Dear Anita

Thank you so much for your advice. I hope that you have a great Christmas and a healthy, happy New Year.

I think that my social anxiety stems from my fear of people judging me because I have been judged harshly by my parents and I worry about what others think of me many times. I sometimes worry that I am not good enough for the world because I don’t know all the life skills that I need and sometimes I wonder if I can make it out into the world and be an independent individual. I know that I want to go into the scientific research field because I feel I have always been a scientist at heart who loves to analyze and question the world around me and look and research things, so pursuing science is a passion for me. It’s like I can see the big picture of my life, but I’m not sure of how to fit the little pieces of the puzzle to help me build the person I want to be. There are times when I feel like I am missing in life and I feel scared, these are the times when I feel the most gender dysphoria and I feel like my life will end before it has a chance to begin and I feel like I’m a hallow person who is not real but just existing in the world and it makes me scared that if I pass away that I won’t leave anything significant behind. I feel like I want to transition to become a guy and be a scientist, but sometimes I’m not sure how the pieces will fit together and then I’m afraid that my anxiety with how my body looks will cause me to lose myself and make my life meaningless. I want to live a life where I feel like I am living and not just going through the motions each day, a life where I can truly feel alive. I just feel like although I know what I want in life- to study science and transition- I am still working on the pieces and since they are pieces I am working on building up, I feel like I’m missing myself as a person. It’s like I can dream of the person I want to be and in my dreams I feel whole , but in reality I feel like I am missing because I don’t know how the pieces fit. As I work on finding myself, meditation helps me work with my emotions. I hope to heal from anorexia because it is straining consistently checking my weight worrying whether I look masculine enough. There are some people with gender dysphoria who feel uncomfortable with their bodies but they do not have eating disorders and there are some that do. Eating disorders such as anorexia are common in the transgender community especially with transgender men who want to make themselves look more masculine and reduce their curves. But there are some transgender men who don’t have eating disorders and sometimes I wish I could be more comfortable and not let gender dysphoria be so overwhelming. I think that the reason why it is so overwhelming is that my parents don’t let me express my gender identity and say that I don’t know enough about how I feel and it makes the gender dysphoria worse because I feel like I’m not living when the place I currently reside makes me not able to express myself as I want. At school where Stockton University is very LGBTQ friendly I am accepted and the anxiety eases a bit, but when I am home on break from school then there is more anxiety because I worry about myself and feel strained trying to survive as myself and express myself as best as I can even though I feel like I’m being suppressed and that makes me feel like I’m fading away. That may be a reason why I became anorexic because I felt like I was fading away trying to hold onto my self-identify of who I am, but since it was very difficult and I felt like I was losing the fight and fading away and who I wanted to be didn’t exist there was a way for me to make me feel like I existed by putting stress on my physical body by trying to shape it into a more toned body that looked more masculine without any curves and the physical pain made me feel like there was something real that I could control in my life because I felt like I was losing control of myself. Hope this helps and makes sense! Thank you for being here and listening!