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loverofpiggies · 1 year

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Hey guys, I got something I’m ready to talk about under the cut. It’s super long! And it’s pretty serious, so feel free to scroll past. It’s also about some serious subject matter regarding transphobia, so if you’re not in a good place and ready to read about something like that, take care of yourself first and foremost. Okay?

Okay.

Hey guys, I’ve been doing a lot of self discovery these last few…. I guess technically my whole life, but I only got serious about focusing and working on it these last few years, and it has to do with my history of transphobia. I want to talk about my journey of growth, and what I’ve done to grow, and maybe it could help anyone else dealing with similar issues.

I was a pretty…. Hateful kid, to put it lightly. I was very angry, VERY angry, and obsessed over all this anger and hatred I had at everyone, but especially at myself. I’ve been in therapy as far back as I can remember, and more meds than I’d like to admit, trying to figure out what was ‘wrong’ with me. Which was a lot, by the way.

Anyway, around 2016, I got really serious about therapy. As a kid I didn’t take it seriously, but by 2016 I knew I needed help. I realized how my anger was ripping me apart, and how deeply it was rooted in hating myself. So, without therapy, and without the tools of therapy, I’d try to alter thoughts as they’d happen. I’d see someone dressed in a way I didn’t like? My thoughts immediately turned to hatred and judgementality. I taught myself to step back, and go, ‘hold on. You don’t know them. That’s a lot to assume about someone you’ve never talked to.’ and it helped curb a lot of my most angry and judgemental thoughts, at least, I thought so. In truth, all it did, was bury the issue, instead of addressing it.

Going into therapy seriously this time as an adult, I started unburying my own trauma, small bit by small bit. I started journaling a lot of it out, and my therapist put it best. Going to therapy is like trying to untangle a ball of paperclips. You might be like ‘ah, I just want to take this one paperclip out’ but it’s attached to so many other things you wouldn’t have guessed, and eventually you just. End up with the whole ball. You go to therapy for one ‘small’ thing, oops, you’re talking about this huge other thing that you never knew was related.

Also at this point, I was pretty serious about my spirituality. I was sick of being so angry and judgemental, I got deep into meditation and learning about compassion, because… well I lacked so much of it for so long. My favorite quote, that helped me grow the most, is “If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete” by Jack Kornfield. Another one I adore, is, “Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” attributed to lots of people so I’m not actually sure who the original quoter is. If you watched a lot of my early streams, I was pretty obsessed with kindness and spirituality at that point! Half the time the streams turned into talks about that, lol. Sorry if that was a bit much, I was in a ‘place’ at that time.

After realizing how angry I was, and being so exhausted from it, I swung the opposite way pretty hard. I knew what it felt like to be angry and judgemental, and hurt people because of it. I’ve seen people I was very close to in my life, destroy relationships because of anger. And I was trying so hard to make up for it, to stop being so angry. I didn’t want to hurt people anymore, I didn’t want to hurt myself, and I wanted to be kind and understanding about perspectives I spent so long cutting off. And the therapy helped, a lot! I worked on a lot of deep issues, and my mind, more and more, started being less angry. I also got on meds, because we *finally* figured out what my issue was, and got me on the right medication. At least, once I got over my ‘I don’t need medication’ phase. Which was an absolute blessing.

I thought to myself, ah ha! Look at me, look at all this progress! I’m not angry or judgemental anymore. I’ve opened up so many doors, learned so many new things, I’m okay now, I don’t need any further help.’ With all the progress I had made, I really believed I didn’t need anymore work. The growth I made in just a couple years was astounding, and I wasn’t where I needed to be, but by this point I had the tools I needed to work on things myself. This was what I told myself anyway.

Also around this time, I was making my first close trans friends. And there was this weird, nasty feeling in my head, that I thought I had gotten past. These angry, judgemental thoughts cropped back up again, and they shocked me. I thought I was past this sort of anger, this judgementality. I didn’t want to look at it. I didn’t want to acknowledge it, or look deeper. I didn’t want to think that I could be so mean again, especially after all the work and growth I put in. So, I shoved it away, as hard as I could. I didn’t want to see it, and I didn’t want to think about it.

The problem with trying to shove angry, and judgemental, hateful thoughts away, is they don’t actually go away. They stay, and force themselves out in other ways. They come back as ‘jokes’ or ignorant angry comments. They come out subconsciously, as a defensive reaction. But… I didn’t want to acknowledge that I might be transphobic, or have transphobic thoughts. I didn’t want to be angry. So when I’d ‘joke’, or make a comment, I’d feel ashamed, and try to bury it deeper. And deeper. And it just made it worse. I also used my therapy as a defense mechanism too, without realizing it. “I’m fine now, I’ve gone to therapy, I don’t need any more work, I’m fine!” So. I buried it. I think there’s a pattern here.

After years of therapy, you’d think I’d realize what was going on. I was trying to bury this, the way I tried to bury all my anger for so many years. I knew from experience, that burying the issue does not work, and just makes it so much worse in the long run. But, I didn’t actually realize I was burying it. I was so deep in my own denial, that I couldn’t see it. Because there was a lot of deep shame there, too. I had so many amazing trans friends, and the experiences they had dealt with by this time, JUST for being trans, horrified me. I never, *ever* wanted to be a source of pain for them. But I’d still make comments, or ‘jokes’. Then, I’d feel horrible, crushing guilt, and try to force that bad side of me down even further.

By this point, a good majority of my friend group was either trans, or non binary. I loved them so much, and didn’t want to acknowledge my issues, or the fact that I had thoughts that could hurt them. Eventually, one of my trans friends approached me, and my god, I’m so lucky to have them in my life. But they approached me, telling me “I know you don’t mean to hurt anyone. I think… maybe it’s time to talk to your therapist about this.”

And… they were right. I spent so much time in denial, once they said this to me, it clicked. Yes, I do need to talk to someone. I can’t live like this anymore. If compassion is as important to me as I’ve always said, I need to work on any parts of me that still hold anger. But I was also so terrified, after spending so long trying to avoid it, now I was going to open up to someone? And say whatever my thoughts were out loud? What if I couldn’t be fixed? What if I was destined to be hateful and angry forever, no matter how hard I worked? I didn’t want to hear my own thoughts. I didn’t want to see this awful side of me, after spending so long trying to ‘defeat it’. I didn’t even know how dark it got, and my mind conjured all sorts of nasty ideas of how ‘bad’ of a person I was.

So. I walked into my therapist’s office, and said… out loud. “I think I’m transphobic. And I hate it.” I’ll leave a lot of details out, because it’s pretty personal, but I’ll go over the important things I discovered. After she let me speak for a bit, we turned to my gender identity. She asked me things in detail. I’m a cis woman, so I didn’t think I had any issues with my gender identity, so her questions confused me, but deeper than that, they scared me. There was still something inside of me that wanted to fight back, to protect me from whatever was coming. But I pushed forward.

As we pulled apart the paperclips, and started getting to the root of my true, deeper issue, I started to realize something. See, I’m pretty confident and comfortable in my skin. At least, I believed I was. I told myself, anyway. In a similar vein as I used ‘compassion’ to shove away parts of myself I hated, I used ‘confidence’ to shove away the insecure parts of myself as well. Which, I mean, couldn’t be a more false version of confidence OR compassion if you ask me.

I started to realize that I had a deep insecurity about my own femininity. A deep, crippling insecurity. See, my face and body are pretty androgynous. With long hair, I can look like a girl, but with short hair I can look pretty boyish. I don’t have much of a figure, or a chest, so I can be mistaken for a boy under lots of circumstances. That, combined with the fact that tight clothes are uncomfortable for me, meant overall I looked very unfeminine. And I was bullied a lot for it, growing up. Kids would call me a boy. In highschool, I was made fun of a lot, too. I’d be made fun of for not looking like a ‘girl’. This was only one factor of my bullying at the time, like I mentioned before. I had a lot of pretty severe behavior issues, so it sorta made me a prime target for bullying. I wanted to be viewed as a girl, as a woman. But because my looks didn’t fit enough into their ‘boxes’, I was made fun of. I was laughed at, and I can’t tell you how often people would say things like ‘are you SURE you’re a girl down there?’.

And this was the smoking gun. I finally had the realization I needed. This is hard to write, but. Because I didn’t fit in the mold of what my peers thought a woman was, I felt guilt, and I felt shame. And I shoved it away. And realized… subconsciously, I was doing what was done to me, to my trans friends. To the trans community. And it hurt. It hurt so much, to realize what I was doing. But now it also made so much sense. The guilt, the trying to ‘play it off’, the avoidance, the burying. It was so painful to grow up with those comments, that my mind was trying to shove away and hide me from realizing I was continuing the cycle of pain.

Not only that, but in therapy I learned something else. I’m still working through this, but. I realized as well I have dysphoria, and some mild dysmorphia. The fact that I was perceived so differently then I felt about myself in my adolescence, followed me deeply into adulthood.

I realized that when I would have friends talk about dysmorphia, my defense mechanism would kick in, to avoid me thinking that I might have the same issue. In fact, all my defense mechanisms would kick in, to avoid me from reliving the bullying and the trauma.

And anyone who knows anything about therapy, knows how much this shit hurts. It hurts SO much to open up wounds you’ve tried to hide, to look in and see where the real issue lies. To realize that maybe you haven’t been as kind as you wanted, even if it wasn’t intentional.

But… after the tears, and the pain of reliving this, and ripping open all the doors I was trying to close, to shove away… there was relief. I finally knew what was wrong. And that I knew where to start working. How to start helping myself grow, and be better.

So many things clicked, and my issues with transphobia evaporated. Finally facing it, finally confronting it, and realizing the deeper sides of myself, took away all that power my anger was holding onto. I had to reteach myself that, ‘hey, thanks for trying to protect me, but I’m okay now. You don’t have to protect me anymore.’

I’m still working on my issues with my femininity. After realizing this, I went through my closet and got rid of everything that made me feel ‘unpretty’. I went thrift shopping, and found looser clothes that still made me feel like a girl. I’m slowly growing my hair out, to see if I’m happier with long hair, or happier with short. In truth, I’m rediscovering myself again. It’s easier to look in the mirror.

The defensive reactions went away. The ‘jokes’ disappeared, and I didn’t have to fight to bury anything anymore. And I could be the supportive friend I always deeply wanted to be. To push back at a society that doesn’t like people ever sitting outside specific ‘molds’. To help make a world be safer for anyone who doesn’t align with the mainstream idea of what being a person is. To what being a man, or a woman is. To being whatever a human is.

This has been very long. But. I wanted to go through the entire experience, every step, to show how I worked on myself. And how I grew, from this darker, angrier, unhappy version of myself. And that maybe it could help anyone else who’s had the same experience. I also wanted to go through all of this, to show the steps I’ve made. And to my trans and nonbinary friends? To all the people in the trans community that I may have hurt in the past? I’m sorry. Genuinely, and truly. I never wanted to be another source of pain, especially to trans people, who already experience so much discrimination.

This was a painful experience to go through, but one I definitely needed. I’m still journaling, working on my issues and working on becoming a happier me. I had to take my time to discover myself, and wanted to open up about my journey to yall. I was finally ready to talk about this.

Anyway. I hope you have a beautiful day, and I hope every day is happier than the last. Cheers yall.

#tw: transphobia #transphobia #cqchat #important #therapy #self discovery #keep it real you guys

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