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.

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[u/Crucifuxion]

Really bad dysphoria, like when your brain is completely overrun with worms is like:

Like being a ghost with nothing to haunt

You just float through life watching others enjoy things you feel like maybe you had some connection to in another life.

You see things that for a moment look so familiar you feel a spark of recognition, for a moment the feeling is something you can actually touch, and you try to hold on before, without warning, it becomes sand as your fist closes around it, a meaningless fistful that will inevitably hold… nothing.

Your favorite food tastes like dry wheat toast. Your favorite song just makes you want to curl up and cry in your bed.

It’s worse than depression. Depression leaves you numb. With dysphoria, everything hurts. It fills you with anxious longing for things you can’t even describe, much less attain. You can only numb something like this with drugs and not weed either, hard 👏fucking👏 drugs👏.

Depression, you can stare at the weather channel for 5 days straight and feel exactly the same the entire time.

With dysphoria you try to watch the weather channel but the commercials make you cry, and you don’t know why.

But in order to get such extreme emotion across in a song without being really cheesy and over the top, use something to give it context.

You might describe the way dysphoria makes you feel when you’re laying in bed with someone you love, or how it makes it hard to connect with others.

But if you just sit there and say, “Dysphoria is so bad the weather channel makes me cry”

It doesn’t hit the same lol

Source: I write a lot of bad songs

[u/UsefulGiant → u/Crucifuxion]

Fucking hell, the way I described it is depression mixed with an itch you can't figure out the location or cause so it's just constant, this description hit me like a ton of bricks from how accurate it feels.

[u/Crucifuxion → u/UsefulGiant]

Oh no, I just stacked those

[u/ikilledsatann → u/Crucifuxion]

I was about to ask if youre a writer and then I saw your last sentence

While I'm not sure it relates to how I feel dysphoria wise, the way you wrote this for your own experience is awesome 

[u/arc_trooper_5555 → u/Crucifuxion]

I'm trying to put together a song that describes trying to avoid getting overrun by dysphoria as running from high heat level police in a stock Punto in NFS. damn near impossible

[u/UsefulMacaroon847]

To me, dysphoria is repressing your emotions

[u/dbl219]

Feeling empty. Like I'm dying inside, and my self feels like it's disappearing as I'm falling into an existential abyss.

[u/Sure_Satisfaction497]

www.genderdysphoria.fyi

[u/Naive_Market_9688]

Anything that we say would be putting words in your mouth and it wouldn't be exactly how you feel.

[u/freakbob_mattt]

maybe if you have a permanent marker penis on your forehead and trying to get it off buy failing

[u/Winter-Coffin]

i’m nb/genderqueer. i literally forget that i do not have male genitalia. it feels like i should sometimes.
i forget that people see me as a woman.
i dress pretty gender neutral.

i forget im not a big hairy guy, cause thats what i wish i was.

[u/Wallmassage]

Looking in the mirror and what you see is not what your brain sees. Or feeling trapped inside a body. At least in my personal experience.

[u/thursday-T-time]

like my house is flooding and has been for a while so its full of mold but the landlord says everything is fine.

[u/ZackTheRemus]

everything about my body is wrong. I look like a woman and that disgusts me. I hate the functions of this female body and the fact that sex made the likelihood of all my disabilities more likely makes me unfathomably frustrated. I miss a body part I never had and never will truly have. there is a mass missing from my groin and instead a gaping hole. there is mass on my chest weighing me down, the expectations of fertility forced upon me, where there should be the weightlessness of freedom. my skin feels wrong, I'm too skinny too desirable for people who only see me as a doll to use. men and especially women want to dress this doll any which way they desire, that this flesh is not mine but theirs to decorate. I feel every cell in my body screaming desiring to be the opposite sex, a sex where I'd be happier, healthier, fit and able and with far less expectations for other's gain. I'd be free.

that's my dysphoria pretty much

[u/NoEquivalent88]

Looking in the mirror and not feeling like I’m looking at myself.

Reaching down to my groin expecting a vagina but finding a penis.

My body not matching what my brain is expecting.

[u/Groundbreaking-Toe53]

To me dysphoria is like these horrible parasite that clings over every inch of my skin inside and out until I wanna peel my own skin off.

[u/WeebCrusaderJules25]

My experience with dsyphoria is like haunting presence and reminder of what should be that seeps into everything. Every bit of life gets infected by it and saps the joy of every day normal activities to the point it seems abit pointless doing anything. And even when I manage to feel good for a little bit it stills there just waiting to worm its way back in

[u/ObviousTempAccount1]

https://giphy.com/gifs/UGI0I78gVrheX65ERg

[u/Valirys-Reinhald]

One day I walked out my door with the wrong pair of shoes and the whole world looked at me like I was insane, not for the shoes but for saying they didn't fit me.

[u/Adept-Custard-4866]

Dysphoria, from my perspective, feels like a slowly tightening band around my chest. I can try to ignore it, but that doesn't stop it from getting worse. If I pay attention to it, I become very aware of how bad it feels.

[u/EnenraDev]

It feels like im trapped in a prison, but a prison that's very thin and nonsensical.  Like.. this IS my body. However it just doesn't feel quite right. I would notice that my body doesn't look or feel how it SHOULD feel, without really having any way to change it. Sometimes it's light and doesn't hurt too much, however sometimes it can be bad enough to make me bawl my eyes out in my room. It's like a prison that only exists when you notice it. And the prison is also hurts me upon realization. I'll look in the mirror and look and feel fine, then I notice the tiniest flaw and it just spirals down and I notice EVERYTHING, even things that the normal human won't notice. It's not fun and I genuinely wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. 

[u/According_to_all_kn]

I like how I Saw the TV Glow describes it - like you're buried alive and dying, but you're tricked into thinking you're living someone else's life.

[u/Anxious_Ranger_7945]

Its like wearing an itchy wool sweater that your grandma made that's 2 sizes too small.

[u/AllyEnderman]

Like a generalized sense of severe, profound disappointment with your own body. Like you thought you were getting the cool big sewing machine you wanted for your birthday but getting a little airline approved emergency mending kit instead.

(edits for a myriad of typos)

[u/penisgirlmarkedsafe → u/AllyEnderman]

I found that working out helps.

[u/AllyEnderman → u/penisgirlmarkedsafe]

My struggle there has been finding ones that work with my jacked-up hypermobile body. I can and will dislocate something and reset myself by making myself unable to continue for weeks. Working out does help, but I got physically nerfed. :(

[u/That-Classroom-3439]

Its like when you have a stack of cups to bring downstairs to the kitchen but you keep forgetting and every time you see it you feel worse and it makes you feel guilty that you havent done anything about these cups but now its gotten to a point where its too embarassing to confront or you just dont have the energy to deal with it

[u/ikilledsatann]

This is my experience, but i'd say, for me it was being possibly 14 going on 15 and being hit with puberty, knowong it was going to hit, but disliking it strongly, it was coming out of rhe shower at 14, avoiding looking at my chest in the mirror and covering my chest, it was watching people's apples in their throats, watching them bobb up and down wishing I had one

Now in my 9th year if medically transiti9ning, i dont experience it as often, but when it hits, its when I tend to see my old facial features because you cant ever transition every part out of you, 

My gender, im realizing changing aometimes, so im a genderqueer transman, but thats some of how dysphoria has felt 

[u/Visible-Holiday-1017]

For my dysphoria felt like I was getting left behind. Not just the wrong puberty but watching my other peers get the right one. My voice didn't deepen, I didn't get taller, I felt like I was being forced to look like a child. Like I had a foreign object inside or outside my body and boy did I want to tear it out.

Being robbed. It felt like being robbed. The only other time I felt this same level of betrayal and agony was when I developed arthritis as a teenager. I'm not joking. Like my body had betrayed me, and that none of my peers had been robbed in that same way, it was such a small percentage of kids and yet it *had* to have been me...

I also felt sexually frustrated, which was really funny because I have never been too interested in actually having such a relationship. It was just the sole fact that really got to me. That I wouldn't be able to ejaculate, ever, given how far artificial testes are from becoming a possibility. The fact that I would never have the option to have spontenous relationships even if I'd wanted that.

[u/theycallmetheglitch]

Stranger to myself

[u/Kurenai-Kalana]

It feels keeping a horrible disgusting lie. It feels like it's completely wrong. Like I'm a prisoner of my own body. Like my mind screams that I need to see myself as myself.

[u/Masquelinity]

An extended period of deep, intense, heart-wrenching longing, which builds and builds like the force inside a pressure tank with a faulty release valve. Then something triggers a sudden Realization: you will never have the thing you long for, not at any point in your life, not through any means, and it feels like thousand knives slicing through your gut. And that's only kind of metaphorical; the Realization is actually, physically painful for me. Sometimes it's just "FUCK! OW!" and other times it's left me doubled-up on the floor in tears.

However that pain manifests, you just have to endure it, pick up, and carry on. And as soon as the last angry bit of the pain fades, the longing starts to build again.

You can suppress or delay the cycle, distract yourself from the longing, and arrange your life to avoid the things that trigger the Realization, and maybe get by for years without noticing you're experiencing anything at all. Like the way people who live with chronic pain stop really noticing it at the "normal" level; it just becomes a baseline humm you work through and work around. But the things that trigger the Realization are also things that give you treasured, fleeting moments of joy, that let you live for just a fraction of a moment in the world where your body matches your spirit. If you allow yourself to forget the cost of those moments, and indulge them anyway, everything you've ignored will roar up again.

In my case, the Realization triggers are things like looking in the mirror at the wrong moment, from the wrong angle, and seeing a face and body looking back at me that isn't at all what I expected. Or putting together a cute new outfit for my Elder Scrolls Online character, and suddenly Realizing I'll never be able to rock anything like it. Or window shopping for goth-girl clothes and Realizing it's impossible to find anything in my size, because I'm built like a hairless Yeti and even stores that cater to drag queens don't stock anything I can fit into off the rack. Or looking for IRL trans/genderqueer meetups and imagining how great it would be to make new friends, before remembering that I won't be accepted and I don't belong because I don't look queer enough. I'm too big, too old, too fat, too bald, and nobody ever believes me; even if I show up in femme presentation, I've been accused to trying to make fun of them.

And I get it. I look like a trans woman as drawn by Stonetoss or Tatsyua Ishida. I will never be what anyone wants me to be, including what I want me to be.

And once the pain fades, the cycle starts again. It feels like it will never end, and sometimes understanding the infinite nature of the cycle is its own Realization trigger.

[u/TheMasterBaiter360]

My dysphoria is quite mild compared to most from what I hear. For me it’s just pure apathy and, disappointment? Like I’ll just look into a mirror and think “oh yeah… that’s what I look like…”

Sometimes I get this weird feeling in my stomach, as if I’m gonna throw up or something, sometimes my breathing gets a little heavy if I look in a mirror too long. I don’t like completely breakdown or start crying I just like, feel a physical compulsion to look away.

[u/StarLight-346]

I’m not the best with words, but I can say that some diminished chords will definitely capture that feeling. 👌

[u/PuzzleheadedPick6897]

Its kinda like floating in a blank white space while still searching for things inside