Mea culpa! I haven’t been on in so long. I have no defense to offer you other than some lame excuse of being so busy in my real life. It’s pathetic, to be honest. I’ll try to be a better hostess and at least write once a week, both for you and also as a salve for my own soul. I need an outlet to just be me. I’ve missed that lately.

So what have I been doing that has kept me so distracted? I’m just trying to survive at work. There’s been a lot of craziness with new supervisors, a new store manager, and it looks like I may have a chance to move up myself! I haven’t offered a lot of details about my everyday life as a male. I work at a home improvement center mixing paint. It’s so exciting! Okay, it really isn’t, but it’s a job, and having been unemployed for a year, from 2012-13, I’m loath just to give it up.

I’ve worked retail much of my adult life. I’ve worked my way up to supervisory positions, going so far as to become a salaried assistant manager at a huge national retailer. I’ve put in the hard work, I earned the experience and knowledge, hell I even went back and earned my Bachelors, but that hasn’t helped me one iota. It’s all about kissing up, at least it has with my past two store directors. This one seems to care about productivity, and I’m putting in an effort to prove myself. I’m tired of working hard for so little. I deserve more!

The reason this is important to me is so that I can earn enough money to move out on my own. As much as I love living with family, there’s something disempowering about being a person in their late thirties – almost forty, ouch! – and living with mommy and daddy. I worked so hard to be on my own, got married and within a year I lost my wife, my house, my job, and even my car. I lost a lifetime. It’s taking me years just to get back to this!

So I want to move out on my own. I want to have the freedom to let me, Stefani Lara, out again. I want the freedom to sit in my living room, in a pretty dress or skirt, or even in a pair of exercise shorts or yoga pants, anything feminine, anything that lets me relax. I don’t have that know.

The closest I got lately was putting on a pair of panties and pantyhose under my male clothes as I drove down to the Dallas area this past weekend. It felt good, even if I had to do it under cover of my clothes. I could indulge myself for a while, enjoying the feel of knowing I could be Stefani to myself, though I had to show otherwise to the world.

That’s okay, for now. My hope is to move up and have my own place by the end of fall. I hope to translate that to a move down to DFW within a reasonable time frame. I think I’ll have more freedom to explore my femme side than I have up in the Panhandle of Texas. That is my plan. I just hope I can make it happen, the sooner the better.