What do you do when the little things stop being little?
For most of my memorable life, I’ve had an invisible set of steps keeping stuff tolerable. Things like growing my leg hair out, playing male characters in video games and TTRPGS, using male names online/in anonymous settings, taping down my chest or hiding my body when alone. For a while, this wasn’t conscious. It was just… my life, what I gravitated towards. Without getting too much into it, other parts of my childhood/adolescence caused extreme, near-constant dissociation. I was out of my body and coping in whatever way I could. I didn’t overthink these rituals because there were so many small things that kept me a bit connected to my mind, my body, whatever. I thought I’d keep doing them every once in a while and it would be enough.
I don’t know why, but I’ve been doing them more as of late. Today, it happened that one of my friends used a lot of gendered language to refer to me. It was related to a joke - they were fake proposing because I got them a favorite food item from the dining hall (uni). Like, a really stupid, casual joke. And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since, cause it was sort of a parallel to how I refer to myself in those little moments, the ones that bring me back to a sense of self. But those are just moments. And this is, what, the rest of my life? If I switched the frequency of the parallels, would living feel clear and connected instead of foggy and meaningless?
I guess it made me realize that these aren’t like mechanisms that sustain my world and make it better, they’re ones that keep me alive in spite of how awful normalcy has always felt. And they are not, like I thought, small. I spend what should be the ‘big’ parts of my time waiting for them. If I need to do this only in doses for the rest of my life? That's not possible. I think I‘ll die. Or I’ll fade into a walking corpse, basically. That realization terrifies me. These felt so tiny a second ago. They could be brushed off as coping strategies or odd behaviors. Now they‘ve snowballed. But now that I feel their weight, moving away from it feels impossible. I’m so, so scared.
I don’t know. Has anybody had a similar experience in terms of sorting this stuff out?