#i had a bad dysphoria day brought on by the fact ive been out as nb for more than 5 years and everyone still sees me as just cis

[confused-alpaca]

extremely annoyed at myself bc i went to a doctors appointment this week and was going to talk about trying to get on hrt and i just. fucking. forgot. to do that while i was there.

[sugoi--sushi-blog]

Here's the Tea🍵

Please read this till the end before you judge it!!

I came out as ftm transgender about 4-5 years ago.

I thought that me hating my body and hating how everything looked wrong, was dysphoria.

Ive been to therapists and counselors, but not for my dysphoria.

My parents and family treated me like shit.

When my friend Carter came out as trans, he was the first in our group. And I do in fact believe he is ftm transgender, he's a boy, I know it deeply in my heart and I trust him.

Shortly after Carter came out.

Ethan came out

At first he thought he was Genderfluid, cool whatever, ya know?

Then I related to their struggles of hating their bodies, I did some research (not much, mostly just going to Pinterest and looking at pictures of different identities and genders.

And I related to Agender/Non Binary

Now this was during when the whole gender thing wasn't blown out of proportion. Trans-trenders existed but weren't as commonly known as far as I could tell.

Shortly after, I struggled and believed I was incorrect about being NB, and thought I was a ftm trans male.

Then Ethan came out as ftm transgender.

Then his twin came out as non binary.

Fast forward 3 or 4 years.

We have a few more friends, we met at cons or pride. I was beginning to question myself more than the usual dysphoria.

Our friend Grey, who always has perfect makeup, never discussed dysphoria, nothing that could que you into them being anything other than a girl.

They always announced they were proud to be a girl and wore (so super cute) dresses and skirts (I'm legit jealous)

Now, this isn't me hating on my friend or anything. I still respect them.

But has anyone heard the new saying, "the gays gather", like we all group up?

Like its cool! Support team of people understanding.

But 98% of our group, wasn't cis, and out of 12+ people that's pretty crazy.

What I'm trying to say

Is that I think some people are romanticized, relating, or using being in the LGBT+ community as an escape.

Like a coping mechanism.

Wanna know why I think that?

Because I (and many others) had very very low confidence or other underlying problems, I related to those who came out and told their story.

How they felt.

What they went through as a child.

What they're going through now.

Etc

I dressed masculine, I went by Jeremy and then Holden

I used he/him pronouns

I have always had short hair and I've always thought "Since I've always been such a tom boy, this makes sense!"

It felt right

But it also felt wrong

I couldn't figure out why, I thought it was just my dysphoria talking.

It wasn't until the last few months of my senior year (I graduated this year, 2019) that I noticed I genuinely enjoyed dressing androgynously or just super cute in general

Baby blues, pastel ya know all that

I didn't mind when people called me they/them

I thought, hmm, maybe I'm non binary?

I let that sit for a while

Now I have a boyfriend I met about a month after graduating, and he respected my gender identity, because he's a good egg

Anyways, I told him about my possible doubts and that maybe it was just my dysphoria talking

It wasn't until I hurt myself by wearing my binder too long that he encouraged me to wear a sports bra during my work shift because I worked 'behind scenes' anyways and I have to wear cook clothes and it would be beneficial to my health. I finally bought a sports bra

I found one thats kinda concealing and almost had the same shape as a binder so I thought it was perfect

But that hurt me too

My ribs were bruised, my lungs aches, I was short of breath, etc etc

((Man I'm so sorry if you're reading this and you're just confused because I definitely didn't plan my life story out and uhhhhhh its all over the place))

He did some research and suggested I just take a week long break from my binder. I didn't have many hours scheduled at work, so it was a good time to just stay at home

After all that, I questioned myself more about my gender

I recently purchased a pink tutu cuz I thought it was cute

I wore that so often, just around my house

I thought I was so cute oh my goodness

I questioned more

My boyfriend brought up his Theory to me, his theory about how all my past abuse, neglect, and overall bad childhood, my lack of confidence, depression and anxiety, possibly played a role in why I believed I was trans

He was terrified to tell me, he thought I would get pissed at him and break up with him

But everything he told me

Was exactly how I felt and completely accurate.

He wasn't pressuring me to change or anything, but I took what he said as motivation to experiment and figure out who I am

A few months later I can confidently say that I am a woman, and all I needed was confidence and support

Now, I've gained so much confidence through my experimenting

I feel so good, and beautiful

It feels so nice (((:

A few days ago, a video popped up on my boyfriends YouTube, it said "Hundreds of Transgender People Trying to Return to Birth Gender" (or something similar)

We watched the video (which was just a dude reading the article)

There are 'ex-trans' people trying to save money to detransition.

Their mental health and physical health problems led them to believe they were transgender

I believe people are being romanticized into believing they are part of the LGBT+ community

Cis people saying "only women can do that" or "since you like to do (masculine thing) you must be trans!", is very hurtful!!

My name is Genevieve, and welcome to my Ted Talk

Please message me your thoughts!!!!

[antlerqueer]

ive been thinking a lot about why all my hobbies are reliant on others (i have a hard time writing without someone to write with) and i think it’s because of my depression/trauma.

i’ve never learned to do things for myself - i grew up in a weird home sitch where i just wanted to stay out of the way and make myself perfect so i didn’t bother my parents and then in school people didn’t like me bc i’m annoying and bc i was in a small conservative town and my cultural upbringing was about questioning authority, asking for clarification, etc; and that was the polar opposite of the norm. so i tried to adapt to what others liked and hoped people would just accept me then. i also developed rejection sensitivity dysphoria along with my adhd so that was a fun thing to have while everyone hated me for (at the time i didn’t know but it’s now a bit clearer) being queer, jewish, and neurodivergent. 

by the time i was in high school, i stopped caring about what people in real life thought of me. i switched to a different school district and my brain very genuinely just counts high school as growing up because a lot of my memories of my childhood before then are trauma-blocked. i studied theater, which is obviously very collaborative, at a school that was for the performing arts. collaborative. literally the whole foundation of my teaching was about collaboration. however, i’d been so accustomed to being disliked/my ideas being shit on/etc; that i just sort of followed what other people wanted to do in those collaborations. i had strong opinions, i was defiant, but not without having others’ input. 

it sucks that once i finally got comfortable in myself, and where i was (little over a year ago), i decided to uproot myself. i felt like there was nothing for me in the city i’d spent eight years in (which, to be fair, was true) and that getting out would help. it’s helped in some ways, but i’ve never been more lonely. for six months i worked at a job where my coworkers treated me “better” but were more homogenous than at my job prior. i could tell someone using sp*rit an*mal was offensive at my prior job and be heard and taken seriously, while i was disciplined for it at the new job. i was kept to work long hours and guilted when i tried to leave at a normal time (the eve of yom kippur for example, when yom kippur starts at sundown and i told them i was taking the next day off to observe but was working until sundown, i was asked why i wouldn’t stay later even though my work was done), so i didn’t even get to like.... meet people. or go out. or do anything. i was so exhausted.

so after being fired for a plethora of reasons that boiled down to: we don’t like you. (they were uncomfortable with me calling out the sp*rit an*mal thing more than once, didn’t like that i said christianity was like a riff off judaism in certain ways after they began a conversation about religion [they were talking about those communion wafers, and i brought up the fun fact that it’s bc matzoh was served at the last supper!] and then told me not to talk about religion at work as though I was the one discussing holy communion and catholicism for like 15-30 minutes, and i was also bad at math. which if they’d just said i was fired for being bad at math that would have been fine but the rest was just... frustrating and given much more attention than the actual issue in my work.) 

i spent two months job hunting and it was december/jan, and i really made finding a job my job, and then once i got one.... fucking lockdown started lmao. so i’ve been so fucking alone. and i want to find other things to do but i don’t have friends that answer my texts or validate my ideas or provide reciprocal support. so i come to like... tumblr and lose the only community i had growing up (the internet) because it’s fading away and has been for the past couple of years and now i’m not motivated to do anything.

i used to be able to write. i didn’t need a character, or a plot, or anything. now i need something to latch onto and for someone to tell me it’s fine and makes sense because i feel like that’s the only way people will give a shit. i can’t just write to make myself happy. i can’t do anything just to make myself happy and while it’s cool that i’m having this realization it’s not cool that this realization is coming when i can’t leave my apartment or make new friends or try something new.

thx for coming to my ted talk.

[lymanjosh]

do you have any tips on bringing up ADHD to a therapist? I desperately need help for it but I don’t want my concerns dismissed because stuff like adderall is heavily misused :(

i had like two pages of an answer for this (and it was coherent, even, if you can believe it) and then i refreshed the page like a dumbass so this is take 2, which is Less Coherent and im sorry but theres nothing i can do about it

so im not an authority on the subject or anything, and i don’t know your situation, and also ive been diagnosed for like 2 weeks, so you can pretty much take everything i say with a grain of salt. what im gonna do is im gonna run through my own experience / what i wish i did differently / what im doing now, and i hope it helps, and you can totally feel free to come back if you wanna talk more at all once im finished!! and i really hope that at least something i say here is of help to you

also this is gonna be rambly and im sorry about that but i don’t know any other way to be. im gonna preemptively forgive myself because youre like me so you get it but im sure it’s not easy to read so for that i apologize.

tldr: know concretely why you think you have ADHD and what treatment options you want to pursue, do like 3 times more research than you think you need to do, write down all your symptoms in advance, cite your past history of mental health treatment if you have one, and try not to worry too much. if your therapist is any good at their job they’ll know you’re not just drug-seeking, and they’ll recognize the symptoms and problems you discuss when you bring them up in the context of ADHD. probably you’ll be okay, and you’ll get the treatment you need.

so i spent most of my teen years in a drug-addled haze. i was depressed and anxious because i couldn’t Fucking Do Anything, and my parents were worried so they took me to the doctor, and the doctor was worried so she sent me to another doctor, and this continued for a long time and i was on like 4 different antidepressants and 4 different antipsychotics and also some anti-anxiety meds between the ages of like 15 and 16. it was heavily traumatic and also not fun, and the reason all this happened was that nobody stopped to think that maybe i might share some genes with my dad, who has been diagnosed inattentive since before i was born.

right off the bat i should have been way more up in arms about self-advocating, which is something you’re clearly doing, so that’s awesome and you should give yourself a pat on the back because that’s really difficult in the mental health industry especially when you’re already fighting your own brain on most things. 

hopefully you haven’t been through a wringer of false diagnoses and nonsensical prescriptions, but if you have, then you can guilt your doctor a little bit. “i was traumatized! i was given dangerous psychoactive drugs during a critical phase of neural development! you have to give me stimulants to atone for your sins!” phrase it exactly like that, it’s like a silver bullet. in all seriousness if you ahve past diagnoses of anxiety or depression or anything to do with emotional dysregulation that can help your case, because you can point out that a) these things are common misdiagnoses for adhd, and b) the symptoms for these things logically emerge from things like emotional hyperarousal and rejection-sensitive dysphoria. 

what i should have done, and what i think you should do, is write down your symptoms in advance, because then you won’t have to spend an hour hemming and hawing and trying to thnk of them all in the doctor’s office. i did not do this. it didn’t prove to be a problem because my doctor was kinda irresponsible but i really should have done this, just for my own benefit.

when i actually brought it up to my doctor that i might have adhd i had a couple different things going for me. i was talking to my GP, and not my therapist; im not in therapy (which you can probably tell) because therapists creep me out, but i think physicians are probably more inclined to throw drugs at it than therapists are. my GP was also brand new to my case– i had never even met the guy before. i mentioned my history of mental health treatment, and i also mentioned my dad being diagnosed, and im also a girl (girls are chronically underdiagnosed and extremely likely to be misdiagnosed with either anxiety or depression), so i had some concrete facts to support why i had suspicions. i had also done a shit ton of research beforehand, so i advise you to do that– know concretely why you think you have adhd and what treatment options you want to pursue.

you might benefit from talking about it with your doctor before your therapist, but idk that might just be my fear of therapists talking. i think a doctor is less likely to want to taco bout it than a therapist but that may just be my specific experience– you know your situation better than i do. and admittedly a therapist is more likely to, like, Know You and know what you’re talking about when you say (for example) that you’ve always struggled with emotional dysregulation, or whatever.

something else that might help you– i wish i had done this not because i don’t want to look like a drug-seeker but because i Miss Coffee– is to bring up non-stimulant treatments like strattera (for adults) or kapvay or intuniv (both for children but sometimes prescribed to adults) because it’ll show you’ve done your homework and it might be a point against writing you off. stimulants are usually the first resort for adhd, so it’s highly likely you’ll end up on adderall or another stimulant, but it’s good to bring up as an option. might also be good to research it as a serious course of action, especially if you suffer with anxiety, because stimulants are likely to make you more anxious.

i would also advise you not to fixate on adderall? idk enough about your situation to know if you’ve done that but it’s good to be open to other medications and treatment plans bc if adderall doesn’t work for you it doesn’t work and there’s not a ton you can do about it. you should for sure read up on other treatments– you might find one that sounds more appealing, or at the very least you’ll know what to think if your doctor brings up another one unexpectedly.

so i brought up to my doctor that i might have adhd and he immediately plonked a questionnaire in front of me. i filled it out (spoiler alert most of my answers were “often”) and he was like “oh this is textbook, let’s get you on adderall” which like WHAT. i didn’t even ask about adderall. like im not gonna argue with you but let’s talk about this first before we break out the stimulant medication. but i’ve been on it for a couple days and no major side effects yet so maybe he was right who knows. anyway he was super irresponsible don’t let your doctor just prescribe you meds at random go through the side effects. always ask about the side effects. i get such bad headaches after it wears off. i have one now and its Bad. 

but as an addendum you should for sure be prepared to use other coping mechanisms. i’ve started using a bullet journal since i was diagnosed which i’ve found works really well, and youtube channels like howtoadhd are really helpful to me!! i try to use the meds sparingly because i Don’t Like taking pills and also bc adderall can be habit forming, and because i hope to eventually be able to function without it, and i advise you to think of it the same way. drugs don’t have to be a permanent fixture in your life– you can use it as a temporary tool while you build up the necessary coping mechanisms and mental pathways to function without it. adhd isn’t broken brain, it’s just brain on hard mode, if you know what i mean. i try to think of the meds as training wheels– i learn to function with it, and then i gradually learn to function without it. so idk if that’s a useful way to think about it for you but to me it feels more hopeful than resigning myself to a lifetime on more drugs. idk. 

but even if you’re okay with that, adderall isn’t gonna make you functional (it might. kinda feel like you’re magically functional. that’s how i feel right now, that is to say when im not headaching.) so you have to have systems in place to make it easier for yourself. some kind of productivity app might help ig (i used ike for like 3 days and then my phone died and i forgot to charge it for a week because that happens to me sometimes, but i liked ike!) but i like analog todo lists. feels good checking stuff off. either way is good though. 

also get your phone to send you alerts. also rearrange your stuff. like, make the world around you conducive to your functioning. do your best to create and live in a space that enables you to do the things you need to do. get accommodations at school if you need to (i haven’t done this and can’t tell you how but there are a ton of online tutorials and you can probably just google your school + accessibility, or something, and that’s assuming you even go to school)

but yeah i hope any of that was helpful to you and im sorry to make you do 1 million hours of deciphering my shitty informal writing style and i love you and i want to help you please come back and let me know how everything goes bc im gonna worry about you otherwise