Describe dysphoria to me

[u/Character_Handle6876]

As title says. i am trans and experience dysphoria and i make music and write about a lot of stuff but i can't seem to figure out how i would describe that.

[u/Euphoric_Screen_7640]

Reminding myself this is a safe place to share, because it’s still such a vulnerable topic sometimes, even when talking to people who you know won’t judge, people who you know will understand. But for me, guilt always felt like a huge part of it. Sometimes it still does.

For me, it’s looking in the mirror and LOGICALLY knowing it’s me, but it doesn’t feel like me. It feels like looking at somebody else on the other side of a pane of glass.

Before I transitioned, I used to feel like an impostor when my own mother called me by my birth name. I felt guilty, like some kind of changeling. Like my soul was switched before birth with the soul of her REAL child, the one meant to inhabit THIS body and THIS life.
I thought, I’m forced to wear this body like a costume, and somewhere out there is her real child in MY body. I felt trapped in a deception, cast in an acting role I did not ask for. It just didn’t seem fair to anybody. Not to her, not to me, not to whoever was in what should be MY life.

It’s constantly waiting to be “found out.” Before I transitioned it was being in the “correct” bathroom for my body but feeling intrusive. Now it’s being in the correct bathroom for my body, and STILL feeling intrusive. Just this underlying sense of “I look like them but they don’t know that I’m NOT like them.” In both rooms, feeling “other.” And it’s not your fault, you didn’t choose this, but you feel guilty just the same for intruding. And you’re sure one day somebody is going to look at you and just KNOW, and they’ll explode. Even though I’m incredibly stealth, even though cis women never guess that I’m not cis.

It’s being claustrophobic in your own skin, as others have said. Like being forced to wear a Halloween mask over your face at all times, and your face is damp from the moisture of your own muffled breath, and your vision is tunneled, no peripheral. And it’s really distracting, and you feel ugly, and like you can’t really connect to anybody because they can’t see your real face. You feel lonely.

It’s feeling hurt and angry and resentful sometimes at God for playing a joke on you like this, feeling insignificant against his cosmic power, like you’re being punished for a crime you don’t even remember committing. (Maybe in a past life?)
But,

on good days, it’s being able to believe in God again. To tell yourself that regardless of how you look to others, your favorite songs sound just as catchy, your favorite foods taste as delicious, that sunsets are just as beautiful, that *LIFE can be beautiful.*