#smth i started on a whim but my therapist has been all for it and very much enthused abt me doing smth and having hobbies again lol

[foreverxdaydreaming]

hello hello guess who's still alive 👀

feels weird to be away from tumblr sm bc this place has always felt like & always will be like home away from home

[rowans-road]

12.12.18

So like I know it's a bad idea to sleep in a binder but like /how/ bad?

Nah I'm not gonna dont worry just. Oof. Don't wanna take this off.

It's kind of funny, I can tell when I'm getting gendered as male more often not because of pronouns usually, people tend to stumble over those or avoid them, but because of little tiny things.

How long people will wait for me to get off the elevator first. Whether people will hold the door for me. Whether people help me pick up my stuff. How close people walk next to me on the sidewalk.

It's fascinating - gender affects these things? Really? I never would have thought so, but apparently it does. It's subconscious.

Ahh. Yeah I wore a button down and the binder that works today, didn't speak to anyone most of the time and so got assumed male a lot I think. Idk I can never tell what people assume about my gender? I'm really curious, I'd like to know what I'm being perceived as. Really I want to know if anything I do makes people perceive me as male all day, because I want to control it. My goal, really, is to be able to control people's perceptions of my gender, because if I can do that, I can start fucking with it. Present so masc then start speaking (my voice is relatively low for an afab person but still always makes people hastily apologize and start "ma'am-ing" me). Wear a binder under a dress or smth. Just completely screw with their expectations.

The issue right now with doing that is no matter how hard I'm trying to fuck over the box people keep putting me in is that I always end up shoved into "masculine woman" or "lesbian". Which I'm not! I'm not any of that! So that's annoying. That's why I like binding, and I think a large part of why I'd like top surgery - to make it a bit easier to fuck up those binary boxes.

I'm really struggling to figure out why I bind. Because I just had this all written out nicely then remembered the first part, and where i am right now. I am alone in my room on my bed wearing pj pants and a binder with a bomber jacket over it. Why am I wearing the binder? It's hard to breathe. It's not comfortable, and starting to border on painful as I am approaching 12 hours of binding. But I wish I never had to take it off.

I am and always have been terrible at understanding and interpreting what I'm feeling. Right now, my biggest issue is whether I experience dysphoria. I am nonbinary either way, I know this. But the only way I know to discover myself is to compare my experiences to those of others, and mine has always seemed recent and more mild, until I look deeper.

My experience with discomfort with my gender, upon deep reflection, has always been there, simply lurking under another name. I came up with reasons for everything I did - because God forbid I do something just on a whim, on a feeling. But the reasons - for cutting my hair, for wearing cargo shorts, for dressing in all black, for using mens hair products, for dyeing my hair - were excuses. Acknowledging that I took those actions because of my gender makes more sense.

I feel like the reason I feel my dysphoria is quieter, more muted than what others feel is that every other emotion is, too. I don't experience intense emotions. Ever. I feel panic, sure, but it's more of a conscious acknowledgement that I am thinking too fast and need to escape. But sadness turns into emptiness more often than not, fear turns into apathy, anger I reflect into self-loathing which is more words than feeling, and yeah no i don't experience emotion intensely. Ever. So why would dysphoria be any different?

Yeah.

I'm going to talk about this with a therapist in January. My mom is getting me tested for ADHD, and while there I'm going to ask about whether its possible I have depression, anxiety, and gender dysphoria. Because those would explain everything I think.

Yeah I've been rambling, oh well. If you think what I experience does or does not sound like dysphoria, maybe let me know? Idk like I'm gonna end up listening to what the therapist tells me but other trans/nb peeps probably know better tbh so. Yeah.

Farewell, and best of luck on exams if you're taking any!!