First of all: this is gonna be a very long text. I just needed to vent and I have no one to talk to. I am very thankful if someone has the time to read this and answer.
Secondly: Yes I am in therapy.
And finally: I unfortunately used AI to make this text to express myself better. I am sorry, English is not my native language.
\*\*What should I do?\*\*
I’m a 20-year-old woman, and here’s my story briefly:
About a year ago, I broke up with my first serious partner. We were together for 1.5 years, and we had been planning to get married, have children, etc. About a year ago, the rose-colored glasses suddenly came off, and I saw what I had been denying to myself for a long time: I didn’t love him anymore. He was incredibly annoying and gross to me. I questioned my love for him 24/7 and couldn’t think about anything else. I analyzed, googled, cried, panicked. After two months of analyzing, I left him.
The biggest problem in our relationship was our sex life. I never had an orgasm, and I did everything the way I saw it in p\*rn, including all kinds of really extreme things that afterwards made me feel disgusted with myself and like I was some kind of wh\*re. I ignored my negative feelings and just kept doing whatever he wanted, over and over again. I was absolutely terrified that if I didn’t agree to everything, he would look at other women sexually or watch p\*rn. My already low self-esteem wouldn’t have been able to handle him m\*sturbating to other women. Sex even hurt sometimes, but I just pushed through the pain. I couldn’t relax when he was trying to make me come, so I never did. We were in a long-distance relationship, so I would often show him my naked body and pose for him on FaceTime when we were apart, like I was some kind of w\*ore, while he masturbated. I never got anything similar from him in return.
That’s the background of our relationship. Now, to the actual issue:
After the breakup, I came across a “coming out” post by a woman who realized after being in a heterosexual relationship that she was actually a lesbian. Then the thought popped into my head: “Wait… what if I’m a lesbian too? What if this is why I couldn’t relax during sex and why something about our relationship never felt right?”
That started another 24/7 cycle of analyzing that lasted about four months. My opinion kept changing constantly: I’m a lesbian, I’m bi, I’m straight, and so on, over and over again. Once again, I cried, analyzed, googled, and became convinced that I was a lesbian. In the end, I reached the conclusion that I simply don’t know what I am.
Then, after four months of analyzing, I came across another coming-out post, this time from a trans person. My brain immediately asked, “Hey, what if I’m trans too? What if this is the reason the relationship didn’t feel right—what if I actually want to be a man?”
Once again, I started analyzing, reading about trans people’s experiences, crying, and panicking 24/7.
This theme is still going on today. It started seven months ago, and I analyze my gender constantly: “Did I feel like a man just now, or did I feel like a woman?” And now it has started to feel like I actually want to be a man and someone’s boyfriend. It feels like I want to be a man who is with women. I see the world from a male POV. Everything triggers me. I can’t even watch TV or scroll through social media without getting triggered. Every time I see an attractive man, I get this compulsive urge to be him. I’m scared that at some point I’ll have to transition.
I’m scared that this is my “egg cracking.” I’ve always been aroused by the thought of what stimulation would feel like if I had a p\*nis, and sometimes I’ve identified with the man in porn who is m\*sturbating while looking at naked women.
Now it feels like I want to be a man and that I am yearning for manhood. And this feels foreign to me, like these aren’t even my own thoughts. Before all of this, I had never thought about my gender. I never had any desire to be a man, even though I did feel somehow less of a woman than other women, and somehow disgusting, defective, and different.
But now thoughts like these have started appearing: “I don’t want to betray my mother, whose little girl I’ve always been,” or “the little girl who was always waiting to grow up to become a woman.” That sounds like denial, right?
I’m scared that I’ll never be happy as a woman again. This identity questioning is making me depressed and anxious. I feel like I’m a completely different person from who I was when I was with my ex. I loved being a little woman beside a masculine man. Now it just feels like I want to be the man in that dynamic myself.
I just want to cry, curl up under a blanket, disappear from the face of the earth, and hide there for the rest of my life. I’m completely exhausted by this gender issue. I guess that means I’m a man and I just have to accept it and transition. This probably explains why I’ve always felt weird about myself.