Six Months of Forward Motion

How I went from chaos to momentum faster than I thought possible. All thanks to AI, fake Farrow and Ball paint, Temu, and masses and masses of hard work from me.

Messy hair is better, who knew?

I think it’s been about two weeks since my last post. Quite long for me. But honestly, I’ve got three in the pipeline.

One is a huge guide on how I transitioned and how I’d recommend you do it. The magnum opus. You’re going to have to wait for that one. It’s taking me longer than I expected, which is what magnum opuses do.

The second is a trek down memory lane. It's called The Van, and it's quite bleak. Me, circa 1993, dressed as a woman and trying to run away in a 1982 Bedford Transit with a mattress in the back, high as a fucking kite. God, it was bleak. But it happened. I don't think you want that today.

The third one is this. A little update on where we’ve gotten to. I thought I’d give you something more uplifting before I weigh you down with The Van next week.

So. Six months.

I’m often pretty hard on myself about what I get done and what I don’t. It’s a default setting I’ve had for years and I haven’t quite shaken it. But I stopped the other day and actually counted, prompted by someone who came round and asked how long I’d been in the house. They didn’t believe the answer. I had to explain that I lost January to surgery and most of February to recovery, so the working figure is closer to four months. They went quiet.

When I sat with that afterwards, I realised the house wasn’t even the half of it.

The work

In September last year, nobody had given me any work for a long time. The contractor market was hostile and I was in the middle of transitioning, which is not the easiest CV bullet point to put in front of a procurement team. I landed a contract anyway, on reputation, doing the kind of specialist infrastructural work I’d done for another university a couple of years before. Niche stuff. The kind of brief where there are maybe ten people in these islands who can actually deliver it.

I’ve delivered it. The products they wanted are built and working.

What I haven’t really talked about here is what I’ve been building alongside it. A whole second product suite, more general purpose, vendor-neutral, designed to address a category of operational problem that every university in the world has and nobody currently owns. It’s the germination of a real business. I’ve been quietly assembling the thing for months and it’s now at the stage where there’s a Gold Partner conversation in the diary for July with the platform vendor whose ecosystem the product sits above.

I’ve also built the marketing infrastructure that’s going to drive that business AND my brand when it’s ready. Agentic AI pipeline tooling, automated outreach, content systems, the lot. I’ve spent twenty years working in automation in one form or another, and what I’ve built for myself is a serious self-learning, self-building agentic system, a long way from the usual AI gimmicks, image slop and shallow automation people mistake for strategy. It’s running quietly in the background while I write this.

The architecture model for my secret squirrel marketing system....

So that’s the work side. A delivered contract, the germination of a new business, the germination of a pipeline machine, a major partner conversation lined up for the summer. In a hostile market. While transitioning.

The body

Then came January.

I went to Thailand for gender reassignment surgery. That month was gone in its entirety, and most of February with it. Recovery from GRS is not trivial.

Since then, two further bouts of pain that took me out of commission. The first was a bulging cervical disc, the pain was excruciating. My left hand was literally quivering for about three weeks. Thirty-five years of sitting in front of a computer monitor finally collecting on the debt. At the time I thought it was the worst pain I'd ever had. A few weeks later, my legs took the title back, an episode bad enough to put me in hospital for three days

New makeup!! Less is more

.

I’m telling you all this not for sympathy but because it’s part of the count. The body has not been fully cooperating. Some mornings, including this one, I can feel a little arthritis whisper in my right ankle. Of the two varieties of arthritis, viral or autoimmune, I suspect I have autoimmune arthritis. Bollocks.

The bike race I’d been planning is probably off. I’m not sure my fitness or legs could get to the level I would need them to be by July the 4th.

I’ve been working through all of it anyway.

The house

I moved to Ireland in 2020 with the largest removal truck and trailer known to man.

This thing was full to the brim, and that’s before we bought about 30% more shit when we got to Ireland.

When I moved to this house in October, it was in a tiny Luton van with some sticks of artwork from my old life, an Eames chair, my guitars, a valve amp and a semi-broken Dyson Hoover and a face that was still healing from seventeen hours of facial surgery in September.

The house, which I christened the Little Basic House™, was a long way from palatial. I’ve spent a lot of my adult life in very nice housing, and this was the opposite. Cabinets that hadn’t been touched in twenty years. A gaping hole in the kitchen where a fridge had been ripped out. A back garden with a dead Christmas tree rotting against the oil tank.

It’s now a house I love walking into.

I'm not going to give you the full forensic tour, but I will give you the highlights, because they show just how obsessive my thinking gets when it comes to how things should look and feel. I am properly anal about designing spaces, and I love it. I'm good with my hands, I'm good at building things, and I’ve worked like my typical little ADHD hyper-focused dog on this. Masses of Temu and acres of fake Farrow and Ball paint, got it over the line on a very, very tight budget. Transgender surgery tends to eat up all of your finances!!!

The kitchen is retro-Sony cafe, late seventies into early eighties, with a Japanese neon overlay. One long open-plan room with two zones: dark navy cabinets along the working wall, a dining zone on the other side with a vertical plant wall, my old Felt TT bike mounted as art, and a Rolex Submariner wall clock with a shelf of vintage motor racing prints underneath and my shrine to coffee making. Yes, there are three separate devices that can produce coffee over there. One accent colour, orange, runs through everything: the dining chairs, the table legs, the pendant lamps, the Le Creuset pots, the slide-out pantry fronts. Next, I’m going to find someone who can make outsized 1980s retro 3D printed Sony headphones, and the Rolex Submariner is going to wear the headphones. It just amuses me.

Yes, I do have a large time trial bike hanging off the wall in my kitchen. I think it looks kind of cool, and besides, there was nowhere else to put it....

The pantry is the reason the whole colour scheme exists. There was a gaping hole where an old fridge had been, and no way to get a matching door for the existing cabinets. So I built an open slide-out pantry instead and used the fronts as the chance to commit to a colour. Originally it was going to be red, to mirror the accent on the Felt bike. But the cassette tape floor mat had orange in it, and once I spotted that, red was finished. Everything followed from there.

The gym is the room I had the least space to work with. My old gym was big, with room for a table inverter and a sofa. This one is much smaller. Getting the Pinarello in alongside the cable machine was a knife edge. I wanted a boutique dark gym this time, inspired by the gym at Adare Manor, which I visited in 2022. Slatted wood walls, warm continuous COB lighting along the panel edges, dark paint everywhere else. The slatting is deliberately restrained because every podcaster in the world has a slatted wall behind them now. Above the converted Victorian fireplace, sits a More Than A Woman neon. The mantel became the Zwift laptop shelf. The sign is a quiet middle finger to someone who used to be in my life. It did not have to be this way.

The bedroom is the counterpoint. Warm whites, sage greens, dusty pinks, brass lamps, natural wood, trailing plants. After the chromatic assault of the kitchen and the gym, it’s a room that doesn’t have to perform. It’s allowed to be soft.

The living room is the adult room. I didn’t bring any of the Grade A furniture from the old house. What came with me was the old IKEA sofa from the kids’ living room, a tired hundred-quid second-hand thing, and the battered Billy bookcase I’d already customised. I dressed the sofa properly with cushions and throws, attacked the room with acres of fake Farrow & Ball, and started again.

The artwork came too. The painting behind the sofa, the two women, was made for me on rolled canvas. I stretched it myself and built the outer frame by hand, millimetre-perfect carpentry or it looks dreadful. So that survived the move.

Then the anchors: my Eames Lounge Chair, the little valve amp glowing orange on the credenza, my left-handed Gretsch Electromatic leaning against the wall, big abstract canvases, a real wood fire.

It’s not grand. It’s not expensive. It’s small, cobbled together, and I think it’s lovely. Plus last week I treated myself to a new replica Noguchi coffee table, like I used to have in my old life.

I built all of it across the working months I had, in between the surgeries and the pain and and the marathon amounts of software engineering I’ve been doing. I’m not finished. The office is still a bit crap.

The front of the house still looks like something you’d condemn. The garden is a wasteland. But it’s April, I’m working on i and the rest of the house is what I wanted it to be.

The dog

In the middle of all of this I took on Colonel Chesterton, a chocolate chihuahua now fifteen weeks old

This is Sheepy, his little friend. He does three things with Sheepy. Cuddle Sheepy, beat the living shit out of Sheepy, and then when his little wild oats get the better of him, tries to fuck Sheepy. That poor sheep is very abused.

.

Yesterday I took him for his second proper walk, through Ballincollig Country Park, coffee in hand. He trotted along beside me on the lead like he’d been doing it for years. He’s barely bigger than my shoe. Every child in the park stopped dead and made the noise children make when they see something they cannot believe is real. Oh my god. Look. Look at it.

I got lucky with this dog. He just knew how to do it.

Where I’ve actually got to

I went into this six months exhausted, recovering from major surgery, freshly thrown out of a house and marriage, and with no work in the diary. It was chaos. Absolute chaos. Overwhelming.

I’m coming out of it with a delivered project, a new business in germination, a partner meeting lined up, a sophisticated marketing engine, a house I love, a dog I adore, and, almost forgotten in the list, voice surgery confirmed for the summer.

For anyone wondering what that can mean in practical terms, this short before-and-after clip gives a decent sense of it at the clinic I am going to.: https://youtube.com/shorts/5FtubGPOy8I?si=CKGM4F5ILeaBHSW3

There were still some people in my life I didn’t want to change my voice for. Alas, the time has come. “Looks like a woman, sounds like a man” has to end.

The final, final surgery.

When I talk to other trans women they often say the same thing back to me, in different words: that I’m a forward momentum machine. That I just keep going. And I think that’s right. I was a forward momentum machine before Stevie. I’m a much bigger forward momentum machine now, because everything has clicked, and the friction is gone, and the version of me that’s doing the work is finally the version I was supposed to be the whole time.

I have a level of confidence I’ve genuinely never had before.

Six months ago my life was still in pieces, but today I’m genuinely building with masses of momentum, and I think the future looks bright.

I hope this didn’t come across as too boastful. See you next week for bleakness and misery of “The Van”!