I'm still relatively new to my journey. Just under 6 months of cracking my egg and 7 weeks of HRT.

Cracking my egg was probably the hardest part for me to be honest. It took years of trauma therapy and peeling back many layers of self inflicted injuries to finally see the real me.

There was a good decade before my egg cracked that things started to spiral out of control. A need for pain management for chronic pain grew into addiction. My long term relationship (been together 15 years now) with my highschool sweetheart started crumbling due to my lies and inability to open up to her.

I learned to hate myself to keep pushing forward. Which wasn't hard because I was always so critical and mean to the "man I had become"

Things would get a little better here and there, but it was on a downward trend. Relapsed into addiction after my son was born. I had an identity crisis and couldn't see myself as a father. I never had a good blueprint for what that was, but I couldn't even envision myself as one. I felt like I needed to push this all down, take another pill for the pain and be the best I could for others. Never acknowledge my feelings or thoughts. I didn't deserve to figure out who I was. I would rather burn myself to the ground supporting my family than to EVER give myself an ounce of love.

Came to a crossroads of sort. My wife and I had many talks when our son was asleep. Our marriage wasn't working. I was spiraling into depression and we both knew I wasn't going to live much longer. For a while I accepted that fate. Because it was all I knew. But seeing my wife crying on the kitchen floor because she didn't understand why she couldn't reach me... That was not my plan. She always saw something more in me that I refused to see. And she was pleading with me to let it out.

So I did. For my wife, my son, and for the first time in my life - I did it for myself.

A year of sobriety from narcotics. Years of trauma work in therapy going as deep as I could remember. Searching deep within myself to finally ask the question. Who am I? And I heard a voice in the distance say "My name is Olivia"

That was my egg cracking and I've been getting closer to that voice every day since ❤️