That does not mean I think everyone else’s is. But it was a convenient way for me to find a simulation of empowerment in a bleak world and broken mind.
That actually resonated with me a lot. I spent a lot of my childhood/adolescence/early adulthood feeling like that. Though I always thought of it more like I was an amorphous brain sort of floating in a vat, piloting a meat robot, awkwardly pulling levers to move it about, never quite able to bridge the gap between my ectoplasm and those others who appeared to actually *be* their meatsuits.
As for feeling uncomfortable in locker rooms, for me it was a combination of being embarrassed about being chubby while the other boys were rocking those washboard abs that they seemed to just automatically have, and what I later identified as bisexuality. Same mirror fantasies as you about being a woman and having sex with men. I am a couple years older than you, so there really wasn't any discourse around gender that was popular enough for me to find myself in.
It's interesting to see how just a couple years difference can lead to such differences in how we cope, for you it ended up being gender, and for me I ended up thinking I needed to explode my brain with hallucinogens to figure out 'what was really going on' or 'who I really was'. Instead I ended up with something like mild Cotard's.
"it is gray space where I am.
soul out of body looking in mirrors
whose reflection is always just slightly
beyond recognition."
That actually resonated with me a lot. I spent a lot of my childhood/adolescence/early adulthood feeling like that. Though I always thought of it more like I was an amorphous brain sort of floating in a vat, piloting a meat robot, awkwardly pulling levers to move it about, never quite able to bridge the gap between my ectoplasm and those others who appeared to actually *be* their meatsuits.
As for feeling uncomfortable in locker rooms, for me it was a combination of being embarrassed about being chubby while the other boys were rocking those washboard abs that they seemed to just automatically have, and what I later identified as bisexuality. Same mirror fantasies as you about being a woman and having sex with men. I am a couple years older than you, so there really wasn't any discourse around gender that was popular enough for me to find myself in.
It's interesting to see how just a couple years difference can lead to such differences in how we cope, for you it ended up being gender, and for me I ended up thinking I needed to explode my brain with hallucinogens to figure out 'what was really going on' or 'who I really was'. Instead I ended up with something like mild Cotard's.