Hello everyone. I've been lurking around Susan's for a couple of weeks now and kept going to make an intro and then stopping myself out of fear. Now I'm actually making my intro post even while having a panic attack over it, silly aren't I?
Basically I don't know where I fit into things anymore so I can't say what 'category' I belong to in the trans community or even if I fit at all, and I feel like i need to apologise for that. I was born with a female body and grew up never fitting in anywhere and always wondering why. I was allowed to act and dress in whatever manner I felt like by my parents, without being guided to be "more feminine" and subsequently have always been tomboyish. I've battled with depression and anxiety all my life and I always feel apologetic for existing when I'm with other people. I don't know how to 'be' when I'm in public and subsequently I tend to hide away and live online where I don't need to have a body. Despite all this I found an amazing guy in my late teens (we met online) and we got married in my early 20's. I'm in my 30's now.
Only recently has it come to light for me, during a therapy session for my mood disorders, that I realise I've been born with a mental map that differs from how I actually am. Unfortunately now that it's bubbled up from my subconscious, it invades my every waking moment, despite wanting to stuff it back into the safe little bottled up area it's been in all this time. I'm not really coping very well even though I have the support of my husband and my mother (neither of whom understand what's going on in my head but they haven't reacted negatively so it all far apart from worrying about me). I have become very adept at not showing panic attacks as they occur because I don't want to stress them out, but I have at least a couple a day at the moment.
When it comes down to it, I loathe my body and everything it entails. I don't fit into a female role, but I can't see myself fitting into a male role either. I desperately wish i had a thin, curve-less male-type body but I have no desire for male genitalia, despite not wanting what I have now. Sometimes I think I should go all the way ftm, sometimes that thought scares me and I think I should aim for androgyny, sometimes I think the entire thing is hopeless and I should forget about it all because I have the ample curves of a woman and have no idea how to change that. Sometimes I feel so horrified/powerless/sick at being trapped in this meatbag for the rest of life that I get full body under-skin itching and then my extremities go ice cold for hours. One thing I absolutely know to be true is that I never want to do anything that might drive my husband away from me because he's everything to me.
I've been scared to speak up here because it seems like a lot of labeling/compartmentalising goes on in the trans community. I don't fit anywhere so I'm scared of being on the outer again, and because I'm so new to it all, I'm scared of offending people by saying the wrong thing or mixing up the acronyms. Basically right now my entire life boils down to one phrase: I'm scared.
