The Girl Who Put The Lightning Back In The Bottle

 The story of my Trans Journey June 2009 to November 2016.

 Coming Out

So the story continues from the point where I had decided to try and embrace being transgendered in 2009. In the May I joined the UK Angels forum, and received a warm welcome from the members on there. I made many friends in my first few weeks, who are still friends now. Sadly some have vanished from my life. Such is the way with the transgender world. One of the first girls to befriend me on Angels, was Gayna Starr, a Tgirl from Nottingham. Gayna was a bit of a force of nature. Very outgoing and confident and full of energy. She was also very pretty. She had just joined Angels after a break from cross dressing. She sent me a private message and we became friends. I wasn’t sure why she chose me as a potential friend,because she seemed so vivacious and I was very shy and insecure. I must admit that I was completely in awe of her. 

After being friends for a few weeks, Gayna decided to organise a night out at Pink Punters LBGTQ+ nightclub in Milton Keynes, for as many of the Angels as she could muster. She invited me to attend and as I was very much in the closet, I felt I had to decline, which saddened me greatly. Was my new trans life going to be spent alone at home, while everyone else was out having fun?

I had nearly been caught out by my Wife whilst dressing when she was out, on a couple of occasions in June. Once she went to an aqua fit class at the local leisure centre and the class was cancelled due to a kiddie being sick in the pool, prior to the lesson. So she came home just as I was almost finished getting dressed as Davina. I had to run from our bedroom into the bathroom and hastily undress and jump in the shower. I had to sneak my clothes out, bundled in my towel. 

The other occasion she had felt ill at work and returned home early, just as I was enjoying an evening in lingerie. I hastily managed to change into boy mode. This and the previous near miss convinced me that my current place in the crossdressing closet was not sustainable in the long term. One day I would be caught out.

So these close shaves, combined with a growing desire to have some freedom as my femme self,  led to me thinking about coming out as a crossdresser to my Wife. I thought her LBGTQ + past would mean she would be fully accepting and embrace my femmeness. After all she had been involved in lesbian relationships in the past. Surely she would have the best of both worlds with me?

Wanting to attend my friend Gayna's night out in early October, did very much drive my decision to come out. In hindsight it was a little too soon, and I should have spent longer preparing the ground for a coming out.

On the Angels forum, I got a lot of good advice and I was told that coming out was not always a good thing. For every successful coming out, there were others that changed relationships for the worst or ended them completely. But I felt confident I would be ok. 

One piece of advice I was given from one of the Angels, was to think very carefully before coming out to my Wife or anyone else. She said, 

"Once the lightning is out of the bottle, you can't put it back".

I decided to press on with my decision to come out to my Wife, and so on a Friday evening in early August,  I told her about Davina. She was very quiet and asked for time to think. In the morning she said that she hated the idea of me dressing as a woman, but would tolerate it, if she never saw me dressed en-femme and I never went out dressed.  This last demand led to a heated discussion and for a while it looked like our marriage would be ending. I hadn't expected this reaction. If I'd known it would be like this, I wouldn't have come out. It took a few days for things to calm down, and my Wife accepted that I could dress as long as she never saw Davina. And I could go out, but I had to be very discreet about it.

 Thankfully with a bit of compromise and acceptance we survived as a couple. There have been awkward moments down the years, especially in the early days, but we managed to stay together. 

Eventually things settled down and I began to dress when my Wife was out of the house. There were plenty of bumps in the road. Once I ordered a  gorgeous gold dress and matching jacket and it was delivered in a packet that allowed my Wife to see it. She was very upset by it. She also got very upset when I left a make up brush in the bathroom one day. Events like this would trigger either the silent treatment or threats to leave.

In hindsight, I took it for granted that my Wife's past same sex relationships would mean that I would be accepted as a crossdresser with enthusiastic acceptance. And it certainly wasn't. It was a very grudging tolerance,with many hidden tears on both sides. 

However without that tolerance I don't think I'd have been able to stay in the marriage if I'd had to give up dressing,  and if I did, I don't think I'd even be alive today.  Removing my ability to become my femme self really does become an existential threat for me as a person, and not just for my femme persona, but for the whole me. This theory would be put to the test a few years later. 

Golden Years 

It took a few weeks for life to settle down after my coming out to my Wife about my crossdressing. I chose not to attend Gayna's night at Pink Punters, because I knew an overnight stay for my first night out, dressed  would be too much. 

I was now dressing at home when my Wife was out, and we had an arrangement where my Wife would phone me about 40 minutes before she got home, which gave me plenty of time to get changed from femme to drab,and put all my clothes away. She never asked if I had been dressing and I never told her if I had. 

There was a local monthly transgender event, just a few miles from home in Totton. The Totton Disco had been running once a month for many years. I spoke to my Wife about attending, and she agreed it would be a good place for me to go for my first night out. It was on from 7pm until 11pm, so no late nights or overnight stays required. So in November 2009 I went for my first night out en-femme. It was a wonderful experience for me. I met other crossdressers face to face for the first time, and felt welcomed by them. I became a regular at this event and another trans disco, the TGirlfriends Get-together which was held a few miles away in Lyndhurst.  From March 2010, I used to give a lift there and back home to Andover, to my friend Chrissie, who I knew through the UK Angels. 

I also had some days out with friends for lunch and shopping in the nearby city of Salisbury.  And I used to drive into Southampton and go shopping there by myself. 

One red letter event for me came in January 2010. The UK Angels were having their 10th Birthday celebrations and they had organised an event at Pink Punters, the club where Gayna had hosted her get-together back in October. I expressed a desire to attend it, to my Wife, and said I would drive up to Milton Keynes during the day, and attend the party until 1pm before driving home again. This seemed like a workable compromise to me. To my surprise, my Wife said why not stay overnight and drive back on Saturday.  So that's what I did.

It was a wonderful night and I got to meet so many of my friends from the UK Angels, including Gayna, Emma, Louisa, Tiffany, Amber Jo, Saffy, Joanne, Sarah, Gillian and Angie. I also met a very special friend that night. Sue Richmond, who said that she had decided to attend when she heard that I was going, because she thought, "If she can do it, so can I ", given that we were both very inexperienced in going out. It was wonderful meeting her, and we have become close friends to this day.

Gayna and I remained close friends until she suddenly disappeared from the scene in late 2012 which was sad. But I've found that's something you have to get used to as an online Tgirl. Friends suddenly leave the scene and you never hear from them again. Sometimes they enter transition and go into stealth mode. Sometimes they just scale back or give up dressing. Sadly some have health issues or even die, and you don't find out. Thankfully I did get some info that Gayna was ok, and just wanted to leave the scene to concentrate on family. 

I started a Flickr account in April 2010, and I still post photos on a regular basis, 15 years later. I have made some very good friends on Flickr, and it's my favourite place to visit online. You can view my Flickr photostream here.

I also opened an account on TV Chix, but I have very mixed feelings about it and often leave it, and then return months later. It is a good place to search for local people, but it's very much orientated towards dating and sex. But there are some nice people on there. And one of these was my lovely friend, Natasha Scott. We swapped messages and photos for several years, and she was incredibly supportive during my difficult times. Sadly she ended her online presence as Natasha in 2019. I do miss her a lot. 

In July 2010, I booked a makeover at the MAC make up store in Oxford, for myself and my friend Chrissie. It was a wonderful day, and the first time I travelled on public transport whilst en-femme. The makeover was really good and I learned a lot from it.

2010 also saw another couple of visits to Pink Punters. One with my friends from the Angels and one visit on my own, when I was attending a training course in a location near to Milton Keynes. The night out with my friends was wonderful, but the night on my own, I found quite lonely and I didn't manage to make any new friends and had to keep knocking back men who thought a Tgirl out on her own is just looking for sex.  A lesson learnt there. 

I also visited Salisbury to meet up with a group of my friends and we had a really nice day out, although it was marred by some nasty transphobic abuse.

Early 2011 continued in much the same vein as 2010 with some more visits to the local TG disco events and plenty of days dressed at home alone. I also managed a few days out shopping in Southampton. 

My nights out did dwindle a little as I was training for the Brighton Marathon, which I completed in the April. I also ran in a lot of shorter races over the Summer. 

In July I had a lovely day at Kew Gardens with Sue Richmond, which I have written about here . 

I will be covering individual days and nights out in future posts, with much more detail, just as I did with my post about Kew with Sue.

The rest of the year was fairly quiet on the social front, partly because I was made redundant at work, when the company I worked for closed down.  I got a job working a long commute from home, in Salisbury, which meant I couldn't get home in time to get to any evening events. Also I had embarked on a Btec certificate in photography at evening college, which took up a lot of time. In the end, I ended up attending college for four years and got a Btec Diploma in Photography. 

One thing that was great was my Wife changed jobs, and spent nearly every Saturday catering at weddings, which meant she was out from late Saturday morning until the early hours of Sunday morning. I got to dress for hours and sometimes went out shopping in Southampton. It also gave me an opportunity to go to bed in a  nightie as Davina, as my Wife would always go into the spare bedroom when she got home,  so she didn't wake me. Not that I got much sleep in a sexy satin chemise. 

2012 proved to be a very difficult  year, but it started in much the same vein as 2011 had. But my long hours at work, with a long journey home, were badly affecting my life. I couldn't go to my running club, so stopped doing races. I had lost a lot of weight whilst running and I was just size 16, and under 13st, so I looked great. But I put a bit of weight on in 2012, which didn't help with my dressing. 

I was still dressing quite a lot at home, and enjoying my femme time, especially on Saturdays with my Wife still doing the wedding catering. 

And then in late July, my Wife came home early one Saturday, saying she couldn't walk properly.  She was fine by the next day, but a few days later it happened again. And it kept happening.  She was put on a waiting list for a neurological assessment.  This largely curtailed my dressing for the year. I managed one dressing session towards the end of the year, when I did a lingerie shoot, and it would be March 2013 before I got the chance to dress again. 

At the end of September 2012 we decided to go privately to get a neurological assessment for my Wife. The neurologist said he thought it might be Multiple Sclerosis causing her problems. She was sent for a scan. We managed to have a nice holiday in Croatia, despite my Wife's problems, but returned to face a double whammy of bad news. 

My Mother who was 86, had been taken to hospital with pneumonia. She was in hospital for three weeks and never fully recovered.  She would lose her fight in January 2013, on the eve of my birthday. 

The other bad news was the confirmation that my Wife had Multiple Sclerosis. It was a difficult time, and of course being Davina went onto the backburner.

During 2013, my Wife's condition continued to get worse.  It was a very worrying time. I couldn't dress until March.

In  early March, I managed one short dressing session and later in the month, I was sent on a training course with work, which involved two nights in a hotel. I took Davina with me, and dressed both evenings. It felt wonderful to be dressed again. 

I managed one more dressing session at home in May. And then my Wife had to give up work.  Now she was at home 24/7. There was no way I could find any time or space to dress.

In the Autumn of that year, we were hit by two tragedies. In October, my Wife's brother died after a very short illness. And in November my Stepfather died suddenly in his sleep. We were devastated. 

My wife's condition slowly but surely worsened.

My Golden Years of crossdressing were over.

Hiatus

I dressed on May 28th 2013. I did a Rock Chick photo shoot for my friend, Natasha and I shared the photos on Flickr.  

The next time I dressed was August 14th 2016.

So over three years with no dressing. I kept myself involved with the TG community through Flickr and TV Chix and my friends on there. I posted photos from my archive to keep my presence there.

In March 2014, I  gave up work to become a full time carer for my Wife. My inheritance from my parents allowed me to do this. But caring for my Wife full time, made it impossible to dress at all. 

I threw myself into my photography and my Btec studies which gave me something to focus on. I achieved a Diploma with a distinction in Photography after four years of studying. It was hard work, but I enjoyed it, and it is one of my biggest life achievements. However once I had finished my studies in July 2015, I found myself with nothing to focus on.

Not being able to dress badly affected my mental health and by the middle of 2016, I was suffering from a severe depression. And it wasn't just myself. My Wife was having suicidal thoughts after four years of declining health and mobility with multiple sclerosis. It was a horrible time. 

My Wife had some bad falls during 2016,and an especially bad fall in August. Just prior to that, it all got to much for me  and I realised I had to dress or dissappear down a rabbit hole of depression that I might not get out of.  

I figured out that I could dress a little upstairs in the bedroom, when my Wife was downstairs.  And vice versa, when she was up in bed,I could dress downstairs. So that's what I did. I couldn't wear makeup, but after three years of no dressing it felt so good to be femme again.  My hiatus was over. 

What Was That About Lightning And A Bottle?

My Wife's fall in August was very bad, and she couldn't get upstairs to bed for a week. It was a difficult time.  It became obvious that we needed to move to single storey accommodation,  ideally a bungalow.  But the prices of bungalows in Hampshire was way out of our budget, and they were few and far between. I  was born in Cornwall and lived there until I was 14. My younger sister and her husband had recently moved back down to Cornwall. I knew that there were lots of bungalows in the county. Also with the price difference between Cornwall and Hampshire, we could sell our house, buy a bungalow in Cornwall and pay off the mortgage. It made perfect sense, so we put our house on the market and began bungalow hunting in West Cornwall. 

I was very mindful during the house hunting, that I needed to create a solution to the problem of dressing en-femme at home. I would need a space where I could be separate from my Wife. So I looked for properties with outbuildings such as garden office  studios or summerhouses or had potential to add one if there wasn't one already. And we found a bungalow near Redruth, which had a nice outdoor wooden summerhouse with a sauna in it. With the removal of the sauna equipment, it could work as a wardrobe and dressing space for my girly alter ego. So we made an offer and bought it. Our home in Hampshire sold for the full asking price, so we found ourselves mortgage free and ready to move to a new life in Cornwall. 

I carefully packed my girl stuff into boxes and labelled them Summerhouse X, so I knew it was femme stuff inside. I was thinking about what life for Davina in Cornwall would be like. Back to where I first started dressing. 

And then one evening my Wife said "When we move to Cornwall, can we leave Davina behind?" I was very upset but didn't let it show. After three years of having to go without dressing and being in a bad place because of it,  I knew I needed to dress, and I wouldn't be able to go on living if I didn't dress. I gave the matter some careful thought. I knew that my Wife was mentally vulnerable and that she might flip over the edge and harm herself or worse if I carried on dressing. But equally I knew that I couldn't give it up, or I would have my own existential mental health issues. 

I decided that I would keep on dressing as I was going to be living somewhere with a space for me to dress in, that my Wife wouldn't be able to reach because of her disability. 

And so I returned to being a closet crossdresser. I grasped the lightning and forced it back into the bottle it had come out of, back in 2009.

I made a promise to my Wife to leave Davina behind in Hampshire. And I did. Davina was finished there and then. But she was reincarnated as Deeanna Williams. Or Dee to my friends. 

I had too many good friends and I had far too much love for dressing en-femme, for me to walk away from it.

My decision to return to the closet, is purely out of concern for my Wife's mental and physical health.  I was tempted to leave her and walk away,  but I knew that she would end up alone in a care home or dead by suicide if I did. 

I felt that I could exist in the closet and still exist as a crossdresser. And so Deeanna moved to Cornwall. 

I knew it would be a few months before I would be able to dress properly again, due to the disruption of moving, but I didn't mind because I knew I would be able to dress again when things were settled.  And so it has proved. 

The next part of the story will follow in a few days, and tell the story of how Deeanna slowly found her identity in Cornwall after a few years. But also how things are becoming difficult again in 2025.

Let's just say that the bottle of lightning is rattling on the shelf, as the cork struggles to contain the contents that are straining within it.

Photos From 2009 To 2016

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2016

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