Hello
First im going to start out saying, i think this is the right place to post this, I'm confused in more ways then one so i may have misplaced this. In the event i have could you point me in the correct direction and ill be on my way. in case this is the right place, well i got that going for me. My writing is kind of, a mess. if i go on random tangents or stay on a topic for too long, it is not intentional, i am just trying to cover all thoughts in my head and give as much information as i can. Anything i do write i feel adds to my story, for lack of a better term.
PAST 2003- JULY 31 2012
Introduction aside, I really don't know where to start because I'm not sure what i am looking for, be it support, answers, ideas, etc. I am currently a 21 year old male in pacific north west who grew up with mostly just his mom with a 11 year span of a mostly on sometimes off step father, and i also have depression and weight problems. I'll start when i was around the age 10, being bullied in school because i didn't fit in, i had an on and off step dad, and i spent a lot of my free time ignoring school work and escaping reality via Video games. I did my first gender exploration (for lack of a better term)one day, i convinced my mom i was "sick" (i faked sickness all the time to get out of going to school where i was bullied, my mom could not check as she was working) and decided to try on my moms clothes. They felt weird, in a way that brought a warmth, a giddiness. i wasted toilet paper to stuff the bra so it looked like i had boobs and i enjoyed it. For the next few months i did this and store the clothes in a different spot from where she kept her clothes. One day she noticed them and asked about them, (at this time i had a very (WARNING THIS MAY COME ACROSS AS RACIST, I'M NOT TRYING TO CONVEY IT THAT WAY, IM JUST SPEAKING ABOUT HOW IT WENT DOWN FROM MY MEMORY) weird black friend who i had caught trying to steal from me a couple of times, being so young and naive, i didn't realize he was trying to steal from me. ) so i knew she thought he was weird so i blamed it on him and she told me to keep my eye on him from now on. I stopped after that for 6 months, but i felt the itch to do it again. At this time my step father didn't live with us but was still my step father (I still dont get it 11 years later) and my mom was staying over at his place for the night... I was alone at night for the first time in my life. so i get all dressed and feel so good, the fabric was so nice on my skin, it just felt so pleasant, so pleasant in fact i slept in it.i awoke to a phone call at 8am where my mom said she would be home around 1pm. so i just did normal things around the house until 11:30 and took it off and went on and got dressed normally. From my memory this was the last time in a long time i did this.
Year pass, i become a teenager, high school a mix of new people and old, going from the top of the food chain to the bottom. The bullying intensifies, and what seemed like a fresh start, turns into a hate...no a fear of school. My bullying while not (mostly) physical, was very verbal. This caused my self esteem to plummet into depths i am still climbing out of to this day. I built a shell around me to isolate myself from the amount of hate directed at me, while containing all my feelings. I see this part of my life, where i should be developing social skills and exploring my identity as a dark ages (btw i like history so i might use more historical metaphors) preventing me from being me. My only escape was going home and unplugging for reality and playing video games online. during the 9th grade i met someone who would, unknowingly (even currently) would send me down this path via proxy. A game came out call Endwar and it had some problems (TO PUT IT LIGHTLY) with multiplayer, it cause a glitch where there was 3 of us one one team and one person on the other in a normally 2v2 mode. From this a friendship blossomed and i gradually over the next few years would become part of a group that i now call my family.
fast forward some more to when i was 16. My mom worked a night shift waitress job and my step dad lived off welfare with us. me and him got along most of the time, but sometimes we would argue and i always refused to back down (teenagers am i right?) to the point where he threatened (but never did) to hit me. anyways, a welfare payday comes around and he says to me, "I'll pay for it, can you go see a movie so me and a friend can have some time alone?" being stupid i didnt realize what he meant by that and agreed. So i went and saw the tooth fairy movie that had the rock in it (the fact that is all i remember about it just shows how good the movie was) and i get home. there is a smell of in-scents and something else, something fowl (it was cocaine). so i ask him how was his friend, only to learn they never showed up. so im heading into my room, the one place in the world i disconnect from it all, my throne room, my sanctuary. we meet in the hallway before both our doors and he says something that has scared me to this day with a face that looked high on things i didnt even want to think about, he said,
"If you ever want, i can give you a ->-bleeped-<-."
i was taken aback by this, though i did not show it. i said no thanks and went into my room. the rest of the night all i could think of was him coming into my room and raping me (I'm sorry if my use of this language bothers anyone, im just telling it how i felt). i did not sleep that night to my recollection, i remember my mom coming home from work at 3am like she did for that job. i told her nothing, everything seemed normal, why should i bother her with this problem when she is stressed out from working to keep a roof over our heads and food in our house.
so the next year rolls around, My mom at this point has lost love for this man,so we move out... down stairs across the building (apartment) to where i live right now. for my last year of school, the bullying changed in a way i was not expecting. i went from a victim of harsh verbal Bullying, to a less harsh form where they respected me (BUT STILL BULLYIED ME). During this year i found my love for History and things started to look up, then i had a bad week of bullying and gave up on school, i would go to school, but not class besides history. i would spend lunch in my history class room watching coverage of the Arab spring with my teacher. That summer a bunch of the suites in the appartment building needed work, one family had abandoned there suite so i had to move all the stuff out into a storage room a floor down, that's when it came back. I saw some female clothes, these clothes were clean and they felt nice, so i snuck them out and hid them. I tried to cross dress in these but the effect it had had on me in the past was not nearly as strong, but it was there slightly. as time past i forgot about them and they got lost in a rearranging of my room.
after this i graduated (i think my teachers had some form of sympathy for me as they knew how much i was bullied i was able to do a small amount of work as a makeup (AND THEN KILLED THE ENGLISH EXAM WORTH 40% OF MY FINAL GRADE (needed 80% got 96%)) then I played games for 2 years while unable to find a job
PRESENT AUG 1 2012 - NOW
In early August one of my friends (not part of the group mentioned earlier) was telling me about a Visual novel called Katawa Shoujo. So i thought i would give it a try and i enjoyed it. Then augest 15 i completed my first story (there are 5 both with good and bad endings) and something happened. My shell that had stood against 5 years of bullying and 6 years of isolation... cracked. A flood of emotions over came me causing me to go into an extreme self loathing and self reflection on the 5 years of my life i basically ignored. This showed me that countless times people had reached out to me to try and help me but i had shelled myself off so much from the outside that i was blind to it. This cascaded for 20 days until Sept 4 where i contemplated killing myself but was diswayded by a heart felt message from a old classmate who never reached out to me originally. Over the next month i talked with her (she was training to be a nurse so, while selfish, i saw this as helping her as well as helping me) about all sorts of things, what it was like to be a female and other things that came up.
After that whole event I started on a long journey of trying to figure out who i was, I didnt know who i was, i did not fit in with anyone around me. During this time i met a new group on minecraft and hung out with them while going into an exile from the other due to not feeling like i was like any of them. I worked my way up to become a Moderator on the server and they introduced me to two of my (now)go to games, Smite and War thunder. the problem with this group was, unlike my last, they were much stricter and i didnt fit in after a while. One day i had a suicidal thought go crazy and almost killed myself again. Two of them turned there back on me and the others just drifted away due to the first 2 moving on. i returned to my old group and things went on for 2 years. During the two years I still did not know who i was, i felt like a now empty shell, all my emotions gone, nothing to make me feel as me, during this time i imagined that i was an angel a lot, being free of human restrictions. I was able to be free in a way, not sure how this would later affect me i didnt try to stop it, nor force it. I just let it be.
fast forward to last week.
I've been with the group i mention early in the post for 3ish years now and everything seems normal. Then one day my friend comes and tells me that they are trans (MTF). I was shocked but immediately accepting. i asked questions to them about that they would like me to call them once progress was made and other things. Then it dawned on me, maybe the reason i was confused was because I was not sure of my gender. I while male, did not feel such, i didnt pleasure myself out of want, i did it because i felt i had to (random boners suck). At the same time, i didn't feel Female, at least enough to change myself fully. i was in a dead zone as i liked to call it. I felt inhuman, because i didnt fit the Male-female genders of society.
So i did some research and came across Androgyny. I looked into it more and it seemed to fit the most to how i felt. i did the Bem Sex-Role Inventory test a few times and i came across as such. now a test is not enough for me to say that this is who i am. I looked at other people who were Androgynous and felt a disconnect. when i think of myself in the definition of being Androgynous it feels right, i feel alleviated, but looking at others i feel like an outsider, a poser, a fake.
I don't know who i am. I want to know though. Thats why i posted this, to see if maybe someone can point things out to me and clear some questions out of my head that i don't have words to ask.
Thank you for your time reading this, I'm sorry this seems more of a post about my depression then about my gender, but i feel one is not exclusive to the other.
