In itself, puberty was a Willy Wonka's psychedelic boat ride down a river of crap.
I knew it was coming (it was late) and I didn't enjoy a second of it, or of having a teenaged brain - stuck between being too young for freedom and too old for the unconditional kind of parental affection. When it was over it was a relief, from that perspective.
I think the worst thing about it, apart from dealing with the body issues, was that relatives would go on and on about it, assuming I'd be happy to soon be in the body of a woman. Lots of sitting around grinding my teeth quietly whenever I had to listen to it, then going off to some dark mental corners to spend some time drilling holes in my own soul. Or working out - which didn't do much ofc.
There was no outlet for this other than to hate myself and everything for a few long years. The idea of telling someone was inconceivable. Or maybe some of the outlet was doing bad things and breaking rules.
I had to fix it somehow so that was when I started trying to reinvent myself. That went on for a few years. School felt a bit like a prison; home life was calm by day, and at least one night a week all hell broke loose because my parents would have a drunken fight and one of them would threaten to leave the other until I was completely numb to all of it. I would treat my life like it was a bad television show, it helped to distance myself from the mess. Pretty sure I lost contact with what I saw in the mirror during these years. I saw something but I wasn't really looking at it.
High school came and went, sixth form arrived and by now it was crucial to get some good grades I suppose but I was tired. Tired of school, tired of home, tired of being me, tired of everything. During those last few years I remember feeling almost completely disconnected and dissociated. A friend of mine I was attracted to died suddenly and unexpectedly, I was depressed for a long time about that and other things.
When bleeding started I got really unpleasant; I refused to care about it, it was difficult to get me to remember the pattern, I had total contempt for having to think about it at all. If I had access to birth control pills at the time I would have without a doubt abused them to stop it happening altogether. Which I did at a later time anyway. As I mentioned many times before I didn't try to conform, I refused to. I didn't fully know the reason for my distress, but decided I was under enough of it that I just wasn't going to play anyone's game but the most minimal one required to exist. Mother told me I had to get a job; unfortunately I was a couple of months into said job when some guy came up behind me and attempted a sexual assault and I got fired for making a vicious threat in response. At that point I had enough. I left the job, spent my earnings on a computer, took it up to my room and stayed there a few months living in any world but this one until the start of the academic year when I got shunted off to university 200 miles away.
To be honest, it felt like every shred of stability in my life that was holding it together was being deliberately cut, one by one with each of these incidents. It wasn't until some years later when I got some actual stability in life that I was able to pinpoint the source of dysphoria properly.
