way way way way more connected with my childhood self like this, which has mostly felt positive (if sometimes scary when i find something repressed). weird and kind of scary disconnection with the fiveish years where i went by flynn, feels kinda dreamlike/nightmarish? bad times
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i'm not sure that i regret transitioning, i'm glad i did. but man are the gender dysphoria and self-hatred difficult to untangle?
feels like dysphoria was a good channel for the self-hatred, so the rest of me could take a break from being attacked. cool defense mechanism imo
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also, idk, probably relevant that I had a really violent, traumatic sexual encounter-gone-wrong the same month I started tentatively exploring my gender. can't imagine that had an effect on my perspective on womanhood
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n e way
my name switching back to helen, after bouncing between helen and flynn and various other things for a few months, felt like a sensory "click"
and it's accompanied by sensations opposite the ones I felt when I switched to flynn in the first place!
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the feelings i'm having now remind me of the aftermath of my hysterectomy, when ~60% of my ftm-ish gender dysphoria disappeared and i stopped needing to bind my chest.
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then i drank ayahuasca literally one time and the rest of the gender dysphoria went away & i started to feel like "oh man i can grow my hair out and be seen as a woman and not care"
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the last two years have involved a lot of tiny ego disruption events and funerals for my masc self and fuckin DRAMA
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but now for the first time since i was like 14 i feel good about my birth name. and a few days ago for the first time since starting to have periods I felt like i had a normal one. (just had to get rid of the bleeding part 😂)
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and most of the time, i don't feel bad about having been Flynn!! which is astonishing when i think about how I was in that period, when dropping any of my identifiers was unthinkably shameful to me, i just had to continue on forever as i was.
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I am just very grateful to be where i am now compared to where i was then.
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