How the “best years of my life” are quickly becoming the worst

Hi, I’m just someone from Finland, and I’m going to be 18 in a few weeks. As many of you might know, people often consider ages 18 through 24 to be the best years one could live. Where nothing bothers you, when you don’t really have anything worth stressing over, and everything is chill.. Right?

Prologue

There are a few things though, that I need to get off my chest before I venture towards these amazing and absolutely glorious years of my life. I’m a transexual, which means that I’m not comfortable with the body I was born with, and wish it was the opposite gender. In some cases the desire is quite faint, and some hormone pills, or even a good talk can help. For me though, it’s very important to me that I do everything I can in order to get as close to the other gender as possible. I’m not satisfied, even if a small feature of me even resembles my current gender. And it sickens me. In addition to all this, I’m even bisexual, which stirs the stew¹ even more.

Always, have I felt uncomfortable around myself, and when I was smaller I was more attracted in the girls’ parties than the boys’ parties, and I was always intrigued about barbies and the generic girls’ toys. I didn’t play with them, I actually didn’t play with pretty much any toys at all, but the toys I played with, were very gender neutral, like legos (I’ll come back to this later). I also always ended up in the boys’ group since that’s just what society wants us to do, so the others would’ve bullied me for life for being the boy who played with barbies in kindergarten.. I feel remorse though, I feel like I should’ve done it anyways, maybe so I wouldn’t even be in this situation right now.

When I was smaller, I wanted the girls’ swim suits instead of the boys’, I often felt “girly” and I even asked my brother about it, and he was confused and laughed. I said about the swimsuit thing to my grandmom, whom I went swimming with often back then, but she was very confused aswell. I finally played with some girls some time before school started and I didn’t understand some of the words and got laughed at and traumatized, which is why I really never went into the girls’ groups anymore.

(This is a bit off-topic, you can skip this paragraph if you want)

Back to the legos for a bit, this is what eventually led to my career. I always liked creating, designing and being creative. I was presented computing and engineering, but I didn’t understand electricity, the mechanics required and I thought the material required to build everything I wanted, and I got disappointed since I wanted to make so much, but I couldn’t, since the materials and cables and everything required would cost so much and it was so complicated and “qhbwgqkjg”. So I was playing games at this age, as I grew a bit older I started thinking, I want to make my own games. I had made some board games and lego “games” before, but now I was starting to become interested in real video games. Therefore I started to research all this, and eventually this lead to me using Game Maker, later a friend teaching me Python and that was the start of my beautiful career as an indie game developer.

Alas this all leads to what I am today. I’m too shy to talk about my feelings, I feel very uncomfortable in my body and since I kind of gave out clues about my inner personality to people near me, they didn’t understand them. The feeling, that I can’t live my life to the fullest, that I am not, what I feel inside makes me feel caged, trapped, jailed even. Me being very shy and quiet, even introverted, I’m not going to tell anyone, obviously. I can’t. Very few people around me actually know how I feel, and the thought of telling my parents or my brother makes me scared stiff. I have actually told a doctor, but I’m not 18 yet, so they won’t let me into any kind of treatment without my parents knowing, not even the preparations for treatment.

Real analytical part

I’m starting to lose my strain of thought, so I guess it’s a good idea to take another start, this time more so from the medical and real standpoint. I admit, I was, for a long time, grossed out by girls and girl bacteria and such, but I feel like it’s because the society told me there were girl bacteria in the first place;

Stage 1, Denial and Anger

When asked by a friend once if I would’ve wanted to been born as a girl, I didn’t answer no immediately though, I thought for a second, but when he asked again, I said no. Did I really mean “no”, though? After that, I’ve been asking myself myself every day. Literally, every single day. Would I have rather wanted to be born as a girl? Once in upper elementary school I started thinking if something was wrong with me, since I was constantly thinking about it. This is when I started actually realizing that I really wanted to be a girl instead. But I didn’t accept it, being a stubborn little child, I tried blocking all these feeling away and hid it from myself. This was stage one, denial and anger. This was when I was ages 13 through maybe 15.

Stage 2, Bargaining and Depression

I then later, towards the end of upper elementary school, started to realize there was nothing to do about it, so I fell into depression. Not too hard yet, this stage didn’t fully start until high school or so. When it started though, it hit me good. This stage hasn’t even completely ended for me and the depression hits me very hard some days. When it hits, I often feel like even if I go through all these processes, nothing matters, since I’m not really a girl after them, or something like that. Sometimes it gets really bad. Like, really bad. So bad, that I don’t want to be a boy, but I’ll never be a girl, and it always leads me even to the edge of thinking that suicide is the only answer. I’ve never done it obviously, nor I’ve even tried it. But It’s just a feeling. I’ll come back to these thoughts later after stage 3.

Stage 3, Acceptance

This stage, actually, started for me only around two years ago. This is when I actually realized I was transexual and there was really nothing I could do about it, well besides hormone pills and other “repairing” operations. I’ve never really fallen off the stage two though, but I feel like I’m in stage three already, since I accept myself as trans, and I know I’m trans, but I still get often very depressed about it.

Conclusions

So as I mentioned earlier, I haven’t gotten into medical care about this, because I don’t want anyone to know about these “hideous” and “horrifying” (or so some think) conditions I had. Now later on my dad now knows, and I feel like all this saving and waiting until I’m 18 has gone straight to the drain. Now as I’m closing up to the age of 18, I’m becoming fairly old. Not old old, but you might get my point in jiffy. The fixing processes take years at best, and It’ll be a very long time from now until I’m going to be actually satisfied with my body. Now as I said in stage 2, I still get strongly depressed these days, and this is mostly why;

Remember when I told you ages 18 through 24 are the best years in human life, according to most people? Well I’m now entering this age, and not until soon, I can get actual medical attention and proper treatment. Do you know what this means? Instead of living my “best years of my life” happy and carefree, I’m going to be very depressed, sad and living in an abomination² of a body. Partially the reason I’m so introverted even, is because my body is not what i want it to be. Even if I started my fixing process right now, I’ll have to go talk to a therapist/psychiatrist or some sort, whom will determine if I’m qualified for these treatments. This’ll take about a year at worst. Now after the treatment starts, I probably start taking pills and eventually begin to resemble and/or look like my opposite gender, though my passport and pretty much everything says; “SEX: MALE”. This is a problem, a major problem. I’m going to practically have to live under a rock in order to not get beaten, because the guard in the bar line won’t let me in, because I’m a trap or something.

This, is what my life is going to be, over this “best years of my life” bullshit. Living a body I don’t want to live and getting beaten for wanting to be diffrent. I constantly get very depressed about this, and being shy and introverted, I can’t make myself tell anyone. I just come here, to the realm of the internet and cry myself out, since this is the only place that I can really share my feelings without having to socialize. Does this sound like they would be the best years of your life? I didn’t think so.

Even in this ~1600 word blog post i didn’t get all my feelings and thoughts about this subject out, but I hope this definitely evokes some feelings among you readers.

Footnotes:

Stirring the stew is a finnish saying, which means making something, which is already confusing or in some way odd, even more so.
Not in literal sense, but the body is unpleasant either way, which is the point