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terminally_underwhelmedFive years ago, I realized something might be up with my gender. A couple months later, I came out as nonbinary.
A year or so ago, my mom asked if I wanted her to edit her old dw posts and correct the pronouns she used for me, and I said, "I dunno, that sounds like a lot of work, I don't mind either way."
Two hours ago I ended up backreading some of her posts, and found out that at some point she had decided the effort was worth it.
And now I don't quite know what I'm feeling, but I can't breathe with it. It's like walking through a room that is crowded and totally silent, so you know for a fact everyone can hear you and everyone knows you're there--but good. It's the primitive and absolute knowledge that you are being seen.
It started so subtly that what I noticed was the lack of friction. I'm used to looking at my old self and finding just a tiny split between me and the girl they looked like, just a record-skip, just a rock-in-the-shoe amount of discomfort that I can sidle past. And it wasn't there. These weren't stories about a girl-child who did the same things as me, they were stories about me! I was in them! I don't just remember seeing through those eyes, operating that body, watching those thoughts tick past. I remember being that person. It burns below my ribs like I'm inhaling into long-disused parts of my lungs, this sense that I am coherent and complete, backwards and forwards through time. That I, me, this person I am, didn't just spring fully-formed out of someone else's childhood a few weeks before my sixteenth birthday.
I didn't think I cared that the pronouns were wrong! I didn't think it mattered! I'm gonna start queuing up these old posts for when I need a hollowpoint of visceral right-ness straight between the eyes!!
I think I want to keep this. I don't know how. It's unbelievably hard to find things I wrote, things I said, things other people said about me, let alone pictures of me, where the terrible wrongness of all the years trying to be the wrong thing isn't the first thing I see. But I don't want to pretend that the Wrongness was all that existed, or that the Child Doing the Wrongness wasn't me or wasn't real or was just a cocoon waiting to be discarded. I want to belong to my past. I want to always have been myself.
I want to go to sleep, and to have grand emotional revelations during the sunlit hours sometimes. I'm not even sure why I'm making this into a post, except that I want it out of me and into the world somehow.
A year or so ago, my mom asked if I wanted her to edit her old dw posts and correct the pronouns she used for me, and I said, "I dunno, that sounds like a lot of work, I don't mind either way."
Two hours ago I ended up backreading some of her posts, and found out that at some point she had decided the effort was worth it.
And now I don't quite know what I'm feeling, but I can't breathe with it. It's like walking through a room that is crowded and totally silent, so you know for a fact everyone can hear you and everyone knows you're there--but good. It's the primitive and absolute knowledge that you are being seen.
It started so subtly that what I noticed was the lack of friction. I'm used to looking at my old self and finding just a tiny split between me and the girl they looked like, just a record-skip, just a rock-in-the-shoe amount of discomfort that I can sidle past. And it wasn't there. These weren't stories about a girl-child who did the same things as me, they were stories about me! I was in them! I don't just remember seeing through those eyes, operating that body, watching those thoughts tick past. I remember being that person. It burns below my ribs like I'm inhaling into long-disused parts of my lungs, this sense that I am coherent and complete, backwards and forwards through time. That I, me, this person I am, didn't just spring fully-formed out of someone else's childhood a few weeks before my sixteenth birthday.
I didn't think I cared that the pronouns were wrong! I didn't think it mattered! I'm gonna start queuing up these old posts for when I need a hollowpoint of visceral right-ness straight between the eyes!!
I think I want to keep this. I don't know how. It's unbelievably hard to find things I wrote, things I said, things other people said about me, let alone pictures of me, where the terrible wrongness of all the years trying to be the wrong thing isn't the first thing I see. But I don't want to pretend that the Wrongness was all that existed, or that the Child Doing the Wrongness wasn't me or wasn't real or was just a cocoon waiting to be discarded. I want to belong to my past. I want to always have been myself.
I want to go to sleep, and to have grand emotional revelations during the sunlit hours sometimes. I'm not even sure why I'm making this into a post, except that I want it out of me and into the world somehow.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-10 05:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-29 11:07 pm (UTC)Thank you so much for sharing this experience. It's always useful, and right now feels vital.