05-08-2025
Through my entire life, I have always had a feeling of being different. Things that would bring other people joy were things that made me feel bad, in one way or another. A snowball thrown at me was enough to start bawling my eyes out. Music that everyone listened to made me feel weird, almost repulsed. I was never able to see the appeal in most of the things people did to entertain themselves. I wasn't able to ever, truly get how people around me would function.
On one hand, I would have some weird behaviors. I would get so entrenched in my "special interests" that everything else, what people were usually considering "interesting" wouldn't even matter. Socializing, a thing that comes naturally to most people around me, is something that I have always struggled with. To this day, I have kept a couple pens I had originally obtained as a 5 year old kid. Not to write with them, but to do this stupid hand flapping movement that never ceases to mesmerize my eyes, as the pen moves with my hand, the light tip against the dark central part making all sorts of abstract, messy shapes only I have ever been able to perceive.
On the other hand, the constant feeling of my body just being wrong. I would look at girls not in the way most straight boys my age would look at them, but in a feeling of jealousy. How is it that they get to have these beautiful bodies? How is it that they can get dressed so pretty? Why do I want to be one so badly?
When I was 17 I learned about the Asperger's syndrome, now most commonly known as "Autism Spectrum Disorder Level 1." It gave me the clues I needed to finally understand some of the things that went wrong with me, the hand flapping, the special interests, the perpetual lack of socializing and understanding social cues. Not many das later, as I was reading about the heightened correlation that exists between being autistic and experiencing gender dysphoria. Having had weird feelings about everything gendered for a long while, this discovery started a long path that eventually realized me that, yes, I'm a trans woman.
When I made both of these discoveries, I felt a sense of relief. I wasn't the only one who experienced everything I do. I would finally be able to embrace all of these behaviors that I had suppressed under social pressure for my whole life. For a while, I thought that making those two discoveries would lead me to have a decent life.
Except that I don't.
Despite having a better understanding of why I am different in the ways I am, I still feel lonely. I have got to the point where I often try to compare my behaviors against the ways most people behave. And, while my university does objectively contain a fair share of "weird" people, I still get to feel weirder than most. Because, even if my peers are smarter than most, interested in more diverse and unique things than most, I feel like few can get a glimpse of what I am experiencing, and none can truly "get it." This has led me to a position where I feel unwell being around in this world, as I just cannot see a future in it where I am just "normal."
While the rational part of my brain understands that a normal person is not a thing, it very much is in my current distorted brain. I cannot help but see people being more actively socializing as more normal than I am. People that don't get overstimulated the same way I do as normal. People who have a preaceful relationship with their bodies at birth as normal. People that don't do the weird stimming movements, like my hand flapping, as normal. And when I see others as the normal ones, I am left out as the weirdo. The one who is never to be understood. To be felt. To be loved. A mere second-class person.
To this day, I still don't know what exactly this is. Maybe I will make a third discovery. Maybe a psychiatrist will make that for me. But, as of today, I feel sick.