u/Virtual_Flow_4078

i haven’t seen a post like this here, but i hope it fits. i just felt the need to get this off my chest since i don’t have anyone in my life i’d feel comfortable sharing these things with. i was unsure of how to flag this, but i hope mental health is correct. peep the sloppy english.

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when i hit puberty, around the age of 12, i fell into a deep depression. i hated the way i looked with a passion. my hips, thighs, chest, face, everything that was feminine. i remember really hating my voice, so much so i tried to train myself to speak in a lower key. hearing my voice on a recording was dreadful. i sounded like a girl, and i didn’t like that. i even compressed my chest with tape for a while.

due to being bullied for the way i presented myself, i dissociated a lot. i can’t remember 7th and 8th grade very well. due to the bullying, i started presenting as a woman again. i continued because i was accepted back into my old circles. my former friends acknowledged me and were kind to me. still, i felt like a huge imposter. like this image i had of myself in my head didn’t match how the world interacted with me.

i stopped thinking about gender and sexuality all together for a while. in vocational school i started presenting more masculine again. i began questioning my identity now that i was amongst others like me, in a creative field. unfortunately for me, this new school had people from my old school, and i couldn’t handle the thought of them seeing me looking like a boy. perhaps that was some sort of trauma due to the exclusion and bullying. after this brief year of feeling like myself again, i reverted back to presenting as a woman. i had learned that it was safe. no one had any reason to be cruel to me when i was this way, even if it didn’t feel right.

now that i finally graduated from school, i had time to rest my mind and think again, to think about this. it’s not like i hate my body the way it is now, but it doesn’t feel like my own. i look in the mirror and see a mature female body, but i never think “this is my body”. this is causing me a lot of distress. being transgender is the furthest thing i want to be. i never liked the thought of going to doctors and opening up about the most fragile parts of myself.

i’m 18 now and could, in theory, do something about this wrongness i feel. book an appointment with a specialist and talk hormones or however it goes. the problem is, i’m very afraid. i have never told anyone about these struggles i have. i tried to break it gently to my parents when i was younger. i didn’t explicitly say that i was a boy, but rejected being called a girl, and they didn’t really appreciate that. i still live with them and don’t want to cause any conflict because i need them. i wish i could just be happy with being a woman, but it seems impossible now that i’ve realised how i feel. i don’t know what to do with any of this. perhaps someone can relate.