#dampened under the overwhelming distress caused by the Biggest Baddest Problem Area

[chicago-geniza]

i know we're not supposed to discuss gender dysphoria & body dysmorphia as phenomenologically comparable, even on the small scale of, like, ~qualia rather than totalizing, universalizing experiences, however the other day a friend said they understood one difference re: surgery, speaking only of themselves, specifically to be that top surgery alleviated many "body image issues" they'd had & helped them recover from disordered eating, whereas they had heard that body dysmorphia was more dynamic, i.e. if one "problem area" on which the person obsessively fixates is "corrected," the dysmorphia will not so much resolve as shift focus and find a new "problem area" on which to fixate. tl;dr two things can be true, top surgery resolved my top dysphoria but cast my p*riod dysphoria into sharp relief, & it is now doubly acute for the absence of anything else to disperse the field of Body Distress, if that makes sense? i think dysphoria & dysmorphia *do* operate using similar logics sometimes, is what i'm saying.