The classic idea of being sad and longingly gazing into a mirror and being like, "I've known from birth that I was supposed to be a girl, even though I have a penis," these are narratives that were created by Hollywood, and created by men in Hollywood. And a lot of trans people adopt these narratives when they're trying to get their meds, but it's such an oversimplification for most of us. What transness and especially a pre-transition dysphoria actually feels like, to me at least, is much more internal and intangible. The language that I use to try to talk about it is language that I'm borrowing from the surrealism of David Lynch β the dreamlike nature of his films β or the body horror of David Cronenberg.
I felt a tug. A pull. The feeling of a door under the stairwell you walk past for years or decades but never open. A draw that can't actually affect you unless you stop and look and ask "what IS that?" A blurry, unreadable captcha whose solution is glaringly obvious only after you walk around and see it from the other side. I was captivated, obsessed with the allegory of the cave and I was in the cave the whole time.