cyaniphor

[cyaniphor]

walls

it seems a little late to only now be explaining what the whole point of this blog is, but it's really not that complicated, so hopefully this post will be kinda short.

one of the things that came with the whole repression thing from the first post was a complete inability to be vulnerable with anyone. anytime i get close to being emotional or vulnerable, i get a deep sense of anxiety and embarrassment which stops me from going further. i have walls, you could say, around my emotions and deeply personal part of my life.

i do still manage to maintain a facade of functionality and normalcy, and most people tend to assume that i'm mentally doing well. in college i've been consistently labelled as the same/stable one in the group, which i mean considering the groups i'm in is not strictly wrong, but i think it shows that my facade is working pretty well.

over the last year and a half, though, i've found myself slowly getting more comfortable being vulnerable around my girlfriend, which is mostly because they're amazing and very good at making me feel safe and not judged, but i digress. and as i've been getting more vulnerable with them, i've gotten new avenues for processing emotions and introspection, and long story short, i can actually kind of process emotions now yayyy!!

but also over the last few months ish, i've started getting a little more vulnerable with a few other people (these are the target audience for these posts ig). overall, it's very strange and i think it's a good thing that it's happening, but i do want to use this opportunity. so what i'm doing is posting things on tumblr to force myself to be vulnerable. it seems to be working so far, and hopefully this trend will continue.

also, i've noticed that i've been writing this post with a distinctly different tone than the other posts, and i don't really know why that is. chat is this too meta what is going on.

[cyaniphor]

trans, pt. 1

i don't think my experience of gender dysphoria and my journey of realizing my transness are very dissimilar to a lot of other people's stories, so maybe this post doesn't really need to exist, but i wanted to write it anyway. partially as a way to get my scattered thoughts in order, partially as a way to let my friends understand what happens in my brain a little better, partially just in the hopes that if it's written down, I'll feel more confident that I'm not faking it. because i'm continually surprised by how much more valid my emotions feel to me once a name is put to them. my vague feelings of stress discomfort and claustrophobia i get when in a loud room became so much more valid and excusable when my girlfriend called it "getting overwhelmed". my similarly vague feelings of discomfort about my body and how people see it felt way more valid when i started calling them gender dysphoria. but i'm getting ahead of myself.

where do i even begin? my memory is concerningly bad at remembering specific events, so this whole part will rely almost entirely on half-remembered vibes. I am however very confident that during the pre-covid period i was extremely not in touch with my emotions. there was zero processing of emotions, good or bad, going on, so i don't remember any explicit feelings of being uncomfortable in my own body, as people like to describe gender dysphoria. i do remember a couple suspicious things that happened in this time though. i got a copy of the legend of zelda: breath of the wild in 2018 and did not manage to get too far into it (i made the mistake of going to vah naboris first and was stuck for weeks on its boss before eventually giving up). but one of the things i did get to in that game was the crossdressing section (iykyk). basically without spoiling too much from an eight year old game, our player character has to pretend to be a woman for a bit for... reasons, and gets a set of clothes for that purpose. i remember wearing those clothes as much as possible, even when i didn't need them, which in hindsight looks a lot like inserting myself into a role where i could do something i couldn't do in the real world, i.e. wear women's clothing. i mention this incident not because it's a particular compelling piece of evidence for my gender dysphoria, but because it's probably the earliest piece of evidence I can remember. it's a lot easier to do something about unprocessable emotions when you can just have a fictional character do it for you, after all.

there's a couple other things that happened in this time that i've taken as evidence for dysphoria. they all follow the same trend of being generally very small things that someone else could easily interpret not to be a sign of dysphoria. my dysphoria was always exceptionally vague because my emotions were always exceptionally vague. but i won't let myself fall into the mindset of trying to prove my dysphoria to anyone else, so don't expect this to be some sort of list of every trans experience or feeling i've ever had. regardless, 2020 and 2021 were the years where i gained some sort of self-awareness and awareness of the world. funny that that happened during covid of all times, when i was basically cut off from the world. i started high school, so i left my old middle school friend group and had to make new friends. freshman and to an extent sophomore year were the most socially alone i've ever been, as it was very much a transitional period for me. i didn't get depressed per se, but this was the time my repression reached an all-time peak. a good part of what i was repressing was definitely dysphoria. i definitely did dislike how i looked, and as the people around me started to get into relationships, the lack of romantic attention (or really any other kind of attention) i was getting definitely made those feelings worse. i could have fallen down the incel pipeline if i was pushed in the right direction. i didn't, though. instead i just repressed all those emotions to cope. i convinced myself i didn't actually care about how i looked and that i didn't want anything to do with romance.

it almost worked. for a year or so i felt, well not ok, but fine enough that i convinced myself i was ok. and then, in the middle of sophomore year, i got my first real crush. this was very much not something I could ignore, no matter how hard I tried. and it forced me to confront the fact that i very much did care, about how i looked, about how people saw me, about who I was, really. i was not at all ready to actually figure out who i was and what i wanted, but i finally had to acknowledge the question. also, something strange happened when i was around my crush. i felt this urge to look and act more femininely around them. i didn't think too hard about it, but i did do some things that i thought my crush might see as more feminine, most notably wearing my hoodie on my elbows (i have no idea if this was at all seen as more feminine, i just thought it was). of course, all of this forced me to fully challenge what i thought i knew about myself.

this finally brings me to the questioning phase. going into junior year, the new friend group i'd attached myself to was basically the group of openly queer people in my grade and the grade above me, which because my school was 1) quite small and 2) generally rather queerphobic, was limited to about ten people. i was exposed to new ideas and identities and expressions of queerness (wow i sound like an academic), and i started questioning if i was really a boy. because i was still a little stuck in repression mode, i thought i might be agender for a bit. then i thought i was genderfluid after misunderstanding what the label meant, and after that i started saying i was fine with any pronouns. of course, if you say you go by any pronouns, most people will just automatically go with what you look like, so everyone just defaulted to he/him for me anyway. which i should have been fine with. any pronouns means i'm fine with he/him, after all. well at that point, i wasn't really fine with it anymore. there still wasn't any sort of conscious realization, but I do remember hoping (without telling anyone, of course) that people would use she/her pronouns for me. for whatever reason, the possibility that i was actually trans had still not actually occurred to me despite all of this stuff i was thinking.

in early november of 2023, three months into my senior year, i settled on calling myself nonbinary. i used they/them pronouns on the internet, and after i got into college, i was known as that identity to my future classmates. in the real world, i got a girlfriend in march 2024, and i, still internally denying my transness, told them it would be really fun if i got to college and was androgynous enough to pass as a guy if i wanted and also pass as a girl if i wanted. my girlfriend got me my first skirt soon after that, and i brought it to my college's event for new admits in april. i wore a skirt for a whole day, met a lot of really cool people, and overall had a lot of fun. i don't remember what exactly that whole experience did in my brain, by i do know that just two days after i got back, i realized i was trans.

p.s. this ended up being really long so i'm going to write a part 2 later.

[cyaniphor]

agency

I've been prone to think that my mental health problems don't really affect me and how I interact with the world. I like thinking that despite all my issues I am still a functioning adult. If I can create and maintain a facade of stability to the outside world, then surely the facade works just as well as actually being stable, right?

The fact that my facade is not as functional as I would like it to be is slowly becoming harder and harder to ignore. I've noticed a couple ways that my nonfunctionality peeks out, but there's one thing in particular that I find very concerning.

I'm now an adult, which means I have more responsibilities to deal with now. For some of these things I'm proud of how well I've done. I've managed to go to the doctor, plan appointments, and get both prescribed HRT and voice training all on my own. I feel somewhat more confident making phone calls, and overall I feel like I'm getting the hang of this whole "talking to strangers" thing.

The one thing I can't do, apparently, is get a job. There have been a couple of career fairs at my school this last year, where representatives of companies come to campus and try to recruit students. I didn't go to any of them, ostensibly because I didn't have any formal clothing that I wouldn't feel dysphoric in. But honestly, even if I had gone, I probably would have just aimlessly walked around looking for people I know before leaving after like ten minutes. I would have gotten too anxious at the idea of walking up to a stall and talking professionally to people I don't know. Every time I get close to getting off my ass and trying to get a job, I just end up going "eh I don't need to right now, I'll get the motivation to do it later". And then before I know it, a whole year has passed without me doing anything.

Even as I'm sitting here typing this, I'm procrastinating an application to an undergrad research job that I haven't even started yet, even though I told myself I would finish before the end of the school year. I just get obscenely anxious if I even start working on the application, and I immediately stop and do something else.

I'm honestly at a loss as to why this is happening. My parents bullied me about it for a couple months until I finally told them to stop. It's a problem that I really need to figure out soon. It's not like I don't have motivation, I just can't stand the actual work. This isn't even a particularly major mental health issue, and you could probably convince me that it's not a mental health issue at all. I originally assumed that this was a problem that everyone had to deal with, but I see my friends getting along just fine. Everyone around me is getting jobs and internships like it's almost second nature, and I still feel left behind and woefully inadequate.

I've been told that I just "have no ambition", and yeah that's more or less accurate, but I don't find it a satisfying explanation for what's going on. I have the motivation, but there's some kind of extreme social anxiety going on where I just physically can't do it. You can probably feel the frustration oozing out of me at this point. I want to figure out what's going on, but I don't know right now and I probably won't find out until I start therapy in a few months. I don't have any closure here so I guess I'll just scream into the void.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

[cyaniphor]

hiiii i like your pfp sm how did you make it🥺

its a picrew avatar made by my gf!!

[cyaniphor]

repression

to have no control is awful.

i've read about a very scary thing that happens to some people during a traumatic experience. if you're physically restrained during some traumatic event and therefore can't do fight or flight, your brain will sometimes shut itself down and simply refuse to register anything that's happening. every part of your brain that isn't necessary to keep you alive is forcibly turned off. you just go totally numb.

i'm not a trauma survivor, but i grew up with very little control. i was, and kind of still am, expected to act, feel, and think a certain way. memory is a wishy washy thing for me and i have trouble remembering specific events, but i certainly remember the pervasive feeling of not being able to express my emotions to anyone else. and being trans in a conservative home very much did not help.

and so, what can a child do with emotions that no one else wants to acknowledge and that are too big to process? repress, repress, repress, baby!! i'm still really good at simply ignoring my emotions until they hopefully go away (they rarely do). as a teenager I even managed to convince myself I just had less strong emotions than everyone else and i could be some emotionless being of pure logic if i tried hard enough.

but emotions never really go away, do they? me pushing them down into a little hole of semi-willful ignorance doesn't actually make me feel better. it's just that my emotions like my gender dysphoria stop being well defined, organizable little blocks, but instead mix together into some inscrutable, sticky, and disgusting pitch-black tar that leaves me with a sense of being vaguely uncomfortable at all times.

i'm not quite sure where i was trying to go with all this. the place i'm at now feels distinctly unsatisfying, as if i've collapsed within sight of the finish line of a marathon. most of all, i feel like i haven't properly been able to communicate my thoughts here. maybe that's fitting though, since i've been talking about feelings i can't process. learning how to identify and process my emotions is going to be a looooooong journey, and i can tell that it's going to take a lot of work. but i can't feeling proud of the fact that after so many years, i finally, at the very least, recognize that there's a problem.

also, i can sense that there's a separate thread to that whole lack of control thing. something about agency and social anxiety and ambition. i can see the jigsaw puzzle fit together, but I'm standing too far away to tell which pieces go where. i'll try walking closer, though.

also also, the bit about trauma victims' brains blanking out is something I read in the fantastic book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk (idk how citations work so hopefully this suffices).