical Hollywood sense so her words confused me.  She explained that in our relationship she felt she was the guy and I was the girl.

It bothered me but I shouldn't have been surprised.  My whole life I've struggled with my identity and back then I didn't know that sexual orientation and gender identity were two separate things.  I knew I wasn't gay as I liked girls.  A lot.  How was it possible that I was a girl?

I couldn't ask anyone about it so I went to the internet.  I found a website that had tests to tell you if your brain is male or female.  Over time I found there's lots of bias in the tests themselves but the site had lots of other stuff on it too.

I think the website's purpose was to get women to sign their boyfriends up for hypnosis and do real live forced feminization on them.  I'd post a link but some pages have nudity and I don't want to get myself in trouble (if you really want to find it google - hypnosis and wishes.  The site will be one of the top answers but it is definitely NSFW).  I'm not sure how legitimate it was but I had fun going through all the links and trying to use the internet hypnosis on myself.

 

Now I'm not a believer in that you can force people to do stuff against their will using an internet flash program but I do think that over time a person can learn to get comfortable with things they don't want to accept about themselves.  I had crossdressed in little since I was in middle school wearing mom's wigs and high heels, smoking her cigarettes, and putting on her makeup.  When I got out of school I had kept a few pieces of clothing I'd gotten from a few girls I'd dated while I still snuck putting on makeup when the occasion allowed.

The internet site let me feel ok to push it a little further.  Luckily my job responsibilities had changed and I was travelling a lot for work.  That meant I'd never get surprise visitors as I was staying in a different hotel room just about every night.  That gave me the confidence to fill my suitcase full of makeup, wigs, dresses, panties, heels, along with a ridiculous amount of makeup.  I found I loved every minute of it.

I realized I wasn't gay but I am at least 50/50 where gender ID was concerned.  I found by ignoring it I was hurting my ability to interact with other people but in our society you can't cross dress all the time and keep a job.  I needed another outlet and I found it in TG fiction which is where Maggie comes in.

The hypnosis website had lots of stories of forced feminization which really aren't my thing.  There was one series called "Heaven and Hell" that was different.  The stories had good characterization, great pacing, and well developed scenes.  It was essentially professional writing and they helped me find a part of myself I'd never really known before.  Of course you've probably guessed by now the author's name was Maggie Finson.

I must have read the Heaven and Hell stories on that site about 20 times each and I needed to find more.  I was searching for more of Maggie's stories when I found her stuff on fictionmania.  I didn't know there were entire websites dedicated to TG fiction.  The rest, as they say, is history.

That brings us back to the present.

A day ago I was obsessing in fear that my story was terrible.  My exact quote was:

...it's left a bad taste in my mouth.  Combine that with the few grammar errors and I can't read my story.  My anxiety is too high and I now feel the story is bad.  I know this is irrational but I took some chances this time as I wanted to try to write a story in 1st person instead of my normal 3rd.  The only thing I see now is a story written too passive (told not shown) with lots of formatting issues.

A day later later Maggie Finson says she likes my story.

I can't stop smiling and it just proves my old girlfriend was right.  Sometimes I am a girl.