Gender Care For Aging Nerds

Something remarkable appears to be happening with my health.

It's been a few years in the making, but I appear to have fully rounded the corner on my physical condition and I am in the clear at last. My panels have all come back in the green, my joints are certainly battered as I have eluded to , but there aren't any serious or surgery-required fixes at the moment.

I've done it. I've, at long last, found freedom from the cage of my own fat.

And I've begun to realize something as it looks like I'll have the chance to add some real numbers to my age. I'm not just doing this for my daughter, or my wife, or my son, even though I very much am doing it so I can spend more time with them. I am beginning to realize that a small part of me is doing this for myself.

I've been fat, with rare and regretful exception, for almost all of my life. When I was five, I went through a period of extreme change with a few near-fatal incidents of asthma. At the time, treatment was radically different than it is now. Now? You have about a million treatment options and none of them are A) expensive or B) absolutely devastating on a young body.

When I was diagnosed, my parents had to do a lot of things very quickly. They had to bar me from going outside very often, which was a great injustice for a hyper-active five year old. I was shackled, quite literally sometimes!, to a machine that pumped inordinate amounts of steroids into my body in mist-form.

I immediately gained an enormous amount of weight and became a lightning rod for both ridicule and torment for the remainder of my childhood. The weight would vary, sometimes I would even escape it for a brief period upon hitting a growth-spurt. But it would always come back, like some recalcitrant sinner, to lord once more over my life.

Now, however, I have finally achieved what I have sought for so long. Heck, I don't even think about my weight anymore. Sometimes for days on end! Yet other thoughts now replace them. What would my life have looked like without that life-altering requirement? Would I have been the same person as I am now? What about my physical vessel? Would I have cared for it differently? Would it be shaped the same?

So, as the weight remains (and will stay) absent, I am now faced with a new problem: Who do I wish to be? Now, at this late remove, what do I wish to do with my body now that I know it will remain in the same shape for a significant stretch of time?

Enter a very wonderful concept that has gained a lot of science and research behind it: Gender self-care. As our trans brothers and sisters have shown us, there is no real limit on what we can do with our physical vessels to care for our mental well-being. With help, guidance, therapy, and appropriate medication you can basically achieve whatever outcome suits you.

And so, I have dwelled upon this issue for some time. Months and months of time, actually. I have mostly kept it hidden from my wife, although if it's anything like how I 'hid' my engagement ring, she has long since figured it out. I finally know what I want to do with my meat-suit.

I want to be swole.

I want to burst out of my shirt. I want my chest to have a second, smaller chest overlaid upon it. I want it to look like I have swallowed a smaller version of myself that is trying to burst me at the seams. I want to take my gluteus minimus and make it a smackable maximus.

I want, in a real way, the chance to bond with my male counterparts that was denied to me due to circumstances beyond my control. It will take time, it will take medicine (testosterone in moderate doses which I need anyway due to other issues), and it will take concerted effort on my part.

However, I have earned myself a bit of extra time on this ol' Earth and I now know how I wish to spend at least some of it. And as with so many other things, I could not have done it without the brave souls to have gone before me, lighting the way.

Thank you, trans brothers and sisters, for yet again proving just how incredible you all are. Your fight is our fight, always and forever.

Swolefully,