nyarlathotep

Heck yeah, chiming in with the “parents had two names picked out” backstory. I like to tell people my mom picked my name, we just needed a little redo to correct it to the right one!

If I could go back and talk to a younger me at the start of her transition, we’d talk about how this is the chance to ACTUALLY learn about myself and to really take time and care to not sweat the details or get stuck in a rut. Try everything and figure out what’s actually you and what is just some baggage or ideal you’re trying to live up to. Don’t be afraid to say yes. Also, don’t be afraid to say no. Keep both open as your options for everything: clothing styles, makeup (if you wanna), hair stuff, sexuality and attraction, etc.

To be clear, I still feel like I managed my way through it and found my way to a rough approximation of what’s right for me eventually, but I was often too hard on myself and placed restrictions where there really weren’t any beyond what I was enforcing on myself. It really is Puberty 2 in so many ways, and you really need to lean into the lessons about how much any of it actually matters from Puberty 1… if at all possible.

Is this still available?

Hey, I can take a swing at this. It’s basically just a question of understanding how fractions work (which is fumbled horrendously by teachers, at least where I’m from - I basically had to teach myself fractions all over again when I went back to school).

So, if you look at the terms on the left hand side, we have “x”, which is the same as saying “1x”, so the whole number “1”, we have a whole number “3” as part of “3x”, and we have the fraction that’s going to cause us to do a little work, “1/2” as part of “1/2x”.

Now, a whole number can be rewritten as a fraction, and this makes the most sense when you see fractions as little division problems unto themselves. For instance, the “1/2” could be read as “1 divided by 2”, or “0.5”. A whole number like “1”, then, could be rewritten as “1/1”, or “2/2”, or “3/3”, and so on.

Now, in order to add fractions together (which is what we’re trying to do since our ultimate goal is to get the variable that we’re solving for alone on one side of the equation), we need the denominator to be the same for all of our terms, i.e. the “common denominator”. Because we already know the denominator we likely need, the “2” in “1/2”, we simply need to transform both of our whole numbers into fractions with 2 in the denominator.

For “1”, this can be rewritten as “2/2”. Dividing 2 by 2 gets us back to 1, so that works out.

For “3”, we need to determine what number divided by 2 gets us to 3. In this case, that’s 6, which leaves us with “6/2”.

The equation now looks like this: 2/2x + 6/2x + 1/2x = 45

We can, of course, pull the “x” out like this: x(2/2 + 6/2 + 1/2) = 45

Then, when adding fractions, we only add the numerators (the reason we were looking for the common denominator in the first place). So, 2 + 6 + 1 = 9, leaving us with “9/2x = 45”. It’s then just a question, as you can see in the posted solution, of multiplying both sides by the reciprocal to solve for x.

I would deal with this, and did, the only way that you really can: take it one day at a time, have deep reserves of both patience and grace, for yourself AND others, and remind yourself that transition is a marathon, not a sprint.

Puberty sucks real bad, even when it’s the correct puberty, and there’s a whole lot of “everything at whatever pace it goes at” to the experience that can feel depressingly, agonizingly slow.

You’ll get there. Take a deep breath and, rather than focusing on all the things you need to get to and need to get started and need to navigate your way through, allow yourself a moment to celebrate the few small victories you already accomplished! Those are the building blocks that can get you to your “magic button-adjacent” future.

No tankies, Nazis, or trolls... but of course, now I'm repeating myself.

So, I’ve been through a few of these tectonic plate shifts in my life on the internet, and I know that there will be others older than me with even more experience or alternate experiences along similar themes.

I am not even kind of an early adopter online. I tend to find something I’m comfortable with and stick with it for quite some time, and it takes a number of “throwing my hands up in disgust” events to get me to consider a change. From my own timeline of use, it was AOL as the “front page of the internet”, followed by 4chan for a very short while, followed by Digg, followed by reddit, and now it’s starting to feel like we’re on the brink of another plate shift. Is this something on that sort of scale? No idea. It would take someone with a far keener eye for these things to tell you for sure, but I can confidently say that if someone like me is here, then I’m certainly not the only one, and that means something’s up.

Make of all of that what you will, but it’s going to be increasingly interesting to see where this goes in both the short and the long term.

Just tagging in to agree with both points (hands?) and to self-report another newcomer fleeing the growing hellscape that is reddit to this increasingly relevant thread. So, there’s two of us, at least?