u/Euphoric-Garlic8436

My partner and I are finally moving on from our tiny apartment to a house with a fenced yard next year. I've always been a dog nerd, and fussing over the right breed for us has been a welcome distraction from a recent family tragedy. Nothing is happening soon, we won't be ready for a dog for the next year or two, I just like to plan, research, and be prepared.

Lagotti have come up in our search and have been the most promising so far. I am planning on trying to meet some in person before we make a decision, but I also wanted to see if this sub had any advice.

Things that make us keen on them are the hypoallergenic (or less triggering to allergies than your average dog, at least) coat, the low prey drive, and the intelligence. I want a SMART dog - ideally, I would like to do competitive obedience, and I just love animals that are smart enough to be operating on a similar 'level' as me. I've also heard that they love to be around their people and tend to have good recall, which are also nice traits. My partner has allergies, we have cats, and having a smart, trainable, not super independent dog is important to me.

Energy levels and grooming is what concerns me most. I am aware that "undemanding" is a poor description of them and was removed from the breed standard, and should have been translated more as easy keeping/adaptable. I have told my partner that I'd only be comfortable with a Lagotto if we *both* trained the dog in a sport. I plan to do obedience and possibly agility, I think he is leaning towards scent work (he would love to take the dog mushroom hunting!) and possibly agility as well. My plan with grooming is to just buy a grooming table and learn to do it ourselves. I'm willing to do that, he's willing to do that, but my only grooming experience is with my longhaired cat, so I'm worried it would be harder to keep up with than I'm expecting.

We are first time dog owners, though we did both grow up with dogs (my family was fairly neglectful of ours, unfortunately). I'm aware Lagotti are typically not reccomended for first time owners, I'm just not sure what other breeds would really work for us due to the allergy, prey drive, and trainability constraints.

I've struggled with ARFID my whole life. I have texture sensitivities and am generally just not interested in eating, because of this I've been significantly underweight for almost my entire life.

About a year ago, I managed to change that. I started making sure I ate breakfast and lunch every day, and started meal planning with my partner to make sure I was eating a healthy, nutritionally and calorically sound dinner every day. It WORKED. I ended up at a healthy weight for the first time in my life, to the point where people who hadn't seen me in a few months would almost always greet me with "you look so much healthier now!"

And then about a month ago, my mom's cancer was deemed terminal. She's been in home hospice ever since. My appetite is *gone* and I feel like I'm going to throw up if I try to force it. I barely eat breakfast anymore and have probably had lunch maybe three or four times since it all started. I'm spending most of my time with my mom and my boyfriend works full time so meal planning just kinda petered out. My weight is maintaining much better than I expected, but I feel worse and malnourished all the time now.

It's just so devastating. Dying mom aside, I can't *eat* anymore. I asked my doctor for advice and she just told me to smoke more weed, which I'm pretty sure is actually contributing to the lack of appetite. I fought so hard to get better and I lost it all in a month.

I was always surrounded by community during my transition. I've known others who identified as trans men since middle school all the way up through college. I got very involved with reddit trans spaces during covid, which are unfortunately so much larger, more active, and more plentiful than detrans spaces.

And now it's gone. I'm basically shunned from online trans spaces, the trans men I was friends with won't even make eye contact with me now. My LGBT friend group talks to me less, to the point that I don't even really consider them friends anymore. My current social group is now my cis boyfriend, one woman who desisted in high school (though we never talk about this and she's much more pro-transition than I am), one cis man who knew me during my transition, and his two cis male friends who met me post-detransition.

None of them get it, and none of them really seem interested in letting me talk about it. I've mentioned that I "used to be trans" to one of the cis men who met me post-detransition and he just completely glazed over it. It was such a big thing that happened to me, and it's just... invisible, somehow?

I just miss having community, being able to actually speak to a person who firsthand understands my experiences. I don't know if I'll ever get to meet another detrans woman in the real world and that feels so isolating. I only really have this subreddit, and I firmly believe that online spaces can't replace offline human connection, so it's not even that helpful :(

I had the stereotypical autism/trauma/internalized misogyny stuff going on, but I also feel like some major things that influenced my decision to transition were the internet and my self-loathing.

Soooooo much of my gender "exploration" was done online. I was super involved in trans reddit/discord spaces. I started questioning and came out just before covid, so everything went online when I was just getting started. I realized I didn't feel comfortable living as a man *once I had to be one offline.* Starting college and interacting with others in physical space made me feel so differently about gender compared to when I was, quite frankly, terminally online. Staying off the internet has been a big part of my detransition and healing.

I think my transition also somewhat functioned as a way for me to 'kill myself off' and start over. I have a lot of self-loathing, which has come back since detransitioning as I'm actually acknowledging the life I lived pre-transition now. During my transition I just wouldn't let myself think about it. It's still hard to deal with and I've been having more suicidal/self-harm urges than I generally did during my transition, but I'm trying to just remind myself that I was just a kid back then and either way I've grown and changed significantly as a person since those times. I'm also finally properly medicated (shoutout to the birth control pill for managing my PMDD & probably saving my life!) so it's much easier to just sit with the thoughts without being volatile and impulsive and actually acting on them.