By the 5th day there has been some attrition. A couple of my new friends have left and one had to abandon his female self for the rest of the week for the sake of the sanity of his partner. There has been some heavy drinking happening, and I don’t really know how much of it is just in good fun and how much is a symptom of problems.
For my part, I have been unable to sleep for more than 6 hours in any one night and so I am physically and emotionally pooped. I went out today as completely androgynous as possible, dropping any semblance of effort to appear as the fabulous woman that I am. I’m not used to being a girl for this long without interruption and that pesky guy in me wants to come up for air. My girlfriend misses him a bit too. But if for some reason I have momentarily forgotten, when I crawl out of bed and look at myself in the mirror and brush away my tousled hair from my eyes with my hand and I notice those beautiful deep purple nails, it hits me again that Janie’s still here and I love her.

Truly, I am having such fun being a girl! Just the way I walk transforms me into a female state, and the world is just so different then! I feel my earrings swaying below my ears, my hair brushing the back of my neck, and oh, what a surprisingly fun and different experience to carry a purse! I walk down the street , bouncing up and down in my enthusiastic feminine gait,  hoping that people will notice me so that I can see their reactions. Just being, walking into stores and browsing around, accomplishing nothing is just so much fun! Yaaaay!

But I am just as convinced as ever that the male part of me is absolutely essential to my enjoyment of all this. I doubt very much that real women go around thinking how wonderful it is the way their posture makes them feel, how different it is to carry a purse, how sensual the smoothness of their legs is etc. any more than a man thinks about how neat it is to have a beard, or how impressive it is that he takes big steps when he walks. In both cases, it just is what you are. But in my case because I am both, the guy in me gets a huge kick out of Jane being and doing all those feminine things I mentioned, and no matter how long I do it, my male self will always find it sexy.

I also noticed how different it felt walking alone as opposed to with my girlfriend.It was much more liberating and exciting and I really did not expect that much of a change.I think is has to do not only with being without the security of having her around but also being free of our patterns of behavior and free of the distraction of our conversation.

Postscript: In an interesting twist, when we were leaving and I finally dressed as a guy after a week off, I found myself quite conscious of the way I was walking and carrying myself. It may be that my dual-gender identity may now make me more conscious of my maleness that I have taken for granted for my whole life.