Seryph

But this stuff is hard, there's an impulse to just say it's okay to let it blow over without rocking the boat too much. To maintain the security of the friendship as it exists. Learning to beat that impulse and actually open up is tricky and takes time to build like any other skill. It's okay to not have that skill just yet, there's no shame in it, everyone experiences and learns different things at different times. And recognising that you lack it lets you focus on it to improve in the future.

And you've shown that you can build these skills with everything you've been doing lately. Like, coming out to her in the first place was unthinkable for you a year ago. You've made progress, and you can do it again here too. I believe in you.

And gods the prose! It's so good and creative and beautiful. There's been so many descriptions that made my jaw drop as I read them since they were so gorgeously vivid yet brief. Like, to take an example from the first chapter:

"A tremor passes through the soil--do not call it earth. The planet dies. Crickets chirp. Crickets survive, for now, among the crashed ships and broken bodies on this crumbling plain. Silver moss devours steel, and violet flowers choke the dead guns. If the planet lasted long enough, the vines that sprout from the corpses' mouths would grow berries.

It won't, and neither will they."

My brain can't keep up or cope with it. I still feel like someone who wears men's medium/large and is bigger than the women around me despite the fact that I currently wear women's smalls and, beyond height, most women I know have bigger sizes than me. I even know that, when I first measured myself pre-E, that I was actually on par with cis women's measurements (based on the dress I was ordering) with the one exception being my waist which has since gotten smaller such that everything is on par now except occasionally height and shoulder width depending on the piece. So I recognise that I was actually more feminine in build in the first place than I thought I was, and I recognise that I'm incredibly lucky to have this sort of body. And I'm really grateful about that, I love it and I've loved watching it sculpt itself with estrogen.

But it is also existentially terrifying to consider when it shows just how much my body has changed in the 1.5 years since I started E and got kicked out. My waist getting thinner? That's because I literally ate nothing more than one muffin a day (at best) for a whole month immediately after I was kicked, and while I've been eating better I'm still not eating as well as I used to. My boobs and hips getting bigger? Typical estrogen effects that make me happy, but it's also pushing me into having a hourglass-adjacent body shape that is, for trans women, very atypical and feels almost alien compared to what I expected my body to become. I'll reiterate that I'm incredibly happy with all of these changes. But I'd be lying if I didn't say that whenever I get a concrete number to think about it scares me a little. It's always a reminder of where I was a year and a half ago and how my self-image doesn't align with my actual self at times, it's always a reminder of how quick a body can drastically change, and it's always a reminder that, maybe, a lot of the things I was dysphoric over were never quite so bad as they used to feel to me.

To use a term I loathe, being faced with these concrete numbers make me feel like I've been a "bdd passoid." I despise that term and how people use it to just insult anyone they consider prettier than them, while being dismissive of whatever dysphoria the person in question has. But it almost feels like it fits me, when I'm given these exact measurements that tell me not only is my body close to cisnormative patriarchal beauty standards in ways unattainable for other people, but it's been that way for maybe longer than I thought.

I've always had a very visual relationship with my dysphoria. It feels like, if I can't see the thing I'm dysphoric about in the moment, then it stops being present in my head. A good example is body hair. I often don't shave as often when it's winter and I'm wearing pants or tights since I can't see, and thereby feel bad about, my body hair. I'd prefer to always be clean shaven, of course. But there's a point where the cost-benefit ratio of shaving my body loses out and it's when I will be actively seeing the dysphoria-inducing thing in question. So this makes the possibility of being a "bdd passoid" feel stronger, after all, BDD is more obsessed with a false perception than anything actual. Maybe my dysphoria was always just that.

But that line of thought ends there, because I am genuinely very happy with my appearance now, in a way where BDD wouldn't seem to apply to me as well. And I mean, of course. "bdd passoids" are usually people who do worry about certain features and the term is just used as a cudgel to be shitty and dismissive of their hurt, to suggest that one's own hurt is more real and therefore valid unlike the passoid's. It's a cruel term like everything else that's come from /tttt/ and its adjacent spaces.

But in my case specifically, it matters that the thing that provokes this feeling is getting concrete measurements. I've always used body measurements as a way to actually track how femme I am, trying to chase a ridiculous cisnormative beauty standard because it's the thing that I thought would bring me some joy. And now that I've gotten quite close to it... It has. And so much of my dysphoria around these things is gone, and goes away every time I do it again. But certain things, my smallness in particular, haven't sunk in yet.

I don't really think my obsession with measurements has been healthy at all. I mean, obviously right? I became so fixated on them because it felt like a calculable way to determine what I'd need to magically pass. The same sort of toxic relationship with my body that spaces like /tttt/ promote, even if I never went there. I've never been quite so bad that I'd measure myself constantly; I only do it when necessary for clothing purchases. But nonetheless it has often been a huge source of both euphoria and dysphoria. Now that I've reached the "good" measurements, it always provokes euphoria. But it also always reminds me that I used to have a body that some would consider already lucky for a trans woman. So why wasn't I satisfied with it? Well, I don't think it was the right body for me. Why should I fixate on if I'm allowed to have felt dysphoric about it. I felt dysphoric regardless, wishing that away won't change anything. And now that I feel euphoric about my body more often than not, why should I believe that it's me being a "bdd passoid" rather than simply a dysphoria about something that just wasn't right for me? Why shouldn't I be allowed to feel this tangled mess of positive and negative emotions when I get a measurement and recognise how far I've come in this tangled mess of a life I've lived? I think that's where I'm at, now. It's a messy feeling that I get, and it's probably not the healthiest thing to feel when being measured. But I also don't think it's so negative as it could be. I'm okay with who I am, both body and mind, even if it took some time to get here.