>>40395725it gets kind of gross from here because it all got split split into 'the real me' vs 'my weird fascination.'
i'd obsessively worry about whether i could be a decent father/husband/boyfriend because deep down there was still a sense that i wasn't 'a man' at all.
i coped by going harder on the man side, which made what i now believe is dysphoria worse, which i tried to solve as if it were an unfortunate kink or something. repression, hobbies, working out, abstinence, all that stuff. it never went away, kind of just got worse
i somehow never noticed two important things.
one, the triggers for these intense possessions were always my own masculinization, be it physical or social, and it got worse as i grew more and more into my agab
two, the non-erotic components never stopped. i still got intensely jealous of girls and thought of myself as a fake man (no matter how much validation and accomplishments i got saying otherwise). i still worried about being able to perform the roles of boyfriend/husband/father because it didn't come naturally to me
all that kind of faded away when i realized what it was.
and now i'm kinda stuck
on one hand i hate myself for being stubborn and not recognizing the dysphoria. i could've treated this much earlier, at 12 or 13, if i wasn't such an idiot or so scared of making a choice instead of wanting to be both a man and a woman
on the other hand, i feel disgusting. i feel like i've twisted and perverted a part of myself to survive, to the point that very few respectable trans women have stories resembling mine, and i can't tell if i'm a severely damaged trans woman or a severely disturbed fetishist.
that's all i remember off the top of my head