My CD Story, Part 1

So I was able to post this quicker than I thought, but it's very long. I'm copying much of it off an email I sent and am doing it using a phone, so this will be broken up. More to come...

The first urge to dress that I can recall was when I was around 3 or 4 years old. My cousin had come over to our house after church. She was wearing her church clothes, including a pair of Mary Jane shoes. I really wanted to try those on, but knew better than to say anything to her or anyone else. 

Then I can remember being around five. I was a huge He-Man fan (like I said I was always pretty much a boy's boy outside of this) and was going to dress as him for Halloween. My mother was worried about me being cold and so got me some tights to wear under the shorts. I tried them on as soon as I got home. Turns out it was warm that Halloween and I didn't need them. I kept seeing them in my dresser drawer but never wore them again. One day my mom cleaned out my clothes and they were gone. 

Then around third grade one of my friends dressed up as a joke. I felt really funny and knew I wanted to be dressed up too. I used to lie in bed and think about dressing before I went to sleep. By fifth grade, after another friend dressed as a joke, curiosity got the better of me. I started to try on my mom and sister's stuff (she was younger than me and small, but she had some clothes that were way too big for her and I could squeeze into some things). I continued to do this for a couple of years, whenever I was at home alone. With the onset of middle school and those associated changes that teenagers go through, these dressing sessions became more frequent (you can read between the lines here).

From then on, I would dress most times when I was home alone. We had just gotten AOL and I discovered the gender forum and pictures there. I would go to the chatrooms, where I would lie about my age and how I was dressed in order to be flattered. This ebbed and flowed through the years. I really didn't date much in high school and only had one girlfriend who lasted for only a few months. Part of this was due to my lack of self-confidence in general and part was fear about being found out as a CD. Those fears lasted through college and well into my 20s.

Outside of that, though, I was a fairly typical guy - I loved sports (still do) and played all kinds, generally liked things most boys do, drank and partied, and was reasonably popular in school. I look back on my high school days generally fondly. I even thought at one point near the end of high school that I had this CD thing beaten. Then I got my own computer, my curiosity got the best of me, and the next thing I know I was checking out all the sites of geocities. Through college I would spend lots of time in my room looking at sites. Rarely (basically never) dressed, and I'm sure all the time in my room on the Internet hurt my social life, but my lack of self confidence and introversion meant my social life was never going to be stellar anyway. 

To be continued...