I've been uncomfortable with my gender for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories are of me being preoccupied with my body and the parts I was lacking that would have made me male. I used to cry to my mother about this, telling her I knew what boy's parts were like and not understanding how I knew or why I didn't have them. It worried her to say the least.
I remember an epiphany I had as a child when I was watching one of my favorite cartoons and had the gut wrenching realization that I was different from the main characters I liked because they were male and I wasn't.
I have pictures of myself as a child in which I looked like a little boy and pictures of myself as a college freshman in which I looked like a young man.
I hated my chest so much that I refused to wear a bra until I was in high school and even then I would only wear sports bras. Girls in my gym class used to say that getting hit in the chest would cause breast cancer so I took to punching myself in the chest for a while until I started to cause black and blue marks that I didn't want to be noticed. I wouldn't wear a bikini until I was well into high school. I used to go swimming in a sports bra and shirt so I wouldn't have to expose my chest because I hated it so much.
I've always been sexually attracted to women. When I was a kid I had a crush on Christina Aguilera. As a teen I had a crush on a female friend. I never dared to tell them or anyone else.
The saying that "the truth will set you free" is a lie, at least in my case. For me it's more like "the truth will get you persecuted by everyone you love".
I've repressed so much that for a while I didn't even have an identity because the identity I did have was just a manifestation of everything everyone else wanted me to be. I let my true self show through when I could but more often than not I was completely lost, just living in my own head.
Maybe I should have stayed repressed though because taking an identity that others made for me would have been a hell of a lot easier than what I'm going through now.
I wake up every single day with anxiety. It's that sinking feeling of coming to from my dreams and realizing that "oh god, I'm still here in this messed up life" accompanied by a throbbing pain in my chest over my heart that destroys me a little every day. Sometimes it develops into a full blown panic attack but I never know where I'll be when it's triggered. I used to have them in the middle of the day at work but now I'm a loser with no job. It's made worse when my family members scream at me that I'm evil, when they keep saying that it's a choice to be this way, when my father tells me he knows I'm suicidal so I should just kill myself or the time when he calmly told me that since I'm transgender and attracted to women it means I'm a sexual deviant who would probably molest my own sisters. My panic attacks after those latter incidents were so bad that my entire body wouldn't stop shaking and I hyperventilated until I passed out.
I don't have a single friend anymore and I have so much social anxiety that I don't know how to make new ones or if I should even reconnect with the old ones. I don't have anyone I can reach out to. I'm always afraid that if I try to reach out to my old friends or acquaintances to tell them my situation they'll just shun me too.
My life now consists of trying to keep myself unconscious because I can't handle this pain. It's like a self-induced coma brought on by sleeping constantly. When I am awake I cautiously spend time around my family, trying in vain to get through to them so they can love me again.
The only person I have to help me is my girlfriend. She calms me during my panic attacks and is always there to talk to me. But I'm not allowed to have any contact with her. For a while my family members seemed to accept that they couldn't force me to quit talking to her but yesterday my father took my phone off of me.
I'm too old to be going through this. I'm trying to get healthy again, mentally and physically, so I can get a job and get out but what for? So I can have a future where my family completely cuts me off, a future where my sister who used to be my best friend no longer speaks to me or where my little sister won't even look at me much less hug me anymore? I don't want to live like that but I don't know if I'll ever be able to get through to them. I'm not sure if they'll ever realize that this isn't about them and that it isn't a choice.
I'm tired of living with this pain and I have no idea how to make it stop. I'm not sure how much more I can take. I'm sorry for always posting such depressing crap about my dysfunctional life and family but sometimes I just need to get it out there.
