There’s been a festering rot inside my brain for the past few years and it’s the internal equivalent of a Lovecraftian horror for me. Try as I might, when viewed from my feeble perspective, I can’t make full sense of it, and my brain shuts down trying to examine it.

The rot has, unfortunately and quite pathetically, throbbed particularly at the accusations from anonymous internet users who I don’t know and don’t know me that Hexbear is full of bad actors cosplaying as marginalized people. To that, I say, well done, you’ve successfully triggered a self-doubt crisis that’s been brewing in my head for years to flare up once more. I don’t care about your opinions, but they have activated my mental necronomicon to begin its own audiobook playthrough.

I’ll cut the pageantry and just start rambling.

In 2019, I went on a birthright trip to Israel that ultimately broke my brain enough to have both a political and general identity crisis. In 2019, I joined the /r/SandersForPresident discord, and, on a whim, decided to mark myself under she/her pronouns. I don’t know how I convinced myself to do that. I think the plausible deniability was the classic ‘opsec’ bit. A week later, I’m running a 104ºF fever, laying in a hotel bed, clutching my stomach and crying, half because I feel like shit, half because I don’t know who I am and I hate it. That’s my direct pinpoint for the moment of ego death which both sent me on a straight trajectory leftwards and plunged me into a gender-identity crisis.

At the tail-end of that trip, without much time to let it settle, I confessed to my parents that I was having this crisis, and they recommended I talk to my therapist about it. I mentioned it once, and never followed through. I stopped regular therapy sessions a year later, due to scheduling issues.

I’m a very socially-malleable person. I can rarely bring myself to say ‘no’ to accommodating someone, and I find myself almost bending-over-backwards trying to find the optimal ‘path of least inconvenience onto others’ to live my life, almost instinctively. I have a rather overactive guilt instinct that flares up the second I feel I’m burdening someone or causing them to feel uncomfortable. I just, I don’t know, I have a very low self-esteem that’s been built over the past couple of decades by being unhealthily-introverted and always having to be actively self-aware of the specific ways in which my rather severe ADHD inconveniences the people around me.

I flaked. I faltered. The instinct overtook, and I just couldn’t bring myself to push further, so I slinked back into the closet for everything but my online presence.

In the past four years, I have made no effort to socially transition or even experiment, partially due to my neuroses, partially because the rot, and mostly due to the feedback loop between them, and it makes me miserable.

Let me explain what the rot is. The rot is dysphoria. Or it could not be dysphoria. It seems rather keen to convince me that it’s not dysphoria in the same breath that it tries to reinforce that I’m actually a cis man cosplaying as a trans woman on the internet and that I should feel ashamed of myself for deceiving others with my pathetic tapestry cosplay of womanhood.

One example of the feedback loop that takes place in my head is as follows: I’m a full-time student. I live in a college dorm. I have a roommate who’s got g*mer-style reactionary brainworms. I don’t have a job. I have a full schedule of classes and cannot make time for a job due to how awkward it is to work around. I don’t have the funds in my personal bank account to purchase feminine clothing to experiment with. I don’t want to buy it on my credit card because it’s attached to my parents’ bank account; I both feel guilty that I’d consider buying clothes on a whim on my parents’ money that I might not even wear full-time, and paranoid that they’d see and ask me about the purchase. Where would I even try it on? I don’t trust my roommate to have good views on this stuff. If I keep it in my room, my mom uses my closet because she has too much clothes for her closet and I’m at college, and she doesn’t wear skirts. Then the rot chimes in, and tells me I’m clearly not that desperate to figure out my gender, because I can’t even muster up the courage to even experiment with myself. This feeds into my neuroses and self-denigration. Rinse and repeat.

Thinking about long hair? You get haircuts with your family from a family-friend who operates out of your basement. Describing it as a mullet doesn’t sit right with you. You have to sit in front of your parents and explain why you’re feeling the sudden style change. The usual short cut it is. Oh hey, here’s the rot, telling you you clearly don’t want it enough. Thank you, very helpful

My little sister came out to me recently. I’m happy for her. I love her for it. Here’s the rot coming to make me feel inferior to her because, look, here’s an example of someone painting their nails, growing their hair, using she/her pronouns with her close friends, experimenting with names, and you’re doing nothing. Fucking nothing. You’re lying to yourself. Get over yourself. Admit it.

Half the time I want to eviscerate all body hair on my person, half the time I just want to sit and rot because a deep self-image nihilism just roots itself into my brain. And then two weeks into my facial hair growing I feel sick looking at myself and so uncomfortable laying down with the constant reminder that yes, there is hair under my chin, that I inevitably shave it all off. I find myself constantly, entirely off-hand, just going into episodes where I fall into a ten-minute rut where a stray thought hits me where I think “I wish I was a girl” and I fall into a loop where I have brain-genius thoughts such as “What if I’m saying that consciously to myself and I don’t actually want it and I’m just deluding myself” and more of the unhinged self-denigrating rationalization greatest hits. There’s times where I’m laying down and just simply trying to will a feeling of having boobs by focusing on my chest because it just feels nice in my mind, and then the rot steps in and chastises me for, I guess, something fetishistic, something wrong, something fundamentally perverted.

Speaking of fetishes (cw: personal kink-shit but actually relevant)

I got into transformation (specifically gender-related) shit at like 14, unlimited access to pornography and it’s consequences, and that absolutely amps up the “You’re just a fetishizer trying to get your sick kicks pretending to be a woman” bit, and the worst part about it is that I can’t even tell if it’s a fetish or if it’s just a suppressed desire to be a woman manifesting itself as one. I don’t know which came first. I don’t know anymore. I can’t parse it. I don’t know. I hate it.

I just hate this shit so much. I couldn’t focus in class today because I was just wrought with an identity doom spiral and cloud of just fucking aaaaaaaggggggggggGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Anyways, I’m using this as a lynchpin to restart therapy. I’m going to be firm on forcing it as an issue. I need to process this with professionals at this point; it’s a web that I cannot untangle by myself. I just needed to vent a little.