I'm in a mood to make a sort of post I would've loved to receive from future-me about 2 years ago or so, so I'm just gonna hammer something out stream of consciousness at 4 AM in case I say something poignant enough to keep around, in case it hits anyone who might need it like I did.
Lots of deeply genderfucked stuff under the cut. Fair warning, I don't know how to get to the point, so it's long.
I am a deeply autistic sort of person who had absolutely no friends until I fell into the right kinds of circles online. These just so happened to be, predominantly, powerfully LGBT+.
While there's a lot of things I can look back on with hindsight and go, 'oh, yeah I guess there's not a lot of cis explanations for asking my family if I would be cute as a girl this one time', I have spent a LOT of time around people who easily and wholeheartedly identify as trans and nonbinary and a lot of other things difficult to catch under the same wide net. And when you already have self-esteem issues, and you care enough about people with honest-to-god trauma and dysphoria, it's really, REALLY easy to deprecate yourself by comparison.
You hear enough stories from enough people who can't even look at their own shadows they cast in the shower without emotionally spiraling, you talk someone down from an anxiety attack they're having over whether or not they'll get to have a horrifically-expensive permanent surgery Fast Enough before their depression gets worse, you fall in love with someone you have to reassure every so often that you'll love unconditionally until they have a body they can love too, and just...
your problems feel small.
You're directly adjacent to people, people you care about, whose feelings about their gender and their body image are deeply ingrained in who they are, utterly ruinous to their mental health at the worst of times, who are willing to commit themselves to feeling better about it, and you feel like you have no right to even be here.
It starts to feel like you need an excuse, just a pervasive guilt that builds up over time being 'the cis one' of the group, because you build yourself a wall of expectation about what dysphoria supposedly is, and what it takes to 'earn the right' to call a feeling by that word.
And all you know is, whatever that is, you don't have that, because you haven't questioned your pronouns So Far, you don't cry to sleep every night over it, you're not chartering a flight to a country where bottom surgery is less expensive and time consuming.
So, if you're anything like me, eventually you dig this hole deep enough that, by the time something finally hits the sort of chord that actually makes you start questioning yourself-- something that feels stupid and insignificant, like, someone idly addresses your vibes as 'masc' and it doesn't sound right, or some character design imprints on you in a unique way (these are totally innocent and random examples I promise)...
You get scared.
Not, like, 'oh no, my friends aren't going to believe or accept me' scared. That'd be stupid. You love and trust these people, they're your friends, you wouldn't even insult them with the idea.
It's more of an, 'oh no, I'm going to have to take up space' kind of scared.
'Oh god, I'm going to have to make all my friends who feel this so much deeper in their bones put up with me and my dumb-heretofore-cisgender-ass pretending I share their problems now'.
'Oh lord, what if I end up changing my mind because nothing fits, and I accomplished nothing but waste all their time and empathy, when they'd be better off spending that on each other'.
And since you're stuck in that hole, and the whole problem is that you're too afraid to call for help, you end up committing to the idea that you have a 'brilliant' solution to this fictional made up situation you imagined that's not real:
You're just gonna stew on it until you're JUST as sure as they are that you're right.
You know enough trans people to have a good grip on 'what that's like', you know enough nonbinary people to have a sense of that gradient, and by this point you're deep in your own head enough to believe yourself when you talk nonsense, so it sounds like a great idea.
So you just, sit there.
And you wait.
And you wait.
And you wait.
And it doesn't really start feeling better.
In fact, you probably didn't even notice the point where it started feeling worse. Like, a lot worse.
Still not 'I can't look myself in the mirror' worse. Still not 'committing to hormones' worse.
But like. You used to get by before, and at some point you started feeling really discouraged that you weren't working yourself out by now.
Because you were 'the cis one'. It was easy before, and now it's not.
Committing to labels is fucking scary, because you don't want to be wrong. You don't want to misunderstand something that's secretly more specific than you'd realized, and offend someone. You don't want to make people start saying something that ends up feeling wrong to you. You really don't want to misunderstand yourself, because... what then? What are you even doing, other than wasting everyone's good will?
... So I'm gonna switch gears now and get to my point, because hopefully this has already conveyed the literal two years of my life I Utterly Wasted in that hole.
If you're hurting this way, and committed to making your pain invisible to not bother anybody, congratulations; you're in a phase of the process that they, the people you're judging yourself by, were all in at some point.
The whole reason you didn't see it, and the reason they make it look effortless, is because they did exactly what you're doing. This is called 'the closet'. It's the same thing. This is, in fact, how it feels. Quit gatekeeping your own pain.
I've been talking to myself a lot here, if it's not clear enough by now, and I'm gonna get really on the nose here and more or less directly address this to 'Kiri from circa ~2021'. If this hits anyone else the same way... That'd be nice, I guess. I hope you didn't hear this too late.
Here goes:
It's okay to be wrong.
You have to be wrong before you can be right.
You have to do your best, throw away what doesn't work, and try again.
That's literally how you come up with something 'definitive', like you want.
You can't just keep guessing quietly to yourself. You have to try it.
You're probably not going to get it right first try, unless you spend more time hurting yourself than it could ever possibly be worth.
You don't need to keep it a secret that you're not sure. You're not breaking anyone's trust by 'messing up'.
You're allowed to take up space.
Take a deep breath, pick something to say, and say it with your whole throat.
That's how you find out if it sounds right.
Now get out there and fuck it up until you get it right.
Is it a funny cop-out to admit at this point that I'm (currently) genderfluid, literally because I'm Not Being Able To Decide if I want twink or tomboy vibes more? Probably. Who gives a shit. Gender is finding the right kind of cop-out to make yourself most comfortable anyway.