Dysphoria (again)

I want to write about what dysphoria means to me.

Dysphoria is looking in the mirror and not recognising the body I see reflected there.

What about my body do I not recognise? I've been living in this body for almost a quarter of a century.

I don't recognise myself because I have gotten very good at performing self-confidence, to the extent that I don't always know it's a performance. I am someone else who likes attention. I am me, who doesn't like the inherent difficulty of social interaction.

When my uterine lining melts away and exits my body in streams of blood, I feel sick. I never asked for this, never asked for the ability to bring other people into the world without their consent. So my dysphoria about my periods is less about my gender, I think, and more about the fact that all of us have our agency taken away from us before we exist. I feel sick because I don't know how to find the balance between my own boundaries and helping others.

I don't recognise my body. It's been two years since my last cello recital. My body does different things now. I know this is adulthood, I know I am responsible for my choices and their outcomes; I miss the simplicity of undergrad. But I don't miss who I was then, partly because I didn't know who I was. I miss the controlled environment in which it was okay to experiment -- as long as it fit into everything I had to do for my degree and grades and credit hours. I don't think youth is wasted on the young; I think we are asked to be too much too soon.

I want to like my body. I want to be able to stop engaging with people who gender my body. Realistically, I can only do one of these things.