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I had a chat today, with my manager, and we're drawing up a plan of who to tell, how to tell them and when to tell them. It's scarily daunting. It's not only the people I work with, such as my immediate team; it's the people I interact with or the people I see every day. Such as the woman in the restaurant who makes my hazelnut latte each morning, or the guy who delivers parcels to our desks, or the security guards at reception, or the cleaners. Those people don't know me but they see me and they talk to me and they think they know me - and they will be surprised (shocked?) by the upcoming name change. So I can't avoid telling them; not really. The guy I sit next to... we're on a first name basis and I know he likes cycling and he knows I like cycling and we've had chats about the Tour de France and the Vuelta and the Giro... but that's about it. He knows nothing else about me. But I still have to tell him. Everyone at work will know. And I mean everyone. As soon as my email address changes... well, everything changes. People I don't actually know will see my dead name disappear from the directory and a new name appear. And therefore I have to be prepared to receive enquiries and questions from a bunch of people who thought they knew me and a bunch of complete strangers too. And I'm talking about a company that has 100,000 employees. Bring it on!!!

I've been away for a while, my trans feelings kind of minimized, as if maybe I'd gotten over it. After all, maybe it was more about hiding, lying, and finally, now that the lying and hiding and shame are mostly over, and my wife and I started deeply loving each other again, the storm had passed. Or maybe it was like Judy my gender therapist said, the TG Train has many stations along its journey, and maybe I only needed a ticket to the first or second station? But lately as the weather has gotten colder it's as if the feelings are always there. This morning I saw an Anatomy of a Scene of a new movie "The Danish Girl" in the New York Times. It's directed by Tom Hooper who also directed "The King's Speech" so I imagine it's very well done. What a trigger for me, to see Eddie Redmayne start to viscerally transform herself into the female she knows she is at her deepest. My mental-health therapist often asks me to describe what I feel in my body when I have strong feelings. It's like a tightening in my chest, a deep longing, with a twinge of sadness, because I know that I wish I'd been born female and although I could take the TG Train further nothing would change the fact that I was not born a girl. And, on balance, I like my life well enough but for that longing, like a love that was never to be. PS: I took the photo several years ago in Wuhan, China, through the window in my hotel room, using the floor lamp as a tripod to hold the camera steady to grab three shots at -2, 0, and +2 stops to process into this, an HDR image. Perhaps this photo with its circling cars is a metaphor for what I go through.

I am thankful for many things today. Heading off to a friend's home to spend Thanksgiving. Not looking to the driving but love this family as the entire family has been super supportive of me. The children range between 16 and 25, when I told them they said we support and never talk about me as a male, the female says I have great fashion sense and we even talk about girl stuff. The mother flew down to California to be with me the day of surgery and two days afterwards. She was also there for me for three days recovering from breast augmentation. So I am thankful to this family over the past few years as a female and about 6 years prior in my former life. Have a date after visiting with the family above, have been with this woman before and would had taken her to the gathering but she is in a field where she has to work today. I am coming up to 12 months since gender reassignment surgery and so happy beyond belief. Hope everyone is with someone today which I know may not be possible but still hope it's possible as being alone on holidays such as this can be depressing and that is no good.