#i am a fucking primary school bully when it comes to being attracted to men why am i like this 😭😭

[panspaming]

He asked me to do a fucking salsa dancing workshop with him. this fucking boy.

[2dtacokit-blog]

oh jeez. Coming Back and I guess, Coming Out?

Well it has been over a few years I think since I was last on here and boy has things changed, myself included. I wasn’t planning on coming back on here as it was a horrendous triggering mess, couldn’t stand the bitchiness and toddlers... But my best buddy dragged my sorry ass back. My blog was an unmitigated disaster, I cringed for the longest time and was furious with myself. Mass deleting spree. It’s a long old read, maybe the longest post in the entire universe, but I cannot put this concisely. If you make it to the end, I thank you for witnessing this.

TW for CSA, SA, R, Su, Si. Just tread carefully. Crude, explicit and uncensored. 

If you know me in real life, please please do not reveal this information.

Some things are the same, still parenting, still confused, still in therapy, still fighting the same old demons but a lot has changed. I have grown up for a start, wizened up a bit, got some of my shit together and I am now single. I gave two fingers up to the NHS mental health service after the complete closure of therapeutic services in my area and sought private medical care. I am in private analytic psychotherapy weekly, getting to know myselves. I have now been formally/clinically diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder, which has been a tough nut to get my teeth around. An old me, unsure who, used to write about it on here with complete assurance that it was the case and I didn’t recognise that attitude when I came back on. I will now be a lot more cautious with what I write with relation to my mental health because it puts me at great risk. I do not want the whole perimeter for my existence to be based on my mental health anymore... Even though it still governs my existence.

So yes, we are a “system” working towards consolidation of trauma and experiences in therapy and with private specialists, but we are primarily Aly. 

Another biggie to cover, and this will be the first place other than the survivors forum I will post this on, is that I am having serious issues with gender dysphoria. Now this is gonna sound very strange, for most that have known me I have seemed someone who sexualized their female body continually, putting it on display and clinging to it. Well... It came as a shock to me as to anyone I haven’t already come out to (literally 5 people I know in real life?). I will do what I can to explain and make sense of what is an ongoing discovery with my therapist.

Trauma fucks with people in many ways. Sexual and psychological trauma is an insidious beast that disguises themselves in many forms. Now as I have already covered, I have DID. A condition caused by having to adapt to survive severe and repeated complex trauma in childhood. I still have not much of an idea what that is but other me’s do. That is neither here or there for now, that is my business, but what it does is erase chunks of my memory of things I have been unable to process/deal with. 

As a kid, I was abnormal to say the least. A large chunk of that was due to trauma, switching continually and just casually failing my way through anything other than academics. One thing I didn’t understand was how the heck I couldn’t connect to the girls around me. I didn’t understand them, couldn’t get my head around how they worked or how they looked. I was tall, scrawny, long haired boyish thing that was torn between doing what they loved (getting muddy, trashing shit, buying the most ridiculous jeans you can imagine, pummelling people in rugby, pummelling people in the playground ((not proud of it)), studying, hanging out with boys, being silly) and who I felt I should be (cute, girly, into pink, dancers, sweet, gentle). 

That conflict tore my little primary school brain apart. What used to happen at home is a mystery but school was agony. I would go in a dishevelled mess and was a freak, as all and sundry used to make clear. Girls didn’t want me as their friend because I wasn’t like them, and my attempts to emulate them came across desperate, copycat, attention seeking behaviour. But dammit I still tried. Tried the pink, tried the cute stuff, but they were my sisters stuff... Not for me. I loved them but they didn’t look right on me, made me feel worse. My younger sister was an alien to me; a proper real life girl and that highlighted my freakishness. I was being rejected by everyone. Experiencing massive emotional and physical neglect at home, bullied at school, turned away by counsellors and tutors, ofc rejected by the boys and girls I fancied. 

ENTER FROM THE LEFT MY MAGICALLY SHIT DISSOCIATIVE POWERS.

I had a few angry boy personalities about by this time, I didn’t know they were boys until like September last year. I had a mass emergence of parts, all male, that stored these memories like time capsules. Memories I had forgotten due to my dissociative amnesia. Anyway, similarly to how these parts formed and were there early, so came a female personality. One that could preform girl where the rest of us couldn’t. Not very well at this stage, she was a young girl, but she dutifully tried to copy the girls we grew up around. Camouflaging what I guess was early stage dysphoria from myself and those around me. This part felt terror at appearing anything like a boy, because looking like a boy when we should be a girl would get us bullied and rejected again. And we were alone enough. 

Around this time, I think between 9-11, I was visibly changing a lot in photos. Sometimes I would be incredibly tomboyish, othertimes... painfully... a mismatched attempt at what we felt a girl should be. Combine that with the elusive sexual abuse we aren’t clear of yet, we prioritised being sexually attractive over all else. Boys liked girls that had tits. Boys liked girls that liked their tits. My family liked girls that were girls, and tits were a thing girls had, make up were what girls wore. Girls liked girls that looked like girls, and were jealous of girls who looked sexy. Well that is who we will be, couldn’t be cute, so let’s be sexy instead. I wore miniskirts that were obscene, tank tops saying “sexy kitty” on it, and stuffed my croptop to make sure my tiny prepubescent body looked that little bit more adult. That didn’t go how we wanted it to. We looked more like a freak than ever because parts were still clinging desperately to their boyhood, and we looked like a clusterfuck to be honest. A sad one though. Desperately sad and my heart breaks to look back at that confused person in the photos.To be clear though, we were not at this point attaching any of this to gender, boyhood wasn't at this point me saying “LOOK I AM A BOY” but kinda what we really were without connecting the word boy to it. I wasn’t afforded an opinion of my own at this age, raised in the church, within a violent and abusive household in literally one of the whitest, hetero-normative, conservative towns in the UK erases ones ability to discover themselves.

In a final act of madness to solidify that i was a normal girl we went to an all girls school. 

Mistake.

Before we even got to that dam school we watched The Matrix. For the first time we saw someone that looked like a girl but also looked like a boy. We were mystified. We bypassed Trinity, she was a she and we didn’t connect at all, but the blonde one (who died very early on) has short boyish spiky hair. So we took our smol ass to the hairdressers and insisted we got our past shoulder length hair cut completely off. That did not go the way we planned. We looked older, looked somehow more like a freak girl/boy thing, and it was horrifying. We also looked like our mum, which was another problem related to the abuse stuff. We cried for ages because we felt like a freak, didn’t understand why we did it, couldn’t change it and we were about to start at the new, All Girls Grammar school. Shit. 

The first two years at that school was hell. My mum finally kicked my dad out, but we were still having to see him weekly. I was at this point dissociating all the time. I would have three loads of school stuff with me all the time, for reasons i couldn’t understand. I didn’t understand why the other girls had one pencil case when I had 3, had to have 3! How in the heck did these girls carry their stuff not in a bag or a giant tray like I had to?! Well I was catering to the parts that were present without knowing it. Either way I was bait man, freaking bait.

Skinny, tall, covered head to toe in excoriation marks, short tufty hair, looked like a boy, but so desperate to fit in I wore my dam mums make up. I got lost all the time, was crying all the time or having fits where i would smash stuff, steal things, yell for no reason or be very sexually overt. I was torn apart. A website was set up by my old so called friends called The Aly Fan Club, where they took photos of me around school, uploaded them to the net and commented on them, with people (usually men) commenting what they wanted to do to me. I took all this in silence because when i got home, my amnesia would wipe that shit clean from my brain for ages. From one hell to another. 

Coming out as what I thought was gay at this time was another huge problem, like any emo nerd I drew all this trash and put it on dA. In no time at all, most of the school knew I liked girls and there was now something NEW to bully me for. I tried to see this as punishment for my bullying behaviour in primary school to justify it but there was no justification. So much at this point was about punishment.

Punishment for being a freak, for being a loser, for not being like anyone else in this entire dam school. Punishment for looking so gross, for wanting these awful, naughty things, for liking the wrong people, for drawing how i felt... I needed to be punished. So I let it continue. I was an awful person and i needed to be punished.

But here is a thing. Breasts. When mine came in they came in suddenly. It felt like all my prayers had been answered and my ticket to being a girl like all these other girls had been called. I was One Of Them. I hated my body so much because of the hatred I got from others and my own discomfort that when these babies came in I adored them. Not what I anticipate anyone expects to here from someone suspecting they are a trans guy? “if you were truly dysphoric you would have hated them, that would have made it worse!” well for most cases probably. What these fatty parts gave me was attention, which i had been starved from in almost all aspects of my life, family included. What’s more, this attention was positive. I had never experienced such a thing for my body before that wasn’t... locked in another trauma pocket. 

For someone who was ready to kill themselves at age 12 because they were such an unforgivable, wretched, disgusting, freak, that wasn't even a girl, that couldn't stop biting themselves till they bled... The power my newly sexualised and definitely female body gave me was sorely needed. People fancied me now. They wanted to touch me rather than just hit me, or throw things at me. They wanted to pull me not swear at me or spit at me. Survival Aly adapts, it is what we do, so we adapted. But things were still not right. Self harm was a massive problem, so were suicide attempts because we were still... not quite there yet. We ventured online a lot, where older men from across the world would ask for photos, videos and meets. I had no idea this was sexual grooming, but we were also dependant on that to survive. Somehow though, the impact of that, some bullying that was still happening, my everpresent self hatred, confusion and discomfort and increase in abuse in the home led us to attempt suicide in the school toilet when i was 14.

We tried to cut our neck open this time.

A teacher found us and dragged us to student services. My mum as usual was angry as heck and embarrassed. Apologising for my behaviour and the inconvenience. My dad was cloying like molasses creeping into my head. I remember because i bled all over the blouse of Ms Ginsberg, a tutor i fancied since forever. It wasn’t that severe, it was considered a superficial wound, but the amount we were doing and the continual attempts were serious cause for concern. Then my step mom found photos of me being sexually active at 14 and before, my mom found a load of the video files for the other men and I was hospitalised. Something miraculous occurred during this time though, another part came out. One that was confident and proudly female, one that was overtly sexualised but more cunning. She was a chav, an incredible cheemo (idk if anyone remembers this fashion disaster movement thing). She could adapt and fit in to any social situation and essentially helped us waltz out of hospital with no memory of being there for years. 

All memory of confused tomboy/greyspace/whatever the fuck i was me was gone. This me didn’t give a dam and was in it for themselves and to survive, to be adored. And sex was their weapon, they just had to be cunning about it. By this point I was 15 and didn’t really think more about what I was. We were screwing guys now, guys and girls, thought this was something to be proud of. Dismissed the old small group of friends i had for the guys that hung around at the park and girls that used to go out and get drunk. We took naked photos of ourselves and put them online, and paraded ourselves around scantily clad because it made us feel powerful and loved. 

At 16 i was raped. I was again at 17 twice, and this pattern continued beyond being hospitalised for the second time at 20 (the worst 21st birthday ever), beyond getting pregnant which was also conceived through rape. I had been sexually abused and raped a lot during this time, but my dissociative amnesia would wipe the memory. So I would know something bad was happening but was denied processing it by my inbuilt survival mechanisms that kept me alive as a kid. I was unable to get out of the loop or register any danger because the switching would be so automatic, so ingrained, it basically was not up to me to get us out of the situation because another part was there in brace position having dissociated fully. All during this time I preformed female because it was necessary. I didn't have room to question my gender because i was too busy surviving and trying to literally not die. 

Then the pregnancy. I cant relive any of this trauma stuff too much, that isn't the point of this post but during this time, my gender was more apparent than ever before. Drawings we used to do of parts that had male appendages but still looked female started to change. Become more male. The internal distress was so monumental for many reasons; rape pregnancy, the gen father not leaving us alone, fear of my dad, still loosing my mind, desperately trying to be loved my my partner at the time. But there was another distress there. 

I cant be a mum. Women become mums. I cant hold this child in me. This shouldn't be there. 

Everyone was hammering home how much of a glowing woman I was and each time they said it I wanted to die. I tortured my body, got others to torture it too. Despised it, loathed it. It wasn't right to any of my parts. Three parts got us through that pregnancy but we dont know who gave birth. I dont remember it. We destroyed almost every pregnant photo of us. What were we disgusted by aside from the feeling of being broken, used and bred? How undeniably, unquestionably female we were. 

Even so things were happening inside my head and body that made us feel insane. We started feeling like we had a penis, like felt like we could touch it, could feel stimulated by holding an appendage there (tmi i know). We tried in secret without thinking about it, moving our breasts up, down, flat, out of the way (fairly impossible by this point i was a lactating G cup *vomits*). We had glimmers of feeling male... which... felt good. First time we pegged we cried in the toilet with the door locked because it felt real, felt right though we couldn't explain it. So we were too scared to do it again, tried to force feminise ourselves again because that is WHO WE SHOULD BE. I mean look? I have a kid now, i am “mom”. Stopped drawing these mysterious genderconfused parts and forcefully only drew accurately what our body was. Which was agony.

Until September 2017. 

Ploughing through therapy, maturing, making milestones in recovery when we started to talk about childhood trauma, my dad, the first and only time i drew myself fully as a man for my friend, and BAM! Bam! is not overrated it was literally a Bam! moment, because the part emergence I mentioned earlier occurred. And with these male parts came the bloody nail bat of gender dysphoria hitting me in the head over and over till I self harmed for the first time in years. The male parts were terrified and disoriented at first, they had a lot of growing up and catching up to do, some more so than others. They remembered being 15, 13, 10. Remembered the first pegging experience, remembered... things we had no connection to. Now they are mostly my age, helping each other to mature and grow as needed due to being a parent. 

The first used to cry and scream in the mirror, punching walls because the body was wrong. Attacking our breasts like i had done subconsciously for years but this time, because they knew their breasts were wrong. They drew themselves over and over to solidify their gender identity when all else was screaming they were female. We pulled away from our partner, couldn't be touched, couldn't be interacted with because it would be a reminder of our gender. We flinched at being called a woman, a girl, female, and with that came memories of feeling like that as a kid. Fuck me, we were dysphoric as a kid. The first proper realisation.

Up until this point we had NO idea we had ever experienced gender dysphoria. But this is how DID works. It erases traumatic information and stores it in the parts that dealt with it. When the parts properly emerge, this information is leaked out over time. So great. Dysphoria.

Another part came out to implement what I am now starting to think is their cure for this, to ultimately feminise us. Because we needed to be female. Erase the dysphoria and with it that other male part. Nothing feminises me quicker than one of my most terrifying abusers. So guess what bellend got back in contact and re-traumatised the system, this one *points to self in dismay*. Long story short, shit went down, not un consensual shit as before but still shit. That part would routinely draw the male part being hurt by this guy over and over again till they freaked out. 

But wait! The hellscape is not over. From stage right we have another destructive part, hyper-masculine, angry and unempathetic. Grateful to him because his presence pulled us away from that guy (he viewed him as pathetic and beneath him), but now we are just... drinking. Getting wasted in the park, hitting things, smoking up at night again. My specialist had told me to get to know these parts as they are vital for my recovery so we drew what they needed us to draw and goddam these guys are hurt. These are protective parts. They took the shit we couldn’t. And this one, swearing at my partner, exploding all over the place, trying to run away, self harming, kicking the shit out of the wheely bin outside survives threat of physical violence. The one that went to my old abuser survives some of the more extreme sexual violence and torture and the first male part deals with psychological abuse. I can see it in their drawings, their confessions and in our therapy sessions. We have other parts but they dont want to be discussed.

All of these parts are heavily dysphoric because they are all male. Unquestionably so. Their rage at this body is because it isn’t the right one.  So where do I come into it, me being the primary/fronting part, or leader of the twisted UN committee that is my brain?  That has taken longer to figure out, and has been a more agonising journey. 

I am dysphoric too. 

I cannot erase now i have them, the memories of my childhood spent dysphoric. The memories of trying at any cost to be a girl. Which shouldn’t be hard considering genetically I am one. I have had to fight within myself my transphobia i didn't even know was present. We aren’t talking bigotry here, but the genuine terror that i could be transgender. When most of the make up of who I am, and my survival to this day has been formulated by trying to accepted, loved, normal (though i failed at that horribly), not rejected and safe from physical, sexual and psychological abuse... Coming to terms with the fact you are transgender is not a comfortable thought. Not one I welcomed, and one that terrified us. 

The fear of being transgender was so great it made us sick, sent us into crisis, started us self harming again. Trying everything we can to not be transgender because I have been through enough and survival brain is screaming as loud as it can that this will cause serious problems. But we couldn’t. Cant draw myself as a girl at all without wanting to cry or wretch. Cant wear girls clothes because i feel like i am crossdressing?! Cant wear bras, cant do feminine make up, cant do anything I used to do to be accepted anymore. Cant be a girlfriend anymore. 

We started without realising it trying to make ourselves masculine. We would zone out and be drawing on facial hair with eyebrow pencil, tried using vetwrap to bind my chest, do not do this, it bruised us for days. We bought a mans top and a guys jeans and we lived in them exclusively unless family was over. We started wearing boxers, packing (though going to the loo and watching a dam sock fall out your pants makes your dysphoria worse and left us feeling humiliated so stopped doing this). I started drawing me not my parts but me and that me was always always male unless we were trying to force ourselves to draw a female us. 

We reached out eventually to my best friend Ruth, and they encouraged us to get a binder. This provoked fear again. Self harm, self medicating, the usual destructive bs. But now the distress levels were triggering depersonalisation and derealisation; both symptoms of DID survival patterns. We stopped being able to recognise ourselves in mirrors because the damn amnesia was wiping it in an instant. My hands would feel male then flick to female, my body was glitching continually and I tried to get out of buying a binder by talking about my “genuine transgender friends” saying how I couldn't be trans because of their experience, that I am so obviously taking the piss, that I cannot be trans this must all be trauma. But Ruth stuck with me, as did a few other people, and still pushed for me to get a binder just to see how it felt. 

I did and when it arrived and i tried it on the reaction was... well... overwhelming. Much like looking in the mirror seeing what is a very female face with a drawn on beard, i was looking at a body i hated being crammed into something that kinda hurt to put on, and making me look like i had a deformed ribcage. I cried. I dont know what i expected in that moment. Maybe that all the dysphoria will go away and it would be fixed and that would be that. All okay. But no. I felt sad that I was punishing my body for not being right, angry at myself for not being able to just be a dam woman. I MADE A BABY WITH MY BODY THIS SHIT SHOULD BE EASY. 

Standing in a mirror, with a binder on, boxers on and socks stuffed in them trying my best to look like a man, I felt like a freak. 

But then i put a shirt on. And holy heck i could see my feet. I was small, the first time i have ever looked at myself and seen a small body rather than something deformed that i see when i see my breasts. I looked smart, I looked beautiful in that shirt. The tears were still rolling down my dam cheeks, and i was a snotty wreck but I for the first time in 4-5 years I also didn't feel rage at being fat. Because I wasn't fat, not in the slightest. Standing there in shirt and boxers with flat chest, masc make up on, i looked like a guy... just about. And i smiled. I smiled so much. 

I urgently facetimed Ruth and was like “come see how good I look” something I hadn’t genuinely felt in a very long time unless a man thought I was sexy. But here, in my tip of a room, almost dancing on cam for my best friend, showing her how i could bend over and no udders were just dangling there, how i could type and see my hands move... I looked at myself and felt good. I didn't care if anyone else thought i looked good because I felt on top of the world 

This was my first introduction to gender euphoria, that wasn’t related to some obscure masturbatory habits and pegging. That feeling made things liveable for a while. I wanted to chase that feeling because it felt incredible. I was working out before but now I did it to not get thin, to not starve myself but to love myself. I started taking weight training seriously, and whilst the gym was a trigger for my dysphoria (room full of massive dudes who all see you and talk to you as a girl in your skimpy ass gym kit will do that to you) I pushed on. My shoulders are getting broader now, muscle definition starting and i love each of these changes. I eat more than I ever have done but I eat healthily because this male me, this real me that i seem to love I want to treasure, look after and care for. 

I am not gonna wear baggy clothes and cut my hair off to look like a passable cis guy because that feels like punishment, and I have done that enough in my life and been punished by people in ways that have left me unable to walk and bleeding. I want to see my body when i work out because i love seeing the muscle definition, I wince at my breasts but try to imagine it being different. I love my long floppy hair, and I am not gonna change that because men with long hair are stunning. People talk about “the cut”, and I get the feeling of shame that i must be making this all up because i dont want to cut my hair off, but I am not a boy, I am almost 25. I have lived through some shit, I am not a boy. I am... a man. And I like how my hair feels like a lions mane. I associate cutting my hair off with my own lack of control and desperation so i dont want to return to that ever. 

My therapist has been exceptional. He wants me to embrace this because he has seen massive improvement. Yes I am in and out of crisis a lot, there is a lot on my plate and dysphoria is a c*nt when you are already struggling, but here is the dam thing.

For the first time in my miserable fucking life I don’t want to be hurt or punished. I don’t want to be beaten, spat on, assaulted or killed. I don’t want to starve, I don’t want to be anywhere near any of my old abusers or rapists. I don’t want to submit to be liked. I don’t want to preform as a character to be accepted. I don’t want to be dependant on anyone to survive. I don’t want to sexualise myself to be loved. 

The dysphoria will challenge this, oh man it does. My depersonalisation and fear of being trans challenges this. 

Little voices going “you are not really a man. you have tits. you have a baby. you are a mom. you are doing this for attention, all this because you have to be somehow sicker than you already are. It is just trauma. You are making all of this up. You are trying to just not be the snivelling wretch that they made you into. You make a mockery of a very real cause. You are not trying hard enough, a real trans guy would cut their hair. You like your appearance sometimes which means you must not be trans. You are not a man, you are just like literally any of those cases of confused survivors of abuse that you see all over the internet, that is you. You just cant admit it because you are scum. It’s the same as everything, none of this is real, none of this is true. You are nothing like a man. You are a nothing, A NOTHING”.

Those are the voices that send me into crisis. That have me self harming, suicidal, terrified, self hating. Not when I pass as a guy, not when I draw myself as a guy or just... am a guy. The doubt and pull back to my assigned gender is what is killing me. Well alongside the actual traumas and parenting a toddler, alone, with over £2000 in debt. I never want to lie, but unpicking the truth when you are multiple people and have amnesic survival programming to prevent you from uncovering traumatic realities is very hard.

What is amazing though.... which I will cling to when my binder is crushing, when Instagram is full of BS about what is True Transgenderism, when FB is full of trans hate and I am still annoyingly in the closet with my family and most of the universe is this... When my BFF Maddy calls me an amazing, perfect boy, I blush and well up with tears and feel seen. I felt visible. When she sends me gifs of someone snuggling the death out of a tired proud lion, ruffling his mane, I feel seen again I cry with happy relief feels. When she or my friend Ruth says i look handsome, or masculine and I am blushing again forever, that is precious. When I look in the mirror after working out and see my shoulders broader and chest almost flat from the binder, hair swept back, I look strong, i look male, i look right. well almost. When i complete a drawing of how i wish i looked and i get it correct, i feel ready to punch the goddamn sun in its stupid face like LOOK! I EXIST! When I dream of being a guy and being touched by another person as if i am a guy, i feel like i am gonna take off from this planet and leave it in my dust... because not only do they see me, but they accept me and love me for who I am, who I want to be rather than who they want me to be or who i need to be... It makes me put that blade down and walk away. Make a hot chocolate or draw something.

So... I guess this is it. I am a guy. 

A closeted guy for my safety for now. But a guy.

A guy with a shit tonne of trauma. But a guy.

A guy with DID, and female personalities. But I am a guy.

A guy who has a 2 year waiting list before he can talk to a gender clinic about this but still. I am a guy. 

A guy that yes, despite all my best efforts, looks androgynous at best, and uses feminine appearance for protection because they are still too scared to present fully as male. But still a guy.

If this changes in future, well then... whilst living without dysphoria would be just the best... I dont want to loose who I am now i have finally caught a glimpse of them for the first time. It has made me a better person, a better parent, a better friend... Why would I ever give that up? It is gonna be a long old road, it may all change, I may change again, I may legitimately forget all about this. I may be too scared to ever come out to my family. The doubt, fear and dysphoria may actually win the next time I am in crisis. I may just delete this post out of shame but fuck it.

My name is Aly and I am a fucking guy. 

[iamhere-now]

Body Dysmorphia.

Body dysmorphic disorder is a mean, nasty, debilitating mental disorder that can really destroy you. You constantly obsess over the smallest of “flaws”, a bit too chunky around the thighs, skin is too spotty, hair isn’t luscious enough. This obsession slowly breaks you down, and then starts breaking down your relationships. It’s a persistent niggle in the back of your mind, and its damn near impossible to ignore.

Body dysmorphia can stem from a number of emotionally traumatic factors, sexual abuse, neglect, bullying to name a few. I was around 9 years old when it started for me, with a small comment being made to me in class at primary school by a boy, which is so deeply engrained in my memory that some days it feels like it happened only yesterday. I wore a skirt on this particular day of school, stood by the bookshelf in my classroom, this boy approached me and said “why are you wearing a skirt, you’re too fat to wear skirts.” 9 years old, and this set off a serious problem within my mental wellbeing for the next 15 years.

From that point on, all I could think about was, maybe I am too fat, maybe I should stop eating crisps and sweets and then I can wear skirts and look nice in them. Immediately after that incident at school, I vowed never to wear a skirt again, nor a dress, or shorts. and I didn’t. For 8 years in fact. As I grew older and hit puberty, my self image only got worse. I come from a bloodline where all the women are notoriously curvy. With big child bearing hips hitting me at around age 13, I hit another snag in terms of my own body dysmorphia. At 13, you start to become interested in the opposite sex, you develop crushes, you watch as all your skinny friends get boyfriends and you’re left behind, like the fat little dumpling that you are. Or at least think you are. It was in art class in secondary school, I was chatting with some friends, talking about the proportions of the human body, when two boys, very bluntly told me “you’re top AND bottom heavy” .. they told me I was fat. Again. Again someone had told me that I was fat, after being acutely aware of this fact since the age of 9, swearing off skirts and dresses, I had now been humiliated all over again, in more ways than one this time, because like I said, I was going through puberty. My body was changing enough as it was, and it wasn’t changing into what I wanted, what I thought I should be looking like. I soon developed bulimia. But thats something I want to focus on another time. Looking back, this really set in stone the true dysmorphic image I had cultivated about my body, for years to come still.

Fast forward a couple of years, I’m 16 years old, first year of college, I fell into a crowd I never have imagined I would ever be associated with. We all developed a nasty relationship with drugs . At first, recreationally, then it was quite literally an addiction. To synthetic amphetamines. 2 minutes of research will tell you that prolonged and extensive use of these types of drugs can cause extreme weight loss. And it did just that. As I was approaching my 17th birthday, I weighed only 6.5 stone. I was TINY. However, thanks to my body dysmorphia, I couldn’t see just how small I had gotten. I could still ‘see’ fat rolls on my stomach, my love handles, my thick wobbly thighs. It didn’t matter how many people told me how skinny I looked, I couldn’t believe them. My brain quite literally tricked me into seeing things about my body that just weren’t there. Looking back now at photographs, I can see just how dangerously small and sick I looked, but at the time, I still saw myself as that “top and bottom heavy” girl.

For a good few years after that, only really up until a couple of months ago, just before turning 24, with the occasional blip of normality, where I was comfortable in my own skin and didn’t mind looking in a mirror, I only ever saw a fat dumpy girl, full of flaws that the whole world could see and would focus on. The harsh reality of the extent of my body dysmorphia was that between the ages of 18 and 23, I simply could not stomach the sight of my naked body. Whatsoever. I would avoid mirrors after I got out the shower, I was practically NEVER naked, ALWAYS covering up in a long baggy tshirt/jumper/cardigan as soon as I was dry enough to put something on, purely because I was that repulsed by my own reflection, or rather, what I perceived my own reflection to be.

I don’t need to remind anyone of the ramifications that having body dysmorphia can do to sexual relationships. Because it destroys them. And it’s heartbreaking, to know that you have subconsciously allowed yourself to become so reclusive and shy enough around somebody who genuinely makes you feel like you could walk on water, that it pushes them away. And during the truly dysmorphic times, you honestly cannot muster up a good enough reason as to why you don’t want to take that giant XXL tshirt off. You cannot explain to your significant other, who is a perfect god/goddess among us mere mortals, that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with them, that it’s just that nasty voice in the back of your mind that tells you you aren’t sexy enough, your aren’t skinny enough, you’re too heavy, you aren’t worthy. No matter how much you truly believe and know that that other person finds you attractive, your stupid fucking dysmorphia takes over. Whether you like it or not.

Body dysmorphia is cruel. For men and women, from the moment we become self aware as human beings, we are constantly bombarded by publications, magazines, catwalk models, fitness models, “telling’ us how we should look, alongside headlines like ‘get the perfect beach body’, ‘how to shed a stone in 6 weeks’ and ‘flab to abs in 3 months’. Those things in the media alone are enough to trigger the dysmorphic tendencies myself and so many others around me battle or have battled with every day. Body dysmorphia almost always leads, or directly correlates with other mental disorders such as eating disorders, depression and anxiety. It’s a real problem and I feel that far too many people suffer from it, a lot of the times in silence. After the truly traumatic year that has been 2017, and with the help of some weight loss, and antidepressants, I can finally, confidently say that I am comfortable in my own skin. I never thought I would ever utter those words and believe them. But I do. Its the truth. All I want is for anyone going through this horrible controlling disorder, to one day experience just how freeing it is, to stand stark naked in front of a mirror and smile, feel comfortable, confident, sexy. To take those questionable photos of yourself in nothing but underwear, or nothing at all, just to show off for yourself! To go out and buy the sexiest underwear you can find, and just wear it around the house, and feel GOOD. 

Because I can tell you now, nothing beats lazing around the house in your finest bra and panties / slip / babydoll / birthday suit, being completely, 100%, truly at peace with yourself.

https://psyche.media/body-dysmorphia