Re: The Difference Between Dysphoria and Negative Body Image

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Re: The Difference Between Dysphoria and Negative Body Image

yellowinthebrain:

This. THIS. I could be the best looking, most fit man in existence, but it STILL wouldn’t feel right to me. My body and my face seem so wrong to me. The problem with dysphoria is that you can’t change certain things. My shoulders are wide, and no diet or exercise will make them narrow out. It’s like playing a video game. You’re not actually that character on screen, you are just controlling them. To me, I’m in the most realistic video game created, and my character is the body I have now, but I never have a chance to change that character, and I can’t turn off the power and go back to the world where I’m the “real” me. I’ll always be stuck here.

Definitely. Especially since sometimes I even like myself. I’ll catch a glimpse of myself at a certain angle on a good day and it’ll look like ME, and more than that, I’ll even think I look a bit attractive… but then later I see the whole picture again and it shatters it. And it’s so frustrating to think that there might actually be the correct-looking “me” in there, I just have to work my ass off to dig myself out. And especially frustrating to realize that if I’d just been born with a single chromosome switched from X to Y, I would probably have none of the problems with self esteem that always plagued me.

(emphasis mine) That’s how it feels for me, too: Like there’s this disgusting shell I have to scrape off, like the real me is in there, just covered up, with a little poking through to the surface here and there. I see little flashes of myself briefly, and then poof, I’m gone.

I have dreams where I’m at some stage in my childhood or teen years, except I’m living as me instead of doing the boy act. I’m not some super-pretty idealized femme like cis people imagine we strive to be. I’m just me, the right way. Still just as tomboyish, still just as nerdy. My hair is still just as flat and fine. My nose is still just as weird. My ears are still big. I’m still just as awkward. But there isn’t any testosterone poisoning, and that makes all the difference.

It feels like coming home.

(original post)