So, I had a therapy session the other day where I started to dissociate really, really hard. I turned around and faced those feelings. It was grief over my lost childhood. I never got to be a little girl. I never got to play with dolls. I never got to dress up as a princess and watch Barbie movies. Play for children is about more than passing time. It's how they determine their identity and the roles they're supposed to fulfill in society. I bought a Monster High doll, the Creature from the Black Lagoon one, and she's so pretty and I'm going to play with her. But some things that have been lost cannot be recovered. I was watching commercials for the toys and realized all the activities they did were things I was supposed to be doing to learn to be a girl. I would give up and trade anything, be subjected to all the horrible messages about my body and my intelligence, just to experience that as a child.
Since that session, all hell has broken loose. I'm generally an emotionally stable and dependable person. Now I feel like a little girl, a terrified little girl, pretending to be an adult. I also feel like I'm a bad girl, a terrible, rotten, irredeemable girl. That I'm going to be punished, harmed, broken, and that I'm going to deserve it. That's probably my mother's voice. I don't think she ever liked me and she was an abusive bitch. I'm being compassionate with myself and trying to treat myself the way I deserved to be as a child. I'm also making a bunch of changes to deal with the dysphoria, but my Mother in Law has banned my female voice in the house. I want out so bad, I can't take living here anymore.
I've also become intimately aware of the way my brain thinks my body is and my actual body. It's like feeling the right size hands and feet, wide hips, narrow shoulders underneath my skin while I'm stuck in the body of the fucking hulk. It's agony. It's awful. I have a baby mothman plushie I've been cuddling to cope and I can't even touch him because it reminds me that my hands are too big. I found a paper called, "Gender Dysphoria Feels Like a Living Hell, a Nightmare One Cannot Ever Wake Up From" and it's honestly the most apt title I've ever read. I feel like I'm on the edge of a nervous breakdown and I'm concerned how far away my next therapy session is.
I know this is some deeply personal shit but either you know what I'm talking about yourself or you can learn something about what its like to have gender dysphoria. Stay strong and don't be afraid to ask for help.