Post #1649625

I had this conversation deep in a thread, but realized I need to make it a primary post as well. When I started my transition in early 2022, I had a couple weeks of massive gender euphoria, then dropped into the worst depression and anxiety I've ever experienced in my life. It lasted more than a year. I don't know why, but I can guess. I think I spent almost 50 years packing away bad feelings, and carefully ignoring them. I think I did that about a variety of things: my feelings about gender dysphoria, aggravation from others belittling me for my autism-powered social skills, insults I had to swallow to avoid a fight, childish taunts from the playground and the conference room, the endless shit society dumps on everyone. I spent 50 years mostly not being mad about this stuff. I let it roll off my back (so I thought), because I was so desperate to play the role of a well-adjusted adult human man. But instead of rolling off my back, I was internalizing it and refusing to deal with it. I just wanted it to go away, and did it the worst way possible. I have often described my coming-out moment as being like a window breaking in front of me, and falling away. While that's a good metaphor for the moment I finally allowed myself to understand that I was trans, a better metaphor for the whole experience was a dam breaking. And what was built up behind that dam was transness, sure, but also everything, all the evil crap that I'd been trying to pack away and ignore. With the dam gone, I was no longer able to ignore all the badness, and it overwhelmed me. I spent that year+ afraid of everything, depressed most days, crying much more often than seemed warranted, mostly by myself. It wasn't a self-destructive depression, fortunately. But it was absolutely amorphous and undefinable. I wasn't sad about a thing, I was just sad. That made it feel unreasonable, and I chafed against it, since I couldn't figure out why. The realization that came to me during my conversation earlier today, though? That I am not overwhelmed with depression and anxiety now. I've thought of myself as being a depression-based person my whole life, and I realized after writing it all out that... that's not me anymore. I think that year of hell was actually me processing all the evil I'd packed away, without understanding that I was doing it. I probably did it in a terribly inefficient way, and it's probably incomplete even now, but the fact is that I mark "depression" above 1 (out of 10) on my mood tracker only about 25% of the time, over the last year (with suspicious good moods during the summer, and lower moods during the winter, hmmmm). I am simply not a baseline-depressed person any more. Did transition fix me? Hell no, it broke me, for a distressingly long time. But after that, things got better. My psyche seems to have rebuilt itself. This is a huge revelation for me, only a few hours old, and it may take a while to really make sense of. I love the stories of folks for whom transition just suddenly made everything better. I wish I were one of them. Even though I'm not, it's encouraging to know that I did eventually come around, and I'm in a better place now.