In the Adirondacks Mountains of upstate New York, every valley, every drainage, watershed has another potential river creek that you can go paddling in when there's enough water. So that's what we did.

There's a core group of about six of us who would meet up at least every weekend, sometimes in the middle of the week to go paddling on whichever river had water – there are some rivers that always have water.

So that's all I did – kayaking and work. I didn’t really have a social life, because I'm living in a very rural, distant place where there isn't much else to do. My friends all live hours away from me and are all over the country. It's not like I can just go down the street and see some friends or go to a restaurant -- there are no restaurants to go to, without driving for 20 minutes, 30 minutes.

Around the same time I was finally getting through to myself about my transness – that I needed to change and accept myself and get on.

The first step was understanding how I could get on hormone replacement therapy. I am extremely lucky in that there's a gender clinic in the regional city that's 20 minutes from my house. Unlike many people in rural America, I actually have the resources down the road.

I called them up and they said, "Come on in".

They prescribed HRT, 'diagnosed' me as having gender dysphoria, and I started that process on 2nd November 2021. I was really terrified about that whole process. For me, picking up the phone and calling them, and talking to the receptionist -- not even to a doctor -- but just talking to the receptionist was the hardest part of that journey for me.

Because I knew that when I started that process, so much else was waiting to happen – starting it was kind of admitting that it always had to happen.

[As told to @Ragi Gupta — continued tomorrow]