For a couple of years or so after I stumbled onto the transgender community on YouTube, I was thoroughly mesmerized. But then gradually I came to see that spending so much time on it was probably not healthy. So I closed my YouTube Channel. After a while, I opened a new channel with the intention of subscribing to primarily music-related channels. However, one thing led to another & gradually I began to return to spending considerable amounts of time watching, & commenting on, trans videos. I never got back to being as totally immersed as I was at first. But I was still back into it in a serious way.

The thing is though that I have always known, from the day I discovered the trans community on YouTube, that it was too late for me. I also was aware, though, that in addition to being transgendered I had also struggled with major depression & generalized anxiety disorder for pretty much my entire life as well. What I will never know is which came first. Did I start out mentally ill & develop Gender Identity Disorder as a component of my mental illness? Or did I start out transgendered & develop mental health problems as a result? It is a ball of wire that will never be untangled.

So a few months ago, I made the conscious decision to focus on the mental illness aspect of my personal struggles. I decided that there was basically nothing I could do about being transsexual. But there were at least a few things I could do about being mentally ill. I could continue to take psych med's, maybe get some therapy (not that this has turned out to be worth much), & I could spend my time on the internet focusing on mental health issues rather than trans issues. So that is what I've done. (Today, I subscribe to almost no trans channels on YouTube.) Obviously, if one looks at the number of posts I have in the Transgender Forum, I have far from left the transgender topic behind. But I am continuing to try to view my personal struggles through the lens of mental illness rather than through the lens of transsexuality. In the whole scheme of things, it probably doesn't make much difference. But it seems to make sense to me.