The title is a quote from the mother of Jonathan, the main focus of the first show I tried out, 'the boy who was born a girl'. I sympathise with Jon completely. He's my age, but has already begun the hormone treatment required to truly become a young man. While looking at photos of 'Natasha', he explained that he really didn't see a girl. He saw a man in drag, as he so bluntly put it. He'd never felt comfortable as Natasha, and when he first had all these thoughts and feelings they made him confused and frustrated. It was almost like watching a documentary of myself, except that I just felt relief when I worked it out. I wasn't the only person like this, but like Jon I hadn't considered that there was another option to being who society raised me to be.
His mother is amazingly supportive and he's so incredibly brave to be going through this in school. But while I'm overwhelmingly happy for him, I'm also getting a ton of painful feelings because my own parents told me to 'think it over' and come back to them when I'm 18, and that I was only being influenced by people I met online. True, at my age, especially then, I was susceptible to suggestion, but I'm wise and mature for my age, which should have been obvious.
I've tried to not think about it for a year, going so far as to force myself to not go there when my mind started to wonder, and I stopped going online at all, stopped visiting the blogs I frequented and asking people to not call my my chosen name, but to revert to my given one, but I literally can't do that any more. That's another reason for this blog. I don't trust diaries, since they're easy to get into and read, and where better to put my thoughts than the internet, where I can't exactly be judged too harshly, and even if I do, it doesn't matter.
Sometimes the sheer mass of what I'm thinking and feeling becomes almost overwhelming, and I feel nauseous when it's at it's worse. It is such a big change, bigger than just realising you're gay (not that that isn't a big thing in itself) but you are in fact asking the world to see you differently, to address you differently and respect you as someone you once were not. But at the same time I'm painstakingly aware that I can't go on being who I am forever. I'm just not comfortable with it and never have been. Getting changed at school has been difficult since I was very young, discussing feminine things, swimming pools, it all just screams wrong at me. I even had to refuse going to the prom, simply because wearing a dress is everything I'm not and I wasn't allowed to have a suit instead.
As Jon said, if I could just get rid of the gender dysphoria and be who I was born as, that would just be amazing, but as it is, life is hardly worth living if you're not happy with who you are. I can't see myself idolising women, and I've always preferred male characters (a prime example is my strong wish to be Peter Pan since I was seven years old and first saw the Disney film, or wanting to be Red Ranger instead of Pink or Yellow).
Still, I've got to wait a few years to re-explain myself, and then I need a psychiatrist
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