Doubt and Dysphoria

Dysphoria is a constant in my life at the moment, but so is doubt of my trans status.How can these two things coexist, I ask myself a lot. I think it’s because the dysphoria is a horribly uncomfortable physical sensation but I can never quite identify whether it is a discomfort with having these parts, or a discomfort with the idea of losing them. This sounds stupid, I know I overthink, and over-obsess about all this, and will eventually end up self-destructing because of it. I’m not comfortable with the body I have, I’m not comfortable with the person that I am, but I don’t know how to change it. I feel like I’m wasting my life in this desperate space between happiness and unhappiness, clutching at straws that might help me sort my life out and feeling as if I fail every time, and maybe as if I don’t deserve to be happy.

‘There’s no point sitting here going crazy on your own’

I need to sort out three parts of that

*sitting here

*going crazy

*on my own

*sitting here

I need to find something to do with my life, I need to stop sitting around doing nothing the whole time, I need to stop my life being this wait to transition, because that’s not helpful for me, or for the people around me. There’s two types of depression, the type that’s caused when I sit and mope about things I can’t change, like transition, and the type that’s caused by trying to deal with stuff I can change, or at least stuff I can change my thinking regarding. That’s the type that I can work with and deal with, because even if it’s difficult, there’s a start-point. For now though, I need to find things to do. I have youth group, kayaking, and am preparing for snowboarding, so it’s not all bad…but… it’s not all good either. I need to concentrate more on my college work I think (he says, sitting writing this in a lesson), and do the amount of work I need to do to maintain my grades, because they’re…important and because maybe focussing on them will make everything else a bit more managable, and it’ll find me something else to do.

*going crazy

Something I make a bit of a habit of, apparantly. Michael, who I now just call ‘dad’ and I are working on how I c an reframe situations that would otherwise have upset me, but we haven’t got very far yet, and I think I find that in itself stressful. I feel as if I need to deal better with the ‘crazy’, the ‘head squirrels’ that actually leave me so battered on a day to day level. What are these? The insecurity that makes me believe that I really really don’t matter, and that nobody could want me in any way. The belief that anyone who appears to care wants something from me. The remnants of tiredness left over from my depression that make me believe every time that I get depressed, I should just cut myself and kill myself. The tiny part of me that still believes I’m nothing but a worthless whore, it’s that instinctive twisted thinking that I need to deal with.

*on my own

I’m not alone, I have a wonderful support network really, but most of it is online, and there’s not so much locally accessible support. I think I need to find myself an older brother type transguy in my local area, so here’s a callout for transguys near the Surrey/Hampshire border, UK

Thanks for reading

J