Dear Anita

The summer months were emotionally exhausting since my parents did not accept my gender identity and did not think it necessary for me to visit the therapist. I felt alone with a raging inner critic and I would burst into tears at least twice every two weeks. I struggled with disordered eating, avoiding certain foods and at other times eating a lot because I didn’t feel full. Then I was filled with self-hatred because I felt I had lost control over my restriction with food and my body wouldn’t be masculine enough so I would work out to the extreme and eat little for days to burn off the calories. I became tired of trying to live, tired of not being recognized for who I am, just tired of doing anything not really living and seeing a meaning in life because I hated myself and thought I was wrong. My parents did not think I needed any resources to help me that I was just being an irresponsible teenager and could change my thoughts to become positive. All the times I was misgendered by people because my parents insisted on my birth sex gender when telling people who I was and all the times the people who used to know me misgendered me, I felt myself want to hurt myself. I would eat very little, exercise to the extreme and also use ace tape (constricts breathing and leaves bruises) to bind my chest along with my chest binder to make it look flatter and make myself skinnier to become more masculine. This summer was emotionally exhausting. Even though things were fine on the outside, I felt tired and empty on the inside. I felt like a shadow walking through life with each passing day like I didn’t really exist. I hated myself for being myself as it seems to me I’m not sure if I’m enough for society or even fit into society at all. However I didn’t want to fit into society, I just wanted to feel like who I am will be enough. But I didn’t think I know who that is anymore. I feel like I’m split between two people, the gender I feel on the inside which doesn’t match the biological sex on the outside and I hate my body because of it. I wish I could just forget the thoughts in my mind and be at peace just for a day so I can focus on learning new things. My mind keeps playing the same loop over and over and I find myself losing my short-term memory and losing sleep. I keep feeling like the body I have doesn’t belong to me, like who I am on the outside isn’t who I want to be and how I see myself on the inside. It seems like my mind has become a one-track mind playing the same record over and over and it makes it hard to focus on learning new things. The inner critic in my mind laughs at me saying that I’ve lost control of myself and keeps telling me that I am wrong for society to be feeling gender dysphoria. On the days I have the worst dysphoria and the inner critic rages, I feel like I am carrying the weight of the world on my chest and it’s hard to breathe. Those are the days when I know I’m truly inside myself because the emotions that I feel like I run from most of the time are really intense and it seems like I am at war with myself. Disordered eating is a way to feel in control of my body when my dysphoric thoughts were causing me to lose myself. It made things worse because I was consistently cold, tired or had aches from working out too much and eating too little, but the physical pain was easier to deal with than the emotional pain and it made me feel like I had some control over the thoughts in my head. It’s like I’m splitting my personality into two different people: one who feels masculine on The inside and one who seems forced to portray feminity The dysphoria causes me to isolate myself from my body entirely because it’s hard living two people at once and wanting so much to be seen as the person I identify as and not the lie. Since I feel like I’m becoming more disillusioned with myself daily and the memories in my mind seem all fragmented, I try to seek a different person to make up for the fragmented person I feel like I am forced to be because I want to feel whole and this has caused me to be stressed and have short-term memory fog because I’m consistently trying to present myself as a confident whole person.

And it’s hard to learn new things because all I can think about is my gender identity and it consumes my mind. It’s like I form the different versions of myself but they all play similar tapes and they loop around in my head, always the same obsessive thought that I’m trying to escape from. When I feel overwhelmed from all of it, it’s like my mental processes are sluggish and being controlled by this one loop that goes round and round and I go between different selves to placate the voice.
I feel like I have an anorexic-like self who strives to be perfect, people-pleaser self that doesn’t want to make anyone mad, an adult-child self that still holds on to childhood ideals wishing I was still a child and life was easier.

Sometimes I feel like I’m the wrong person for others, like I’m wrong for society and that the person I am will never be enough or have anything worthy to give.

I felt severely depressed and just couldn’t figure out ways to cope with my self-hatred and gender dysphoria that it made it hard to focus on the things of the moment and daily tasks.  This was how I felt in the summer months. When August came around, I had hope because school was around the corner but it was still difficult. My college friends from Ocean Pride LGBT club initiated contact with me toward the late weeks of August and I was grateful to have people to talk to, but also felt bitter because I wish they had responded sooner when I had told them I needed comfort. I did try some online therapy,  but it felt impersonal and although it did help to express my feelings I wanted to talk with someone who truly understood me because I wanted a connection that would make me feel less alone. I thought about posting on tinybuddha, but was just drained emotionally and didn’t really feel like I would have the words to express what I was feeling or the motivation. The only thing that kept me alive in the summer months was one of my spiritual friends who practices Buddhist Wicca with me. She listened to me and gave advice and it was like having a therapist in person even though it was online groupchat because she gave detailed advice and encouragement that helped me have some focus when I was lost in my inner bully. The closer the days get to school, the more I feel like myself again because I know there will be friends there for me. It’s like being in school awakens a sense of self in me and I can focus on learning new things again because I don’t always have to tell myself that I am masculine enough to make myself believe it when told otherwise. It’s like the closer school gets, the less the inner critic talks and there are times when it seems as if the inner critic is gone and there is this void that I’m not sure of how to feel because it had been occupied by the inner critic for quite a length of time. It makes me feel numb and comfused as to what I’m feeling. I think I have a lesser form of dissociation because I do experience mental fog that makes it hard to focus on daily tasks, but doesn’t really affect my memory much. I find I am still able to remember an event someone tells me, but there are some things that are hard to grasp. It’s like my mind is a filter and the dense and important thoughts are remembered while the ones that people tell me at the moment I remember for ten minutes then forget. For example, someone will tell me that I need to do the laundry and I’ll remember to do it. But I have trouble focusing on things with a structured order like grocery list items. If someone check items in stock and write a list of items needed, I can do it but when people ask me what the list says when I don’t have it in front of me I find I don’t remember clearly what I wrote even if it was just five minutes ago. I do feel like the true me is trapped in a false self and I am aware of my true self and feel like my false self doesn’t exist. Yet I am aware of reality and the distinction between the false feminine self and true masculine self. My inner critic stems from my parents’ criticisms and I’m aware of it criticizing me daily. When it seems to overwhelm me, then all I hear is the inner critic but I know the inner critic is a part of me- it’s the part that internalized the shame my parents inflicted upon me and now tries to torment me on the inside. The inner voice is the other part of me that tries to stop the inner critic from destroying who I am. I feel my emotions at a deep level and it feels like I truly inhabit my body, but since it feels wrong for me I detach myself from it to stop the inner critic from raging. Yet this makes me feel numb and depressed, yet as I go through my days I know the events that pass and am aware of them, but they seem to not hold my interest. I think what is more accurate is that I’m experiencing a severe form of depression that causes me to feel lost in my life, causing me to become detached from myself to escape the self-hatred in my head and the fact that sometimes I can’t escape it and I feel numb and like the events in life hold little interest for me. My inner critic and inner voice are part of me and they war in my head and make me want to escape the thoughts in my head. The warring thoughts make it hard to focus on reality and myself. My inner critic is a response to the negative thoughts that I try to detach from in my mind. I find it easier to focus somewhere else, to imagine me as the person I want to be rather than the person that is there and in the body that is constantly hounded by the inner critic. The inner critic sees the worst in me and it makes them worse because it is part of me. It like fighting myself and losing control because of the self-doubt the inner critic makes me believe. Which is why I became anorexic and it is hard to let it go because the inner critic seems like a part of me and the more it rages the more I feel like I’m losing myself and anorexia feels like I have some control over my body’s appearance. But anorexia is not a way of control because it makes me feel more tired and drained. One way to avoid anorexia and the inner critic is to disengage from myself. To act as if I am the person I want to be and to say to myself “their opinion, not my reality.” This detachment from the world around me at home has left me feeling tired and withdrawn into myself and like I don’t really care anymore about fighting to be recognized for who I am, I just want to believe in myself and that will be enough. I don’t want to constantly fight my own thoughts and other people’s as well so I detach from myself and act as if I am the person I want to be and it gives me a sense of self and an escape from the inner critic in my mind that tries to get me to be anorexic so I can look more masculine.