Photo by Alexey Demidov on Unsplash

That Feeling

A piece on the agony and relief of finding the words for gender dysphoria.

That feeling.

It’s a feeling I’ve been trying to find the words to describe for years. It’s a feeling that drove me into the darkest periods of my life, periods where I felt my life wasn’t worth living. I spent so long chipping away at myself, bit by bit, cut by cut; trying to manage the pain of that feeling by inflicting controlled pain on myself. But it wasn’t the pain I needed control over, I realized, it was my life.

Though this feeling has been gut wrenching and merciless, it’s due to this feeling that I set myself on the right path. A path towards a place where I don’t want to crawl out of my own skin; a place where I don’t feel a wall between me and everyone else in every room I enter; a place where I don’t look in the mirror and feel nauseous with unbelonging; a place where I don’t ache to be someone else. I am on this path now and on the horizon, for the first time, I can see that place.

Even when I reach that place, I don’t know that I’ll ever be free of that feeling that follows me and haunts me like a ghost. But I do know that feeling will become a quiet, soft breeze instead of a cruel spirit. There will come a day when I am in that place, and that breeze of a feeling will brush past my cheek; an exchange with an old acquaintance, not a current enemy I’m at war with.

For now, that feeling is a violent gust of wind trying to sweep me away.

That feeling is gender dysphoria.

What makes that feeling truly grueling is how isolating it is. Hardly anyone else understands this feeling because they haven’t felt it. Finding the words to describe it feels like grasping aimlessly at darkness, trying to put a leash on the wind, searching for something I don’t even know, all while fighting the tears that push from behind my eyes. This loneliness has made my teenage years total agony, an agony I would never wish upon anyone else. But I know there are others like me; being tormented by that same feeling, being haunted by their own ghosts.

I want them to know what I didn’t know: transness is not something to be ashamed of, it’s something to be celebrated. It’s tearing an old building down and rebuilding it brick by brick to create a monument more beautiful than any other. Transness takes a profound sense of self-awareness and self-worth to be discovered and carried. To be someone who has felt empty and lost their whole life and look at themself in the mirror and say, “This is not who I am, and I will find who I am no matter what the world thinks,” is to have impenetrable strength and perseverance. To break from the chains of that feeling, gender dysphoria, is to be as free as a fledgling leaving their nest and soaring through the skies without restraint.