I feel a little alienated from my sisters sometimes and took forever to understand myself because I lack the standard narratives everyone seems to have. I never knew what was wrong with my life. Not even a little. I’m AuDHD and I grew up when Silence of the Lambs and Ace Ventura were coming out. I had a privileged, well-off childhood with early access to the internet and my parents told me that if I just kept acing math and science tests I’d be set for life. So I just got up in the morning, put on clothes society told me to put on, sat through school, and then went home and dissociated out of my body onto the internet. On the internet I got to be no one without a body, shitposting on 4chan (before /tttt/ existed, thank the sun) and then fark and then reddit.
I never picked girl characters in rpgs, but you know the one rpg character I really, really got into imagining myself as? My Forsaken (undead) WoW main. Because he was dead, and struggling to find some purpose in his undead existence.
Taking hormones shocked me to my core because I suddenly came alive and hadn’t even realized I was dead. I felt present in my body and feminine and they went together and felt completely right. Looking back on my life now, I didn’t feel like a girl trapped in the wrong body, I felt dead and absent and coped with it by being anon online. Life never forced me to reckon with myself and that feels embarrassing now.
Now I’m craving sisterhood and validation and being seen. But I’m well into middle age and I’m shackled to a house in the suburbs I sleepwalked into. I can be the woman I want to be but real growth is slow and I’m impatient. I keep vomiting my feelings at people like I am in this post (and people find it off-putting I think). Can anyone relate to my story?
Fuck, I need to watch I Saw The TV Glow, don’t I
Exactly how I’ve explained it to my spouse – when we were kids, the vocabulary just didn’t exist out in the boonies. Everything was just “gay,” and that was the thought-terminating cliche, as if the mere concept were suppressed simply by limiting the ability to put it into words.
It definitely was suppressed!!! Like obviously some trans people managed to figure it out from first principles without needing to have heard about it first, but a lot of its us didn’t.
(Please note my use of the phrase “first principles” is just cuz it’s in common use currently. In the philosophical sense, first principles are metaphysical bullshit, very undialectical)
Oh, absolutely. I guess I meant more that we still are who we are, even if some of us had to take the long way 'round to figuring it out. Stigmatization of mental health care really didn’t do us any favors, either, although 1990s psychiatry would have probably amounted to “you just have depression, shut up and take the Zoloft” because a lot of us in this situation don’t perfectly fit Blanchard’s bullshit categories.