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
I can really relate… in many ways I’ve fallen back into “living death,” but that spark of life- that especially was so bright, for that while I lived more fully (for all I was still a total traumatized and dysfunctional mess). I’d always felt like a corpse, tbh I was constantly telling myself even in my preteen years that I had to “gain” or “claw my way to life…”
Regressing (not detransitioning, just typical dysfunction/depression/etc) has been hard… I really need to get out of my shell more.
CW typical unhealthy brain stuff, SH adjacent
spoiler
If I actually am present in my body, oftentimes it feels like my body is a necrotic, cancerous mess. Sometimes I imagine being able to carve up and modify myself like I were the corpse I often feel like, rather than some dysfunctional meat computer. In fairness I guess I’ve always had this really unhealthy relationship with myself even outside of dysphoria, as a kid I interpreted the whole (ex)Christian schtick of “if your hand fails you, cut it off” in a pretty literal way and it still sticks
Life is definitely out there, though. I’m- not brave enough to return to it yet as I am (dysphoria, but equally or maybe moreso dysmorphia and shame over life in general), not ready. But even as-is it’s better than it was before the egg cracked… I need to rewatch I Saw the TV Glow too tbh, but in general even just seeing others commiserating, or remembering it in myself, or the small bits of good genderfeels and feeling like myself in general, it’s like a warmth that keeps me from just vanishing, bedrotting or dissociating into nonexistence. So basically- thanks, too.